Free Republic

An Obama fundraiser awarded a cushy European ambassadorship after bundling more than half a million dollars for his presidential campaign ran her U.S. embassy like a hostile dictator, spent government funds on booze and bullied staff.Here comes the good part. State Department leadership (that includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) knew all about it but took no action, presumably because the wealthy donor—a Seattle philanthropist named Cynthia Stroum—is untouchable. At least that’s what an internal State Department investigation seems to indicate. Made public this week, a scathing report of the probe says that during her year-long tenure as U.S....

-- A Fond du Lac man intentionally crashed into and killed a motorcyclist last week because he believed the motorcyclist was white, Fond du Lac County Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt said. Daniel Navarro, 27, is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, hate crime and use of a dangerous weapon in the crash last week that killed 55-year-old Phillip Thiessen. “Given the current social climate, the information shared today will undoubtedly lead to future conversation and discussion within our community,” said Waldschmidt. Thiessen was found dead in the road on July 3. Officers were called to the area of Winnebago Drive and Taycheedah...

A small Iowa town received a big surprise last week from an anonymous donor who shipped every household in town $150 worth of gift cards good at local small businesses. All 549 households in the town of 1,400 people received three $50 gift cards, according to the Des Moines Register, one each for West Side Bar and Grille, Hometown Market and Trostel’s Broken Branch. Collectively, the cards added up to $82,350, or $27,450 to each locally owned business. Mayor Jeff Lillie was in on the secret. On March 26, he was called by a man who said he was the...

One of the three winners of the record-breaking Powerball lottery jackpot in the United States became wealthy overnight thanks to the generosity of her boss, one of the American Jewish community’s leading philanthropists. Shlomo Rechnitz, a health care magnate who owns 80 assisted living facilities throughout California, purchased nearly 18,000 lottery tickets for all of his employees, one of which happened to contain the winning numbers. The unprecedented $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot will be divided among three winning tickets purchased in Tennessee, California and Florida. Each ticket is worth $528.8 million, lottery officials said in California, one of 44 states...

The latest batch of publicly-released State Department emails provide more evidence that a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio was made as a result of pressure from Bill and Hillary Clinton. The loan to a company named InnoVida, owned by Osorio, was supposed to be for building houses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, but Osorio used the money to finance a lavish lifestyle. Osorio is currently in prison for fraud. OPIC is an independent agency but submits its budget through the State Department. The Clintons’ efforts to push the OPIC loan...

The Clinton Foundation's financial statements over the past six years have been fraudulent, Wall Street investor and financial analyst Charles Ortel, who is preparing a 100-page report on the issue, told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The organization, which has recently had doubts cast publicly over its transparency, including claims that it accepted substantial foreign donations while Hillary Clinton was in power, has remained silent on the matter, ignoring media requests for comment. "The Clinton Foundation financial statements are simple to evaluate under New York law; what they have produced, particularly since 2009, is fraudulent," Ortel said. Under New York state...

glaringly missing from the summary was mention of $15 million in fees paid by Burkle's Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund since 2002

Dundalk resident Bernadette Gietka was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service and aspiring playwright working four part-time jobs in June 2003 when she won the $183 million jackpot from the Mega Millions interstate lottery game. She chose the cash payout option of $112.8 million, taking home $76 million after taxes. Her win was the fourth largest in state history, a windfall both for Gietka and the charitable causes she championed. Gietka died Aug. 10 in Phoenix, Md., at age 65. A funeral Mass will be offered Aug. 15 at 10 a.m. at Holy Rosary in Fells Point. Shortly...

Philanthropist Willard Hackerman, president and chief executive officer of Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., is being remembered in the Archdiocese of Baltimore as a generous supporter of Catholic education. Hackerman, who was Jewish, died Feb. 10 at age 95. Since 1996, Whiting-Turner has given more than $1 million to Catholic schools in the archdiocese, primarily for tuition assistance scholarships, said Matthew Anthony, director of development for the archdiocese. According to Anthony, Whiting-Turner made a six-figure gift to kick off the archdiocesan Partners in Excellence scholarship program, founded in 1996 by Cardinal William H. Keeler. “It all starts with his relationship with Cardinal...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Milan "Mike" Puskar, co-founder of the third-largest generic pharmaceuticals company in the world and longtime donor to West Virginia University, died Friday at age 77. Puskar died at 8:30 p.m. in Morgantown after a battle with cancer, said Steve Lorenze, his business partner. In 1961, Puskar co-founded Mylan Laboratories Inc. in Morgantown. The company began as a distributor, buying finished goods and reselling them to pharmacies and physicians. In 1966, it received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to manufacture its first medicine, Penicillin G. Mylan now is a Fortune 500 company with headquarters in...

