Free Republic

Durbin Calls On President Trump & Republican Majority in Congress to Stand Up to the Gun Sales Lobby, Act to Help Prevent Gun Violence Senator also calls on Gov. Rauner and Illinois General Assembly to pass meaningful state-level gun reforms Following last week’s school shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, which left eight students and two teachers dead and another 13 victims wounded, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) today slammed President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress for still being unwilling to push for any gun reforms that the gun sales lobby opposes. “Congress is going to have...

MT. VERNON, Ill.---There's quite the uproar going on in the city of Mt. Vernon and its surrounds as of the past few weeks, all of it having to do with water. Mainstream media has been all over the matter of the public's opposition to Illinois-American Water (IAW) being brought in to the Mt. Vernon area. You can find such stories as this on The Southern this morning following a meeting last night in Mt. V......

LOS ANGELES, California, May 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) -- California’s Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra is leading a coalition of 20 attorneys general, representing 19 states plus Washington, D.C., opposing a Trump administration rule change that prioritizes abstinence education over contraception distribution in family planning funds. In February, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that abstinence messages and natural family planning methods would be given priority in distributing $260 million worth of family planning grants. The announcement did not mention artificial birth control. In response, Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio, Utah, and Wisconsin, as well as the American...

Connecticut’s official balance sheets will be noticeably worse next year due to changes in how the state reports its retiree healthcare liabilities... Truth in Accounting issued Connecticut a failing grade based on its 2017 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and said the state is “hiding” $10.4 billion in retiree healthcare debt. “Connecticut’s financial condition is not only concerning, but also misleading as government officials failed to disclose significant amounts of retirement debt on the state’s balance sheet,” the report says. “As a result, residents and taxpayers have been presented with an inaccurate and untruthful accounting of the state government’s finances.” According...

On July 4, 1960, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard rang in Independence Day with a dire Associated Press report by one Norma Gauhn headlined “American Dialects Disappearing.” The problem, according to “speech experts,” was the homogenizing effect of “mass communications, compulsory education, [and] the mobility of restless Americans.” These conformist pressures have only intensified in the half-century since the AP warned “that within four generations virtually all regional U.S. speech differences will be gone.” And so as we enter the predicted twilight of regional American English, it’s no surprise that publications as venerable as the Economist now confirm what our collective...

Art exhibit has been dubbed the Chicago Gun Share Program. Each bike slot is filled with an AR-15 to show just how easy it is to get a gun in US. Exhibit was created by the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 'We're hoping the Chicago community can take advantage of this...and learn how simple it is for a civilian to obtain a weapon of war.' Also included in the exhibit is a screen that allows people to donate to the Brady Center. At least 862 people have been shot in Chicago in 2018 and 173 people have...

Barack Obama made a habit of stealing private land to create more public parks. Now, in a highly ironic turn of events, public park activists have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to block construction of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side. The Obama Presidential Center has been mired in controversy from the start. In March 2015, the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance for Chicago Park District land in Jackson Park to be transferred to the City of Chicago to lease to the Obama...

Former President Obama just loves being front and center of all the attention in the media. The headlines are usually about some new scandal Obama is apart of, or his poorly executed plans during his presidency that are barely coming to the surface. Now the former president has been caught red handed in a “bait and switch” in personal museum scandal. His new plan is to snatch some public land right from under the noses of the people of Chicago. Obama wants to create a Presidential Library in the Public Park Land. However, some people are not too happy about...

If former President Barack Obama wants the Obama Presidential Center to define his legacy, he’s going to have to let life go full circle. That means climbing off his presidential high horse and returning to his roots as a community organizer. Once Obama announced his library would be in Chicago, it was as if the former president had suddenly turned into a greedy real estate developer. And unfortunately, the manner in which the project was unveiled wasn’t inclusive. Jeanette Taylor, the education director for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Taylor said she asked the former president why he wouldn’t sign...

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michele have signed a multi-million book deal with Penguin Random House. Terms of the deal were not released but Financial Times reported bidding for the two-book deal had reached more than $65 million, a record amount for presidential memoirs.

