Free Republic

WEIRTON, West Virginia - Most people in this town will tell you they’d rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.It isn’t just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there’s also the demise of the tax base,...

To many in America, the West coast and the East coast seem to be the only regions that matter. There’s California, New York and Washington, DC. Why bother with flyover America? But as I traveled across America, I realized that it is flyover country that truly makes America great and provides its solid ground of values and patriotism. When my son accepted a call to Edenton First Baptist Church in Southwestern Ohio, we had to use Google to find it. Edenton doesn’t have any businesses, just a few homes, Stonelick Lake, and my son’s church. Just weeks before, there was...

Imagine if you had a job. A good job, one that required skill and critical thinking and had a broad impact in the community where you lived. A job you didn't just show up to do. It was a job you were good at, and because of it, you were able to provide a roof over your family's head, put your children through college or help pay for their wedding, and once a year, it gave you the ability to carve out a week or two to take the family on vacation. Now imagine that job becomes the center of...

Abolishing the Electoral College would be a disaster for freedom and the constitutional imperative to prevent the concentration and abuse of power.If former Vice President Joe Biden prevails in the 2020 election by scoring a victory in both the electoral and popular vote tallies, it will not curtail the clamoring nor the movement to send the Electoral College to a crematorium. The Washington Post editorial board, for example, recently renewed its call to abolish it. Abolishing the Electoral College would be a disaster for freedom and the constitutional imperative to prevent the concentration and abuse of power. It would also...

When we were kids on the playground and there was an angry dispute, someone would always shout "majority rules." And we'd vote. If the losers didn't like the outcome, there were two options: punch the winners in the stomach or take the ball and go home. It worked on our playgrounds because a punch in the stomach isn't the end of the world, exactly. You could punch a kid, or he could punch you, and half an hour later you could both ride your bikes to a convenience store for a Slurpee. You could always find a ball somewhere. There...

President Trump has taken significant criticism for his recent comments on low-income government housing from a speech in Texas late last month: You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home… There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.… It’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia. These comments speak to the current state and local dynamic. Americans, in the past, would move to rural or suburban areas in order to separate from hostile persons, be near those...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is in the final stretch of a 44-city blitz for the midterm elections, but the America he’s glimpsed from the airport arrivals and his armored limousine is hardly a reflection of the nation as a whole.The president has mostly traveled to counties that are whiter, less educated and have lower incomes than the rest of the United States, according to Census Bureau data. It’s a sign that he is seeking to galvanize the same group of voters that helped carry him to victory in 2016. Trump has largely eschewed the big metropolises for smaller...

Hollywood may have laughed when Emmys host Michael Che said the only white people who thank Jesus are "Republicans and ex-crackheads," but Tinseltown's latest middle finger to Middle America fell flat in flyover country, and may have contributed to the telecast's all-time low viewership. Co-host Michael Che left many viewers of the 70th Annual Emmy Awards upset during the opening monologue with his fellow "Saturday Night Live" star Colin Jost, explaining that his mother would not be watching the show on Monday night. "She says she doesn’t like watching white award shows because you guys don’t thank Jesus enough," Che...

Eric Greitens stormed into the governor’s office in January 2017 vowing to clean up a state government he said was corrupt. He resigned Tuesday just as abruptly as he had arrived on Missouri's political scene, his career buried under an avalanche of scandal and felony charges. Mike Parson, 63, a fellow Republican and former sheriff who served 11 years in the General Assembly before being elected as lieutenant governor in 2016, will take over as Missouri’s 57th governor. He’ll finish Greitens’ term, which runs until January 2021. A Rhodes scholar and former Navy SEAL, Greitens was once considered one of...

To say that academic elites don’t like ordinary folks is to state the obvious. To them, Lanford, Illinois—the fictional, archetypal, working-class town, made famous by Roseanne and Dan Conner—is not to be listened to, but tamed.A well-functioning democracy depends on it.Taming Fishtown—Charles Murray’s version of Lanford—is the thread that seems to run through a new book, “The People vs. Democracy,” by one Yascha Mounk.You guessed it. Mr. Mounk is not an American from the prairies; he’s a German academic, ensconced at Harvard, and sitting in judgment of American and European populism.If only he were capable of advancing a decent argument.“The number...

