Free Republic

It can be all too easy to forget that California, now a Democrat-mismanaged chronic cesspool, used to be a conservative stronghold. The state gave America Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and voted for the GOP in nine out of ten presidential elections between 1952 and 1988.Clearly, a lot has changed. California hasn’t supported a single Republican presidential candidate in any of the eight elections since 1988. What’s more, the margin of support for Republican candidates has consistently shrunk, with Bill Clinton receiving 46 percent of the vote in 1992 (an election with three serious candidates) and 51 percent in 1996.In...

The pandemic saw people leave Democratic blue states in droves and head towards sunnier climes in the red states of the south to escape the strict lockdowns and spiraling crime. A migration report from moving company North American Moving Services found those living in the states of New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland headed for Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Idaho. Four of the top seven states people were fleeing were located in the Northeast where the pandemic stuck first.

It’s not a coincidence that the worst states for COVID are Democrat-run states. It’s also not news. The media could not care less that New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc., have been killing fields for elderly and vulnerable populations. Instead, we’ve been inundated with stories about how Texas and Florida WILL be deathtraps with no follow-ups about how they weren’t. Leftist establishment media is singularly focused on protecting their own at the expense of everything else, but Democrat heroes really have been awful throughout this whole thing, denying them the attention they so richly deserve.New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ruled...

Virginia Majority Makers is now on the scene.

... Santa Clara County saw 4,517 people fail to show up for confirmed vaccine appointments at county-run sites such as the fairgrounds from Feb. 8 to 12, according to a county spokesperson. The county couldn't confirm why people failed to show. One theory was they made multiple appointments out of concern one would be cancelled as some vaccine sites run out of supply. The county said they filled the spots through public messaging and social media alerting people in Phase 1A — health care workers and long-term care residents — who haven't received vaccines. SFGATE is hoping to learn more...

It is not surprising that people are leaving California and New York in record numbers. Citizens of those oppressive, socialist-leaning, nanny states have long suffered under governments that prioritize the rights and well-being of criminals while ignoring or abusing their own law-abiding and tax-paying citizens. For that reason, if you are one of those rare California conservatives, it is time to move to a free state. While it is not surprising to me that people are leaving California, it is surprising to me that there are still a (relatively) significant number of California conservatives and, more generally, Republicans in California....

... Californians will barely notice most of the hundreds of new laws going into effect in 2021. But we've pulled out the most noteworthy, interesting and wide-reaching laws that will take effect in 2021. - Assembly Bill 685 ensures the right of employees to quickly learn if COVID exposure has occurred in the workplace. - After a number of high-profile deaths in police custody around the nation, California passed AB 1196, which prohibits police from using chokeholds and carotid holds. - As part of California’s continued incremental raising of the minimum wage, it will go up to $14 per hour...

The 12th edition of Rich States, Poor States, written by White House Advisors Arthur Laffer, Ph.D., Stephen Moore, and Jonathan Williams, chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Council, pinpoints why some states in the union grow and prosper while others shrink and fail. Based on the authors’ collective research, appropriate regulations, competitive tax rates, and wise government spending yields greater opportunities for all Americans. In particular, citizens in states where lawmakers are focused on establishing long-term prosperity benefit the most. This is especially true when those citizens trust the judgment of their political leaders and have witnessed the wisdom...

Despite the demonstrable fact that dying from COVID is about as likely as you getting a birthday card from a one-armed Himalayan banjo player you've never met, pinhead state governors, city mayors, and local officials all the way down to dogcatchers still insist on maintaining the fiction that merely catching the beerbug is a death sentence and that squashing the things until none of them are left is some sort of life-or-death priority. These "officials," self-liberated from the burden of actually consulting with others in the give-and-take inherent in representative government, are on power trips that no doubt give them...

Blue wave in Texas?   Let's look at some numbers. On Tuesday, Texas Democrats nominated Mary "M.J." Hegar to run against Senator John Cornyn.  Miss Hegar defeated State Senator Roy West.   Altogether, less than 1 million Democrats showed up to vote:  52-47% or 40,000 votes. It was a contested election with lots of radio ads.  Most of the ones I heard were about the West campaign, claiming that Hegar was not a liberal.  On the other hand, she promoted her electability. I understand that COVID-19 was a factor but compare these numbers with the first round in March. Senator Cornyn got 1.4 million votes in...

