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Billionaire Obama donor Tom Steyer, who is funding and leading the environmentalist campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, will air an anti-Keystone ad on MSNBC before and after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday evening. The minute-long ad, entitled "Sucker Punch," claims that Canada may not send its tar sand oil through the pipeline to the U.S., and implies it will send the oil to China instead.

The chief executive of TransCanada said Wednesday if the Obama administration doesn’t approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline his company will look to the more dangerous alternative of building build rail terminals in Alberta and Oklahoma. President Barack Obama is expected to decide early this year on Keystone XL, which is under review at the State Department. The long-delayed pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said pipelines are “by far a safer alternative” to oil trains but said if customers want him to build rail terminals he will. He said he’s in...

Where crude oil is concerned, Canada waits for no country. It doesn’t matter how wealthy or how friendly that country is -- or whether that country is the United States. With the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline stuck in limbo on the U.S. side, Canada’s Energy Board recently gave a thumbs up to a $6.5 billion pipeline designed to carry 525,000 barrels of oil per day from the oil sands of Alberta to ships on the British Columbia coast. The final destination is most likely Asia. The development has the U.S. oil industry attacking the Obama administration over its drawn-out process....

Investor Warren Buffett says he didn’t buy the Washington Post because he didn't want it to be a burden on his company or family. His Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate has purchased dozens of other newspapers since 2011. And Berkshire was the largest Washington Post Co. shareholder before the newspaper was sold to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. But Buffett told Fortune magazine he only briefly considered buying the Post because he didn’t want to saddle Berkshire’s next CEO or his children with a metro newspaper. …

The billionaire investor spoke one day after the central bank surprised investors by postponing its expected wind-down of monetary stimulus, which has in five years more than tripled the Fed's balance sheet to above $3.6 trillion. "Since the panic of five years ago, he's done a terrific job," Buffett said on CNBC television in a joint interview with Brian Moynihan, chief executive of Bank of America Corp. Asked if he would reappoint Bernanke when his term expires, Buffett said: "That's what I would do." Nevertheless, at an event later Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Buffett said that the Fed's eventual...

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"You know things are bad for President Obama when even Warren Buffett has soured on Obamacare and says that "we need something else." Money Morning writes:..""Republicans should take Buffett's words as an invitation to propose a long-overdue Obamacare alternative, one that would lower costs, fix the unfairness in the tax code, deal with the specific problem of preexisting conditions, breathe life into a moribund individual insurance market, and constitute real reform. It's time to delay Obamacare and propose an alternative, then repeal Obamacare (in 2017) and pass the alternative."

The word on the street is that the Obama administration is ready to reignite the Department of Energy loan program for alternative vehicles. I think I’ve harped on Fisker Automotive, Vehicle Production Group and the battery-failure twins Solyndra and A123 Systems enough for you all to remember that each one of these flops received large loans from DOE… and failed to pay them back. The controversial loan program was taken offline by then department head Steven Chu two years ago. Well, it’s back. Chu’s successor, Ernest Moniz, is hoping that the department can jump-start the loan program again — and...

PITTSBURGH - H.J. Heinz Co, the world's largest ketchup maker, said on Tuesday it plans to eliminate 600 jobs across North America.

Even if you're Warren Buffett--billionaire investor, founder of Berkshire Hathaway, and Democratic donor--it helps to have friends in high places. Through his holding company MidAmerican Energy, Buffett is currently atttempting to purchase NV Energy, a Nevada-based energy firm, and he's getting some big help from that state's senior U.S. senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid. Energy and Environmental Daily reports (subscriber content only) that Reid, who has been publicly supporting Buffett's acquisition of NV Energy and has criticized Nevada state regulators holding up the purchase, wrote a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requesting the agency give "close consideration" to...

When billionaire Warren Buffett pledged to give away 85 per cent of his fortune in 2006, as part of a Giving Pledge where some of the country's wealthiest people would do more to help charity, he was applauded. But, seven years on, his son Peter warns that just throwing funds at problems in society such as poverty and ill health can prevent a more permanent solution from being found. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, the composer and chairman of the NoVo Foundation warned that a donor's desire to 'save the day' could have 'unintended consequences. Mr...

