Free Republic

Despite the controversy over monuments and the deadly Alt-Left vs Alt-Right rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, there has been another surge in the sale of Confederate flags, CBS News reported. Belinda Kennedy, owner of the Alabama Flag & Banner shop in Huntsville, Alabama, said sales have been brisk. She said sales spiked even more “dramatically within in the last 24 hours,” since an interview about the shop was published at AL.com. “What's really pushing sales [now] is removal of the monuments,” said Kennedy, who opened her shop in 1985. “The general feeling I get from customers that call and email is...

The New York Times represents a special case in the spiraling loss of credibility among the American mainstream media. For generations now, it has been the dominant newspaper in America; the most well-known and the most influential. It’s motto is “All the news that’s fit to print.” But it also has been a leader in the leftward lurch in journalism, which has now turned into a full-throttle route of any remnants of fair and objective reporting. The Times has made itself into a thought-leader of the American progressive movement and an overt propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. It drips...

And now we face the final test: the debt ceiling. Will we or won’t we stop the spending madness? Will the Republicans enact the cuts they’ve promised, or will they now be the ones to kick the can, piling evermore trillions of dollars of debt on their own grandchildren? By every indication that’s precisely what they plan to do. The signal has come from President Trump, from Speaker Ryan, and from Majority Leader McConnell. The debt ceiling will be raised and no fiscal sanity will be restored. There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Put them together. They are...

Millennials in the U.S. were so slow to become homeowners that it was beginning to look like they'd rent forever. Now they're a force in the market for new high-end houses. Toll Brothers Inc., the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said Tuesday that 23 percent of its sales this year were to customers with at least one buyer age 35 or younger. That was a surprise, given that the company's average contract price in the three months through July was $837,300. Buyers in their 20s and 30s have been slow to purchase for good reason. They're marrying and having children later...

Competition is heating up among U.S. grocery chains, but Americans are increasingly buying their food at Walmart. The retailer on Thursday said food sales had grown to their highest level in five years, as Walmart expands its grocery business both in stores and online by adding more organic produce. The company is also testing grocery delivery in New York, and has taken aggressive steps to compete with Amazon.com. “We’ve seen strong results from the rollout of online grocery, which is now in more than 900 U.S. locations,” Doug McMillon, president and chief executive of Walmart, said in a Thursday call...

Older Americans own half of the houses in the market. Many are simply refusing to sell and others have adult “kids” moving back in since they can’t afford a place to rent or buy. It is a Catch 22 and many people are looking at countries like Italy where the number of adults that live at home is enormous. Multi-generational families just don’t coincide with the “rugged American” worldview where you go out on your own and you make it with your own two hands. Of course, many house humpers had mom and dad chip in but that doesn’t make...

August 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Historian Arnold Toynbee once famously said that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Using this as a springboard, commentator Mark Steyn shows in a new video how Western Europe is already in the death throes of “demographic suicide” because couples are no longer having enough children. He then shows how a thriving Muslim population in Western Europe is well on its way to filling all the empty space. Steyn explained how given the divergent birth rate between Muslims and post-Christian secularists, it will take only two generations for the current Muslim population (sitting at...

Adults in the United States are dying from colon and rectal cancers at an increasing rate about age 50, when they should just be beginning screenings, according to a new study from the American Cancer Society. Since routine screening is generally not recommended for most adults under 50, the cancers found in younger adults are often in advanced stages and more deadly, said Dr. James Church, a colorectal surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Church, who was not involved in the new study, said he has seen this trend in death rates up close. Last year, on separate occasions,...

Jessica Smith raised an arm and pointed across the lobby of the university student center like an ornithologist who had just spied a rare breed in the underbrush. “There’s one,” she said. It was, in fact, an unusual bird that Smith had spotted, especially on this campus: masculum collegium discipulus. A male college student.

In 2011, for the first time in more than two decades, suicide began killing more teenagers than homicide. And according to research presented in a recent article in The Atlantic, excerpted from a book written by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, smartphones and social media may deserve a lot of the blame. "As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another," Twenge wrote, "and more likely to kill themselves." Over the past decade, psychologists have come to see a picture in which young, developing brains are pitted against...

