Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has criticized rival Newt Gingrich for earning more than $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac even though he has as much as $500,000 invested in the U.S.-backed lender and its sister entity, Fannie Mae. A day before Romney planned to release his income tax returns, his old investments in two controversial government-backed housing lenders stirred up new questions at the same time his campaign targeted Gingrich for his work for Freddie Mac. The dimensions and the sources of Romney's wealth, which he has estimated to be as much as $250...

Q. "You were asked about world government and you said 'there is no world government'. What is your role in groups like the bohemian club, freemasonry, and that sort of thing, Council on Foreign Relations? Gingrich: "I don't belong to the Bohemian Club, I have no role in freemasonry. And my primary activity in Council on Foreign Relations was on figuring out how to fight terrorism"

The newly appointed chief of President Obama's Social Innovation and Civic Participation Council is a member of a globalist organization whose activists can be found throughout the Obama administration. Jonathan Greenblatt was appointed the new head of Obama's Social Innovation Unit earlier this month.... WND reported last week that until his appointment to the Obama administration, Greenblatt served as the director of a social justice group funded by George Soros. ..Now it has emerged that Greenblatt is a member of the globalist group Pacific Council on International Policy, or PCIP. He previously chaired PCIP's energy and environment committee and served...

To win in 2012, Obama's going to have to act a bit more like the tyrants he's so proud of toppling. Barack Obama can't get away from talking about dictators. Four years ago, candidate Obama controversially asserted that his administration would be open to negotiations with autocratic governments like Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Today, responding to Republican criticisms that he has been weak or hesitant on foreign policy, the U.S. president's supporters are more likely to trot out the fact that three longtime dictatorships have fallen under his watch. How much credit the president deserves for this is certainly...

Tim Pawlenty winced audibly when The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg made the obvious explicit. In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the columnist posited, "I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing." Mr. Goldberg's question, after all, was asked only after listening to Pawlenty's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations - a McCain redoubt where dreams of a progressive world order frequently substitute for the world that is. Pakistan, is urging the Afghans to dump the United States and look not just to Pakistan and Iran but also to China for help striking a deal with the...

Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they're told. Part one of our exclusive interview with Iserbyt breaks down how conditioning/training under a corporate agenda has replaced traditional education, leading to a deliberate dumbing down of Americans. Iserbyt further explains how Reagan signed agreements merging the U.S. and...

Of all the members of President Obama’s new national security team, Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, tapped as the fourth commander in two years to run the war in Afghanistan, may have the toughest assignment. In the coming days, Obama is expected to make a key strategic decision about how many troops the United States can afford to withdraw from Afghanistan without giving ground to the Taliban. To execute that high-stakes plan, he’ll turn to Allen, 57, a low-profile Marine with no Afghan fighting experience but with a reputation as a military turnaround specialist. Unlike the household name he is...

“That is very good,” Cain said this afternoon of Trump’s exit from the political stage. “…I’m very proud that I have never held public office because most of the people in Washington, D.C., they have held public office.”… “I was never threatened or concerned about Donald Trump in the first place, to be perfectly honest, because bullying, being a bully is not a leadership strategy, not if you want to lead the United States of America,” Cain told a group of Iowa reporters this afternoon. “And so I was not surprised he is not running.”

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama didn’t just ask for donations. His website asked donors to “declare their independence from a broken system by supporting the first presidential election truly funded by the people.” At the time, no one expected that by “the people” he meant a bunch of millionaires, but this is the conclusion we draw from Obama’s latest campaign initiative. Politico reported last week that Obama, having raised three-quarters of a billion dollars in his 2008 race, is now seeking out 400 elite campaign cash bundlers to raise $700,000 apiece for his 2012 re-election. If the plan succeeds, it...

