Free Republic

Megan Barry has been elected mayor in Nashville’s runoff election. Barry called the night historic. “This one is going down in the history books,” she said. “This one is all about the fact that today, you went to the polls and you elected the first woman mayor.” As Barry’s victory speech went on, the crowd began chanting her name. “Tomorrow our real work begins,” she said.

A North Korean military official says a meeting of senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and "reviewed and approved the final attack operation." He gave no details on what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate punishment for South Korea's shelling of its territory on Thursday. Kim Yong Chol, director of the general reconnaissance bureau of the North Korean army, on Friday denied South Korean allegations that Pyongyang has been raising tensions on the peninsula. He denied the North fired anything across the Demilitarized Zone and says...

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday declared his frontline troops in a "quasi-state of war" and ordered them to prepare for battle a day after the most serious confrontation between the rivals in years. South Korea's military on Thursday fired dozens of artillery rounds across the border in response to what Seoul said were North Korean artillery strikes meant to back up a threat to attack loudspeakers broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda.

Protesters who claimed affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement stormed the stage during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Seattle on Saturday, taking over the microphone and forcing Sanders to leave without ever speaking. Moments after Sanders took the stage at Westlake Park, two women and one man climbed the stage and confronted the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding a chance to speak. After several moments of confusion and confrontation, an event organizer took the microphone and said the protesters would be allowed to speak before Sanders.

An exclusive Newsmax poll released Tuesday shows businessman Donald Trump sweeping to a commanding lead among Republican presidential candidates across the South, with retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson surging in popularity. Trump, who has led in the polls since his campaign began on June 16, finished with 28 points in the exclusive Newsmax-Southern Political Report Survey conducted by OpinionSavvy.

Pollster Matt Towery released the exclusive Newsmax-Southern Political Report Survey conducted by Opinion Savvy late Tuesday. The poll, which has a margin of error of just 1.3 percent, showed Trump dominating the rest of the GOP field in the South with 28 percent of the vote, compared to his national standing of 23 percent of the GOP vote, as reflected in the latest RealClearPolitics poll average.

This 1938 Jackson Daily News article tells the story of how the Southern governors fought to level the playing field with the North when it came to railroad freight rates. The railroad commissions kept the freight rates very slanted towards the North. Canada, yes- Canada, enjoyed lower freight rates on railroads than did the South; so slanted weighted against the South were the rates. Thus a builder in New Orleans could get steel shipped more cheaply from Pittsburgh than he could from Birmingham....

UNLIKE previous Alabama governors, Robert J. Bentley is not a fount of oratory. Nor is he a champion of “kinder and gentler.” His dyspeptic refusal to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion, in a state where more than one million of 4.8 million residents depend on the program, betokens a stunning indifference to the Hippocratic oath. (The governor is a dermatologist.) Yet Mr. Bentley recently took a page from the Obama playbook and used a surprise executive order to remove four Confederate flags from the Alabama Capitol grounds, not far from the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in...

Why did the southern states reward a racist murderer by making him the most significant southern political figure since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Are southern politicians so ignorant that they don’t understand that the people who commit such crimes do so to get attention? Why are they aiding and abetting his effort to steal the Confederate Flag and make it a symbol of racism? Why are they trying to cause whites to be mad at blacks and possibly hate them?

An eight-mile convoy of pickups, motorcycles and cars wound through a central Florida town on Sunday in a show of support for the Confederate flag, as a backlash against its banishment from public landmarks across the South picks up steam. Horns blared and hundreds of the rebel flags fluttered as more than 1,500 vehicles and some 4,500 people turned out for the "Florida Southern Pride Ride" in Ocala, according to police estimates. Vehicles from states across the South and as far away as California participated. "That flag has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people," said...

Thought I would post this because this is Lynyrd Skynyrd playing in front of a huge Confederate flag in 1977 which you can see more clearly around the 7 second mark, and to me, I take this flag as more of symbol of Southern pride than of racism. These guys absolutely worshipped black blues guitar players and musicians, were they racist? Hell no. This just goes to show that things change, which is exactly what Democrats keep telling us anytime the history of the Democratic party is brought up. "Oh, it's not the same party it was 100 years ago..things...

