Free Republic

With South Carolina's victory of the first 'Deep South' black Republican to Congress since Reconstruction, one conservative thinks it's evident that the tea party is not racist. Ron Miller, a conservative author, columnist, veteran and tea party member, says Tim Scott's election to Congress is "an impressive victory." "I think it's a great testimony to Americans' ability to evaluate people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin..." ----snip. In winning the election, Scott beat out....the son of late Senator Strom Thurmond and the son of former South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell. ----snip"...they've demonstrated their...

NEW YORK - The King's College has named former White House policy analyst and best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza as the school's new president. D'Souza previously served as John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Located in the Empire State Building, The King's College is a Christian liberal arts college that educates students to bring firm Christian conviction and strong moral character to positions of leadership in the institutions of government, civil society, media, law, education, business, the arts and the church. The King's College...

The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party's supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. "I am a policy girl," Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state's Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she...

Record Number of Indian-Americans Seeking Office JESSE WASHINGTON Meet Reshma, Surya, Manan, Raj, Ami, Ravi, Nimrata and Kamala — a new wave of Indian-American politicians. At least eight children of Indian immigrants are running for Congress or statewide office, the most ever. The star of this trend is Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, who is favored to win the election for governor of South Carolina. Indian heritage is where Haley's similarity with the other candidates seems to end. She is the only Republican, the only one who has been widely mistaken for a white woman, the only one who...

Nikki Haley, the favorite to become the first governor of South Carolina who is neither white nor male, has always challenged established norms with her own brand of moxie. As a girl, her parents — the first Indian immigrants this small, working-class town had ever seen — entered Nikki and her sister in the Little Miss Bamberg pageant. The judges of the contest, one that crowned one black queen and one white queen, were so flummoxed that they simply disqualified Nikki and her sister, Simran — but not before Nikki, about 5, sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Ms. Haley,...

Shantanu Srivatsa and Anamika Veeramani sat nervously, side by side on stage. Once again, an Indian-American was going to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was just a matter of what word and what time on Friday. Shantanu, 13, an eighth-grader from West Fargo, N.D., stepped to the microphone first and couldn't spell "ochidore." Anamika — showing the cool demeanor she kept throughout — kept her hands behind her back and rattled off the correct letters for the medical term "stromuhr." She didn't crack a smile until the trophy was presented. "It was too surreal," she said. "It was...

Univited couple get through Security last night at the White House and attend the White House State Dinner, not only that, they got their picture with Vice President Joe Biden, (Video from CNN + Photo with Biden)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Secret Service is investigating how an uninvited couple was admitted to U.S. President Barack Obama's White House state dinner, penetrating layers of security and mingling with VIP guests. The couple from northern Virginia was not invited to the dinner, not included on the official guest list, and were never seated at a table in the South Lawn tent where the dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was held, The Washington Post reported, citing a White House official it did not identify. A Secret Service spokesman told the Post that no one was under any risk...

WASHINGTON - -- What's the hottest ticket in the nation's capital? An engraved invitation to Tuesday's White House State Dinner, the first hosted by President Barack Obama. He and the first lady will honor Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister -- in a big way, and in their way. In a departure from the most traditional venue, the elegant, high-ceilinged State Dining Room, the Obamas instead will gather with a few hundred VIPs in a huge, heated tent on the South Lawn. The guest list for the black-tie gala remains a closely guarded secret, so there's heavy speculation about who may...

The Dow Jones reached a significant milestone yesterday, and news outlets were abuzz with excitement. Olympia Snowe's vote for the Baucus bill was plenty fodder for the 24-hour news cycles. But, for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists in the United States, an epochal event transpired at the White House afternoon that should not slip notice. Lead me from Untruth to Truth. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality. (from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad -- I.iii.28) As the ethereal sounds of a Hindu priest's chanting of this Sanskrit prayer from ancient Hindu scripture filled the East Room,...

