Free Republic

Unlike Kerry, Obama Covets Soros' SupportRobert B. Bluey, CNSNews.comWednesday, July 28, 2004BOSTON – Without a formidable Republican opponent in his U.S. Senate race, Barack Obama has little reason not to take money from billionaire liberal financier George Soros, a man other Democrats keep at a distance. When Obama took the stage Tuesday night for a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention, the candidate for Senate in Illinois was introduced to a wider audience ... [snip!] Democrats expect him to pass any test he faces. They view Obama as a rising star within their party, touting his good looks and...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday that the crisis over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not be the last, and noted that the broader credit meltdown will impact an already slowing U.S. economy. The Treasury Department agreed to raise Fannie and Freddie's credit lines above the existing $2.25 billion apiece and buy shares to strengthen their finances, if needed. The Federal Reserve offered to let the mortgage finance companies borrow at the rate it charges banks for direct loans. The government's aggressive move on Sunday underscored problems plaguing the markets and the potential for...

Obama's Liberal Shock Troops By JOHN FUND July 12, 2008 While he is a skilled candidate, Barack Obama's ability to surprise, stun and sweep over the vaunted Clinton Machine to capture the Democratic nomination was rooted in his background as a community organizer. He's now turning those skills to the general election. But liberals aren't just on the march on the presidential level. This year, liberal activists are spending parts of the fortunes of their wealthy donors to transform politics at the state and local level. In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors...

Barack Obama has published an enemies list and conspiracy web on his presidential campaign website, Fight the Smears.The site lists conservative activists David Bossie, Floyd Brown, Bob Perry, Craig Shirley, Bruce Hawkins and James Lacy.The Obama campaign posted an accompanying graphic that lays out a web of connections between the conservatives, groups they represent and their efforts opposing liberals, including "Swift Boat", "Clinton Impeachment" and "Willie Horton Ad".The text never connects any of those listed to 'smears' against Obama, but instead lists their politcal sins such as working with the Minutemen, Ann Coulter, Gary Aldrich, donating to the Swift Boat...

8 July 2008 | 16:36 | Source: Beta PRIŠTINA -- Representatives of civil society in Kosovo will start lobbying for Kosovo's recognition, write Priština media. Daily Koha Ditore claims that there is financial support from George Soros and the Kosovo Fund for Open Society: “The lobbying group will include Veton Suroi and Blerim Shala, the coordinator of the former Kosovo negotiating team, Luan Shllaku, the director of the Kosovo Fund for Open Society, and Muhamet Mustafa, the dean of the Reinvest University.� The group‘s work will be based on the plan and recommendations of former international envoy to Kosovo Martti...

The swift boats are coming. They'll go by different names this year, but the largely unregulated interest groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth - which in 2004 torpedoed Democrat John Kerry with allegations he'd inflated his war record - are gearing up for the 2008 White House race like never before. So far this year, so-called 527 groups - named for a section of the IRS tax code - have raised a staggering $210 million, up from $182 million at this point in 2004. But here's the ideological bottom line - roughly two-thirds of that $210 million has been...

You would think that this story is right out of science fiction. But the facts appear to be that the US Democrat-controlled Congress intends to destroy the Republican middle class with $11 per gallon gasoline.

“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” Some 170 years and 36 presidents later, the choice presented to the American people at this year’s presidential election does not merely confirm the correctness of the Frenchman’s assessment; it amplifies his verdict in an absurd, almost surreal manner. Among America’s presidents—many of them impressive and some great,...

John McCain is the most dangerous man in today’s America because this likely next occupant of the White House combines a muddled world outlook with an imbalanced personality, limited intelligence, and low character. Like Vladimir Ilich Lenin or Ted Kaczynski, he needs dehumanized adversaries and loves to hate, never mind the ideology. He pours scorn on powerful countries such as Russia or China, or weak ones such as Serbia, not because it makes any sense from the point of view of this country’s security interests, but because they resist—or may resist—what his archneoconservative advisor Robert Kagan terms America’s Benevolent Global...

One of the biggest factors in high oil prices, according to many experts, is that investors, such as hedge funds and investment bankers, can use loopholes in commodities law to manipulate the market and drive crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and diesel fuel prices to new heights. Congress is aware of the problem and lawmakers recently passed legislation to address the “Enron Loophole,” one of the major loopholes that opens the door to abusive trading practices, but the law didn’t go far enough.

