Politico reports on the connection between Solyndra and recent Obama fundraising:

Two Obama fundraisers involved in the controversy surrounding embattled energy company Solyndra ramped up their efforts on behalf of the president’s campaign in late summer, according to the campaign’s voluntary disclosure of its bundler list, released late Friday…

Steve Spinner, a longtime Obama fundraiser of Menlo Park, Calif., raised $500,000 or more during the third quarter, up from $200,000 to $500,000 during the second quarter.

Spinner got a spot in the administration to help monitor the clean energy program that eventually gave $535 million in loan guarantees to faltering Solyndra, which was once touted as a model for business-government partnerships by the Obama White House.

Spinner repeatedly pushed the Energy Department and the White House to commit to a loan before Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to the company’s headquarters in September 2009, according to emails released by the administration last week.

And for those who argue that the Solyndra debacle was just another case of the government making a poor investment…

Two senior Treasury officials said Friday that they had never seen a loan restructuring similar to an Energy Department loan to a failed solar panel maker.

The half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra Inc. was restructured earlier this year so that private investors moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment on part of the loan in case of a default.

Treasury officials Gary Grippo and Gary Burner told a House committee they had never seen that occur in a federal loan. Grippo is a deputy assistant treasury secretary and Burner is chief financial officer at the Federal Financing Bank, which made a $528 million loan to Solyndra in 2009.

The two Treasury officials stopped short of declaring the loan restructuring illegal, as some Republicans allege.

The more you read about the Solyndra bankruptcy the worse it gets. Our federal government appears to have just thrown money to favored friends in support of the idea of green energy. Let’s here what some of the Solyndra’s employees, sorry, former employees, had to say about the company and what they did with the infusion of tax payer cash:

Former employees of Solyndra, the shuttered solar company that exhausted half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, said they saw questionable spending by management almost as soon as a federal agency approved a $535 million government-backed loan for the start-up.

A new factory built with public money boasted a gleaming conference room with glass walls that, with the flip of a switch, turned a smoky gray to conceal the room’s occupants. Hastily purchased state-of-the-art equipment ended up being sold for pennies on the dollar, still in its plastic wrap, employees said.

As the $344 million factory went up just down the road from the company’s leased plant in Fremont, Calif., workers watched as pallets of unsold solar panels stacked up in storage. Many wondered: Was the factory needed?

“After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right,” said former Solyndra engineer Lindsey Eastburn. “Because we were doing well, nobody cared. Because of that infusion of money, it made people sloppy.”

Angry is definitely a natural notion for a taxpayer to feel in reading about this debacle, but as I pointed out earlier, this situation is so ridiculous, one also has to laugh. For instance, this same Washington Post article reports that within a week of receiving their 500+ million dollar loan from the Obama administration, Solyndra executives asked for $400 more. Well, why not!

Just was reading this Washington Post story on the Solyndra debacle and found this gold in the beginning of the piece:

Administration officials defended the loan restructuring, saying that without an infusion of cash earlier this year, solar panel maker Solyndra Inc. would likely have faced immediate bankruptcy, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.

Even with the federal help, Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees.

Sooooo the US government had to hurry up and give money to a failing business. Sounds like good public policy to me! Here’s my guess of one of the possible internal Department of Energy discussions about whether the government should lend Solyndra millions of dollars:

Obama official #1: ‘We have to get this 500+ million dollar loan to Solyndra ASAP!’

Obama official #2: ‘Why?’

Obama official #1: ‘Because if we don’t it will go out of business very, very soon.’

Obama official #2: ‘If that is true than maybe we should take even more time to investigate the company. This might be a bad investment.’

Obama official #1: ‘Shut up! Loan approved.’

Ridiculous, I know, but probably not far from the truth. Maybe I’m also being too harsh calling these fake DOE characters ‘Obama officials’, after all it’s not like the President himself was an integral part in pushing and promoting this colossal boondoggle of tax payer dollars. Oh wait, he was:

President Obama visiting the Solyndra solar plant. The worker smiling beside him no longer has a job.

I’ll have more on this gross waste of American tax dollars soon.

I would like to recommend that you watch this fascinating and poignant interview with Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot. Mr. Langone discusses the debt ceiling debate, President Obama’s damaging class welfare rhetoric, and America’s poor job market. Mr. Langone’s words and advice should be heeded in Washington. Enjoy

The Washington Post chart above (H/T Cato) clearly lays out three key truths: 1. The United States government has a structural problem controlling it’s level of debt and spending 2. The growing size of the federal government and its debt has been a bipartisan affair 3. President Obama’s tenure has greatly exasperated America’s short and long term financial situation.

