Free Republic

I think our duty to a representative and limited government, a constitutional republic, doesn’t end when we exercise one day of democracy — Election Day and the vote. If our candidate makes mistakes, it’s up to each of us to speak out — not to criticize, but to educate, to ask him to do better. The following is an attempt to apply principle to the specific issue of tariffs and the overarching principle of constitutionally limited government. Congrats: Any citizen who consumes (buys) goods made in China, you are going to pay 35 to 50 percent more for everything you...

("an analyst told CNN." CNN, June 15, 2025 https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-strikes-news-06-15-25) _______ CAMERA Special Report: The National Iranian American Council; Tehran’s Best Friend in Washington. By: Sean Durns November 24, 2015. [...] Parsi’s dissertation on Israeli-Iranian relations served as the basis for his book Treacherous Alliance (2008, Yale University Press). Parsi is a resident alien, with Swedish and Iranian passports, not an American citizen, although he runs an organization that claims to represent Iranian-Americans... Upon coming to the United States in 2001, Parsi worked as a managing director for Hooshang Amirhadmadi of the American Iranian Council (AIC) while completing graduate study. Parsi...

GOING THE DISTANCE Following in her father's footsteps, Vanessa Kerry is training to run in the Boston Marathon. John Kerry's youngest daughter is studying in London on a Fulbright scholarship, but told friends in a recent e-mail that she's training for the April race. (Her father has said he competed in the late 1970s.) In the e-mail, Kerry said she's running as part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's marathon team and invited friends to visit the Dana-Farber website and make a donation supporting cancer research. (Among those who've responded are famous friends: singer Carole King and Al Gore's middle daughter,...

All members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board resigned Wednesday, citing alleged political interference by members of the Trump administration. In a statement posted to Substack, the dozen former board members said they “voted overwhelmingly” to resign “rather than endorse unprecedented actions that we believe are impermissible under the law, compromise U.S. national interests and integrity, and undermine the mission and mandates Congress established for the Fulbright program nearly 80 years ago.” snip The prestigious program — which awards a select group of scholars and academics the opportunity to continue research abroad each year — is managed by the State...

There he was again, making a cameo appearance at another historical commemoration, grabbing a sliver of the limelight before it moves on. He's become the man who's always in the background but so clearly, achingly would rather be in the forefront: The Hon. William J. Clinton, former president, former governor, former everything but straight-shooter. He was still as slick as ever when he got to speak for a few minutes on the 50th anniversary of the great March on Washington. . . Age has not withered nor custom staled his fine clintonesque touch, which consists not just of knowing what...

Shiva Ayyadurai is an entrepreneur, MIT graduate, Donald Trump-supporting Indian-born immigrant and U.S. citizen hoping that his outsider status will carry him to the U.S. Senate. A Republican, Ayyadurai declared on social media several weeks ago that he intends to challenge for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's seat in the 2018 election. He filed official paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on March 17. Warren, a Democrat, is a former Harvard Law School professor who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in the 2012 election. In a Monday meeting with editors of The Sun, Ayyadurai portrayed himself as a "21st-century senator" with...

Terror mastermind and senior Al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki is dead a senior U.S. official confirms. Al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Islamic militant cleric who became a prominent figure in Al-Qaeda's most active branch, using his fluent English and Internet savvy to draw recruits to carry out attacks in the United States, was killed Friday in the mountains of Yemen, American and Yemeni officials said. excerpt - Yemeni security officials and local tribal leaders said al-Awlaki was killed in an air strike on his convoy that they believed was carried out by the Americans. They said pilotless drones had been seen over the...

Excerpt from Jan Egeland Biography Mr Egeland holds a Magister Artium in Political Science, University of Oslo. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, and the Truman Institute for the Advancement for Peace, Jerusalem. Mr. Egeland has been Chair of Amnesty International, Norway, and Vice Chair of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International. Which means he gets a gross salary of UnderSecretaryGeneral|Gross $186,144 but pays no Income Taxes for I quote from the link: Income taxes: Most member states have granted United Nations staff...

GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave. Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza. A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them...

Not Just Cos: Take back William Fulbright’s medal, too by Daniel Clark In the aftermath of the latest Bill Cosby revelations, it has been proposed that the fallen icon be stripped of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was awarded to him by George W. Bush in 2002. A petition, being championed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), says Cosby “does not deserve to be on the list of distinguished recipients.” Well, if we’re going to hold the honorees to that standard, we also need to take back the award from the late Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. Imagine if Cosby...

On this date, Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced the Southern Manifesto in a speech on the House Floor. Formally titled the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had once composed the Confederacy. It marked a moment of southern defiance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision, which determined that separate school facilities for black and white school children were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an...

memory hole reminder The first documentary evidence that Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry’s group Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been discovered in a U.S. archive, according to a researcher who spoke with WorldNetDaily. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2004/10/27207/#615wufvA5oZXKuWK.99

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

This John Kerry is not that John Kerry. This John Kerry has turned out to be an ineffectual, soporific presidential candidate whose main talent lies in torturing the syntax of his sentences so as to never get caught actually saying anything. That John Kerry was an earnest young man, so full of conviction that his eyes burned with it, a young man newly returned from a war in which he had fought bravely enough to earn a chestful of medals before deciding that the war was all wrong. I was in a Senate committee room on the now-famous day in...

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said Saturday that his daughter Vanessa has won a Fulbright scholarship to study medicine in London. Vanessa Kerry is a 27-year-old Harvard medical student who frequently travels with her father's campaign. According to the Fulbright Web site, about 1,000 U.S. students are awarded the federally funded fellowships each year of about 4,500 who apply. Kerry told reporters traveling with him to a long weekend vacation in Idaho that Vanessa recently found out she was one of this year's winners.

Welcome to Blogspirator.John Kerry had a history going back decades with Senator Senator J. William Fulbright. For example, Kerry testified before the Fulbright Committee. McCain: Hanoi Hilton Guards Taunted POWs With Kerry's Testimony [Newsmax.com] ...after he was released from the Hanoi Hilton in 1973, McCain publicly complained that testimony by Kerry and others before J. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee was "the most effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us." "They used Senator Fulbright a great deal," McCain wrote in the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report.While he was languishing in...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Christine Iverson202-863-8614 Washington, DC—RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke issued the following statement today in response to a news conference by DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. “If former Secretary of State Madeline Albright is willing to mislead Americans by mischaracterizing a recent study saying ‘basically there are 18,000 more terrorists. And so it’s a little bit like every time we attack we create more of them,’ then it is a breeze for DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe to make false, misleading and inaccurate statements about a budget that does not yet exist.” Associated Press May 26, 2004“The IISS said...

After the price of oil quadrupled in 1973, Syria and other Arab states put pressure on Saudi Arabia to use its new wealth against Israel. Part of the Saudi government's response was to lead a campaign against support for Israel in the U.S. On their own, however, the Saudis lacked the connections and savvy to affect American-Israeli ties. To make up for this, the Saudi state recruited help. In "The American House of Saud" (Franklin Watts, 448 pages, $18.95), Steven Emerson, a journalist and former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chronicles anti-Israeli activities undertaken in recent years...

Around 50 retired US diplomats have written to US President George Bush to complain about America's policy towards the Middle East. The letter is similar to one written by 52 former British diplomats to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair last week. The former US diplomats complained that President Bush's approach is losing the US "credibility, prestige and friends". They criticised what they say is Washington's unabashed support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The American diplomats said they were deeply concerned by Mr Bush's endorsement last month of Mr Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. 'Great danger' They were...

Iraqi scholars study at UO (Eugene-AP) -- Six Iraqi scholars are attending the University of Oregon this year as part of the first group of Fulbright scholars from Iraq since 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Fulbright program has brought international students to the United States and sent Americans abroad for nearly 60 years to increase understanding between countries. The two women and four men from Iraq are enrolled at Oregon's American English Institute for advanced language study to help them with their graduate programs. The four men from the group met with reporters Friday in Eugene to...