Free Republic

Every year since 2002, Minnesota has been losing residents to other states. What’s worse: Young adults are leaving in the greatest numbers. Casey Sperzel is Minnesotan through and through. She grew up in Maple Grove, went to college at the University of Minnesota, and lived in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. But when the 27-year-old met with a job recruiter last year, she was set on the Pacific Northwest. “I don’t think I’ll be back,” said Sperzel, now with a Seattle ad agency. States are scrambling for young professionals like Sperzel to help offset the wave of baby boomer retirements....

"....This development, perhaps one of if not the biggest of the 2016 presidential campaign so far, comes as Walker has taken a commanding lead in polls in all three of the first GOP primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The reason why this development is so significant is that the two establishment-backed candidates, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, both have an in-depth understanding of the immigration issue and come down on the side that supports special interests’ desire for a massive increase in legal immigration that hurts American workers. Meanwhile, Sens. Ted Cruz...

Martin Mawyer, president of Christian Action Network and filmmaker, is releasing a new documentary Tuesday April 21st titled Europe’s Last Stand: America’s Final Warning. The film documents Islamists’ plans for domination over first Western Europe and then America.The idea for Mawyer’s documentary came from former FBI agents who caught his attention. Mawyer said they were discussing how they believe Western Europe could fall to radical Islam within the next 10 to 20 years.

Charles and David Koch are considering throwing their massive wealth and sophisticated organization into the Republican presidential primary for the first time, a potentially game-changing boost that could make even a second-tier candidate instantly viable. In another surprise, a top Koch aide revealed to POLITICO that Jeb Bush will be given a chance to audition for the brothers’ support, despite initial skepticism about him at the top of the Kochs’ growing political behemoth.

I don't get depressed too often, but I feel the blues coming on. Many moons ago, if memory serves, I tweeted my skepticism that Hillary Clinton would even get the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, much less win the general election. I'm afraid I probably was right about her not getting the nomination, but I'm concerned that her implosion appears to be happening too soon -- with way too much time for Democrats to regroup. I realize that all of this is speculative and I could have egg all over my face if Hillary were to smoothly sail to the nomination...

How bad are things getting for Hillary when the best her defender can do is float the notion that Bill was ripping off foreigners trying to influence his wife the Secretary of State? On today's Morning Joe, MSNBC contributor Dorian Warren, responding to the Clinton Cash revelations, said that Bill Clinton "could have been running serious game on many of these countries saying I'll talk to my wife, give me the check, and then never mentioning [it.]" View the video here.

Google is famous for keeping discreet tabs on how people browse the Internet in order to market ads back to them and point them toward the websites, videos and services they want.Now, it’s possible for the average Web user to get a slice of some of that information.Over the weekend, an unofficial Google blog highlighted a new feature that the Internet giant had quietly rolled out to let people download their entire Google search histories.  ADVERTISEMENT To find everything they’ve ever searched for, users should go to Google Web History, click the gear icon and click “Download.”“Create an archive of...

POST FALLS, Idaho — It took five years for negotiators to work out the details of a multinational treaty on child support that would make it easier to track delinquent parents around the world. It took only a couple of minutes for a committee of the Idaho Legislature to endanger America’s participation. In a 9-to-8 vote in the closing hours of the legislative session, the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee killed a bill that state and federal officials had said was crucial to the finely crafted choreography of the child support treaty reached at The Hague. All 50 states...

...Cuomo speaks at the beginning of a Business Rountable with Cuban and American business leaders held at the Hotel Parque Central in Havana, Cuba....

Yesterday I started a thread 6 Somali-Americans Arrested in ISIS Recruiting Case, linking to a New York Times article with the same title and remarking that the NYT would usually use a title like "6 Minnesota Men Arrested". Sure enough, the NYT has reverted to PC, and the article is now titled "6 Minnesotans Held in Plot to Join ISIS". Who poses more of a terrorist threat -- non-Somali Minnesotans or non-Minnesotan Somalis in America? Since the answer is the latter, the original NYT headline was the right one. But the media does not want people to notice certain patterns.