In 30 years the United States’ debt has increased from $1 trillion dollars to $14 trillion and if the chart continued into the projected future, well, you would have had to scroll even further down to read this. I may not be an economist or an expert on Congressional budgets, but I don’t have to be to know we are on the wrong track. The past few weeks we have constantly heard the President and numerous other political leaders strongly defend the status quo. Sure there is much talk about ‘cutting spending’, but where are the details?

We need much more than gimmicks and baseline budgeting tricks to solve our real problems. We need leaders to tackle the transparent challenge shown in the aforementioned chart and we just aren’t getting it from this White House and Senate. For gosh sakes, the US Senate has put a constitutionally mandated budget in over two years! Why haven’t they? It’s pretty simple: If you never take a stand, you never have to take responsibility. I’ll finish with the first and last entries on Congressman Paul Ryan’s (a man who put out a budget all by himself, are you listening US Senate?) timeline of the Obama administration’s financial stewardship:

January 20, 2009
President Obama sworn into office

• President tells the American people in his Inaugural Address: “Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”
• Debt Held By Public = $6.31 trillion

……..

July 15, 2011
President Holds Press Conference: “We’re Running Out of Time” to Deal with Debt

• President Obama tells reporters: “I’ve got reams of paper and printouts and spreadsheets on my desk, and so we know how we can create a package that solves the deficits and debt for a significant period of time.  But in order to do that, we got to get started now.”
• The American people have still not seen any “paper” or “printouts” of what specific spending cuts the President supports.  The American people have still not seen any “spreadsheets” from the White House to corroborate their claims of having offered a deficit reduction plan.
• While it’s long past time for Washington “to get started now” on tackling our debt problems, President Obama has still not proposed a credible budget, and Senate Democrats have still not proposed any budget.
• Debt Held by Public = $9.75 trillion

Saturday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal poignantly identifies the problem with the President and the liberal elite’s mindset in today’s politics: let’s focus on new programs and bury any discussion of how we’re going to pay for them or the current ones we already can’t afford. The WSJ says it best:

“Maybe the most unknowing moment from President Obama’s debt-limit press conference the other day was when he said that, ‘I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes, like new programs.’ Define everybody—and, please, let us know when the new programs are going to stop.”

Yes, Mr. President, please tell us when we can finally start addressing the record debt and deficits. Or the impending bankruptcy of Medicare. Or the several trillion dollar shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund. Or the rising interest that we have to pay to service our massive debt to foreigners (41 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed!). Or a handful of other disastrous budgetary issues we have ignored over the past several years (like pensions, for starters).

In light of this deep hole we are in as a country – and the very real display in Greece of what our future might look like if we stay on this current path – it is absolutely stunning to think we are still pondering new government programs. Just a cursory look at the several thousand federal programs and agencies that we have now should put to rest the thought that we need any more government or that the government we currently have is somehow cost-effective.

Yet this is the guiding light of modern day liberalism. As Thomas Sowell recently put it when discussing President Obama’s advocacy for a new high-speed rail program, “One of the most successful political ploys is to promise people things without having the money to pay for them. Then, when others want to cut back on the things that have been promised, blame them for lacking the compassion of those who wrote the checks without enough money in the bank to cover them.”

Nevertheless, with an ever increasing percent of the American population paying no federal income taxes, receiving government-run health care and cashing in on welfare programs (e.g., unemployment benefits, food stamps), the argument for a fiscally sane federal government is becoming a more difficult sell.

Sadly, it might take a default on the national debt before Americans realize we are on an unsustainable path. In the meantime, it appears the conductor (President Obama) will be sitting in the caboose figuring out how to add more cars to the train.

Senator Barack Obama, March, 2006:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said. “It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Senator Obama was right. Too bad, he’s now the President and appears to have not meant a word of that statement above. Too bad for all of us. President Obama has tried to portray himself as the adult in this debt ceiling debate, but when it comes to taking care of our nation’s fiscal well being his administration has made a drunk teenager in love look responsible and mature. Just months ago he released a budget so unserious that his own party and the entire Senate disowned it 97-0. He came into office to lead a country facing massive debt and managed to make the situation even worse as our debt has sky rocketed in the past 3 years. He not only has failed to do anything to rectify our coming entitlement crisis, he has actually made them even worse by passing a new health care entitlement and vilifying anyone who is willing to address Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, all of which are facing major funding shortages.  Barack Obama is many things, a good leader, he is not.

Why the Jobs Situation Is Worse Than It Look2. ‘Obama’s focus on visiting clean-tech companies raises questions‘ – Carol D. Leonnig, Joe Stephens and Alice Crites, Washington Post

1. ‘Why the Jobs Situation is Worse Than It Looks‘ – Mort Zuckerman, US News and World Report

Zuckerman details how our economy and job situation is worse than even an unemployment rate of 9.1% make it appear. Plain and simple, America’s job market has been faltering for three years and is not currently showing signs of significant improvement that one would expect during a recovery. Zuckerman, an Obama supporter in 2008, believes this administration’s fiscal and economic policies have failed greatly:

The Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression. In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.

