Free Republic

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy loathes concealed carry, and so it must be particularly painful for him today to deal with the fact that it was a concealed carry permit holder who stopped a madman firing into a Chicago crowd. A Logan Square man was ordered held on no bail Sunday after prosecutors said he fired a handgun into a crowd of people Friday night. But 22-year-old Everardo Custodio wasn’t in Cook County bond court to hear Judge Peggy Chiampas deny him bail. He was at Advocate Illinois Masonic hospital, being treated for gunshot wounds to the shin, thigh and...

Siluria Technologies’ new ethylene plant is a 4-story-tall maze of pipes and valves and pressure vessels. If it were a standalone plant it might be impressive. But this one is tucked in among dozens of giant petrochemical complexes along the Houston Ship Channel and situated within a larger polypropylene site operated by Brazilian chemicals giant Braskem So how does this facility stand out? Because it’s unique. All the rest of the world’s ethylene is made the old-fashioned way: by breaking apart larger hydrocarbons such as naphtha (sourced from crude oil) or ethane (found in natural gas). In contrast, Siluria’s technology...

Did Georgia just pull the plug on the electric car market? Many people are wondering after state legislators voted to eliminate a tax credit that last year helped catapult metro Atlanta to the highest U.S. market share for plug-in electric vehicles. The same bill will impose a $200 registration fee -- the nation's highest -- on noncommercial EVs. When the governor signs the bill, as expected, Georgia will go from first to worst on its support for the EV market. The electric vehicle tax credit ends June 30; the EV fee starts the next day. Local car dealers say they're...

Oil producer EOG Resources Inc has the lion’s share of an estimated 900 North Dakota wells waiting to be fracked, according to state data, showing that even major oil titans are mothballing operations while they hope for a rebound in oil prices. For months the conventional wisdom in North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation had been that smaller producers with weak cash flow comprised the bulk of that estimate. While the estimate had been published monthly, it was not clear until a Tuesday update from the state’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) who was dominating the list. Oilfield service companies have...

Celanese Corp. is considering expanding its South Texas chemical plant to produce methanol, the company has announced. Building a methanol unit at the plant in Bishop near Corpus Christi would be the latest move by the Dallas-based chemical company to capitalize on an abundance of cheap U.S. shale gas. Celanese has been building a new methanol unit in Clear Lake, southeast of Houston under a joint venture with Mitsui & Co., one of Japan’s largest generally traded companies. The project, which should be finished by October, will have the capacity to produce 1.3 million tons of methanol per year. Made...

Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: "We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from." In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (IS). The...

The flight distance from Washington, District of Columbia to Miami, Florida is: 923 miles

Sen. Bob Corker has authored a bill to hand President Obama the Imperium Magnum—in Rome it was called “dictator”—in regards to his caplituating “deal” with Iran.  In doing so, he has not only trashed the Constitution, but also the Senate’s own rules, bestowing an authority never intended for the chief executive to possess. The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has authority, by Senate Rule XXX, to act upon treaties, but Corker, along with Sen. Robert Menendez and 91%-certain-to-be-running-for-president Sen. Lindsey Graham, have come up with a scheme to make it appear as if the Senate opposed Obama’s nuclear dalliance with Iran’s regime,...

Word For The Day, Monday, 4/20/15 ; In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". minion; noun/adj 1. a servile follower or subordinate of a person in power. 2. a favored or highly regarded person. 3. a minor official. 4. Printing. a 7-point type. adjective 5. dainty; elegant; trim; pretty. Etymology: 1490-1500; < Middle French mignon, for Old French mignot dainty < Rules: Everyone must leave a post using the Word for the Day in a sentence. The sentence must, in some...

It was bad enough, as I wrote here last August, that the Internal Revenue Service appeared to reach an agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches. WhatÂ’s worse is that the IRS, directly counter to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements, steadfastly has refused to make public key documents pertaining to that decision. So the IRS, acting with the whole power of government behind it, seems to be saying it can monitor and presumably punish churches for the content of their sermons, but the churches canÂ’t know exactly if, how, and why they are being monitored. To fight this...

