Here's a classic case of government waste. The U.S. taxpayers financed equipment for the government of Yemen. But the equipment — nearly $600,000 worth of night vision goggles, along with medical supplies and other goods — has been sitting decaying in a Virginia warehouse for eight years now. The Government Accountability Office reports, "According to DOD officials, DOD faces limitations in accessing the equipment and mediating a resolution to the situation because it involves a private contract between the government of Yemen and its freight forwarder."

In the Daily News, Wayne Barrett, a left-winger, has a piece that is very tough on Mayor de Blasio and details his ties to labor unions:

Most of the water de Blasio carries for his backers these days flows from city reservoirs. He has awarded the richest labor contracts in city history, and support for his 2017 reelection bid from the union recipients of his public largesse may ward off any primary challenge.

SEIU signed one of those contracts — valued, when combined with the nurses union, at $879 million. Hotel workers don't have a city contract, but are pleased no doubt by the mayor's enforcement war against hotel competitor Airbnb. And de Blasio, whose chief of staff used to work for Wilhelm at HTC, backed a bill this year that banned the residential conversion of hotels for two years, an unprecedented restriction on property rights championed by the union.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has a column about the potential unintended consequences of a Dodd-Frank rule mandating "clawbacks" of incentive pay for executives of publicly traded companies that restate earnings:

the new rule, on which the S.E.C. is seeking public comment, is causing some head-scratching because its language could lead to a different, perverse consequence.
Instead of acting as a check on compensation and accountability, the new law increasingly looks as if it could drive up base salaries — and make executives less aligned with shareholders — or increase incentive pay to even higher levels to account for the risk of any potential clawback.

Hillary's economic policy speech delivered today at the New School is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax here, at the New York Sun here, and at Reason here.

The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, explains why he is running for president. "Let's turn things around in our nation by focusing on three positive goals: reform, growth and safety."

ExxonMobil has a post making concrete the scale of global energy demand. It mentions the Hebron project off the east coast of Canada:

Like many projects undertaken by the oil and gas industry, Hebron is enormous. It is among the largest engineering projects currently underway anywhere in the world, and when completed will be one of the larger and more complex offshore drilling and production projects our industry has ever pioneered.

It will take five years to build and is not scheduled to start up until 2017. (By contrast, the Pentagon took 18 months to build.) The cost to build Hebron? More than $14 billion.

We expect Hebron to produce oil for three decades, and we are in the process of hiring people who could spend their entire careers working on this one project.

When all is said and done and Hebron comes online, this massive energy project is expected to produce about 700 million barrels of oil.

Remember, that is over the course of 30 years.

HUDSON, N.H. — Watch Jeb Bush in action taking questions from New Hampshire voters at a town hall-style campaign event here, and it becomes clear pretty quickly why he's considered a first-tier candidate, maybe even the front-runner, at this stage of the Republican presidential campaign.

The campaign has the little things down. The formal portion of the event takes precisely an hour, and the candidate leaves the event as scheduled at exactly 8 p.m. The sound system works perfectly. As voters leave the event, there's a table with stacks of bright white t-shirts, in a variety of sizes, with the red "Jeb!" logo. When someone asks if they are for sale, the person staffing the table replies with the Granite State motto —"Live Free or Die." Other campaigns sell tchotchkes and apparel to make money; the Jeb Bush campaign is well funded enough to give the gear away to build goodwill.

Tony Rodham's unpaid taxes — and his plan to make money on the post-earthquake rebuilding of Haiti — were the subject of a post here back in May. Now the New York Times has an article about Roger Clinton that shows Bill Clinton's brother has some things in common with Hillary Clinton's brother Tony:

A Bloomberg news article reports on one consequence of the Dodd-Frank law increasing regulation of banks:

Schonfeld Group Holdings already has 34 teams managing $7.5 billion of positions and is seeking to get bigger. His family office offers a home for top Wall Street portfolio managers as banks are constrained by new rules limiting trading for their own books. One of the biggest teams, Quantbot Technologies, which has been working for him for six years, is run by a nuclear physicist who helped establish electronic-trading platforms at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch & Co.
"We can be flexible, entrepreneurial and nimble," said Schonfeld. The Dodd-Frank Act and the Volcker Rule have meant "the banks lost a lot of talent, and we were able to have an offering that was unbelievably competitive."

Israel is a country that I am far more likely to be found defending than criticizing, but even for a lover of Israel like me, the way that country has shaken down the private companies who have successfully explored natural gas fields there is nothing short of outrageous. The Israeli publication Mida has an interview with Bini Zomer, Noble Energy's country manager for Israel, that sheds some light on the situation, which involves retroactive and confiscatory taxation as well as antitrust accusations: "There's this notion that corporations are anti-regulation. We're not. Unregulated environments are the hardest to operate in. We want regulation, but we want the regulations to be known, stable, and in consonance with best practices around the world."

The interview may be a bit hard to follow if you haven't been following all the twists and turns of the situation, but it at least provides a flavor of what has been going on.

Pete Wehner has an article in the New York Times making what seems to me to be a pretty strong case against Donald Trump as a presidential candidate:

My column this week:

Measured purely in terms of philanthropic bang-for-the-buck, the $4.3 million that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has spent since 2003 on promoting a nuclear deal between America and Iran has to be one of the greatest bargains in the history of political charity. That's true regardless of whether America and Iran ultimately reach a nuclear deal, and regardless of whether you are in favor of such a deal or oppose it....

Please read the rest at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), or at Newsmax (here).

Yale professor David Gelernter is the subject of the latest "Conversations With Bill Kristol" interview. Some highlights from the transcript:

[On Yale students today:]Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they're likable...Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it's hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it's very hard to grasp that the person you're talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn't know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let's say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed...

Governor Jindal's suggestion that we get rid of the Supreme Court is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

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