Free Republic

A one-time motel in a small central Maine town could soon be offering an eye-opening way to start the day — topless coffee shop waitresses. The Vassalboro Planning Board on Tuesday will consider a business permit request for a topless coffee shop on busy Route 3. The one-story building has also been the home to several other business ventures, most recently Mac Daddy's Pub at the Fat Cat Grille, which closed three or four years ago. Neighbors have mixed opinions. Some say Vassalboro is a rural town and that a topless coffee shop would bring the wrong crowd. But others...

John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, on Friday began a three-day bus tour of small-town America to mark the Independence Day weekend, highlighting his economic differences with President George W. Bush while dodging questions about who will be his vice-presidential choice. Beginning in tiny Cloquet, Minnesota, Mr Kerry aimed to appeal to rural voters by criticising the administration's record on job creation, trade, budget cuts and healthcare. "They say this is the best we can do," Mr Kerry said. "Don't tell us losing 1,300 dairy farms in Minnesota is the best we can do. In 2004, we have to bring...

During the Great Migration, U.S. Highway 61 became the gateway of the Mississippi Delta, leading thousands of African-Americans north to industrial cities such as Chicago between the 1920s and 1960s to escape the poverty and racism of the Jim Crow South. Today it is down Highway 61, a mostly two-lane rural road surrounded by cotton fields, that big-city problems of gangs and drugs have made their way to the Delta, infusing America's most economically distressed towns with social problems that neither law enforcement nor the communities are equipped to handle.

The following is a speech delivered by my late grandfather (1888-1973). He was mustard-gassed in the Argonne on Nov. 11, 1918, returned to the U.S. to raise a family and have a distinguished career as an educator. He was a proud member of various veterans' groups, and it is to the American Legion in his homestate of West Virginia he spoke on Veterans Day 1956. I hope you will find it interesting to see what people were thinking back then, and to consider whether things have changed all that much.________________It is a real honor to be invited to this big,...

A judge in a small, poor Ohio county told prosecutors there this month that they could not seek the death penalty in the murder of a college student because the county's share of the defense costs would be too great. The decision, which experts say is the first of its kind, is a rare judicial acknowledgment of the powerful role money plays in death penalty cases. "The law acknowledges that capital cases are different and require enhanced due process, for obvious reasons," Judge Jeffrey L. Simmons of the Court of Common Pleas in Vinton County wrote. Noting that such cases...