Sen. Biden Questions Airstikes’ Drudge Report ^ | Wed Oct 24 2001 10:22:37 ET | Wilmington News Journal Posted on 10/24/2001 10:47:54 PM by tomball The top Democratic lawmaker on foreign policy said Monday that unless the bombing of Afghanistan ends “sooner rather than later,” America risks looking like a “high-tech bully,” the Wilmington News Journal reports. “Every moment it goes on, it makes the aftermath problems more severe,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan group of foreign policy experts, Biden said he understands the bombing...

When the internationalist-minded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) decided it was time to take a hard look at the growing influence of the Tea Party movement in America, it selected “one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy,” Walter Russell Mead, to do the study. Appearing as the headline article in Foreign Affairs for March/April 2011, his article is entitled “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy.” Mead’s credentials for representing one of the leading lights of the Anglo-American Establishment are impeccable: an honors graduate from the Groton School and Yale University, he was the Henry A. Kissinger...

I have long known about the existence of the CFR - Council on Foreign Relations. In some recent readings, there was a listing of many past and current members: politicians of both parties, non-elected government officials, military, etc. The light for me went off when I saw WJ Clinton and GHW Bush as members. Which, for me, explained their collegial relations during the Haiti fund raisings, etc. The CFR is also one of the long term proponents of the New World Order, i.e., elites over the non-elites, I guess. Again for me, it means we really don't get "two party"...

CAIRO/VIENNA (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei said on Friday he could run in Egypt's presidential elections if the Egyptian people asked him to, denying a report in an Austrian newspaper that he would not run. "This is not true," ElBaradei said in a phone interview with Al Jazeera. "If the Egyptian people want me to continue the change process, I will not disappoint the Egyptian people." ElBaradei has tended to answer the question of whether he wants to run for president, often asked of him, by saying he was ready for a role in helping Egypt achieve political...

Two key senators offered and passed a resolution on Thursday that calls for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to hand over power to a caretaker government. The resolution offered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also call for elections and urges that Egypt’s military demonstrate “maximum professionalism and restraint” in working to restore order. In a floor speech, McCain warned that the situation in Egypt could turn into a “genuine massacre.” “We cannot afford that, and we must do everything in our power to see that it stops,” McCain said. “This is a...

This is an important article. Right now it appears to be pdf only so you have to go to the link I've given. Here's a pull quote: It is not out of the question that Barack Obama is actually working to insure that our allies in the Middle East, including Egypt and Jordan, follow in the footsteps of Iran in installing a radical Islamist government. It is not out of the question that Obama seeks the demise of our staunchest ally, Israel. Think about it. Which side was Obama when there was trouble in Honduras? Which side was Obama on...

According to Richard Holbrooke, Richard Holbrooke is essentially this country's top diplomat -- Hillary Clinton is merely his "pupil. This despite the fact that Holbrooke has hit the trifecta of shady business dealings over the last few years: a member of AIG's board with more than $800,000 in compensation, a managing director at Lehman Brothers, and the recipient of a "Friends of Angelo" loan from Countrywide (that alone was enough to get Jim Johnson thrown under the Obama campaign bus). Now comes another revelation from the New York Times. Despite repeated denials, according to three sources, Holbrooke did offer former...

Federal Judge Blocks Red Light Camera Removal in Houston, Texas Houston, Texas city attorneys attempt to preserve red light camera program by throwing lawsuit filed with vendor. A federal judge issued an order last Friday blocking the immediate removal of red light cameras from Houston, Texas intersections. On November 2, voters adopted an amendment to the city charter making photo tickets unenforceable, against the wishes of the Houston city council and the private vendor that operates the cameras, American Traffic Solutions (ATS). Over the Thanksgiving holiday, US District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Lynn N. Hughes worked...

US Pacific Command’s Adm William Fallon says the group wasn’t conducting anti-sub operations, but the fact remains that the submarine did slip past the group’s security screen undetected and popped up within firing range of the Kitty Hawk.