I would bet on globalization slowly being in abeyance," tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a video interview with George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen. "I think with the benefit of hindsight, we will realize that 2007 was not just the peak year of the finance boom, but also the peak year of globalization, like maybe 1913." It's a tantalizing thought, and Thiel is well worth a listen. He is the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, selling his initial $500,000 investment eight years later for $1 billion. His record for spotting future trends and flexion...

Explanation: You can explore asteroid Vesta. Recently, NASA's robotic spaceship Dawn visited Vesta, the second largest object in our Solar System's main asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. During a year-long stopover, Dawn's cameras photographed Vesta's entire surface, documenting all of the minor planet's major mountains and craters. These images have now been combined into a digital model that allows anyone with a full-featured browser to fly all around Vesta, virtually, and even zoom in on interesting surface features, by just dragging and clicking. If desired, the initially flat 2D map can be wrapped into a nearly spherical...

Politics: As refugees flood the Mediterranean, Europe is in a crisis. But the issue is not about how many lifeboats to send; it's the failed state of Libya. Why isn't Hillary Clinton, the architect of U.S. Libya policy, answering questions? The European Union is being hit with a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions as another boat loaded with emigres capsized near the Italian island of Lampedusa on Saturday. Nearly all of its 900 passengers drowned in what's billed as the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, now known as "a cemetery without graves," will be...

General Dynamics-NASSCO has launched Isla Bella, the first liquid natural gas-powered container ship that the Barrio Logan shipyard has built for the company TOTE. The 764-foot-long vessel slid down the launch ways Saturday at NASSCO, the last major shipyard on the West Coast. The company also is building a second vessel for TOTE under a contract that was signed in 2012. NASSCO said in a statement that the Marlin-class container ships “will be the largest dry-cargo ships of any kind in the world powered by LNG. The vessels ... will significantly decrease emissions while increasing fuel efficiency as compared to...

KITTERY, Maine – Officials at Mitchell Primary School are apologizing after a book about a transgender child was read to most of the school’s K-3 students. “We have a practice of if a topic is considered sensitive, parents should be informed,” superintendent Allyn Hutton told SeaCoastOnline.com. “In this situation, that didn’t happen. The whole culture at Mitchell School is about teaching tolerance and respect. The people presenting the lesson thought (the book) was one more piece of teaching that lesson. “In retrospect, we understand that toleration is tolerating people of all opinions,” Hutton said. Criticism flooded the district after Fox...

White House and Department of State officials contend that – irrespective of Congress – President Obama can apply effective diplomatic, commercial and national security pressure, coercing Israel to repartition Jerusalem, and retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria to the 9-15 mile wide pre-1967 sliver, surrounded by the violently turbulent and unpredictable Arab Street. That inaccurate underestimate of the power of Congress – which has traditionally opposed pressure on Israel, echoing the sentiments of most constituents – was recently expressed by US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro: “what is unmistakable about our foreign policy system is that the...

Word For The Day, Tuesday April 21, 2015 In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". larrikin [lar-i-kin] Australian slang -n1. a street rowdy; hoodlum. -adj 2.disorderly; rowdy. [1865-70; origin uncertain]

Baltimore's mayor, police officials, and prosecutor sought to calm their city Monday, while six officers were suspended as authorities investigated how a suspect suffered a fatal spine injury in police custody last week. A week after Freddie Gray, 25, was pulled off the street and into a police van, authorities don't have any videos or other evidence explaining what happened to cause the "medical emergency" an arresting officer said Gray suffered while being taken to the local police station, Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. The Gray family's lawyer, Billy Murphy, had said that Gray's "spine was 80 percent severed at...

Hillary Clinton fired back Monday at questions about a potentially damaging new book — saying that slamming her seems to be the Republicans’ sole topic of conversation. The book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by former George W. Bush aide Peter Schweizer, is to be published next month and is generating a lot of buzz in conservative circles. “We’re back into the political system and therefore I’ll be subjected to all kinds of distraction and attacks and I’m ready for that,” Clinton said during her first...

The financial portfolio of Hillary Clinton, her family and the Clinton Foundation is under new scrutiny, worrying some Democrats, as the former secretary of State begins her 2016 campaign. The New York Times fired the starting pistol on another round of stories about the Clinton finances with a story on Monday morning describing a forthcoming book, Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution. The Times called the tome “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy.” The book’s allegations were summed up in the author’s own words: “We...