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...

(IsraelNN.com) Mujahideen Muslim terrorists may be behind the sinking American dollar as part of a campaign to cripple the American economy, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported. The media watch group, which specializes in tracking Arabic language websites, said that postings on websites the past two years reflect a move toward waging an economic war against the United States. Financial, rather than military, losses that will prompt the U.S. to change its policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. Mujahideen terrorist groups that operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries "have come to the conclusion that it is...

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.

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...

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

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...

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...

Although today his book is being touted by left-wing reporters and pundits, his initial plans for the project show former White House press secretary Scott McClellan intended to take a much different approach, one that was more sympathetic to President Bush but also quite hard on the "liberal elites" of the Washington press corps and their "hostility" toward the administration. Reading through McClellan's original book proposal, obtained by Politico.com, it is clear that before his editor Peter Osnos took the book on a sharp leftward turn, McClellan wanted to turn the tables on foes in the press gallery including far-left...

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.

An examination of published reports reveals that Scott McClellan's kiss-and-smell betrayal of George W. Bush is a far cry from the book McClellan started out to write and was shaped into an offensive tome by a publisher with close ties to George Soros. To understand how McClellan's literary knife-in-the-back evolved, one has to know something about the book industry.

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...

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in...

Was George Soros behind the publication of Scott McClellan's book? Meredith Vieira had the perfect opportunity this morning to find out—but chose to punt. The Today co-anchor certainly had the time: her much-touted exclusive interview with the author of What Happened ranged over the show's first two half-hours. But even when McClellan himself put the issue on the table by citing his publisher by name and alluding to its philosophy, Vieira failed to pursue a line of questioning that could have put matters in an explosive new light. As MRC's Brent Baker has detailed, McClellan's publisher, PublicAffairs: is part of...

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...

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...

The Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, is probably turning over in his grave as we speak. The day after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), perverted the definition of free market to advocate his global warming platform, along comes left-wing billionaire George Soros suggesting traditional free-market theory is flawed in the May 13 USA Today. The profile by David J. Lynch touted Soros' “theory of reflexivity,” which asserts classic free market theory is flawed because it assumes everyone acts rationally “to maximize their individual welfare or profits." "Of course, real life never matches up exactly with the...

George Soros talked about domestic and international financial markets, and the impact of a recent mortgage crisis on other sectors of the economy. In his remarks he said the worst of the financial crisis might be over but the effects of he crisis might be felt for some time to come by various sectors of the economy. Mr. Soros is the author of The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means, published by PublicAffairs.

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...

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Senator John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist. The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA. The...

False ideology at the heart of the financial crisis By George Soros Published: April 2 2008 18:11 | Last updated: April 2 2008 18:11 The proposal from Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, for reorganising government regulation of financial institutions misses the point. We need new thinking, not a reshuffling of regulatory agencies. The Federal Reserve has long had authority to issue rules for the mortgage industry but failed to exercise it. For the past 25 years or so the financial authorities and institutions they regulate have been guided by market fundamentalism: the belief that markets tend towards equilibrium and that...

The world economy is at the end of a "super-boom" in asset prices and debt which has lasted since the end of the Second World War, billionaire investor George Soros has warned. Speaking in a BBC documentary, Mr Soros said that at the heart of the financial crisis was the culmination of a 60-year-old boom in leverage, the result of which will be a far deeper downturn than many expect. He also warned that the financial services industry now faces a painful crunch. "I think that the financial industry will have to shrink... and of course the indebtedness of the...

Yesterday, we noted the journalistic morals of the George Soros-funded Minnesota Monitor, which ran a Molly Priesmeyer article on its front page that made fun of John McCain’s teeth. Priesmeyer didn’t bother to research why his teeth look like “a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets” — which was that his torturers in Vietnam smashed his teeth to the gumline. Today, the MinnMon, which gets its funding from Center for Independent Media, continues to demonstrate the ethics of the Sorosphere. After acknowledging the fact that she didn’t bother to research her topic, Priesmeyer has yet to write a correction or...

In the 1960's I had a lady friend who loved Robert Redford. So, naturally, I got dragged to all of Redford's movies. I saw "The Candidate" several times. In that film, Mr. McKay (Redford), a "community organizer" like Barack Obama, hatches a slogan, "McKay, The Better Way" to run for office. Ironically, Barack "Barry" Obama has now chosen "The Better Way" as his mantra through February 10th. Well. Obama's slogan has about as much substance as the celluloid version popularized by Robert Redford. Obama is entirely a creation of wealthy contributors and powerful, liberal media interests. So what he does...

