Free Republic

**SNIP** Pelosi and Lantos went over to Syria for one purpose, and that was to undermine United States foreign policy. That's why they went, and that is what they did, and now they are responding to criticism by claiming they really went over there to celebrate all the religious holidays, to carry the president's message and so forth. But she is lying about it, and Lantos let the cat out of the bag because he admitted that they were there establishing an alternative Democrat foreign policy, which means he admits that the Democrats are attempting to undermine established US foreign...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, just back from a trip to Syria that sparked sharp criticism from Republicans and the Bush administration, suggested Tuesday that they may be interested in taking another diplomatic trip - to open a dialogue with Iran. The Democratic speaker from San Francisco and Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were asked at a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday whether on the heels of their recent trip to the Middle East they would be interested in extending their diplomacy in the troubled region with a visit to Iran....

CAIRO, Egypt - A top U.S. Democratic congressman met a leading member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed opposition group, during a recent visit to the country, the Islamic fundamentalist group and U.S. officials said Saturday. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (news, bio, voting record) met with the Muslim Brotherhood's parliament leader, Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, twice on Thursday — once at the parliament building and then at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, said Brotherhood spokesman Hamdi Hassan. U.S. Embassy spokesman John Berry would only confirm that Hoyer, who represents Maryland, met with el-Katatni at U.S. Ambassador Francis...

SEOUL, April 7 (Yonhap) -- A senior U.S. congressman is planning to visit North Korea in a month or two, a Washington-based radio station reported Saturday, saying he is also seeking to meet the country's reclusive leader. Radio Free Asia quoted an aide to Rep. Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as saying the congressman is likely to visit Pyongyang in May. Lantos has requested a meeting with the North's leader Kim Jong-il during the trip, but there has been no response from the North Korean government yet, it said. The Democrat from California has been...

Washington -- Bush administration criticism of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria this week is "hypocritical beyond belief,'' San Mateo Rep. Tom Lantos said Friday as he and the speaker prepared to return home from their nine-day trip with a congressional delegation to the Mideast. Lantos, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the criticism from President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials and allies, was particularly out of line because Republican House members also met Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus just before and after the delegation led by the Democratic speaker. "The notion that...

April 3, 2007 Congressman Tom Lantos, who is a member of the delegation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading to Syria, put the mission clearly when he said: "We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy." Democrats can have any foreign policy they want -- if and when they are elected to the White House. Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and -- like him or not -- he alone had the constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime. All that...

"U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Damascus next week for talks with Syrian officials, a U.S. Embassy official said Friday, making her the highest-ranking American politician to come to Syria since relations began souring in 2003. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said Pelosi would be leading a delegation of members of Congress and would arrive on Tuesday and leave Wednesday."

Moscow (CNSNews.com) - Amid a continuing diplomatic row over missile defense, Russian officials have welcomed a call by a senior U.S. Democratic lawmaker to abandon a measure linking trade with human rights whose existence has long irked the Kremlin. The survival of the Cold War-era measure known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment is "mere nonsense," Sergei Mironov, speaker of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, said Wednesday. He added that Washington had long promised to scrap the amendment but had yet to do so. The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act links normal U.S. trade relations...

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. ...Obama, however, is different from most Democrats because of his willingness to embrace the controversial Soros. Shortly after Soros equated the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Obama joined him for a New York fund-raiser June 7.Little has been made of his connection to Soros, although it is quite unique. Not only did George Soros donate...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A key U.S. legislator said in Israel on Sunday he would block aid President George W. Bush promised Lebanon and free the funds only when Beirut agreed to the deployment of international troops on the border with Syria. "The international community must use all our available means to stiffen Lebanon's spine and to convince the government of Lebanon to have the new UNIFIL troops on the Syrian border in adequate numbers," said Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives' International Relations Committee. Lantos said he was putting a legislative hold on Bush's proposal...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Even as U.S. President George W. Bush's administration avoids contacts with Iran, a lone Democratic congressman is cultivating his own dialogue with the Islamic state. Rep. Tom Lantos, an influential lawmaker who could end up running the International Relations Committee if Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives in November, said he has met Iran's UN ambassador Javad Zarif at the envoy's New York home twice in 2006 -- once for dinner and once for lunch. The meetings were initiated by Lantos of California, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. He also had contacts with Iran's UN...

