RUTHFULLY YOURS

Congress should kill the Export-Import Bank, a taxpayer-financed slush fund for crooks, cronies, and corporate flops. Rather than reauthorize this gold-plated boondoggle, Congress simply should do nothing. If so, the Ex-Im Bank will die of terminal inaction on June 30.

And what a well-deserved death that would be. As a new report details, this multibillion-dollar Pandora’s Bank teems with unaffordable horrors.

American Transparency/OpenTheBooks.com (on whose advisory board I serve) scrutinized $172 billion in Ex-Im Bank loans, guarantees, and transactions from Fiscal Year 2007 through FY 2014. Among this watchdog group’s discoveries:

A new poll released Thursday might contain some bad news for Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton: Iowans want a candidate who is open with the press and voters.

A survey of likely Iowa caucusgoers conducted by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics from May 25-29 found that 77 percent of the 437 Democrats polled want to elect a nominee who will “meet with and answer questions from news reporters and editors.” An astounding 96 percent of respondents want a nominee who will “take questions from voters.”

”Clinton hasn’t sat for an interview with the Des Moines Register or any other Iowa newspaper this election cycle, but rival Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have each done multiple interviews,” writes Jennifer Jacobs. “Vice President Joe Biden, who is still weighing whether to jump into the 2016 race, has answered Iowa reporters’ questions at a news conference.”

‘We have a lot of information about people, and that is something that our adversaries want.”

That’s how Donna Seymour, an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) official recently described the OPM hacking to a reporter for the Washington Post. As we found out yesterday, in April, Chinese hackers intruded OPM networks and potentially acquired the personal information of 4 million U.S. government employees.

So how did this happen? Well, according to an OPM press release, the agency has been upgrading its network security over the past year. That said, yesterday’s press release also notes that it was only after the April hacking that OPM focused on “restricting remote access for network administrators . . . and deploying anti-malware software” against programs that might “compromise the network.” In short, OPM hasn’t been moving fast enough to prevent hacking.

At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word “woman” into a term of exclusion and oppression.

This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what passes for liberalism today eats itself.

No doubt you’ve heard: Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner. I can’t muster much outrage about this. If someone born a man wants to live as a woman, or vice versa, they are free to do so as far as I’m concerned. What does bother me is the way everyone is expected to celebrate Jenner’s decision and courage. Why can’t I just not care? Or, maybe I just don’t want to be part of a massive public-relations effort tied to the rollout of yet another reality show?

Seven Candidates on Harleys? Mad Voter Goes to Joni’s ‘Roast and Ride’

The Mad Voter (meaning me) is heading for Iowa Friday to attend Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” Saturday in someplace called Boone. Not only have I never been to Boone, I’ve never been to Iowa. But never mind. I’m going now and probably will several times more before this is over because Iowa is — as we all know — the number one caucus state, having injected itself into a poll position in every presidential election, for good or ill, for long as we can remember. (Yes, I’ll be asking people “Why Iowa?”)

So you may be asking, wazza ”Roast and Ride“? Well, you may recall former Senator Tom Harkin — the putative Navy flying ace – gives an annual steak fry in Iowa that is a Democratic Party must-attend. Ernst — an actual military hero unlike her predecessor — seems to be going him one better with a pig roast cum motor cycle ride to Boone for the GOP presidential candidates. The kickoff will be at Big Barn Harley-Davidson in Des Moines on Saturday at 11.

This tilts somewhat to Scott Walker, who is attending and, like Ernst herself, is a known Harley rider. No word on the others who are coming, but they are Ben Carson (doing surprisingly well), Carly Fiorina (whom I wrote about here), Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry (just in Thursday with a rousing speech) and Marco Rubio, who has been, with Walker, an early frontrunner and is said by the NYT to put the fear of God in the Democratic establishment. Each candidate has been allotted eight minutes to speak, which probably will be about three times as much as they will get in the debates. Before and after there will be fun and games at the Central Iowa Expo with people playing cornhole and eating Iowa foods that we can assume (thankfully) will be very short on kale.

Which leads to the question — why only these seven of the umpteen candidates are showing for what promises to be a lot of free publicity in a benign environment. Where are Ernst’s Senate colleagues Ted Cruz and Rand Paul? Where’s the soon-to-be announcing Jeb Bush and former Iowa (narrow) victor Rick Santorum (not to mention George Pataki, Donald Trump and my Uncle Sid) ? I don’t know, but will ask when I’m there, once I wipe the fried ice cream off my face. (Hey, there’s no hurry. It’s a long campaign.)

Tough break, enviroloons.

A long-awaited EPA report released Thursday found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution caused by fracking — a conclusion that offers a victory to the oil and gas industry and a major blow to a wave of grassroots anti-drilling movements sprouting across the country.

The results of EPA’s years-long fracking study should bolster natural gas producers, who have benefited from Obama administration climate and environmental policies that have shrunk the coal industry’s hold on the electricity industry.

After years of denial, the U.S. response must now go beyond countering ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

As Islamic State advances in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, there is a deadly twist in the war. The radical Islamist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is now expanding in roughly a dozen countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia by exploiting local grievances, doling out money and leveraging its battlefield successes.

Even as the United States struggles to combat Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, swift U.S. action is urgently needed in these new Islamic State outposts to stop and ultimately reverse the group’s spread. The May 29 suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque in Saudi Arabia, the second recent attack on that predominantly Sunni nation, shows how undaunted Islamic State has become.

So even the Environmental Protection Agency now concedes that fracking is safe, which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the reality of unconventional oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. But if no less than the EPA is saying this, then the political opposition doesn’t have much of a case left.

“We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” the EPA observes in a 1,399-page report and multiple appendices. By mechanisms, the researchers mean the practice of injecting water and chemicals into shale at high pressure to extract oil or natural gas.

‘Potential vulnerabilities’ should be addressed to prevent water contamination, EPA says after four-year study

Fracking isn’t causing widespread damage to the nation’s drinking water, the Obama administration said in a long-awaited report released Thursday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—after a four-year study that is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue to date—concluded that hydraulic fracturing, as being carried out by industry and regulated by states, isn’t having “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water.”

However, the EPA said there were a small number of contaminated drinking wells and highlighted potential vulnerabilities, including the disposal of wastewater and construction of durable wells.

The report was issued nearly a decade since fracking began helping unlock vast reserves of oil and natural gas across the U.S. It also bolsters the position staked out by the energy industry and its supporters: that fracking can be carried out safely.

Employment rolls for the Clinton Foundation show scads of political operatives—but this doesn’t seem to bother the IRS.

The scandal of the century at the IRS was that agency’s secret targeting of conservative nonprofits. Perhaps a close second is the scandal of what the IRS hasn’t been investigating: the Clinton Foundation.

The media’s focus is on Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and whether she took official actions to benefit her family’s global charity. But the mistake is starting from the premise that the Clinton Foundation is a “charity.” What’s clear by now is that this family enterprise was set up as a global shakedown operation, designed to finance and nurture the Clintons’ continued political ambitions. It’s a Hillary super PAC that throws in the occasional good deed.