We’re three weeks out from Virginia’s gubernatorial race and it’s been mostly relegated to the backburner thanks to the endless news that emanates from the Trump White House. It’s an off-year election, but it’s in D.C.'s backyard. The state has increasingly become more bluish since the Bush years, albeit the state legislature is Republican. The House of Delegates, the lower chamber, is reliably Republican where they hold a supermajority. The state Senate is more competitive. Anti-gun groups under the Bloomberg umbrella tried and failed to flip the Senate in 2015. Those groups are mounting a second invasion of the state...

<p>Hi folks! Eddie Lampert, CEO of Sears Holdings here! I’ve been reliably informed that everyone who’s anyone in conservative America reads MILO, and he has been gracious enough to lend me his column today to send you a simple message — Sears and our other failing brand K-Mart fucking hate you!</p>

MONTICELLO, Iowa — The Table of Knowledge was delving into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plans to upend government, and marveling at how he had forced his fellow Republicans in the House to reverse themselves on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics. “He’s getting responses; things are happening,” Jerry Retzlaff, a retiree, said. “He got Congress to turn themselves around with one tweet.” “There’s no secret the press doesn’t like him, and neither does a lot of the leadership,” he added. “And that’s because he’s planning on making a lot of changes.” The eight men around a rectangular table, sipping coffee...

Anita Perry, the 59-year-old wife of Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, has been very actively campaigning for him on her own all fall. Now, she's taken on a new assignment. Mrs. Perry has launched an online drive to recruit hundreds of volunteers for what she calls the Perry Strike Force. This would consist of Perry fans who would travel to Iowa and work across the state Jan. 2-4, getting out Perry caucus-goers to the hundreds of meeting sites on the evening of Jan. 3. (Don't worry, the BCS Championship Game is not until Jan. 9 this time.) "With over 1,700...

She scored points with me when she accepted Sgt. Scott Moore’s invitation to the Marine Corps Ball, but, with her recent comments to the U.K.’s “Stylist” magazine, she lost that clout.“I love Barack Obama, I voted for him and I will forever be proud of my vote,” she said, before defending his performance during the debt ceiling debate. “I know that he [Obama] tried. I know because you keep reading these reports of him trying to compromise with the Tea Party and the Republican Party and trying to come to a 50/50 agreement. I don’t think it was one. I...

Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it. — Gail Collins, in The New York Times How about Wisconsin? Somewhere between the first cries of the Tea Party in February 2009 and the November election in 2010, the states in the middle of the continent suddenly came to realize what Texas and Alaska have known all along: They are free. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says his party has been emboldened by massive protests against his controversial budget plan, The Hill reports. He says the demonstrators who filled the...

The unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is 5 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1990s again. But college graduates are only 30 percent of the country. For the rest of the population, the jobs picture is grimmer. For people without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate is more than 15 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1930s again. The unemployment rates are part of a growing divergence between the fortunes of the college educated and the rest of the country, including proverbial Middle America. In...

It's starting to feel like 1995 all over again. For 64 years, the Democrats possessed a monopoly of power in the House of Representatives (the two interruptions in 1946 and 1952 when the GOP eked out a tiny majority then quickly lost it don't count). The Dems' arrogance and conviction they had a moral "divine right" to their monopoly doubled in size when the Pubs tore themselves apart in an internal power struggle, with newcomer Newt Gingrich replacing long-serving Bob "You've got to go along to get along" Michael as Minority Leader. The Dems laughed at Newt's "Contract With America"...

So says the girl from Tennessee who’s covered with garish tattoos. Sigh. Our straight male readers may consider this further proof of the cardinal rule of atheism: Anyone you worship is bound to let you down eventually. ---------------------------------------------------- The “Transformers” bombshell-cum-uninhibited philosophizer also contemplates — reluctantly — what she would say to Megatron to keep him from destroying the world. “I’d barter with him,” she muses to the July issue Total Film UK, “and say instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?” -------------------------------------------------------- Like...

I know why Obama is in trouble. Non-political guys like my husband are all of a sudden excited! He's been reading news stories he finds to me. This morning, he told me "Palin has the most charisma of any leader he's seen since JFK." He's come a long way. He still won't say anything really positive about Reagan, but when he said that, my mouth dropped open. It's reactions like that all over the country which are being reflected in the polls. Way to go!