Free Republic

Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won't have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls. You won't find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica. 67% of firearm murders took place in the country's 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years...

Louisville, Kentucky - Tracy Browning, a 38-year-old Louisville woman, was jailed after she allegedly tried to purchase several iPads with a food stamp card, then fled to another location where she tried to make the same transaction. According to Louisville police, Browning went to the Valley Station Walmart and tried to purchase two iPads with an Electronic Benefit Transfer card. When the transaction was denied, she assaulted a store clerk, pushed another employee to the ground and fled from the store with the merchandise. Investigators say Browning went to another Walmart in the area a short time later and again...

The nephew of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was indicted Monday for involuntary manslaughter in the 2004 death of a 21-year-old man outside a Chicago bar, and a grand jury is continuing its inquiry into whether authorities covered up or impeded an investigation of a relative of the city's most powerful man. Richard Vanecko, 38, was indicted by a Cook County special grand jury in the death of David Koschman of Mount Prospect. Koschman died days after he fell and struck his head during a fight with Vanecko outside a bar in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood.

Not all black mob riots start with an armed robbery and car chase. But this one did. Just like on TV. This riot is also on TV: YouTube. Not quite as polished but you get the picture. The attacks are part of an epidemic of hundreds of cases of black mob violence in more than 80 cities over the last three years, as documented in the book “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence to America and how the media ignore it.” Chicago is Ground Zero for violence and denial. So much so that the riot did...

22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America By Michael Snyder December 17th, 2012 When are we finally going to admit that we have a very serious problem with this generation of young men in America? We have failed them so dramatically that it is hard to put it into words. We have raised an entire generation of young males that don't know how to be men, and many of them feel completely lost. Sometimes they feel so lost that they "snap" in very destructive ways. Adam Lanza and James Holmes are two...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Illinois' public pension funding problems, likely to persist if not worsen, led Moody's Investors Service on Thursday to revise the state's credit outlook to negative from stable, putting more pressure on state lawmakers to act. Illinois' finances are buckling under a $96.8 billion unfunded pension liability while Governor Pat Quinn and various state lawmakers are pushing to get various reform measures passed by the legislature in early January. But Moody's, which affirmed Illinois' A2 rating, said the passage of any reforms stands a good chance of being challenged in court on the basis of strong state constitutional...

President Barack Obama travelled to Michigan this week and made his case for class war in defense of the welfare state. We need to take more money from the rich, he said, or schools will not be able to afford books, students will not be able to afford college, and disabled children will not get health care. "Our economic success has never come from the top down," said Obama. "It comes from the middle out.It comes from the bottom up." Obama spoke these words a few miles from Detroit -- the reductio ad absurdum of his argument. If America continues...

By FOX 2 News Staff DETROIT (WJBK) -- The city of Detroit faces a major financial crisis and one member of city council thinks President Barack Obama should step in and help. City Council member JoAnn Watson said Tuesday the citizens support of Obama in last month's election was enough reason for the president to bailout the struggling the city. (Click the video player to listen) "Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that," said Watson. "Of course, not...

The Department of Labor's WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) website may have been exempt from layoff notices related to the fiscal cliff, but it still provides a sufficiently (bleak) complete picture about the real nature of layoffs and business cycle in general in America's busiest city. Which is why it was precisely using the WARN website that we learned that one of New York's most historic steakhouses, "NY's Prime Steakhouse since 1927" Gallagher's, located on 52nd street, and which survive the great depression, is shutting down on January 16. Surely neither the surging price of meat, nor the ability...

Full title: Ground Reports from the “Depression that Shall Not Be Named” — things we notice that the corrupt media won’t report that show this is indeed a Depression On my desk, just under the computer monitor, I have a little box full of slips of scrap paper. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid because the nuns who taught me in Catholic School refused to ever waste paper. Anything that comes into my home that’s blank on one side and has outlived its usefulness is drawn and quartered and spends some time as scrap paper in that...

