Free Republic

Just four words: Black America, I'm Sorry. Laurella Willis' methods are turning heads on Chicago’s South Side, CBS 2's Audrina Bigos reports. [Snip] [Willis] says she is sorry about "everything that's going on in America." The violence, the anger, the racial tension, all of it. "I don't want to continue to see Black American being oppressed, and held down and killed like animals," Willis said.

The city of Detroit, now famous as an economic disaster, began its decline when it lost jobs. This was accompanied by a loss of population, a rapid rise in poverty, increasing dependence upon federal entitlement programs and an unstoppable downward economic spiral. Puerto Rico is now undergoing an economic collapse sparked not by population loss but by excessive government spending. Chicago is in the same situation. Government overspending and over taxation comes first, population loss follows. Chicago is technically bankrupt. Its expenditures have exceeded its receipts for about ten years. All big rust belt cities in the Midwest, East, and...

The driver of an SUV plowed through a group of protesters during a “Black Lives Matters” march in southern Illinois on Sunday, July 10.According to Carbondale police, at around 10 p.m., officers began to monitor demonstrators who began marching along Washington Street in Carbondale.Police say they continued marching throughout the downtown streets, briefly assembled in front of the Carbondale Police Department, before returning to the Town Square Pavilion.According to police, as they were returning to the pavilion, a vehicle tried to drive through the demonstrators in the 200 block of East Main Street while they were blocking traffic.You can see...

A federal judge temporarily blocked Chicago election officials Tuesday from removing a Republican Congressional candidate from the ballot in a case that poses an intriguing question: When is a Republican not a Republican? (An) ousted GOP committeemen, Frances Sapone, challenged the party’s selection of Jeffrey Leef to run against U.S. Rep Danny K. Davis in the 7th Congressional District. Sapone contended a vote of GOP committeemen to nominate Leef (after no candidate ran in the primary) was invalid because she and another of the ousted committeemen were not notified of the meeting in which Leef was selected. A Chicago Board...

Milo Yiannopolous was supposed to deliver a second speech to Chicago’s DePaul University, but will now have to host his undoubtedly provocative talk elsewhere. School administrators denied a College Republican group’s request to use school facilities for Milo’s return visit.

Less than 24 hours after a Black Lives Matter sympathizer’s murderous rampage left 5 police officers dead and 11 more wounded, the streaming music service Pandora did something vile. They posted a message on the front of their Facebook page: pandora message It reads: “Our heart ache for all those who unfairly lost their lives. We stand with marginalized communities. We stand for racial justice. We stand for equity And we stand together to make this world a better place. #BlackLivesMatter #LoveAboveAll.” No mention of the lives of the officers lost the day before. No mention of their heroic sacrifice....

JERUSALEM – Although the reporter involved denies she coordinated with the White House, speculation abounds over the genesis of the press conference inquiry last week by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, whose question about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. prompted a national race scandal involving President Obama. Several blogs have picked up on unanswered questions surrounding the event and have speculated that the White House may have coordinated the question. "Sweet was prepped, planted and performed on cue," was the title of a piece on The Real Barack Obama blog. "Lynn Sweet has earned her bones as a...

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every 2¹/₂ hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West sides into the downtown business district; even Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies. The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’...

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., his wife, Jill, center, and Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., applaud during talk on the final night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Former Illinois Congressman turned conservative radio host Joe Walsh went on a twitter rant following the deadly sniper attack on Dallas police officers Thursday, including a now-deleted message that read: "This is now war. Watch out Obama." Walsh, a Republican who represented Illinois' 8th district from 2011 to 2013 before becoming a syndicated radio host, delivered a series of tweets that criticized President Barack Obama and suggested that the president was a "cop hater" no different from "the thugs on the street."

A war among criminals rages on in America's third-largest city, with innocent residents caught in the crossfire. Over the holiday weekend, Chicago passed an ominous threshold: So far in 2016, 2,000 people have been victims of gun violence. In all of last year, 2,988 people were victims of gun violence, according to records kept by The Chicago Tribune.

