Free Republic

Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times decided last week to purchase an AR-15 following the Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, Florida. His purpose, he said, was to demonstrate how simple it was and to explore Illinois’ gun laws concerning assault weapons. When he bought the gun, Steinberg planned to sell it back to the store. However, his purchase was stopped by the gun store, which canceled the transaction during Illinois’ required 24-hour waiting period after discovering he had lied on his background check about his history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence. In his article, Steinberg admitted that while...

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, Chicago Sun Times reporter Neil Steinberg set out to buy an “assault rifle,” presumably to prove how easy it is. But the process didn't exactly go as planned. In his column titled "Would-be Terrorists Can Buy Guns, But a Reporter? No," he points out how a journalist in Philadelphia was able to buy an "assault rifle” in less than 10 minutes. He also noted the percentage of gun transactions in America that don’t go through a background check, and so on. But not at the gun shop he visited. After filling out the...

Former Bears coach Mike Ditka, who has repeatedly voiced his support for Donald Trump to the Chicago Sun-Times, blasted President Obama during a radio appearance Thursday."Obama is the worst president we've ever had," Ditka told hosts Sid Rosenberg and Bernard McGuirk during an appearance on their morning show on WABC-AM in New York.Ditka, who guided the 1985 Bears to a Super Bowl victory, questioned Obama’s skills as a leader. "Barack Obama's a fine man. I mean, he's pleasant," Ditka said. "He would be great to play golf with. He's not a leader. This country needs leadership. It needs direction. It...

Washington (AFP) - The Internet was supposed to facilitate better exchange between the public and news media. But vile and hateful comments changed all that. In the face of rising vitriol -- attacks, bigotry and general nastiness -- news organizations are increasingly throwing in the towel on online comments. Last month, Vice Media's Motherboard news site turned off reader comments, saying "the scorched earth nature of comments sections just stifles real conversation." It instead began taking "letters to the editor" to be screened by staff. Vox Media's online news site The Verge said in July it was "turning off comments...

A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney, accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released. Alstory Simon, 64, of Ohio, claims in the lawsuit that he was the victim of unethical tactics by a team focused on freeing another man in what became a celebrated Illinois wrongful conviction case. Simon was imprisoned in 1999 after confessing to the 1982 murder of two people in a park, and spent more than 15 years behind bars before he was...

State Government: Bruce Rauner became Illinois' 42nd governor on Monday, the first Republican since 2003. He inherits a state that's been dubbed "America's Greece," but it's another opportunity to show what a GOP chief executive can do. A big part of the GOP tsunami in 2014 occurred at the state level, with Republicans expanding their hold on governors' mansions and legislatures with wins in blue states such as Maryland, Massachusetts and President Obama's Illinois. The number of GOP governors has grown to 31 from 21, control of legislatures has expanded to 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers, and Republicans now...

CHICAGO - In one of his first public interviews since being picked by new Governor Bruce Rauner to be the state's new school superintendent, Rev. James Meeks told WLS 890 AM this morning that he intends to implement the Common Core curriculum in the state's schools. Meeks, a Democrat, headed the Illinois Senate Education Committee while he was a state senator serving his Chicago-based district. He continues to pastor the 15,000-member Salem Baptist Church and has become an advocate of school choice over the years. ...

It's par for the course for politicians to back away from campaign pledges. But one might have at least expected that Republicans would not consider tax hikes. Unfortunately, even that modest assumption is suspect as Governor Rauner Set to Inherit Illinois' Sea of Red Ink. Illinois faces a sea of red ink because shrinking income tax revenue will fail to keep pace with rising pension and health insurance costs, according to outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn's latest three-year budget forecast. The projections from the Office of Management and Budget warn that the estimated $4.1 billion bill backlog expected at the close...

Illinois's new Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, will be sworn in today, and he is facing what most experts agree to be the worst fiscal crisis of any state in the nation. The Democrat-controlled legislature simply can't restrain itself.  That, and a pension time bomb set to go off in the next few years, swamping the state's finances, makes Rauner's job the most challenging of any new governor elected in November. Some of the numbers in this Reuter's report are incredible: Pension payments are projected to jump to nearly $7.6 billion in fiscal 2016 from $6.8 billion this fiscal year....

With Bruce Rauner’s election in Illinois, the Republican Governor’s Association has checked this bluer-than-blue state off its Democrat tick list. It must feel good—but I’m less than sanguine. For the better part of a year, powerful Chicago Democrats have been whispering in my ear, extolling Rauner’s virtues. I heard similar insider political “chatter” about Barack Obama from these same Democrats long before he ran for U.S. Senate. Even the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times suddenly changed its no-endorsement policy to back Rauner — and only Rauner — without even the basic formality of a candidate questionnaire or interview.

