Free Republic

Obama bundler Jodie Evans, far left, protests in Yemen with al Qaeda tied group al Karama, June 17, 2013. Photo via al Karama. Obama bundler Jodie Evans and Code Pink, the leftist group she co-leads, have been found to be working with a group whose leaders have recently been declared terrorists and al Qaeda supporters by the Treasury Department. This is not the first time the Democratic Party allied group has been caught in bed with terrorists. As this writer has reported over the years, Code Pink works with terrorists, state sponsors of terrorists, the Democratic Party and President Barack...

JOE GARCIA, Florida Dem. Congressman Accepts Money from Radical Muslim Group Posted By Joe Kaufman On May 30, 2014 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage Emerge USA is a Florida-based organization whose unstated goal is to give radical Muslims a political voice in America. One way they do this is by getting their leaders placed in key positions of power. Another way is by making friends with those already in power. United States Representative from Florida, Joe Garcia, is one of those friends. He has accepted thousands of dollars from Emerge for his 2014 reelection bid, and he has returned...

Breaking: scotus strikes down aggregate campaign contribution limits 5-4 per Chief Justice Roberts in McCutcheon case.

the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989 ... The political left always accuses the Republican Party of being the “party of rich guys.” It’s a lie. ... C) Committed Democrat donors have outspent committed Republican donors by nearly $486 million since 1989 D) Overall, the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989. E) The largest committed DNC donor group has outspent the largest committed RNC donor group by 67% since 1989 ... The arguments by Democrats that the RNC...

The web site OpenSecrets.org has done a great deal of useful work. Especially helpful are its lists of high-dollar political campaign donor organizations. The web site's 1989-2014 and 2012-specific lists, to name just two, demonstrate that the hyperventilating on the left and in the establishment press about the eeeevil Koch Brothers is completely out of line: Imagine that. Koch Industries is way down in 59th place in the past 25 years and 77th place in 2012. This makes at least the following people look really dumb:

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case. ...U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.” “These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a...

Picking winners and losers is one thing. Picking winners and losers if you are President of the United States is another, as Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) suggested in his response to President Obama's State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. But so far in his presidency, Obama has banked on certain business interests over others and ensured that campaign donors are well taken care of. For example, after Obama selected General Electric chief Jeffrey Immelt to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Tabitha Hale wrote on FreedomWorks, "This could not have been a more clear product of a...

SNIPPET: "Among individual donors, Ellison – the first Muslim elected to Congress – enjoys strong support from Muslim Americans throughout the country, campaign finance records show. That's understandable. Tucked in among those contributions, however, are a handful of donors with a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections. For example..." SNIPPET: "These contributions are a small slice of Ellison's campaign war chest and hardly constitute the difference between a third term or defeat. By seeking them out, the congressman makes clear that he sees himself not as a representative of all American Muslims. Just like-minded Islamists." Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/1913/keith-ellisons-mb-support

It is our firm belief that the way to prevent the Healthcare Rationing bill from passing is to put an intense fear of the public’s ire into the wealthy people and law firms who fund the campaigns of the following Democrats:.........You need to accept, as we do, that Democrats in Congress have stopped listening to their constituents and the American people. Nancy Pelosi, Tim Kaine, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama have built up a mental wall between Democrats in the House and reality. Whatever they are telling these people, it’s working, because they have taken their office phones off the...

Preliminary results of a study on presidential campaign donations shows that President Obama had more than 3.7 million donors compared with 827,000 who donated to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) And while Obama had a substantial lead over McCain in small donors -- $200 or less -- Obama also led in the number of individuals who gave at or near the legal limit of $4,600, researchers at Brigham Young University said. Donors gave Obama $700 million to Obama (sic) and $316 million to McCain. Donations from individuals giving $200 or less represented nearly a quarter ($178 million) of Obama's fund-raising total...

The risk -- and look -- of bias is too great, the Supreme Court decides in a 5-4 ruling. Chief Justice Roberts dissents along with Scalia, Thomas and Alito. The U.S. Supreme Court put elected judges on notice Monday that they must step aside from deciding cases involving big-money donors who helped them win their jobs. The decision comes after a decade in which corporate interests and trial lawyers have waged increasingly costly campaigns for 21 states' supreme court seats. Most are in the Great Lakes region or the South. The justices said Monday that there is a real risk...