In a short concession speech, state Sen. Bill Brady, the Bloomington Republican who lost his campaign for governor, made one thing plain Friday. We've got Gov. Jell-O for the next four years. Brady didn't actually mention anything gelatinous. He didn't remind us that the Jell-O will quiver on Boss Madigan's serving platter, with the state facing a $15 billion budget deficit by next summer and public pensions out of control and Pat Quinn owing his election to public employee unions.

Anyone critical of President Obama being in India right now is an "idiot," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bluntly served on his morning show, which prides itself on being a safe haven for different views. India is "exactly where [President Obama] should be" right now, he opined. With Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass on as a guest Monday morning, Scarborough clamored that President Obama "needs" to be in India right now for the sake of U.S. foreign policy. "I would send my President to India, like once a month, if I could, for long weekends," he emphasized. Scarborough hit left-wing...

Republican strategist Karl Rove said today that in running a slew of TV ads paid for by undisclosed donors, GOP groups are only doing what Democrats have done in the past. “This has been going on for a long while,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Suddenly everybody’s gotten spun up about it this year… Once we copied what liberals did, liberals got upset.” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), who heads the committee working to elect House Democrats, replied, “Karl Rove just told you he did not want the voters to know who is spending tens of...

Rauf on the Ropes An Islamic community center at Ground Zero seems increasingly unlikely. 13 September 2010 The white flag hasn’t reached the top of the flagpole yet, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf all but surrendered on Monday morning in his battle to build a Muslim interfaith community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero. At an unusual meeting Monday morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan, Rauf said that he wanted to find a “solution” to the furious imbroglio over the planned center, which opponents say is inappropriate, insensitive to the memory of...

A recent State Department appointee is wife to the founder of a radical organization whose leaders include a socialist party founder, communists and a leader of the 1960's anti-American Weatherman terrorist organization. Barbara Shailor, appointed by the State Department as special representative for international labor affairs in May, also carries her own ties to some of the same radicals. Prior to her appointment, Shailor was director of the international department of the AFL-CIO, the country's largest union, and served as senior advisor to the union's President John Sweeney on foreign and international policy issues. She is also a member of...

The developer of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero has begun repaying the $270,000 he owes in property taxes. Sharif el-Gamal walked into the Department of Finance payment center at 66 John St. on Wednesday and said he wanted to settle his tax bill, a department spokesman said. He paid $35,449.17 -- 15 percent of what his real-estate firm, Soho Properties, owed -- and said that the remaining $236,327.81 would then be taken care of in eight quarterly payments.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) on Sunday strongly criticized Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam seeking to build an Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero. “He seems by his actions to be more interested in confrontation than in healing,” Giuliani said on NBC’s "Meet the Press." The former mayor alleged that the plan is hurtful to the vast majority of family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Giuliani also said the imam has not been transparent about the project’s financing, and cited Rauf’s 2001 comment on CBS’s 60 Minutes that “United States...

PLAYING WITH FIRE

The ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee accused the imam behind the mosque project near Ground Zero of arm-twisting and "blackmailing" to push Park51 through. "To me, it's almost as if he's blackmailing and threatening the United States that somehow if the mosque is not approved or people speak out against his mosque, you have to worry about being attacked by Islamic terrorists," Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on Fox Business Network on Friday. King said that the Islamic center was being "put their to make a statement, not to build bridges, but...

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

9/11/10 Koran burning at Ground Zero captured on video.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has advertised the controversial Ground Zero mosque as an Islamic outreach to the community, a cultural center open and intended to unify all religions. Today, he still stands by that assertion, even as his proposed mosque continues to exact the opposite effect before it’s even built. Now, harsh critics, such as Chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, William Murray, are presented with even more perplexing information in the form of Sharif El-Gamal (pictured), the mysterious developer behind the mosque. Reportedly a waiter by profession who suddenly “came into” the kind of money to spearhead a $100...

Click The Picture To Enlarge I had an initial rough scan of this forwarded to me by a very respected elder Jewish friend and historian. He wrote: "In the current issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the foreign policy journal put out by the Council on Foreign Relations, this full page, color ad appeared on the inside back cover. Look at it carefully. See who is designated as "Resistance" and who is designated as bring "Stability" to the situation. In the upside down, topsy-turvy world of double-speak this is being promulgated via every library in the U.S. as well as in...

