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CHICAGO (AP) — As speculation swirls about who will be Chicago's next top cop, a finalist for the post said Sunday that Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered him the job a few days ago, but then phoned Saturday night to say he was "going in a different direction." An aide to Emanuel on Sunday denied that Cedric Alexander was ever offered the job as Chicago's police superintendent. Alexander, the public safety director in Georgia's DeKalb County, told The Associated Press that the mayor offered him the job Thursday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., and that the mayor said he intended...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has decided to install veteran cop Eddie Johnson as the city's interim police superintendent while rejecting the three finalists the Chicago Police Board sent him, according to four sources familiar with the process. It remained unclear whether Emanuel will seek to hand the top cop job to Johnson permanently, but his move to circumvent the three candidates presented to him from the Police Board's national search for a new police superintendent came among heightened pressure from black and Latino aldermen to make the hire from within the department. Johnson, a prominent African-American who currently serves as chief...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Our president, Barack Hussein O -- in what should surprise nobody -- said that there actually is very little difference between and capitalism. Just choose what works, he said. It's a town hall event in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And he was talking to young Latin-American leaders, a young Latin-American leaders initiative, and he said there's not much difference in capitalism and communism. Just, you know, pick whatever works. You know, pick one from Column A, one from Column B. Mix 'em; combine 'em. Do whatever works. That's what I do. No, that's not what Obama does. Obama...

CHICAGO — More people are leaving the Chicago area than any other major city in the United States. According to census data released Thursday, the Chicago area lost more than 6,000 residents in 2015. That now puts the region’s population at 9.5 million. Chicago’s metropolitan statistical area, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana. The Chicago region’s decline extended to the state. In fact, Illinois was one of just seven states to see a population dip in 2015, and had the second-greatest decline rate last year after West Virginia, census...

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee apologized to President Obama Tuesday for Donald Trump and some attendees cheering the end of his presidency at the group's policy conference.

Ted Cruz, the opportunist, shows up again. Instead of saying anything about radical Islamists, ISIS, need for better vetting and assimilation, or even praying for the victims —— He plays political games before the bodies are cold. He says “oh well isn’t it funny NATO HQ city was bombed and Trump yesterday said NATO expenses should be split more evenly, instead of US taxpayers shouldering all the financial burden. He ‪#‎lying‬ now when he said “Trump wants us to end NATO and withdraw from it”. The lies from this man are unreal. Trump explained the plan on CNN with Wolf...

GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Tuesday that Donald Trump was engaging in a "pre-emptive surrender" to Islamic terror by calling for a "withdrawal" from NATO on the eve of the Brussels terror attacks. On Monday, Trump told CNN that the U.S. should greatly reduce its support of NATO. "It's too much and frankly it's a different world than it was when we originally conceived of the idea," Trump said of the US-European security alliance. Cruz said he found it "striking" that the terror attacks occurred on the day after his rival candidate Donald Trump called for reducing the U.S....

Cruz: "It is striking that the day after Donald Trump called for America weakening NATO withdrawing from NATO we see Brussels, where NATO is headquartered, the subject of a radical Islamist terrorist attack."Cruz supporters: "How dare you say Cruz is blaming Trump for Brussels? Cruz said no such thing."

Hours after terrorist explosions in Brussels killed at least 31 people, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz proposed that law enforcement increase monitoring of Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S. In a statement released by his campaign, Cruz wrote: "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." . . "I don't know whether this is true or not, but Cruz said we should start patrolling Muslim neighborhoods or something - is that true?" Kasich asked a group of reporters outside of a campaign stop in Minneapolis. He added: "In our country, we don't want...

Recently, when disrupters showed up at a Trump rally in Chicago, the first thing that came to mind was that America’s most notorious community organizer could be the wizard behind the curtain orchestrating what was being sold as an organic occurrence. In Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals, the late author could have been describing Obama’s last seven years in office when he wrote that an efficacious organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.”...