Last week, Democrat Governor of Illinois Pat Quinn, via Twitter, promoted and, presumably therefore associated himself with, an article from the Chicago Sun Times that compared being a black Republican to being a Nazi collaborator. Eventually, as Greta outlines in the clip below, the tweets were deleted on the grounds that it was offensive to Jews. [3:06 video clip] From the offending column: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round...

The Chicago Sun-Times is now accepting bitcoins as payment for subscription, becoming the first major U.S. newspaper to take the digital currency.The paper's goal is to keep evolving with changing technology, and accepting bitcoin payments is one way it is trying to stay digitally focused, Editor-in-Chief Jim Kirk said in a release.The Sun-Times has a "digital-first" strategy that led it to experiment with a bitcoin paywall for a one-day period in February.It had partnered with San Francisco-based micropayments startup Bitwall so readers could donate bitcoin or tweets on Twitter to benefit an organization called the Taproot Foundation, which pairs professionals...

Leland Yee should be making national headlines. A Democratic state senator from San Francisco, a statewide candidate until this week, and a rising member of Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein’s Democratic political machine, was arrested on Wednesday by the Justice Department for wire fraud, corruption, and his alleged involvement in illegal gun deal between Chinatown gangsters and Islamist militants. **SNIP** Yet four of the most prominent news outlets in America — CNN, USA Today, Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times — made no mention of the Leland Yee scandal within two days of the story breaking. When Politico finally ran a...

The powerful editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times has thought long and hard about the epidemic of black mob lawlessness in the Windy City. And one editorial board member has come up with a new way to stop the hyper-violence and killing: Take away their Facebook accounts. Mary Mitchell’s call for a Facebook crackdown breaks other new ground as well: She acknowledges the mobs are black. So she got that much right. Even if it is the official policy of the rest of the paper to ignore – or even deny – the racial component of mob violence. This, of...

Last July, two Chicago Sun-Times reporters noted an allegation of "payments made by Rezko to Obama" that surfaced in a deposition involving former Rezko business partner Daniel T. Frawley. Since then, the only follow-up coverage from the Sun-Times has been the sound of crickets. An article dated July 11, 2011, entitled "Ex-Rezko partner's sentencing delayed," announced that Daniel Frawley's sentencing for bank fraud had been postponed, yet again. He came up for sentencing again this week, and -- surprise! -- there's been another postponement. So, how were Frawley and Rezko business partners? It started when Ayham al-Samaraie, an Iraqi-American, college...

Among the biggest flashpoints in the House Republicans’ $1.2 trillion bill for financing federal programs through Sept. 30 are provisions to: † Cut $60 billion from last year’s spending on domestic programs, including education, environmental protection and community services. † Block money to implement President Obama’s health-care overhaul. † Bar federal funds for Planned Parenthood. † Prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing regulations curbing emissions of gases that cause global warming. † Reduce Pell Grants for low-income college students $5.6 billion, which the White House says would reduce the maximum $5,550 grant by $845. † Cut $747 million in...

The Chicago Sun-Times said that a group of local investors had made a bid to buy the ailing newspaper, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March. The Sun-Times said an investor group called STMG Holdings LLC had offered to buy the Sun-Times Media Group, which includes the flagship newspaper and its sister publications, in a deal worth about 25 million dollars. It said the deal, which would be subject to approval by a bankruptcy court judge, would include up to five million dollars in cash while the investors would take on about 20 million dollars in liabilities. It said the...

In an outrageous calumny, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has decided that the nearly one million Americans that attended the tax day tea party protests all across the country must not care about our military veterans. Considering a large number of these very same protesters were military vets, I'd bet that Steinberg's blinkered figuring would come as quite a surprise to them. In his April 17 column Steinberg insists that tax protesters are in reality "speaking out against our military and our vets." Ridiculously, he also tries to make it seem like our founding fathers would be unhappy with the...

~ EXCERPT ~ CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers and online sites said Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Syndicated Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and is being treated in a Boston hospital. Novak issued a statement Monday saying the tumor was found Sunday after he'd been rushed to Brigham and Women's Hospital from Cape Cod, where he was visiting his daughter. Novak said he was suspending his journalistic work for an indefinite, "but God willing, not too lengthy period." His statement did not say if the tumor was malignant. Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a homeless man with his black Corvette in Washington. Novak kept...