Free Republic

Norma Clark, 80, slipped on the ice out by the horse corral one afternoon and broke her hip in four places. Alone, it took her three hours to drag herself the 40 yards back to the house through snow and mud, after she had tied her legs together with rope to stabilize the injury. A dutiful farm wife, Ms. Clark somehow even got to her feet to latch the gate. And her first call when she got to the house was not to 911, but to a daughter 30 miles away. “I told her she’d better come feed the horses,”...

In June, 40-year-old Shane Dawley and his 36-year-old wife, Rhonda, uprooted themselves and their four boys from their suburban Atlanta rental home and bought an old five-acre farmhouse in Ogdensburg, Wisc. Their goal: Flee the rat race and adopt a more self-reliant lifestyle amid the troubled economy. While urban and suburban real estate is still generally under pressure, the rural market is holding up better in many areas, thanks in part to buyers such as the Dawleys. Sometimes dubbed "ruralpolitans," these city and town dwellers are looking at land as their new safe investment, one they hope could prove more...

They represent a migration that turns conventional wisdom on its head. Urban planners have until now proceeded on the assumption that retiring baby boomers will downsize to a high-rise and spend their days lapping lattes and taking the streetcar to the art museum. A lot of them will. But new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says baby boomers will head to the country in big numbers, in the Northwest changing the face of rural Oregon, Washington and Idaho. And it's not just because the 83 million boomer generation is the largest in U.S. history and all of their...

Most of the mobile homes in the U.S. are located in the south, where land is more plentiful, the weather is warmer, and rural poverty is higher. The region is home to over 56% of the mobile housing units in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey data released Monday. Specifically, two cities outside of Jacksonville, Fla., had the country's highest concentration of mobile homes, which are generally about 12-feet wide and include a kitchen, a living and dining area, and one or two smaller bedrooms. While mobile homes make up only 6.17% of the...

WALSENBURG, Colo.-Don't tell Dorothy J. Tenorio that Washington is nearing a deal to improve her health care. A former grocery clerk, Tenorio's been scraping by on disability benefits for more than a decade. The 60-year-old, and many of her neighbors, are skeptical health care overhauls pending in Congress will change much in Colorado's rural San Juan Valley. "I would tell Congress, they need to get out here to Huerfano County and see how bad it is, see what we're living with," said Tenorio, who suffered a neck injury in 1979 and hasn't worked since 1996. In rural America, many like...

The Crab Orchard Museum and Pioneer Park in the small town of Tazewell, Virginia, sponsors a July 4 festival every year, filling the Park area with displays, demonstrations, and re-enactors. For those who prefer the traditional ways, pictures have been posted.

Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda. “They don’t get rural America,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat who represents California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley. “They form their views of the world in large cities.” Cardoza’s critique was aimed at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, but it echoes complaints rural-district Democrats have about a number of Obama administration decisions. “I wouldn’t say it’s a complete strikeout, but they’ve just got a few more bases to it when it...

As goes Michigan's crumbling economy, so go some once-paved rural roads now being turned back into gravel. About a quarter of the state's county road agencies largely left out of the federal stimulus package, which focuses on highways and other major thoroughfares, say they can't afford some costly repaving projects and have crushed up deteriorating roads. Montcalm County alone estimates it saved nearly $900,000 by converting almost 10 miles of pothole-plagued pavement into gravel this spring. Reverting to gravel on low-traffic roads has been done to some degree for years and long-term savings and maintenance costs vary widely. But it...

THE RULES OF RURAL N.B. ARE AS FOLLOWS Listen up City Slickers & out of province Tourists 1. Pull your droopy pants up. You look like an idiot. 2. Turn your cap right, your head isn't crooked. 3. Let's get this straight; it's called a 'dirt road.' I drive a pickup truck because I want to. No matter how slow you drive, you're going to get dust on your Lexus. Drive it or get out of the way. 4. They are cattle. They're live steaks. That's why they smell funny to you. But they smell like money to us. Get...

Doug King publishes his keyboard music online and his wife, Marjorie, sells home-made pottery to customers in Iceland, China and New Zealand. But doing business from their rural Dane County house is virtually impossible without high-speed Internet. "We got to the point where we’re simply unable to do business" using the dial-up Internet their phone company provides, King said. The couple finally signed up for a wireless modem from Verizon, which in the last year has sought to build nine cell towers in rural Dane County to keep up with growing demand. But wireless service isn’t available everywhere, either, leaving...

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-Selects-Top-Rural-Health-Care-Advocate-to-Oversee-Key-HHS-Agency/ Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 3:45 pm President Obama Selects Top Rural Health Care Advocate to Oversee Key HHS Agency THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ________________________ For Immediate Release February 20, 2009 President Obama today announced the appointment of one of the nation’s top rural health care professionals as Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Dr. Mary Wakefield, Director of the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota, will oversee this critical agency, which helps to deliver health care to...

BRINKLEY, Ark. - Wayne Loewer's truck reveals a lot about his life. A 12-gauge shotgun for duck hunting rests on the floorboard. A blue thermal lunch bag containing elk meat is shoved under the seat, left in haste that morning by his teenage son rushing to catch the school bus. Binoculars in the console help Loewer scan his 2,900 acres of rice, soybeans and corn. The dashboard radio is set to classic rock, playing the same Lynyrd Skynyrd tunes from Loewer's high school days, when Brinkley was still a thriving small town with stores and a movie theater. His muddy...

On election eve I re-post my personal analysis and prediction for the 2008 election.

CARLISLE, Ky. -- Tabbatha Tubbs laughs at the thought of Washington politicians decreeing her hometown Appalachian. After all, there's not a mountain in sight from this gently rolling countryside best known for its thoroughbred horse farms. This is picturesque Bluegrass country: Black wooden fences surround grazing thoroughbreds. Golden stalks of tobacco hang from tiered barns. And herds of fat beef cattle mow their way across fields of green grass. It's hardly the heart of Appalachia, the rugged hills where President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty some 44 years ago. But like it or not, Tubbs and her neighbors...

While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of -- the demise of suburbia. In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday's new suburbs will become "the slums" of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author...

CHESTER, Ill. -- The rookie state senator from Chicago had driven 340 miles to explore southern Illinois, but Barb Brown could muster only 20 Democrats in this small town on the Mississippi River to have breakfast with him. She asked her niece and sister-in-law, who were helping in the kitchen, to come out to pad the audience. "We tried to convince people that they needed to come out and meet with this senator from Chicago, who on top of everything else was African American," Brown, a circuit court clerk, said of the 1997 gathering. "We had people looking at us...

TCHULA, Miss. — Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country. But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets. Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching...

Driver's would love these pumps if gas goes through the roof, except human ingenuity has trumped technology. Junek's has the pumps set for half the price you'll actually pay, so if the meter reads you've filled up $20-worth, you'll still have to pay $40. duh

Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants to build a big highway through the Lone Star State. No, make that a really big highway, as in a monstrously big highway. The exact route hasn't been determined. The mega-highway would run roughly from Laredo on the Rio Grande River through the Hill Country and the Piney Woods and then through Texarkana in that tiny portion of the state that borders Arkansas. Imagine for a moment if that thoroughfare would be pointed in the other direction - from the Valley, through the South Plains and then through the heart of the Panhandle, right past...

As Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., avoids any real campaigning in West Virginia, the former president of the United States is out there ginning up resentments. Bill Clinton has the right to say whatever he wants, of course. But he's a smart man. Brilliant, even. He can do the math. He must know that it's quite improbable that his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will be the Democratic presidential nominee. So what purpose does it serve for him to barnstorm a state like West Virginia and tell rural voters that Obama and his elitist political/media cabal allies are mocking Appalachia? He's...

Killing Local America by Donald Devine Issue 106 - April 23, 2008 So it is a conservative canard that government aid means government control? Liberal New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine is out to prove the conservatives right. He recently announced in his state budget message that he would drastically cut or eliminate state aid to its 323 towns with populations of fewer than 10,000 if they did not consolidate themselves into larger, more “efficient” units. There is not much greater control than elimination. Gov. Corzine won his reputation as a mergers and acquisitions chairman of the investment banking firm Goldman...

Before the Second World War, American Westerns presented what later came to be seen as a "naive" view of what might be called white borderer culture and conflicts. The "good" of the Scots-Irish based and European immigrant and settler population was not just an underlying assumption but a central and explicit thesis in the Westerns, most of which were made by “poverty row” studios and distributed to rural and small-town theaters—and seen by the grandchildren of the very people portrayed. By the 1950s, this was no longer the case. The movie Western had moved from “poverty row” (abetting the demise...

NARROWS, Va. (AP) -- Allen Neely eases his Chrysler Pacifica onto the bridge named in honor of Jarrett Lane, who grew up in this tiny town near the West Virginia state line. Mr. Lane, Mr. Neely says quietly, always wanted to build a bridge. Under the back seat are two pistols. Mr. Neely keeps them close these days. He and his construction crew were in Virginia Tech's Norris Hall a year ago this week when a mentally ill student went on a rampage, killing Jarrett Lane and 31 others. Since then, Mr. Neely feels safer if his guns are within...

The dirty little secret about Barack Obama's indictment of flyover country is that he said what liberals, including Hillary Clinton, believe. Sufficient proof of this can be found in the liberal outrage at Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate, where Obama was pressed both by the moderators and Clinton to explain Bitter-gate, Wright-gate, Ayers-gate and Flag pin-gate. Consider the uncannily similar reactions of columnists Tom Shales and Stephen Silver. Shales expressed indignation that ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos would dare ask Obama to justify his insulting remarks about small-town Americans and his relationships with certain anti-American people. Shale's...

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.” This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political...

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, accused of being elitist for remarks he made about small-town American voters, said on Tuesday the slap at his background is amusing and signals a nation in the midst of "political silly season." The Democratic senator, campaigning in Pennsylvania, dismissed the charges of being elitist and out of touch by fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton and by Republican John McCain as unfounded, given his background. "I am amused about this notion of elitist, given that when you're raised by a single mom, when you were on food stamps for a while when you were growing up, you...

The furor surrounding Barack Obama’s comments about “bitter” small-town voters and their faith clouds an emerging story line that stood to benefit the eventual Democratic nominee at Republican John McCain’s expense. That narrative was an ironic twist on longstanding partisan stereotypes: a November election that figured to be between a Democrat who is comfortable talking about faith and a Republican who is not. But the Illinois senator’s controversial remarks about “bitter” small-town Pennsylvanians who “cling” to religion and other cultural stances out of economic despair — comments immediately characterized by New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and McCain as condescending...

Typically when politicians want to bury bad news, they put it out late on a Friday -- which is precisely when this story broke. But for at least five reasons, this story may only gain steam in the days ahead. First, Obama and his campaign are attacking the problem head-on, seeking to "hang a lantern on their problem." The candidate sought to clarify his comments last night in Terre Haute, Indiana, and did more of the same today. But this morning in Muncie he also offered something approaching a mea culpa, which he pointedly did not last night. "I didn’t...

In their attempts to spin away from Barack Obama’s stunningly stupid remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser last weekend, Democrats and the Obama campaign have focused on only the least objectionable portion of the comment as a means to frame the national discussion. In a single sentence where Obama called small-town Midwestern voters overly religious bigots who cling to their guns out of frustration with George Bush, the Democrats have decided to build their defense on “bitter”. Here’s the original remark: And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who...

Barack Obama showed his deft political touch today, and demonstrated his keen insight into the lives of the little people in this country, with a speech that is sure to be worth at least thirty points in Pennsylvania in the upcoming primary: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Hillary Clinton slammed Barack Obama for comments he made at fundraiser last Sunday where he said middle class Americans are “bitter” about the state of the economy. “I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small town America,” Clinton said. “Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans, certainly not the Americans I know, not the Americans I grew up with, not the Americans I grew up with in Arkansas or the Americans I represent in New York.” Referring to...

INDIANAPOLIS - (WANE) - The Indiana Republican Party is calling on Indiana Democrats in Congress to denounce Barack Obama's criticism of Midwestern values at a San Francisco fundraiser last Sunday. Indiana Republican Party spokesman Jay Kenworthy issued the following statement on Barack Obama's comments posted below. "Indiana is full of decent people who support gun rights because they believe in the Constitution and place a premium on religion because they are people of faith -- not because we are bitter as Obama stated. Perhaps this is something Barack Obama doesn't understand, but surely our Congressional delegation does. "I can't imagine...

I'm about done with Obama over this mill-closures-drive-small-town-losers-to-guns-and-God business. If you're running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you've got to be very careful not to give the game away - especially when the game turns out to be the usual cliched elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband's at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says: Leave it to Obama to make John...

MUNCIE, Ind - After a full throated response to criticism that he is condescending, Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday conceded that that comments he made about bitter working class voters who "cling to guns or religion" were ill chosen. "I didn't say it as well as I should have," he said. As Obama tried to quell the furor, presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton hit him with one of her lengthiest and most pointed criticisms to date. "Senator Obama's remarks were elitist and out of touch," she said, campaigning about an hour away in Indianapolis. "They are not reflective of the...

PHILADELPHIA, April 11 -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain sharply criticized Sen. Barack Obama on Friday for saying at a private April 6 fundraiser in San Francisco that small-town voters in economically distressed areas of Pennsylvania are "bitter." "Well, that's not my experience," Clinton told a crowd of several hundred at Drexel University. "As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive. . . . They're working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them. They...

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - Sen. Barack Obama was criticized Friday by his two fellow presidential candidates for statements he made recently at a San Francisco fundraiser that could be viewed as derogatory toward rural America. "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said Sunday, according to the Huffington Post web site. "And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate...

Democrat Hillary Clinton criticized presidential rival Barack Obama on Friday for describing small-town Pennsylvania residents as bitter and said she would help economically struggling communities, not look down on them. Clinton, whose once big Pennsylvania lead over Obama in opinion polls has been shrinking ahead of their April 22 primary election showdown, said residents in small towns suffering from job losses across the state were resilient and optimistic. "Pennsylvania doesn't need a president who looks down on them," she said at a rally in Philadelphia. "They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works...

McCain camp hammers Obama on small town comments The McCain campaign, finding a gift in its lap, tees off on the eye-opening comments by Barack Obama from a fundraiser last week in San Francisco (of all places). Asked to respond, McCain adviser Steve Schmidt called it a "remarkable statement and extremely revealing." "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking," Schmidt said. "It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans." Said Obama, as recorded by a HuffPost writer in attendance: "You go into...

Hillary Clinton and John McCain both ripped into Barack Obama Friday for reportedly saying residents of small-town America “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” out of bitterness over lost jobs, a remark his opponents interpreted as arrogant...

The Huffington Post's Mayhill Fowler reports that, at that same San Francisco fundraiser where Obama revealed his previously unknown college sojourn to Pakistan, the junior senator from Illinois seemed to try to get inside the mind of small towners in Pennsylvania, with a dose of sociology and a dollop of dime-store psychology. "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration...

Mayhill Fowler has more from Obama's remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser Sunday, and they include an attempt to explain the resentment in small-town Pennsylvania that won't be appreciated by some of the people whose votes Obama's seeking: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising...

<p>You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.</p>

MERCED, Calif. (AP) - The end came in a blink outside the Merced County courthouse. Only six people showed up for the foreclosure auction, Janice Pimentel and her son Nick included. By chance, the Pimentels' dairy farm was the first property offered. The auctioneer, a young man in aviator sunglasses and blue jeans, read their address and paused for bids. When none came, the Joe T and Janice R Pimentel Dairy Farm, 21 years in the life of the family, officially became the property of its main creditor, a local lender. "Well," Janice Pimentel said, "that's that." The Pimentels' farm...

Corzine, who presided over mergers and acquisitions as chairman of Goldman Sachs, is telling hundreds of New Jersey's smallest towns and boroughs that they are too small to exist. Multiple layers of government are financially wasteful, he says, and the littlest towns and boroughs need to merge with their bigger neighbors to achieve economies of scale. Corzine's incentive -- more like a hammer -- is a threatened cutoff of state aid. Under the governor's proposed budget, the state's 323 towns with populations of fewer than 10,000 people would face drastic cuts if they do not consolidate. Towns with populations between...

CONNELL, Wash. (AP) - Bill Bennett has spent 45 years feeding and herding 2,500 cattle on his rolling eastern Washington ranch. He's also had to act as a doctor because he's unable to find a veterinarian who will come to his rural spread. He's not alone, as farmers and ranchers across the country complain of a shortage of large-animal veterinarians. A federal program created in 2003 to help the situation sits dormant while the U.S. Department of Agriculture writes rules. In addition to caring for livestock and pets, veterinarians monitor and inspect a large portion of the food supply and...

Record grain prices boost rural economy By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 7, 6:31 AM ET Record-high grain prices are fueling a rural economic boom in farm states such as Kansas. Farm equipment dealers have a backlog of several months in orders for new machinery. Cropland rents are rising, along with agricultural land prices. And with spring planting just weeks away, farmers are watching the volatile commodities markets as they decide which crops to grow in the coming season. While their city neighbors are struggling with foreclosures and fears of a recession, a lot more money is circulating...

URRY, Va. (AP) -- A husband went to the hospital. A wife passed away. Cancer struck. Grandchildren were born. The full-time job and the two young kids just got too overwhelming. And so it came to be that in Dendron, no one remembered to run for Town Council or mayor this year. "We forgot," said Ruth Sheffield, a current councilwoman in the tiny Surry County town of just under 300 souls. "We usually have a reminder and we didn't get that reminder. We should have known. It's our fault." There was a time when this wouldn't have happened in Dendron....

West Virginia boils at 'inbred' epithet; movie casting director fired By David M. Brown and Mike Wereschagin TRIBUNE-REVIEW Wednesday, February 27, 2008 The producers of the horror thriller "Shelter" have fired the Pittsburgh casting director who outraged West Virginians by publically seeking odd-looking -- even physically deformed -- people to portray residents of a West Virginia "holler." The reaction from West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin and others was swift after a story appeared in the Tribune-Review with a comment from Donna Belajac Casting of Pittsburgh indicating the script for a movie being shot here needs actors with an inbred look...

According to Franklin County Sheriff Ewell Hunt, this morning's lockdown at Ferrum College began with an incident around 7:30 a.m. Hunt said a white male carrying a handgun was seen by a housekeeper walking into Bassett Hall. The man told the housekeeper not to say anything. There was no shooting incident, Hunt said, but two people were detained and questioned as persons of interest. Officials are still looking for the suspect now, Hunt said, and they are searching dorms and buildings on campus.

Film's casting call wants that 'inbred' look By David M. Brown TRIBUNE-REVIEW Tuesday, February 26, 2008 A movie about to be filmed in Pittsburgh is casting Gothic characters -- including an albino-like girl and deformed people -- to depict West Virginia mountain people. "'Regular-looking" children need not apply.