Free Republic

Insurgent conservatives seeking to pull the Republican Party to the right raised more money last year than the groups controlled by the party establishment, whose bulging bank accounts and ties to major donors have been their most potent advantage in the running struggle over the party’s future, according to new campaign filings and interviews with officials. Baby Newt The shift in fortunes among the largest and most influential outside political groups could have an enormous impact in the 2014 election cycle, as the warring Republican factions prepare to square off in a series of Senate and House primaries around the...

From the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world of the Second Vatican Council In the face of death the enigma of human existence reaches its climax. Man is not only the victim of pain and the progressive deterioration of his body; he is also, and more deeply, tormented by the fear of final extinction. But the instinctive judgement of his heart is right when he shrinks from, and rejects, the idea of a total collapse and definitive end of his own person. He carries within him the seed of eternity, which cannot be reduced to matter alone,...

This video of actual combat in Afghanistan will make you smile and make you angry. It will make you smile because it follows the work of two Apache helicopter crews as they destroy a nest of Tally –ban troops who were trying to set up an ambush of a Special Forces patrol. It will make you angry because it...

If there is one thing I hate, it is spam. I hate spam email, spam snail mail, and most of all, spam comments on my blog. I take great pains to keep spam comments off Political Realities. At the same time, I want to make it easy for normal commenters to leave their thoughts on the blog, even if I disagree with what they have to say. That said, this post may only be of interest to those of you who operate WordPress blogs, but it is important enough for me to share in a post of its own. Every...

What is wrong with this picture? What kind of people are we when we celebrate sleaze and ignore honor and valor ?

Conservative links at Reaganite Republican...

More/links at Reaganite Republican...

According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), different generations have paid and will continue to pay disparate amounts of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, and they will also receive dissimilar amounts of Medicare and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number 18. This is on Ryan Seacrest's radio show yesterday. It's Kanye West. WEST: There's no way that Kim Kardashian shouldn't be on the cover of Vogue. She's like the most intriguing woman. Right now Barbara Walters is calling her every day. Of course we're the most interesting. Nobody's looking at what Obama is wearing, nobody's -- Michelle Obama can't Instagram a pic like what my girl Instagram. RUSH: Now, we've all been sitting around waiting for the turning point here, and a lot of people think that Obama's in the middle of...

One of my posts on the Civil War just got its 40,000th "view." On December 27, 2011, I posted an article titled The U.S. Constitution and Civil War. It had 42 views that year, 18,728 in 2012 and has had 21,234 so far this year, for a total of 40,004. That amounts to just over thirty percent of the views at my little blog since it began. The progression, suggesting a current level of interest in the Civil War, strikes me as interesting and I thought that maybe others might be similarly interested.For anyone who may be interested, here is...

The basic framework of the deal Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid have hammered out is coming to light. The provision the GOP is crowing over — that the Obama Administration will check the income levels of those who receive a subsidy — is already the law. Meanwhile, the GOP will let the rest of the year proceed above sequester level spending, give the unions another carve out of Obamacare, and extend the debt limit to February. I’m sure at the last minute they’ll also delay the medical device tax so it looks like Harry Reid caved on something. Really, it’ll...

Read it. Email it. Tweet it. Retweet it. Facebook it. ***picture at link***

Some of my favorite stories are about the underdogs and the lost causes. They are about men and women and groups of people that had no hope of succeeding, but they raced forward anyway. They fought the battles, they ran the races, they stood up and spoke of their dreams, even when it seemed like the whole world was against them.

If you haven’t been in a bubble cut off from all forms of media lately, it would be impossible to have missed all of the warnings being issued about the impending loss of our electrical grid. This isn’t just coming from so-called “gloom and doom” sites or from alternative media. Major mainstream media sources such as ABC News, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CBS News have all issued the alerts. Unfortunately, the hordes seem to be brushing these warnings off as something that cannot happen, because the reality is too unpleasant to even contemplate. Many seem to...

<p>He was born of a mixed race parentage, who graduated from Columbia University, and worked as a community organizer, before being elected president. He has now announced his resignation.</p>

Radical group Femen is mainly known for staging topless media stunts to protest oppression. And while they’ve been presented as a feminist female empowerment group, a new documentary revealed that the group is actually run by a man who happens to love hot topless women.Victor Svyatski is listed as a consultant for the group, however filmmaker Kitty Green — who just completed the documentary “Ukraine is Not a Brothel” about the group — says that Svyatski is more of the mastermind behind the stunts.Green told The Independent, “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because...

I’m not a rap fan. But I know who Jay-Z is. He’s sold 50 million CDs. He’s won 17 Grammy Awards. He has a net worth of $500 million, according to Forbes magazine. And, oh yes, he’s married to Beyoncé, Billboard’s top female artist of the 2000s. So, Jay Z just “dropped” his latest CD, “Magna Carta…Holy Grail.” Magna Carta is a play on the rapper’s real name, Shawn Carter. Holy Grail? Well, that’s where Jay Z offends this Christ follower’s sensibilities. A review of the rap star’s 12th studio album appears in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I...

Sara Palin is a gifted politician. Her love of country is as clear as a winter's day. She could be a good president, maybe even a great one, depending on circumstances. She has all the attributes of a leader: she's personally charming, down-to-earth, she's attractive, but her writing drives me crazy! Every sentence she composes or utters in real-time is a convoluted mess of subordinate clauses. Every idea introduced gives way to a meandering aside, a parenthetical more

The FBI and Seattle authorities were investigating a Nevada man who was arrested after he was spotted on the University of Washington campus in a stolen truck carrying multiple explosive devices, stolen firearms and body armor, police said Thursday. The man was arrested a few blocks away after a police pursuit near Seattle Children's Hospital late Wednesday, said John Vinson, chief of the University of Washington police. He gave no further details of the pursuit, but he described the arrest as "high-risk." Justin Miles Jasper was arrested early Thursday and was being held without bail in the King County jail...

We keep hearing insistent claims that if Republicans don't pass amnesty yesterday it will be the end of the party. Can I see the math on that? I can see why bringing in 30 million new Democratic voters would be good for the Democrats, but how does it help Republicans? Maybe conservatives shouldn't blindly trust the calculations of the guy who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. If I were a Democrat, I would have tried to sneak this bill past Republicans by proposing amnesty only after reaching some easily rigged benchmarks. But,...