Free Republic

Among the top 10 cable networks in terms of prime-time viewers, only Fox News Channel, HGTV and Discovery Channel are on track to finish 2015 on an upswing. Among the top channels taking big hits this year are TNT, off 16% in viewers, and History, which is experiencing a decline of 20%. Even AMC, home of "The Walking Dead" and the last season of "Mad Men," is down 2%. Not every news channel got a boost from politics. Al Jazeera America finished 99th in prime-time rankings with an average of just 28,000 viewers.

The conversation surprised me. I was recently meeting with about a dozen members of a church that was on the precipice of closing. During their perceived "good old days," the average worship attendance was in the 40s and 50s. Now the church attendance was in the teens. The church was on metaphorical life support. I shared with them some items of urgency that might give them some glimmer of hope. So I was surprised when one of the members asked me a question that seemed to come from nowhere: "Will we have to sing from screens instead of hymnals?" she...

Employment rates among prime-age workers, especially men, have declined sharply over the last few decades. The Great Recession made matters worse. Recent declines in the unemployment rate have enticed some back into the active labor force but the long-term picture is still discouraging. When we compare the U.S. to other advanced countries, working-age adults are simply not working as much as adults in most European nations. What's going on here? As my colleague Gary Burtless notes, three developments have probably played a role. First, real wages have fallen by 28 percent for high-school educated men since 1980, making work much...

Obesity is still rising among American adults, despite more than a decade of public-awareness campaigns and other efforts to get people to watch their weight, and women have now overtaken men in the obese category, new government research shows. For the past several years, experts thought the nation's alarming, decades-long rise in obesity had leveled off. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday that the obesity rate has climbed to nearly 38 percent of adults, up from 32 percent about a decade earlier.

Christianity is under attack from a thousand different directions all at once, and yet many believers have turned their guns on one another. This war among Christians seems to intensify with each passing year, and believers are often fighting for some of the stupidest reasons you can possibly imagine. Meanwhile, people are leaving our churches in droves and church attendance is way down. This is especially true of younger Americans. According to an incredible new report that was just released by the Pew Research Center, only 27 percent of all Millennials (U.S. adults born since 1990) attend religious services on...

A large segment of white middle-aged Americans has suffered a startling rise in its death rate since 1999, reversing decades of progress, according to a new review of statistics published Monday. The mortality rate for white men and women between the ages of 45 and 54 with less than a college education increased by half a percent per year between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol, and suicide, according to the study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.... The rising death rate was accompanied by a parallel increase...

RUSH: ESPN is in trouble economically, financially. ESPN just announced that they're gonna have to cut a minimum of 350 jobs. And the reason why is subscribers are abandoning cable. Many people do not understand how all of this works, the cable bundle. I mean, you understand that you have to pay a minimum amount per month to get a bunch of channels, the vast majority of which you never watch, but the channels you want are in that bundle, and you have to pay for the bundle. So let's say you want your local stations, you want ESPN, maybe...

Since the media has the attention span of Joe Biden, it doesn’t matter if the trend makes sense or even exists outside a few malcontent exhibitionists Paraphrasing William F. Buckley, I’d rather take lifestyle direction from 200 randomly selected people in the phone book than follow the advice found in the 200 most prominent media outlets. Reporters are fad–conscious professionals at the expense of common sense. If they can identify a trend first, they become media experts and their journalistic prestige — if there is such a thing today — increases among their peers. Since the media has the attention...

When the 2014 stats came out last week, it was no surprise that The Episcopal Church had again lost membership across the board. However, the newest released figures show that there is a dip in most church growth indicators -- total membership, ASA, congregations, baptisms, communicants, faith formation pupils, confirmations, and receptions from other Christian denominations. There is a slight uptick in marriages and an increase in funerals. For the first time in 75 years, The Episcopal Church's total membership dipped below the two million member mark. TEC's just-released official 2014 stats show worldwide church membership standing at 1,956,042. The...

The so-called “progressives” love to talk about how their policies will create a worker’s paradise, but then why is it that day after day, month after month, year after year, people are fleeing liberal blue states for conservative red states? The new Census data on where we live and where we moved to in 2014 shows that the top seven states with the biggest percentage increase in in-migration from other states are in order: North Dakota, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and Texas. All of these states are red, except Colorado, which is purple. Meanwhile the leading exodus states...