A founder of Intel, the billionaire donated lavishly to political causes and the arts. He was a key backer of L.A.'s first black mayor, Tom Bradley.

Isabelle Redford is a 7 year old little girl who loves to draw, but her art is more than just kid stuff. She is an artist. Her drawings are good enough to earn some real money but she isn’t spending it on toys or candy. Isabelle draws cards and raise money to help the orphans. It all started when Isabelle was 5, her mother Kelly Redford told her a story about twin girls in Haiti whose mother died during childbirth. Isabelle immediately asks her mother, “What can we do, we have to help.” Isabelle brainstormed and thought of a way...

Heh. Surely the producers of The Philanthropist meant this show to be a comedy. Surely? It's a liberal's dream show, as far removed from truth and reality as…well most liberal ideas. We've got a tongue-in-cheek, pokey-fun review. Also, America's Got Talent continues on and the acts being sent through just boggle the mind. 75 dancing little girls donned in little orphan annie wigs? The judges think they can win this thing? HGTV's "Showdown" quickly review and dismissed. All with pics and video you'll find nowhere else on the Internet.

HOUSTON — Roy M. Huffington, an oilman who played a major role in developing Indonesia's oil and natural gas sector and later served as a U.S. ambassador to Austria, has died. He was 90. Huffington died Friday while traveling out of the country, according to the funeral home George H. Lewis and Sons. Huffington also founded the Huffington Foundation, which donated millions of dollars to Houston charities, and also served as the chairman of the New York-based Asia Society for more than seven years in the 1980s. Huffington served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and upon his...

John Crean, the rags-to-riches Orange County multimillionaire whose Fleetwood Enterprises was one of the nation's largest manufacturers of recreational vehicles, has died. He was 81. Crean, also known for his extraordinary philanthropy, died Thursday at his Santa Ana Heights home, Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. spokeswoman Kathy Munson confirmed Friday. Crean had been ill with heart disease. Crean and his wife Donna traveled nationwide asking RV owners what they liked and disliked about their RVs. The ideas were then incorporated into new models. He founded Fleetwood Enterprises in Riverside in 1950 and it was a $3 billion-a-year Fortune 500 company when he...

When venture capitalists Bill Draper and Robin Richards Donohoe decided they wanted to give back to the community, they came up with a grant-making foundation modeled on the same principles they use in their VC business. The Draper Richards Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship provides early-stage grants of $300,000 over three years to social entrepreneurs with a vision of changing the world. The partners rely on the same due-diligence process and business acumen that brought them success in the financial world. They're among a growing wave of executives and entrepreneurs who have taken business models into the nonprofit arena, not only...

The Philanthropist next door Couple pinches pennies to endow scholarships, make other contributions Sunday, July 24, 2005 KATHY KEMPNews staff writer You won't find his name on buildings or bridges or hospital wings. Not yet anyway. But Ron Howard, whose annual salary hovered around $55,000 when he retired in 1996, is leaving the kind of philanthropic legacy that typically comes from deeper pockets. He and his wife, Elizabeth, have their names on five $20,000 scholarship endowments that support education students at the University of Alabama, Ron's alma mater. At the University of Mississippi, where Elizabeth earned an education degree, they've...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The boys were halfway across a snowfield when the German airplane appeared. Their rifles, clumsily camouflaged, were sticking out of their backpacks. They stood frozen as the plane buzzed in tighter and tighter circles around them, wondering if they should run for the only possible shelter, a large boulder in the middle of the field. It might finally have been curtains for the Kavli boys, Fred and Aslak. "If we'd run, we would have been done for," Fred Kavli, 77, recalled recently, his head thrown back as he communed with memories of an adventurous youth in...

<p>Bill Simon's political team inadvertently accomplished what no one thought possible just two years ago: They ran a campaign against Democrat Gov. Gray Davis without mentioning the energy crisis.</p> <p>Team Simon tried to run the Republican candidate for governor as an ethical standard-bearer in moderate California. The strategy wasted four years of work by Republicans in the Legislature, who hammered Davis on energy missteps and then heroically sustained a budget debate until September even as it was obvious that Team Simon was doing nothing to take advantage of their efforts. Instead, the Simon campaign defied the wisdom of all its polling, its extensive focus groups and even recent California political history. It entered the ethics minefield.</p>

William E. Simon, Sr. & Jr. Devout Catholics and Politicians. http://www.capitalresearch.org/publications/foundation_watch/2001/0110.htm http://www.mmhf.org/html/giving.html http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-05/staffingup.html http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-01/simon.html http://www.nationalreview.com/maserati/maserati042202.asp