RUTHFULLY YOURS

Convicted in Ponzi scheme, Norman Hsu speaks in first prison interview about politics; denies he broke campaign-finance laws

Norman Hsu was in the middle of the action in national politics eight years ago, as a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.These days, he is holed up in a federal penitentiary here on charges of operating a Ponzi scheme and breaking campaign finance laws, and the action is anything but heated.

Recently, an inmate asked him how to make $1 million “legitimately, in a year.” Mr. Hsu advised him: “Win the lottery.” When a guard approached him to ask a question, Mr. Hsu stopped him: “I said, ‘I know what you’re going to ask: Who’s going to be the next president?’”

The government said Mr. Hsu stole between $50 million and $100 million from individuals by claiming he was making short-term loans to retail companies—and then pressured the investors to make political contributions.

Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of 27,500 in Los Angeles on Monday. In the age of Obama, a liberal with a statist agenda fits right in.

People who follow politics probably know that Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a socialist. Whether they give a fig is a separate matter, which may tell you something about today’s Democrats.

Mr. Sanders is currently drawing the largest crowds of any candidate in either party. On Monday, he drew a crowd his campaign estimated at 27,500 to the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, including those in an overflow area outside, watching on giant video screens. Over the weekend, 28,000 people turned out to see him in Portland, Ore., and a campaign stop in Seattle pulled 15,000. The conventional wisdom is that Mr. Sanders’s bid is destined to fail. His progressive base is too white and too small for a party that places a premium on “diversity,” and the Democratic establishment has already settled on Mrs. Clinton.

A court says Lafe Solomon should not have had the job.

One of President Obama’s legacies will be his abuse of executive authority, and his hits keep coming. On Friday a federal appeals court struck down a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board because, incredibly, its acting general counsel was in the job illegally.

The scofflaw was Lafe Solomon, whom readers may recall for his legal complaints against the likes of Boeing for wanting to build planes in right-to-work South Carolina instead of union-dominated Washington. It turns out Mr. Solomon was the one violating the law.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a 2014 NLRB ruling against an Arizona ambulance company, SW General. The panel found that Messrs. Solomon and Obama had violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which generally holds that a person cannot serve as an “acting” officer of an agency while also nominated for the post.

Who you gonna call when the green police unleash a toxic river?

‘Ghostbusters” has been playing again on cable, so we are reminded that the villain of that movie classic was a bully from the Environmental Protection Agency. He broke the ghost-containment grid and all hell broke loose. So who you gonna call today when the E-men dump three million gallons of toxic slurry down the rivers of the West?

Last week an EPA hazmat team hoped to inspect an abandoned Gold Rush-era mine near Durango, Colorado, and the backhoe digging out the collapsed cave entrance breached a retaining wall. The blowout spilled the contaminated sludge that had accumulated for nearly a century in the mine’s tunnels into a creek that is a tributary of the Animas River, flowing at a rate of 740 gallons a minute.

The long-term consequences of allowing Choudary to be free constitute a terrible mistake: the main impact of Choudary on the wider public has been colossally to exacerbate suspicions of Muslims as a whole.

Broadcasters have for years introduced him as a “sheikh” or a “cleric,” without often casting doubt on his qualifications to such titles, or noting the comparative paucity of his following.

It is perfectly possible that Anjem Choudary will slip between the UK’s terrorism laws once again. Or perhaps now it is he that has slipped up, and the most visible chink in the UK’s counter-extremism policy has finally resolved itself.

If there was a single flaw in the British Prime Minister’s recent speech on countering extremism in the UK, it might be encapsulated in the name “Anjem Choudary.” His speech went into terrific detail on the significance of tacking radicalism through the education system, the Charity Commission, the broadcasting license authority and numerous other means. But it failed the Choudary test.

The EPA is not only a jobs killer, but …..regulations that save toads and earthworms have halted much needed repairs to infrastructure and new construction….rsk

While President Barack Obama intensifies his rhetoric denigrating Republicans and anyone else who opposes his nuclear pact with Iran, he remained silent about one of his favorite agencies being accused of harming the American environment. On Monday afternoon, Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper reacted to a toxic water incident perpetrated by Obama’s enlarged Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agency that frequently refers cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution of polluters, according to numerous media outlets.

The EPA has been accused of unilaterally increasing its power over private-sector organizations and citizens with the blessings of the White House, while not holding itself up to the same standards they insist others uphold. It is also being criticized for arming some of its personnel with heavy fire-power and equipment that’s usually found in police forces or military units.

What is it about dictatorships that make Americans swoon?Juxtaposing two recent articles published within 24 hours of each other on Cuba is instructive.

First, a Wall Street Journal article titled “Amid Thaw, First Authorized U.S. Yacht Sails to Cuba on Hopes of Travel Surge” reads:

The 78-foot Still Water docked in the marina late Wednesday after a four-hour jaunt. Aboard the sleek yacht were three crew and 12 passengers eager to see Cuba before the sharp economic and social change that many Americans expect to sweep the country as a long-frozen U.S.-Cuba relationship thaws. Some also hoped to sniff out business opportunities that such a transformation might spawn.

“Being born in the 50s and being indoctrinated the way we were, it’s interesting to be able to see this,” said 57-year-old passenger Jack McClurg, who manages his personal investments from Colorado and sails the Caribbean in his own 115-foot Italian-made yacht. “I’m just wanting to see this change happening.”

“For all their talk about Middle East peace, Obama and his advisors are not at all interested in achieving it.”The US has striven to achieve peaceable relations between the states of the Middle East for nearly 70 years. Yet today, US government is disparaging the burgeoning strategic ties between the Sunni Arab states and Israel.

In a briefing to a delegation of visiting Israeli diplomatic correspondents in Washington last week, a senior Obama administration official sneered that the only noticeable shift in Israel-Arab relations in recent years is that the current Egyptian government has been coordinating security issues “more closely” with Jerusalem than the previous one did.

“But we have yet to see that change materialize in the Gulf.”

The FBI has taken possession of thumb drives containing Hillary Clinton’s emails, some of which have been deemed to contain highly sensitive classified information, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.

The official was not authorized to be quoted publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, turned over the emails after the FBI determined that he could not remain in possession of the classified information, the official said.

Over 700 students from all over Europe participated in the debating competition where the Israeli team was declared the ESL champions.

Stav Singer and Iddan Golomb, a pair of debaters from Tel Aviv University, brought home a gold trophy from the European Universities Debating Championship that took place in Vienna over the past week.

More than 700 students from all over Europe participated in the debating competition, vying for prizes in two language categories – English as a first language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL). Singer and Golomb were declared champions in the latter category.

Six Israeli teams made it into the knockout rounds of the ESL tournament: Three teams from Tel Aviv University, a team from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a team from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dan Lahav and Ayal Hayut- Man from Tel Aviv University also made their way to the grand finals of the EFL category, a rare achievement for non-native English-speaking teams.