House and Senate Democratic leaders have joined together to urge President Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq this year. The move is part of an effort to shake the notion that Democrats are split on the Iraq war and keep the focus on what they see as a winning issue against Republicans. Twelve Democrats, including the Senate and House minority leaders and ranking members of key committees, wrote President Bush on Sunday about the matter. "In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot...

Senior lawmaker Tom Lantos is as passionate in his support to India as in his antagonism for Iran. The two dispositions come into periodic conflict. It was the same on Wednesday when one saw the co-author of the nuclear deal legislation momentarily join the ranks of the bill’s foremost critic, Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey. Indian supporters watching the proceedings of the House of Representatives held their breath as Lantos came out in support of Markey’s motion to add a new paragraph virtually making the deal conditional on India’s “full and active” participation in US efforts to dissuade, isolate and possibly...

WASHINGTON - Five Congress members were willingly arrested and led away from the Sudanese Embassy in plastic handcuffs Friday in protest of the Sudanese government's role in atrocities in the Darfur region. "The slaughter of the people of Darfur must end," Rep. Tom Lantos (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., a Holocaust survivor who founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, said from the embassy steps before his arrest. Four other Democratic Congress members — James McGovern and John Olver of Massachusetts, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Jim Moran of Virginia — were among 11 protesters arrested on charges of disorderly...

29.11.05 | Hugo Chavez's spinmeisters love to sing the mantra "Venezuela wants to have the most cordial relations with the USA, based in mutual respect and understanding..." Well, how does the barring a BIPARTISAN US Congressional Delegation, from entering Venezuela, bodes with the aforementioned predicament? It was not enough, for Chavez, to have orchestrated with Kirchner, riots and the subsequent media attack on Bush in Mar del Plata. Nor it was sufficient for him to call President Fox a "lapdog of the empire" -one has to love the irony in light of the dynamics of the Castro-Chavez marriage... Now the...

CARACAS -- A congressional delegation led by Rep. Henry Hyde arrived on Monday in Venezuela, but was not permitted to leave the plane at the country's main airport and left abruptly, a spokesman for the U.S. embassy said. The president of the airport, however, denied the accusation, saying the U.S. ambassador met the plane at the airport, entered it briefly, and then the craft departed. The delegation on the plane had been slated to meet with Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel and other government officials, and waited for roughly one hour before departing, Brian Penn, the embassy spokesman, told...

India's vote in favour of the IAEA resolution on Iran nuclear programme was an "encouraging and significant" step which indicated the evolving nature of US-India relationship, a leading US daily on Sunday said, while warning some American officials and lawmakers against creating the appearance of having pressurised New Delhi for its stance. Asking legislators like Congressman Tom Lantos not to "brag" about 'pushing' India and advising American officials to avoid the crude appearance of a quid pro quo of Indian vote for access to US civilian nuclear technology, The Washington Times said India had surprised even the most vigilant observers...

So, just who is Tom Lantos? September 15, 2005 'We know that India has been waging a long -- and until now -- a lonely battle against terrorism... (India) has been dealing with terrorism for decades, and has paid a tremendous price in terms of human lives, lost productivity and the psychological impact on the people of India... I want to reaffirm to you that we value India as one of our most important partners and allies.'-- November 8, 2001  'They (India) will pay a heavy price for a total disregard of US concerns vis-à-vis Iran. It just will not fly...

SEOUL, Aug. 30 (Yonhap) -- A delegation of U.S. congressmen arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, North Korea's state-run media said, for a visit expected to focus on ways of resuming the six-party talks on the North's nuclear weapons program. "A delegation from the U.S. Congress headed by James Leach, chairman of the Subcommittee on Asian and the Pacific Affairs of the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, arrived here Tuesday," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. The delegation, which also includes Tom Lantos (D-California), will stay in Pyongyang for three days and then visit Seoul before...

Wednesday July 6, 7:22 PM N. Korea invites U.S. congressman, New Mexico governor for visits(Kyodo) _ North Korea has invited a U.S. congressman as well as the New Mexico governor for separate visits to the country from later this week, diplomatic sources familiar with U.S.-North Korea issues said Wednesday. The trips by House of Representatives member Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, and Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will likely take place as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tours other Asian countries from Friday, the sources said. According to the sources, final arrangements were being made for Lantos...