Why didn't the press ask Physicians for Human Rights about how weak most of their evidence of torture by Americans turned out to be? Despite claims uncritically repeated in some media outlets, medical examinations of 11 former detainees of U.S. military prison facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba advanced by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) do not provide open-and-shut examples of prisoner abuse. Instead PHR offers up one-sided accounts based largely upon allegations made by former detainees to an organization with a predefined political agenda and financed in part by Bush Administration opponent and convicted felon George Soros and his...

Soros, the Man Who Cries Wolf, Now Is Warning of a 'Superbubble' By GREG IP June 21, 2008; Page B1 He has cried wolf many times, but this time George Soros says the beast is really upon us. Mr. Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, is best-known as a speculator, philanthropist and political activist. He made a fortune by doing things such as betting against Britain's currency in 1992 and Thailand's in 1997. A Hungarian refugee, he has spent millions to promote democracy and learning in post-Soviet nations. He also has spent heavily to promote liberal causes and has...

Quoted material is verbatim from the E-mail to which Barack Obama signed his name. Since we announced our decision not to accept taxpayer funds for the general election, tens of thousands of people like you have come forward to declare their independence from a broken system. The decision not to accept taxpayer funds frees Obama from Federal spending limits. This decision frees us to build a movement of millions of people giving whatever they can afford to a campaign that is truly reforming the way our political process works. It also frees us to take our campaign for change to...

BARACK OBAMA isn't abandoning his pledge to take public financing for the general election campaign because it's in his political interest. Certainly not. He isn't about to become the first candidate since Watergate to run an election fueled entirely with private money because he will be able to raise far more that way than the mere $85 million he'd get if he stuck to his promise -- and with which his Republican opponent, John McCain, will have to make do. No, Mr. Obama, or so he would have you believe, is forgoing the money because he is so committed to...

The Illinois Senator makes the announcement Thursday morning in a video sent out to his supporters.

(CNSNews.com) - Does any doting mother want to think about putting her firstborn baby in harm's way? Liberal backers of Sen. Barack Obama are banking on a "no" answer. The liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org is running a political ad featuring a new mother, bouncing baby boy on her lap, chiding John McCain about wanting to wage a "hundred-year" war in Iraq. "John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for a hundred years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can't have him," the mother (actress) says with a quaver in her voice. (See video)...

WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- A new television ad blasting likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain is only the beginning of liberal "independent group" ads, union officials say. The spot, produced independently of Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, financed by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, features a young mother with a baby criticizing McCain's determination to keep troops in Iraq. It began airing Tuesday in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, USA Today reported. Pro-Democrat labor union leaders told the newspaper they have assembled millions of dollars for so-called independent...

New MoveOn ad: Don’t take my baby, John McCain! In which a 90-year-old Maverick, serving his fifth term as president after declaring martial law and suspending the Constitution, conscripts young Alex to walk the beat in Baghdad. Either that or mom here hasn’t yet grasped that (a) President McCain won’t be setting Iraq policy for the next 18 years, let alone the next hundred, (b) MoveOn’s candidate of choice has himself been dropping some dark hints lately about “tactical readjustments,� and (c) whether McCain and the military can have her son is, um, up to her son, not her. The...

Last week, the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama announced that it had established a “war room” to battle rumors spread on the Internet and amplified by other media reporting. Obama supporters will use a website titled “Fight the Smears” to identify allegedly untrue statements about their candidate and provide evidence in an effort to refute them. That sounds like a good public relations strategy, but the implementation will ultimately have a negative impact on Obama. The campaign employs the Media Matters for America model for dealing with so-called “smears.” In fact, Obama’s war room uses the George...

Obama-Kerry? Editorial of The New York Sun June 17, 2008 The news that Senator Kerry's name is on a list of potential running mates that Senator Obama is circulating on Capitol Hill, according to NBC News, was enough to get our attention. Maybe they meant the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey? Both men are decorated combat veterans of Vietnam that would bring Mr. Obama some of the national security heft he is apparently seeking in a vice presidential candidate. No, according to a report in yesterday's New York Times, "During the course of two long dinners at the...