Donald Trump’s private meeting Thursday with Senate Republicans — designed to foster greater party unity ahead of the national convention in Cleveland — grew combative as the presumptive presidential nominee admonished three senators who have been critical of his candidacy and predicted they would lose their reelection bids, according to two Republican officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges. Trump’s most tense exchange was with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been vocal in his concerns about the business mogul’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric and policies on immigration that the senator argues alienate many Latino voters and others in Arizona....

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

Five days after agreeing to raise property taxes by another $250 million for teachers pensions, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday defended the record increase for police and fire pensions and school construction reflected in property tax bills now landing like a thud in Chicago mailboxes.The mayor was asked if he had “any words of consolation” for those taxpayers “stunned or even outraged” by their property tax bills, which reflect the $588 million property tax increase approved by the City Council last fall. His response essentially was, “I told you so.”

Bright colors and breezy fabrics of traditional tunics and trousers floated across the sidewalks of Navy Pier, which housed the first Eid Expo, bringing together diverse denominations and ethnicities Wednesday. The two-day event celebrated Eid al-Fitr, a holiday that concludes Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. Thousands of Muslims from the Midwest attended the event to pray, mingle and eat halal food. Imam Zaid Shakir, who led Muhammad Ali's funeral prayers, led the Eid prayers. Asma Ahad, director of market development for the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America, one of the co-sponsors along with the Council of Islamic...

For years, Jorge Ramos has been the face of Univision, America's most influential Spanish-language news channel. Although seen by millions of people, for a time he was largely unknown to just as many. But then he stood up to Donald Trump, further solidifying himself as the voice of Latino voters. He also does a show for millennial viewers on Fusion, which broadens his base. It's been a long journey for the fifty-eight-year-old, who came to America as an immigrant and, as he says here, is inspired by de Tocqueville. I learned very early on that I had to question everything,...

Three children—ages 5, 7 and 11—were among the 64 shooting victims in Chicago over Independence Day weekend. That’s a handful fewer than the 69 people shot there over Memorial Day weekend but it is well above the 55 people shot over Fourth of July weekend in 2015. Chicago’s warm-weather mayhem is as constant as it is concentrated. Nearly all of this gun violence takes place in black and brown neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides. A resident of North Lawndale—which recorded 82 violent crimes, including homicide and sexual assault, between May 21 and June 20—told the Chicago Tribune...

Abner Mikva, a liberal stalwart from Illinois who served in all three branches of the federal government, mentored a young Barack Obama and famously learned firsthand the brazen nature of Chicago’s political machine, has died. The 90-year-old died of bladder cancer Monday at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Steven Cohen, who is married to Mikva’s oldest of three daughters, told The Associated Press. Mikva worked his way up from a welfare-recipient family to the Illinois House, U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Court of Appeals’ bench and later the White House as an adviser to President Bill Clinton. But...

The skyrocketing violent crime that’s plaguing the city of Chicago did not let up over the Fourth of July holiday. Fifty people were shot, including three children, and four people were murdered from Friday through Monday. These shocking figures are actually an improvement from recent Fourth of Julys, according to Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. [Snip] 2016 is shaping up to be one of deadliest in Chicago since the 1990s. 338 people have been murdered and thousands shot since January 1st. In the month of June seventy people were killed. Those figures average out to someone being shot roughly every...

Urbana, IL — If you decide to desecrate an American flag and share photos of your big moment on social media, beware the wrath of the internet. A 22-year-old Illinois man learned that lesson after setting a flag on fire and sharing photos on his Facebook page. Bryton Mellott paired the photos with statements about violence and race in the U.S., according to a Forbes report. "I am not proud to be an American. In this moment, being proud of my country is to ignore the atrocities committed against people of color, people living in poverty, people who identify as...