Free Republic

Biden energy loan czar Jigar Shah was a major investor in a struggling green energy company that is in advanced talks to receive a $1.5 billion loan from his office. The Department of Energy’s loan office, where Shah serves as director, is working to fast-track the funding to Plug Power, a hydrogen fuel company on the brink of bankruptcy. But the ties between Plug Power and Shah could add to concerns from lawmakers about conflicts of interest in the federal loan program. Securities and Exchange Commission records detail a long-standing financial relationship between Plug Power and Generate Capital, an investment...

A private trade association founded by the Biden administration’s energy loan czar Jigar Shah has become a gatekeeper for companies seeking billions of dollars in financing from Shah’s office. The Cleantech Leaders Roundtable has seen a surge in its influence and revenue since its former president, Shah, was tapped to lead the powerful $400 billion Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO) in 2021. The group, which didn’t have a website until three years ago, now regularly hosts sold-out receptions featuring Shah for its paying members across the country. Last week, the DOE Loans Program Office and Cleantech Leaders co-hosted...

Carter owes the people of Iran an apology. ... Carter's critics always point to his handling of the Iran hostage crisis as the most glaring flaw in his time in office. During the course of that 444-day nightmare, a student mob held 52 U.S. diplomats and civilians hostage, and no amount of negotiation—or attempted military action—could get them released. Thankfully, that sad chapter finally ended on Jan. 20, 1980, the day President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office at the U.S. Capitol. But Carter's true transgression—the original sin that has complicated and shaped U.S. policy in the Middle East...

Reza Pahlavi, the son of late Iranian Shah, arrived in Israel on Monday on a trip that showed Israeli embrace of the Iranian figure who is seeking a regime change in his home country. Pahlavi arrived in Israel together with his wife, Yasmine. He met later with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon arrival, Pahlavi said he is committed to work for peace with Israel. The couple was welcomed at Ben Gurion International Airport by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel. The minister referred to Pahlavi as "the Iranian crown prince" and as "the most senior Iranian personality ever to come on...

The foreign-headquartered company that recently purchased the leading U.S. electronic voting firm is boasting that it was highlighted in a report on how technology is making the election process more efficient, secure, transparent, accessible and reliable. The report, WND has learned, was authored by a firm with links to billionaire activist George Soros. The information comes after WND reported two weeks ago that SCYTL recently acquired the software division of a non-profit election organization tied to Soros’ Open Society Institute. Yesterday, WND reported SCYTL announced its technology will be deployed at more U.S. jurisdictions ahead of the 2014 midterm elections....

There's a thing where racists supposedly think all members of one ethnicity look alike. While it doesn't actually make someone racist to not recognize the feature variations of an ethnic group he hasn't been as exposed to, the Left likes to think it does. Which makes Leftist news network MSNBC's gaffe even more hilarious. MSNBC host Chris Hayes was talking about White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. As usual on television news, if you're going to talk about someone, you show an image of them. However, apparently his staff didn't bother to look too deep. Either that, or they...

Pundits have marveled at what a big surprise it is that ordinary Iranians have revolted against the mullahs. It's a surprise to them, but no surprise to American Thinker's readers, whose Iranian contributors have kept us posted for years about what is really going on in Iran. Just look at these pieces by Hamid Bahrami, Reza Shafiee, Hassan Mahmoudi, Amil Imani, and Shahriar Kia. Over and over again, these writers warned there is a problem, and now Iranians' protests against corruption, soaring prices, environmental ruin, Revolutionary Guards thuggery, poverty, and bank collapses have become the "surprise" story of the day....

William Faulkner once mused that the past is never dead, in fact it’s not even past. The story of the coup that toppled Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 may not be dead, but it is unhinged from history. Tall tales by a scion of the American establishment—former CIA agent and presidential grandson Kermit Roosevelt—and reams of studies by left-wing professors have sustained the myth that the Eisenhower administration ousted Mossadeq. The Iranians are mere bystanders in this story, watching helplessly as a malevolent America manipulates their nation’s destiny. Most academic speculations remain cloistered in college campuses, but the...

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the tumultuous years of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, died on Friday at a hospital in Virginia. He was 89. His death, at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, was announced on Friday by his daughter, Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.” Like his predecessor Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Brzezinski was a foreign-born scholar (he in Poland, Mr. Kissinger in Germany) with considerable influence in global affairs, both before and long...

In the mid twentieth century, US-Iran relations prospered. Many Americans celebrated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a model king. President Lyndon B. Johnson pronounced in 1964: "What is going on in Iran is about the best thing going on anywhere in the world". During the 1970's Iran's Shah propelled Iran into becoming a dynamic middle-east regional power. The Shah implemented broad economic and social reforms, including enhanced rights for women, and religious and ethnic minorities. Economic and educational reforms were adopted, initiatives to cleanse politics of social upheaval were systematized, and the civil service system was reformed. When sectors of...