The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America’s greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.

2. ‘Obama’s focus on visiting clean-tech companies raises questions‘ – Carol D. Leonnig, Joe Stephens and Alice Crites, Washington Post

A thorough report on some of the winners and losers of the Obama administration’s green job promotion. The stimulus package was full of giveaways to companies doing green projects and when the government gives away money or tax breaks there are inevitable winners and losers. This report details how many of the ‘winning’ companies had connections to Obama’s campaign and many of the losers did not. When one company making electric car batteries gets federal money and another one doing the same thing doesn’t it’s called crony capitalism:

There was intense competition for clean-tech stimulus dollars. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said his agency reviewed 50,000 applicants and chose 5,000, a 90 percent rejection rate.

For the winners, there was an added bonus when Obama or his Cabinet secretaries dropped by to tout progress. “You couldn’t get that kind of publicity if you devoted all your advertising budget to it,” said Brendan Doherty, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who has studied and written about presidential travel.

Obama began his clean-tech travel in March 2009. At a number of companies the president visited, there were connections — not all of them close, to be sure — to his 2008 campaign. Over the months, Obama touted a Florida’s utility’s electric grid project (a company in an Obama fundraiser’s portfolio was doing extensive business with the project) and a Nevada company that generates emission-free power from waste heat, the warmth radiated by machines or industrial processes (an Obama fundraiser is a partner in a venture fund that has a small stake in the company).

3. ‘The McKinsey Health Insurance Survey Was Rigorous, After All‘ – Avik Roy, Forbes

FMFP recommended this article which details the methodology behind the McKinsey Health Insurance Survey which concluded that tens of millions of working Americans would be dropped from their current employer’s insurance and forced onto Obamacare rolls. Commentator S O brought to our attention that McKinsey did not release how they came to their numbers, but hopefully this will clear things up:

Because McKinsey had refused to release details of the methodology used in their work, Democrats and left-of-center writers accused the company of having something to hide. A “keyed-in source says McKinsey is unlikely to release the survey materials because ‘it would be damaging to them,’” asserted Brian Beutler in Talking Points Memo. Senator Max Baucus (D., Mont.) wrote a letter to McKinsey demanding they release the survey’s methodology, with three House committees intending to follow suit.

Well, lo and behold, McKinsey decided to release the details: the full questionnaire used in their survey, along with a 206-page report detailing the survey’s complete results. Accompanying these details was a thoughtful discussion of the survey’s methodology, one that pops the balloon of those who tried to tar McKinsey as some sort of careless, partisan outfit. Despite reporting which implied that McKinsey wanted to distance itself from its own work, the company declared, “We stand by the integrity and methodology of the survey.”

4. ‘The U.S. and E.U.: Have They Ever Been in Such Terrible Shape?‘ – Josef Joffe, The New Republic

Joffe sheds light onto how the Greek crisis is hurting both the EU, Germany and France, and the United States and that the situation is likely to get worse. Europe and the United States have been the saviors for so many facing tough or critical fiscal crisis, but as Joffe asks ‘who will save them?’:

Europe will inevitably buy time by handing over a few more slices of bail-out money to Greece, even though, one day, the country will default. With 50 cents of the euro, it will halve its debt as well as its repayments and thus buy more time. The E.U., meanwhile, still won’t have any idea where it’s going or how to handle the crisis long-term. But what else is new? Twenty-seven governments do not a “more perfect union” make. Certainly not when the natural leader, which is Germany by dint of wealth and weight, sounds such an uncertain trumpet as it has under Chancellor Merkel. Yet what, exactly, is she supposed to do when the chickens of an ill-designed monetary union have finally come home to roost? Neither she nor Sarkozy can undo the mismanagement of the PIIGS in one fell swoop.

Meanwhile, back to the United States—to its still-sinking dollar and rising unemployment. It is hard to think of a time when both the U.S. and the E.U., the two biggest players in the international economy, were in such miserable shape. We are talking about two giants with a total of 50 percent of global GDP. Who will save them?

5.’The Local Government Pension Squeeze‘ – Steve Malanga, Wall Street Journal

We all know that the US federal government and numerous state governments (Illinois, California, Wisconsin a few months ago) are facing rising fiscal crisis. Basically, these entities are spending far more than they are bringing in and they have structural issues (entitlements for the federal government, pensions for the states) that are the wolf at the door. Well, our nation’s city governments are also facing fiscal crises that are already coming to a head. You can’t have libraries, police, and no pot holes when half your budget is going toward retired city workers:

While the national media has focused on state budget face-offs between government unions and governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, municipal officials like Mr. DeStefano are engaged in their own budget warfare. Wages and benefits account for 30% of state general fund expenditures, according to data from the National Governors Association. But U.S. Census surveys show that in the typical town or school district, employee pay and benefits can consume from 70% to 80% of the budget.

