RUTHFULLY YOURS

The grand project of European Union bureaucrats — bringing the united continent under ever tighter centralized control exercised from the EU capital of Brussels — is the real sick man of Europe.

Greece has closed its banks for at least a week, banned the cashing of checks, halted almost all payments outside the country, and limited the amount of money that an individual can withdraw from an ATM to $66 per day.

All of this came after the European Central Bank ended more emergency loans needed to keep the Greek banking system afloat. That move was in retaliation for the decision by the far-left Greek government to reject new bank-bailout terms from its creditors and instead call a referendum on July 5. On that day, the Greek people will be asked to make a choice: either “surrender” and give in to cuts in pensions and higher taxes or refuse and perhaps be forced to exit the euro and go back to a depreciated drachma as their national currency.

Can you imagine George W. Bush having an agenda item, like securing the border, and then saying, “I will veto all bills that come across my desk until the border fence is fully funded”, and then carrying through on his promise? Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing that, or John McCain, or Jeb Bush?

If you can’t, meet Maine Governor Paul Le Page. He has all the worst qualities that the media finds in a Republican–combative, ideological, pugnacious. Why the very first sentence of the New York Times article introduces him as “Paul R. LePage, Maine’s combative governor”!

The problems began with Mr. LePage’s desire to eliminate the income tax by increasing and broadening the sales tax.

Moscow doesn’t always need tanks and troops when trying to dominate its neighbors.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine over the past year has made it clear that President Vladimir Putin is out to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union as he can, having once called its collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It should be of great concern in the West that Bulgaria, a member of NATO and the European Union, is one of his targets.

In a September address in Sofia to members of the America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev compared Moscow’s stealthy undermining aggression toward Bulgaria to a “Trojan horse” attempt by Russia to penetrate NATO. Our foundation, perhaps Eastern Europe’s biggest, seeks to help Bulgarians preserve their hard-won independence.

ISIS and other jihadis show their global reach on a single day.

Jihadists have a fondness for anniversaries, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by three terror attacks, on three continents, all taking place on the eve of the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate last June 29. That makes the prospect of follow-on strikes through Monday that much more plausible—and more difficult to stop.

ISIS took credit for only one of the three atrocities—a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait, in which at least 27 people were killed. But their near-simultaneity suggested some kind of coordination, or at least joint inspiration. Ramadan began last week, and an ISIS spokesman recently called on “mujahadeen everywhere” to make it “a month of disasters for the infidels.”

‘Eyewitness’ testimony that Alfonso Plazas Vega ordered civilians killed was fraudulent.
Alfonso Plazas Vega is a retired Colombian army colonel and a former director of Colombia’s antinarcotics office. He is serving a 30-year sentence for the disappearance of two individuals who were said to be inside the Palace of Justice when it was attacked in 1985 by Cuban-backed Marxist rebels known as the M-19.

In 2011 the key eyewitness testimony used to convict Col. Plazas was exposed as fraudulent—more on that in a minute. And in December a Supreme Court penal judge, assigned to review the facts on appeal, recommended that Mr. Plazas be released and declared innocent. Yet seven months later he remains a prisoner at a military base in Bogotá, where I interviewed him in February.

The huge theft from the Office of Personnel Management comes after years Obama administration passivity despite repeated digital attacks.

The Obama administration disclosed this month that for the past year China had access to the confidential records of four million federal employees. This was the biggest breach ever—until the administration later admitted the number of hacked employees is at least 18 million. In congressional testimony last week it became clear the number could reach 32 million—all current and former federal workers.

Athens has itself to blame if it defaults and leaves the euro.

The collapse on the weekend of last-ditch talks to extend Greece’s bailout means Athens won’t be able to afford a €1.55 billion debt payment due to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday, the day the 2012 bailout agreement expires. The European Central Bank said Sunday it won’t increase its liquidity assistance to Greek banks, and Greece ordered banks not to open Monday to avoid more deposit flight.

