Free Republic

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition staff has issued a blanket edict requiring politically appointed ambassadors to leave their overseas posts by Inauguration Day, according to several American diplomats familiar with the plan, breaking with decades of precedent by declining to provide even the briefest of grace periods. The mandate — issued “without exceptions,” according to a terse State Department cable sent on Dec. 23, diplomats who saw it said — threatens to leave the United States without Senate-confirmed envoys for months in critical nations like Germany, Canada and Britain. In the past, administrations of both parties have often granted extensions...

President-elect Donald Trump has fired,effective Inauguration Day January 20, every U.S. ambassador politically appointed by President Barack Obama, according to a report published Thursday night by the New York Times. The Times reports the State Department sent out a notice on December 23 informing the ambassadors of Trump’s order. The move sent shock waves through the diplomatic corps as some ambassadors in previous transitions had been given time to leave their post for personal convenience.

After addressing a cybersecuirty conference in London, notorious hacker 'Guccifer' shared over 500Mb of documents detailing 100,000 DNC donors contact info and donations. A large number of the largest donors received senior diplomatic or political positions following thge donations, ranging from UK Ambassador to Assistant Attorney General. The DNC released a statement pre-emptively claiming that this was the work of Russia (and reigniting Trump's links to Putin). Probably just coincidence...

Obama Fundraiser: Palin Putting Career Above Family by FOXNews.com Saturday, September 6, 2008 An original member of Barack Obama’s finance committee said Friday that Sarah Palin is putting her career above her family by accepting the nomination as John McCain’s running mate. Howard Gutman made the argument on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” telling the radio host that the Alaska governor should focus her energy on her unwed, pregnant teenage daughter. “If my daughter had just come home at 17 years old and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant, we have a family problem,’ I wouldn’t say, ‘You know what we’re going...

Within the veteran community, there are over 1.8 million women. Some of those women are part of a pro-military organization called Pin Ups For Vets: Veterans Pin Ups For Vets is a non-profit that produces WWII-style pinup calendars every year. Proceeds from the calendar help to support our hospitalized veterans and deployed troops. The women who are part of Pin Ups For Vets even go to the VA hospitals to hand deliver them. Image Credit: Pin Ups For Vets This year, their calendar features 12 female veterans. Pin Up For Vets founder Gina Elise shared some of the images...

Instead of watching helplessly as our republic devolves into crown government, let’s distract ourselves with a counterfactual. What if senators were appointed by state legislatures for indefinite terms?The Senate was designed to preserve the federal nature of our system. Members of the House represent the people, but the Senators were to represent the states — really, state governments.Had this worked, the people would have benefited. (Sometimes, you win by grabbing all the power, but sometimes you win by ceding power to critical allies. The states were the people’s only allies in the War Against the Feds.) Unfortunately, senators came to...

Secretary of State John Kerry, America’s greatest diplomat since Kendall Myers, has announced a plan to tackle Al Qaeda in Iraq by appointing gay ambassadors to Asian countries.As long as those gay ambassadors give Obama money first. Ted Osius of the State Department gave Obama money. Now he’s the Ambassador to Vietnam.If he had given more money, he might have actually gotten France or the UK, but old Ted cheaped out. This is what happens when you cheap out, you end up in Vietnam.Still he’s gay, so Kerry will count coup on that while Al Qaeda counts human heads. During...

Everybody knew that Israel's move to build new settlements in the previously off-limits area outside Jerusalem known as E1 would anger friends and enemies alike. But few probably guessed that it would send European ambassadors fleeing the country. According to a new report from Haaretz, that's exactly what the diplomats from France and Britain are thinking. More specifically, the Haaretz report cites senior European diplomats who say that the two countries are considering "the unprecedented step of recalling their ambassadors." One told the paper, "This time it won't just be a condemnation, there will be real action taken against Israel."

Therefore from now on we recognize no man according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer. Therefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation....

God Now sends us believers as ambassadors for Christ Jesus

<p>A promise not to hire lobbyists didn't even last 2 months. A promise for sweeping ethics reforms has been all hat no cattle.</p> <p>Big donors considering whether to work the phones raising money for President Obama's reelection campaign might consider the fate of his 2008 bundlers. Many of them, it turns out, won plum jobs in his administration.</p>

BEIRUT -Syria warned the American and French ambassadors Wednesday not to travel outside the capital without permission, two weeks after they angered the regime by visiting a city that has become the center of the country's four-month-old uprising. If the U.S. and French envoys disobey the order, Syria will ban all diplomats from leaving Damascus, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said during a lecture at Damascus University. "We did not evict the two ambassadors because we want the relations to develop in the future and in order for their governments to review their stances toward Syria," al-Moallem said. "If these acts...

..... During the meeting between the President and the incoming Ambassador from Cyprus to Israel, Dimitris Hatziargrou, the new Ambassador thanked the President for Israel's support during this difficult period since the explosion in the Southern part of the country. "Israel was among the first countries, if not the first, that offered assistance - and this is not a coincidence," Hatziargrou said. He also added, "the time is ripe for improving relations between Cyprus and Israel and I will do everything I can so that the relationship will realize its potential." Later in the day President Peres called the President...

Oh but I am not buying it! Even though I am a Republican, I still hope that Obama will change the culture in Washington. But I have to report in this area of Ambassadorships, Obama has turned into a Bush clone. I have written previously about how Bush gave Ambassador posts as a reward (Bush once gave a posting to the CEO of Ameriquest Mortgage to the Netherlands after his company went out of business and was sued over 160 times for help causing the sub-prime meltdown) for raising money for him, and Obama seems to have forgotten his promise...

President Barack Obama on Thursday tapped four big Democratic Party donors for plum ambassadorships in Europe and Latin America while naming six career diplomats to posts in Africa, the Mideast and the Pacific. Washington lawyer Howard Gutman, who raised more than $500,000 for Obama's campaign and personally contributed the maximum $4,600 to it, was nominated to be the next U.S. envoy to Belgium, the White House said in a statement. Gutman also contributed $2,300 to now Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics. Obama...

The practice of sending top fund-raisers to prestigious embassies is nothing new for presidents of either party. But that is what makes Mr. Obama’s nominations so noteworthy. For a candidate who made grand promises to bring change to a capital where power and position are greased by money, the latest selections are a reminder that there are limits to just how much change the new president intends to bring. For all his generalized message of change, Mr. Obama made clear when pressed even before becoming president that he would wall off the ambassadorial spoils system from his vows of reform....

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Despite his promises of change, President Barack Obama has kept tradition by naming top donors to plum ambassador posts, drawing fire from career US diplomats and causing dismay among some US allies. Obama has been criticized for naming fund raisers with no diplomatic experience -- and who together drummed up well over a million dollars for his record-shattering campaign -- to be ambassadors to Britain, France and Japan. "It's an 18th-century practice we are continuing which no other major democratic country does," said Ronald Neumann, a veteran ambassador and head of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a...

The Holy See has rejected at least three candidates proposed by President Obama for U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, the Washington Times reports. In an April 7 story headlined “3 Strikes at Vatican,” the Times, citing Italian journalist Massimo Franco, reported, “papal advisers told Mr. Obama's aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican's most basic qualification on the abortion issue.” President Obama is scheduled to visit the Vatican this summer, said the Times, noting “the White House might be running out of time to find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when...

The incoming Obama administration has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, a State Department official said. The clean slate will open up prime opportunities for the president-elect to reward political supporters with posts in London, Paris, Tokyo and the like. The notice to diplomatic posts was issued this week. Political ambassadors sometimes are permitted to stay on briefly during a new administration, but the sweeping nature of the directive suggests that Obama has little interest in retaining any of Bush's ambassadorial appointees.

BAGHDAD, Nov. 14, 2007 – Coalition officials are taking advantage of a decline in insurgent violence to jumpstart a transition into long-term stability operations, a U.S. commander said in Baghdad. With the effects of the U.S. troop surge bearing positive fruit in the form of reduced attack numbers, reduced casualties, and an increase in weapons cache finds, U.S. forces can pay more attention to capacity building in Iraq’s towns and provinces, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division Center, told reporters in the International Zone on Oct. 11. “(Iraqi) civilian casualties since the 1st of July are down...