President Obama and his wife Michelle paid 18.4% in taxes on $608,611 in 2012. April 12 (Bloomberg) — President Obama, wife, Michelle, had adjusted gross income of $608,611 in 2012, paid $112,214 in taxes, according to federal tax returns released by White House. • Vice President Biden, wife, Jill, report $385,072 in adjusted gross income, paid $87,851 in federal taxes • Obamas donated $150,034, ~24.6% of adjusted gross income, to 33 charities Here are the Obama’s 2012 tax returns. What happened to the vitriol about Warren Buffett’s tax rate versus his secretary? The same holds true about the vitriol about...

Billionaire Warren Buffett loves Heinz ketchup with his hash browns so much that he is driving Heinz into junk status. Maybe he actually likes Hunts Ketchup better. His love of ketchup and hash browns is transforming H.J. Heinz Co. into the most-leveraged food maker in America. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and 3G Capital Inc.’s $2 billion acquisition of Heinz may double the company’s total debt to five times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to Fitch Ratings, the highest of any comparable food company. The cost to protect Heinz’s debt from losses soared to a record after the...

Interesting news for auto-watchers: Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A), the savvy conglomerate controlled by the great Warren Buffett, disclosed in an SEC filing on Thursday that it had bought 10 million shares of General Motors (NYSE: GM). That comes on top of another 15 million shares of GM Berkshire bought earlier in 2012, bringing the total value of the company's investment in the General to nearly $700 million as of Thursday's close. That's not chump change, even by Buffett's standards. What might Berkshire be thinking? Is GM a value stock? The obvious guess for anyone who knows anything about Buffett's career...

<p>The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has frozen the assets of a Swiss trading account that allegedly made a series of "highly suspicious" trades reaping about $1.7 million ahead of the blockbuster sale of H.J. Heinz Co.</p> <p>The regulator's move came one day after Heinz said it was selling itself for $23 billion to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital in one of the biggest food-industry acquisitions ever.</p>

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is dipping into the ketchup business as part of $23.3 billion deal to buy the Heinz ketchup company. H.J. Heinz Co. says it’s the largest deal ever in the food industry. The company, based in Pittsburgh, also makes Classico spaghetti sauces, Ore-Ida potatoes and Smart Ones frozen meals. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and its partner on the deal—3G Capital, the investment firm that bought Burger King in 2010—say Heinz will remain headquartered in Pittsburgh. Heinz CEO William Johnson said in a statement that the company “will have an opportunity to drive further growth” as a private enterprise....

(Reuters) - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and private equity firm 3G Capital will buy ketchup and baby food maker H.J. Heinz Co for $23.2 billion in cash, a deal that combines 3G's ambitions in the food industry with Buffett's hunt for growth. Including debt assumption, Heinz valued the transaction, which it called the largest in its industry's history, at $28 billion. Berkshire and 3G will pay $72.50 per share, a 19 percent premium to the stock's previous all-time high.

Arizona, 2007: A child is suspended for drawing images of a gun: MESA, Ariz. — Parents of a Florence student suspended for sketching a gun during class say his punishment is an overreaction by school officials. The eighth-grader at Florence's Walker Butte K-8 school was suspended for three days on Aug. 24 for drawing images of a gun. Stephanie Vardarkis said her son, Joshua, had drawn the images on index cards, sort of like a cartoon that included a stick figure holding a gun. In one image, the boy included the name of the school resource officer. Rather than it...

You may be sick of hearing about him again, but Warren Buffett did huge damage serving as Obama’s useful fool last year. Dupes comprise a long, dubious tradition in American history. Over 200 years ago, George Washington warned the nation about “dupes” in his historic Farewell Address. Such warnings would echo from the founding of the republic through the Cold War. During the Cold War, “dupe,” like the associated word, “useful idiot” — attributed to Vladimir Lenin — became an everyday term. Dupes were legion during the Cold War, a unique breed of (largely) left-leaning Americans who, unwittingly, allowed or...

WASHINGTON - The Manassas News & Messenger is no more. The paper printed its final edition after 143 years of covering the news in Prince William County, Manassas and Manassas Park Sunday. The paper's parent company, the Warren Buffett-owned World Media Enterprises, decided to close the paper and its website ... World Media Enterprises purchased the paper, as well as several others, from Media General in June. ... All employees lost their jobs, and