Free Republic

GOP Senate candidate Ben Sasse announced Thursday he raised more than $850,000 in the first quarter of the year, significantly more than his main challenger in the race. Sasse made the announcement on Twitter. Another Republican candidate, Shane Osborn, announced earlier this week he raised more than $550,000 in the first quarter of this year. Osborn is a former state Treasurer and Navy pilot and his main rival is Sasse, who serves as president of Midland University. Last week, conservative group FreedomWorks withdrew its endorsement of Osborn and said it would support Sasse instead. They are among four GOP contenders...

In a major blow to former Republican state Treasurer Shane Osborn’s candidacy for Nebraska Senate, national conservative group FreedomWorks is withdrawing its endorsement and backing his main primary rival, Midland University President Ben Sasse, instead. At issue, FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said in a statement, is the unspoken support Osborn is believed to have from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “Both Osborn and Sasse are great people, and this was not a decision taken lightly. The question at the heart of this decision is, who would caucus with the Freedom Caucus, and who would fall in line with the...

As explained on this blog since hostilities began, Russian foreign policy is being guided by the outspoken fascist Aleksandr Dugin. The son of a GRU (Russian military intelligence) General, Dugin wrote the military textbook now studied at Russian academies of war. The Foundations of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future, is a throwback to the German (and Nazi) concept of “geopolitik,” dictating that Russia is naturally a land-based empire, and in order to defeat the maritime powers of the United States and England, must conquer virtually the entire Eurasian continent, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. To underscore how determined these fascists to create...

After Crimea, what next? In an unauthenticated audio, Ambassadors Chubarov and Sergei Bakharev laugh about taking over areas in Alaska, Venice, Scotland, Catalonia and Miami. Watch out, the Russians are coming! ... The pair...joke that Russia will take control of Alaska, Venice, Scotland and Catalonia, a region of Spain which wants a vote on independence, reports The Guardian {link at URL]... The recording has been posted on Youtube, reports The Guardian [link at URL] ...

On Friday, former Alaska Gov. Palin went to Nebraska and endorsed businessman Pete Ricketts for governor in the state in which her endorsement has proven to be the gold standard. Palin joined Kay Orr, Nebraska's former Republican governor whom Palin called the "original Mama Grizzly," to endorse to endorse Ricketts, whom Palin called the clear principled commonsense conservative choice in this race whose positions are clear: "he opposes amnesty and taxpayer funded benefits for illegal immigrants in any form and always has." Palin said the "alternative is woeful dependency on an inevitable sinking ship I call 'Liberal Lunacy.'" Palin has...

<p>Unauthenticated, expletive-laden recording of pair joking about which countries to annex after Crimea is leaked online.</p> <p>A recording has surfaced online purporting to be a leaked conversation between two Russian ambassadors discussing which parts of the world they would like to annex after Crimea.</p>

Alaska State Troopers said a 24-year-old Homer man fatally shot himself with a trooper's pistol during a struggle Wednesday night. About 10:17 p.m., a woman reported to troopers that her ex-boyfriend had assaulted her at her home on East End Road near Homer, according to a trooper dispatch posted Thursday morning Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2014/04/03/3407761/troopers-homer-man-fatally-shoots.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1#storylink=cpy

On Tuesday, Mike Dickinson, the Virginia Democrat seeking the House seat currently held by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., compared the Tea Party to the terror group al-Qaeda on Twitter and claimed that Sarah Palin, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., are the U.S. equivalent of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terror attacks. Ultimately, Dickinson called the Tea Party and Sarah Palin "pure unamerican (sic) trash." "The tea party is Americas version of Al-Qaeda. Ted Cruz/Sarah Palin/Rand Paul all on same level as Bin laden (sic)," he claimed. "Tea party and Al-Qaeda: both resort to...

The Tonight Show will have a special guest on tonight’s show: Sarah Palin. The show’s Twitter account made the announcement Wednesday afternoon, saying the former Alaska governor will be stopping by the show to “do something fun” with host Jimmy Fallon. Fallon Tonight ✔ @FallonTonight Last minute addition to tonight's show. We've got @SarahPalinUSA stopping by to do something fun! #FallonTonight 12:58 PM - 2 Apr 2014 The scheduled guests for Wednesday night’s show are Denis Leary, Cat Deeley along with musical guest Nickel Creek. It appears unlikely that Palin will sit down with Fallon for an interview, but perhaps...

