Free Republic

The United States on Thursday downgraded the status of its main diplomatic mission to the Palestinians by placing it under the authority of the U.S. Embassy to Israel. The move, which was immediately denounced by the Palestinians and hailed by Israel, is the latest Trump administration decision to align with Israeli government views and a victory for U.S. Ambassador David Friedman. He had long sought to end the Jerusalem consulate’s independent status but had faced resistance from within the State Department. Friedman’s push picked up steam in May after the Trump administration moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem...

An attorney for Trump, Jay Sekulow and his senior counsel Carly Gammill appeared in a Washington D.C. federal court last week to find out when they will be receiving documents related to the Obama unmasking scandal. The ACLJ (American Center For Law and Justice) filed a FOIA lawsuit last summer and they are just now beginning to receive documents. Sekulow revealed the first batch of unmasking documents on his radio show Jay Live on Tuesday. The ACLJ received heavily redacted emails from former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power that show unprecedented unmasking and political bias in the final...

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speculated the Mueller special counsel probe will result in some sort of finding that will lead to a “constitutional crisis.” That according to Friedman will lead to former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama having to step and prevent a constitutional crisis.

News coverage of Israel is distorted both by the lopsided amount of attention it gets from world media and from a “herd mentality” that embraces and promotes a narrow, simplistic view of “what the story is,” according to an author and former Associated Press reporter in Israel. Israel accounts for 0.01 percent of the world’s territory and has roughly the population of New York City, but when Matti Friedman joined the AP in 2006, he recalled in Jerusalem this week, the wire service had 40 full-time staff in the country. That was more than the number of AP staff covering...

If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he were a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another … If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies. No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate...

The Palestinian Authority blasted US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, calling recent comments made by the Ambassador regarding Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria “unacceptable”. Last week, Ambassador Friedman spoke with the Jerusalem Post, which published the interview on Friday. During the course of the interview, Friedman referred to PA claims that Israel is “occupying” Judea and Samaria, calling Israel’s presence in the area the “alleged occupation”. In response, Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization penned a letter to diplomats lambasting Ambassador Friedman for his comments, calling them unacceptable, AFP reported Wednesday. …

Milton Friedman's prescient notions regarding Antifa and all like-minded communist brownshirts: Why Communism Must Lead to Corruption

Sometimes truth really is the best defense. All but two Democrats sided with J Street over Israel and voted against the confirmation of Ambassador Friedman. Republicans stood with the Jewish pro-Israel community. J Street lost. Jews and supporters of Israel won. Of the Senate Dems who spoke against Friedman, all but one were recipients of sizable amounts of J Street money. J Street is the anti-Israel pressure group set up by George Soros. Schatz, Udall, Van Hollen and Leahy had all gotten cash from J Street. Al Franken had not. But he had a better grievance against Ambassador Friedman. "Mr....

The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts. Trump took office promising to fix our trade imbalance with China, and what’s the first thing he did? He threw away a U.S.-designed free-trade deal with 11 other Pacific nations — a pact whose members make up 40 percent of global G.D.P. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was based largely on U.S. economic interests, benefiting our fastest-growing technologies and agribusinesses, and had...

The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts. [] Trump took his Make China Great campaign to a new level on Tuesday by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power. Trump also wants to weaken existing mileage requirements for U.S.-made vehicles. Stupid.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted in favor of recommending the nomination of President Donald Trump’s choice for US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, by a tally of 12-9. The vote was almost completely divided along party lines. The only Democrat who broke ranks to join all Republican members of the committee to vote yes, was New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. Chairman of the committee, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee explained his decision and that of his Republican colleagues in the committee to recommend Trump’s nominee. “Mr. Friedman is an impassioned advocate for America and for strengthening the mutually beneficial...

One of Rush Limbaugh’s classic maxims is that when it comes to liberals’ demands for investigations, it’s not the nature of the evidence; it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters. Thomas Friedman provided a perfect illustration of Rush’s rule on today’s Meet the Press. Discussing the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with the Russians regarding the 2016 election, Friedman said “I agree: there is no evidence, which is why we need a special prosecutor or an independent commission to get to the bottom of it.” View the video here.

Five former US ambassadors to Israel claimed Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s choice for the position is unqualified, and they are urging senators to carefully consider the nomination. In a letter sent to members of the Foreign Relations Committee, the former diplomats said David Friedman has staked out “extreme, radical positions” and has derided the two-state solution as an “illusory” fix for a non-existent problem. “We believe the committee should satisfy itself that Mr. Friedman has the balance and the temperament required to represent the United States as ambassador to Israel,” they wrote. The committee is scheduled to meet Thursday...

Personnel is policy.” That’s one of the great cliches of Washington staffing, and we have an example of its truth in Donald Trump’s nomination of the New York bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel. Much will be made of the blunt Friedman’s very harsh words about left-wing Jewish groups and about President Obama, and these will be used in an effort to derail his nomination. Friedman wrote an op-ed earlier this year likening JStreet to the kapos—the Jews who worked for the Nazis policing their own people. It was wrong of him to do so, but...

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust.

When it comes to assessing the presidential race, I prefer to listen to the spies. They tend to be brutally unsentimental, see through the nonsense and cut to the cold, hard bottom line. And right now, two of the world’s foremost former spymasters are sending uncoded messages about what it will mean for America and the Western alliance if Donald Trump is elected president. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce former C.I.A. Director Robert Gates and his longtime nemesis and former K.G.B. agent, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Putin is voting Trump. Gates is not. In an essay in The Wall...

Attorney David M. Friedman, one of Donald trump's two advisors on Israel, told Arutz Sheva in an exclusive interview that Donald Trump has assured him he will not pressure Israel into "peace processes" and concessions that it does not want. “I’ve known Donald Trump for about 15 years," he said, in a conversation with Dr. Joseph Frager. "I met him in the context of being his lawyer, and we’ve become friends over the years. He know how much I love Israel, and hopefully people who read Arutz Sheva know how much I love Israel because I write a column for...

This old video seemed quite appropriate to dust off with the resurgence of "free college" demands from the Left. Back in 1985, a young David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, sat across from economist Milton Friedman and was schooled on why government-subsidized higher education is a bad idea. The video is courtesy of Liberty Pen. Friedman set the stage for the debate involving Brooks and the other panelists: The question I want to raise is whether those higher education expenditures are a justifiable activity of government and what there consequences are and whether they really are a desirable...

Thomas Friedman’s email account must have been hacked! Assuming the New York Times columnist doesn’t walk his offerings over to the paper’s editorial page office, what else could explain the appearance last night of an essay on trade under his byline so chock full of embarrassing mistakes and stale canards? True, the column had a characteristically clever, Friedman-like premise: Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump shouldn’t be criticizing President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement because it contains exactly the kinds of tough-minded provisions that the champion deal-maker would insist on himself. Unfortunately, whoever really wrote the article revealed such ignorance...

Senator Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate and America’s leading socialist, announced today that he would be introducing a bill to make college “free” for students seeking bachelor degrees. Had Milton Friedman been alive today, he would have no doubt thrown cold water on Sanders’ proposal. First, he would have likely addressed the fallacy known as the free lunch myth. You can watch him do so below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZMxvlKxyk0 Secondly, and more specifically, he would have discussed the economics of higher education. You can watch him do so below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-_r_t7AZU It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a conservative/libertarian intellectual with the communication skills of...