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Blake, my hard hat grandson!
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Soros is at it again as he plays both sides of the fence (supporting Green causes) and then making money from driving companies out of business, causing their stock price to collapse and their workers fired.
Ask the English if you do not believe me as he pounded the Pound and made billions. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, A Federal Judge shoots Obama a bird for killing birds. (See 1a below.)
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A nation that cannot protect its borders is in serious danger and Trump's ideas are a bit over board, unrealistically costly, not a complete solution and impractical but then, maybe he can get Mexico to pay for everything, even our $18 trillion debt.
At this very early point in the campaign, Trump has appeal because, like a magnet, he attracts the disaffected. He is a breath of fresh air when compared to the public's disaffection with politicians. Donald is entertaining and those who are currently listening to him are not interested in examining the rationale of his ideas. In time they will or they had better. If they do, I suspect Kasich and/or Walker will emerge and Carly and/or Ben will be on their ticket.
JEB is a decent person, has a fine record as governor but is failing to catch on partly because he is another Bush and is too bland against the fire breathing Donald. The rest of the candidates in one way or the other have positives but are just not catching on either.
Time will tell. We have a long way to go.
Frankly, when I look at my nation I am appalled at what I find. In just about every category one judges a nation we are failing and/or sinking: educational, financial, values, character, political both foreign and domestic, racial and the list seems endless
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What triggered the FBI investigation of Hillarious? (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Clean Energy Advocate Soros Buys Coal Company Shares
Hedge fund legend George Soros is a major financial backer of clean energy, but his Soros Fund Management firm bought shares of the country's two biggest coal producers in the second quarter, according to
SEC filings.
The companies are Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. Soros bought more than 1 million shares of Peabody and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal. At Tuesday's share prices, that puts the Peabody stake at more than $1.13 million, and the Arch Coal stake at $768,810.
In October, the Soros-funded Climate Policy Initiative published a report saying the world economy could save $1.8 trillion over the next 20 years by shifting from coal to clean energy.
"What a difference a few months makes, especially when those months have seen coal company stocks fall to fire sale prices," Steve Milloy a former coal industry executive who publishes JunkScience.com,
writes on Breitbart.
"It’s possible that Soros is only looking for a dead cat bounce" by the stocks, Milloy says.
But, "I doubt the shrewd Soros is looking to make just a few million dollars on these investments."
Michael South, a UK-based mining and energy consultant, told
FoxNews.com that while coal prices have suffered around the world in part because of a drop in demand from China and other countries, and fracking, which produced natural gas at a cheaper price, there is still a huge need for coal, and eventually prices will go up.
“George Soros spent millions of dollars and multiple years helping to driving down price of coal,” H. Sterling Burnett, research fellow and managing editor, at the Heartland Institute, told
FoxNews.com.
“If he buys enough stock to have controlling interests in these coal businesses, closes them down and leaves the coal in the ground, we might accept that he is a true believer, that his investment was all about stopping climate change and saving the environment," he said.
“But my suspicion is that he helped to drive stocks down, bought as many shares as he can, and, when stocks rebound, he can sell his shares and make a huge profit.”
Elsewhere on the commodity front, with major commodities indices hitting 13-year lows, now must be time to exit the asset class with both feet running, right?
Quite the contrary, says Barron's columnist Andrew Bary. "It’s time to consider commodities," he writes.
"While the Standard & Poor’s 500, Nasdaq Composite, and other key equity indexes are near record levels, commodity stocks, including energy shares, are way below their peaks. Commodities are probably the most out-of-favor industry group in the stock market."
That's cat nip for value investors.
Indeed, "the commodities space represents great value versus the rest of the market,” Roland Morris, a commodity strategist and portfolio manager at Van Eck Global,
tells Barron's.
"There has been no place to hide — gold, industrial metals, and energy have all been weak."
Gold has dropped to a five-year low, trading at $1,115.20 an ounce Tuesday afternoon, and oil has slid to a six-year low, with U.S. crude trading at $42.42 a barrel.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index stood at 2,096, 2 percent beneath its record high.
1a)
Obama’s Wind-Energy Lobby Gets Blown Away
A California judge rules in favor of bald eagles and against 30-year permits to shred them.
The American bald eagle. PHOTO: REUTERS
By ROBERT BRYCE
Chalk one up for the bald eagle. The avian symbol of American freedom has beaten the Obama administration and the wind industry in court, though the majestic birds still don’t stand a chance when flying near the subsidy-fueled blades of green-energy production.
On Aug. 11, a federal judge in the Northern District of California shot down a rule proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that would have allowed the wind industry to legally kill bald eagles and golden eagles for up to three decades.
The ruling is a setback for the wind industry and President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which depends on tripling domestic wind-energy capacity to meet the plan’s projected cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2030. The ruling also exposes the Obama administration’s cozy relationship with the wind industry and the danger to wildlife posed by a major expansion of wind-energy capacity.
