Tag: rural America

Commentary: Healing the Heartland

RealClearWire
red barn and farm

Rural health care in America faces a host of chronic challenges: high costs, limited access, and aging infrastructure. For millions of families across the heartland, these problems aren’t abstract—they determine whether patients can see a doctor, reach a hospital, or receive timely care close to home.

More than 60 million Americans—nearly one in five—live in rural areas where patients routinely travel long distances only to find fewer doctors, hospitals, and clinics available to serve them.

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Commentary: Thanksgiving Is a Time to Thank Struggling American Farmers

Daily Caller News Foundation
farmer

As we head to the local grocery store to prepare that Thanksgiving meal, take a moment to reflect on how all the items we will enjoy made it to the shelves. Every Thanksgiving feast starts with the hard work of America’s farmers. The turkey, the potatoes, the corn, the cranberries, and the sugar-sweetened pies — all of it traces back to a network of family farms across the country. Because of them, we benefit from a food supply that is both plentiful and among the safest and most affordable in the world.

Behind this bounty is real sacrifice and growing strain. Even in good times, farmers and ranchers earn only roughly 15 cents of every dollar Americans spend on food. But in this economic climate, they’re taking on more risks, and in many cases, facing negative net returns. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put it plainly: “The farm economy is in a significant challenge right now.”

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New Conservative Think Tanks Aim to Elevate Rural Issues Ahead of 2026 Battles

RealClearWire
Jenn Pellegrino

nother conservative satellite has joined the Trump constellation.

Jenn Pellegrino, formerly chief spokesperson for the America First Policy Institute, has launched twin think tanks in time for a brewing fight on Capitol Hill over health care and ahead of the coming midterms. The GOP is scrambling to build legislation from scratch to lower health care costs when Biden-era Obamacare subsidies expire on Dec. 31. Those same Republicans are hoping to keep their seats in the election next year.

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Commentary: AI’s Demand for Resources Poses Promise and Peril to Rural America

RealClearWire
data center

More than three millennia ago, indigenous people built a massive ceremonial mound a few miles from here, an engineering marvel called Poverty Point and one of the oldest known building projects in North America. Today, this is ground zero for what may prove a defining feature of the 21st century’s landscape.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is constructing a gargantuan, $10 billion data center that tech executives, lawmakers, and business leaders say will bring much-needed prosperity to this rural area in northeast Louisiana. Set to be operational by 2030, the project has also disturbed local homeowners and drawn opposition from environmental and government activists who worry that it will suck up vast resources, especially water and energy, from surrounding communities. 

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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn Presses VP Kamala Harris on Her Failed Broadband Initiative to Connect Americans to the Internet

Kaitlin Housler

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) was among nine Republican senators who sent a letter to Vice President Kamala Harris pressing her on the administration’s “failed” initiative to connect millions of Americans to broadband internet.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, provided the National Telecommunications and Information Administration with $42.45 billion for the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which was intended to “provide broadband access to unserved communities, particularly those in rural areas.”

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Commentary: ‘ZuckBucks’ Heads to Rural America in 2024

Daily Caller News Foundation

Money always finds a way. In the years following the 2020 election, dozens of states managed to ban private funding of elections. But even though Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised not to pour more of his money into your local election office, this year, the “Zuckbucks” team is recommitted to spreading cash wherever they legally can.

Recall that in late 2020, Zuckerberg directed his charitable arm to pass $350 million through an obscure nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to fund large and small election offices around the nation. Some politically important counties received millions of dollars while others did not. As of today, 28 states have since banned the practice. Despite the bans, the CTCL’s work continues. In fact, the bans guide cash along new paths of least resistance.

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Commentary: Rural America Needs Permitting Reform

RealClearWire

If something isn’t farmed, mined, or manufactured it can’t exist. And if a burdensome, archaic, and overly bureaucratic permitting scheme doesn’t allow America to farm, mine, or manufacture, we risk the detriment of our economy. That’s why the new House Republican Majority responded with H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act.

H.R. 1 updates our broken permitting process to actually let Americans mine, farm, manufacture, process, and build infrastructure so we can get shovels in the ground and move this country forward. For far too long, we’ve sat idle and let bureaucrats in Washington and radical activist lawyers hamstring American workers by suing at every opportunity, long after decisions have been made and permits have been issued.

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Commentary: Phaseout of Oil Cars Show Contempt for Rural America and the Developing World

RealClearWire
Cars in traffic

America’s big auto companies, less than 15 years since they were bailed out of bankruptcy following the Clinton-Bush recession of 2008, are betraying the American people out of their greed for government cash and favor. Their “net zero” plans – in conjunction with the globalist dictators and the Biden Administration – include eliminating huge numbers of jobs and devastating major segments of the U.S. economy.  

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The Supply Chain Crisis Could Threaten Rural America’s Internet Access

Admin

The telecommunications industry, like other sectors, is suffering from ongoing supply chain chaos, with equipment delays and heightened costs endangering efforts to bring internet access to rural America.

AT&T announced in August that it would miss its target of supplying internet to 3 million new homes, citing supply chain disruptions, while smaller providers and contractors are reporting widespread shortages impacting their ability to complete jobs. The problem is exacerbated by the ongoing semiconductor shortage, causing long lead times, or the time it takes for products to arrive after an order is placed, for broadband equipment requiring a computer chip  like modems and routers.

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Blackburn Applauds Federal Taskforce to Improve Telehealth Access for Rural Americans

Jason M. Reynolds

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is applauding a federal initiative to grow the availability of telehealth for rural areas.

The Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Department Of Health And Human Services and the U.S. Department Of Agriculture last week announced they signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the Rural Telehealth Initiative.

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Commentary: The Deep State Destruction of Rural America

Admin

Ever since the heinous killing of an unarmed black man by four rogue police officers on May 25, protests and riots have consumed America’s cities. These mass protests have mobilized millions of so-called progressives, incited to destructive fury by well-organized provocateurs. The groups behind this extremism are well known, as are the leftist and anarchist ideologies that propel them.

But another important movement is growing in the United States.

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War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers Author Ben Teitelbaum Joins The Tennessee Star Report

Julie Carr

In a special interview on Wednesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Leahy interviewed Ben Teitelman who wrote the book called “War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers.”

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Poll: US Rural and Urban Political Divisions Also Split Suburbs

Admin

America’s suburbs are today’s great political battleground, long seen as an independent pivot between the country’s liberal cities and conservative small towns and rural expanse. But it’s not that simple. It turns out that these places in-between may be the most politically polarized of all — and when figuring out the partisan leanings of people living in the suburbs, where they came from makes a difference. Fewer suburbanites describe themselves as politically independent than do residents of the nation’s urban and rural areas, according to a survey released Tuesday by the University of Chicago Harris School for Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll also found that the partisan leanings of suburban residents are closely linked to whether they have previously lived in a city. “In the last decade, particularly in the past five years, I’ve felt a shift in having some liberal neighbors,” said Nancy Wieman, 63, a registered Republican and staunch conservative who has lived in suburban Jefferson County outside of Denver her entire life. “The ones who are markedly liberal have moved from Denver or other cities.” Suburbanites who previously lived in a city are about as likely as city-dwellers to…

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