E.D. Hill and her show, "America's Pulse" has been removed from her time slot at Fox, because of something she said in her news presentation . On June 6th last, on her former program, "America's Pulse," E.D. Hill teased in a segment about body-language about Obama's fist bump with his wife Michelle. Obama supporters and the leftist blogs on the web were in a rage and an uproar about the comments, and George Soros' "Media Matters" began a campaign encouraging people to contact Fox and complaint about what is in their view an unforgivable slight of Obama and Michelle. They...

Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court's lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush, the ruling that gives America's terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen. (You can't miss the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin's idiotic, ahistorical ballad in which he grossly misrepresents the views of the Founding Fathers.) The Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is jumping for joy, hailing the decision handed down this week as a great triumph for...

Miami Herald columnist, Andres Oppenheimer, is like a high school football player who just scored a touchdown. You can spot him in the end zone triumphantly spiking the football and performing his over the top victory dance. However there is something a bit too overenthusiastic about Oppenheimer's self-celebration as if he knows there is a huge caveat to his "victory." You can read his not quite convincing "celebration" in his Miami Herald column, "About time! Reckless TV anchors put on spot:" Bravo! A new study has found widespread fear-mongering and reckless journalism by cable television hosts such as CNN's Lou Dobbs and...

The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America has gone on the attack against longtime “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, saying he has “regularly smeared” Democrats on a variety of issues. In its “Weekly Update,” Media Matters launched its attack by asserting that Russert, as the host of Democratic presidential debates, has all but ignored important issues such as the mortgage crisis, global warming, wiretapping and executive power, while questioning Dennis Kucinich about his claim to have seen a UFO and John Edwards about his expensive haircut.

Recent news articles suggest that a large, and possibly dominant, element in the surge in crude oil prices consists of speculation as opposed to actual demand versus supply. While demand is indeed rising, as driven by the growing Chinese and Indian economies, this does not explain the recent doubling of crude prices. Noting that poor economic conditions usually help the challenger party against the incumbent party in an election, and that many foreign countries want Barack Obama to be elected, this leads to a frightening possibility: Are foreign governments and/or other entities manipulating oil prices to deliberately throw the U.S....

Smear: LIE: Rush Limbaugh says a tape exists of Michelle Obama using the word "whitey" from the pulpit of Trinity United... Lie: Proven GOP sleazemeister Roger Stone says he has "credible evidence that some indelible record exists" of a tape of Michelle Obama using the term "whitey."

WASHINGTON (June 11) - Jim Johnson, a manager of Democrat Barack Obama's vice presidential search team, resigned Wednesday amid criticism over his personal loan deals. "Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept," Obama said in a statement. "We have a very good selection process under way, and I am confident that it will produce a number of highly qualified candidates for me to choose from in the weeks ahead. I remain grateful to...

Soren Dayton of RedState notices that Barack Obama's choice of Jim Johnson to vet vice presidential choices is worse than previously understood: ...there is more on Johnson. In 2001, he joined Persueus LLC as a Vice Chairman. Perseus has a number of funds. Among them: PERSEUS-SOROS BIOPHARMACEUTICAL FUND, L.P., which Perseus co-manages, was formed in 2000 with capital commitments totaling $449 million to make investments in life sciences companies So Perseus is a business partner with George Soros. And Johnson is the Vice Chairman ... Incidentally, as Say Anything Blog notes, Perseus also seems to own the publisher of the...

Civil-Liberties Group Announces $335-Million Drive The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday announced a campaign to raise $335-million, far more than it has sought before in a single drive, according to the Associated Press. The campaign will focus on raising money to expand the organization’s work in Florida, Texas, and other places where the New York group is not as established. “The purpose is to build a civil-liberties infrastructure in the middle of the country — where battleground states are often under-resourced and our efforts are most needed,” said Anthony Romero, the civil-rights group’s executive director. The organization has already...

As the price of GAS is the subject of every conversation and the effects have stretched far and wide to every corner of this great country, we are desperately in need of relief. I received an e-mail today referring to a earlier post on Free Republic regarding the Democrats keeping the price of gas inflated and attached to the bottom of the e-mail was a piece about how the price of gas in Venezeula is 12 cents a gallon. It also went on to say about the possibility of gas in this country being around 53 cents a gallon in...

