It should also be noted that the writer employs three other time-honored liberal instruments:
He overstates the benefits of his preferred government intervention. No adult believes that solar can offer any more than 8-10% of our total power needs at any time in the forseeable future.
He implies that because the right is opposed to government intervention, they are opposed to alternative energe. Hasn't bothered to read Romney's platform, I guess.
Finally, when all else fails, he brings it right back to George Bush, who may have supported green energy initiatives, but was clearly not willing to throw good money after bad.
More like an IED.
Why, all one has to do is look at history. Look at the huge Gov’t loans that Ford had to acquire to start his automobile company, or the huge loans that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had to take to start their computer companies. Look at the huge Govt’ loans required to start the bio-med expansions, the huge loans that the Wright Brothers had to undertake to make flight a reality.
Funny ... they didn’t take any loans to get their ideas to take off. If pretty much every company on the face of the planet found economic success without the Gov’t propping them up - why do Green companies require it? Perhaps every other company had an economically viable product?
Sorry Skippy, $535 million of taxpayer dollars in the toilet is a lot of THERE, THERE! Jackass.
But one little steel company that didn’t make it despite Bain Capital’s best efforts makes Romney a murderer in Obama’s TV ads...and Romney was using private money, not taxpayer money!
This Grunwald is married to Maggie Grunwald, a far-Left msm fixture. It figures that they are all trying to rewrite Obama’s crony scendals.
But the Solyndra story is not a scandal. It is an inevitable bump on the road to a clean-energy economy.
Don’t mind the man behind the curtain. 2 + 2 = 5. The sky is pink. Pigs fly.
Cheap empty words do not tell the true story.
He forgot the point about Obama ensuring the loan went to a solid donor to his campaign. He forgot that Obama made sure that the US govt was last on the list of people to be paid out in a bankruptcy, despite being the source of all the funding. This ensured OTHER campaign donors in that industry could walk away clean.
This is sooooo much more than a loan to a company that just didnt work out.
And as for “helping tech companies cross death valley” to get started and help free us from petro-thugs. Let me hip you. IF we drilled here without limits, that would free us from them faster than anything else imaginable. Furthermore, what solyindra sold did not make any economic sense except in a world of government induced artifically high energy prices.
Obastard is killing coal everywhere he can find it. He fights fracking for shale gas. He does everything he can to make prices “neccessarily skyrocket”. In a world with no government whatsoever, if oil and gas and coal became scarce, the prices of those would rise naturally. At some point on the curve, Solyndra would suddenly find that their technology was profitable, and their business would take off.
Solyndra was a scam. Artificially created need, and fed by free government cash, and all for the benefit of democrat supporters and vote buying. Case closed.
and the investment should have stayed with "elite investors" or other non-government investors. Most new products fail in the market place and throwing government politics into the mix corrupts the process making success even less likely. It's a good case study in why "government didn't build that".
No realistic adult who has looked at the date would expect solar to supply more than 1% of the nations energy supply.
The only place that solar makes economic sense is in areas where it is too expensive to run an electric transmission line.
Even if you can not reasonably run a transmission line to your site it is still more than likely cheaper to have your own diesel generator (and more reliable unless your weather is unusually good).
With out government subsidies solar can not possibly compete with conventional electric generation technology.
Solar is a nitch technology good for powering calculators, watches and phone charges and not much else.
http://www.timemediakit.com/us/media/bios/grunwald.html
Time magazine ecochondriac, say no more, say no more.
The standard for Obama: Look at the portfolio, not just one investment.
The standard for Romney: Don’t look at the portfolio, pick out one investment to look at.
With regard to Solyndra, the pay-off was the legal fees paid to the lawyers who had invested heavily in the Obama campaign. That money was skimmed off the top of the loan guarantees and not recovered.
With regard to companies in which Bain Capital lost money (and workers lost jobs), it was their money they lost, not the taxpayers’ money. In contrast, Solyndra execs lost other peoples money.
With regard to Bush, this is a delicate issue. In hindsight, he sold us - movement conservatives and libertarians - a bill of goods.
Bush, along with others, shares in responsibility for huge deficits, the TARP, the housing bubble, and boondoggles such as subsides to so-called renewable energy.
Bush is to Obama what Hoover was to FDR, the John the Baptist of a socialist Messiah.
It is not clear where Romney stands on the Bush legacy. Hopefully, he is smart enough to move on from that agenda.
Sure. Got it.
I guess political thievery and influence peddling is OK now - if you are the "right" sort of people and have the "right" connections? Frankly, this used to be referred to as "graft" and "bribery" and people went to jail for it!
But, that was long, long ago in a country now unfamiliar and far, far away...
LMFAO @ Michael Grunwald! Nice try for a liberal hack. However, losing $535 million of taxpayers money may not be a lot to you among $16 TRILLION, but the loss is still “there”. And that’s not a good thing no matter how it’s spun.
You can’t have a scandal if the press won’t give it press.
At the time the Energy Department was considering the loan, however, an Office of Management and Budget analysis “suggested that Solyndra could run out of money in 2011” and said that it had a 20 percent chance of failing, which was actually well below some successful loans. An Energy Department official told Grunwald, “When I heard they got the first loan, I thought, oh, no! Noooooooo.”
Six Revelations From Michael Grunwald’s ‘The New New Deal’
Grunwald's response, though, would be that a lot of Washingtonians, Republican as well as Democrat, were pushing for loans for their own pet energy project.
The response to that would be that this was the one that went through and lost money. That's a lot more serious than projects that aren't adopted and don't cost the taxpayers anything.
FWIW, I wanted to find out if Michael Grunwald was related to legendary Timesman Henry Anatole Grunwald. I didn't, but Clintonista Mandy Grunwald was the old man's daughter.
Not the truth, Skippy. They didn't approve it because the GAO predicted that Solyndra would go bankrupt and it did almost exactly when predicted. It was guaranteed to fail and 0bungles dumped over half a billion dollars into it anyway.
You have two ways to explain that. Either 0bama is a complete moron or there was a quid pro quo.
Lordy this guy needs a fact checker. He is spinning the WH lines as if they are real. Bush’s DOE had decided not to go ahead with Solyndra which is why the head honchos there started pimping themselves to O and company. From the initial premise onward this guy is just plain nuts
A BILLION DOLLARS TO A COMPANY WHOSE TECHNOLOGY WAS JUNK AND WHO WENT TO THE OBAMA WHITE TO GET LOANS SIGNED OFF, AND WHO OBAMA TOUTED.
And its slogan, “The New Shape of Solar,” was more than marketing fluff. “
It was marketing fluff. solar cells are flat because that geometry is best for creating energy, and the process is cheaper. Solyndra was more expensive and less energy efficient. It was junk.
Government has no business picking winners and losers because too often they pick losers.