Free Republic

Mendon, Missouri. Population 171. There’s really nothing here. The tiny town is located off Route 11, just south of Yellow Creek. You’re three hours west of Saint Louis, two hours east of Kansas City. It’s quiet. No attractions. No major landmarks. Nobody famous ever lived here unless you count Vern Kennedy, right-hander for the White Sox, circa 1934. If you’re looking for entertainment in Mendon, your main option is Busch Light. But you’ll have to drive all the way to Brunswick to find a liquor store. “We are just country folk,” said Mendon native Carol Ann Wamsley, “and that’s what...

So-called “deaths of despair” in rural areas — from drug overdoses and suicide — have become so common that they have even affected our national life expectancy figures. Life expectancy in the United States has fallen for three years in a row. That is a reversal not seen since 1918 (during a pandemic) or in any other wealthy nation in modern times, as Nobel-prize winning economist Angus Deaton has pointed out. What should be done? Small town woes in many areas can be traced to the erosion of manufacturing jobs. A typical example is Lordstown, Ohio (population 3,300) which revolved around a...

If a small town has a need for a fire department, why is it more often than not a volunteer fire department ?Should't the same taxes that paid fire departments operate from serve the smaller community ?

....... And yet I feel a fierce defensiveness for this place. Particularly since the 2016 election, I hear the national media — or even my friends back in Portland — dismiss my rural colleagues, family and neighbors as out of touch, hateful, fearful of immigrants, and doomed to a life of boredom and poverty. But they don’t know my friend Sarah Calhoun, who started a women’s clothing company and a music festival near White Sulphur Springs, Mont. They’ve never been to the country church in Underwood, a few miles east of Fergus Falls, whose congregants are starting conversations about race,...

Political bickering has long been a roadblock to getting big things done in the US but a grassroots movement getting few headlines could yet herald a new American age of change. A green giant in a loin cloth would seem an unlikely indicator for what some describe as a revolution under way in the heart of America. But the Jolly Green Giant statue on Highway 169 in rural Minnesota wears a 48-inch (1.2m) smile for a reason. Accompanied by the slogan Dream Big, he typifies a sense of hope and renewal in the nearby city of Blue Earth that is...

If you’ve ever lived in a small town or city, these new census figures will not surprise you:More Americans, especially retirees, are moving to small towns for the safer, cleaner, more affordable life. Even those younger Gen X types who put off families for the bright lights of the big city are moving out of there, usually to suburbs.One major reason for urban flight is the rising cost of housing, which if you’re paying rent, is like burning money. City populations are still growing slightly but much less than before and mainly because of immigrant arrivals. In the last...

One of the great debates in American politics and economics in 2018 is likely to be how to help the country's forgotten towns, the former coal-mining and manufacturing hubs with quaint Main Streets that haven't changed much since the 1950s and '60s. Many of these places turned out heavily to vote for Donald Trump. He talks often about wanting to help them, but it's unclear how he can. Traditional economics says people living in these struggling towns should just move. Many of the United States' urban centers (and surrounding suburbs) are booming. If jobs are plentiful in Denver (unemployment rate:...

The first time Donald J. Trump stepped onstage in Pennsylvania in April 2016 at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, it was clear something very different was going on in this state, with this candidate. It was not because the rally was massive, or because it was boisterous, or that it was poorly organized, though all those things were true. Having already attended 18 of his rallies throughout primary states across the country, I found, in fact, that it looked very familiar. It was different because it was in Pennsylvania. It was a campaign that was designed to fail from...

Why are small towns in conservative states being specifically targeted for refugee resettlement? Of course the Obama administration will never publicly admit that this is happening, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is going on. Just look at the uproar that refugee resettlement is now causing in small communities in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and Kansas. The Obama administration has deemed large cities such as Washington D.C. to be “too expensive” for the refugees, and so large numbers of them are being dispersed throughout smaller communities all over the nation. If you drop a few hundred...

