Free Republic

WHEN my brother Michael was a Senate page, he delivered mail to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had offices across the hall from each other. He recalled that Kennedy never looked up or acknowledged his presence, but Nixon would greet him with a huge smile. “Hi, Mike,” he’d say. “How are you doing? How’s the family?” It seemed a bit counterintuitive, especially since my dad, a D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security, was a huge Kennedy booster. (The two prominent pictures in our house were of the Mona Lisa and J.F.K.) But after puzzling over it,...

A Syrian businessman described as the "middleman" for oil deals between ISIS and Bashar al-Assad's regime will be targeted for European Union sanctions on Saturday. The listing of George Haswani, the owner of HESCO engineering company, sheds more light on financial links between Syria's regime and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or Isil or Islamic State or Daiesh).

The U.S. Department of State must explain to Congress if it fails to designate Boko Haram, an Islamic jihadist group, as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization," or FTO, according to amended legislation a House panel approved Thursday. The House Appropriations Committee by unanimous voice vote supported the measure, which Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) offered as an amendment to the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Bill (FY 2013). The panel likewise approved the $40 billion State & Foreign Ops funding bill, which it sent to the full House for consideration. Boko Haram, which means ‘‘People Committed to the Propagation of...

Oh, Look Who’s Suddenly Tied With Hillary… Just About Everybody! D.C. Conventional Wisdom: “Hillary’s unstoppable, Republicans begin with giant disadvantages, Rand Paul is this wacko Libertarian fruitcake, and he could never wiiiii -WHA?”>>>>Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s lead is wilting against leading Republican presidential candidates in three critical swing states, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, and she finds herself in a close race with U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in each state, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll released today. In head-to-head matchups, every Republican candidate effectively ties her in Colorado and almost all Republicans effectively tie...

Gary Hart has serious reservations about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. The prospect of a billion-dollar Clinton campaign “ought to frighten every American,” he said in an interview with POLITICO, and Democrats would be better served by a competitive primary that forced her to speak in more depth about the issues. Hart, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, offered his opinions in a phone interview Wednesday where he also expressed admiration of Elizabeth Warren and gave advice to prospective challenger Martin O’Malley, a former Hart campaign staffer. “I like Hillary Clinton. I really appreciate what she and her husband have done …...

Hillary rebrands herself---but---How much has changed? The Spotty Resume; The Suspicious Finances; The Other WomenThe Shady Foundation: Founded in 2001 as The Clinton Foundation and renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Family Foundation in 2013, this ostensible philanthropic concern is a liability.....she was lobbied by human-rights groups and union leaders to address the Colombian govt’s miltary threatening striking worker's at gunpoint, as the oil company, Pacific Rubiales, was promising millions to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary wound up publicly hailing Colombia’s commitment to human-rights reform — and her statement allowed the US to continue funding the Colombian military. Today, Pacific...

Despite Hillary Rodham Clinton’s promise that she had scrubbed illegal cash contributions from her 2008 presidential campaign, prosecutors revealed Monday that the mastermind of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s “shadow campaign” also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the White House.

(VIDEO INCLUDED AT THE LINK - what you will watch is absolutely illegal...solicitation of a donor and coordination by Hillary and her aides from the White House) Hillary Clinton Caught Violating Campaign Finance Laws On Tape! Posted: June 22, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Art Moore � 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Hillary Clinton greeted at August 2000 Hollywood gala and fund-raiser by Peter Paul and his wife Andrea (Courtesy Hillcap.org) The full, five-minute videotape touted as "smoking gun evidence" of two felonies committed by Sen. Hillary Clinton has been released to WND. As WND reported, the tape was submitted as evidence to...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's team has told the Federal Election Commission that she continued her campaign even after endorsing Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama on June 7, a claim that lets her transfer millions of dollars from her presidential bid to her Senate campaign. The former first lady made the $6.4 million transfer from her White House campaign, which remains more than $7 million in debt, to Friends of Hillary on Aug. 28. That date would fall outside the legal deadline for making such a move if her campaign were to have ended June 7. Her campaign treasurer told federal...

February 8, 2008 From the Desk of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: Hillary Lends Her Campaign $5 Million – Where Did the Money Come From?     Last week, in this space I wrote that Bill Clinton’s business dealings around the world could create a conflict of interest with respect to Hillary’s position in the U.S. Senate and her candidacy for President of the United States.  This week, Hillary showed us all why we should be very concerned.   According to the New York Post:  “Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million from her personal bank account late...

Sant Chatwal courts controversy for helping Hillary By Arun Kumar, Washington, Sep 3 : Indian American businessman Sant Chatwal helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton's campaigns even as he battled to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens, the Washington Post alleged Monday. The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their "bundlers" while they press to raise record amounts, the daily said. Chatwal's case reached from...

At long last, what the media wouldn't tell you about...BILL AND HILLARY'S 11TH-HOUR CRIME SPREE Final Days by Olson, Barbara "Disgraceful." That was former president Jimmy Carter's word for the final days of the Clinton administration. But as the late Barbara Olson shows in this riveting book, it was worse than disgraceful; it was well-nigh criminal. Here's the whole shocking story of a manic Clinton White House consumed with self-enrichment, gifts, pardons, federal land grabs, and an orgy of spending and regulating. If the Clinton administration was the most corrupt in American history, here was its most obscenely corrupt moment....

Hillary launches her campaign on Sunday – and, some Dems say, it’s about damn time.At long last, the campaign has a candidate. After playing one of the more tedious games of cat and mouse in recent American political history, Hillary Clinton stands now ready to admit that she is what she has been for the last two years: an actual contender for the Democratic nomination for president. The announcement comes as Democrats in DC have fretted that without an organized infrastructure Clinton has been a glutton for Republican attacks, and ill-equipped to respond to the news of the moment, whether...

Hillary Clinton is prepared to formally declare her intention to run for president on Sunday, ending years of speculation over her ambitions to return to the White House as the first female president of the United States. The political world’s worst-kept secret will officially escape out into the wild shortly before noon Eastern time with the launch of Clinton’s campaign website. As the Guardian first reported early Friday, the former secretary of state is scheduled to announce her second presidential candidacy on Twitter – alongside simultaneous video and email messages – while aboard a plane from New York to the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Moscow on Monday where the issue of Middle East peace talks will be raised, Russian authorities announced Thursday. “The two leaders will hold talks concerning key aspects of Russian-Palestinian relations and their future, with particular attention on the trade, economy and humanitarian sectors,” the Kremlin said in a statement according to AFP. There will also be “an exchange of ideas on the process of Israeli-Palestinian talks and other problematic regional situations,” the statement continued, adding that North Africa would also be on the agenda. …

Hillary Clinton plans to build her planned quest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination on a risky strategy that touts a "new chapter" that builds on President Barack Obama's efforts and embraces her 2008 opponent as a key ally and adviser. Clinton, 67, who is expected to announce her candidacy on Sunday, "is proud of what was accomplished, both as President Obama’s partner on critical issues of national security, and on the progress made on the domestic front," her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told The New York Times. Merrill added that Clinton's campaign, "would be about laying out her own vision...

For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life. For the United States, these were precisely the sorts of discomfiting accounts that were supposed to be prevented in Colombia under a labor agreement that accompanied a recently signed free trade pact liberalizing the exchange of goods...

Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” national politics correspondent for The Washington Post Anne Gearan said the Hillary Clinton campaign’s plan to reintroduce her through smaller personal events and gatherings in living rooms across America is “sort of ridiculous on its face.”

In The Manchurian Candidate, the son of a prominent right-wing politician is captured by the Soviets and brainwashed in a secret Manchurian location. His task is to assassinate a presidential candidate, thus ensuring the election of the demagogic vice-president. Hence, the title “Manchurian Candidate.”The film has several parallels to current events. The main difference is that in those days, Americans had to be brainwashed into serving enemy interests by psy-ops teams. Nowadays, they come self-brainwashed with some indoctrinative assist from the American educational system.In the film, a scary lady with leftist sympathies who looks vaguely like Hillary Clinton manipulates...

...It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.Hillary Clinton, who reportedly will announce her candidacy this weekend, is such a prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination that...