Free Republic

During the 1970’s, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had acceded to the monarchist governmental leadership role present throughout Iran’s history, implemented economic, educational and social reforms. In 1978, in the midst of democratic reforms, the Shah and the Iranian people celebrated 2,500 years of Persian Monarchy. Thereafter, the Carter Administration, awkwardly wielding a contorted rhetoric of “human rights” thoughtlessly encouraged the overthrow of the Shah and thereby hastened the arrival of an exiled and obscure cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, and with him the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Carter’s misguided approach to raising human rights (catered to fundamentalists and communists) in...

Mr. Obama: Don't Betray My People July 03, 2008 Mr. Obama: Don't Betray My People By Amil Imani It looks like Mr. Obama may well be the next resident of the White House. It also looks like my people are going to be betrayed once again by a badly misguided American president. Jimmy Carter helped give birth to the virulent Shiite Islamism by forbidding the Shah of Iran to crush the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of rabid Islamists. Now, Mr. Obama intends to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate child, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jimmy Carter, the self-appointed...

DESPITE HIS PLEA, OBAMA WILL BETRAY HIS PEOPLE Further proof that a bad President is not merely four bad years for our country. Who can forget Carter's gas lines, hostage crises, notch babies, and interest rates skyrocketing from 5 - 21% percent? We are still suffering from that even though interest rates came down after he left office in disgrace. Credit cards and loans stayed high, high, hish. And credit card rates are still obscene in many cases. But worse than that, Carter's failed foreign policy helped give birth and usher in the age of Islamic jihad. Carter threw our...

New Threat: The 'Obama Market' By DAN DORFMAN June 30, 2008 http://www.nysun.com/business/new-threat-the-obama-market/80913/ As if investors didn't have enough to worry about, a new land mine is lurking: "the Obama market." That's what I heard over the weekend from a veteran investment adviser, Charles Allmon. "Political ramifications represent a significant added market risk that should not be ignored," he says. Initial polling suggests that Senator Obama will be the next president, a view Mr. Allmon shares. An Obama presidency is certain to mean a big tax increase, he says. He also points to the likelihood that the senator will seek to...

As Barack Obama coasts to his coronation as the Democratic nominee in late August, he’s managed to convince many that he wears the mantle of Camelot. Toward that end, he’s been chasing Kennedy coattails every bit as much as he has delegates. Some who are clearly less-than-enamored of Mr. Obama have tried to suggest that his candidacy looks more like George McGovern’s in 1972 than that of Jack Kennedy in 1960, or brother Bobby in 1968. But that argument hasn’t developed much traction. A closer look at current personalities and patterns suggests another comparison, one that may actually be the...

Don't you hate it when old Navy guys just can't get along? John McCain took a swipe at Jimmy Carter the other day in an interview, with the transcript getting posted over at the Las Vegas Sun earlier today. As the folks at CNN's Politicker point out, it's not just a gratuitous political shot, since McCain has been trying to tie Obama to Carter, generally considered by the right (and quite a few centrists) to have been an ineffectual president. But the comments are a bit jarring. McCain was asked by interviewer Jon Ralston, a Nevada political observer and blogger,...

In selling his economic plan, President Clinton is gambling that voters never took seriously his campaign promise to lower the tax burden of the middle class and will respond favorably to an aggressive pitch based on equal measures of hope, fear and class revenge.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." --author unknown For the past 32 years, the election cycle has revolved in a most familiar way. Every sixteen years, the Democrat candidate for president has been a relatively-unknown who campaigned as an agent of "CHANGE!" "One reason why this constant mantra of “CHANGE! HOPE!” is so irritating is that they’ve been peddling this snake oil for decades." --Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs[video of Carter commercial] Thirty-two years ago, it resulted in a squeaker of an election that wasn't decided until the next day. Jimmy Carter became just the...

WASHINGTON -- Pitching himself to voters as a centrist candidate with a slight adjustment to the left who appeals to both sides of the political aisle and is a prototypical outsider is going to be a tough sell for Barack Obama who has supported his party's line for the two years he has been in the Senate and is advised by leading insiders. His economic mantra of readjusting the nation's incomes to soak the rich and help the middle and lower classes through government spending is pure liberal dogma. It is the solution to our economic ills that the Democratic...

Barack Obama may be the political equivalent of a rock star with his huge crowds and his celebrity endorsements, but his economic policies are simply the warmed over liberalism of the sixties and seventies. Stale liberalism doesn’t have a history of success in America and doesn’t match his image of Hope and Change. This same old big government tax and spend liberalism is a far cry from a “New Politics.” So Obama has been forced into some creative marketing to sell his leftist ideology as post-partisan solutions to the country’s problems. If you can cut through the hype and the...