President Barack Obama, accompanied by Hindu Priest Sri Narayanachar Digalakote, uses a candle to light an oil lamp in observation of Diwali, or the 'Festival of Lights,' a holiday celebrated across faiths in India, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. U.S. President Barack Obama smiles after signing an Executive Order restoring the White House Advisory Commission and Interagency Working Group, and observing Diwali in the East Room of the White House in Washington, October 14, 2009.

Maybe we need to wake up. The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera. Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh...

It might have been just a coincidence, but if it was, it was an awfully eerie one. Last week, 13-year-old Kayva Shivashankar won the 2009 National Spelling Bee by spelling the word "Laodicean." That word left a lot of Americans befuddled. Typically, the vast majority of Americans that are products of our nation's collective calamity known as the government schools have no clue how to spell or define the words used at the National Spelling Bee. "Laodicean" is certainly no different. The uninformed mainstream media did its typical best to keep Americans as uninformed as they are. Most of those...

I think I see a pattern here. When 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar calmly spelled "Laodicean" this past Thursday to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she became the seventh Indian-American to take the title in the past 11 contests. As the Times of India boasted, at this point an Indian-American win at the Spelling Bee has "an air of inevitability." So Indian kids must have a natural advantage, right? Well actually, no. Consider the winner in 2004, David Tidmarsh, a fair-haired Midwestern boy whose ancestors never ventured anywhere near New Delhi. I spoke with David in between final rounds on the...

The reigning national spelling champion is a 14-year-old kid whose one-liners kept everyone laughing a year ago. His parents moved to the United States from central India, and he wants to be a neurosurgeon when he grows up. Last year's runner-up -- and one of this year's favorites at the Scripps National Spelling Bee -- is an all-business 13-year-old Indian-American boy from Michigan. He's also set his sights on neurosurgery. Another favorite expected to be onstage for Thursday night's nationally televised finals is a 13-year-old Kansas girl with a sweet smile and a last name that's a spelling challenge unto...

President Barack Obama on Saturday chose two Indian-Americans to help to streamline the federal government and cut costs. Obama named Aneesh Chopra, the Harvard-educated secretary of technology for the state of Virginia, as the federal government's first chief technology officer. Chopra, 36, will help reduce health care costs and foster cybersecurity. "In this role, Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities - from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure," Obama said in his Saturday radio and Internet address. Chopra's corporate experience included working as managing director of the Advisory...

Recently Forbes ran a contentious article that slipped through the cracks without much commentary. The piece, written by Jason Richwine of the American Enterprise Institute, declared Indian Americans “The New Model Minority,” as if we were competing for the title in a pageant. Let’s clear this up once and for all. Being called a “model minority” is an unwelcome characterization that is damaging and tough to overcome. Why do you think the “old” model minorities—East Asian Americans—have struggled to shed the label since they were first saddled with it in the 1960s because of “their advanced educations and high earnings.”...

Our friends over at Radio Equalizer caught liberal radio talker Mike Malloy in a bit of hypocrisy. Malloy obviously thought his wife was a scream as she pretended to be Governor Bobby Jindal portraying him as an outsourced computer tech from India replete with cutsey faux Indian accent. Malloy's wife acted as if Jindal was the Simpson's character Apu, or something. Now, one cannot help but realize that if a conservative had indulged in such an outrageous parody of an ethnic politician, Mike Malloy would have eviscerated that action presenting it as a high crime. Yet, when he and his...

"Hello, my name is Bobby. How may I give you excellent customer service today? I hear you are having problems with hard drive. I am so very sorry this is happening to you, ma'am."

“Oh, God,” why did he have to use that word? According to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the GOP “outsourced” the Republican response to a young, successful Indian-American governor who “had nothing to do with Congress.” They had to outsource the response tonight, the Republican party. They had to outsource to someone who had nothing to do with Congress because the Republicans in Congress had nothing to do with the programs he was talking about tonight or the record he referred to. First of all, one might point out that Piyush “Bobby” Jindal was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives...