Free Republic

Bill Browder rose from rebellious grandson of the former head of the Communist Party USA, Earl Browder, to the leading foreign capitalist in Russia, as the founder and CEO of the high-flying hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management. But his rise was matched by a brutal and deadly fall, in which the Russian government would steal and destroy Browder’s company, and physically threaten its employees, culminating in the imprisonment, torture and death of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — the man for whom on account of Browder’s lobbying, the Magnitsky Act was named. Browder and a deceased Magnitsky would both be convicted...

So just to be clear, Secretary of State Kerry and the Obama administration have cut a deal in which Iran will be subjected to no inspections, no disclosures, no verification and no sanctions, that will equip the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with billions of dollars, and requires that the U.S. help protect its nuclear infrastructure, among many other travesties, but Secretary of State Kerry believes that critical Israelis in particular and Jews in general are responding “emotionally,” as opposed to rationally with fear and loathing? Contrast the reaction of Jews, Christians and others who comprise the majority of...

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Caldeira, CEO of the International Franchise Association, alerts us to the latest plan to ensure “economic justice” through raising worker pay by government decree. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, believing that the Empire State is free from the strictures of supply and demand curves — or more likely that he must appease Big Labor — is promoting a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour from $8.75 an hour for workers in fast-food restaurants with 30 or more locations. Such a plan may be politically astute — how can anyone...

1. A constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College and substituting in its place a direct election of the president by popular vote. 2. A constitutional amendment abolishing the two term limit on the presidency. 3. A constitutional amendment mandating that 5% of GDP be spent on the Pentagon’s budget, with safeguards that the money actually be spent on soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and the equipment they need, and not on absurd “tack-ons” like “green energy” production for military bases. Rebuild the military and detach it from the GOP, and do so before a coup becomes a reality in the...

The First Amendment exists to protect speech you don’t agree with. It actually is there — if all that was worthy of protection was speech everybody agreed with, we wouldn’t need the First Amendment. OK. So you don’t have to agree with what Pamela Geller is doing, but my G-d, Pamela Geller is doing more to help reform Islam than any pansy on the left or right who is criticizing her. And I don’t care who criticized her. I don’t care who it is: You are weak, and you’re a pansy for not standing behind her. It makes no sense...

"Everybody tells me that I should be more pessimistic — that the “friends of China,” what I call the “cheerleaders for China” — are too strong, too well-entrenched, and they know that if someone like me comes along, they just have to demonize that person, or try to undercut their arguments. That’s why the book ["The Hundred-Year Marathon"] has 70 pages of footnotes. I’m trying to show the actual documents. But I am slightly pessimistic I would say, that our country historically wakes up with a Pearl Harbor attack, or some kind of huge disaster takes place. Then in the...

Halper believes that the Clintons’ effort to in effect keep their friends close while turning enemies into friends has been a masterful and hugely overlooked part of the rebuilding of their machine: "What has been little understood in the past decade, from 2001 to the present, is how successfully the Clintons undertook a systematic, comprehensive, and sustained effort to win over leaders in the GOP, especially figures who were once the biggest critics. In return, both Clintons were able to develop a bipartisan, statesmanlike image that had eluded them through eight years in the White House."

In recent days the Weekly Standard and Washington Free Beacon have brought to light a now-scrubbed recommended reading list for students that had resided on Sen. Rand Paul’s website. Why the focus on a book list, and why was the book list scrubbed? The answer to the second question could lie in the answer to the first: the foreign policy recommendations in the reading list take a variety of controversial stances, suggesting that the U.S. is to blame for the rise of Islamic supremacism in the Middle East, that the “Israeli Lobby” controls U.S. foreign policy to America’s great detriment,...