Barack Obama: HATE We Can Believe In It is Barack Obama, not white voters, who has chosen to make this election an exercise not only in racial but also religious divisiveness, and even gender divisions. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the problem is not the color of Barack Obama’s skin, but the content of his character or lack thereof. The problem is not that Barack Obama is of mixed race, but that he surrounds himself with racists, anti-Semites, Catholic-hating bigots, and even misogynists. Whites (and Jews, Catholics, and women) who refuse to vote for this phony smile on top of...

Another example of that famous Obama good judgment. According to today’s Washington Post, Obama’s veep vetter Jim Johnson is linked to an accounting scandal at his former company, Fannie Mae. The newspaper reported this morning that Johnson “was the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie Mae’s earnings were manipulated so that executives could earn larger bonuses. The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the maximum payouts to Fannie Mae’s senior executives — $1.9 million in Johnson’s case — when the company’s performance that year would have otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all.

Democrat Barack Obama is continuing his tour this week of battleground states, where his biggest campaign vulnerability comes from swing voters. Obama's strengths are obvious. The Illinois senator can draw huge crowds, register millions of new voters and raise money like no other candidate in history. He is also a giant-slayer, meaning he managed to outmaneuver the powerful Clinton machine in a one-on-one contest. But in the end, Obama wheezed across the finish line. He lost nine of the last 14 primaries, and although Democrats are uniting behind their nominee, there is a lot to make them nervous about Obama's...

The doubts Barack Obama faces are far more existential than the more superficial questions raised about most candidates. They go to his very core as a person and call into question his values, his worldview, and even his patriotism. He is a bit of a reach for the average American voter. Hard racial divisions have softened in America, but unfounded fears persist. Obama has a strange name. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He had a Muslim Kenyan father who left when he was a baby. He made his political career in the cesspool of American politics — the...

Oklahoma City (AP) - Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House. ... Boren, the lone Democrat in Oklahoma's congressional delegate, said that while Obama has talked about working with Republicans, "unfortunately, his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion."

The government of the District of Columbia is defending a gun ban before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected this month. The National Rifle Association Web site has a list of those "common sense" restrictions Obama has favored. One of them caught the eye of blogger David Hardy: Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America. [Snip] Five miles? As Hardy notes, the effect of this would be to "eliminate almost every gun store in America." Alan Korwin, a Phoenix-based gun-rights...

Despite the hopes of Democrats, the economy isn't going to tank, at least not unless Barack Obama gets into the White House. While the media would like to help along the meme that McCain's financial plan of low taxes and lowered government spending is a continuation of Bush's economy, that is fiction. McCain's policies are in line with Ronald Reagan's successful conservative economic plans; of the two Presidential candidates, it is Obama's plan that is more like those practiced by Bush. The bloated government and increased spending seen under the Bush Administration is horrific from a fiscally conservative standpoint, and...

Barack Obama received a standing ovation when he proclaimed his unwavering support for Israel to the influential lobbying group AIPAC last week. In her own AIPAC speech, Hillary Clinton said she was sure "that Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel." But Clinton's reassuring words didn't soothe the wounded feelings of some prominent Jewish Obama supporters, who charge that Clinton campaign operatives manufactured fear about Obama's ethnic background and doubt about his loyalty to Israel in an effort to turn Jewish primary voters against him.

Just because the Obama campaign doesn't pay for cabs from O'Hare and staffers are expected to double-up at hotels doesn't make it frugal. Indeed, Obama oversees a team of 700 people--more than twice as many as Bush in 2004--the biggest, most bloated campaign in the history of presidential elections: "So far in 2008, combined campaign-spending data for the three most recent months available--February, March and April--show that Sen. Obama outspent Sen. McCain 4.5-to-1 on staff salaries, more than 2-to-1 on office rents, and 25-to-1 on broadcast advertising, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Sen. Obama has about 700 employees...

When conservatives point out the sort of things I'm going to point out in this post, they are accused of "using fear" and other such crimes against warmness and fuzziness. There are two problems with that. First, these things are scary and there is almost no chance that mainstream media sources will ever ask any hard questions about them or even give them a passing mention. Second, the Presidential campaign is the most important job interview in the world. Imagine that a guy gets his English Lit degree and then expects to interview for Chief of Surgery at a...