Free Republic

Ohio planners will move full speed ahead on a proposed hyperloop system that would carry passengers between Pittsburgh and Chicago in about 58 minutes for a one-way cost of about $93. But the full system, known as Mid-West Connect, probably wouldn’t be finished until about 2050. Thea Walsh, director of transportation and funding for the Columbus, Ohio-based Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, said this week the agency is putting the finishing touches on feasibility and environmental impact studies but has concluded it should pursue the hyperloop system. The system being developed by Virgin Hyperloop One would move passengers and freight in...

East St. Louis is short $9.5 million between a budget deficit and back payments owed to its fire and police pensions. As a result, city leaders are closing a firehouse and laying off nine firefighters. Nine firefighters have been asked to hand in their gear and their fire station will temporarily close as East St. Louis, Illinois, faces a $5.5 million budget deficit and interception of nearly $4 million in state funding for debts owed to its police and fire pensions. Unfortunately, with 100% of the City’s state revenues being redirected to the police and fire pensions, we are faced...

Lousiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy has blocked a bill drafted by a top Democratic Senator that would accelerate the flow of Indian visa workers and immigrants into Americans’ office jobs. “The American people deserve an immigration system that looks like somebody designed it on purpose,” Kennedy told Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin during a polite conversation on the Senate floor. He said: I am rising to object [to Durbin’s bill] because a number of my colleagues … would like a little additional time to study this bill. But equally important, if not more important, many of my colleagues’ sentiment is that...

Law abiding political candidate Marie Newman returns illegal campaign contribution that criminal Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had illegally given to her Marie Newman is a law abiding political candidate who is running for office in Illinois.The largest campaign contribution that anyone is allowed to legally give to her campaign is $2,000.However, this report from the Federal Election Commission shows that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $5,000 to Newman’s campaign.Here’s a screenshot which proves that Ocasio-Cortez broke federal campaign finance law. Source: https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00639591/1357189/sb/21Fortunately, Newman is a law abiding citizen, and returned the excess $3,000.On the other hand, Ocasio-Cortez is a criminal who violated federal campaign finance...

Dive Brief: Illinois State Sen. Martin Sandoval has resigned from his position as chair of the State Senate's Transportation Committee amid a federal fraud and corruption investigation related to state construction work, the Associated Press reported. The Democratic senator is still listed as a member of the committee, however, as of Oct. 15. The move came after the details of a federal search warrant revealed that the FBI last month combed Sandoval's offices and home for information related to architect Cesar Santoy; Santoy's architecture firm, Studio ARQ; red-light camera program company SafeSpeed; lobbyists; construction companies; and employees of the Illinois...

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike on Thursday as 27,000 educators began picketing near schools at 6:30 a.m. The strike leaves 300,000 students unsure of when they will return to school. The union listed thirteen demands on its website, which include salary raises for all school employees, smaller class sizes, and hiring more support staff such as teacher’s assistants. “Our students deserve smaller class sizes. They deserve nurses. They deserve social workers. They deserve bilingual educators,” special education teacher Linda Perales told CNN School social worker Emily Penn said teachers face a continuing struggle to work in...

June 7 (UPI) -- Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday will launch what he calls the largest ever coordinated campaign to beat climate change, which will close all U.S. coal plants by 2030. Bloomberg said the $500 million program, Beyond Carbon, will put the United States on track toward a 100 percent clean energy economy by working with advocates to "build on leadership and climate progress already underway." Bloomberg and his foundation joined with the Sierra Club in 2011 to launch Beyond Coal with the goal of closing at least a third of U.S. coal plants. "With...

A man facing eviction from his Northwest Side condo building went on a deadly rampage over the weekend, killing four people in a neighboring apartment as they sat down for dinner before hunting down another neighbor and shooting her in the back of the head as she fled, Cook County prosecutors alleged Monday. Police later found two chilling notes written in Polish in Krysztof Marek’s apartment in the Dunning neighborhood. “Tomorrow!! No Mercy Without any stupid hesitation!!!” prosecutors said one read in part. After prosecutors laid out the dramatic details Monday in the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Judge John Fitzgerald...

Last week School District 65, which serves the racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse Evanston and Skokie, Illinois communities, went whole hog on disseminating a controversial ideology to captive audiences of other people’s children who came to school with open minds and hearts into which “progressives” poured poison masquerading as inarguable truth. District 65’s celebration of “LGBTQ+ Equity Week” offers a glimpse into the kind of pernicious indoctrination that the cunningly named “Inclusive Curriculum” bill signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker will bring to Illinois school children.

[...] Many Indians have been imported to take high-tech jobs throughout Durbin’s home state of Illinois. On October 10, roughly 600 of these imported workers turned out to demand passage of Lee’s green card giveaway bill, which is dubbed by advocates the “Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act.” Advocates claimed a turnout of 5,000, but the video shows roughly 600 marchers [...] Companies have imported roughly 35,000 H-1B workers into Durbin’s Illinois, along with thousands of additional L-1, OPT, and H4EAD workers. Roughly 75 percent of these visa workers are hired in India for a wide variety of U.S. jobs,...

