David McElroy

The voting was tight, but the judges were fair. There were no hanging chads and no spoiled ballots. In honor of the site’s first birthday, here are the posts that got the most readers over the past year. A few of them still have me scratching my head.

‘I’m just quitting’: A scene right out of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in Birmingham — The most popular story on the site in the first year was read more than 50,000 times. When I started, I wasn’t sure I’d have 50,000 views for the entire year put together, so this was gratifying. I happened to attend a public hearing about environmental issues, because I was doing some research that I didn’t think would turn into a story. But I wasn’t counting on an angry coal mine operator to tell the environmental officials that he wasn’t going to open a mine he had planned — because of the attitudes he saw in the meeting that made him believe people didn’t want him. The comments posted after the story are amazing and heartbreaking in some cases, as people give their own stories about having businesses hurt by the government.

The story was picked up by Instapundit, The Blaze, Free Republic, Fark, Reddit and dozens of other sites. For a few days, it was viral. This one story contributed hugely to increasing overall daily traffic on the site immensely. (Here’s an interview that a radio station in Indianapolis did with me about the story. I wasn’t happy with the interview, but it was my first radio appearance in years, so I wasn’t too upset.)

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At 9:27 a.m. a year ago today, I made a brief announcement on Facebook that my new website was open. The result wasn’t especially promising. I had a grand total of 35 visitors from three countries that day.

Although the numbers climbed — very slowly — it wasn’t until late July that things really took off. On July 25, I had more than 30,000 visitors to the site — in one day — which created problems with the server crashing from the overload, but it was a great problem to have. Things have settled down to somewhere far lower than the peak, but far higher than the meager beginning. For instance, in the past week, the site has had 6,233 visitors.

Where are all those people coming from? Well, I’ve had visitors from all 50 U.S. states and 163 countries. I still haven’t figured out why people in some of those places come — much less come back — but I’ve watched with gratitude as it’s continued to happen.

The list of most active countries for sending visitors has been led by English-speaking countries, which seems natural, but six of the top 10 are not primarily English-speaking: In order, the most visitors have come from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Spain, India, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden.

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About 15 years ago, I knew a couple from Latvia who had moved here and gone through the long process to become U.S. citizens. It was a big deal to them and it represented the culmination of years of hopes — dreaming of getting away from what had been a repressive government and becoming a part of the American experience.

For many of us, it’s always been a point of pride that so many people in other places wanted to become Americans. Some are like the 6-year-old from China, above, who are adopted here and don’t have much say in the matter. But most of the naturalized citizens are people who have struggled to get here and then struggled to make something of themselves in their new homeland. They’ve been grateful to have opportunities they couldn’t have dreamed of in the countries of their birth, in many cases. But I wonder whether that’s slowly changing.

The United States is still the “land of opportunity” compared to many places, but there are an increasing number of people who find the tax burden isn’t worth putting up for in exchange for U.S. citizenship. The latest example is Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian-born c0-founder of Facebook. Saverin has decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship. It’s going to save him a lot of money as he becomes a very wealthy man by Facebook going public.

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