Free Republic

Editor's note: Reacting to a proposed tax affecting Minnesota "snowbirds," U.S. Rep. Trey Radel, a Fort Myers, Fla., Republican, sent this letter to Gov. Mark Dayton. It was published recently in the Naples Daily News.Dear Gov. Mark Dayton, I'm writing today to thank you. As a Floridian, I am overjoyed to hear about your plan to raise taxes on Minnesotans, most especially the so-called "snowbirds." Your proposal gives us a chance to shine here in the Sunshine State. We love to share southwest Florida with snowbirds from all over the country. We are proud to host or be home to...

State Farm, the nationally knowninsurance chain headquartered in Bloomington Illinois, has apparently had its fill of “The Land of Lincoln’s” confiscatory taxes. The 800 million dollar company is reported to have purchased “substantial workspace” in the Dallas, Texas area. The giant insurance firm’s workers are being kept in the dark reportedly to avoid “alarming them” but is it their workers or the State of Illinois they would like to keep in the dark about this move? If this doesn’t signal State Farm’s coming dash out of Illinois’s clutches what could it mean? A knowledgeable Dallas real estate insider has called...

Ruby-throated hummingbirds are migrating to North America weeks earlier than in decades past, and research indicates that higher temperatures in their winter habitat may be the reason. Researchers say the early arrival could mean less food at nesting time for the tiny birds that feed on insect pests, help pollinate flowers and are popular with birdwatchers. … Jason Courtier of Taylor University said the historical data on hummingbirds is based on government surveys from about 3,000 naturalists around the country who recorded the first spring arrival time of bird species over the decades. About 6 million such records exist and...

The 22 states that were right-to-work saw an increase in the number of union members from 2011 to 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The right-to-work states had an overall increase of 39,000 union members while non-right-to-work states lost 390,000, a 3.4 percent decrease. Indiana was not included in the analysis because it passed right-to-work legislation in 2012. In the 22 right-to-work states, overall union membership increased from 2,813,000 to 2,852,000. Michigan saw its union membership drop from 671,000 to 629,000 and Indiana saw union membership fall from 302,000 to 246,000. The latest BLS report casts doubt...

The common media view of the South is as a regressive region, full of overweight, prejudiced, exploited and undereducated numbskulls. This meme was perfectly captured in this Bill Maher-commissioned video from Alexandra Pelosi, the New York-based daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Given the level of imbecility, maybe we’d be better off if the former Confederate states exiled themselves into their own redneck empire. Travel writer Chuck Thompson recently suggested this approach in a new book. Right now, however, Northeners can content themselves with the largely total isolation of Southerners from the corridors of executive power. Yet even as...

The St. Louis based moving company United Van Lines is reporting that Illinois leads the nation alongside New Jersey with the nations highest move out rates. United Van Lines spokeswoman, Melissa Sullivan told CBS affiliate KMOX in St. Louis, 60.5% of their business comes from individuals and businesses leaving Illinois. She also said, “Illinois has seen more outbound movement every year since” they have been keeping track, beginning in 1977.

United Van Lines released its annual accounting of where American households are moving and Michigan ranked as the 6th highest state in outbound traffic in 2012. That is a modest improvement over 2011, when the Great Lake State was ranked 4th. Specifically, 58 percent of all United Van Lines 2012 Michigan-related moves are outbound. The good news is that this isn't the most recent improvement in the state's ranking. From 2006 through 2009, Michigan ranked as the company's No. 1 state for outbound moving traffic. Also, by making this state a more attractive place for investors and entrepreneurs to locate...

ST. LOUIS- The Northeast region leads the United States in outbound migration, according to the results of United Van Lines’ 36th annual “migration” study, which tracks which states the company’s customers move to and from during the course of the year. Washington, D.C., continues to lead the nation in inbound moves based on the study findings released today, which analyzed moves from the full year 2012. “As the nation’s largest household goods mover, United’s data is an accurate reflection of the overall U.S. moving trends,” explained Carl Walter, vice president of United Van Lines. “Tracking the number of inbound and...

As the din of America’s falling headfirst over the fiscal cliff reverberates across the nation, the Obama administration is quietly killing a key economic metric that tells how, and how many, people are voting with their feet. Since 1991 the Internal Revenue Service has been compiling statistics on filers’ addresses, which the agency’s Statistics of Income division uses to show who is moving into and out of every county and state in the nation. As you’d expect, the IRS also knows the aggregate income levels of those who move. So the movements of the most fundamental productive components of the...

