Free Republic

7,016,272 When I moved here in 1963 there were about 1.4 million people here and the state was ranked 34th in population. Now it's just north of 7 million and ranked 14th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecFjU1WNxVM

Reid labeled rural Americans “the core threat to our Democracy” and called for the abolition of the electoral college to limit their ability to influence elections and government.

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach. This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast,...

HILBERT, Wis. — Sargento Foods is expanding in eastern Wisconsin for the fourth time in the past decade. WLUK-TV reports that the company is adding 40,000 square feet (almost 3,720 square meters) and 150 jobs to its Hilbert location. The Hilbert location currently employs about 300 people

Donald J. Trump spoke to rural voters in a way that launched him into the presidency. His soaring rhetoric and no-nonsense promises to stand up against corruption were exactly what his constituents voted for. Say it ain’t so, but now, his own Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is pushing a rule that will hurt the very voters who put him in the White House. The swamp has overtaken the FCC and President Trump’s Make America Great Again motto is in jeopardy. Will the Trump Administration stand up to the big mobile carriers or will it cave just like every Administration...

I’m a political junkie. Every day I read The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other media giants, with great interest and appreciation. Here in conservative rural America, Trump is ascendant. I was loafing in a booth at the coffee shop Saturday morning, and my friend Mark said something like, “Hey Bob, if you want to understand why rural conservatives like Trump, watch the speech he gave at the Values Voters Summit.” Doing my best to understand how my conservative friends might read Trump’s speech, I read. I contrasted Trump’s messaging with how rural conservatives often view Democratic...

So said our own Steve Hayward to a college Republican group in Minnesota last week. For your daily dose of schadenfreude, check out the New York Times’s lament over Iowa’s swing to the right: There is little to suggest a future for the [Democratic] party here in this once reliable Democratic stronghold, at least in races on the national level. President Trump easily carried this county in the 2016 election, and Iowa as a whole; the only counties Hillary Clinton won were in metropolitan areas or university towns.Iowa’s dramatic change has been both abrupt and a long time in coming....

President Donald Trump’s decision to end a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was benefiting roughly 6 million Americans helps fulfill a campaign promise, but it also risks harming some of the very people who helped him win the presidency. Nearly 70 percent of those benefiting from the so-called cost-sharing subsidies live in states Trump won last November, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.The subsidies are paid to insurers by the federal government to help lower consumers’ deductibles and co-pays. People who benefit will continue receiving the discounts because insurers are obligated by law to provide them....

Democrats point to a thousand reasons that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election. Here is another. In political circles, it’s common knowledge that in four key states President Trump unexpectedly carried counties that Democratic presidential campaign strategists had failed to recognize as crucial terrain — sparsely populated areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In “What I Got Wrong About the Election,” for example, published right after Clinton lost, David Plouffe, who had managed the Obama campaign in 2008, wrote that Trump’s margins in rural and exurban counties were off the charts. For example, in Madison County, an exurban area...

Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn plans to build an LCD panel manufacturing facility in the southeastern Wisconsin village of Mount Pleasant, local officials announced Wednesday. The announcement comes just a few weeks after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a $3 billion incentive package for the company, on track to be the largest subsidy to a foreign company in U.S. history.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny inexplicably pointed out Monday after the Las Vegas shooting that many country music fans are likely Trump supporters

A pair of new polls on Monday showed Roy Moore beating incumbent Luther Strange by double digits in Tuesdays’s GOP senate runoff in Alabama — despite President Trump’s endorsement of the man he calls “Big Luther.” The first survey, conducted by the Trafalgar Group during the two days after Trump’s raucous rally for Strange on Friday — showed the arch-conservative leading by 16 points, 56 to 40. The second, commissioned by Cygnal, an Alabama-based research firm, was also conducted after Trump’s visit to Huntsville, showed Moore leading 52 to 41.

GLENWOOD,GA ― If you want to watch a rural community die, kill its hospital. After the Lower Oconee Community Hospital shut down in June 2014, other mainstays of the community followed. The bank and the pharmacy in the small town of Glenwood shuttered. Then the only grocery store in all of Wheeler County closed in the middle of August this year. On Glenwood’s main street, building after building is now for sale, closing, falling apart or infested with weeds growing through the foundation’s cracks. Opportunity has been dying in Wheeler County for the last 20 years. Agriculture was once the...

Matt Wuerker, the leftwing editorial cartoonist for the leftwingPolitico, was met with almost universal condemnation Wednesday for a ‘toon that not only mocked the victims of Hurricane Harvey, but mocked the victims in most desperate need, those requiring rescue from rooftops. Utilizing that form of bigotry and hate that will always be acceptable among the Beautiful People, Wuerker managed to lump all Texans into a single GodTardingRacistSecessionist. Ugly, ugly stuff. [...] In summation… In the middle of a historic hurricane devastating God knows how many thousands and thousands of Texans, the cultural supremacists at Politico are stereotyping those very same Texans in the...

There are no cardboard boxes or bubble wrap or heavy duty packing tape in Tim Stokes' 1,600-square-foot Sacramento, Calif., home. But, according to the 36-year-old, he and his pregnant wife, their three kids and their two 100-pound mastiffs are on the verge of selling the house they bought just over a year ago. Though Stokes was born in Nevada, he has spent all but the first six months of his life in California. For most of that time, any move away from his hometown and family would have been unthinkable for him. But in the past six years, Stokes, who...

Recruiters in areas with a dearth of professionals, including Maine, are successfully targeting talent that has local roots, but left for school and careers. AUGUST 23, 2017 —Alana Greer was sure she’d never return to Miami. “I was very anti-moving home for a really long time,” says the civil rights attorney, who graduated from Harvard Law School and worked in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., before resettling near her childhood home in Coral Gables. “But I can’t imagine myself anywhere else right now.” Ms. Greer is co-founder of the Community Justice Project, a nonprofit law firm that works with grassroots...

The Alabama Senate special election certainly isn’t a toss-up, but the possibility that former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore might become the Republican nominee creates the potential for a Democratic upset.

Diane Hendricks and her late husband saw opportunity in Beloit, a decaying industrial town. Now, she dreams of turning it into a mecca for start-ups. When Diane Hendricks sees something she doesn’t like here, she buys it. A bankrupt country club. A half-empty mall. Abandoned buildings. The rusting foundry down by the river. Beloit used to be a town that made papermaking machines and diesel engines. Ms. Hendricks thinks it can be a place where start-ups create the next billion-dollar idea, and she is remaking the town to fit her vision. She can do so because she is the second-richest...

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Bragging about keeping his promises on immigration, the economy, the environment and crime, President Trump celebrated on Thursday with a raucous West Virginia crowd as the state’s Democratic governor announced that he will switch to the Republican Party. With Gov. Jim Justice by his side, Mr. Trump hailed stock market records and the growth of coal income in West Virginia. And he delivered a lengthy critique of the federal investigations of his campaign’s ties to Russia, calling the matter “a fake story that is demeaning to all of us.”