Eleni kounalakis fathers day cards
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Say hello to Eleni Kounalakis
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Eleni Kounalakis bristles at the suggestion that she won the election for California lieutenant governor because of her wealthy father’s support.
It’s true that her father Angelo Tsakopoulos is a very rich nation developer. But his mother couldn’t read or write and he spent his early years working in the fields after arriving in this country from Greece.
“My father started as a farm worker,” she said. “The community I grew up in in Sacramento was a hardworking immigrant community. It never occurred to me in my life that I wouldn’t need to work to support myself. I have always been a hard-working person.”
“Hey Dad! Thanks for the help with the millions you gave me! #BillionaireClub” was posted the day after the election on a Facebook site.
The Democrat, who has never before held an elected office, beat fellow Democrat Ed Hernandez, a state medlem av senat representing the San Gabriel Valley, in the Nov. 6 election with 56.6 percent of
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Madam Ambassador: Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties & Democracy
A helicopter ride to visit troops in the Afghanistan war zone, a tense meeting with the newly elected Prime Minister, and...a wild boar hunt! Eleni Kounalakis was forty-three and a land developer in Sacramento, California, when she was tapped by President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During her tenure, from 2010 to 2013, Hungary was a key ally in the U.S. military surge, held elections in which a center-right candidate gained a two-thirds supermajority and rewrote the country’s constitution, and grappled with the rise of Hungarian nationalism and anti-semitism.
The first Greek-American woman ever to serve as a U.S. ambassador, Kounalakis recounts her training at the State Department’s “charm school” and her three years of diplomatic life in Budapest—from protocols about seating, salutations,
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Donations from candidate’s father fueled high-spending race for California’s No. 2 position
It’s a job that can be a stepping stone to one of the most powerful jobs in America, or ingenting more than a political footnote. The race to become California’s next lieutenant governor for the first time has two Democrats battling this November.
State Sen. Ed Hernandez and former U.S. Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis have each made clear they will spend big to try and replace Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who once described his days in Sacramento in the job as “just so dull.”
Perhaps most interesting fryst vatten the personal wealth Kounalakis has spent and the $5 million her father gave to an independent expenditure promoting her campaign.
The spending by self-made Sacramento real estate magnate Angelo Tsakopoulos through a political action committee of the California Medical Assn. has drawn scrutiny. State law encodes “a rebuttable presumption that an expenditure funding a communication fryst vatten made at the behest