Free Republic

Currently at: Strongly approve 52.04% (77,191 votes) Approve 5.86% (8,697 votes) Disapprove 1.84% (2,735 votes) Strongly disapprove 40.26% (59,719 votes) Total Votes: 148,342

Five runaway Democratic Wisconsin state senators made a pit stop Tuesday at a Grayslake hotel where they watched a budget address by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Wisconsin's Democratic nomadic senators who surfaced at Grayslake's Comfort Suites are among 14 legislators who bolted for Illinois on Feb. 17 in protest of Walker's proposal that has infuriated public employees. After the senators left, a vote has been unable to occur on Walker's plan to have public workers contribute more to their pensions and health insurance, while losing the ability to collectively bargain benefits and work conditions. “We must work together to bring...

Newly elected state Rep. Tom Morrison raised some eyebrows Tuesday during freshmen legislators’ orientation in Springfield when presented with paperwork to join the General Assembly’s lucrative pension system. That’s because he opted out a move officials can recall happening just once before. “Are you sure you want to do that?” one administrator asked him. The 35-year-old Palatine Republican, who succeeds six-term state Rep. Suzie Bassi in the 54th House District, realizes that forgoing his pension won’t make a dent in the state’s $13 billion deficit or $80 billion unfunded pension liability. But Morrison says he’s a proponent of self-sacrifice and...

Some African-American tea party candidates are displeased by a resolution that the NAACP approved on Tuesday calling the grass-roots conservative movement “racist.” “I have not experienced the charges of racism that the NAACP is touting,” Vernon Parker, an African-American tea party congressional candidate in Arizona, told POLITICO. Parker, former mayor of Paradise Valley, said that he has never felt out of place at a tea party rally because of the color of his skin. “When I go to tea party events, people don’t look at me any differently,” he said. “They didn’t judge me on the color of my skin,...

Alonzo "Lon" Monk has moved to the topic of U. S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. for the first time, discussing tapes in which former Gov. Rod Blagojevich said he had been approached by Jackson representatives about appointing Jackson to the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. In one call Monk said that Michael Rumman, an associate of fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, was contacting him about Jackson. In another call, Monk can be heard mentioning Jackson. "He'll offer you fundraising and all kinds of stuff,” Blagojevich said of Jackson on the call. Monk said he understood Blagojevich to be saying...

Since meeting in law school, Rod Blagojevich and Alonzo "Lon" Monk had been the closest of friends. They roomed together, partied together, jogged together, vacationed together and worked together. So when Monk first walked into court Wednesday to testify against Blagojevich at his corruption trial, the former governor gave his longtime buddy a stare-down that lasted for minutes and silently screamed betrayal. Monk, who managed Blagojevich's campaigns for governor and for a time also served as his chief of staff, put Blagojevich in the room on more than one occasion when key members of his brain trust were hatching allegedly...

Freep the Gov and the new running mate tomorrow on their fly-around: 8:30am (gather) at MIDWAY - SIGNATURE TERMINAL - parking at 59th street, two blocks east of Cicero, on the south side of the street - FREEPMail me if you can make it for the 9am FREEP Other sites to FREEP if you are in the vicinity: 10:15 AM Rockford International Airport, Rockford 11:45 AM Quad City International Airport, Moline 1:40 PM Student Union, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 3:25 PM St. Louis Downtown Airport, Cahokia 5:25 PM Shryock Auditorium, Southern Illinois University SUGGESTED THEME/SIGNAGE: No Taxes, Cut Spending… OPEN...

Supposed pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak may well have been bribed in order to buy his vote to support Barack Obama's health care "reform." Late Sunday, meticulous research by accountability-minded bloggers first brought to light a stealthy press release from Stupak's own office this past Friday. The release announced a US Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration grant in the value of $726 409 for three airports in northern Michigan, meant to go to maintenance and improvements; Stupak represents Michigan's 1st district. Suspicions have only increased with greater fervor since Stupak represented the so-called "pro-life" bloc of Democrat holdouts who wanted...

Angry Massachusetts voters sent Washington a ringing message yesterday: Enough. Voter anxiety and resentment, building for months in a troubled economy, exploded like a match on dry kindling in the final days of the special election for US Senate. In arguably the most liberal state in the nation, a Republican - and a conservative one at that - won and will crash the Bay State’s all-Democratic delegation with a mandate to kill the health care overhaul pending in Congress. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Scott Brown’s victory because so much was at stake. From the agenda of...

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is prepared to jail any American who does not buy a qualifying health insurance plan if the healthcare bill she sponsored (H.R. 3962, as amended) is passed into law. On November 6, Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, released a letter he received from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) in response to his inquiry as to potential penalties for failing to comply with mandates set forth in the so-called “Affordable Health Care for America Act.” The information set out in the response should be shocking,...

