Free Republic

The Energy Department announced Wednesday that is has finalized a $737 million loan guarantee for a Nevada solar project. The decision comes several weeks after a California-based solar manufacturer that received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration in 2009 filed for bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers, setting off a firestorm in Washington. The $737 million loan guarantee will help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve. Crescent Dunes is the latest solar project to...

On Feb. 28, just after Interior Secretary Salazar declared that he was not satisfied with Gulf drilling safety standards, President Obama's drilling czar, Michael Bromwich, announced that a permit had been approved to resume deep-water drilling 70 miles off the Louisiana coast. Not a new permit, mind you, but one for a project that had already begun drilling before the Deepwater Horizon accident in April 2010. In the months ahead, Bromwich hinted, there might be more approvals, even approval for a new deep-water well. Maybe so, maybe not. That's the way it works with crony socialism. Just to show how...

<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.</p>

The long term prospects of Chavez's "revolutionary" state in Venezuela are not good. A long report in the Spanish edition of today's Miami Herald lays it out. Since the same story does not appear in the English edition I thought I'd offer at least a summary of this important article. Everyone knows that Chavez's "revolution"--his popularity with the poor of Venezuela and his influence in the region--is entirely mortgaged to the price of oil. But few realize that it is even more dependent on the efficiency (or lack of it) of his state oil company, which goes by the acronymn...