Small town America is the soul of our country, despite the opinion of the Seattle Weekly’s Ellis Conklin and the lamestream media. Todd and I are on our way to congratulate the graduating class in Republic, Washington, this Saturday and I’m honored and touched by their ingenuity, tenacity, and invitation to speak to these young Americans about to begin their futures. Small town America is our heart; it may not be the Ivy Leagues or what Ellis and the media deem acceptable, but these students and this town represent what is good and right about America and the small towns...

Community gardens are gardens that more than one family plants, weeds and harvests together. They were called Victory or war gardens in the past because they were planted when the country was at war and helped provide AdChoices food for Americans. Rising grocery prices,recalls and health and environmental concerns have brought them back. Does a community garden fit rural and small towns? Like a gardeners glove!

This whole cap and trade thing reminds me of a discussion I took part in as part of our city’s Master Plan Rewrite Committee. As part of the Master Plan Rewrite we filled out an SGRAT survey (Smart Growth Readiness Assessment Tool, a product of Michigan State University). It allows you to evaluate your city by SMART growth standards. The intent of SMART growth is to stress the reuse of property and so inhibit urban sprawl. If I am not boring you yet, here are the ten tenets of SMART growth. 1. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices—(...

Scully wrote the speech [Palin's acceptance speech] largely before Palin was selected. Which makes sense. But the parts that seemed tailored specifically to her? Who wrote those? Specifically, the line about small towns, and how they grow great people? That line, as was revealed this week, was written by a very bigoted columnist named Westbrook Pegler. That line seems like a landmine of unintentional readings: it was written by a racist, about a man who became president when the old man before him died. Not really a single good interpretation there, right? Well either someone more wacky and right-wing than...

The Coming Re-Becoming Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don't mean that we are a better people than any other society -- these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts -- but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle "time out" from a frantic...

Barak Obama has now explained why small-town, penny-ante peckerwoods like moi utter vicious anti-trade and anti-immigrant rhetoric. He also explains why we like playing around with guns, bibles and other things Barack thinks are too dangerous to allow in public without arrogant, liberal supervision. He took a fund-raising junket to San Francisco and figured it would be safe to let the hemline of his Trotskyite slip show. While amongst the condescending, self-selected elite by the bay, he had the following to say about small town America. “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion...

Obama outburst in Pennsylvania Shame, shame, shame TRIBUNE-REVIEW By Salena Zito ABC News is reporting that Barack Obama launched into a fiery offensive tonight in a speech before the United Steelworkers Union in Steelton, Pa. Obama, in response to Sen. Hillary Clinton criticisms of his 'bitter' remarks, said "Shame on her, shame on her, she knows better."

Senator Barack Obama fought back Saturday against accusations from his rivals that he had displayed a profound misunderstanding of small-town values, in a flare-up that left him on the defensive before a series of primaries that could test his ability to win over white voters in economically distressed communities. For a second day, Mr. Obama sought to explain his remarks at a recent San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations. Acknowledging Saturday that “I didn’t...

In San Francisco last week, Senator Barack Obama, Democrat candidate for President, made a certain statement about people who live in small towns in Pennsylvania. He is about to undergo a primary in that state against Senator Hillary Clinton, the other remaining Democrat candidate for President. Why should a comment made by a candidate in San Francisco about people who live in Pennsylvania be of the slightest interest to the people who live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina? Simple. Almost half of the people here, in the 11th Congressional District of North Carolina, also live in...

I know that perhaps a vanity is frowned upon so I'll keep it as short as possible. Tonight Vancleave High School in MS hosts its first play off game ever. My office is next to the high school so I went outside to participate in the pep rally.

RAMPANT lovers have helped High Wycombe's Asda supermarket come fourth best in condom sales out of 280 stores nationwide. The branch, in Holmers Farm Way, shifts around 700 packets of six every week, which is the equivalent of more than 250,000 single condoms every year. An Asda spokesman said: "When it comes to condom capitals, High Wycombe is in the top five best selling stores in the whole of the UK." The food retailer's sales analysis computer Retail Link, which is capable of tracking sales of individual items by store every 15 minutes, revealed its Bridge of Dee store, in...