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 17, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Delayed, but not undaunted, the leadership of the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress may force a Thursday vote on a new campaign finance bill, the Orwellian-named “Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act” that has pro-life, pro-family groups, and even the ACLU crying foul. Critics say the measure will have a chilling effect on political free speech, especially with mid-term elections just around the corner. Late Wednesday afternoon, National Right to Life Legislative Director Douglas Johnson told LifeSiteNews.com that the House Rules Committee was meeting at that moment to make...

All I could think about this weekend was one word: Halliburton. Everyone in the universe knows what Halliburton is. It's Dick Cheney's evil oil company. Yup, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, they're just puppets of the big oil companies like Halliburton. So, getting in bed with Big Oil is a touchy subject with the left. They won't stand for anyone with any sort of a connection with an oil company. Oil is evil! Yet no one knows the word "Petrobras." Suddenly the left's concerns with politicians and Big Oil seem to have dissipated. But you've heard George Soros' name...

Splash! Could that be the sound of Lord Mandelson hitting one of the Dolce hotel’s four pools? Or Robert Zoellick of the World Bank? Paul Volcker of the US Economic Recovery Advisory Board? Or merely the euro taking another dive? That is the thing about the Bilderberg group’s top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints. Across the world, secretaries to the rich and the powerful have blocked out the next three days in their bosses’ calendars for their annual gathering, this time at the Dolce in Sitges, one of Spain’s most exclusive...

Once considered a "conspiracy" theory, the secretive story of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderbergs – tycoons worth more than the combined wealth of all Americans – will be told in public before the European Parliament. Author Daniel Estulin, whose work "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group" has sold millions of copies, has been invited to present an unprecedented speech before the European Parliament in Brussels June 1 on the subject of the secretive cabal. "This is an opportunity to bring Bilderberg into the mainstream," Estulin said. "A subject that was once considered to be in...

(D-N.Y.), Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) plan to unveil legislation to close campaign-finance loopholes opened by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The legislation was written in consultation with the White House. Here are details that have been circulated to Democratic congressional staffers, and were obtained by POLITICO:

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds Contributor April 4, 2010 "If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981. Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew. In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants...

PHOENIX, Arizona -- Behind a Dunkin' Donuts in a shopping center on East Cactus Road, J.D. Hayworth's Senate campaign headquarters has a low-budget look. Near the front door, pinned to a cubicle wall, is a campaign T-shirt proclaiming Hayworth "The Consistent Conservative," offered for sale at $15 each. Volunteers are stuffing envelopes at a folding table that holds seven telephones, the phone lines dangling down from the ceiling. A large bulletin board is festooned with letters from supporters, including a woman from Dewey, Arizona, who wrote to say, "Sock it to him, please!" The "him" is, of course, Sen. John...

Apparently out of a sense of loyalty to the man who plucked her from Alaska and put her in the national spotlight, McCain’s former VP running mate Sarah Palin has been campaigning in his behalf. (We grimace at this, but we can appreciate the loyalty…..maybe) In light of the revelations below, we hope she will reconsider. New Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has also shown up in Arizona in McCain’s behalf, again out of loyalty for McCain’s support when Brown was still in “obscurity.” _______________________________________________ J.D. Hayworth is the true conservative opposing John McCain in the Arizona GOP primary...

Listen Up! Great New Tune! McCain's Got to Go! This one says it all! The CD came by mail anonymously to the Terry Anderson show. "Your career has hit a snag, it's time to pack your bags...it's time to hit the road!"FLUSH the JOHN.mp3

A federal appeals court on Friday handed another victory to conservative opponents of campaign-finance restrictions, striking down limits on individual contributions to independent groups who want to use the money for or against candidates in federal elections. But in its unanimous decision, the nine-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also said that a conservative group called SpeechNow.org must disclose its donors and other details of its finances to the Federal Election Commission, a requirement that the group had sought to overturn... The ruling amounts to a mixed bag for beleaguered advocates of campaign-finance restrictions, who are...

