Free Republic

If you told me I’d share anything in common with the vicious racist hypocrite and Marxist Chicago Teacher’s Union boss Stacy Davis Gates, I would have said you were a drooling madman. But wait: Stacy Davis Gates and I share one thing in common we share with our kids. And it’s beautiful. It’s so damn beautiful that I could cry. We appreciate The Beautiful Game, which Americans call soccer, but those who love it call it futbol. Our twin sons played it growing up through high school and college, and still play today. But we did not move to the...

I love Chicago’s John Kass. Today his blog post was on something I and my friends here (especially David) have hit time and time again because we are so passionately terrified for today’s children. But there was a moment in it that was such a revelation, I wanted to share it with you all. An aspect of the gender affirming madness that I hadn’t considered before. His column appeared at almost the same time as this horrific story on Fox, and it was as if it was meant to be. A young male, who formerly identified as a transwoman, who...

American media doesn’t care much about Oct. 28 and Oxi Day, literally “The Day of the No.” But I care about it, because a man I loved was there. Oxi Day, (pronounced O-hee), is the day that Greece said “No” to the Axis powers and changed the course of World War II at terrible cost. On Oxi Day, I think of that man. My father. He wasn’t political. Politicians were talkers and he was not much of a talker. He was a boy in the Greek Army then, from the village of Rizes on Oct. 28, 1940, when Mussolini, backed...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is an experienced lawyer, skilled in the great game of words. She made a good living craftily parsing words at one of the city’s top law firms. Law firm politics, played on carpets in board rooms is one thing. But Chicago politics played on the concrete and asphalt of the blood-spattered Chicago Way is another. And as a rookie mayor clearly overwhelmed by the job, she’s publicly proven herself to be woefully inept at leadership, crisis management and the dark arts of politics. She has lost the city. She lost it when she failed to stop...

Chicago holds its breath, awaiting release of a police video showing 13-year-old Adam Toledo, reportedly with a gun, shot dead by a cop.The city by the lake hasn't recovered from the waves of looting and other violence that grew out of last year's George Floyd protests. Just look at all the vacant storefronts on North Michigan Avenue, the "Magnificent Mile." And now Chicago looks north to a trembling Minneapolis, a city on edge with the murder trial of Floyd's alleged killer, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a white man. Floyd was Black.Just a short drive from Minneapolis, in Brooklyn...

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass is telling the woke apologist sharks for liberal billionaire George Soros at his paper’s union to pound sand.

I think Soros is pumping a lot of money into Political Opposition "Journalism." I remember when the Weekly Standard, failing and desperate for money and for a new buyer, started claiming that Soros had not meant he helped Nazis catalogue the art collections of Jews when he said he helped Nazis catalogue the art collections of Jews. George Soros seemed very interested in Reputation Management, and more determined than ever to impose socialism on America through spending his millions, and suddenly all sorts of people were very, very interested in helping him. Now Soros' paid minions have come to #Cancel...

Columnist John Kass has defied “cancel culture” at the Chicago Tribune after members of the journalists’ union attacked him for criticizing left-wing billionaire George Soros and his backing of “progressive” prosecutors across the country. Last week, Kass wrote about “an overwhelming sense of lawlessness” in Democrat-run cities, and noted: “[T]hese Democratic cities are also where left-wing billionaire George Soros has spent millions of dollars to help elect liberal social justice warriors as prosecutors. He remakes the justice system in urban America, flying under the radar.” That statement is entirely accurate. In 2018, Breitbart News reported that Soros was involved in...

After 23 years as the Chicago Tribune’s white male conservative standard-bearer, John Kass is about to lose his coveted spot on Page 2 and his status as the newspaper’s “lead columnist.” Colin McMahon, editor-in-chief of the Tribune, today announced plans to reorganize the paper’s columnists and separate their work from the news section. Within the next few days the changes will be unveiled in print and online to help readers differentiate between news and opinions, he said. One effect will be to relegate Kass and other columnists farther back in the print edition and label them more clearly as opinion...

After the riots in Chicago, what you noticed was all that broken glass from all the windows of all the looted stores and looted restaurants. Each crunching step was the sound of the city’s breaking heart. Some residents came out early Sunday to help, trying to sweep up the pieces on the ground. “This started out to be about George Floyd,” said a man on Clark Street. “But it turned into something else, about what they could grab and take and ruin. Look at it.” The mayor and the governor finally called out the Illinois National Guard on Sunday to...

