Of course, your ability to correct that statement is predicated on our trust in your definition of "corruption." For example, is it corruption if Obama pushes for a literacy campaign, knowing that his books are two of the best-selling young adult books out there? Under your definition of corruption in the Solyndra case, it would be. Secondly, the success rate of Green energy is exactly what "Person A" said it was - your "correction" was to refute the 1/39 remark by saying "oh a handful of them failed." Since we have already had this argument, I know that you consider a $400 million loan for a company that added something like 100 jobs is equated to failure. So not only is your definition of corruption wildly off the mark, but your definition of failure is as well. Since we have only the words you write to judge you by, and since you have shown absolutely no objective metric by which to judge the primary criteria in this Solyndra story, I must conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about. Writing incoherently only reinforces that belief. There are several ways for you to correct this beyond proofreading your posts: 1) You clearly define both "corruption" and "failure", get those definitions validated by other - preferably those with which you differ in opinion - posters, and hold to those standards consistently. 2) Find evidence that liberal posters have changed their standards from the Bush era - if, for example, you discover that Democrats attacked Bush over a scandal of similar size and scope, but that we dismiss Solyndra, it would be evidence that our definitions of corruption and failure are not to be trusted. Given the time and energy you have expended in writing posts that are neither grammatically accurate nor cited with evidence to back up your assertions, it is likely you value neither our opinions or consider our factual evidence when forming your own conclusions. It is a very sad state of affairs for our national discourse if true.
You just gotta love people who cite dailycaller (and really, that's one of his better links I've seen)...
1) I never claimed that having a high cost-per-job was equated to absolute failure- rather a hint at its inefficiency. But I would say filing for Bankruptcy is absolute failure- like Evergreen Solar- for example, which received a lot of federal funds. So, there's a second firm that has "failed", making his statement false and your windy explanation useless. 2) I believe it is corruption when 535 million of the public's money goes to a firm that we knew was going to go belly up, which was run by an executive who secured over $500,000 in campaign contributions to the Obama Administration. If that is not corruption to you, then it appears our standards have fallen off the map.
My request remains. Either you find other people to validate your claims of corruption or you show Democratic hypocrisy on the issue, but at your current rate of not doing anything different and expecting a different answer I have to assume you crave neither our input nor any opinion which differs from your preconceived notions. If Evergreen Solar went bankrupt after receiving stimulus funding, that would make 2/39. Still a small proportion. Certainly not $38 billion wasted in Iraq, not by a long shot.
I am not sure what you are even arguing right now or why this conversation took the turn that it did. I haven't said anything about Democratic hypocrisy in this conversation. And a lot of people are calling this a "scandal" or "corruption". Come on man. And there's more than just Solyndra and Evergreen that have gone belly up- and using both common sense and your proportional success / failure scale, it is not a leap of faith to assume a lot of other green dollars have been spent wastefully... you fully know shrugging it off as "well if its only 2/39 its not bad" is incredibly disingenuous when you have studies like these showing that each green job created costs the economy 2.2 traditional jobs.
The American Thinker is a right-wing website - we do not expect you to take seriously the DailyKos as a reliable website. Moreover, the Institute for Energy Research has been given $300,000 by ExxonMobil and was established by the Koch Brothers. Finally, one of its executives is a former Enron director. Why we would take their claims on anything with the same weight as, say, the IPCC, the UN, the government, a research institution, etc., is beyond me. You use them because there is nothing else to help you validate your claim.
Forgive me Brummie, but even a superficial, CYA, due diligence effort up front would have been enough to disqualify Solyndra from any stimulus money so this loan should never have be made. To deny this fact at this point it just stupid. Give that fact, to claim cronyism wasn’t involved is just retarded.
It's a mighty small anchor to try to sink a President with. The middle and independents know that. Sorry about your luck. Keep digging. I'm sure you'll find something 1/1000th as bad as the last administration eventually.
The rapidly-expanding definition of cronyism and crony capitalism never ceases to amaze me. Some guy I know told me recently that crony capitalism consists of all government interference in the market, including such radically-corrupt things like roads (benefit the auto industry) and the post office (we're looking at you, envelope makers and loggers!). So we have two potential realities. 1) The Obama administration made a bad loan to give a friend $400 million (because $100 million was recouped by the administration once it was known the company would fail), knowing the whole time what the long-term price of energy would cost. OR 2) The Obama administration made a bad loan to one or two of 39 clean-energy companies and once it realized the breadth of its mistake, because it was doing a bajillion things and these things happen. When Democrats admit that the administration was incompetent, Republicans say "No! Cronyism!" conveniently forgetting the blatant cronyism in the Bush administration that they either ignored or condemned with the benefit of hindsight. You want to see what real cronyism looks like, here ya go: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ays-he-bought-100-members-of-congress/247860/ http://www.boston.com/news/nation/a...yism_in_iraq_afghanistan_contracts/?page=full A pair of loans that cost less than a week in Iraq shouldn't be considered cronyism by the people that so willfully cheered on our invasion there (and no, I don't buy your crap that you've never supported Iraq. I know how math works).