The shady Iranian fundraiser who for years donated lucrative sums to top Democrats—including the president, vice president and secretary of state—has pleaded guilty to a major bank-fraud scheme that could land him in jail for nearly two decades.Disgraced Democratic money man Hassan Nemazee admitted this week that he defrauded three financial institutions out of nearly $300 million in loan proceeds by falsifying documents and signatures to show he had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collateral. The Ivy League-educated crook then used the proceeds to donate big bucks to the campaigns of federal, state and local candidates. Among them...

Hillary Clinton will not easily be mistaken for Sir Winston Churchill, but our nation’s Secretary of State borrowed a metaphor from old “Winnie” recently when lecturing on the importance of freedom on the Internet. As the former British Prime Minister warned of the communist “iron curtain” descending on Eastern Europe at the beginning of the Cold War, Secretary Clinton has warned of an “information curtain” falling in those nations where governments have used modern technology to suppress and plunder, rather than facilitate, the flow of information among peoples and nations. The Secretary made her comments in Washington on January 21,...

My brother and I have a running conversation about whether it is a good thing that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., didn't become president. We both voted for him, but I decided early on, as much as I oppose every Marx-tinged thing President Obama stands for, I was glad Obama had won and McCain had lost. At least, I was glad McCain had lost. That's because only out of ashes may the phoenix be reborn. The liberal-lite frustrations of a McCain administration would have smoldered on the Right but lit few fires, dampening the possibility of real post-Bush regeneration. From Bush's...

Much has been made of late about the hyper-partisan political environment in America. On Tuesday, Sen. Evan Bayh explained his surprising recent decision to leave the senate by lamenting a "dysfunctional" political system riddled with "brain-dead partisanship." It seems you'd be hard-pressed to get Republicans and Democrats inside and outside of Washington to agree on anything these days, that if one party publicly stated its intention to add a "puppies are adorable" declaration to its platform, that the other party would immediately launch a series of anti-puppy advertisements. But it appears that one issue does unite Americans across the political...

The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller with Zbigniew Brzezinski as executive director, after Brzezinski published Between Two Ages, which became the blueprint for the TC. David read and appreciated his ideas, which included, “Though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.” “Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external...

In 2000, Senator John McCain asked me to campaign on his behalf for president. I was honored to do so. I remember traveling to South Carolina to act as a one-man truth squad and doing countless television interviews for John. It was a tremendous experience and, as we all know, John came up short. But as always, he fought hard for what he thought was right. But the John McCain I supported for president in 2000 is not the same John McCain I’ve watched frustrate conservatives time and again as our senator. He still fights hard, all right, but too...

In the matter of Obama v. Alito, I side with the president. I agree with him on the merits of the argument, but that’s beside the point.... Mark Salter is the former Chief of Staff to Senator John McCain, senior adviser to his presidential campaign, and co-author of his five books.

The scene is the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut . The year 2000. The congressman has $100 chips stacked high, having a grand time at the crap table. He likes to gamble and isn't afraid to show some temper when he loses. Along for the ride are his campaign manager and one of the two biggest lobbyist handing out campaign money from various Indian tribes who was also a 20 year friend of the legislator. By now we've all heard about the money J.D. Hayworth received from an Indian tribe by way of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was one...

Each idea below is totally unwinnable, downright daft, and probably unconstitutional to boot. Some are mutually incompatible. But each would effectively end the corruption that campaign finance “reform” advocates worry about. Each would also show more respect for individual liberty than the usual fare we get from them. And there’s even a method to my madness, which I will explain below. Life Terms Members of Congress serve for life. Few special interests will throw money at the political process in this system, because the cycle of funding and response won’t exist anymore. Elections will be hard to predict and infrequent,...