Illinois local governments generated more than $1 billion in red-light camera revenue from 2008 to 2018.. Each red-light camera ticket in Illinois costs drivers up to $100.. Chicago has long been a poster child for red-light camera abuse. The city is home to the nation’s highest count of red-light cameras, a former high-ranking transportation official serving jail time for taking bribes from a red-light camera company, and a pricey settlement for drivers who a judge ruled did not receive proper notifications in the ticketing process. ... smaller local governments outside the city have installed almost as many red-light cameras as...

last year Buffett donated $169 million to the NoVo Foundation, a charity run by his youngest son, Peter, and Peter’s wife, Jennifer. ... Some of the foundation’s resources are directed towards radical activism that clearly benefits Buffett’s bottom line. In fact, money Buffett donated to the NoVo Foundation has been used to attack companies that compete with Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries and holdings. ... In 2017, NoVo donated $3.5 million to the “Clean Clothes Campaign” managed by the liberal Tides Foundation.. ... Why would the NoVo Foundation fund a series of crusades focused on ferociously targeting Walmart and Sam’s Club? It...

Three women and two men are dead in a shooting in a condominium building on Chicago’s Northwest Side by a neighbor who was known to have “anger management issues,” police said. A woman who had been in critical condition after a gunman opened fire in two units of a Dunning condo building died Sunday from her injuries, bringing the death toll to five from the Saturday night shooting rampage, police said. Authorities said the man left his condo in the 6700 block of West Irving Park Road in the Dunning neighborhood, went to a neighbor’s home in the same building...

Lately, there has been much attention paid to the topic of climate change, and what we are doing about it. We can start by taking a stand to save Jackson Park. **SNIP** There are locations directly across the street on Stony Island. There are properties owned by the University of Chicago near Washington Park. These properties are outside of the parks themselves, and would both enlarge as well as bring businesses into the community. Parks like Jackson and Washington provide much-needed contact with nature and many benefits to the public, including trees, which are the lungs of a city.

A Facebook page run by the Arlington Heights-based Church of Christian Liberty was shut down for not complying with the social media company's policies, church officials said Friday. Church leaders say they weren't told exactly what led Facebook to ban the Christian Liberty Press page, but they speculate it has to do with expressing their Christian views.

"Shut up, I don't want to hear what you have to say." That sums up today's Democratic Party in a nutshell.There's nothing quite like a 2 way discussion where 1 person just needs to shut up......that's how you solve disagreements. This mental illness is spreading like a virus across this nation. I don't think it's merely the dumbing down of the population.

More fetal remains have been found in Illinois in a vehicle formerly owned by late Dr. Ulrich Klopfer, the physician who performed abortions at clinics in Fort Wayne, Gary and South Bend, according to a release from Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill. Hill released a statement Wednesday saying the latest remains were found as family members continued to sort through the late doctor’s belongings in Will County, Ill. In a revised statement released later Wednesday afternoon, members of the Will County Sheriff’s Office reportedly found the remains while searching several vehicles owned by Klopfer that were parked at a business...

DOLTON, Illinois, October 10, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Even more remains of aborted children have been found in property belonging to the late abortionist Ulrich Klopfer, law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. Klopfer died on September 3 at age 75. For decades he was an abortionist at The Women’s Pavilion in South Bend, Indiana until his medical license was suspended in 2016 for a history of violations including failure to report the rape of a 13-year-old girl. The Sheriff’s Office of Will County, Illinois (where Klopfer had a home) announced last month that a Klopfer family attorney had notified the county coroner’s...

In life, Tyshawn Lee was a mischievous fourth grader who loved basketball, Xbox and macaroni and cheese. In death, Tyshawn became a symbol of the cycle of gang retaliation that authorities say drives much of the violence in pockets of Chicago’s South and West sides. Nearly four years after the skinny 9-year-old was lured into a South Side alley and shot execution-style by rivals of his father’s gang, separate Cook County juries last week convicted Corey Morgan and Dwright Doty in his killing. A third defendant, Kevin Edwards, pleaded guilty before the trial. All were allegedly members of the Bang...

SOUTH BARRINGTON, Ill. — Nearly every voter I met here felt the need to remind me. “This is a Republican district, you know.” For Democrats, it was a reflection of their pride that this suburban Chicago district flipped from red to blue last year after more than 45 years as a reliable Republican stronghold. Conservatives, on the other hand, wanted to emphasize to me that Rep. Sean Casten is just too liberal for Illinois’ 6th Congressional District, and that voters here support President Donald Trump and his agenda. Many of those same Republicans — who lived for nearly five decades...