The vote of the Democratic rules committee not to seat the entire Michigan and Florida delegations — as Hillary had wanted — signals the end of the domination of the Democratic Party by Bill and Hillary Clinton. It began when Bill won the California primary in 1992 and ended this past weekend, on May 31, 2008. During this period, nothing moved unless the Clintons OKed it. Now the Party has declared its independence, shaking off their family fiefdom. There is a lot more involved than just the fact that Hillary lost the primaries to Obama and trails him among elected...

With barely a whimper a few weeks after its big launch, David Brock's much-hyped Progressive Media USA has collapsed, thrown under the bus by Team Obama. (See previous blog entry here.) Two weeks ago [sorry--I've gotten behind in my blogging] the ambitious 501(c)(4) group, which vowed to spend $400 million trashing John McCain, quietly announced it would "dramatically scale back its efforts in deference to the wishes of the [Democratic] party's presumptive nominee," the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reports. So much for Brock's claim that the George Soros-sponsored group would be independent and nonpartisan.

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

Enter the name of a person and/or organization Search Help | Advanced Search Exploring the paths of power and influence MUCKETY HOME NEWS & POLITICS BUSINESS & MEDIA CELEBS MUCKETY THIS! DYNASTIES MAKE A MUCKETY STORY INDEX LISTINGS SEARCH � Has Oprah peaked?  Scott McClellan comes from ‘tell-all’ tradition By A. James Memmott   |   May 28, 2008 at 3:02pm   |   2  When Scott McClellan was named George Bush’s White House press secretary in 2003, The New York Times referred to his “tell-all-dad,� Barr McClellan.Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map MAP HINTS:...

As all the left wing pundits are promoting Scott McClellan’s new “Tell All” book about the Bush administration it’s been revealed that the publisher is a close ally of George Soros and has published Soros’ books along with a multitude of other left wing authors.

The hat tip for this post goes to LGF reader John Williams in Texas.The company that published Scott McClellan’s new Bush-bashing book is Public Affairs Books, and their Editor at Large is a guy named Peter Osnos: About The Century Foundation. The owner of Public Affairs Books is a company called Perseus Book Group. Here’s their ownership tree: Perseus Books Home.The firm is owned by Perseus Funds Group, (holding company Perseus LLC) a capital management firm that grew from about $20 million in 1995 to over $2 billion now. Big infusions of cash seemed to help it grow exponentially and...

BELGRADE (Reuters) - The socialist and nationalist parties that will soon rule Serbia's capital Belgrade vowed on Wednesday to prove their pro-Western rivals wrong by making the city more attractive to investors and a better place to live. National and local elections on May 11 left Serbia split between nationalists, led by the Radical Party, and liberals led by the Democratic Party. The Socialists of late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic emerged as kingmakers in the elections and hold the key to coalitions at the local and national level. It is unclear if the Socialists' deal with the Radicals in the capital,...

Speculators are largely responsible for driving crude prices to their peaks in recent weeks and the record oil price now looks like a bubble, George Soros has warned. The billionaire investor's comments came only days after the oil price soared to a record high of $135 a barrel amid speculation that crude could soon be catapulted towards the $200 mark. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Soros said that although the weak dollar, ebbing Middle Eastern supply and record Chinese demand could explain some of the increase in energy prices, the crude oil market had been significantly affected...

The state's largest gun control group, CeaseFirePA, is getting a $350,000 grant to strengthen its advocacy efforts statewide. The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation is granting the organization the money over two years to aid its bid to build a statewide, grass-roots response to gun violence, CeaseFirePA's executive director Joe Grace said...

Unlike Kerry, Barack Obama Covets George Soros' Support By Robert B. Bluey CNSNews.com Staff Writer July 27, 2004 Boston (CNSNews.com) - Without a formidable Republican opponent in his U.S. Senate race, Barack Obama has little reason not to take money from billionaire liberal financier George Soros, a man other Democrats keep at a distance. When Obama takes the stage Tuesday night for a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention, the candidate for Senate in Illinois will be introduced to a wider audience for the first time, bringing heightened scrutiny to the relative political newcomer's campaign. Democrats expect him to...