In 1979, after a long campaign of political pressure applied by the Carter administration in the United States, the Shah of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, ending a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years since the rule of Cyrus the Great. The stage was set for the rise of the Ayatollah, and the establishment of a theocracy in Iran that, today, most Iranians do not even want. But what if none of that had ever happened? While a momentous departure from actual history, it is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds....

Another nice catch from the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross brings into sharp relief another aspect of the danger to national security that Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail system created. Chief of staff Cheryl Mills lost her Blackberry in March 2010, a little over a year into Hillary’s tenure at State, which had been used with the unauthorized and non-secure homebrew Hillary server. She reached out to the State Department to inform a familiar figure of the loss: Records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show [Cheryl] Mills revealed that she lost her Blackberry in...

In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and took more than sixty Americans hostage for 444 days. Those hostages were not released until Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President on January 20th, 1981. This week the Obama government admitted it is paying the same Muslim extremist Iranian government that took those U.S. hostages in 1979 $1.7 BILLION in penalties and fees the Iranians claim was owed to them for agreements the United States had with the previous Iranian government prior to the revolution that saw Iran overtaken by radical Islamic fundamentalists. Read more at http://dcwhispers.com/insanity-obama-govt-gives-iran-1-7-billion-in-were-sorry-money/#7r1Bsxpl5oU8fOru.99

Iranian Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the country's deposed shah whose glamorous life epitomized the excesses of her brother's rule, has died after decades in exile. She was 96. [...] Reza Pahlavi, a son of the shah, announced his aunt's death in a Facebook post on Thursday night. Her personal website said she died Thursday, without elaborating. Robert F. Armao, a longtime adviser to Princess Ashraf in New York, said the princess died in Europe on Thursday, declining to elaborate on the cause of her death. He said there were no immediate plans for a funeral. ...

In the wonderfully funny movie “Mom and Dad Save the World,” one of the heroes admits that his people are not so bright. “But what we lack in brains,” he says, “we make up for in ...good intentions.” Gentle mocking here of the frequent appeal of the incompetent for tolerance of their mistakes: How can you blame us if our intentions are good? The trouble is that much of what's really rotten in the world is due to people who thought that their good intentions would ensure a favorable result. Maybe the best example of this: former president Jimmy Carter....

The common wisdom is wrong; a history lesson is in order. A cousin of mine has finished his freshman year in college; like most freshmen, he now knows absolutely everything. He took it upon himself, this week, to announce (to my brother, who is a very patient man) that Iran’s Islamist dictators were “a predictable consequence of American imperialism,” which manifested itself through “the CIA’s international pro-fascist crimes.” That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s widely believed nonsense — and not just among college kids who’ve read the first chapter of a Noam Chomsky book. There are serious men who are...

The State Department is delaying the release of a volume from its U.S. foreign relations history that deals with the CIA-backed overthrow of an Iranian prime minister in the 1950s out of concern that publication could undermine nuclear diplomacy with the Islamic republic. The decision was made at a September meeting of the department’s advisory committee on historical diplomatic documentation and recorded in minutes released this week. The foreign relations records aren’t supposed to be suppressed for longer than three decades. Stephen Randolph, the department’s historian, informed the gathering that the volume on U.S. policy in Iran would be withheld...

In 1979, after a long campaign of political pressure applied by the Carter administration in the United States, the Shah of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, ending a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years since the rule of Cyrus the Great. The stage was set for the rise of the Ayatollah, and the establishment of a theocracy in Iran that, today, most Iranians do not even want. But what if none of that had ever happened? While a momentous departure from actual history, it is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds....

Truth be told, it was principally the Republican party in the United States that saw the value of Mohammad Reza as an ally and treated him with warmth, respect, and friendship. Prominent Republican President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1980 to 1988, spoke favorably of the Shah, calling him "a stalwart ally" and criticizing Jimmy Carter's attitudes towards him. Another Republican President, the well-known Richard Nixon, who sat from 1969 until 1974, openly praised the Shah. Hosting the Shah at a dinner at the White House, Nixon referenced a visit he had made to Iran in the aftermath of...

(Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls a business empire worth around $95 billion - a sum exceeding the value of his oil-rich nation's current annual petroleum exports - a six-month Reuters investigation shows. The little-known organization, called Setad, is one of the keys to the Iranian leader's enduring power and now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming. Setad has built its empire on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties belonging to ordinary Iranians - members of religious minorities, Shi'ite Muslims,...