Dennis Byrne is a Chicago-based columnist and commentator who contributed to The Weekly Standard between 2015 and 2018. His articles for the magazine focused on Illinois and Chicago politics, cultural debates, and national electoral issues, often bringing a local Midwestern perspective to broader political trends. He has been a longtime opinion writer for Chicago-area publications.
For some reason yet to be fathomed, the 50 million Americans born between the greatest generation and the baby boomers were never assigned a name—at least not one widely recognizable.
A community organizes against his library plans.
Northfield, Il.
When it comes to the widening "post-fact," "post-truth" and "fake news" landscape supposedly foisted on naïve Americans by the alt-right, it would be hard to outdo the progressive narrative of how Wisconsin's voter ID law "suppressed" turnout and handed Donald Trump the state's ten electoral votes.
While half of American voters have stomped through the Garden of Progressive Delights, Illinois is ever more shackled by insider deal-making, special interests of the liberal kind, and an autocratic Democratic machine. Case in point: As if organized labor hasn't wrung enough out of the nearly broke…
Chicago
Distant newsrooms have sent word to Chicago that Republican moderate Mark Kirk is dead meat in his bid to win a second term as Illinois’s junior senator. He reliably tops newspaper lists of "Most Endangered GOP Senators in 2016."
Milwaukee’s Marquette University is poised to fire a tenured political science professor, John McAdams, for speaking his mind.
Rahm Emanuel still is Chicago’s mayor. So far, anyway. Not that any serious students of the Chicago Way expected Emanuel to resign, even in the face of accusations that he covered up the brutal shooting of a black youth by a white cop. He might not have survived last year's mayoral election if…
Coming soon to a girls' locker room in a high school near you: the Obama administration's transgender gendarmes.