For a variety of personal and professional reasons, I did an epic amount of travel in the last year, across thousands of miles and several states, and there was one cultural constant: Everywhere I went were lots of people with tattoos.And it’s not just that people have tattoos, it’s the tattoos they have. At one point, I found myself in Breckenridge, gawking at the majestic Rocky Mountain scenery—imagine the “Sound of Music,” only swap Julie Andrews singing with a middle-aged dad yelling at the kids to stop complaining about the long drive. The view of the mountain valley was...

There’s hot, and then there’s Death Valley hot. While Southern California and much of the West cooked in July under a pair of heat waves that killed livestock, knocked out power and encouraged wildfires, nowhere was the heat more brutally enduring than in Death Valley. According to the National Weather Service, Death Valley National Park broke its 100-year-old record for the hottest month ever in July, when the average temperature was 107.4 degrees, eclipsing the 1917 record of 107.2 degrees. Though 107 degrees doesn’t sound that bad, keep in mind the average includes nighttime temperatures. The average overnight temperature in...

Millennials are losing their faith and replacing it with pizza, pushups and profound digital connections. Just 27 to 28 percent of people in their 20s and early 30s attend religious services regularly, according to the latest figures from the Pew Research Center. Compare that to the 38 percent of baby boomers who log time in houses of worship, and 51 percent of folks in the silent and greatest generations who still show up for services. Instead, millennials are getting their spiritual fix from secular pursuits such as fitness classes and Facebook groups — community-driven activities that create a sense of...

While it is extremely difficult to measure the extent to which religion impacts Americans, one polling organization has attempted to do so using four criteria. The poll was designed to acquire a sense of how the 50 states compare with each other on the matter of which has the most religious population. The four criteria used were the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer, and absolute certainty of belief in God (“How Religious...?,” 2009). As one might expect, more Americans in the “Bible Belt” states indicate that religion is very important...

Winter is coming for the North. Last year, three states in the Northeast — New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — landed in the top five places people were moving out of fastest, according to 2017 data from United Van Lines. (The other two states on the list were Illinois and Kansas.) And data from Pew Charitable Trusts found that while people are all about moving to the South (their population grew by nearly 1.4 million people from 2014 to 2015) and the West (866,000 more people), the population growth in the Northeast is “sluggish.”

The number of federally registered political lobbyists has fallen by 14 percent thus far in 2017 from the 2016 total. However, based on data provided by the non-partisan OpenSecrets.org, spending by lobbyists is on track to rise by about 3 percent in 2017. Mark Twain famously wrote: “We have the best government that money can buy.” That seemed to be the case in the Obama presidency, as registered lobbyists set an all-time spending record for any president of $26.7 billion, averaging over $3.3 billion a year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has led the lobbying charge for globalization, was...

Reasons for the ‘shocking’ drop are unclear, say researchers, and represent a huge and neglected area of public health __ Nicola Davis @NicolaKSDavis Tuesday 25 July 2017 13.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 25 July 2017 20.10 EDT Sperm counts among men have more than halved in the last 40 years, research suggests, although the drivers behind the decline remain unclear. The latest findings reveal that between 1973 and 2011, the concentration of sperm in the ejaculate of men in western countries has fallen by an average of 1.4% a year, leading to an overall drop of just over 52%....

Winter is coming for the North. Last year, three states in the Northeast — New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — landed in the top five places people were moving out of fastest, according to 2017 data from United Van Lines. (The other two states on the list were Illinois and Kansas.) And data from Pew Charitable Trusts found that while people are all about moving to the South (their population grew by nearly 1.4 million people from 2014 to 2015) and the West (866,000 more people,) the population growth in the Northeast is “sluggish.” The Northeastern exodus is particularly...

Some people say capitalism and alligators have much in common — both eat their young. While the rich get richer (and will get richer still if the #FakePresident has his way), ordinary schlubs who are working one, two, or sometimes three jobs to make ends meet are finding they can no longer afford to buy average new cars. That’s according to a new study by Bankrate.com. It finds that people living in 24 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US cannot afford the average price of new cars, which was $33,000 in May according to Kelly Blue Book....

Concealed handgun permits in the United States soared by 1.83 million since last July, setting a record for the fourth consecutive year, according to an analysis released Thursday. That brings the total number of concealed handgun permit holders in the country to 16.3 million, with some of the biggest increases occurring among women and African-Americans, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said.