Left-wing Black Lives Matter protesters in Seattle have attempted to secede from the rest of the country, occupying a six-block enclave that they are calling the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

Like many of you, I could not believe what we were watching on TV, from St. John's Church burning in Washington D.C. to Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago saying "F.....U" to President Trump as violence swpt the city and more people were killed. Here in North Texas, we had protests but nothing got out of hand.  Yes, a man was beaten outside his business but the police presence was such that the curfew was enforced.   In Texas, we arrested people whereas they looted in other cities up north. The Dallas Morning News headline told the story:   "‘We’re not playing tonight,’ authorities say as they begin...

Mayor Eric Garcetti has asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to mobilize the National Guard to help Los Angeles deal with worsening looting, vandalism and violence on the streets. The move comes less than an hour after the mayor expanded expanded a curfew, first set for downtown, to the entire city from 8 p.m. Saturday to 5:30 a.m. Sunday. Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he is also seeking help from the National Guard. The decision came as the situation in the Fairfax District deteriorated, with shops, including Nordstrom and the Apple store, vandalized and looted. A small police kiosk in the mall was...

“Forty-eight homeless people — an average of six per week — died in San Francisco between March 30 and May 24, according to Dr. Barry Zevin, director of the Department of Public Health’s Street Medicine Team. For comparison, 14 people died in the same time period last year.” The causes, pending official confirmation, may have more to do with the lockdown than the coronavirus itself, as many homeless people had less access to medical services and other needs......An even more important factor may simply have been drug overdoses, as there was an “explosion of fentanyl on San Francisco’s streets”over the...

The Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation says the state's unemployment rate is a record high for any state. April's unemployment rate was 28.2%. "Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, ahead of number two Michigan, which had a rate of 22.7%," David Schmidt, Nevada Chief Economist said. "Nevada now has the highest unemployment rate of any state in any month dating back to 1976."

<p>Red- and blue-state America was already divided before the coronavirus epidemic hit. Globalization had enriched the East Coast and West Coast corridors but hollowed out much in between.</p> <p>The traditional values of small towns and rural counties were increasingly at odds with postmodern lifestyles in the cities.</p>

Your chance of dying from COVID-19 is notably higher if you live in a blue state. There is only one reliable metric that reveals how likely you are to die from COVID-19 in a given state, and it isn’t what you’re seeing in the legacy media. The number of new cases and deaths, for example, are staples of news stories about the pandemic. Neither of these factoids, however, tells us very much in the absence of sophisticated epidemiological data that just isn’t yet available. A far more predictive metric is “death rate per million.” Why? Testing is far more consistent...

3 Reasons Why States Shouldn’t Get a Congressional Bailout Rachel Greszler / April 19, 2020 Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon sent a letter April 14 on behalf of the Illinois Senate Democratic Caucus to members of Congress requesting $40 billion in federal funds for the beleaguered state. Although the letter comes under the guise of unprecedented COVID-19 disruptions, the purposes for which Illinois and other states seek additional federal funds are anything but unprecedented. Opening the floodgates to federal taxpayer dollars to cover states’ self-imposed fiscal woes would only lead to even further fiscal recklessness. Here are three ways...

New York State’s long-feared surge of coronavirus cases has begun, thrusting the medical system toward a crisis point. In a startlingly quick ascent, officials reported on Friday that the state was closing in on 8,000 positive tests, about half the cases in the country. The number was 10 times higher than what was reported earlier in the week. In the Bronx, doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center say they have only a few remaining ventilators for patients who need them to breathe. In Brooklyn, doctors at Kings County Hospital Center say they are so low on supplies that...

Regis Philbin and his wife Joy have put their Greenwich, Conn., home on the market — at a much lower price than they bought it. The 13,661-square-foot residence is selling for $4.595 million, according to the listing. That price is actually 36 percent less than what the Philbins paid for it almost 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Every seller in Greenwich is having to adjust to this market,” the property’s listing agent, Joseph Barbieri of Sotheby’s International Realty Greenwich Brokerage told FOX Business. […] The English Manor-inspired house has six bedrooms, nine full bathrooms and three partial...