Free Republic

ST. LOUIS - City officials Wednesday declared St. Louis has reversed about 50 years of population loss and is growing, though a U.S. Census Bureau (news - web sites) official said he had no data to confirm the new count. The city earlier challenged Census Bureau estimates that the population declined by roughly 16,000 people since 2000, when the bureau set the population at 348,189. During the challenge process, the bureau changed a July 2003 population estimate from 332,223 to 348,039. According to the Census Bureau, the city's 2003 population was just 150 people below where it was in 2000....

SCRANTON, Pa. - Joe Dougherty knows better than to predict the outcome of the presidential election in this hardscrabble city at the base of the Poconos, where coal left in the 1950s and people have been fleeing ever since. "The town," says Dougherty as he flipped burgers in the back of his tidy diner off the town's faded main strip, "is always a question mark." Scranton is a mostly conservative place, "where there are as many churches as there are taverns," joked Dougherty, 68, a father of 12 who has seen the town dwindle from 140,000 to 70,000 in his...

NEW LEXINGTON, Ohio, Sept. 3 - Sharon Alfman, the cook at the little County Seat Diner here, might seem to be a likely John Kerry supporter. She has voted Democratic most of her life. She has no health insurance through the diner, and her husband's insurance ran out after he was on disability for more than a year. But she already knows that she is going to vote for President Bush. Mrs. Alfman, 51, said that if the Democrats could do anything about health insurance, they would have done it under Bill Clinton. Now, she said, the Democrats have "burned...

LIMA — The Allen County Fairgrounds is no stranger to the throaty roar of motorcycle pipes. But next year, a different kind of bike will be rolling in, something far quieter but with every bit as much muscle. In July, the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America will hold its annual rally in Lima, bringing around 7,000 people and 4,000 motorcycles to town. Despite the name, the group is an interna-tional organization with members in 40 countries, many of which send at least a few to the rally, organizers said. “We’re going to transform the Allen County Fairgrounds to Beamerville, USA,”...

<p>JOHNSTOWN, Pa. -- A few men sat around the Greyhound bus station the other day telling stories about the good times, when this was a bustling industrial city that attracted newcomers from as far away as Croatia. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, with its coal, steel, and railroads, the small city was once known as the "Cradle of the American Steel Industry."</p>

Fri September 12, 2003 11:14 AM ET By Karen Pierog and Susan Kelly CHICAGO (Reuters) - The prospect of a jobless economic recovery has governors in the nation's rust belt increasingly worried that the thousands of manufacturing jobs lost during the recession and the tax revenues they generated are not coming back. "I'm sending up the alarm," said Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm in a recent interview. "We are at code red in terms of loss of manufacturing jobs and the shifting of these businesses offshore." In Michigan, where manufacturing accounts for one out of every five jobs, more than 170,000...

NO: NO: YES: "Democratic Nationalists" supporting Traficant's bid pledge electoral victory against ultra-left Democratic Socialists invasion of Democratic party as well as "free trade" economic treachery of the Democratic Leadership Council. On one year anniversary of Congressman's wrongful expulsion from Congress, candidate approved "Draft Traficant" Committee Files with FEC in Washington. July 24, 2003 In a stunning political move by his supporters, authorized "Draft Traficant" leaders file official organizational papers with Federal Elections Commission in Washington on Monday. Draft Committee pledges "Candidate's Movement" supporting Traficant throughout next year in Democratic primaries nationwide. "We will fight against the Democratic Socialists and...