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President Obama spoke to reporters Monday about the terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and said Omar Mateen had a “Glock which had a lot of clips in it.” Obama also said Mateen had an “assault rifle.” According to CNN, the President explained that Mateen acquired his guns via a background check. And he explained that the background check did not stop Manteen “because he did not have a criminal record that in some ways would prohibit him from purchasing” his weapons.

A 7-year-old workplace retaliation lawsuit against Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Duckworth will remain a campaign issue into the late summer after an Illinois judge said on Thursday that the case could go to trial before the November election. Union County Judge Mark Boie set a tentative trial date of August and rejected an effort by government lawyers to dismiss the case, which stems from Duckworth's time as head of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. Illinois Republicans have highlighted the lawsuit, seeking to thwart Duckworth's bid against Sen. Mark Kirk, a first-term moderate in a Democratic-leaning state. Kirk is...

FBI Heads To San Francisco – Connecting Dots Behind Orlando Terrorist’s Wife Noor Sahi Salman… Posted on June 14, 2016 by sundance Finally.  It’s taken three days, we’ve been pounding the connections, and now media reports the FBI is in San Francisco to interview Ekbal Zahi.  Zahi is the mother of Noor Sahi Salman, terrorist Omar Mateen’s wife. There are very similar circumstances between the events, travels and behaviors of Omar Matten, his wife Noor Salman and the San Bernardino terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. The connections include similar travel (Saudi Arabia), social Islam / Mosque connected relationships, and sham marriages to gain...

Illinois—a state that has long embraced progressive fiscal policies—has moved one step closer to the financial abyss. Last week, Moody’s Investors Service issued the jarring announcement that it was downgrading Illinois’s general obligations bonds to Baa2 from Baa1, which is just two levels above junk bond status. The next day, Standard & Poor’s followed suit by lowering its rating to BBB+, or three levels above junk bond status. In one important sense, this is really not news at all, since Illinois had thirteen bond downgrades under its previous governor, Patrick Quinn, even though it passed a temporary tax increase that...

Three men were killed and at least 23 other people were wounded in shootings Monday across Chicago.

Chicago homeowners should brace themselves for sticker shock when they open their mailbox at the end of the month: property tax bills on average 13 percent higher than last year. The big increase is mostly being driven by the record tax increase Mayor Rahm Emanuel engineered last fall to fix city pension funds for police officers and firefighters. Cook County Clerk David Orr released tax rate figures Monday, revealing the practical effects of City Hall's painful decision. The owner of a single-family home with the current average sale price of about $225,000 can expect to see a property tax bill...

At least 29 people have been wounded, three fatally, in shootings since midmorning Monday in Chicago, authorities said. At 10:45 p.m., a 21-year-old man died after being shot in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, police said. The man was walking in the 5600 block of South May Street when someone in a passing black sedan fired shots, striking him in the left side, police said. The man was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was initially listed in serious condition. He was later pronounced dead, said Officer Hector Alfaro, a police spokesman.

Seven people were killed and at least 32 others - including a 5-year-old girl - have been wounded in shootings across Chicago since Friday night. A 5-year-old girl was wounded in the weekend's first shooting, which happened about 8 p.m. Friday. She was on a sidewalk with a 34-year-old woman when someone walked out of an alley and opened fire, striking the girl in the foot and the woman in the left ankle. The woman drove them to St. Bernard Hospital, where the woman's condition was stabilized. The girl was transferred to Holy Cross Hospital in good condition, police said....

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has come out against proposals in Chicago and New Jersey to require fingerprint background checks of drivers for ride-hailing platforms such as Uber and Lyft. Why would President Obama's onetime top lawman come out against regulation that is supposed to protect the riding public? Credit the intersection of two forces. First, Holder's tony corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, represents Uber. Also, as Holder sees it, requiring drivers to submit fingerprints may "have a discriminatory impact on communities of color." I was surprised to read about Holder's opposition, as I have trouble seeing Holder as...

SAN JOSE (KRON) — Officers arrested a 24-year-old man Friday after they had released a photo of him, along with others, asking the public to help identify suspects connected to assaults that happened during a rally for Donald Trump in San Jose last week. Officers arrested San Jose resident Anthony Yi on suspicion of robbery, assault and battery, according to police. The arrest stems from three separate incidents in which Yi allegedly robbed one victim and then assaulted two other people at the rally, police said. The rally, which drew hundreds of protestors, occurred on June 2 outside the San...

