Free Republic

As pro-life supporters from around the nation gather in Washington, D.C. today to mark the 42nd memorial of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion in the U.S., Operation Rescue announces that two more abortion facilities have permanently closed. “Today, as pro-lifers, we should be encouraged that our efforts have not been in vain. Abortion clinics are closing in record numbers due to their tireless work of men, women, and young people all across this nation,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “America is beginning to reject abortion, and that is evidenced in closed clinics and...

The U.S. birth rate remained at an all-time low in 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

See list. Sooooo true!

There’s a widening gap between the baby-having of married women, who tend to be more educated and more affluent, and their less-educated, less-financially-secure, unmarried peers. A growing body of research, including work by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, raises the possibility that because people like to feel financially secure before taking the marriage plunge, the rise of income inequality has divided Americans into those who marry and those who don’t. Now this could be playing out with childbearing, too. America’s recessionary “baby bust” has clearly leveled off now, but we’ve yet to see the birth recovery one would expect...

The exodus of Jewish Americans from the Democratic Party continued in 2014, with only 61 percent of Jews identifying with the party last year, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Gallup. Sixty-one percent may seem high, compared to 31 percent of the general public who identify as Democrats, but that’s a 3 percent dip from 2013, and a huge drop from 2008, when 71 percent of Jews said they were Democrats. The Democrats’ loss is the GOP’s gain. In 2014, 29 percent of Jews said they were Republicans, up 1 percent from 2013 and a 7 percent rise...

Starting in the mid-1990s, "the mall genie was out of the bottle," says one mall analyst, "and it was never going to come back." While about 80% of the country’s 1,200 malls are considered healthy (vacancy rates of 10% or less), that compares with 94% in 2006; and more than 30 million square feet of malls are more than 40% empty, a threshold that signals the beginning of what one one analyst called "the death spiral." As The NY Times reports, like beached whales, dead malls draw fascination as well as dismay, "nobody ever thinks a mall is going to...

Without Iron Man, Batman or James Bond to bolster ticket sales, the overall box office plunged 5.2% in 2014, topping out at $10.3 billion domestically. Audiences cooled to Hollywood offerings, voting with their feet as attendance dropped by an estimated 6% to 1.26 billion, the lowest figure in nearly two decades. “This was the most flabbergasting year ever,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with Rentrak. “The good news is that the movie business had a great year in 2013. A record breaker. The bad news was that in 2014, it was measured against that success.” Although there were some...

Apparently smear ads during campaigns can sometimes tell the truth. Compare Republican Joe Lhota’s ad from the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign to the big, fat Drudge header captured below. The article linked reads in part: New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said Monday that tensions in the city are echoing those in the 1970s — a fear he expressed only days prior to the ambush killings of two police officers.“Who would’ve ever thought déjà vu all over again, that we would be back where we were 40-some-odd years ago,” Bratton said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”...

For the last nine years, the Military Times newspaper has surveyed an average of 2,300 active-duty service members. Their latest poll has just been released and concludes that “Obama’s popularity — never high to begin with — has crumbled, falling from 35 percent in 2009 to just 15 percent this year, while his disapproval ratings have increased to 55 percent from 40 percent over that time.” Much of the opposition to Obama has come from military members who believe he has been an inconsistent and flawed leader in foreign policy — for example, his 2011 removal of all troops in...

There could be an unlikely contributor to the decline of marriage in this country. And it's free pornography on the Internet. A team of researchers, who published their findings in The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany, determined that the rise of free Internet pornography is not only correlated with a pronounced decline in percentage of young adult males who are married, but might actually be contributing to the trend. "The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large," the study notes. The researchers used data from the...

In a new Washington Post poll released today, American Latinos have a more favorable view of the GOP, besting the Democratic Party among the nations fastest growing demographic group. In a survey conducted between December 11-14, 52 percent of Hispanic Americans view the Republican Party favorably, while 37 percent have an unfavorable view of the Party of Lincoln. In contrast, 40 percent of Latinos have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, while 48 percent rate them favorable. The poll suggests that large numbers of Americans, of all demographic groups, are moving toward the right, as the GOP holds a...

Six years after candidate Barack Obama vowed to make working for government “cool again,” federal hiring of young people is instead tailing off and many millennials are heading for the door. The share of the federal workforce under the age of 30 dropped to 7 percent this year, the lowest figure in nearly a decade, government figures show. With agencies starved for digital expertise and thousands of federal jobs coming open because of a wave of baby-boomer retirements, top government officials, including at the White House, are growing increasingly distressed about the dwindling role played by young workers. “Millennials are

They may not have a crystal ball, but the folks at Spotify do have the next best thing: heaps and heaps of hot, fresh listener data. ...Here’s who’s next up, according to Spotify. Pell Børns Raury The Bohicas Mikky Ekko Seinabo Sey Houndmouth Ezra Vine Kim Cesarion MisterWives James Bay Ryn Weaver George Ezra Young Fathers Catfish and the Bottlemen MLKMN Francesco Yates AURORA

In a dozen polls taken from 1982 to 2014, Gallup has asked Americans to choose among three views of evolution. One view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Another view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” The third option is that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” In that three-decade span, the young-Earth creationist option has always...

•The 2014 election and the long-term trends •Whither the Hispanic vote? •Catholics drop out of the Democratic coalition. Amid the tangled lines above,[below] we see the trends of America’s voters over the last 32 years. The chart measures something very specific: How much larger (or smaller) a Democratic margin of victory has grown in each of several different voting groups for U.S. House in the last 17 elections. For example: If Democrats won women by three points in an election Republicans won by six points, women were nine points more Democratic than the average voter in that election. And if...

NOAA says that the first 10 months of the calendar have been the warmest in more than 130 years. The weather outside has been frightful, but not because it’s cold. According to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this year is shaping up to be the hottest since scientists began keeping record more than 130 years ago. The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature from January to October was 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average of 57.4 degrees Fahrenheit. “Record warmth for the year-to-date was particularly notable across much of northern...

… The data coming out of Colorado is exhibit A on why voters should reject legalization efforts. Even the Democratic governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, said that legalizing marijuana in Colorado was “reckless.” As I have written at Heritage, pot-positive traffic fatalities have gone up 100 percent since voters legalized pot in Colorado. This is true despite the fact that overall traffic fatalities in Colorado have gone down since 2007. A report by a federal grant-funded agency in Colorado found seven specific negative side effects that pot legalization has caused in Colorado: the majority of DUI drug arrests involve marijuana;youth...

Nielsen Ratings are going to finally factor in Netflix traffic. Reed Hastings thinks it's too little, too late.

Orange County continued its trend toward an electorate that looks more like the rest of the Democratic state when it supported Proposition 47 – which reduces some non-violent felonies to misdemeanors – with 53 percent of the vote. Republicans had a good mid-term election nationwide and in Orange County wrested two state legislative seats from Democrats. But a Register analysis of Prop. 47 found a broader ongoing shift of county voters. The county GOP advantage over Democrats has steadily declined from 22 percentage points in 1990 to 9 points today, with little indication that the slide’s end is in sight....

Take a look at this informative website. It shows all the races and the most frequent search trends that voters are using to learn about candidates. We have seen the enemy...