Free Republic

As of Wednesday night, the state had the fifth-most confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the fifth-most deaths from the virus in the U.S. The economic toll has been even more striking. Since March 14, about 1.3 million Pennsylvanians (or nearly 1 in 5 workers in the state) have lost their jobs — the second-highest number during that period in the country, behind only California. ...the political fallout for Trump in Pennsylvania is already significant — and is likely to remain stark unless the public health and economic situations improve dramatically before Nov. 3. Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based GOP strategist...warned that...

We can define a lockdown in today's world as a government-ordered shutdown of businesses, schools, public facilities and of the free movement of people in general. Lockdowns are taking away human freedom under the rationale of trying to "save lives." This is no different from the argument used for banning guns, e.g. "if it will save just one life, we have to do it." Neither policy actually works for similar reasons. A. Both guns and the virus are already out there. In theory, a ban on importing or making guns and on letting someone with the virus into the country...

Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus. ...he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures...nature had already...nearly achieved herd immunity. With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have...

Health professionals say the majority of Luzerne county's coronavirus cases are in the Hazleton area and the numbers are growing quickly. The mayor of Hazleton will enact a curfew for residents on Saturday at 8PM along with other rules that will be enforced by police. Luzerne County has asked the governor to send in the National Guard...there are many factors that led to Hazleton being a hot spot for COVID-19... ...Hazleton is really going to be ground zero for this... Rep. Toohil says there are many factors that may have led to this including commuters to New York and New...

I am ecstatic for Carrier employees! Their bosses just decided to keep shop onshore. What a relief for hundreds of workers. Merry Christmas Indiana! We don't yet know terms of the public/private deal that was cut to make the company stay, but let's hope every business is equally incentivized to keep Americans working in America. Foundational to our exceptional nation's sacred private property rights, a business must have freedom to locate where it wishes. In a free market, if a business makes a mistake (including a marketing mistake that perhaps Carrier executives made), threatening to move elsewhere claiming efficiency's sake,...

For many years, the biggest name in Michigan Republican politics has been DeVos. With billions of dollars in Amway wealth, the family has long backed conservative causes across the country, including school choice. The DeVos family backed Romney in 2012. Its support may have been crucial for him as he squeaked past Rick Santorum by three points to notch a crucial win before Super Tuesday. On Feb. 25, the family picked its horse in the 2016 GOP primary: Marco Rubio... DeVos: As the field has continued to narrow, after Gov. [Jeb] Bush exited the race, we felt it appropriate and...

"[Voters said] we want blue-collar jobs and manufacturing, we don't want to be controlled by the media and elites." In recent elections, Democrats have won Pennsylvania...by piling up huge margins in...Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as...suburban counties... Hillary Clinton executed that strategy well. She came out of Philadelphia with a 450,000-vote margin, won all four of the suburban counties...and carried Allegheny County by 8,400 more votes than...Obama. But there is another ingredient in that winning formula. Winning Democratic candidates pad their lead with votes from...former industrial powerhouses, onetime union strongholds such as Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Bethlehem and Erie. "They didn't finish...

With two elections still too close to call, Democrats have lost power in three states, including traditionally blue Vermont. Going into Election Day, Republicans made up a historically large 31-18 majority of governors. (There's one independent, Alaska's Bill Walker.) In Missouri, Eric Greitens won a Democratic-held open seat to replace term-limited Jay Nixon. In Vermont, the normally blue state opted for a moderate Republican governor, Phil Scott, to replace Peter Shumlin, who chose not to run for re-election. And in New Hampshire, Republican Chris Sununu flipped the Democratic-held governorship that's currently held by Maggie Hassan, who's in a tight race...

The GOP successfully defended its majorities in most chambers, and also picked up chambers in Kentucky and Iowa, giving the party full control of those states. Democrats went into this election controlling the governorship, Senate and House in just seven states...Now, they control just four states. "In short, Republicans bested expectations," Republicans not only picked up the Kentucky House and the Iowa Senate, but unseated the top Democratic leaders in both... The Kentucky House was the last chamber controlled by Democrats in the South. Their gains in Iowa and Kentucky mean the GOP has won the trifecta in those states,...

Republicans, who have dominated control of legislatures since the 2010 mid-term election, held the majority in 67 of the country's 98 partisan legislative chambers, while Democrats had 31 going into the election. Nebraska's single chamber is nonpartisan. In Kentucky, Republicans took over the House of Representatives for the first time since 1921... That result leaves Republicans in control of all 30 legislative chambers in the U.S. South for the first time in history, Storey said. Republicans also wrested control of the Iowa Senate and the Minnesota Senate from Democrats, according to NCSL. Democrats hit their target in the New Mexico...

During Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump indulged in some mudslinging even more flawed than usual on the tired topic of Hillary Clinton’s State Department email. It is old non-news that Clinton’s staff deleted 33,000 messages on her server after they deemed these personal in nature. This has been investigated to death, by a court in civil litigation, the State Department Inspector General, the FBI, and the Justice Department. FBI Director James Comey, a solid Republican and a universally respected former prosecutor, concluded after an exceptionally thorough investigation that no charges were warranted. ...he asserted that he would appoint a...

Megan Rouse, a Dublin school board member elected in 2014, was mentioned in the hacked email allegations that her father, John Podesta, at one time had stocks connected to a firm that had ties to Russia. Documents show that Podesta received 75,000 shares of Joule Unlimited Technologies. The hacked Jan. 3, 2014 document shows that Podesta transferred more than 25,000 of these shares to Leonidio Holdings LLC, which had an address listed as Rouse’s Shannon Court home in Dublin. Rouse operates Megan Rouse Financial Planning from that same address. “When Podesta went back to the work at the White House,...

"From time to time I get the questions in advance," the email subject was titled in a letter written from Brazile delivered to Podesta's Gmail. Brazile did not give a coherent explanation other than to say she won't respond to content that was stolen, the hacked emails, and that she will not let herself be "persecuted" by Megyn Kelly who grilled her for an explanation. She also accused Kelly of being a "thief." "As a Christian woman, I understand persecution," Brazile told Kelly. "Your information is false. What you're -- well, for suggestive e-mails were stolen. You're interested and you're...

Arthur Laffer of Laffer Associates reacts to presidential candidate Ted Cruz's tax plan, in which Cruz proposes individuals above certain income threshold pay a 10 percent flat tax, and a 16 percent flat tax on companies. http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000509983

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) blamed “Donald Trump and his henchmen” for planting a National Enquirer story that accused him of extramarital affairs. Vehemently denying the story as “garbage” and “complete and utter lies,” “It became clear as the campaign went on that Donald was a whole lot of sizzle without any substance,” said Cruz. “When he’s scared, when he’s losing, his first and natural resort is to go to sleaze and to go to slime.” Friday on CNN, a Trump supporter, Boston Herald columnist and radio host Adriana Cohen accused a former Cruz staffer, Amanda Carpenter, of being one of...

Yes, the race for the White House is about winning states, but really it's about winning delegates. In 1976, President Gerald Ford went up against his challenger, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Not unlike today, tempers raged and traditional rules were broken... "The convention meant the climax to a party that had a kind of split personality." "If I remember correctly, the president, Gerald Ford, was winning, winning, winning from New Hampshire on, and then suddenly he hit a block in North Carolina and Gov. Reagan started to win, win, win. "People talk about how upset people are with Washington,...

...if Rubio and Kasich exit the race after March 15...Ted Cruz can beat out Donald Trump... [Trump] has a very high floor of support because he has garnered more media attention than any candidate in the history of presidential politics. ...that same media attention has convinced almost every other Republican voter...to oppose him at all costs. ...had this battle been a two man race after Super Tuesday, Cruz would already be leading... The March 15 Roadblock Donald Trump could not ask for a more fortuitous situation in which the mixture of his challengers, their home states, and winner-take-all status all...

Ted Cruz has snagged a big endorsement the day before the Mississippi primary: Gov. Phil Bryant. "It's time for Republicans to join together and unite the party for the good of our state and our nation," Bryant said in a statement. "I urge my fellow Mississippians to join me in standing behind Ted Cruz tomorrow." "I'm not going to get out and make a big show about it, but Sen. Cruz was in town today, and I met with him and gave him my endorsement," Bryant said, according to The Clarion-Ledger. "It was a hard choice -- I know so...

Ted Cruz’s tax plan would cost less and stimulate the economy more than Donald Trump's, a recent analysis found. “Of the two proposals that we have examined so far, those by Trump and Cruz, we find the Cruz proposal to be the better of the two,” said David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute and senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. The free-market groups released a report comparing the economic effects of the tax plans from the two Republican presidential candidates. Trump’s plan would lower the top individual income tax rate from 39.6 percent to...

...our model shows more growth from the Rubio and Cruz plans than the Trump plan, even though Trump proposed a larger cut: While Donald Trump largely opted for big rate reductions across the board, Rubio and Cruz made improvements to the structure of taxes, while cutting taxes by less overall. Senators Rubio and Cruz both put thought into the nature of the taxes that businesses pay. They noticed that the current way businesses are asked to calculate taxes creates a bias in the code. When a business builds something new, like, say, a new industrial lathe, that decision actually has...