Free Republic

Last week, the national Republican Party issued a report on why it lost the 2012 presidential election. The report belongs in the paper shredder. Look at a map of the U.S., and you’ll see why. The Republican Party is already on the way to dominating presidential politics. Red states are on the rise, and blue states are sinking. In politics, demography is destiny. The biggest mistake the GOP could make is to change course and abandon its current policies. It will soon control an Electoral College majority. Americans are voting with their feet to live in Republican-run states with low...

Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Washington University's Mercatus Center. The "Freedom in the 50 States" study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.

Recently, Republican Governors Rick Perry of Texas and Terry Branstad of Iowa appealed to those wanting to flee liberal California. “Move your business to our state,” they implore. “We’ll welcome you with open arms here.” They should be careful what they wish for. When my wife and I used to vacation in Colorado in the 1970s, I started noticing bumper stickers that read “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The initial movement that spawned that sentiment was a way for Colorado residents to express their disapproval of how Southern California had exploded with seemingly unlimited development. However, since that time, “Californicate” has taken...

A record number of U.S. counties - more than 1 in 3 - are now dying off, hit by an aging population and weakened local economies that are spurring young adults to seek jobs and build families elsewhere. New 2012 census estimates released Thursday highlight the population shifts as the U.S. encounters its most sluggish growth levels since the Great Depression. The findings also reflect the increasing economic importance of foreign-born residents as the U.S. ponders an overhaul of a major 1965 federal immigration law. Without new immigrants, many metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and St....

Why are so many people leaving the United States right now? Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of Americans have decided that moving to another country is the best way to prepare for the collapse of America. According to the U.S. State Department, an all-time record of more than 6 million Americans are now working or studying overseas. Of course many of those that have left the country do not believe that the U.S. economy is going to collapse, but without a doubt there are an increasing number of preppers that believe that now is the time...

When it comes to gun laws, California is vying to have the strictest in the nation. It comes as no surprise, then, that the state is not a particularly business-friendly environment for those in the gun industry. And so Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s wishes are beginning to come true: Shield Tactical, a California retailer and firearms training provider, has decided to ‘get the heck out of Dodge’ — and move to Texas John W. Harrington founded Shield Tactical in 2008, but with California’s hard-line stance on gun control, he decided the state was no longer a good place for his...

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,...