A century ago, nine out of ten black Americans lived in the South, primarily in formerly Confederate states where segregation reigned. Then, in the 1920s, blacks began heading north, both to escape the racism of Jim Crow and to seek work as southern agriculture grew increasingly mechanized. “From World War I to the 1970s, some six million black Americans fled the American South for an uncertain existence in the urban North and West,” writes journalist Isabel Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns. Principal destinations in the Great Migration, as the exodus came to be called, included...

Indo-European tongues traced back more than 8,000 years to present-day Turkey ANCIENT SPREADThe map shows the timing and geographic expansion of Indo-European languages proposed in a new statistical analysis. The red area in what’s now Turkey is a possible birthplace of the Indo-European language family more than 8,000 years ago.Remco Bouckaert et al. Indo-European languages range throughout Europe and South Asia and even into Iran, yet the roots of this widespread family of tongues have long been controversial. A new study adds support to the proposal that the language family expanded out of Anatolia — what’s now Turkey — between...

Native Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday. The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas. But the new study, claiming to be the most comprehensive analysis yet of Native American genetics, claims to have found incontrovertible proof that there were three immigration waves -- a theory first put forward in 1986. Most Native Americans, said the study,...

Not only do my ex’s live in Texas, but your ex’s, and pretty much everyone else’s ex’s as well. All of America is moving to Texas. Especially the ex-residents of high tax states like California and New York. And, I'll bet many of the ex-residents of Big Brother tax and spend Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan are there too. The fact is Texas led the nation in net population growth for the past decade, while New York and California led the nation in net population loss. Interestingly, the most new Texans (over 550,000) came from one state- California. They brought with...

For decades, scientists thought that the Clovis hunters were the first to cross the Arctic to America. They were wrong — and now they need a better theory The mastodon was old, its teeth worn to nubs. It was perfect prey for a band of hunters, wielding spears tipped with needle-sharp points made from bone. Sensing an easy target, they closed in for the kill. Almost 14,000 years later, there is no way to tell how many hits it took to bring the beast to the ground near the coast of present-day Washington state. But at least one struck home,...

These are the snowy owls attracting quite a crowd of onlookers across America as an ‘unbelievable’ mass migration continues to grow. Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of the Arctic birds winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a mass southern migration. Some states as far south as Texas are reporting sightings of the bird that is as white as the driven snow.

Battered by the worst drought on record in Texas, the world's only self-sustaining flock of migratory whooping cranes is showing vulnerabilities that raise the stakes for crane work in Wisconsin. Texas' dry conditions and booming development have heightened worries about the health of the cranes and have sparked a legal battle over whether the endangered birds are getting their fair share of fresh water. The specter of drought, hurricanes or other calamity is the reason why Wisconsin and a few other states - away from Texas - were identified as candidates for crane reintroduction. The 5-foot tall cranes that migrate...

First of two parts For more than 20 years, natives of Guerrero, Mexico, have sought a better life in the U.S., with many of them settling in Orange County, especially in Santa Ana. Lately, what was a one-way wave of immigration has reversed. The slow U.S. economy and an unprecedented number of deportations have led many of those immigrants to return to Mexico. Orange County Register staff writers Cindy Carcamo and Michael Mello detail the phenomenon in a two-part story. These stories were made possible by a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism grant that was funded by the Rosenberg...

The National Geographic has info, a teaser for an October 26 Nova special: The genetic results add both information and intrigue. From his genes, we now know that the Iceman had brown hair and brown eyes and that he was probably lactose intolerant and thus could not digest milk—somewhat ironic, given theories that he was a shepherd. Not surprisingly, he is more related to people living in southern Europe today than to those in North Africa or the Middle East, with close connections to geographically isolated modern populations in Sardinia, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. The DNA analysis also revealed...

Earlier this week, the journal Proceeedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study on climate change that is at the same time scary, comforting, insightful and a statement of the obvious.To be more accurate, I should probably say that the paper is capable of being interpreted in all of those ways, rather than risk implying that the authors intended to do more than run the numbers and see what popped up. What they're talking about is climate change in Europe, specifically between 1500 and 1800 AD - a period that encompasses the so-called Little Ice Age. It...

I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone. According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of...