Free Republic

Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that 10 states will receive funding to turn around their persistently lowest-achieving schools through the Department's School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Four of the states will receive awards to run a new competition for previously unfunded schools, and six states will receive continuation funds for the third year of implementing a SIG model. The states receiving new awards are: Indiana—$9.2 million; Nebraska—$2.6 million; Colorado—$5.2 million; and Louisiana—$9.6 million. The states receiving continuation awards are: Alaska—$1.5 million; Iowa—$3.0 million; North Dakota—$1.2 million; Oklahoma—$5.5 million; Texas—$49.7 million; and Wyoming—$1.1 million. "When schools fail, our...

Look on the bright side: She might not run. In which case we won’t have to worry about Texas imposing a Democratic stranglehold on the White House for the foreseeable future until, oh, 2024 or so.Or maybe 2020? Much depends on the time frame for that path to citizenship that Schumer, McCain, Rubio, et al. are cooking up. While the knee-jerk reaction among many Republicans would be to dismiss the idea that the state could be competitive in 2016 — just four years after Mitt Romney carried it by 16 points over President Obama — Texas GOP Chairman Steve Munisteri...

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...

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...

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013, (Santa Monica, CA) — It has been 34 years of marriage, three children, two grandchildren, two homes and three jobs, and Mary and Joseph Peterson have had enough. The two Sacramento natives and college sweethearts have lived in California their entire lives. Now their lifelong stay in the Sunshine state is sadly coming to an end. Mary Peterson, 56, and husband Joseph, 57, lament being only an estimated 250,000 people who are now leaving California annually, in comparison to the hordes more that are storming in (mainly illegally). They also lament not having fully experienced the...

Alabama has taken the crown previously held by Mississippi as the most conservative state in the union, according to a new Gallup poll. Last year the top four were Mississippi, Utah, and Wyoming, with Alabama coming in fourth. Overall, Americans in 2012 remained more likely to identify as conservative (38%) than as moderate (36%) or as liberal (23%), although liberals have gained 2 percentage points compared to 2011. On the liberal side, the medalists have gotten stronger. Washington DC, Massachusetts, and Oregon, the 2011 liberal top three, retain their titles...Residents of Washington DC are more liberal

Alabama is the most “conservative” state in the U.S., with roughly 50 percent of its residents “identifying their ideology as conservative,” trailed closely by North Dakota and Wyoming (both 48.6 percent), according to a recent survey by Gallup.

Alabama has won the title of the most conservative state in the nation, followed closely by North Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, and Utah, a new Gallup poll reveals. Rounding out the Top 10 reddest of the red states are Oklahoma, Idaho, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Arkansas. Alabama took the crown after a majority of residents — 50.6 percent of those polled — told Gallup they identified their ideology as conservative. North Dakota and Wyoming tied for second place with 48.6 percent of residents in those states saying they are conservative. “The Top 10 conservative states are all red states that vote reliably...

The report ranks the most and least “Bible-minded” cities by looking at how people in those cities view the Bible.... Regionally, the South still qualifies as the most Bible-minded. The top ranking cities, where at least half of the population qualifies as Bible-minded, are all Southern cities. This includes the media markets for Knoxville, TN (52% of the population are Bible-minded), Shreveport, LA (52%), Chattanooga, TN (52%), Birmingham, AL (50%), and Jackson, MS (50%). Other markets in the top 10 include Springfield, MO (49%), Charlotte, NC (48%), Lynchburg, VA (48%), Huntsville-Decatur, AL (48%), and Charleston, WV (47%). The least Bible-oriented...

Continuing my map series on voter registration, this shows the county-by-county trend from last January. Democrats had a positive trend in only one county (Adair), and that was only +0.29%. Republicans netted positive percentages in the other 76 counties, capped with +8.22% in Marshall County. With the rate at which the GOP is catching up to the Democrats, the Republican Party will likely take the lead in voter registration sometime in 2014.

.......... the United States needs its conservative leaders and activists in the public square now more than at any time in our lifetimes. If we hold on, we'll win. Blue State America is doomed, and the blue-staters represented by President Obama and his party cannot save it. ...... we red-staters must remain fully involved and fully engaged in American politics and culture. This is especially true after a year like 2012 -- when we lose. Better to quote U.S. General Joseph Stilwell after the loss of Burma to the Japanese. "I claim," Vinegar Joe said, "we took a hell of...

This is part two of a column on the state of Republicanism and how they should move forward.In 1973, the Supreme Court issued one of their worst rulings ever in Roe v. Wade. Largely made from “whole cloth,” the ruling has started a 40-year fight over abortion that unnecessarily has divided this country. If Republican principles were in place on this issue, then there would be a heated discussion; but the core of the fight would be defused and the issue would be handled at the state level where it properly belongs and where other issues should be handled. Without...

Many Republicans seem ready to agree to Obama's demands for tax increases -- after all, elections have consequences, and he won, right? Maybe, but before agreeing to anything, the GOP should probably look a little more carefully at just who elected Obama. Dr. Robert Vanderbei, a professor of Operations Research at Princeton, developed the visualization shown above by combining Democrat blue with GOP red according to popular vote proportions taken at the county level and printing the result as a 3D map in which apparent vertical height is a stand-in for the number of voters counted.Nationally, Obama won the popular...

The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants. The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012...

The dust may still be settling on the 2012 election, but there is good reason for conservatives to find optimism for the future. Recently, I found such hope reviewing the full exit poll data from our recent election. The bottom line on the presidential race was this: Mitt Romney lost the election because voters liked him less than Barack Obama. Despite claims otherwise, the election was not a referendum on Obama’s record or even red state values versus blue state values. Obama and the Democrats have claimed a “mandate,” but the data shows voters actually oppose President Obama’s programs like...

CNN's Gary Tuchman heads to King County, Texas, where President Obama won only five votes. Video at link.

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of presidential elections. Here is a typical map of the results of the 2012 election:

Republican Mitt Romney leads Democrat Barack Obama in the race for president in Tennessee, bolstered at least partly by the support Romney has gained among Tennessee's white evangelical voters since last spring's primary. A solid 59 percent of the state's registered, likely voters say they support Romney. Just 34 percent say they support Obama. About 6 percent are undecided, and the remaining 1 percent say they support "someone else." Romney enjoys his broadest support among the self-described white evangelical Christians who make up nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of the state's likely voters. Among Tennesseans in this group, Romney leads Obama...

For the third consecutive year, Area Development magazine’s editors have conducted a survey of a select group of highly respected location consultants who work with a nationwide client base. We asked the consultants to name their top-5 state choices in 14 site selection categories. States were ranked in each of the 14 categories based on the number of times they were named as a "top-5" choice by the responding consultants. According to the results, the top-10 states for doing business are Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Indiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, in that order... The top-five states...

Even more encouraging than the new Gallup numbers, I think, and circumstantial evidence that maybe Major Garrett was right yesterday about Team O preparing to pull back from some swing states. The catch with Gallup's tracker is that it's the only national pollster showing anything close to a seven-point lead right now; doesn't mean they're wrong, but allegedly even GOP pollsters aren't picking up a lead like that in their internal numbers. To get a better sense of Romney's surge, says election guru Sean Trende, follow the (campaign) money: "Simply put, if Romney were up 7, he'd be advertising in...