Free Republic

Texas Democratic lawmaker used a racially tinged Spanish insult to describe the Republican Party during the state’s Democratic convention Friday. State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, left, leaves the U.S. Federal Courthouse, May 29, 2013, in San Antonio. (Eric Gay/AP) State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer said at the Texas Democratic Convention that “GOP” stands for “gringos y otros pendejos,” the Houston Chronicle reported. The word “gringo” is sometimes used as a derogatory term to mean “white foreigner.” “Pendejo” can mean “asshole,” “fool” or “idiot.”

SAN FRANCISCO - The Bush administration can go ahead with a pilot program to allow as many as 100 Mexican trucking companies to freely haul their cargo anywhere within the U.S. for the next year, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request made by the Teamsters union, the Sierra Club and the nonprofit Public Citizen to halt the program. The appeals court ruled the groups have not satisfied the legal requirements to immediately stop what the government is calling a "demonstration project," but can continue to argue their case. The trucking...

U.S. antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan will open the World Social Forum in Caracas on Tuesday together with other political and cultural leaders from diverse nations with a mass action, organizers for the event said Sunday. Sheehan, mother of a dead soldier in Iraq who achieved notoriety from heading various antiwar actions against the government of George W. Bush, will give a speech at a march that will kick off the World Social Forum en the Venezuelan capital, said dará Edgardo Lander, a member of the organizing committee of the event. In the action for which the activist will assist, "she...

Have you ever been issued a "guaranteed" reservation by a hotel? You know the drill: they take a credit card number and tell you that you will be charged for the room if you don't show up. But in return, you comfort yourself with the assumption that your access to an actual room at that particular hotel is "guaranteed" even if you show up at 4 AM. Maybe if you did this, you assumed that it meant that the hotel had already sold the room to you, and that, barring acts of God like a tornado, no matter how late...

SAN LUIS DE LA PAZ, Mexico (AP) -- Mexican soldiers with automatic weapons interrupted the July 4 funeral of a U.S. Marine and demanded the Marine honor guard give up ceremonial replicas of rifles they carried. Hundreds of friends and relatives packed a small cemetery for the funeral on Sunday of 22-year-old Juan Lopez, who was born in this sun-scorched farming town, immigrated to Dalton, Georgia, as a teenager and became a Marine. He was killed in an ambush in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on June 21. Maj. Curt Gwilliam presented an American flag to Lopez's widow, Sandra Torres, who...