Pensions are an enormous part of the problem. While pension payments now consume about 4% of state budgets, many municipalities are already spending 15% to 20% of their finances on pension costs. Earlier this year, California’s Little Hoover Commission, a government oversight agency, observed: “Barring a miraculous market advance and sustained economic expansion, no government entity—especially at the local level—will be able to absorb the blow [from rising pensions] without severe cuts to services.”

Costa Mesa, Calif. (population 110,000) made news earlier this year when it sent layoff notices to 43% of its employees. In 10 years, the city’s annual pension bill increased to $15 million from $5 million and now consumes 16% of the city’s $93 million budget. In nearby Anaheim, pensions already account for 22% of its $252 million budget. San Jose’s pension costs for police and firefighters have quadrupled in a past decade. Without reform, the city estimates that its yearly pension costs, $63 million in 2000, will swell to $650 million in 2015.

Analyzing President Obama’s Afghanistan speech and policy is at once easy and difficult. His decision to start to withdraw his own surge policy (10,000 troops home this summer and 33,000 by the end of next summer) is blatantly political, not strategic. Joint Chief of Staff Mullen and Secretary of Defense Gates have both called a withdrawal at this proscribed timetable to be ‘risky’, aka this policy decreases the chances for a successful outcome in Afghanistan. Next summer, as the weather and therefore the fighting heats up, the Taliban will be facing a retreating army. The fact that the surge of troops is dissipated just two months short of the 2012 presidential election is no coincidence. Obama wants the war off his plate and he made that clear in his speech.

Candidate Obama once called the Afghan conflict “the war we need to win”, but things have changed. Obama concluded his speech with ‘Let us responsibly end these wars’. He also mentioned ‘our effort to wind down this war’. Of course ending wars is a good thing, but it would also be nice to win them too. Barack Obama is a domestic minded president through and through. In a key foreign policy speech, one that will affect the life and death of American soldiers, he stated that he was more interested in nation building in the United States. This critical Afghan war speech featured this sentence: ‘We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy.’ This is not exactly ‘Blood, Sweat, and Tears‘. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post has it right: A president provides for the common defense and promotes the general welfare, instead of positing a dangerous choice between the two. In other words, having a successful outcome in Afghanistan should not mean that we have to suffer here at home.

Now for the difficult part: This decision to drawdown our troop presence in Afghanistan is indeed a tough call. We have spent billions of dollars (as Obama said in his speech, though I don’t hear him discuss our unfunded entitlements very much if at all) and have soldiers being injured and killed in a conflict that may not have a positive outcome with a majority of the strategies we put forth. We are in Afghanistan to protect ourselves from foreign terrorists who wish us harm. It is this key point where the death Osama Bin Laden comes in. If you take away the parts of the speech where Obama credits our killing of the Al Qaeda leader than our case for a well earned victorious departure gets quite flimsy. It gets especially cloudy when we look back at Obama’s reasoning for starting the surge in the first place, only a year and some months ago. Did the surge help capture Osama Bin Laden? I don’t think so, but now it is being used as a reason to start leaving Afghanistan. Fellow political blogger UNRR posits two key questions regarding Obama’s decision to pull out troops, both have to be answered in the negative:

Is there anyone who seriously believes the situation in Afghanistan is so improved that we can reasonably start pulling out troops? Does anyone really think the incredibly corrupt and incompetent Karzai government and Afghan military are ready to start taking over their own war effort any time in the foreseeable future?

Obama’s surge was only fully in place last August and 10,000 of the 30,000 troops are already packing their bags for home. I know progress has been made in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, two Taliban strongholds, but can these tactical gains be cemented with less troops and the Taliban’s knowledge that we are leaving. I guess it’s possible, though unlikely. I also want to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt that negotiations between the US, Karzai government, and Taliban are already ongoing and showing signs of progress. I also have great faith that even with minimal numbers, there is no greater fighting force than the American military and they still may be able to accomplish our goal of making Afghanistan a somewhat stable, secure country where terrorists cannot effectively plan and implement their objectives against the United States.

Part of the job of a leader, and especially one in charge of the United States, is to make tough decisions that overall best serve your constituents. President Obama has every right to make this withdrawal decision as he is our commander in chief. We as a country cannot fight every battle or right every wrong in the world and our current fiscal crisis and long term debt have made tough decisions even harder. Choices need to be made. These choices will have outcomes and we must judge our leaders by them. President Obama has made a major decision that will shape the future of the war on terror and like his predecessor, he will have to answer to the people and history.