Washington (CNN)-The Rev. Jesse Jackson endorsed Hillary Clinton on Saturday, continuing a recent string of high-profile endorsements for the presumptive Democratic nominee. Jackson, speaking in Chicago, said he trusts that Clinton will look out for the interests of marginalized communities including refugees, immigrants and the poor. "We trust her to work on health care, to fight for the poor ... for the willingness to fight for civil rights," Jackson said. Jackson, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 and 1988, endorsed Clinton at the site of a memorial recognizing the hundreds of children killed in the city...

Illinois came one step closer to forcing its pro-life medical community to choose between violating state law and violating deeply held religious conscience Wednesday, as the state’s House approved Senate Bill 1564 and set the legislation on the governor’s desk.  The bill, which would introduce decisive changes to Illinois’ Health Care Right of Conscience Act, passed by a 61-54 margin and now awaits the signature of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.Originally put forward in the summer of 2015, the legislation would require pro-life medical providers, including 51 Illinois nonprofit pregnancy centers offering free services including ultrasound and STI testing, to take...

<p>According to Gallup, Americans' satisfaction levels with the way things are going in the U.S. are low and President Obama will be leaving office with a lower overall satisfaction average of any president since Jimmy Carter.</p> <p>Only 29% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. according to the Gallup poll conducted during the first week of June.</p>

He uses the Left’s identity politics strategies against them ___ For years I’ve warned that the Left is playing a dangerous game by embracing illiberal identity politics. Last week, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait wrote about the “ideological fissure” on the Left: Why is it wrong for Trump to gripe about how a Latino judge is bound to be unfair to him by virtue of his ethnicity, but okay for Sonia Sotomayor to assert that a Latina judge could be more fair as a result of her ethnicity? Why is it wrong for white people to look out for their...

Elizabeth Warren could be on her way to becoming Hillary Clinton’s choice for Vice President. Today, Clinton invited Warren to meet with her at her D.C. home. Politico reports: Cameras captured Warren exiting a blue SUV with legislative director Jon Donenberg and heading into Clinton’s Whitehaven residence Friday morning, more than an hour before Clinton was scheduled to deliver remarks at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

A 52-year-old man was shot and killed and at least 13 other people were wounded in shootings Thursday across Chicago. Paul Webster was sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle about 5:26 p.m. when a dark-colored vehicle pulled up and someone inside fired shots. The most recent nonfatal shooting occurred about 11:40 p.m. in Englewood. A 31-year-old man was standing outside in the 6300 block of South Parnell about 11:40 p.m. when a black sedan pulled up and someone inside shot him in the abdomen, leg and arm. Ten minutes earlier, a male, whose age was not immediately known,...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush's diplomacy. Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama's supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries. It triggered a round of competing memos and statements Tuesday between the chief Democratic presidential rivals. Obama's team portrayed it as a bold stroke; Clinton supporters saw...

The Democrats' acrimonious primary battle came back to haunt Hillary Clinton yesterday, a day before she sets off on her first solo campaign swing for Barack Obama, with John McCain using footage of her attacking the Democratic candidate in a new campaign ad. The ad, which was released on the internet, features a number of Democratic leaders - including Obama - offering praise for McCain. But only Clinton, who is the closing speaker, goes so far as to take a jab at Obama, in footage culled from one of her primary rallies. The ad surfaced a day before Clinton is...

Senator John McCain, looking ahead to a possible general-election matchup with Senator Barack Obama, attacked Mr. Obama on Wednesday for what he called a weak and naïve approach to the conflict in Iraq and the effort to combat international terrorism. Seizing on a comment from Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, Mr. McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, said that Mr. Obama’s plan to rapidly withdraw American troops from Iraq would leave the country in the hands of Al Qaeda and possibly other terrorist groups. In response to a hypothetical question at the debate, Mr. Obama said that although he intended to...

WATERTOWN, S.D. - (AP) Barack Obama laid into John McCain on Friday for advancing a tough-guy foreign policy that he called "naive and irresponsible," serving notice that he's ready to launch a full-throttle challenge to the Republican presidential contender on international relations in the general election campaign. Lumping McCain together with President Bush, Obama declared: "If they want a debate about protecting the United States of America, that's a debate I'm ready to win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for." He blamed Bush for policies that enhance the strength of terrorist groups such as...