The Obama Foundation is trying to generate as much public support as possible ahead of the city of Chicago's first municipal vote to approve construction permits that would allow the Obama Presidential Center to be built on historic parkland. The foundation's chief engagement officer, Michael Strautmanis, emailed "friends" of the project late last week asking them to show up at City Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday to demonstrate to city officials that local residents are behind it. Attendees were told to pick up Obama swag — T-shirts and buttons — from the organization's local headquarters ahead of Thursday. Although the...

A resource officer may have prevented a massacre after a 19-year-old former student allegedly brought a gun inside an Illinois school and opened fire. The suspect shot at the Dixon High School resource officer, who returned fire and struck the gunman, City Administrator Danny Langloss said. The officer was not hit by gunfire and the suspect had non-life threatening injuries. No students or staff members were injured in the incident. The suspect was placed in police custody.

Activists filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block construction of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s historic public parklands. Protect Our Parks Inc. accused organizers of an “institutional bait and switch” by initially advertising the center as the 44th president’s official library. “In August 2016, the City and the Park District publically announced that the Obama Presidential Library, promised to include all of the former President’s official records, would be built in Jackson Park,” the lawsuit reads. “Then, in May 2017, after the Defendants’ public announcement that a true ‘Presidential Library’ would be built, the Obamas did an about face...

mass shooting of congressional Republicans... many lawmakers are mad, or frustrated, or saddened, at how quickly the story disappeared from the headlines given that the shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, targeted Republicans... Hodgkinson carried a list of names of lawmakers in his pocket: ... The list included their office numbers and short physical descriptions. He’d recorded video of the field in April of of that year — a sign, the prosecutor wrote in his official report, that Hodgkinson “had already selected Simpson field as a potential target as early as April 2017.” His social media was filled with Bernie and anti-Republican...

An audible gasp went out in the breakout room I was in at last month’s pension eventcosponsored by The Civic Federation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. That was when a speaker from the Chicago Fed proposed levying, across the state and in addition to current property taxes, a special property assessment they estimate would be about 1% of actual property value each year for 30 years. Evidently, that wasn’t reality shock enough. This week the Chicago Fed published that proposal formally. It’s linked linked here. It surely ranks among the most blatantly inhumane and foolish ideas we’ve seen...

Former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds is headed back to jail, but for a short enough time — four months — that he said hopes to be living in Africa by Christmas. “I’m done with America. I’m going to do this, and I’m going home — to Africa. … I’ve given up on America,” Reynolds told reporters after U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman sentenced him to six months imprisonment for his failure to file income tax returns. “It’s really a tragedy you’ve squandered the opportunities you’ve had and the type of person you could have been,” the judge told Reynolds. Reynolds,...

CHICAGO -- Former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds of Illinois is headed back to prison for a third time in his ill-fated career after a federal judge sentenced him Thursday to six months behind bars for failing to file tax returns. The sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman marked the end of a nearly three-year legal saga that has seen the former Democratic congressman jailed for violating bond, accused by prosecutors of launching a smear campaign on social media and reprimanded by two judges for failing to abide by the court's rules. Reynolds, 66, who acted as his...

About half of all Americans now live under sanctuary policies that shield illegal immigrants from law enforcement, according to the latest tally of jurisdictions that the Federation for American Immigration Reform is releasing Thursday. FAIR calculates there were 564 states and municipalities that refuse some level of cooperation with federal immigration authorities as of April 1, up more than 200 since President Trump took office and up more than 500 compared with a decade ago. There were just 40 sanctuaries when President Obama took office. Entire states such as California, Illinois and New York are now sanctuaries, as well as...

A former Democratic congressman from Chicago, heading to prison for the third time, says he has “given up on America” and plans to move to Africa after he serves his latest sentence. At his sentencing Thursday, Mel Reynolds, 66, got six months in prison for failing to file tax returns on more than $400,000 he received for consulting work. He also received a scolding from federal Judge Robert Gettleman, who told the Harvard graduate he could recall thinking to himself in the early 1990s that Reynolds had tremendous promise. “It's a tragedy that you squandered the opportunities you had and...

The end result of indoctrination in government schools and mass media that teaches "urban youths" that American society is racist, corrupt, unfair, and unworthy of compliance is the crumbling of civil order.  When a substantial group of young males (the segment of society most prone to acting out with violence) think they have no stake in the continuation of existing social and property relations, they are able to impose anarchy in local areas.  When enough people think and feel this way, the forces of order – police, and in extremis the National Guard – can be overwhelmed and powerless to stop...