Free Republic

Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel has offered to take charge of a film celebrating Donald Trump's presidential campaign that would air next month at the Republican National Convention, Trump said in a new interview. "He's a very good friend of mine," Trump said about Emanuel in a story posted online Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter. "He calls me a lot. I call him a lot and we talk. He's very political. Even though he's not political, he's political. He gets it." . . .

Chicago police beefed up patrols for Memorial Day as more than 60 people were shot during the violent three-day holiday weekend. By Monday evening, at least 62 people had been shot across the city since Friday afternoon, including six who were killed. This surpasses the number of people shot during last year's Memorial Day weekend, though Chicago Police News Affairs said murders are down 50 percent compared to last Memorial Day.

Some police officers who have spoken to The Daily Beast blame arduous paperwork required for street stops—Chicago’s version of stop and frisk—for this year’s uptick in gun violence. Fewer street stops mean fewer guns being taken off the street. One officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity blamed this system for the shooting spike, saying his fellow cops want nothing to do with the spider’s web of legalities involved every time they stop someone they think might be a shooter... ...“Chicago is dead,” Simmons said staring blankly at the street, the lights, the cars, the scene. “I got a...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday blamed his dismal showing in a New York Times poll on “40 years” of financial neglect of Chicago’s South and West sides — not on disenchantment with him. One year after the mayor’s second inauguration, 62 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Emanuel’s performance as mayor. Only 25 percent approved of the job the mayor is doing. ... Without mentioning former Mayor Richard M. Daley by name, Emanuel laid the blame squarely on the doorstep of his predecessor and political mentor.

CHICAGO (WLS) - The violence plaguing Chicago did not stop this Mother's Day weekend. At least 49 people were shot and seven died over the last three days in locations all over the city. On Friday, mothers who lost children to violence pleaded for calm over the weekend, but their pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears. Community members spoke out against the violence on a weekend when mothers are supposed to be spending time with their children, not saying goodbye.

President Obama’s hometown is a war zone. The horrendous violence on the streets there has escalated. With warm summer-like weather, gang bangers were especially active, easily surpassing 2015’s Mothers Day carnage (3 killed, 25 wounded) and 2014’s (5 killed, 19 wounded). Meanwhile, the President of the United States ignores the battlefield conditions in the hometown he adopted as his political base. Nearly all of the violence is among young black males, making the rate of death in that particular demographic segment comparable to a serous war zone. A map of the violence this year to date from heyjackss.com shows where...

The people of Chicago are deeply riven by race, class and neighborhood, distrustful of the police, fearful of the growing rate of violent crime and united chiefly in their disapproval of the mayor’s performance and their conviction that the city is headed down the wrong track. These are among findings of a new survey by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, which polled residents of a city that has been upended in recent months by revelations of questionable actions by the police, threats of a teachers’ strike, a school funding crisis and an uptick in violence. The...

CHICAGO (CBS) — Three people were killed and at least 25 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

New Top Cop's Fiancee Under Investigation For Alleged Police Exam Cheating By Mark Konkol and Heather Cherone Updated April 5, 2016 THE LOOP — Mayor Rahm Emanuel's newly appointed top cop Eddie Johnson's fiancee is a Chicago Police lieutenant named in an ongoing investigation into alleged cheating on the department's lieutenant's exam, DNAinfo Chicago has learned. It's the same cheating probe that sources said helped derail Deputy Chief Eugene Williams' chances of being promoted to police superintendent. Now the allegations are part of a separate probe, this one by Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson, sources said. Williams, one of the...

CHICAGO — Thousands of Chicago teachers plan to walk off the job for one day on Friday, shutting down schools in the nation's third-largest district in what could be an early glimpse of a more prolonged strike still to come. Some 27,000 Chicago Teachers Union members have been working without a contract since June. They've overwhelmingly authorized an open-ended strike like the one that closed schools for more than a week in 2012, though that would still be weeks away. The union and its allies say Friday's action is an attempt to draw attention to their fight for a new...

