Free Republic

Chicago is known for good steaks, expensive stores and beautiful architecture. Unfortunately, the Windy City also enjoys a reputation for corrupt politics, violent crime, and some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere in the country. To rational people, the inverse relationship between the last two is obvious. Unfortunately for residents of and visitors to Chicago, the city is governed by officials who operate not in the real world, but in a virtual “Bizarro World,” where up is down, black is white, and good guys are to be punished. In this strange environment, current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (who...

Chicago soon will have the nation’s most expensive downtown parking meters. On New Year’s Day, meters in the city’s downtown Loop area will begin charging $6.50 an hour—up from $5.75. …

446 school age children shot in Chicago so far this year with strongest gun laws in country – media silent The cesspool known as Chicago probably has the toughest gun laws in the country, yet despite all the shootings, murders, and bloodshed, you never hear a peep about this from the corrupt state run media. In Chicago, there have been 446 school age children shot in leftist utopia run by Rahm Emanuel and that produced Obama, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, etc. 62 school aged children have actually been killed by crazed nuts in Chicago so far this year with almost...

Mayor Emanuel has released a fiery statement denouncing the National Rifle Association for advocating armed police in about every school. Rahm Emanuel prepared an unusually strong statement, even by his standards. “It’s outrageous and unsettling that the NRA would choose to address gun violence not by taking assault weapons off our streets, but by adding more guns to our schools, " the mayor said in a statement. The statement went on to say "that is not the right answer for our society, our schools and most importantly our children. People across this country, from small towns to big cities, are...

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said President Obama’s former consigliere Rahm Emanuel, who is now the mayor of the strictly gun-controlled gun murder capital of the world, Chicago. So naturally the statist anti-gun utopians see opportunity in Friday’s Newtown school massacre to push the total gun ban they’ve been lusting after for so long. Rather than pause long enough to grieve with the rest of us over the horrific murders of twenty children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school; rather than wait for the media frenzy to subside so all the facts could...

On the heels of the controversial California Federation of Teachers “Tax the Rich” video, the Chicago Teachers Union has produced its own class warfare-stoking cartoon, “Stand Up to the Fat Cats.” The CTU is again attempting to slam Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the advocates of school reform as the “fat cats” who are simply looking to get rich off the government education system. The CTU apparently doesn’t want the billionaires and “profiteers” horning in on their very lucrative territory. Fashioned as a children’s book – likely for an audience of students – the CTU video claims several groups from around...

Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday indicated he would like to see assault weapons banned in Illinois as lawmakers this spring revise state law to allow some form of concealed carry to comply with a court ruling that tossed aside a long-standing ban on allowing people to carry weapons. Meanwhile, at City Hall, Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted Tuesday's federal appellate court decision as "wrongheaded" as he offered legal help to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan as she weighs an appeal. Judges gave the General Assembly six months to make changes, and the Democratic governor suggested the new rules will have to...

Rhode Island’s blue-on-blue showdown is heating up. Famed litigator David Boies is taking a 96 percent pay cut to represent the state against recalcitrant public sector unions. The New York Times reports: Mr. Boies became involved, he said, because he was convinced that Rhode Island’s pension troubles were just the tip of a $5 trillion iceberg of unsecured retirement promises to the nation’s millions of public workers. “This is something that can cripple state and municipal governments at a time when the federal government is, more and more, cutting back on the services it provides,” he said. Public unions and...

Demographics alone are not destiny. There is nothing in this year’s election returns that guarantees Democrats a permanent majority in the years to come. President Obama and the Democratic Party earned the support of key groups — young people, single women, Latinos, African Americans, auto workers in the Rust Belt and millions of other middle-class Americans — because of our ideas. So, instead of resting on false assurances of underlying demographic advantages, the Democratic Party must follow through on our No. 1 priority, which the president set when he took office and reemphasized throughout this campaign: It is time to...

The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive...

“Government ’help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.” That is what Ayn Rand has to say about government involvement in the world of business, but the full extent of this practice is difficult to nail down. Tad DeHaven of the CATO Institute investigated the situation to determine exactly how deep the problem runs. Periodically, CATO analyzes the federal budget to ascertain exactly how much money our government shovels out to favored parties. Unfortunately, over the years both parties have...

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike By STEPHANIE BANCHERO The Chicago public school teachers strike entered its second week after the teachers union declined Sunday to call off a week-long walkout that has catapulted the city into the national debate over teacher evaluations and job security. Only hours earlier, Chicago Teachers Union officials had trumpeted new concessions they said they had extracted from Mayor Rahm Emanuel during talks to settle the strike that started last Monday and has canceled classes for 350,000 students in the nation's third largest district. The vote to continue the strike came Sunday night by the...

The measure of who won and lost in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's showdown with the Chicago Teachers Union won't be clear until the details of the new contract emerge, but last week's strike took some of the luster off the mayor's self-portrait as an innovative leader brimming with new ways to solve the city's most vexing challenges. The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack. That singular approach contributed to the first teachers strike in...

via TwitterA sign seen during a protest by the Chicago Teachers Union.The strike going on in Chicago is serious: 350,000 students are locked out and we brought you the news in a post from this morning.We'll get back to real news in a little. First, here's a bit of levity:There is a picture from the picket lines on Monday that had Daniel Strauss, who tweeted it, saying, "Civility has disappeared in Chicago Teachers Union protests."The sign was written in all caps: "RAHM EMANUEL LIKES NICKELBACK."Nickelback, if you're not of that persuasion, is a popular Canadian rock band, which is not...

Neither Jay Carney nor Romney mentioned Rahm in their respective statements on the strike (Carney punted on the matter altogether, not surprisingly), but Ryan knows a political opportunity when he sees one. In a standoff between two of Obama’s biggest cronies, his former chief of staff and the unions that bankroll him, The One’s going to strain mightily to remain scrupulously neutral. Romney/Ryan’s task: Make that neutrality as uncomfortable as possible. The only surprise, says National Journal, is that it took the campaign this long to twist the knife. “If you turned on the TV this morning or sometime today,...

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan spoke out against the Chicago Teachers Union strike on Monday, saying he stands behind Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's opposition to the demonstration. "Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher's union strike is unnecessary and wrong," Ryan said in Portland, Ore., according to a pool report transcript. "We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel." More than 26,000 education professionals in the Chicago area did not attend work on Monday over a contract negotiation dispute with the...

For the first time in nearly three decades, Chicago public school teachers went on strike this morning. At first glance, you might be tempted to think that what happens in Chicago has little to no effect on the politics of Washington and the presidential race. But, you’d be wrong. There are several reasons to believe that what happens in Chicago could have a real — and negative — impact on President Obama and the broader race for the White House this fall. We list the three biggest reasons below. * It’s Chicago: Yes, we know that President Obama has no...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (rahm ih-MAN'-yoo-uhl) is leaving President Barack Obama's campaign so he can raise cash for an independent "super" political action committee trying to help the president win a second term. An Obama campaign aide confirmed Wednesday that Emanuel is making the switch to the Priorities USA Action super PAC.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel will be spending a lot less time at the Democratic National Convention than he’d originally planned. Originally, the mayor had planned to be in Charlotte from Tuesday through Friday morning. Now, his Communications Director Sarah Hamilton tells Newsradio that Emanuel has changed his plans. Hamilton insisted the mayor’s shortened trip to the convention doesn’t have anything to do with a possible teachers strike. She said Emanuel’s abbreviated trip likewise doesn’t have anything to do with the city’s higher murder rate this year.

Twenty people were shot, two fatally, across the city Friday night and Saturday morning. The weekend's violence started about 6:20 p.m. Friday.......... [The article runs about 1000 words, listing locations and times of crimes, the sex and ages of casualties and where on their bodies everyone was shot]