Republican leaders have been scolded for not doing more in their first 100 days in charge of Congress, but one victory deserves applause: the House's 240-179 vote Thursday to kill the hated and unfair death tax. We'll see if economic common sense prevails in the Senate to get the required 60 votes or if the redistributionists who run the Democratic Party in Washington derail this tax reform. President Obama, class warrior in chief, has already vowed to veto any repeal of the estate tax. That's a shame, but it's still worth it to send a repeal bill to his desk....

The presidents of Turkey and the U.S. will open the Turkish-American Culture and Civilization Center in Maryland, Turkey’s foreign minister said April 19. Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who was on a three-day visit to Washington, visited the center that also has a medium-sized mosque, and lunched with representatives from the American Muslim community. “During a phone call, President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan asked President [Barack] Obama to accompany him in opening the center together and President Obama accepted his offer in principle,’” Çavuşoğlu told the representatives. If Obama’s schedule allows at the time of the opening, he will accompany Erdoğan. The...

<p>Dallas Police are investigating a deadly dog attack that occurred Sunday afternoon.</p> <p>At approximately 4:54 p.m., officers responded to a call regarding an animal attack in the 6800 block of Beechnut Street.</p> <p>The homeowner was reportedly at home alone with his 2 month old son and a pet pit bull inside the residence.</p>

Jon Corzine is thinking about making a comeback. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Corzine, who was formerly chairman of Goldman Sachs and the CEO at hedge fund MF Global before it went bankrupt in 2011, is considering a comeback. The Journal's Julie Steinberg and Rob Copeland report that Corzine has discussed plans about starting a new fund and that it would be started from his personal wealth and a small group of outside investors. The new fund could have around $150 million in assets under management, the report said. MF Global, which was a $1.6 billion...

The last time some Twitter leftist sneered at me and called me a “breeder,” I wondered whether this collectivist genius considered not reproducing to be a wise long-term strategy. The fact is that in America, most of the time it’s the traditional, conservative people who choose to have children. Between their contempt for traditional family life, their abortion fetish, and the vexing problem of the fact that neither XX+XX nor XY+XY equals “baby,” leftists are dropping below their replacement fertility rate. But letting them die out is not enough; we conservatives need to outbreed them. Basically, we already erotically high-achieving...

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the comic store... Archie Comics announced Friday that it would pit its freckled, red-headed boy next door against a maelstrom of toothy proportions in time for the July 22 release of "Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!" The forecast for the single-issue "Archie vs. Sharknado" mash-up calls for the fearsome fish to rain down just as the students of Riverdale High start summer break. "It's Sharknado, people will die," "Sharknado 3" director Anthony C. Ferrante, who penned the comic, told The Daily News, "And if we tell the story really...

What an awful person Hillary Clinton is should come as no surprise to anybody over the age of 30, except of course her designated, pathetic, soul-corroded hacks like David Brock, the head hack and nonentity at the home of hacks and nonentities, Media Matters, and the ineffable Lanny Davis, who’s become a sad caricature of his old Clinton-defending self from the Bubba administration. But the late New York Times op-ed columnist, William Safire, had her number early on, as this gem from 1996 about the prevaricating first lady illustrates: Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization...

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The Supreme Court has again thwarted the Obama administration’s illegal crusade to coerce employers into violating their religious convictions. Late last Wednesday, Associate Justice Samuel Alito stayed an order secured by the administration in a lower court that would have forced several Catholic organizations to comply with Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Despite a high-profile Supreme Court defeat last June in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, President Obama’s HHS bureaucrats and lawyers have continued their attempts to bully obviously exempt entities into obeying the mandate. Justice Alito’s action constitutes the fifth time SCOTUS has been compelled to rein the government in. The Court...

Dave Ramsey always says the phrase "Live like no one else so you can live like No One Else" on his show. And anyone who listens knows it's about eating "beans and rice and rice and beans" and till you overcome the debt lifestyle. But what's not talked about is the other side - where you've made it and are living "Like No One else". What's that like and what kind of thinking happens on that side of the fence? Having just come back from Two Weeks in Oahu, I was thinking about it. How did I get to this...