They didn’t make a bad loan. They gave half a billion taxpayer dollars to a company that was obviously doomed. I realize you, Barack Obama, and Steven Chu might not understand what a sustainable business model looks like, but certainly someone in the DOE should have. And certainly they would have pointed out the problems with Solyndra to Obama and Chu, right? But they didn’t…. oh wait they did. Predicting the company would be bankrupt by September 2011. Coincidently Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 on September 1st. 2011. But how could the administration have known, right? What you are looking at is a half a billion dollar photo op that benefited no one other than a few poltical supporters. And thanks for providing yet more proof for Fish’s Law – no matter what the subject a floundering liberal will always try to drag the cost of the Iraq war into the conversation.
Interesting Friday news dump: White House on Solyndra subpoena's - we refer you to American Brummie. The White House on Friday all but refused to turn over the documents House Republicans have subpoenaed on bankrupt solar firm Solyndra, firing off a letter saying the request would put an "unreasonable burden on the president's ability to meet his constitutional duties." The feisty response appears to set up a clash between congressional investigators and the White House over the sprawling probe into Solyndra's finances and the administration's involvement in the decision to provide the struggling company a $528 million loan with taxpayer money. ...
An equally unbiased news organization puts the same damn story this way: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...ma-administration_n_1076871.html?ref=politics Didn't I have some post-fact society thread around here a while back?
Excuse me, you completely ignored a direct reply to one of your posts to reply to this? Does that mean I've won on that point or simply you need more time to google a response?
I have already addressed the reason why the Iraq war is the gold standard by which all accusations of cronyism ought to be compared. Solyndra - as I and others have stated numerous times - doesn't even qualify in the same league. But it doesn't matter what we write. You are asking me to write on what I - and others - have already written on. In effect, you are asking us to hit the copy-paste-refresh button. It is not my fault you are not intelligent enough to hit the "prior page" button. It is not my fault that you suffer from confirmation bias. Solyndra was a bad loan. It should not have gone through. To call it anything other than incompetence is to ignore what incompetence means, and what other definitions mean. But because you are not intelligent enough to go back in the thread, let's do this another time: Crony capitalism: in effect, it is when the government picks winners and losers in the system to help friends. If this accusation were true crony capitalism, the government would have invested more in the company (their buddies) as bad news surfaced, not abandoned them and taken 1/5 of the loan back. If you don't believe me, it's because you don't know what crony capitalism is. Political impropriety: Again, compare to Iraq. The Solyndra loan involved a $535 million loan to a company with ties to an Obama fundraiser. This is compared to the no-bid contracts with Halliburton. Or Clinton's relationship with the Florida sugar industry (through the farm bill). Or Reagan's relationship with the defense industry. This is not new, and by comparison, Obama's "impropriety" is as tame as they come. Either every President in the last thirty years is so corrupt as to require this constant level of subpoenas or media scrutiny, or there is a level of hypocrisy from the Republicans in the room that is almost unbearable. Match that hypocrisy with near-instantaneous amnesia and you have a combination of fanatics who can never be wrong. Incompetence: This, if you reject the other two options, is what must be right. Biographies of Secretary Chu as a brilliant scientist with little policy expertise have already been posted here - you should find them if you figure out how to click the back button.
Wow. You can always tell people who don't read DK. It's not one of my top 5 favorite political sites. For me, I like it for its coverage of state and local races, which is excellent (great crowd sourcing) but on policy matters it's weak. But seriously, that's such a false equivalency. It's like saying an apple is better than a bicycle.
I do read DK. That has nothing to do with the fact that conservatives think it's about as worthwhile as half-ply toilet paper. For example, I think Michael Moore is waaay better as a liberal pundit than Rush Limbaugh, but you won't get me to subscribe to Limbaugh and VFish won't watch Michael Moore any longer than he is physically forced to. My point is this: don't use partisan sites, no matter how reliable, to talk about politics. You may use them to discuss grocery bills at your own risk.
I am shocked, shocked to find crony capitalism going on here... Solyndra: Energy Dept. pushed firm to keep layoffs quiet until after midterms The money quote: DOE continues to be cooperative and have indicated that they will fund the November draw on our loan (app. $40 million) but have not committed to December yet. They did push very hard for us to hold our announcement of the consolidation to employees and vendors to Nov. 3rd – oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date. At least you can’t accuse these corrupt crony capitalists of not having a sense of humor.