In his defense of the Energy Department's handling of the $535 million loan guarantee to the now bankrupt Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made some bold claims about the overall effectiveness of the department's clean-energy loan programs. He also made the case that the collapse in solar panel prices -- which helped sink Solyndra -- was "totally unexpected" by most financial analysts at the time when the department went forward with the loan in 2009.
There are a number of issues in dispute concerning Solyndra, but these two statements by Chu appear to be the most ripe for a fact check because they get to the heart of the issue about whether the clean-energy program is creating many jobs and whether the Energy Department should have seen the red flags concerning the Solyndra investment.
#2
Talked to him in Western Alaska a few years ago. He and I went to UC Berkeley. That was what we had in common. A few photo ops and then the entourage left.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
11/18/2011 17:41 Comments ||
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We call on you today to hold Attorney General Eric Holder accountable for Operation Fast and Furious and urge you to ask for his immediate resignation, the letter reads.
In intentionally letting over 2,000 firearms walk across the border into Mexico, it continues, the [ATF] under the leadership of Attorney General Holder carried out an operation that left a U.S. Border Patrol agent dead, broke federal law and attempted to build a case for gun control. Operation Fast and Furious has proved to be one of the most serious errors in judgment carried out in recent history by a federal agency.
#5
That would be entertaining; as pretzel-like as Harry Reid has been to ensure that the Senate doesn't pass a budget, he'd become an outright contortion artist to deep-six a Holder impeachment trial and make sure the juicy tidbits stayed quiet.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/18/2011 16:13 Comments ||
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#6
ailing to prosecute ACORN or the New Black Panthers in the coming voter fraud?
That, plus working it in the opposite direction.
Imagine the following scenario: DOJ receives anonymous tip of election irregularities in a critical district where vote count gives advantage to O's opponent. DOJ (which is meanwhile being staffed with O's loyalists, while the professionals get kicked out/moved to nonsensitive spots) investigates. Does it really matter whether they "discover" evidence of wrongdoing, or just tie the results in a lengthy investigation?* After all, it isn't as if 90% of the votes have to be faked. Obama already has the votes of public employees, big labor, welfare recipients, majority of Afro-Americans, a lot of Hispanics, etc....
*While this never happened before in USA, it's SOP in a lot of places.
#7
Holder is what needs to be toppled, that's first priority. This is the most corrupt Justice Department in our Nations history.
And yes Grom, this is third world activity, as is most of what the President uses in tactics seeing as he is always pushing the envelope with the way he conducts lawfare. The is a third world leader right there in the White House.
I put this under Seedy Politicians since Obama and the Democrats (and Unions) Own these terrorists Lock, Stock, and Barrel. Feel free to move this elsewhere (WOT for example)
They were caught in the middle of madness.
Some grade school students were forced to walk a gauntlet of screaming Occupy Wall Street protesters just to get to school on Thursday.
It was a wild day in lower Manhattan for most everyone involved, including elementary school children who had to brave the mayhem just to get to class on the other side of Wall Street.
These guys are terrorists, yelling at little kids, one father said.
For them its horrible. Theyre afraid of all the crowds. Were not even able to get through. Theyre just, hes very afraid now, a mother added.
One protester followed a father and his little daughter all the way down the block.
The guy would have followed me into an alley... but not out of it....
As the school day ended just after 3 p.m. children trickled out of Leman Manhattan Prep on Broad Street. Smith heard a 4-year-old boy telling his mom he was scared. He told Smith it looked like a parade.
There was a parade. It was scary crowded with school, the boy said.
After a while it got so bad some parents couldnt get their children through and they had to go late, said Gary Goldenstein of Tribeca.
The Gingrich Group took in between $1.5M and $2.0M over an eight year period (about $25K per month over many months).
Newt says all he offered was strategic advice. Others say it must have been more than that given the amount of billable hours.
Newt's former chief of staff was a corporate officer there.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
11/18/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Newt has problems. I really do not like Romney. Cain has issues. Paul is too radical. Perry is done because of his brain fart. Etc.
Obama wins.
I do not see the subtlety of the plan.
Could someone please explain.
Posted by: kelly ||
11/18/2011 11:43 Comments ||
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#2
That's the kind of thing I mean when I say "baggage". And yet, somehow, I still like the guy. Maybe it's that rapier whit that he displays in the debates. But I think the best "advice" he could have given Fannie and Freddie would have been to shut it down.
#3
OTOH, you know of course that Obama has a few extra bags of his own. It should be just a matter of finding a GOP candidate with the balls to talk about it.
#4
The entire country has 'baggage' but I guess its arms aren't yet tired enough of carrying it around. Maybe when the pain is bad, the electorate will become more interested in getting out of this mess than running down any individual candidates.
#5
The amount of money Gingrich brought in over 8 years is not that much; $250 K per year max. He has a small firm of about a dozen people. The nature of the consulting is more important. I hope it's not another dumb thing like pitching Climate Change with Nancy Pelosi.
I like Newt. He could probably chew Obama up in the debates. That would be fun to watch. He seems like an idea and policy guy. Whether he can win the election and govern, I don't know.
Newt is much better than what we got. I don't by any means think it's inevitable that Obama wins. There is a lot of discontent in the electorate over the economy as well as many other issues.