BALTIMORE - America's Roman Catholic bishops, long one of the leading political forces against abortion, vowed on Tuesday to accept no compromise for the sake of unity until there is legal protection for the unborn. About 300 prelates gathered here for their national meeting adopted a formal blessing for a child in the womb and advised Chicago's Cardinal Francis George as he drafted a post-election letter to America's Catholics. The moves were meant to tell the incoming Obama administration, which supports keeping abortion legal, that the nation's Catholic bishops are stepping up their opposition to abortion. "This is not a...

Nevada state authorities seized records & computers Tuesday from the Las Vegas office of an organization that tries to get low-income people registered to vote, after fielding complaints of voter fraud. Bob Walsh, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state's office, told FOXNews.com the raid was prompted by ongoing complaints about "erroneous" registration information being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN. The group was submitting the information through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote. "Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were...

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has made little secret that it has been routinely outspent by rival Barack Obama in the extended race for the Democratic presidential nomination and has been forced to curtail checks for some of its vendors and staff. But stiffing your high school alma mater? That’s apparently the case, according to federal campaign disclosure reports that show that among more than $8.7 million listed as debts, the Clinton campaign owed $3,161 to Maine South High School in Park Ridge for renting the school for an event, as well as for catering.

The government's star witness in the corruption trial of Antoin "Tony" Rezko took the stand Tuesday and in just 48 minutes laid out a stunning personal tale of bribery, treachery, rampant drug abuse and a precipitous fall from grace. In a brief but vivid prologue to what is expected to be days of testimony, one-time political insider Stuart Levine said he had illegally greased contracts to sell tires to the city's Streets and Sanitation Department and supply school buses to the Chicago Board of Education and even health insurance to members of a postal workers union. Levine, 62, identified one...

Witness at Tony Rezko trial talks about his connections Rezko witness Thomas Beck said yesterday he's cousins with former longtime ward boss (and former parks superintendent) Ed Kelly. When asked today, Beck laughed. He explained that Kelly is his mother's sister's husband's sister's son. That got a laugh in the courtroom. He calls Kelly his cousin: "to make it simple for everyone." The two have known each other their whole lives, said Beck, former head of the state's health planning board. Beck testified he set up Kelly with a lawyer, Jeff Ladd, who hired Kelly as a consultant to represent...

John McCain and Mike Huckabee dueled for victory in a hard-fought Republican primary in South Carolina Saturday. Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama split the spoils in Nevada presidential caucuses marred by late charges of dirty politics. "This is one step on a long journey," Clinton told cheering supporters in Las Vegas. She captured the popular vote, but Obama edged her out for national convention delegates at stake, taking 13 to her 12. Obama issued a statement that said he had conducted an "honest, uplifting campaign ... that appealed to people's hopes instead of their fears." If the Democrats...

11/27 Muscatine "Organizing for Change" Event with Pres. Clinton (Muscatine) Pres. Clinton will attend an "Organizing for Change" event at the Muscatine Community YMCA at 11:45 a.m.-1pm in Muscatine, IA. Muscatine Community YMCA 1823 Logan Street Muscatine, IA 52761 11/27 De Witt "Organizing for Change" Event with Pres. Clinton (De Witt) Pres. Clinton will attend an "Organizing for Change" event at the Auditorium Building on the Clinton County Fairgrounds at 3:30 p.m.- 4:45 p.m. in De Witt, IA. Auditorium Building on the Clinton County Fairgrounds 331 East 8th Street De Witt, IA 52742 11/27 Peosta "Organizing for Change" Event with...

11/19 Hillary Delivers Policy Address in Knoxville (Knoxville) 33.8 miles Senator Hillary Clinton will deliver a policy address at 10:45 a.m. at the gymnasium of the School Administration Office in Knoxville, IA. RSVP to the right or call Sari at (515) 962-2762. 11/20 Hillary Clinton to Attend “Organizing for Change” Event in Creston (Creston) 55.1 miles Hillary Clinton will attend an "Organizing for Change" event at Chicken Inn at 3:15 p.m. in Creston, IA. Please RSVP using the form to the right or call Charlotte at (641) 782-4684. 11/19 "Organizing for Change" Event with Hillary Clinton in Tama (Tama) 59.9...

WASHINGTON - First Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was attacked by political rivals at home. Now he is under fire from abroad. A senior Pakistani government official Friday criticized as "irresponsible" a threat Obama made this week to launch unilateral American military strikes against Al Qaeda havens in a remote border region of the Muslim nation. Obama's comments also stirred street protests in Pakistan and criticism from Pakistani-Americans living in the Chicago area. "It's a very irresponsible statement, that's all I can say," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khusheed Kasuri told AP Television News. "As the election campaign in America is heating...

A truck hauling greasy animal parts lost part of its load after a minor accident on the Stevenson Expressway Thursday night, forcing crews to close down lanes for more than two hours while they mopped up the mess, officials said. It was the second time this month that such a spill has wreaked havoc on a major Chicago-area expressway. The incident Thursday occurred about 6:15 p.m. in the northbound lanes of the Stevenson (Interstate Highway 55) near Loomis Street, according to Illinois State Police. A truck hauling raw poultry and pig parts was involved in a minor traffic accident with...