Free Republic

The left has long sought to nationalize government, which means a subordination of the states. In the meantime, liberals aren't blind to the advantages red states enjoy over blue states, in terms of siphoning off blue states' productive citizens and enterprises. Liberals see where many businesses choose to relocate. They appreciate that red states are often more affordable to Americans. Critical to the nation's ongoing experiments in democracy is the imperative to roll back intrusive -- and often coercive -- national government. Washington is an informal ally of blue states, like Maryland, at the expense of red states, via legislation,...

FORT EDWARD, New York — When General Electric moves jobs from its capacitor plant in this Hudson River town next year, worker Mark Rock figures he might have to leave, too. About 200 jobs will head south as soon as September when GE sends local operations to Florida to cut costs. While New York has had successes in the constant geographical tug of war for jobs, manufacturing jobs like these have been dwindling for decades. People in this area south of the Adirondack Mountains are the latest to wonder what comes next.

The bottom line of the “Duck Dynasty” controversy may be that marketers shouldn’t underestimate the power of “red state” shoppers. For those readers living in a duck blind during the past week, the whole mess started when the patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” Phil Robertson, made anti-gay comments in a GQ interview. His message: “Homosexual offenders” (and other miscreants such as male prostitutes and the greedy) won’t “inherit the kingdom of God.” After cable network A&E suspended Robertson for his remarks, a curious thing happened. Unlike other celebrity scandals involving offensive remarks (think of Paula Deen’s admission of using racist epithets),...

SEATTLE (AP) — Boeing's history in the Pacific Northwest dates back more than a century, when William Boeing purchased a Seattle shipyard that would become his first airplane factory. In recent years, however, those ties have been fraying, first with the company shifting its headquarters to Chicago, then with the development of a new production line in South Carolina. Now, the relationship between Boeing and Washington state is near the point of unraveling after a fiery debate among machinists this week led the workers to reject a long-term contract. On Thursday, Boeing made good on its threats and said it...

This will probably come as no surprise to those who watched the federal government stepping in to help unions strongarm manufacturers in the last few years, but Boeing is back in the news with more labor issues. The aerospace giant is getting ready to unveil their newest jet – the 777X – which had been widely expected to be built in the Seattle area as so many of their other lines have been. But at the last minute, the unions decided the deal wasn’t fat enough for their tastes. Boeing workers’ rejection of a new labour deal has sent the...

Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower income levels. “Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks. Actually, it's not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges...

A Rochester-based company that makes firearms, ammunition and tactical equipment is relocating its headquarters in Dorchester County, South Carolina officials announced Monday. The state Department of Commerce said that the $2.7 million investment by American Tactical Imports, currently located on Airpark Drive, would mean more than 100 new jobs for the Summerville area.

".........Why? “Honestly, because everybody in this county hates Barack Obama. That is the biggest reason,” Mitchell said. Animosity toward President Obama runs high here. He lost Wyoming County by nearly 56 percentage points last year, despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1. But as Mitchell and her friends talked more about it, their conversation turned to fears and anxieties that had little to do with party or politics. They discussed the well-paying jobs that had vanished with the coal industry; the crime and drugs that followed; the changing culture that mocks what they hold sacred....

Patrick J. Buchanan has raised the question asked here fifteen months ago: Is there a peaceful civil secession of Red States underway? Originally raised here in July 2012, we asked if there wasn’t a real possibility of what we described as a “constructive secession” which would accomplish what The Confederacy could not achieve. As we described the situation those states that have grown tired of the overbearing Barack Obama Administration and see it as no longer intolerable could engage in conduct that would amount to de facto if not a de jure secession from the United States. Red Staters have...

In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated, so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR. Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia. Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. Yet a Europe that plunged straight...

***SNIP*** Republican states have purposely and vindictively put up roadblocks to prevent its citizens from easy access to health care information as the Affordable Care Act was rolled out. They've either ignored the roll-out or encouraged people not to sign up. Missouri's lieutenant governor Peter Kinder, urged "active resistance" to the new law. This is why we have low information voters and why, according to two polls, 7% or 8% favor the Affordable Care Act over Obamacare, even though they are one and the same. ***SNIP*** Rachel Grob, Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied how different states are...

On the day consumers start perusing newly launched federal online health exchanges, Republican governors who oppose President Barack Obama’s insurance overhaul are mostly sitting on their hands. But the law is going into effect without them. Thirty-six states, most of them Republican-controlled, opted to let the federal government run exchanges where consumers can shop for individual policies from private insurance firms. Consumers are getting their first opportunity on Tuesday to buy policies on the exchanges, even as the law remains at the core of congressional budget gridlock that has caused a partial federal government shutdown. The exchanges’ funding isn't affected...

Views on abortion are becoming more entrenched in certain regions of the country, with New England residents more convinced of the pro-choice position and the Midwest and parts of the South becoming more pro-life, according to a new Pew Forum study. While abortion views have remained relatively steady when looking at the nation as a whole, the Pew study shows greater variation in a few regions of the country. The study compares views on abortion in 1995 and 1996 to views on abortion in 2012 and 2013 for eight regional areas – New England, Pacific Coast, Mid-Atlantic, Mountain West, Great...

<p>Where you live in the U.S. could affect your lifespan, according to a new report from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.</p>

The chairman of the powerful House budget-writing committee has become a Republican, a move that continues to widen the gap between the two parties in the Louisiana Legislature.

According to today’s release by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 31 of the 50 states have experienced significant job growth over the last 12 months. It might not come as a huge surprise, but states with GOP governors (8 of the top 10) and right-to-work states (7 of the top 10, in bold) dominate the top of the list in terms of job growth over the last 12 months...

AUSTIN, Texas — Cellphone pioneer Motorola announced Wednesday that it’s opening a Texas manufacturing facility that will create 2,000 jobs and produce its new flagship device, Moto X, the first smartphone ever assembled in the U.S. The company has already begun hiring for the Fort Worth plant. The site was most recently unoccupied but was once used by fellow phone manufacturer Nokia, meaning it was designed to produce mobile devices, said Will Moss, a spokesman for Motorola Mobility, which is owned by Google. “It was a great facility in an ideal location,” said Moss, who said it will be an...

A new report, called "Rich States, Poor States," issued by the American Legislative Exchange Council on state economies, shows states mostly governed by Republicans outperform states mostly governed by Democrats. Those ranked in the top ten in economic performance from 2001 to 2011 were, in order from first place to tenth place: Texas, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, Idaho, Arizona, Alaska and Montana. Those in the bottom ten, in order from 40th to 50th place are: Mississippi, Wisconsin, Missouri, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan. The only states in the top 10 that mostly vote...

A side-by-side comparison of red/blue vote by counties and percentage of veterans per county yields an interesting visual.

Email 0Share 0Tweet0Share0Print...... Eight of 15 cities with the fastest growth in the United States are in Texas, according to the latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Estimates released Thursday also show that half of those cities in the nation with the largest total population increases are in Texas. And Houston added more than 34,500 people to reach 2.2 million inhabitants — only second to New York City in total population gains in the year that ended last July. The Central Texas town of San Marcos is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., increasing by 4.9 percent. It...