[Caesar Soze]

If you're using http://en.utrace.de to access it, it's probably going to hit a copy cached in Germany. FWIW, I'm in the US and for me whitehouse.gov resolves to a completely different IP address.

[perchprism]

If you go to the German site, and type in ‘Freerepublic.com’, it resolves to Englewood, Colorado.

I thought it was based out of Fresno, CA, but at least it doesn’t point to some gateway portal in Germany.

[angkor]

www.whitehouse.gov uses Akamai which caches multiple live copies of the site across multiple locations (wherever Akamai has a presence, which is everywhere), in order to improve performance. This will obviously produce different traceroutes and pings according to your location.

[Calpernia]

A copy cache? It is more than that if the domain is pointing to it. It has to be listed as a name server for the domain to pick up that IP.