Chrysler announced the closing of 789 dealerships earlier this month. On today's radio program, Rush Limbaugh spoke for a few seconds about whether or not some of the dealership closings are the result of politics (campaign contributions). After hearing this, I decided to look up the contributions of the dealers on the Internet. Here are a few examples of the campaign donations made by some of the dealers who will close their doors shortly. I'm not anywhere close to going through the entire list yet. The figures are only from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Election cycles: (1) Michael E....

Hedge funds seek to keep a grip on data By James Mackintosh Published: November 27 2008 18:43 | Last updated: November 27 2008 18:43 Hedge funds have always had a reputation for secrecy but the recent crisis engulfing the industry is prompting some to become private to the point of paranoia. SRM’s decision to sue the Wall Street Journal for printing the poor performance of its Monaco-based SRM Global hedge fund, which lost its original investors 85 per cent in a little over two years, is at the extreme of industry reaction.

In 2007, Shaw personally earned an estimated $210 million and he spent a chunk of it on contributions to prominent Democratic politicians during the 2008 presidential cycle according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Overall, the hedge fund’s employees skew heavily Democratic, contributing more than $200,000 to political candidates in the 2008 campaign cycle, according to the center. Only $2,000 of that went to a Republican. The hedge fund also has gotten much more involved in Washington policymaking in recent years (snip) resisting increased regulation and taxation of hedge funds in Washington.

Remember during the campaign how this whole economic mess, according to the Obama camp, was the fault of the Bush administration and the past 8 years? They had all those excellent slogans… we can’t afford four more years of the same… remember? I don’t want to say that a lot of people bought that crap, but anytime you tried to talk about actual economic history and how this mess evolved, most people glazed over and muttered “past 8 years… more of same… must change.” Well, just this Sunday while enjoying a piping hot cup of joe and a danish, I...

As policymakers confront the ongoing U.S. financial crisis, it is important to take a step back and understand its origins. Those who fault "deregulation," "unfettered capitalism," or "greed" would do well to look instead at flawed institutions and misguided policies. The expansion in risky mortgages to underqualified borrowers was encouraged by the federal government. The growth of "creative" nonprime lending followed Congress's strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act, the Federal Housing Administration's loosening of down-payment standards, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's pressuring lenders to extend mortgages to borrowers who previously would not have qualified. Meanwhile, Freddie Mac...

New Jersey's pension fund has lost more than $23 billion this year, dropping to its lowest level since 2003 as a collapsing financial market battered its investments, a state report showed yesterday. The latest losses -- nearly $9 billion in October, and another $3 billion so far this month -- mean the fund is now worth $57.8 billion, or less than half the $118 billion in benefits it is due to pay out over time, state reports show. "I don't think any of us in the division have ever seen anything like it," said Bill Clark, director of the state's...

<p>A New Jersey pension fund run by one of Barack Obama’s earliest and biggest campaign fundraisers has lost $25 billion -- including $9 billion in October, a published report says.  The New Jersey Investment Council, chaired by hedge fund manager Orin Kramer, says that the value of the state pension fund has shrunk from $82 billion in July to $57 billion, Politicker NJ reports.  The report could not be confirmed.</p>

Two days after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sought bankruptcy protection, an explosive rumor spread that another big Wall Street firm, Morgan Stanley, was on the brink of failure. The chatter on trading desks that Sept. 17 was that Deutsche Bank AG had yanked a $25 billion credit line to the firm That wasn't true, but it helped trigger a cascade of bearish bets against Morgan Stanley. Chief Executive Officer John Mack complained bitterly that profit-hungry traders were sowing panic. Yet he lacked a critical piece of information: Who exactly was behind those damaging trades? Trading records reviewed by The Wall...

Volatile markets may tempt hedge-fund fraud * Reuters, Thursday November 20 2008 By Svea Herbst-Bayliss BOSTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - While fraud can happen any time, the loosely regulated $1.7 trillion hedge-fund industry looks especially vulnerable following record losses. Losses of roughly 15 percent this year and a growing sense of panic as hedge-fund clients exit worldwide are creating ripe conditions for a small number of the estimated 9,000 hedge-fund managers to break the law, according to forensic accountants, private investigators and former prosecutors. "In volatile markets there is a greater likelihood that a manager might want to try and...