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's decision to stay in the Democratic race to the bitter end, she has signaled a delegate fight all the way to the party's convention in Denver this August. Both candidates appear in something of a stalemate. Political strategists have concluded that Clinton cannot overcome Sen. Barack Obama's pledged delegate lead by winning additional primaries. And despite his lead in electoral and delegate wins, Obama cannot seal his nomination without the support of the party's superdelegates. Clinton's decision, after winning in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island this week that she would not capitulate has opened up...

Just three years ago the Democratic Party was in disarray. Despite record high-dollar donations from affluent supporters, Democrats had failed to reclaim the White House and Congress. Shell-shocked by their defeat, George Soros and other wealthy liberals formed a loose-knit group to consider how to fund a political comeback. Their answer: Create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups—a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement. The group they created –called the Democracy Alliance (DA)— is meant to be a financial clearinghouse. The Alliance got off to a...

Since 1996, George Soros’s Open Society Institute has been funding the production of “social justice” documentaries to win converts to the billionaire’s brand of liberalism. In 2001, Soros joined forces with actor-director Robert Redford and let Redford’s Sundance Institute take over his Soros Documentary Fund. What’s the outcome of this made-in-Hollywood merger?

George Soros is a big fan of euthanasia and assisted suicide and wants to see it legalized everywhere. Toward this end, Soros has donated millions to groups promoting the cause--which I believe to be an ultimately abandoning policy that implicitly tells people with terminal illnesses and other serious conditions that their lives are not as valuable or worth protecting as those of other people. The assertions made by Soros in this feature about his philanthropy around issued of death and dying, are, I think, quite telling about his ultimately disdainful perspective about people who are approaching the end of...

Most Americans never heard of Saul Alinsky. Yet his shadow darkens our coming election. Democrat frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both worship at the altar of Alinskyism. In a 1971 book called Rules for Radicals, Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within. Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties. In his native Chicago, Alinsky courted power...

Candidate's Reform Institute also accepted funds from Teresa Kerry As Sen. John McCain assumes the GOP front-runner mantle, his long-standing, but little-noticed association with left-wing donors such as George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry is receiving new attention among his Republican critics. In 2001, McCain founded the Alexandria, Va.-based Reform Institute as a vehicle to receive funding from George Soros' Open Society Institute and Teresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation and several other prominent non-profit organizations. McCain used the institute to promote his political agenda and provide compensation to key campaign operatives between elections. In 2006, the Arizona senator was forced...

(snip) MALKIN: ...He [Juan Hernandez]...when he worked for this Mexican bureaucracy called the presidential office for Mexican abroad...he spent his time traveling all across our country lobbying local, state and federal officials for driver's license for illegal aliens. He defended his operators who were carrying illegal aliens to the country and who promoted extending banking privileges here in the United States to illegal aliens, lobbied to get lower rates for them so that they could send home billions of dollars in remittances back to their country. The guy does not believe in borders. He is a senior fellow at something...

It is often said that the best way to find out how a candidate would act in office if elected, is to see who he/she surrounds himself with. Money is another factor, what people and industries are backing the candidate. These answers should be an indicator of what to expect. Who is behind the man should gauge what kind of man he is. The great Richard Viguerie tells the story of how he and other conservatives had a “seat at the table” of the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan for. His thinking was if Conservatives aren’t at...

AMERICA, the ailing superpower, has fresh evidence about its feet of clay, with the credit crisis supplanting Iraq as the latest malaise of the presidential election season. The US Federal Reserve has cut the federal fund rate by 75 basis points to 3.5 per cent, the biggest cut in 25 years, while President GeorgeW. Bush has combined with the US Congress to approve an urgent $150 billion package to boost spending and combat the loss of consumer confidence. Consider the dismal story of the Bush presidency. After the 9/11 attack, the folly of the Iraq war, the tribulations of the...

Dollar's golden era is ending, warns Soros By Edmund Conway in Davos Last Updated: 8:10pm GMT 23/01/2008 The billionaire investor famous for "breaking" the Bank of England in the 1990s has warned that Britain is heading for a recession. George Soros said that a recession in both the United States and Britain "will be very difficult to avoid". He was speaking on the fringes of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, where many of the world's top politicians and businessmen are meeting. The billionaire investor expects the dollar to be usurped as the top currency The warning is...

New York judge orders former Bosnian U.N. ambassador extradited

The AP reports, and the New York Times expands, on a new study by a supposedly "independent" organization that claims to have assembled hundred of "false statements" by the Bush administration in the course of the Iraq war. However, the Center for Public Integrity hardly qualifies as "independent". It gets much of its funding from George Soros, who has thrown millions of dollars behind Democratic political candidates, and explicitly campaigned to defeat George Bush in 2004: A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security...