Everybody has an opinion about whether the Confederate flag is good or bad. They’re all dug in. Some are certain it’s racist and the very signature of evil. Others say it’s purely an expression of Southern pride and reverence for ancestors who fought and died a long time ago. Some of them have devoted careers and personal reputations to these propositions. A newspaper column is not going to change any minds. The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular...

Every year the Fourth of July is marked by ringing affirmations of American exceptionalism. We are a special nation, uniquely founded on high ideals like freedom and equality. In practice, however, much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/how-the-south-skews-america-119725.html#ixzz3evoOFM1c

With the revulsion against Confederate symbols that has resulted from shooter Dylann Roof's internet picture with the Confederate battle flag, Robert E. Lee has been put in the gunsights of social radicals. Lee was one of the two great generals of the Civil War and due in part to his good fortune in having an excellent biographer in Douglas Southall Freeman, is generally regarded as the greatest, although it should be noted that Grant won the war. Lee came from one of the oldest families in Virginia and arguably its most distinguished. His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, was a...

Calling for the removal of the Confederate Flag from South Carolina’s Capitol in the wake of a national tragedy, the assigned symbol of one man’s hate and paranoia, is ironically both defensible and predictably shortsighted. What rabid activists conveniently forget is that the Confederate Flag – which still wavers at the behest of state law - was never derived as a proud beacon of slavery; after all, even at the height of the Antebellum period less than 2% of all Americans owned slaves. Slavery was a means to an end, an economic mechanism utilized to compete with foreign competitors and...

Next year’s “SEC primary” is taking final shape. On Thursday, Arkansas lawmakers gave final approval to legislation moving that state’s presidential nomination contest to March 1 – to match the same date set by Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. From Andrew Demillo and the Associated Press: By a 67-16 vote, the House sent Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson legislation to move the primaries as part of an effort to create a regional presidential nominating contest that supporters have dubbed the “SEC primary.” Hutchinson plans to sign the legislation into law....

Jefferson, a member of the gentry of Old Virginia, was always regarded as one of the best and brightest of his generation, a gentleman of the finest intellect, taste, and manners. Although Jefferson loved and was loyal to the Union, he was a Virginian first and an American second; Virginia, Jefferson avowed, was his “country.” This order of allegiance – State over Union, or “Society” over “the State” – was firmly rooted in the Old South. Accordingly, in the emerging conflict between the North and the South, Jefferson sided with his own country. “It is true that we are completely...

The most luscious watermelon the Deep South has ever produced was once so coveted, 19th-century growers used poison or electrocuting wires to thwart potential thieves, or simply stood guard with guns in the thick of night. The legendary Bradford was delectable — but the melon didn't ship well, and it all but disappeared by the 1920s. Now, eight generations later, a great-great-great-grandson of its creator is bringing it back. The story of the Bradford begins on a prison ship during the American Revolutionary War. It was 1783, and the British had captured an American soldier named John Franklin Lawson and...

In recent presidential primary cycles, the influence of Southern states — with the exception of Florida, whose "Southern status" is perhaps more locational than anything else — has been minimal. While pundits like to say that GOP presidential nominees have relied heavily on a "red state" electorate based in the South, that same base has had little to say in determining the nominee. After all, neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney had much in common with the region. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp sensed that voter turnout intensity in the region could be stronger in November 2016 if...

One hundred-fifty years after Appomattox, many Southerners still won’t give up. One hundred fifty years ago, on April 9th, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House and the Union triumphed in the Civil War. Yet the passage of a century and a half has not dimmed the passion for the Confederacy among many Americans. Just three weeks ago, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) appeared before the Supreme Court arguing for the right to put a Confederate flag on vanity license plates in Texas. Just why would someone in 2015 want a Confederate flag on their license...