Corruption: Though she tries to ignore it, Hillary Clinton can’t escape her email problem. Almost every day brings more trouble for her. It’s time she did what a decent person would do — temporarily shelve her presidential campaign. While Clinton leads Sen. Bernie Sanders in the delegate count, the former secretary of state is far behind everyone on the ethical score. She is consistently battered by news that reminds voters just how corrupt she is and now is facing a report that the FBI director is convinced she broke the law.

"This appearance in Arizona was a new low," the eyewitness told The ENQUIRER. "Gabby Giffords is still suffering the aftereffects of being shot in the head by a psycho in 2011 — but she seemed to be much more articulate and aware of her surroundings than Bill! Everyone was dreading what would happen when [the former President] tried to speak!" But insiders also said that current events are taking a toll on the struggling campaigner — with Bill now terrified that an outspoken opponent like Donald Trump will harm Hillary by bringing up the former President's own disgusting behavior with...

Bill Clinton is either losing it, or he’s ramping up his attacks on President Obama. Neither is good news for Hillary Clinton. During a speech in Spokane, Washington on Monday, Clinton seemed to tear down Obama to boost his wife. “Literally from the time I met her till we talked yesterday, she is the best change maker I have ever known. “She always finds a way to make something good happen, to make people feel empowered, to buy people into the process, to make democracy work the way the framer intended for it to work,” Clinton said. “Now, if you...

A pair of House committees is forming a bipartisan working group of eight lawmakers to prepare for possible legislation addressing how the widespread use of encryption affects law enforcement investigations. "The bipartisan encryption working group will examine the issues surrounding this ongoing national debate," House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton. R-Mich., said Monday. As chairman of the two committees that have jurisdiction over encryption issues, Goodlatte and Upton are ex officio chairs of the working group. They released that statement jointly along with Michigan Rep. John Conyers and New Jersey Rep. Steve...

First, in many ways, the president’s initiative to normalize relations with Cuba isn’t so much ending their isolation as ending ours. Cuba has enjoyed good and growing relations with our neighbors across the hemisphere for years. In recent years, those countries have threatened to exclude the U.S. from hemispheric meetings if we continued to demand that Cuba’s exclusion. We have sought to isolate Cuba for over 50 years; we ended up isolating ourselves. Second, for many across the world, Cuba, not the U.S., has been on the right side of history. Cuba stood with Nelson Mandela and the African National...

At an event today in Spokane, Washington, Bill Clinton called for putting "the awful legacy of the last 8 years behind us and the 7 years before that where we were practicing trickle down economics."

The Timberwolves were night soldiers, some of the toughest in World War II, and Milford Ray Allen was one of those tough sons of guns, spending 196 consecutive days on the front lines. After D-Day, it looked for a while like the war might be over by Christmas. But on Christmas Eve, Allen, now 91, saw some of the toughest fighting of the war. It was the Battle of the Bulge, a desperate counter-offensive by the Germans. In one of the coldest winters on record, the ground was "frozen like concrete." That was tough on U.S. soldiers, but an advantage...

You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count. But if you guessed “the same campaign that did not get enough valid signatures to be on the ballot in either Pennsylvania or Illinois,” you would be absolutely correct! Yup, John Kasich cannot win all of the delegates from Maryland. It is in fact mathematically impossible for Kasich to do so, at this point. Quick background: Maryland assigns 14 of its 38 delegates to the winner of the statewide race, and the other 24 by who wins each Congressional District. The CD delegates are directly voted on: the top three...

It seems that everyday residents of red states aren’t the only ones fed up with people moving to our states from their failed progressive fantasylands and bringing those failed policies with them.One Mississippi State Representative echoed the sentiments of many of us; while I live in Florida, not Mississippi, Florida is being inundated with blue staters fleeing the results of their policies . . . only to try to force them on us.The Clarion-Ledger reports: When Becky Guidry of Gulfport emailed freshman Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, expressing her concerns about the tax breaks being considered by the Legislature, she was...

 Rubio wanted a fight with Cruz over national security. Well, he's got one. Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. "Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense," Cruz told Bloomberg Politics in a wide-ranging and exclusive interview during a campaign swing through Iowa. He argued that the 2011 bombings that toppled the Libyan leader didn’t help the fight against terrorists. "Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet, he had become a significant ally in fighting...