Free Republic

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 President BARACK OBAMA: "I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory -- you should just decide what works." Buenos Aires, Argentina / March 23, 2016

We did trade wrong. We could have had a good trade policy that increased trade and raised living standards. We could export more soybeans, airplanes and software, and protect the environment around the world. We could have low-cost goods and encourage democracy, respect for human rights and improved working conditions.

Brandon Tatum My experience at Donald Trump's rally in Tucson, AZ. brandon tatum speaks of his experience at a trump rally.

Please read and pass it on. When that is the subject line in an email message, most of us know to hit the delete button. But the sender was someone I knew. It was one of those forwarded emails you get; something sent to me and 25 other people. The message contained a first-person account by a man named Todd Petruna about an American commercial airlines flight on which "11 Muslim men" caused a near riot, purportedly as practice or a dry-run for hijacking an airplane. Petruna claimed he was a passenger who helped foil the coordinated attempt by the...

Predictably, the political right and left are in a tizzy over the prospect [of Trump winning the GOP nomination], but for different reasons. On the right, it is a "moral and character issue" according to Erick Erickson, organizer of Conservatives Against Trump. A group of conservative activists met and drafted a statement denouncing Trump but said activists declined to sign the statement or otherwise identify themselves. Surprising that they would not all be proud to publically stand against Trump rather than scheme against him behind closed doors. The GOP establishment is also down on The Donald because, in their opinion,...

An event hosted by METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich at the University of California-Berkeley earlier this month was interrupted by liberal students who stormed the stage in protest of subpar conditions endured by contract workers on campus. One student allegedly assaulted Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff during the incident. Benioff was on campus on March 2 to participate in the public forum intended to explore the creative culture of the Bay Area through conversations with other leading cultural figures from the community, including Ulrich and the drummer's father, Torben Ulrich, who at 87 is still active in music, film and poetry. Members...

A Romanian Member of Parliament has been sentenced to two years in prison for handing out vast quantities of fast food to voters in a bid to win an election. Florin Aurelian Popescu, a Liberal Democrat (PDL) politician resigned his parliamentary seat this month ahead of sentencing as he came to answer for a crime committed in 2012. Mr. Popescu was not an MP then, but was seeking re-election on a local council, reports the Telegraph. Despite it not being a seat in the national parliament Mr. Popescu saw fit to give away 60,992 kg of “grilled chicken”, ordering it...

More than one-quarter of Americans would consider moving to another country such as Canada if businessman Donald Trump wins the presidency, according to a new poll. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed in the Morning Consult/Vox poll released Tuesday said they would likely consider leaving the country if Trump were president, while 65 percent said they would stay. More than half of those who indicated openness to leaving the U.S. should Trump win in November reported that they are "very likely" to consider moving to another country. Vox highlighted an ideological split among respondents: nearly half of liberals, 49 percent, said...

Is the media inciting violence against Donald Trump? Frank Chung THE media wants a member of the public to kill Donald Trump. That’s the view of a growing number of commentators, who have sounded warnings about the increasingly dangerous tone to media reporting around the Republican presidential hopeful. In a lengthy blog post, Scott Adams, the creator of the popular Dilbert comic strip, has slammed the media for “priming the public to try to kill Trump”, likening the conduct to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. The author recalled how a mere three months earlier, in his book The...

Larry David was back on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend to reprise his all-too-perfect Bernie Sanders character. And despite Sanders's win in Michigan last week, the big joke was how limited his base of support remains -- and its propensity for shenanigans on social media. "I want to thank everyone who voted for me, and apologize to everyone else for making your Facebook feeds so, so annoying," he said. "I mean, I love my supporters, but they're too much, right? I'm great, but I'm not five-posts-a-day great. With all due respect to my supporters, get a life." David-as-Sanders then poked...

"We may be introducing a kind of poison into the American political system that can hurt us," Mondale said. "If this sort of stuff is accepted, condoned, is seen as positive, we'll see more of it." Mondale, who supports Hillary Clinton for president, worries if Donald Trump or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wins the Republican nomination. Trump, he said, has "stirred up a sub-caucus of Americans that like anti-immigrant talk, that like assaults against decent immigration rules. If there is an America out there that is so brash, so racist, so nativist that they like supporting Trump or so evangelically...

The television personality is now being investigated for possible animal cruelty, NBC Los Angeles reported. Sheriff’s deputies with Los Angeles County Animal Control visited Millan’s Dog Psychology Center in Santa Clarita, La., Thursday evening, but he was away on a business trip, a family member told NBC. The animal welfare officials had received several inquiries after the episode with Simon, which showed the dog biting a pig’s ear during a training session led by Millan. A 24-hour notice has been issued, requiring him to contact the investigators, according to NBC. They want to know what has happened to the pig...

National Public Radio collaborated with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to survey Americans’ recent experience with health care. As to the Affordable Care Act, the survey’s findings are damning. They suggest that Obamacare has been worse than a complete waste of money. This is the survey’s only question directly on Obamacare. Most respondents say that Obamacare hasn’t affected them; where it has affected them, most say the law’s impact has been harmful: The promises that President Obama made about the ACA–cheaper premiums! lower co-pays and deductibles! better coverage!–have completely failed to materialize....

I have a coworker who is a Yuuuuge Lib. He came at me yesterday with this "20% of Trump supporters are in the KKK" idiocy. I've heard this dude say some pretty wild crap but I think this is the craziest thing ever to come out of his mouth.

"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering. The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory...

"A "Liberal Paradise" would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only Law Enforcement has guns. And believe it or not, such a place does indeed exist …… It’s called prison." Sheriff Joe Arpaio Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Pheonix, Arizona

The West Virginia legislature did not waste any time in overriding Governor Tomblin’s veto of HB 4145, also known as “Constitutional carry” or permitless carry.  Governor Tomblin vetoed a similar bill in 2015, but the veto occurred after the legislature had adjourned, making a veto override difficult.This year, 2016, the Constitutional carry bill was passed early enough for the legislature to vote on a veto override if necessary.  Governor Tomblin received the  Constitutional carry bill on 26 February.  He waited to the last possible day to veto it, 3 March.  The House of Delegates overrode his veto on 4...

To the catalogue of anxieties her patients explore during therapy — marriage, children, and careers — psychologist Alison Howard is now listening to a new source of stress: the political rise of Donald Trump. In recent days, at least two patients have invoked the Republican front-runner, including one who talked at length about being disturbed that Trump can be so divisive and popular at the same time, said Howard, who practices in the District. What had happened to Trump during his childhood, the patient wanted to know, to make him such a “bad person?” “He has stirred people up,” Howard...

The University of Pittsburgh’s Student Government Board held a public meeting on Tuesday to discuss the traumatizing visit the night before from “dangerous” homosexual and Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos, during which students described themselves as feeling “hurt” and “unsafe.” “During his talk, Yiannopoulos called students who believe in a gender wage gap ‘idiots,’ declared the Black Lives Matter movement a ‘supremacy’ group, while feminists are ‘man-haters,’” according to the student paper The Pitt News, prompting a handful of twenty-something-year olds to feel upset. “Just because we have to be neutral with our funding doesn’t mean we’re personally neutral,” announced...