A simple tweak by the Commerce Department would allow the U.S. to begin selling ultralight fossil fuels overseas, a significant first step in easing the 39-year-old ban on crude exports, a new report says. The analysis released by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, focuses on condensate, a natural gas liquid made up of light fuels such as propane and butane. The fuels generally flow as liquids at normal temperatures even if they’re gas underground. Though it is chemically different than crude, condensate is swept under the oil export ban — at least as long as the light hydrocarbon is coming out...

Texas is producing about 36 percent of the country’s crude oil — three times more than any other state, according to the latest monthly figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Texas pumped nearly 2.9 million barrels of crude daily of the 7.9 million barrels produced nationwide in January, the latest month for which figures are available. The Gulf of Mexico produced about 17 percent, the second-largest portion, followed by North Dakota with about 12 percent of the U.S. crude. California and Alaska rounded out the top five crude-producing areas, each home to about 7 percent of the nation’s oil....

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his "indecision" and "moral equivalence" may encourage Russia's Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Palin said then: "After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next." For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine. In light of recent...

Turns out Sarah Palin was right. Obamacare does have Death Panels, and they are currently disguised as the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. In this week when Obamacare finally turns one day old, the political problems that our economic recovery face have never been on better display. While the stock market makes new highs, even the Fed is acknowledging that this recovery is different. And because it’s different, Wall Street is winning and Main Street is losing. “Although we work through financial markets, our goal is to help Main Street, not Wall Street,” said...

--snip-- Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has never made any bones, if you will, about her culinary preferences. She's a carnivore, a hunter and proud of both. So it's not really a surprise that her book, "Going Rogue," published today, extols the virtues of eating meat. "If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore," she wrote. "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” But the former Republican vice presidential candidate did not stop there. “I...

What a shock- a Russian-Ukrainian billionaire who made his initial fortune from dubious stock shares eminating from the breakup of the Soviet Union has been sending big, fat checks this year to establishment Republicans and Democrats who aren't too uppity re. foreign policy.Of course, most billionaire Russians who are part owners of huge Russian mining/energy companies over there are KGB/FSB and/or mafia-connected... just like Putin And London resident Leonard Blavatnik is a typical pro-Putin oligarch, getting rich off looting the Russian state then utilizing that ill-gotten fortune to spread Russian influence around the globe. In this case, Blavatnik made almost 20 BILLION from the Russian oil/mining industries...

I assumed that this non-story would have gone away on its own, but some conservative sites still insist on taking it seriously. Some Alaskans apparently are not opposed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent annexation of Crimea—in fact, they are hoping to be grabbed up next. More than 30,000 Alaskans have signed the petition “Alaska back to Russia,” pleading that the White House allow them to secede and join their native land. If the request garners 100,000 signatures by April 20, the White House will make an official response. The petition titled “WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: Alaska back...

This isn’t exclusively an “Obama problem” — the boss emeritus has been scorching ICE for its catch-and-release policies for ages, starting long before O took office — but it’s important counterprogramming to the left’s narrative that Obama is some sort of fanatic about deporting illegals. Jeff Sessions put one hole in that balloon last week when his office ran the numbers and found that that if you’re here illegally and don’t have a criminal record, you’re already basically exempt from deportation. ICE won’t touch you, whether because you qualify for some sort of statutory exclusion or because Obama’s definition of...

Unrest in the nation must be running high if people are looking for ways to pull up stakes and leave the union entirely. Some Texans petitioned the White House to break away in 2012, though not much came of the effort. Possibly my favorite breakaway story was that of the Conch Republic, which seceded from the US in 1982, immediately suing the government for $1B in war damages.Despite the lack of success on the part of these previous efforts, they all had one thing in common. They weren’t looking to join up with any other nations, but rather to strike...

Two newcomers, Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, are the hottest figures in the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party. In markedly different ways, they both claim to be the heirs to the party’s contemporary patron saint, Ronald Reagan. In a short time, these first-term lawmakers have electrified elements of the party’s base and rattled the Senate establishment. The top two Republican leaders in the chamber, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas, have had to defer to the political popularity of their junior colleagues. Both are outside the party mainstream, rock stars...

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Great Alaskan Earthquake. It struck at 5:36pm ADT on March 27, 1964. The moment magnitude was 9.2 on the Richter scale. There were 11 aftershocks on the day of the earthquake over 6.0, and 9 more over the next three weeks. The Earth "rang" like a bell for several weeks afterward. Vertical ground movements of 5 to 10 cm were detected in Texas and Florida.