Free Republic

On this date in 1896, during a driving Adirondack snowstorm, Bartholomew “Bat” Shea was electrocuted at New York’s Clinton Prison for a political murder two years prior. This was the great boom time for machine politics, corrupt political patronage networks doling “spoils” like jobs and benefits to members who in turn maintained a party’s stranglehold on an electorate. These flourished in an industrializing America’s burgeoning cities; Troy, N.Y., at 60,000-plus in the 1890s (it has fewer than that today), was one of upstate New York’s prime industrial centers, and home to a municipal machine rooted in Irish Catholic immigrants and...

George Norcross III, the South Jersey Democratic power broker long at odds with the governor, has declared all-out war on Phil Murphy, calling him a “liar” and “politically incompetent.” After enduring a steady drumbeat of criticism over how his company and other entities tied to him allegedly benefitted from lucrative tax incentives meant to help revive the city of Camden, Norcross went on the attack. He lambasted a special governor’s task force deployed to investigate the New Jersey Economic Development Authority in connection with those tax incentives, as well as the governor.

[...]If Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush were to become president of the United States it would mean the power and influence of the presidency remained in the hands of the Clinton family for possibly sixteen years, and that’s not even counting the princess in waiting, Chelsea; and in the case of the Bush family, possibly twenty years, and that’s not counting the heir apparent, George Prescott Bush. Have we devolved into a nation of bleating sheep, or screaming teenagers at an episode of American Idol? Can it be true that there are no other citizens in this great nation worthy of...

Left-of-center nonprofits are getting the bailout they wanted from the U.S. government, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. The news comes a month after Independent Sector president Diana Aviv demanded it. Our lawmakers are intent on pissing away billions of dollars on utterly useless giveaways to their supporters in the liberal nonprofit establishment. The money will have virtually no positive impact on the economy, except perhaps that it might bolster employment at nonprofit groups. One of the more egregious line items is the $1 billion allocation for community development block grants (CDBG). These are slush funds that liberal groups like La...

So the Chicago Way hauled off and slapped the U.S. Senate in the face—one of those backhands with the knuckles to unsuspecting lips—and guess who blinked? It wasn't Chicago. It was the Senate. Get used to it, America. And it won't be the last time either. Roland "Tombstone" Burris, the amiable Illinois Democratic political hack who is being called eminently qualified by the national Democrats—perhaps because he's from Illinois and he hasn't been indicted—has almost reached his goal of being addressed as "Yes, sir, Senator." Now Tombstone has President-elect Barack Obama behind him, muscling Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid in...

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted public competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General. That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general's 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted. In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators...

While the nation's capital obsesses over Barack Obama's next Cabinet pick, the president-elect's lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama's vast grass-roots network? Electoral campaigns, like circus tents, quickly disappear after the show is over. But Obama is our first community-organizer president, and he sees the way he got elected as being almost as crucial as the fact that he won. Because of the emphasis he put on organizing, barackobama.com might fairly be seen as the most successful high-tech startup of the past two years. Over and over, Obama has...

CHICAGO (CBS) ― Chicago is the Second City in nickname and the third in population, but when it comes to murder, the city has the dubious distinction of being second to no city in America. As CBS 2's Mike Puccinelli reports, the Chicago Sun-Times pointed out on Friday that Chicago has seen 426 homicides this year through Tuesday, compared with 417 in New York and 302 in Los Angeles. At the end of 1998, Chicago made international headlines as the U.S. "murder capital" after surpassing New York's homicide totals for the first time ever. Chicago shed that dubious distinction when...

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is the first nonwhite candidate in U.S. history to win a major-party presidential nomination. That fact alone makes him a tradition-breaking, political pioneer. Much less discussed is that Mr. Obama is an atypical, nontraditional African-American politician, too. I'm not talking about Mr. Obama's rhetorical abilities or personal charisma, which set him apart from the vast majority of American politicians of all races. I refer instead to five aspects of Mr. Obama's biography that make him unique even among America's black political class.

The left is preparing to up the ante in what they see as their bid to take control of Congress and the White House. They announced their plans in a Washington Post story on August 7, describing how at least 80 wealthy Democratic Party supporters each pledged to put up at least $200,000 a year for five years, with an overall goal of raising $200 million dollars to invest in "a network of think tanks and advocacy groups." This follows the intervention of billionaire George Soros in the 2004 presidential election, using a loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law...

SACRAMENTO - Secretary of State Kevin Shelley bent rules, missed deadlines and failed to do proper paperwork as he spent millions of dollars in federal election money, state Auditor Elaine Howle told a legislative committee conducting its first hearing Monday to investigate the embattled state elections official. Howle meticulously told the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that Shelley's management failures, which also included the questionable use of federal money, added up to "disregard for proper controls and poor oversight" of money given California to modernize its voting systems. But a representative of Shelley's office testified under oath that much of the...

Hey, I just found this game yesterday. It's a simulation where you can run your own campaign. You can take out ads in print/tv/radio, give speeches on different topics to gain support (affirmative action, homeland security, WOT, taxes, illegal immigration are just a few), hire political operatives to do your dirty work, get endorsements from NRA/Christian Coalition/etc. There's even a multiplayer mode where you can play against others online. This is for those of you who just can't get enough of politics and want to run your own campaign. It's fun, try it!