Free Republic

How an Americanist devoted to destroying international alliances became the US envoy to the UNIn the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were...

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott announced Thursday he will oppose embattled judicial nominee Thomas Farr, in a reversal of his position a day earlier that seemingly ends the nominee's chances for now amid fierce criticism by civil rights groups. Democratic lawmakers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have long cited Farr's work on the campaigns of North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in 1984 and 1990. Farr was first nominated to the federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina by former President George W. Bush in 2006, but never received a confirmation...

South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott said Thursday he would oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr to the federal bench over his links to voter suppression efforts in North Carolina targeting blacks. Scott’s decision assures that President Trump’s nominee will not be confirmed by the Senate, where retiring Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake had already said he would oppose Farr’s nomination. Senate Republicans have a slim 51-49 majority and could not afford to lose more than one vote since all 49 Democrats oppose Trump’s pick. In a statement explaining his decision, Scott, who is black, cited a 1991 Department of...

Senate Republicans on Thursday delayed a vote on one of President Trump's judicial nominees after a determination that they don't yet have to vote to confirm him. The Senate was set to vote at noon on Thomas Farr, who was nominated by President Trump to serve on the federal bench in North Carolina's Eastern District. But that vote was moved until some time next week. Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, are still deciding whether to support Farr, a former campaign lawyer for the late Sen. Jesse Helms who has been accused participating in a scheme to suppress...

Confirmation proceedings for President Trump’s judicial nominees have partially stalled on Capitol Hill, as outgoing Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake is standing firm in his vow to oppose all Trump nominations until the Senate votes on legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Flake, a frequent Trump critic who opted against running for re-election this year, followed through on his threat Wednesday afternoon and joined Democrats in opposing a bid to advance Thomas Farr’s nomination to serve on the federal bench for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Vice President Pence was then forced to break a tie on...

The Senate advanced a controversial judicial pick for President Trump on Wednesday after Vice President Pence cast a tie-breaking vote for the nomination. Senators were deadlocked 50-50 to end debate on Thomas Farr's nomination to be a district judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Pence, presiding over the chamber, then cast the tie-breaking vote. The fate of Farr's nomination was held in suspense even going into the start of the vote on Wednesday afternoon. Four Republicans were viewed as potential swing votes: Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). But Collins...

...Hillary’s private email server acted as portal to a private intelligence network that included retired members of special operations, former CIA clandestine personnel and foreign informers. Acting in some indeterminate capacity over it was Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to president Bill Clinton and now apparently a retainer to the family dynasty. It was the compromise of Blumenthal’s emails by the Romanian hacker Guccifer that in part led to journalists to discover Hillary’s private email account. Publicly available sources describe Guccifer as a taxi driver who penetrated the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin Powell and of course Sidney Blumenthal...

Donald Trump has inserted himself into one of the most contentious House primaries in the country this weekend, endorsing GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers in her member-versus-member race in North Carolina. Trump makes a personal appeal to voters to back Ellmers in a robocall released Saturday. She was "the first congresswoman to endorse me and she really was terrific and boy, is she a fighter," Trump says in the call. It is the first time this election that Trump has picked sides in a congressional race.

Dorothy Coble Helms, wife of the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, has died. She was 96. [...] Her husband, a staunch Republican conservative, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. She was a regular speaker for Republican women's groups and other gatherings. ...

Snip..... In what could be the biggest State Department scandal since State Department official and United Nations founder Alger Hiss was exposed as a Soviet spy, a top Clinton State Department official and former Time magazine journalist has been identified as having been a trusted contact of the Russian intelligence service. Snip... The sensational charge against Strobe Talbott is made in a new book based on interviews with a Russian defector. Snip... Talbott has been and continues to be a major foreign policy thinker. Back in 2000, when he was named head of the Yale Center for the Study of...

Lately, I had been thinking about writing a piece asking the question of whether Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is more like the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) or if he is more like President Ronald Reagan. For those of you who don’t remember — or who weren’t born yet — the irascible Helms served in the Senate from 1973-2003. He was well known for his independent streak, and he was certainly not shy about ignoring the will of Senate leaders when he did not see things their way. Some of his stubborn pursuits and lonely battles in the Senate are...

I was thinking about this the other day.

Senator Ted Cruz spoke at an event for the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, and amidst what was a strong foreign policy speech, Cruz got a little personal and talked about the late Republican Senator Jesse Helms, the first politician Cruz ever gave money to. Cruz touted all the “crazy things” Helms said, not as a negative, but as a positive, declaring that the Senate could use “a hundred more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.”Cruz recalled how he sent ten dollars to Helms when he was a kid, joking that he “may have been Jesse Helms’ single largest donor...

The U.S. Congress. The House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Combined, they make up the greatest deliberative body in the world. Where our elected representatives meet and debate in the open to determine the laws of the land in the greatest representative democracy the world has ever seen. Committees are formed consisting of members of each party in our two-party system. These committees in both bodies use public hearings to debate and gather input on the important public matters of the day, such as tax policy, budgets, appropriations, etc. It is designed to be an open process that produces...

This week, as conservative insurgents take their seats in Congress, I can't help but think that my old boss, the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), would be thrilled. Before there was a Tea Party there was the New Right, and Helms was its most successful leader. He turned his surprise election in 1972 into a three-decade run driving the Washington establishment crazy. Were Helms still alive, he would have some advice for the GOP class of 2010. Ignore the national media. Once when the New York Times wrote a nasty editorial about Helms, I drafted a vigorous rebuttal. Helms smiled...

Reading "Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take. But it does, as we were reminded by the sudden death at age 69 this week of Richard Holbrooke, who was working prodigiously as Barack Obama's special representative for AfPak, i.e., Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke was known in cynical Washington...

Democrats' hypocrisy on Bolton exposed Joel Mowbray May 5, 2005 Call it the tale of two confirmation hearings. Two of the four men most recently nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations found their candidacies challenged, though they could not have faced more different receptions.  Both men were supremely qualified, but the similarities end there. The divergent paths for each reveal Democrats' rabid partisanship and belies their claims that they oppose John Bolton on the grounds that character matters. Six years ago, Foreign Service veteran Richard Holbrooke was awaiting Senate confirmation.  As former a ambassador to Germany,...

Death threats, spying and vote-buying accusations are all included in the nearly 1,600 pages of just-released FBI documents into the life of the late Jesse Helms. The WRAL Investigates team filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year to get the files on North Carolina's longest-serving senator. Helms died on July 4, 2008, at 86 after years of declining health. The documents show the former five-term U.S. senator had plenty of enemies and that he thought his own government was one of them...

Newcomers to political activism may be surprised to learn that this summer was not the first time the Left had used lies and distortions to smear its opponents as racist. As David Horowitz pointed out Monday, this is the Left's defining modus operandi and has been for a generation: as he writes, "the left’s chief political contribution to American politics is witch-hunts." Another chief contribution would be the myths that undergird those witch-hunts. On the health-care front, we've seen MSNBC talker Ed Schultz lie to transform protest signs into death threats (even though the correct wording was on the...