Free Republic

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot reflects on her first two years in office on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. "About 99 percent of it, Lightfoot said. "Look at my predecessors. Did people say that Rich Daley held tea sessions with people that he didn't disagree on? Rahm Emanuel was a polite guy who was a uniter? No. Women and people of color are always held to a different standard."

For decades, Illinois House speaker Michael Madigan dominated the state’s political system, corrupting it to his own ends. What should we make of his ouster? The Chicago machine turned out some of the most notorious names in American public corruption, including Anton Cermak, Richard J. Daley, and Ed Kelly. The machine also turned out Mike Madigan, who ruled over Illinois politics for 50 years, 36 of which he spent calling the shots as House speaker. Most people thought Madigan would only leave office in handcuffs or a casket. Most people were wrong. For the first time since 1970, “the Velvet...

It is a truism in American politics that Democrats cheat.Dead voters, repeating voters, voters with false IDs, and the new angle of “ballot harvesting” are just some of the ways that the leftist party has devised to subvert the will of the American people. Historians, even liberal ones, now mostly agree that Democrat John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election from then-Vice President and Republican standard-bearer Richard Nixon in Texas and Illinois by using the political machines of Kennedy’s own running-mate, Lyndon Johnson, and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to add voters to the Democrats’ count and suppress the GOP...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said recently he opposes paying government reparations to the descendants of American slaves, has a family history deeply entwined in the issue: Two of his great-great-grandfathers were slave owners, U.S. census records show. The two great-great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned a total of at least 14 slaves in Limestone County, Alabama — all but two of them female, according to the county “Slave Schedules” in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. The details about McConnell’s ancestors, discovered by NBC News through a search of ancestry and census records, came in the wake of...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

Late on an April night in 2004, Richard Vanecko, the nephew of then Mayor Richard M. Daley, threw a single punch at David Koschman on a sidewalk in Downtown Chicago. Vanecko, Koschman and the small groups accompanying them had been drinking. An argument broke out and the blow from the 6’3″ 230lb Vanecko drove the 5’5″ 125lb Koschman to the pavement. Koschman’s head struck the cement with such force that he died 12 days later in a Chicago hospital. The police investigation didn’t begin until after David Koschman died. “[Police] didn’t conduct lineups to try to identify who threw the...

Oh, the irony. There it was just above Democrat Illinois Gov. Quinn’s editorial pleading to make the state’s temporary income tax hike a permanent income tax hike, as if we could see that one coming. You might remember that Illinois kind of went the “other” way a few years ago, hiking taxes on personal income 66 percent as a way of trying to get out of the de facto bankruptcy that politicians like Illinois Senator Barack Obama (Present!) had given the state. Politicians and unions had combined in plan to grift taxpayers in a union pension scheme that was...

CIRCA 2008 Democrat Cong Luis Gutierrez personally lobbied then-Democrat Mayor Richard Daley to back a controversial multimillion-dollar development for a campaign contributor who had just lent the congressman $200,000 in a real estate deal. Now Gutierrez's unusual gesture of support is under federal scrutiny.Gutierrez's July 7, 2004, letter to Daley -- written on U.S. House stationery -- is part of a federal grand juryi nvestigation. Gutierrez said there is no connection between the loan and his support for the Galewood Yards project, which is not in his district.....he said his involvement was "extremely minimal" and "entirely appropriate." Key events in...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in Mexico and signed a new trade agreement with Mexico City. Emanuel has company on this trip in former Mayor Richard Daley. Former Mayor Daley spent 22 years building Chicago's international reputation. In Mexico City Thursday he did his best to stay in the background as he passed the baton to his successor. When Emanuel joined Mexico City Mayor Miguel Mancera signing the new sister cities agreement, Chicago's mayor was less concerned with ceremony and more with the potential two of the continent's largest metro areas hold for each other. "We can grow together, create jobs,...

On Tuesday, President Obama and the first lady used the State of the Union spotlight to pay tribute to an innocent teenage girl shot and killed by Chicago gang thugs. On Friday, Obama will travel to the Windy City to decry violence and crusade for more gun laws in the town with the strictest gun laws and bloodiest gun-related death tolls in America. Does the White House really want to open up a national conversation about the state of Chicago? OK, let's talk. Obama, his wife, his campaign strategists, his closest cronies and his biggest bundlers all hail from Chicago....

My heart is broken, deeply broken. Is there no one in Illinois who has the moral compunction to stand up to the corruption known as Chicago? Will any Illinois person of honor come forward to put a stop to what is going on? When I received an anonymous E-mail about the Land of Lincoln–where our governors make our license plates–I couldn’t laugh any more. You see, there always has been a perverse sort of gallows humor, perhaps even misplaced sense of pride associated with Chicago. When I tell people here in Florida that I’m from near Chicago, I sense that...

In March, Coach is Right published a story of official cover-up and falsification of witness testimony involved in the 2004 death of David Koschman at the hands of Richard Vanecko, nephew of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. After 8 years, that story has finally come to a head. In the early morning hours of April 25th 2004, Koschman and three friends bumped into someone from a group which had been visiting the bars in downtown Chicago. A moment later, a member of that party struck Koschman, driving his head into the street causing brain damage from which the young man...

The nephew of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was indicted Monday for involuntary manslaughter in the 2004 death of a 21-year-old man outside a Chicago bar, and a grand jury is continuing its inquiry into whether authorities covered up or impeded an investigation of a relative of the city's most powerful man. Richard Vanecko, 38, was indicted by a Cook County special grand jury in the death of David Koschman of Mount Prospect. Koschman died days after he fell and struck his head during a fight with Vanecko outside a bar in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood.

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. …

In 2004, a nephew of Chicago’s then-mayor Richie Daley got into an altercation off of Rush Street, the Windy City’s alcohol-fueled playground for revelers and romancers. Taunts were thrown, obscenities exchanged, and in an instant, a kid from the suburbs, David Koschman, who was just 21 years old at the time, fell backwards, his head making an audible thump as it contacted the street. A friend says that he was unconscious before he hit the ground According to witnesses R. J. Vanecko, a current Daley nephew and a former college lineman who weighed in a 230 pounds and stands 6-feet-3,...

As a young single woman, Michelle Robinson was a fixture in the home of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who along with Rev. Jeremiah Wright “arranged” her marriage to Barack Obama, according to sources in Chicago who know the couple. Jackson’s daughter, Santita, is still one of Michelle’s best friends. “It all relates back to Trinity and to the Jesse Jackson orbit of blacks here in Chicago who gave Obama legitimacy and helped him establish his identity as a black man,” Robyn explained. “The political left wanted to push a black to the presidency, and the key operatives in the...

Eleven Chicago police officers who were removed from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's security detail when he took office have filed a federal lawsuit alleging they were replaced by officers who had volunteered on the mayor's campaign. The officers, who are white or Hispanic, also alleged discrimination, saying African-American officers on the detail with less seniority were not demoted at the time. The lawsuit contended that police Cmdr. Brian Thompson, in charge of the security detail, and the city violated Chicago's decades-old Shakman decree, which prohibits political considerations in most city hiring decisions. Six of the 11 officers also filed a complaint...

Chicago, the city that launched the career of President Barack Obama, now has the dubious title of being the nation’s most corrupt city, according to a lengthy study done by University of Illinois Political Science Professor, Dick Simpson. He is pointing to the fact that “the Chicago area has logged more public corruption convictions by federal prosecutors than any other city.” The two worst crime zones, Simpson says, are “the governor’s mansion in Springfield and the city council chambers down the hall.” His research revealed a staggering 1,531 convictions since 1976! Additionally, Illinois is the only state which will have...

If for nothing else, Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas will be remembered for an anecdote from 2010. After he spent hours disputing an allegation in the French media that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was “hell,” press secretary Robert Gibbs encountered senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. She told him the first lady was unhappy with his work. Gibbs exploded in a rage, informing Jarrett that she didn’t “know what the f— you’re talking about” and that if Mrs. Obama was displeased, well, “f— her too.” Subsequent relations between the senior adviser and press secretary were strained. Gibbs told Kantor...

Maggie Daley, the wife of former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and a gracious promoter of the city's cultural and educational programs, has died. She was 69. (born July 1943) Maggie Daley, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, died Thursday night, family spokeswoman Jacquelyn Heard told The Associated Press. Daley had been a reserved and dignified presence at her husband's side during his 22 eventful years as mayor. When she first learned she had breast cancer in June 2002, Daley said she was shocked. "But you pick up and you move on. ... I'm not alone here....