NEW YORK - As consumers began hitting the road Friday for the Memorial Day weekend, they faced the sobering reality that it now costs $87 to fill a Ford Explorer SUV, up $14 from last year, and $72 to fill a mid-sized Honda Accord, up $12. That's because gas prices, which took another jump higher overnight, are up nearly 20 percent, or 65 cents a gallon, over the past year to average nearly $3.88 a gallon nationally. But unlike this time last year, when gas prices were at their peak for 2007, pump prices now show no signs of halting...

Senator Barack Obama's campaign is steering the candidate's wealthy supporters away from independent Democratic groups, calling into question what had been expected to be the groups' central role in this year's Democratic offensive against Senator John McCain. Obama's national finance chairwoman, Chicago hotel mogul Penny Pritzker, told supporters at a national finance committee meeting in Indianapolis May 2, and in other conversations, not to give money to the groups, people familiar with her comments said. "From the beginning of this race Obama has told supporters that if they want to help his effort, they should do so through his campaign,"...

Today, the Washington Post editorial board urged Cindy McCain to release her tax returns, repeating a call made four years earlier to Teresa Heinz Kerry. But the timing seemed coincidental, given that Media Matters just wrote a letter to Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt last Friday. In that letter, the organization brought up the Heinz Kerry editorial from 2004, and asked why a similar request was not made to McCain. Hiatt tells Politico that the letter wasn't the reason for publishing Wednesday's editorial. "The editorial actually had been drafted before the [group's effort] began, or at least before I...

MoveOn.org sponsored a contest for the best 30-second pro-Barack Obama TV commercial. The winner, according to the Associated Press's article, "MoveOn ad features pro-Obama Republican," was an ad starring Air Force veteran John Weiler. The spot includes Mr. Weiler, whose military service is to be commended, saying "I've been a Republican since before I could actually vote." Not only that: "I'm a lifelong Republican and I'm voting for Barack Obama." I don't know if Mr. Weiler is a lifelong Republican as he claims. I do know that if the Associated Press is accurate in its reporting, he must have been...

The Left misappropriates intellectual capital for perverse ends, in order to lend itself a veneer of respectability and befuddle its critics. According to the website of the Open Society Institute, the George Soros funded nerve-center of today's Left, "The term ‘open society' was popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper's work deeply influenced George Soros, the founder of the Open Society Institute, and it is upon the concept of an open society that Soros bases his philanthropic activity."  But the Open Society Institute embodies Popper's idea of an open society the way...

...As we ate near the Days' home in Florida recently, I heard things about Sen. McCain that were deeply moving and politically troubling. Moving because they told me things about him the American people need to know. And troubling because it is clear that Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history. ...Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I...

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes in today's Wall Street Journal that George Soros's Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O'Grady notes that Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the...

DNC SERVICES CORPORATION/DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Democrat 21,750 06/30/2007 DEMOCRATIC SENATORIAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE Democrat 21,750 06/29/2007 DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE Democrat 21,750 06/29/2007 PATRICK MURPHY FOR CONGRESS Democrat 1,000 06/28/2007 SESTAK FOR CONGRESS Democrat 1,000 05/14/2007 TOM ALLEN FOR SENATE Democrat 2,300 03/07/2007 OBAMA FOR AMERICA Democrat 2,100 01/26/2007 AYDELOTT FOR CONGRESS, INC Democrat 2,100 11/11/2006 KLEEB FOR CONGRESS Democrat 2,100 11/06/2006 JOHN HALL FOR CONGRESS Democrat 1,400 11/03/2006 FRIENDS OF DAN MAFFEI Democrat 2,000 10/20/2006 CAMPAIGN MONEY WATCH -- 100,000 07/28/2006 FRIENDS OF TAMMY DUCKWORTH Democrat 1,000 07/27/2006 SESTAK FOR CONGRESS Democrat 1,000 07/27/2006 MAJORITY ACTION -- 120,000 07/21/2006 PATRICK...

If the Democratic National Convention failed to produce a bounce for John Kerry, the same cannot be said of Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s candidate for United States Senator from Illinois. While this rising star in the Democratic Party spouted some conservative themes during his speech, the rhetoric may be deceptive. While Obama spoke of individual responsibility – such as stating that the government cannot teach kids to read, parents must – his ideology and voting record is quite different. Obama is very liberal. Among his campaign contributors are George Soros, People for the American Way, pro-abortion...