Chicago Teachers Union President: Strike is About ‘The Very Soul of Public Education’ By Matt Cover September 11, 2012 (CNSNews.com) – Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis told a Labor Day rally last week that the teachers’ strike that began on Monday was not just about the CTU’s salary demands, but about “the very soul of public education.” Speaking to a labor day rally on Sept. 3, Lewis said that the fight between Chicago Public School (CPS) officials and the CTU over how large a raise teachers would receive over the coming years was not a fight she or...

Here's an odd side effect of South Florida's foreclosure crisis: Some immense homes with pools and three-car garages in gated communities are being rented out to unlikely tenants — poor people paying with Section 8 aid. Among the properties are homes with up to 4,500 square feet of space in private communities with guardhouses and regal names such as "Monarch Lakes" and "Bellagio at Vizcaya." Some of the owners are teetering on foreclosure and gambling they can earn enough money from the federal housing vouchers to stave off the banks. Others bought the properties cheap in foreclosure auctions and want...

The written testimony that Jonathan Adler and I submitted for the House Oversight Committee hearing on the Internal Revenue Service’s unlawful attempt to increase taxes and spending under Obamacare is now online. An excerpt: Contrary to the clear language of the statute and congressional intent, this [IRS] rule issues tax credits in health insurance “exchanges” established by the federal government. It thus triggers a $2,000-per-employee tax on employers and appropriates billions of dollars to private health insurance companies in states with a federal Exchange, also contrary to the clear language of the statute and congressional intent. Since those illegal expenditures will exceed...

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net. Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections. The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent....

The city of Chicago enforces the most draconian (and unconstitutional) gun-control laws in the United States. And how's that working out? Oddly, there are no calls for more gun control in the wake of the weekly Chicago massacre. Once you have the stiffest gun control laws on the books, you should probably look at the root of the problem... "Three men are dead and at least 23 other people wounded from gun violence across the city since Friday night."In fact, Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy is "accentuating the positives" of the bloody results of his city's oppressive gun ban, which...

Daffy's Inc., a staple of the New York shopping scene for 51 years, is closing its doors. The Secaucus, N.J.-based discount retailer, which had been rumored to be in financial turmoil, said Monday that all its stores will be shuttering over the next few months, as part of a company liquidation. In a statement, Daffy's said it "deeply regrets that this action was necessary due to the impact on its business of the uncertain economy and weak consumer spending and a lack of viable financial and business alternatives." The discounter employs 1,300 people and operates a total of 19 locations,...

It started with homes, then cars, and now penny-pinching Americans, especially minorities, are giving up cable TV because they just can't afford it in the lingering recession. Instead, they are switching back to free TV, improved with the recent switch to digital broadcast which requires a special antenna but eliminates the $70-$100 monthly cable, satellite or broadband service fee. Industry officials had worried that Americans would begin "cord-cutting" in a shift to internet TV, but the recession is more to blame, not internet bling. "It's not so much cord-cutting as cost-cutting that's motivating this. There's possibly recessionary issues here," said...

States seeking a larger share of the nearly $80 billion a year the federal government hands out for food stamps have resorted to several practices that some lawmakers say are abuses of the system: —Fourteen states and the District of Columbia make use of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Paying people as little as $1 a year for heating assistance, even if they don’t have a heating bill, automatically qualifies them for greater food stamp benefits. Critics say that can result in households getting up to $100 extra a month in food stamps....

LA County Finds Health Code Violations in Skid Row LOS ANGELES (AP) — The city of Los Angeles is violating the county health code for hazardous conditions on Skid Row, including nearly 90 rats' nests, a dozen hypodermic needles and piles of human excrement and trash on sidewalks, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has found. The notice of violation stems from an extensive Health Department inspection last month of the 10-block area of downtown Los Angeles that houses the nation's densest population of homeless people, most of them mentally ill and substance abusers. Health officials ordered the...