"Not even half the story..."

When Mitt Romney's Bain Capital invested in companies, it was his own money. When Barack Obama's energy department invests in companies, it's mine. And yours...

"Solyndra Was Just a Bad Bet From the Beginning"

Good piece from Megan McArdle on why Solyndra was a bad idea from the start, tax dollars essentially flushed...

Scale matters--you can't take billion-dollar fliers on too many ideas. Appropriateness matters--retirees shouldn't put their living expenses in tech stocks. And the potential payoff matters--we should not invest billions to develop a slightly better form of white-out, or into experiments that have a 1-in-a-trillion chance of developing a low-cost way to turn lead into gold.

I think Solyndra flunks on all three counts.

Read it all.

Worse and worse: New e-mails show White House rushed OMB to approve Solyndra loan

Haven't been following the Solyndra story? It can be difficult, I know, when the mainstream press isn't interested. But thanks to the internet, there are outlets for stuff that the press would have been able to suppress 15 years ago. There's a lot of bad behavior here...

Until now, the White House has insisted that it didn’t intervene in the deal, but what else would you call it if, due to time constraints, OMB was forced to use a possibly sub-standard model that led to approval of a loan that everyone else knew shouldn’t have been made?

This is how much these people care about taxpayer money. Half a billion dollars down the tubes because they wanted to get one of their speeches just right.

In terms of our current financial situation, of course, half a billion dollars is meaningless. But it is indicative of mindset.