Before World War II, red-brick textile mills that processed cotton and wove it into cloth were all over the southern United States, dotting the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama. But in the last 50 years, automation, free trade agreements and competition from countries like China whittled down the historic industry until it was almost gone. Now some textile jobs are coming back, but on much different terms. As the New York Times reported Sunday, some Chinese manufacturers are setting up shop in the United States, after finding it cheaper to produce their goods in the American South than in China.

In case anyone entertained doubts, Hillary Rodham Clinton's Monday speech on the economy offered proof positive that the center of the Democratic Party has moved left. Her address contained all the elements of the party's analysis of 21st-century American capitalism: • Economic rewards go only to the rich ("successful CEOs and money managers," as she put it). • Corporations reward shareholders and top executives at the expense of investment and employees. • The decimation of unions has left workers powerless to demand their share of the revenue they produce. • Sluggishness of investment, worker income and consumption has made the...

Kansas City, Kansas mayor Mark Hollan bragged during a speech this week at the annual La Raza Convention that his city is no longer a majority white town. Hooray! The mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, in an address to the radical socialist organization National Council of La Raza, bragged that his city is no longer majority white and the city’s schools now have students who speak 62 different languages. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Kansas City, Kansas, was 52 percent white. But in a speech before the La Raza National Affiliates Luncheon earlier this week in Kansas City, Mayor...

As a lifelong reader of newspapers, and a devoted follower of the journalism profession, although not a part of it, I am sad to write this.  It's like a eulogy for a body long dead but failed to be given a proper burial.  Or like the M. Night Shyamalan movie "The Sixth Sense," where Bruce Willis' character walks the earth as a dead man until a boy who can see dead people leads him to realize his own fate and depart. Large, centralized news gathering operations are dead.  The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today--all the old-line...

As regular readers are no doubt aware, shifting demographics are affecting everything from the labor market, to homeownership, to race relations in America. In “The ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Recovery” for instance, we documented the stunning fact that in May, the number of foreign born workers lept 279K which means that, assuming the Household and Establishment surveys were congruent, there were just 1K native-born workers added in May of the total 280K jobs added. Alternatively, assuming the series, which is not seasonally adjusted, was indicative of seasonally adjusted data, then the 272K increase in total Household Survey civilian employment in May would...

In a nation that based its Declaration of Independence on the principle that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” a record 58 percent now say they would vote to elect “a generally well-qualified” atheist as president if their political party nominated such a person. In a poll conducted June 2-7, Gallup asked 771 adults living in the United States this question: “Between now and the 2016 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates—their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president...

Complete Headline: Hillary Clinton is going to lose: She doesn’t even see the frustrated progressive wave that will nominate Bernie Sanders Hillary Clinton went to New York’s Roosevelt Island earlier this month to relaunch her campaign for president. Her first kickoff fell flat, perhaps because she herself didn’t attend, opting instead to send a video greeting card in which people she still insists on calling ‘everyday Americans’ shared their life plans. (To go to school! Plant a garden! Get married!) She came on at the end to say she had plans of her own that include being president, and that...

Last year’s most popular baby names were Benjamin and Emma, but this year the top boy and girl names could actually be the same. 2015 is looking like the year of the gender-neutral baby names, according to a midyear report by BabyCenter.com. Currently, names like Amari, Karter, Phoenix, Quinn and Reese have been making the largest leaps in popularity. “As usual, baby names are reflecting a larger cultural shift,” says BabyCenter’s Global Editor in Chief Linda Murray. “Millennials are an open-minded and accepting group, and they don’t want their children to feel pressured to conform to stereotypes that might be...

The mainstream media (MSM) are hailing the release of recent polls purporting to show “progressive” perspectives on several social issues -- i.e., same-sex marriage, homosexuality, legalization of marijuana, even abortion -- either equaling or, in some cases outstripping, more “traditional” viewpoints. A Gallup poll released on May 22nd, for example, was headlined “On Social Ideology, the Left Catches Up to the Right.”  Never mind that other Gallup polls, such as one released on June 2nd, or one put out on June 4th, provide cautionary findings. The MSM aren’t interested unless “the news” can be spun leftward. This essay explores two...

What do we call me? I’m a 26-year-old writer who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. I’m a straight white man with a single-speed bike and a mustache. I studied liberal arts in college, and I have ideas about stuff, you guys. Millennial? Hipster? Yuppie? All of these, or none? We don’t have a term that quite encapsulates this corner of the despicable millenn-intelligensia. And like any other privileged member of a so-called “creative class,” being called a hipster offends me for its inaccuracy. I demand to be snarked in precise terms. Let's consider something new: Yuccies. Young Urban...