True, which is why I noted that this will play badly for Obama.
Uh unh. I spend my time trying to avoid being pressured into watching Fox by my folks…apparently it is my duty as a Republican to watch the station :rolleyes: I suggested radio, though, because he comes home from work wound up about it, and they don’t watch TV where he works, just listen to radio.
It won’t help, sure, but the question is if it will keep anyone from voting for him who might have seriously considered it otherwise. I don’t really think it will. 
VC firms report failure rates of between 20% (the very best) to 90%. In other words, this was to be expected. If not Solyndra, then someone else.
This is an echo chamber story. I had heard of it, but didn’t think much of it, but last night I was channel surfing and came upon Fox where they were flogging it for all it was worth. This will go the way of the Rod Blagojovich trial, which all the right wing talkers and bloggers were assuring us would expose Obama’s web of corruption and drive him from office. It’s ACORN. Death Panels. Climategate. Rapper thugs in the White House.
There is a lot of time to fill on talk radio and Fox News every day, they need stories to fill the space.
Those guys could inflate a Japanese condom to the size of the Hindenberg.
But it is ribbed for your pleasure!
It’s still a pretty big story out here in Silicon Valley. Not huge, but it’s in the paper a lot. One of the two Sunday political cartoons on the editorial page was a spoof on it, although I notice it’s attributed to the Chicago Tribune.
The story will die down, but it will make a nice little sound bite for whoever the GOP candidate is next fall.
Ahem.
It will win him union votes… that’s pretty much what it was about.
So politicians pandering to interest groups is a bad thing?
And… preventing the collapse of the US auto industry. I mean, there IS that…
Why would he bother? He already had the union vote.
I think this does have the potential to hurt Obama.
And it shouldn’t.
A reasonable analysis has been offered above – this is the only recipient company to go bankrupt, and the whole point of venture capitalism is that it’s a venture, not a sure thing. Arguably, the success rate here is above average.
There might be some hay in whatever verified facts ultimately come out about White House involvement in the specific approval, but as yet I’m not hearing anything except rumor and suggestion.
But unfortunately, what will happen here is that opposition candidates will run ads showing Obama touring the facility, dollar signs, and then copies of the bankruptcy papers, as though this makes a point.
Because it’s not enough to criticize the President for the actual poor choices he’s made – we also have to make shit up.
Misleading election messages are hardly limited to your side, and I don’t doubt that liberal sources would be using this if Hypothetical Republican President X had backed it.
It’s only a semi-reasonable analysis.
If Solyndra is representative of how the companies were chosen for receiving money, then whether most of them have been doing well or not is irrelevant. The head of Solyndra knew someone in the White House, did a little wining and dining, and ended up with a half a billion dollars, without ever having to prove the economic value of his company. If that’s all it takes to pass muster for a large investment, then I wouldn’t trust any of the companies that were accepted for the fund. If they all end up doing well and making a fortune, then while that’s good for the economy and government and all, it’s still down to random, blind luck and whoever chose those companies still deserves to be thrown out.
The issue isn’t that Solyndra failed, it’s that they were approved for a loan to start with.
The question it raises isn’t, “But overall, what percentage of the companies have failed to date?” It’s, “But overall, what percentage of the companies which were chosen, were chosen based on their numbers, rather than on their connections?”
It’s quite likely that Solyndra is the sole, isolated example of connections being the leading factor in the company being approved for a loan. But you would really need to expand your sights beyond the cased of Solyndra and investigate the other companies which were approved or disapproved for funding, before you could say whether it is an isolated case or not, and whether the Obama administration was really doing their job or not.
If venture capital firms expect that many of their investments will not pan out, then they should not have been upset if the federal loan guarantees were placed ahead of their interests in the event of a liquidation.
It seems that administration officials approved a reversal of this reasonable policy. This needs to be examined as the bankruptcy proceeds through court. Administrative decisions such as these may not necessarily be the last word.
If these decisions were against the law I would hope that the officials that approved this would be disciplined in some way.
That’s as far as it goes for me. If we are to have a program such as this we need to run it in a consistent fashion, so that firms get a floor from which they can rise or fall. We can’t erase risk or subsidize loss to too great a degree - that creates the classic moral hazard, and would show that we learned no lessons from the last decade.
No, I wouldn’t.
The President is entitled to the presumption that he, and his administration, are acting appropriately. It’s for the proponent of the claim that he isn’t to offer the prrof of their proposition.
I’m not suggesting that the President prove that he and his people prove that every decision they made was appropriate. If the President had to do that every time there was a slip-up, he couldn’t do his job. (And of course that’s why so much of what the government does is made public, so that reporters and researchers can double check on their own, if they really feel the need to.)
I’m saying nothing more nor less than that scientifically, there’s no way to know whether the Solyndra case is a one off, than by checking for a pattern of behavior. If you haven’t done that, both declaring it a scandal and declaring it a non-scandal are both presumptuous. If it’s symptomatic of poor research, then it’s a scandal. If it’s a one-off case of connections over good planning, then it’s not. Minus data, it’s just a lead-in for further investigation, by anyone who doesn’t care to presume the best of the President.
And there is an active investigation going on right now in Congress to determine that. I’m sure the GOP will be completely impartial in their findings.
I don’t disagree, except that since the default position for the needle is pointing to “non-scandal,” I say it’s for those claiming ‘scandal’ to move the needle.