#9
Call me shallow, but one of my problems with Mr. Gingrich is that his nickname is "Newt" and his last name is "Gingrich". For the life of me I just can't see a U.S. president named "Newt Gingrich".
If he just changed his name to something like "Neil Grandman" I would consider him much more electable.
Even better would be my all-time macho name: the pulp author "Manly Wellman"!
I'd talk candidates but not registered r, so don't know if that's cool or not. So I'll leave the old words of wisdom, "Every hands a winner, and every hands a loser."
#12
All these guys need to realize in the debates that, while they have different ideas than the guy standing next to them, their real target is the Imposter-In-Chief; until they start playing the game the same as the left, we will get fo' mo' yeahs of Bammy and Company.
[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Embattled President Barack I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money Obama's re-election bid, weighed down by the sour economy, got a shot in the arm on Thursday as a powerful US labour union announced it was endorsing him.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which boasts 2.1 million members, backed Mr Obama's bid for a new term in the November 2012 elections in a move that could stiffen the spine of disaffected or demoralised Democrats.
SEIU, which contributes millions of dollars and a robust get-out-the-vote effort to Democratic causes, had endorsed Mr Obama's historic first White House run in February 2008 and had been expected to do so again in this race.
"This early endorsement is to make crystal clear what kind of country we want," said SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry, citing the need to create jobs, safeguard the social safety net, and overhaul US immigration.
"We think President Barack Obama is the leader who is going to help make that vision a reality," she said.
The fast-growing union's endorsement came amid worry among some Democrats that the coalition that powered Mr Obama's 2008 White House win has fractured, lengthening his odds of holding the White House for four more years.
Meanwhile, ...back at the sea battle, the Terror of the Baltic's career had come to an abrupt and watery end... President B.O. signalled a pivotal US shift to Asia on Thursday, pledging not to let Washington's budget crunch compromise his expansive vision and military presence in the region.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/18/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Mehhh, call me when its the SIU, Teamsters or Longshoremen.
#3
"This early endorsement is to make crystal clear what kind of country we want," said SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry...I guess that means the only people with jobs, homes, cars, and money are government employees?
Just another useful idiot in the march to total collapse.
I personally think that government employee unions should not be allowed to make campaign contributions or endorse a particular candidate. It smacks of deliberate sabotage of the leadership if the opposition is elected...
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
11/18/2011 10:58 Comments ||
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#4
...or if they do contribute, the party that receives the most, becomes the unit for collective bargaining on the legislative floor. No need for other paid representation.
At the end of last month, I wrote about Beacon Power, a green-tech company that received over a hundred million dollars in taxpayer-backed credit but who teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Yesterday, Beacon tipped over, filing for protection from its creditors -- and potentially taking $43 million in taxpayer dollars with it:
Beacon Power, a Massachusetts-based company that won praise from renewable power activists and loan guarantees from the federal government, has filed for bankruptcy, potentially leaving taxpayers on the hook for $43 million.
The company, which promised to build storage devices for intermittent power produced by wind and solar power facilities, was never able to attract investors. Coming on the heels of the Solyndra bankruptcy and ensuing scandal, the Beacon Power bankruptcy has a growing number of people calling for an end to federal loan guarantees for risky alternative energy start-ups.
Never is the operative word. By the time the Obama administration handed Beacon parent company EnerDel a huge line of credit, its share price had fallen more than half from its peak two years earlier. Three weeks ago, it was trading at eleven cents a share. According to the report from the Heartlander, the share tumble was worse when put in wider perspective:
According to published reports, Beacon's shares traded for $47 in 2005 but fell to $3.44 in February 2011 and less than $1 a few months later. The company was cautioned by Nasdaq it was in danger of losing its listing. In late October, the price per share fell to just under 11 cents, leaving the company with a market value of $3 million.
Thus far, no connections to political donors or bundlers have been found between EnerDel and the Obama administration, which makes it different from the Solyndra scandal. The money loss for taxpayers is much smaller than with Solyndra as well, but the carelessness of the Obama administration's investment strategy is just as apparent with Beacon's collapse. It shows the folly of government investing taxpayer dollars in companies that investors have already fled.
The Pioneer Institute takes that lesson from this collapse:
"We take a pretty dim view of government getting too deeply involved in private companies and picking winners and losers," said Steve Poftak, research director for the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute. "When they start to rend away from support at the early stage of development--at the science and research stage--and get into the balance sheets of companies, that's [crossing the line]."
And it's a recipe for failure, too. Congress should start taking a look at how the DoE chose Beacon as a recipient. Has there ever been a choice made by Obama that didn't completely fuck the rest of us?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In his defense of the Energy Department's handling of the $535 million loan guarantee to the now bankrupt Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made some bold claims about the overall effectiveness of the department's clean-energy loan programs. He also made the case that the collapse in solar panel prices -- which helped sink Solyndra -- was "totally unexpected" by most financial analysts at the time when the department went forward with the loan in 2009.
The Gingrich Group took in between $1.5M and $2.0M over an eight year period (about $25K per month over many months).
Embattled President 
At the end of last month, I wrote about Beacon Power, a green-tech company that received over a hundred million dollars in taxpayer-backed credit but who teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Yesterday, Beacon tipped over, filing for protection from its creditors -- and potentially taking $43 million in taxpayer dollars with it:
