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The Clinton Foundation, created in 1997 as a nominal nonprofit, has served as a shadow Super PAC for the Clintons. It covers the Clintons travel expenses and keeps their retinue employed between elections, discusses Daniel Henninger in the WSJ.
The payroll has included Huma Abedin, who drew a State Department salary even as she managed politics at the foundation and is now vice-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. Dennis Cheng raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, then became the foundation’s chief development officer and now leads Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at State, sat on the foundation board. And don’t forget Sid Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton Svengali who was secretly advising Mrs. Clinton at State while drawing a foundation salary. This may not be illegal but the charity here is for the Clintons’ benefit.
Who is funding this political operation? Contributions have come from “nearly every country and major company in the world.”
- Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia.
- UBS gave more than $500,000 to the foundation after Secretary Clinton solved its IRS problem.
- Canadian mining magnate Ian Telfer used a family charity to donate millions to the foundation at the same time a Cabinet committee on which Mrs. Clinton sat was reviewing (and ultimately greenlighted) a Russian mining deal involving his company.
- Bill Clinton received $105 million for 542 speeches between January 2001 (when he left the White House) and January 2013 (when Hillary stepped down from State), often from companies and countries with business before State.
‘Clinton Cash’ author on Clinton Foundation money
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I have three full EuroCave, Revelation wine coolers. And not a bottle of Bordeaux or Cabernet in residence. In Jay Mcinerney’s excellent The Wine Questionnaire, Jay puts the Burgundy or Bordeaux question to a number of experts
Daniel Johnnes, Wine director for Daniel Boulud’s Dinex Group: “Ask anyone in the world of wine and they will laugh at the question. BURGUNDY!!!”
Perhaps the most valuable book in the Sommelier world is the legendary Rajat Parr’s Secrets of the Sommeliers: How to think and drink the World’s Top Wine Professionals.
In Secrets, Rajat devotes nearly 30 pages to Burgundy and 30 lines of type to Bordeaux. On Bordeaux Rajat opines, “Bordeaux plays a rather small role in both my wine programs and my personal cellar. You will see lots of aged Bordeaux on my lists, but they are generally bought from old cellars. As a destination in the French wine country, Bordeaux is less appealing than almost anywhere else I have
been once and felt that was enough. When you go to Bordeaux, you do not taste out of a barrel and you are never taken to a vineyard. So I see no reason why I should go to Bordeaux when I can go to Burgundy and actually learn about wine and experience the true environment of its making-where I can see vineyards, visit cellars, and talk to winemakers. … My favorite wine, my obsession for many years, is Burgundy. At their best, the reds and whites of Burgundy are perhaps the greatest wines in the World.”
Debbie and I travel to the vineyards of Burgundy twice a year (links). In part II, I will introduce five nice Burgundies to drink today and not break the bank in the process. And I will introduce you to a New England restaurant wine buyer who has actually figured this out. Rare indeed.
P.S. Read more on Burgundy or Bordeaux here.
Also see The Best of Burgundy and Your Burgundy Wine Tour.
 
 
  
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My friend and Cato Institute scholar, Chris Edwards has succinctly summarized what’s wrong with Tim Kaine and why he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near Number One Observatory Circle. Edwards writes:
Kaine was governor of Virginia from January 2006 to January 2010. I assessed Kaine on Cato’s fiscal report card in 2008, and he received a low grade of “D.”
I found:
Governor Kaine has campaigned vigorously to raise taxes and fees to fund higher transportation spending. In 2007, Kaine helped pass a large revenue package that included tax and fee increases, higher penalties for driving infractions, and the creation of regional taxing authorities within Virginia. The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the unelected tax authorities, and citizens hated the new driver penalties so much that they were repealed. Kaine supported a few tax cuts in 2007, including an increase in the bottom threshold of the individual income tax and a repeal of the estate tax. But in 2008, he is promoting an even bigger transportation plan that would increase taxes and fees by $1.1 billion annually, and he is advocating higher state borrowing to fund education and transportation. On spending, Kaine promoted a big increase in his first budget, but has favored greater restraint since then.
In Kaine’s first year, general fund spending jumped a remarkable 17 percent. But spending was flat the second year, and then declined 14 percent during Kaine’s final two years as the economy entered recession. Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Bart Hinkle gives Kaine credit for the spending cuts, but notes, “it’s clear that Kaine would much rather have preferred to balance the state budget by raising taxes.”
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Every Budget Kaine Proposed Included Tax Increases
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Many smaller businesses that wouldn’t typically be served well by the financial industry are being forced to create pension plans for their employees. Whether this is good or bad, these small businesses will need the absolute cheapest option in order to fulfill their regulatory obligations while simultaneously remaining afloat. Of course, when businesses need cookie cutter service to satisfy regulators, and need it at the lowest possible cost, there’s only one thing to do–hire a robot. The 401(k) advisor industry has been slammed in recent years for high fees and few options, so it’s no surprise competition is creeping into the space. Anne Tergesen writes in The Wall Street Journal that startup companies developing robots for financial advice are multiplying.
The upstarts are pursuing a large market that has been relatively ignored until recently—a vacuum that has prompted some states to start requiring small businesses to offer retirement plans. Among companies with 100 or fewer employees—a group that employs about 42 million people, or one-third of the private-sector workforce—only 14% sponsor a retirement plan, according to an estimate by the Government Accountability Office.
The robos, which feature online service and low-cost indexed investments, are also trying to win business from the insurers and payroll providers that have long dominated the small end of the 401(k) market. Among the smallest plans, fees can run as high as 1.5% of assets or more a year, according to data from 401(k) plan tracker BrightScope Inc. and fund-industry trade group Investment Company Institute. In contrast, fees for participants in plans with more than $1 billion in assets average 0.26% of assets.
“The 401(k) market is ripe for disruption,” said Cynthia Loh, general manager of robo-advisory pioneer Betterment LLC’s 401(k) business. “Everybody is trying to leverage technology to make things more efficient.”
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 The Wall Street Journal
reports this unsurprising finding:
Economic growth is now tracking at a 1% rate in 2016—the weakest start to a year since 2011—when combined with a downwardly revised reading for the first quarter. That makes for an annual average rate of 2.1% growth since the end of the recession, the weakest pace of any expansion since at least 1949.
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Obama Economy: CNBC’s Rick Santelli Loses It Over Terrible GDP Growth
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Michael Scheuer, former CIA bin Laden unit chief, summarizes Hillary Clinton as “a dissembling, man-dependent, non-entity.”
As for Barack Obama, Mike’s long and short on this tragic and failed figure is “ignorant, stupid or a liar.”
Barack Obama, the pride of the Ivy League, the darling of the media, and a man who can only be described as ignorant, stupid, or a liar. In his oh-so-superior speech to the convention, Obama said that Hillary Clinton was the most prepared/experienced candidate for the presidency in U.S. history, adding “better than you or me Bill”. Well, Obama was right on one count, he is certainly the least-prepared person ever to be president. Indeed, there probably has never been another American arrogant enough to believe that, with no applicable work experience, no record of meaningful accomplishment, and academic grades so poor they must be hidden, he deserved the presidency simply because he is Black and could count on the Democratic Party to endlessly and mindlessly champion losers, abortionists, felons, the unqualified, the racist, the lawless, the anti-American, and the authoritarian
By claiming that Hillary Clinton is the most prepared and experienced presidential candidate in U.S. history, Obama proved himself to be either a victim – always his best role – of the brain-crippling American education system that he and his party built, or a liar.