Hillary has been likened to Evita Peron, an uneducated tart from rural Argentina who, at the age of fifteen pursued an “acting career” on the, shall we say, lay-away plan. Then she met and married Colonel Juan Peron who became President of Argentina in 1946 .Evita, as she became known, was an active and popular first lady for six years who had a stab at politics, was clever and duplicitous and lent her voice to women’s rights, labor unions, and charitable works. She died at the age of 33.
There are similarities but the presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate is more akin to Argentina’s President Cristina Elisabet Fernandez de Kirchner the merry widow of former president Nestor Kirchner.
They are both lawyers who met and married lawyers in 1975. Both husbands went on to become president of his respective country. Both women served as senators.
Both Nestor Kirchner and Bill Clinton were mired in scandals which included their wives during their tenure as President.
Nestor was president from 2003 until 2007. He was succeeded by his wife in 2007. In 2011 Cristina was re-elected. Allegations of impropriety have contributed to her decline in popularity.
In 2009 Hillary became Secretary of State for the Obama administration, and now seeks to become President but allegations of impropriety have contributed to her decline in popularity.
Both are poseurs who pretend to be populists.

Public records show that since their arrival to power in 2003, the declared assets of the Kirchners increased by 572%.

Clinton who left the White House on welfare now has assets of over $100,000,000.
A special prosecutor charged Cristina Kirchner with covering up an agreement between her country and Iran to speed up an investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The charges were dropped in March, but the accusations and later, the prosecutor’s death from a gunshot wound to the head, caused an uproar in Argentina. More recently Cristina “reset” relations with Russia and signed a “strategic partnership” that included oil and gas deals, plans for Russian funding of a hydropower facility and an agreement for Russia to help build a nuclear power plant in Argentina .
Clinton faces investigations for deletion of 30,000 secret e-mails, failures in Benghazi, the shady Clinton Foundation and its suspicious contributions including millions from nations that Fund ISIS, and selling Uranium interests to Russia while she was Secretary of State.
Kirchner’s critics have claimed she is involved in numerous cases of corruption. She is described as venal, greedy, ambitious, ruthless, a liar, and one who has deleted, altered and falsified her actions.

Hillary’s critics have claimed she is involved in numerous cases of corruption. She is described as venal, greedy, ambitious, ruthless, a liar, and one who has deleted, altered and falsified her actions.

On beating the dead horse of the Confederacy and the Confederate flag. And while we’re at it, consign “Gone With the Wind” and other “racist” movies to the dustbin of cinematic history?

It is America’s congenital, generations-old anti-intellectualism that renders the country easy prey to hysteria, the kind of hysteria that results from educational policies that stress the unimportance of ideas in daily life. But this hysteria is taken advantage of by the Left and the Mainstream Media, both of which are always ready to stoke up the fires of emotional, headless chicken behavior if the destruction of the object suits their agenda.

After sparking controversy by saying President Barack Obama deliberately damaged U.S.-Israel ties, the former ambassador says he is anxious about Iran, questions the U.S.’s military credibility and can’t keep quiet while Israel’s future is in jeopardy.Dr. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. who is currently a member of the Knesset on the Kulanu list, published his new book this week and managed to achieve every writer’s dream: It sparked an international uproar.

Oren issued a string of articles and lectures to coincide with the launch of his book, “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” thus maximizing interest in this memoir from his time as ambassador (2009-2013). In his book he distills his views on U.S. President Barack Obama and his attitude toward Israel, and particularly his attitude toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Oren’s article in the Wall Street Journal last week accusing Obama of “purposely damaging Israel-U.S. relations” drew outrage from the White House and from its representative in Tel Aviv, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who accused Oren of lying and catalogued his book as fiction.

This week, while visiting New York, Oren took the time to conduct a telephone interview with Israel Hayom, saying he wrote it out of a sense of duty.

“The book is very balanced, very fair, with a lot of subtle nuances highlighted by a process that began in 2009 when I assumed the [ambassador’s] post,” he says.

“Everything that I wrote in the book is firsthand knowledge; things that I heard in intimate conversations behind the scenes. It tells what really happened there. I analyze how we got to where we are on critical issues, mainly the administration’s attitude toward Iran.