WASHINGTON - A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said he could...

The antiquated Securities and Exchange Commission's computer system prevents investigators from safeguarding U.S. market integrity. "It's like working with one hand tied behind their backs," Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley commented about the Dec. 17 release of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report he'd initiated — "SEC: Opportunities Exist to Improve Oversight of Self-Regulatory Organizations." Why can't the government with the world's most advanced computer technology and capabilities equip its agencies with state-of-the-art systems allowing them to better monitor markets and transactions, including illegal activities? In response to the GAO criticism, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox acknowledged, "additional information-technology changes such as...

Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Editorials in many major newspapers cited the Lancet article as further evidence that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, and the liberal blogosphere ridiculed Bush for his response. Prominent mainstream media outlets quoted various academics who vouched for the study's methodology, including some who said they had reviewed the data before publication. Within a few weeks a backlash rose, although the contrarian view of the study generated far less press attention than the Lancet article. In the ensuing year, numerous skeptics have identified various weaknesses with the study's methodology and conclusions. Political blogs and academic journals have registered...

Robert Redford and George Soros surely make one of the oddest couples in American pop culture. For most of us, Redford’s all-American good looks evoke images of the dashing outlaw Harry Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid. By contrast, Soros’ gaunt visage, thousand-yard stare, thick Central European accent, levitating gray hair and megalomaniacal pronouncements weirdly echo those of the “Dr. Strangelove” character in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War classic. The differences between these two men are only skin deep, however. Both owe allegiance to the far left. And both work quietly, in a sinister partnership, to flood U.S. media...

"Paulo Melo, 29, has been in a coma at the Royal Darwin Hospital for two weeks, after severing his spinal cord in a car crash." - read more below: doctor requested, family objected, court granted

Desperate to take support from wherever he can get it. Some - well more like all of two readers have gotten a little cross-eyed over the fact that I dared to imply that George Soros/MoveOn forces were working covertly to assist the most Soros-like candidate on the GOP ticket. The truth is some of the support has been covert, some of it rather obvious... For instance one MoveOn group assisted in the funding and production of this television ad:

Al Gore and IPCC receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2007. The live webcast ceremony and speeches are from 12:50 p.m. - 2:15 p.m. (CET) which is 6:50 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. U.S. East Coast time (EST). Posted for FlAttorney by TAB

Hailed as the cure for ill will toward Washington and other diplomatic problems at the United Nations, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was taken down a peg over the weekend, as his own — and his country's — prestige were thrown into question. What will one of President Bush's favorite operators do now? Mr. Khalilzad sold to the 15 members of the Security Council a resolution in support of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli negotiations at Annapolis. But he acted like a star quarterback who botched the signals, ran ahead with the football, got the backs and coaches all confused, and ended...

Republican Ron Paul said Sunday his upstart presidential campaign is on track to raise more than $12 million this quarter, boldly predicting the Iowa polls "are going to continue to shift" once he's finished spending it all. Speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," Paul said he had raised roughly $10.4 million so far in the quarter beginning Oct. 1, an amount that is already double the $5.2 million he pulled in during the third quarter. A big online fundraising effort planned for Dec. 16 could push the fourth quarter's total higher by several million, he said. "We are going to be...

In another sign of Rep. Ron Paul's online fundraising prowess, the Republican presidential candidate from Texas said in a TV interview Friday that he has raised more than $9 million during the past two months and expects to raise a total of at least $12 million for the fourth quarter. Paul, speaking on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt," said he considers his recent fundraising success "astounding." He added that his campaign plans another "special" fundraising day Dec. 16. On Nov. 5, Paul supporters raised $4.3 million, one of the biggest single-day showings of any candidate in history.

Soros fund takes on Countrywide, XM, Sirius stakes Soros Fund Management reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission its holdings as of Sept. 30, which included a $33.9 million investment in Countrywide. The fund also reported stakes in Sirius Satellite Radio Inc (SIRI.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc (XMSR.O: Quote, Profile, Research), of 1.21 million shares and 103,265 Class A shares, respectively. The shareholders of the rival companies voted in favor on Tuesday of a planned $5.1 billion merger that still needs approval by the federal government. The overall value of Soros'...

Did you know that a man described as "a former top aide" of George Soros took a guilty plea on federal charges of conspiring to defraud investors and faces sentencing next week? I didn't. Now, having a former top associate cop a plea on charges could just happen to a bigtime financial operator out of the blue, I suppose. But George Soros himself was convicted of insider trading and fined 2.2 million euros in France, a conviction upheld when he appealed. Now he is seeking to leave behind that nation-state and is appealing to an EU court. (I bet they...