Bernie Sanders is a survivor, but can he survive the orchestrated media onslaught that seems determined to bring him down? At 78, Sanders has survived a heart attack, and the loathing of the Democratic Party establishment and its compliant media wing. He survived that recent vicious and shameful CNN takedown accusing him of sexism for allegedly saying a woman couldn't be elected president. Sanders denied it. CNN didn't much care. Now his supporters are being shamed as dangerous and angry by other media and also as tools of President Donald Trump. But guess what? It's all backfiring. Sanders is surging,...

Where did the Trump impeachment go? When House Democrats began selling tickets to their President Donald Trump Impeachment Theater — shouting their outrage, preening on those late-night talk shows — it was much meatier business. It would be full of collusion with Russia, blackmail of Ukraine, it would contain extortion and go heavy on bribery. The way the Democrats sold it, Americans were to expect some giant roast, bone in, with a rich, thick gravy, to feed a nation longing for justice from Orange Man Bad. At least, that’s what Democrats promised. But that’s not what they delivered for consideration...

Should Elizabeth Warren do the right thing and drop out of the Democratic presidential race, so Bernie Sanders can address Joe Biden’s multiple “reality issues” before taking on President Donald Trump? Yes, immediately.

Are you still looking for the one searing illuminated truth from the Democratic presidential debates? That moment telling America what voting Democratic will really mean in 2020? I’ve got it. But it wasn’t Kamala Harris (rhetorically) whipping Joe Biden. That’s what Democrats would rather focus on, because it’s easier than the inadvertently revealed truth that could doom their political chances. It did offer great drama: a tired old white guy reduced to babbling and a younger, smarter black woman putting him in his place and finishing off his political career. He’s toast. Even if Biden squeezes into one of her...

And then she dropped charges against Smollett -- alleging that the Hollywood star faked his own hate crime and blamed it on President Trump. Smollett's vanity and recklessness could have touched off racial violence. Instead, it killed Preckwinkle's mayoral ambitions and Foxx's political future. It kills off that Foxx dream of one day becoming a U.S. senator from Illinois, once Dick Durbin is pushed out of the way. Imagine, Kim Foxx, celebrity chaser, hanging out with Kamala Harris and the Obamas... Can you imagine it? Remember that high-minded talk about Foxx having "recused" herself on account of compromising herself with...

After it was over, Chuck mumbled as if he’d just had unmentionable outpatient surgery. And Nancy bragged about how she was “the mom” in the room, before she veered off to a treatise on skunk urination fights while questioning the president’s “manhood.” We can at least thank Pelosi for having the decency not to hold up her hands. But when a gentlewoman like Nancy Pelosi feels compelled to discuss skunk urine in the most vulgar terms, while putting her “I was trying to be the mom” in the same rhetorical stew as her ruminations on “manhood,” it suggests she’s lost...

Future historians probably won’t devote entire volumes to Hollywood actor Matt Damon for his part in the grotesque savaging of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Sadly, Damon will most likely be just a footnote, some jester in motley, participating in the American political circus. It is that circus in which Kavanaugh, a man of exemplary public reputation, has had his honor stripped by the political left, accused without evidence or corroboration, as a high school sexual predator, a gang rapist, a drunken bully and boor. If Damon is remembered at all in this, it will be for a bit part, his mimicry...

The #KassforMayor campaign is en fuego, with hordes of supporters beseeching me to put dibs on Chicago, become mayor and boss this crazy town. Perhaps they love me for the simple honesty of my Chicago Way platform: Riches for me and mine, from boodle and asphalt and trucking contracts. And taxes for the rest of you to pay for it all. I will give sanctuary to all voters, even the suburban dead. And if you don’t like it, get your mouth shut. So let it be written, so let it be done. Yes, my friends, I am truly humbled by...

My friends, I will be the next mayor of Chicago. And this I vow: As mayor, I'll never lie to you and I'll rule by respecting Chicago’s most ancient traditions, meaning my family and friends will get rich, and the people of Chicago will pay for it. Or else. Everyone will be happy and content, or else. For I am a river to my people. Future historians may notice that my first successful campaign began with a tweet. It was from Tom Bevan, publisher of RealClearPolitics and host of the “Tom Bevan Show” on WLS-AM radio. “At this point, just...

Even with her victories Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton will not be elected president of the United States. Why? Because she can’t win, that’s why. And the sooner you figure this out, the calmer you will be. She wants desperately to win. She’s endured painful decades of Bill, years of Barack, eating all the insults like so many sins and swallowing them down as the price of her ambition. It’s all there in the dull weight of her eyes. But I just don’t see Hillary winning this election, because she’s the lone candidate of the establishment in a year of insurgency....