U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh,
an Obama appointee,
ruled in favor of the plaintiff, the American Bird Conservancy, and against the FWS’s “eagle take” rule. Judge Koh found that the FWS violated the National Environmental Policy Act in 2013 when the agency’s director, Dan Ashe, decided that the agency could issue permits to wind-energy companies that would have allowed them to lawfully kill eagles for up to 30 years without first doing an environmental-impact assessment. Permits were previously limited to five years.
Mr. Ashe, an Obama nominee who has headed the FWS since 2011, ignored the advice of a staff member who warned him, according to the ruling, that “real, significant, and cumulative biological impacts will result” if the eagle-kill permits were extended from five to 30 years. Rather than listen to his staff, Mr. Ashe sided with the wind-energy lobby, which
pushed hard for the 30-year permits. More than a dozen wind companies have
applied for eagle-kill permits.
Bird kills in general, and eagle kills in particular, are a legal and public-relations nightmare for an industry that promotes itself as “green.” The FWS and the Justice Department have been
reluctant to prosecute the wind industry for killing protected birds—bringing only
two cases against wind-energy companies over the past two years—even though a
study published in the March 2013 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin found that wind turbines in the U.S. kill some 573,000 birds and 880,000 bats each year. The study also said there is an “urgent need to improve fatality monitoring methods” at wind facilities.
Under the Clean Power Plan, the Energy Department projects that wind-generation capacity will surge from 66 gigawatts in 2014 to some 200 gigawatts in 2030. But for that expansion to happen, the federal government will have to give wind companies formal permission to kill some of our most iconic wildlife. And that’s where the raptor meets the turbine blade.
The Clean Power Plan
relies on wind more than any other form of renewable energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving those reductions will require covering roughly 54,000 square miles of land (an area about the size of New York state) with tens of thousands of new turbines.
Those turbines will be killing birds and bats in far greater numbers than they are now. Yet the federal government has no clear policies for how it will handle the impending slaughter or to what extent it will prosecute wind-energy companies for violating the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
The rationale being used by renewable-energy promoters and the Obama administration is that future climate change trumps today’s wildlife concerns. Therefore, we have to kill lots of birds and bats with turbines to save them from the possibility of climate change. Never mind that whatever carbon-dioxide cuts we achieve will be swamped by soaring emissions growth in places like Brazil, India and Indonesia.
Meanwhile, the killing by wind turbines continues. On July 25 a wounded female golden eagle was found near a turbine at the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in northern California. A local 2008
study estimated that the Altamont wind facility kills some 60 golden eagles, 2,500 raptors and 7,000 non-raptors each year. The injured eagle was taken to a wildlife hospital where veterinarians found the bird’s wing had been “shredded.” Saving the bird was deemed futile and the eagle was euthanized.
Last week an FWS spokesman told me the agency is “looking into the circumstances surrounding” the eagle death at Altamont.
Mr. Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong” (PublicAffairs, 2014).
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-2)
2) Report: Email by Hillary Aide Huma Abedin Triggered FBI Inquiry
By Jason Devaney
Two emails containing classified information from two people in Hillary Clinton's inner circle jump-started the FBI investigation into her use of a private email setup during her time as secretary of state, according to a new report.
Fox News reports that emails from Clinton adviser Huma Abedin and aide Jake Sullivan passed through Clinton's private email server. The messages were about military intelligence information a year before the 2012 Benghazi attack, and about the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.
Fox News reports that it confirmed via the intelligence community inspector general the material in the emails was classified when it was sent.
Both Abedin and Sullivan are working on Clinton's presidential campaign.
The FBI took control of Clinton's email server last week and its agents are now combing through it, even though the device was wiped clean of all data. A report this week said the
FBI may be able to recover some of the erased data from the server.
The email scandal has dogged Clinton all year, and her poll numbers as she campaigns for president are starting to take a hit. Her main challenger from the left, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is
gaining ground on her and is actually tied with the former first lady in one New Hampshire poll.
Real estate mogul Donald Trump, the leading candidate for president on the Republican side,
trails Clinton by just 6 points in another poll.
Clinton addressed the email controversy during a press conference Tuesday in Las Vegas. Fox News' Ed Henry and Clinton had a
"contentious" back and forth for nearly 5 minutes about the scandal.
When Henry asked Clinton if she tried to wipe her server, she replied with a joke answer.
"What, with a cloth or something?" she asked. Henry rephrased his question and Clinton replied, "I don't know how it works digitally at all."
FBI investigators have
flagged more than 300 of Clinton's emails thus far that may contain classified information. The number is expected to climb.
At one point, her server was managed and maintained by a small, Denver-based company whose office at the time was in a loft apartment.
Clinton's server was located in a bathroom
closet, it was reported this week.
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