Free Republic

Former President Barack Obama is traveling to Italy, where he will speak this week about food security and climate change. The former president is expected to go to Milan to meet with several Italians and discuss the issues. On Monday, the former president is scheduled to meet with former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. That evening, he will attend a private dinner held by the Institute for International Political Studies. Obama on Tuesday is expected to give a keynote address to the Seeds and Chips Global Food Innovation Summit. The theme of the summit this year is "The Impact of Technology...

...The Obama administration ordered travel bans and asset freezes for seven Russian officials, including two said to be in Mr. Putin’s inner circle, and froze assets for 17 companies. Thirteen Russian companies will also face additional restrictions as the government will cut off the export or re-export of American-made products to them. Additionally, the State and Commerce Departments announced a new policy to deny export license applications for high-technology items....

I've never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I'm beginning to see its uses. Diss: On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Hasan Rouhani named Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani is the Iranian president the West keeps insisting is a "moderate," mounting evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Aboutalebi was one of the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Here's the kicker: The State Department—the very institution whose diplomats were...

... Obama is set to lay out his vision for advancing toward a world free of nuclear weapons during a speech Wednesday at the historic Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A senior administration official says Mr. Obama will propose the United States and Russia cut their number of strategic nuclear warheads by up to one third below the level agreed to in a 2009 treaty. That pact, called the New START agreement, calls for the two countries to reduce their arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads by 2018.

The Obama administration says China is increasingly frustrated by the provocative actions of North Korea and Secretary of State John Kerry will try to convince leaders in Beijing that Pyongyang is, as one senior administration official said, “putting China’s own interests at risk.” Briefing reporters on Kerry’s plane as he flew from London to the first stop on his four-day Asian tour, that official and a senior State Department official said the administration is urging China to use its leverage with the North “otherwise it is very destabilizing.” Specifically, the officials said the United States wants Beijing to “stop the...

Some good news for Mitt Romney today after spending yesterday getting hammered in his London trip by British press and politicians: He's leading President Barack Obama in Rasmussen's daily tracking poll by his biggest margin in more than a month. Romney leads Obama, 49 percent to 44 percent, in the general election matchup. That nearly mirrors the result on who voters say they trust more to handle the economy. Romney leads there 49-43. Just last Saturday, though, the two candidates were tied at 46 percent apiece. Rasmussen notes that "as with any such change in the race, it remains to...

JANUARY 29, 2010 Carteresque Obama thinks we’ve lost confidence in America when we’ve just lost confidence in him. By Mona Charen. In 1960, Fidel Castro addressed the U.N. General Assembly for four and a half hours. President Obama didn’t hit that target last night — it only felt like it. The president had some things to get off this chest — and if it took 70-plus minutes, well, lucky us, we got to listen. The speech answered the question that began to form when Republicans took the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey and came into sharp focus after Scott...

Writing in the National Journal Magazine, political analyst Charlie Cook opines that President Barack Obama had better start playing his own game, or his administration is going to get labeled incompetent. Cook, who edits the respected "Cook Political Report," writes that, with such stains on the record as Sen. Tom Daschle’s withdrawal as Health and Human Services secretary nominee, embarrassing disclosures about Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner’s taxes, and a stimulus package that has run up against a wall of criticism, President Obama may be setting himself up for the shortest honeymoon in presidential history.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich issued a sharp critique of President Barack Obama's speech before House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va. "It shrinks his presidency," said Gingrich Friday at the American Enterprise Institute. "I thought last night's speech in Williamsburg actually was a lot more like Carter and a long way from Reagan." The former Speaker's remarks referred to the more partisan tone adopted by Obama Thursday evening in addressing Republican objections to the stimulus package and to the President's assertion that critics want to return to "the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and...

ORLANDO, FLA. -- With about 150 supporters crowded around a podium set up on the tarmac of Orlando Executive airport (and about 20 Ron Paul supporters waving signs outside) Mike Huckabee strode out to the strains of “Right Now” by Van Halen and immediately addressed the Bhutto situation, expressing “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.” He said the assassination is a reminder that here in the US, we are lucky to vote “not with bullets but with ballots,” and said “I guess we are sometimes lulled into failing to appreciate the magnitude” of the democratic...