Black residents of Chicago are leaving for cities like Atlanta in massive numbers—away from the waves of crime tearing apart their hometown. ___ William Lee describes the crime and poverty driving black residents away from Chicago, where he lives in the South Side neighborhood of South Shore. According to Lee, "a multitude of black residents have called it quits with their hometown, searching for safety and prosperity beyond the city limits — my own friends and family among them." Lee adds: "It's been a humbling experience watching as those worlds, those communities filled with stable families and businesses, crumble into...

Four homicides over the weekend and two more Monday morning pushed Chicago's homicide count so far this year to double the same period last year. The city has recorded at least 95 homicides since the first of the year, compared to 47 last year, according to data kept by the Tribune. The city has also more than doubled the amount of people shot - about 420 this year compared to 193 last year.

Presidents Day weekend shootings have left four people dead and at least nine others wounded across the city, according to Chicago Police.

Gage Park victims' identities officially released by medical examiner Chicago Tribune staff Contact Reporter The Cook County medical examiner's office on Saturday officially released information on the identities of the six people found killed inside a Gage Park home this week. The six family members were found dead a little after 1 p.m. Thursday when police were called to a home in the 5700 block of South California Avenue because a man who lived there had not shown up for work. Those killed were identified as Rosaura Martinez, 58, who family members have said went by Rosaura Hernandez; her husband,...

Calls for Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to resign have been increasing and include a call from Al Sharpton. Amid rumors that Emanuel's office withheld the Laquan McDonald police video purposefully to boost his reelection chances, Illinois is now considering the possibility of a recall election. [Snip] Emanuel has been adamant in insisting that he will not step down and held a press conference to that effect last week. [Snip] With Chicago, Illinois, and other prominent Democrats calling for Emanuel to resign and even The New Yorker writing about Emanuel's "sudden but well-deserved fall," it's hard to see how he stays...

Escape From Chicago Chicago: The mess that Democrats made. January 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. Chicago is on fire. It's America's mass shooting capital. Its deadliest neighborhoods are gang territories prowled by thousands of killers with some of the highest murder rates in the world. So far, 442 people have been shot and killed in Chicago this year. 2,540 were shot and wounded. 2,982 were shot. Fewer Americans died fighting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War than in a year in Chicago....

No doubt you, too, spent the holidays relishing the humiliation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the overrated and obnoxious Democratic Party hack who, finally, is teetering on the brink of political oblivion. How the former ballet dancer and Sarah Lawrence alumnus parlayed ambition and drive and the ability to scream like a lunatic into high office and a fortune of more than $10 million is one of the remarkable political stories of our time. "Emanuel has succeeded in almost every professional endeavor he has undertaken," Ryan Lizza wrote approvingly in 2009. Spoke too soon. How bad is Rahm Emanuel? He...

CHICAGO, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Chicago police will get new equipment and training to help them defuse tense situations and limit their use of lethal force, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Wednesday, following weeks of protests calling for him to resign over his handling of fatal police shootings. The number of Tasers, or electric stun guns that are generally not lethal, for the police department will be doubled to 1,400 so that every patrol unit that goes out at night has one, Emanuel said at a news conference. "Just because you are trained that you can use force, doesn't mean...

One of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's deputy chiefs of staff was attacked Sunday evening while attending a vigil for Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, who were fatally shot by Chicago Police in West Garfield Park on Saturday. According to a source, Vance Henry was attending the vigil about 5:50 p.m. at the site of the shooting in the 4700 block of West Erie when he was attacked.The police department's Office of News Affairs confirmed that a 50-year-old man was at the vigil when "he was approached by an unknown person who began to make verbal threats which escalated to a physical...

The Reverend Al Sharpton called for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to step down because of his poor management of race and policing in his city since the release last month of a video showing a white Chicago police officer firing 16 shots into a black teenager and subsequent officer violence. Mr. Emanuel is vacationing in Cuba, while demonstrators are circulating petitions for his resignation, and protesters blocked traffic on the city’s famed shopping district on Michigan Avenue on Christmas Eve chanting “Rahms got to go in 2016!” “You talk about a crisis on steroids,” Mr. Sharpton said Monday on MSNBC’s...