It's hard to believe that a person that smart can act so carelessly.

A trifecta of fail:

1: Run a family foundation WHILE you're secretary of state.
2: Approve sketchy deals and then TAKE funds from agents in that deal, and fail to report it.
3: Do these things while using a private email server in your home, then deleting files from it.

These taken together would be the end of the job interview anywhere but in bizarro land.

I looked into the Clinton Global Initiative's financial records, their Form 990:

Some interesting figures that came from simple research about CGI:

I work with nonprofits and thought I'd look up the numbers for CGI.

You know, some orgs send a lot of their revenue on direct assistance while others spend a lot on salaries and expenses.

Answer: 1: NO. Only 32% of CGI revenue was spend on grants paid out.

Reported prior year figures reported on their 2013 Form 990:

Revenue: $28,221,924

Grants paid: $8,975,872

Salaries, benefits: $6,949,577

Other expenses: $12,296,668

Less than 32% of the revenue was spent on grants paid out.
Over 24% was spent on salaries and benefits.
"Other expenses" accounted for almost 44%.

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2013/271/551/2013-271551550-0b0d6513-9.pdf

Recommended.

Shedding some light on the candidates, I'm grateful.

Also, glad to hear John Kerry get props for a change.

DU: Beware the Water Desalination Movement and it's Lies.

"Water is the next Oil" "Be Prepared to Pay Gas Prices for Water"

Citizens, we are going to see more and more posts promoting desalination as a solution to drought and scarcity of water.

-- Proceed with caution, desalination is a very costly and energy-intensive process and has dire environmental consequences.
-- It is favored by mega-utility companies and if deployed will make us more and more dependent upon nameless faceless corporations that will not answer to our needs.
-- Defend your local water utility, if you still have one, and lobby for more conservation measures and penalties for water waste.
-- Hold your legislators' feet to the fire to hold big agriculture and fracking entities to strict conservation and water recovery standards.
-- Water scarcity keeps suburban sprawl to a minimum; desalination plants are a developer's dream. Don't be tempted, be informed.

DU: Beware the Hydrogen Economy Lies being pushed by the Fossil Fuel industry.

It's very easy to fall for the lies:

"hydrogen is a clean energy source" (it's not a source and it's neither clean nor green)

From a single OP earlier today, the post contains a great deal of information and it needs to be vetted. I'm selecting two claims to debunk.

First: A graphic that reads "Sphera Hydrogen is Easy to Use". Follow the links to see THIS graphic explaining that it's a Natural Gas and Coal-to-Hydrogen Scheme.



Throw some solar and wind turbines in and Carbon Capture and Sequestration and all of a sudden it's "green" (washed).

Second: The 2013 model of Panasonic's household fuel cell (ENE FARM) is mentioned as if to demonstrate proof of this new clean technology. Well, the problem is that these fuel cells use natural gas as the energy source. They depend 100% on Fossil Fuels.



Household fuel cells have adopted city gas (methane, CH4) as fuel, and steam reforming
as the method to produce hydrogen, so that the existing city gas supply infrastructure can be used.

Since hydrogen is produced in the place where it is used, there is no need to transport or store hydrogen, which is hard to handle.

However, when hydrogen is extracted by steam reforming, carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) are produced, because it is a fossil resource containing carbon that is being reformed.

http://panasonic.co.jp/ap/FC/en_doc02_02.html

It's true. We make shit up all the time, it's called "experimentation"...

We ask, "what if" all the time, and then we test it and test it again.

Ya know, skepticscott, it's a real shame you resist the beauty of the truth here, of the LTR between science and religion. It's a love affair, not a contest.

Science and religion are practically inseparable, both having been with humankind throughout history, and with no indication that this will ever change, both are in our DNA.

How you've been convinced to believe that they are somehow incompatible in every case is beyond me, the evidence of their similarities and symbiosis is overwhelming.

Both are products of our innate curiosity, both require faith at different stages, both seek to find order in things and to explain things.

Science involves more testing and research and constant refinement, but other than these the two domains are more alike than they are different.

I don't need to back it up, it's all self evident.

Yay! I was looking for this graphic and thanks to you I found it. H2 vs BEV efficiency.

List of battery electric vehicles sold in the US, and all can charge at your home or work!

Ted Cruz's wife works for Goldman Sachs? Does anyone, D or R, NOT sleep with Goldman Sachs.

Jesus Christ.

To the left and to the right, Goldman Sachs...

[font size=14]Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sachs Problem[/font size]
She talks populism, but hobnobs with Wall Street.

—By David Corn Wed Jun. 4, 2014 6:00 AM EDT



A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton delivered a much-touted policy speech at the New America Foundation in Washington, where she talked passionately about the financial plight of Americans who "are still barely getting by, barely holding on, not seeing the rewards that they believe their hard work should have merited." She bemoaned the fact that the slice of the nation's wealth collected by the top 1 percent—or 0.01 percent—has "risen sharply over the last generation," and she denounced this "throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons." Her speech, in which she cited the various projects of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation that address economic inequality, was widely compared to the rhetoric of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the unofficial torchbearer of the populist wing of the Democratic Party. Here was Hillary, test-driving a theme for a possible 2016 presidential campaign, sticking up for the little guy and trash-talking the economic elites. She decried the "shadow banking system that operated without accountability" and caused the financial crisis that wiped out millions of jobs and the nest eggs, retirement funds, and college savings of families across the land. Yet at the end of this week, when all three Clintons hold a daylong confab with donors to their foundation, the site for this gathering will be the Manhattan headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

Goldman was a key participant in that "shadow banking system" that precipitated the housing market collapse and the consequent financial debacle that slammed America's middle class. (A system that was unleashed in part due to deregulation supported by the Clinton administration in the 1990s.) This investment house might even be considered one of the robber barons of Wall Street. In its 2011 report, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a congressionally created panel set up to investigate the economic meltdown, approvingly cited a financial expert who concluded that Goldman practices had "multiplied the effects of the collapse in [the] subprime" mortgage market that set off the wider financial implosion that nearly threw the nation into a depression.

Hillary Clinton's shift from declaimer of Big Finance shenanigans to collaborator with Goldman—the firm has donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation—prompts an obvious question: Can the former secretary of state cultivate populist cred while hobnobbing with Goldman and pocketing money from it and other Wall Street firms? Last year, she gave two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs audiences. (Her customary fee is $200,000 a speech.)

In recent years, Goldman Sachs has hardly exemplified the values and principles Clinton earnestly hailed in her speech. A few reminders:

~~~see the rest of the article here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clintons-goldman-sachs-problem