She was a failure as a first lady in the area of healthcare; she abused and ridiculed federal civil servants who did not suit her; and she presided over a White House that appears to have been more or less a brothel. She was a failure as a U.S. Senator from New York, specializing in supporting Israel, thereby ensuring more war and dead Americans; in securing favors and funding for her favorites in the state; and in helping to lead the republic to unending war with Islam by her strong support for the Iraq war. She was an unmitigated failure as Secretary of State, by knowingly lying to Americans in claiming the Arab Spring meant secular democracy was winning in the Islamic world and that the Islamists were defeated; by championing an unnecessary war on Libya that is destabilizing and Islamicizing Africa, and then refusing to provide adequate security for the diplomats, intelligence officers, and military personnel she stuck in that hellhole and then ignored; and by sanctioning sales that gave foreigners control of key U.S. natural resources, foreigners who apparently then contributed to the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs. Clinton is not much more than a dependent female adolescent who needs a man as her surrogate on every occasion she faces a hard problem, a serious challenge, or a truthful attack. Compared to the readiness to be president of, say, Mrs. Abigail Adams, Mrs. Dolley Madison, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Hillary Clinton is not much more than a dissembling, man-dependent non-entity, neither prepared for nor worthy of high public office.
Dr. Michael Scheuer: It’s been 3 days at the DNC & the democrats still haven’t addressed ISIS
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Vanguard Dividend Growth Closes to New Investors
No, it is not the end of the world, but if you are a loyal Vanguard investor, as am I, having one of the few dividend-based funds in the world I advise for purchase close is a “Vanguard Crisis” for me as well as for many individual investors.
How is this “Crisis at Vanguard” going to play out for the individual investor?
I have been anticipating this “Crisis at Vanguard” for a long time. And it is going to become a broadening industry crisis, not just a “Crisis at Vanguard.” The handful of big mutual funds suitable for my subscribers and management clients are facing the imminent risk of closing to new investors.
Why is there high risk of closings among the worthy funds available to conservative, retirement-oriented, seasoned investors?
The acceptable funds have simply grown too big. Increasingly, fund managers are finding that the field of securities suitable, given a particular fund’s strategy mandate, is shrinking below a satisfactory level that allows investing options. The well is running dry.
When a well runs dry, there is no more water. In the case of Vanguard Dividend Growth, the day of the dry well has arrived. The flow of suitable securities options for fund managers no longer exists.
Now What?
I long ago developed a strategy ladder to deal with the “dry well.” My strategy ladder has a two-rung approach.
First: My family management accounts are not super-fund sized. Meaning, I have a multitude of securities options available for all my accounts. Neither Intelligence Report readers nor my management clients suffer from size constraints.
Second: I have the luxury in Intelligence Report and at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. (sign up here for the Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. client letter, delivered free even to non-clients) of being able to select from a field of securities where market capitalization levels are small enough that any big fund would be excluded from the start. I can stay under the big fund radar and feel no repercussion from big fund closings.
Investing in mutual funds at all could actually become a narrowing process.
On many fronts, the tide for the mutual fund industry is moving out.
I recently was involved in an exclusive interview series in which I explain how investors can transition away from this dying breed of financial beast. The interview series should be available this fall.
For the individual investor, the future is with old-line, conservative investment firms that concentrate on individual securities selection and ongoing family-oriented associations.
Now here is the sad and official release from Vanguard:
Vanguard Dividend Growth Fund is closed to new investors as of July 28, 2016. The fund will remain open to existing investors for additional purchases.
Vanguard has a long history of preemptively restricting cash inflows to maintain funds’ assets at reasonable levels. In addition to the Dividend Growth Fund, other funds that have closed or have restrictions, include Vanguard Capital Opportunity, Vanguard PRIMECAP, and Vanguard PRIMECAP Core funds. Vanguard Convertible Securities Fund and Vanguard Wellington Fund remain closed to most new institutional accounts.
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Barack Obama took office with a pretty high sense of his place in history. Beyond the indisputable significance of his being the first black U.S. president, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008 by hoping aloud that his election would be looked back on as
the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
Heady stuff. At the same time, on foreign policy, Obama noted his “deep respect for Brent Scowcroft,” later remarking of Bush the Elder that
when you look at both how he managed foreign policy and when you think about how he handled domestic policy in each case he was thoughtful, restrained, and made good decisions. And I think that ultimately he was one of the more underrated presidents that we’ve ever had certainly in modern times.
So you have the soaring Obama rhetoric coupled with a substantive commitment to the comparatively dour realism of Bush I and Scowcroft. And the Obama doctrine, of course, wound up as “don’t do stupid [stuff].”
In evaluating his foreign policy legacy, a number of important policy issues are likely to come up. Did the Iran deal, as its critics allege, all but ensure that Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability? Did the administration’s decision not to participate more fully in the Syrian civil war doom that nation to a decade as a charnel house? Did the war in Libya do anything salutary beyond disposing of Muammar Qaddafi? Did the pivot to Asia amount to much after all?
But these policy arguments will obscure an element of Obama’s legacy that he shares with Scowcroft and Bush: During his time in office, Obama failed miserably to develop a farm team of Democratic realists–or at least realist sympathizers–who could continue reshaping the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment. In fact, with Hillary Clinton likely to win the presidency, Obama’s impact on the Democrats’ future foreign policy positions might be hard to identify.
On every issue where the Obama cabinet was divided between hawks and doves, Clinton was with the hawks. As my old Cato colleague Gene Healy has noted, “In her long career, she’s rarely met a war she didn’t like — or a constitutional limit she deems worth respecting.”
And this puts Clinton in the mainstream of Democratic foreign policy thought. The Democratic foreign policy elite is still intensely interventionist, and if you think the State Department grousing about Obama’s failure to plunge deeper into the Syrian morass was notable, pop by the Brookings Institution water cooler sometime. There is a broad resentment at Obama’s failure to wield U.S. power more…liberally…among the Democratic establishment.
All of this was predictable. As the old Washington saw goes, Personnel Are Policy. If you don’t have Cheney and Rumsfeld in the cabinet as well as Wolfowitz and Bolton and Feith inside the bureaucracies, it’s harder to start the Iraq War. And the reason there were so few Republican realists in the bureaucracies of Bush the Younger is because Scowcroft, Bush, James Baker, and others paid too little attention to developing their successors, particularly in comparison to the neoconservatives, who made it a priority.
To be sure, some Democratic foreign policy elites with realist leanings got ahead in the Obama administration. Jeremy Shapiro, who spent months at the State Department pointing out that nobody was offering an actual plan for what to do in Syria, remains a voice of sanity in a sea of Democrats calling out for more intervention.
But in the end, the Democratic Party of 2017 is going to look a lot like the Democratic Party of 2002. And that’s a sorry legacy Obama will share in common with Scowcroft and Bush. To leave an enduring mark on the Democrats’ foreign policy, Obama could have learned from his heroes’ mistakes.
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About a five-hour car drive southwest of Madrid, a fifth-generation Spanish farmer and an ecologist and migratory bird expert are in business together—the foie gras business. Foie gras is, of course, that wonderful buttery, fatty goose or duck liver that is revered in Europe, especially in France. It’s also banned in at least 20 countries because of the practice of gavage, or force-feeding the birds.
According to NPR, the two gentlemen farmers, Mr. Sousa and Mr. Labourdette, who have become “darlings in the culinary world,” make their product from wild geese who land on the farm once a year “to gorge themselves on acorns and olives before flying south for the winter.”
The duo set out to commercially produce foie gras in a natural, sustainable way. But Sousa says their technique is nothing new: It was used in Spain more than 500 years ago, before the Spanish Inquisition.
“In 1492, Spain expelled the Jewish family that lived on this land, and the church took their property,” Sousa explains. “Three hundred years later, my family bought it from the church, and we revived the old Jewish family’s tradition. They used to raise geese on this land.”
“The natural cycle for the wild goose of Europe is to spend the summer in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, northern Germany or parts of Russia and Ukraine. Then they migrate south to Africa each autumn,” Labourdette explains. “They stop here in Spain on their way, to eat and gain energy for the long flight. But lots of them never leave because they find such a good habitat here.”
Unlike big commercial foie gras farms, where geese are slaughtered every few weeks for their livers, this farm slaughters once a year — usually in October — with the first chill of autumn, on the night of the new moon.
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