The wheels on the green-tech bus keep falling off, falling off, falling off ...

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.  An administration walks into Congress and insists on billions of dollars to “invest” in green-tech startups, then loses its shirt on bad bets — even while knowing the bets were bad.  If that sounds like Solyndra, well, you’re right — but it’s also part of a pattern in [...]

Read this post »

Déjà vu, anyone?

Ugh. Here we go again: “There are few more important things we can do to create jobs right now and strengthen our economy over the long haul than rebuilding the infrastructure that powers our businesses and our economy — our roads, our bridges, our schools and our ports like this one,” President Obama said. … [...]

Read this post »

Zoinks!

In yet another of a wide array of examples demonstrating just how deeply the Obama administration’s especial penchant for frivolously dropping taxpayer dollars on favored projects whose only profitable returns come in the form of political capital, a new IG report details some glaring mismanagement of one of their stimulus-backed, climate-change minded green tech ventures. [...]

Read this post »

Obvi.

Yes, we don’t doubt that. “I’d like to get as much stuff done as quickly as possible,” he said in an interview with San Francisco’s ABC7. “Even though I’m just starting my second term, I know that, you know, once we get through this year, then people start looking at the midterms, and after that, [...]

Read this post »

$150 million for "volunteering for animal shelters and community groups."

This comes as no surprise to Hot Air readers, who learned about the value of the Obama administration’s $150 million subsidy investment of LG Chem last fall.  After furloughing its workers at their Grand Rapids plant without having a single one of their batteries installed in a consumer vehicle, the local NBC affiliate produced this [...]

Read this post »

Shocker.

This should be a lesson to politicians and economists about the nature of gimmicky “stimulus” efforts …. but probably won’t be.  In the pressure cooker of the tax fight over the holidays, most people forgot about the payroll-tax holiday — the reduction by two percentage points of FICA withholding for Social Security.  Its backers claimed [...]

Read this post »

Why Obama fears the sequestration debate.

Barack Obama and his allies have attempted to derail the sequester that his own White House demanded in the summer of 2011 by issuing lots of scare stories about the consequences.  Layoffs, national-security crises, and an economic plunge are just a few of the dire predictions being offered if Republicans don’t cave on the automatic [...]

Read this post »

Plus, we spent $7 trillion on stimulus and didn't even get a lousy T-shirt.

What did the Q4 GDP number and the January jobs report show us?  To listen to the White House, the New York Times, and Obama administration apologists, it supposedly proves that “austerity” is the culprit behind the lack of growth.  Newsbusters catches the Times blaming “austerity efforts” are damaging economic recoveries in developed nations: The [...]

Read this post »

"Investments."

Let me get my obligatory free-trade qualifier out of the way here first: It’s not so much that there’s anything at all wrong with businesses buying and selling on the international arena, because foreign markets may have demands for products we don’t, and we all stand to make money off of one another in a [...]

Read this post »

Well, they were paying for it anyway ...

Two months after Barack Obama’s green-tech stimulus recipient A123 went bankrupt, losing close to $135 million in federal grants, taxpayers may finally have some good news. When A123 goes on the auction block, a buyer is already poised to snatch up the firm and perhaps provide a few cents on the dollar from Obama’s investment.  [...]

Read this post »

Reruns.

Yesterday, I noted that the White House seemed curiously unwilling to talk about the expiration of the payroll-tax holiday, the bipartisan stimulus plan enacted in 2011 which ended up not providing any economic stimulus.  At almost the same time, the Obama administration rolled out its new idea for a job-creation stimulus, which borrows from Jimmy [...]

Read this post »

...Just keep swimming?

If you have any lingering romantical notions about the big nothingburger of old n’ busted recyclables that is President Obama’s last-ditch effort at a “second-term agenda,” here’s another exercise in futility we can glean from its glossy depths — or, rather, its glossy shallows. If you flip through it, you’ll notice some lovely-looking assurances of [...]

Read this post »

Morrissey's Axiom on Politics and Dating.

As I noted in my earlier column for The Fiscal Times, we’ve now gone more than 570 days into the Barack Obama Re-Election Campaign.  On Day 568, Obama finally deigned to produce a second-term agenda — a document so unserious and insubstantial that its release served to underscore his desperation rather than enlighten anyone on [...]

Read this post »

Another one bites the dust.

Another day, yet another example of what happens when the government tries to “create” jobs based on its own ideological-political ambitions rather than allowing the free market to function based on efficiency and consumer choice. This latest government-sponsored (read: taxpayer-sponsored) green-energy bust comes in the form of A123 Systems, a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for [...]

Read this post »

The wind industry is so dang needy.

I missed this last week, but hey, who doesn’t love being regaled with yet another example of the many ways in which the government’s unceasing market interference continually goes awry? The federal government never seems to tire of fancying itself a venture capitalist with our tax dollars, no matter how many instances of hilarious ineptitude [...]

Read this post »

Plus, Solyndra nothing more than a tax dodge?

Remember this moment from the Romney-Obama debate last week?  Mitt Romney hammered Barack Obama on green-energy subsidies and the futility of government intervention designed to distort markets: ROMNEY: … to oil, to tax breaks, then companies going overseas. So let’s go through them one by one. First of all, the Department of Energy has said [...]

Read this post »

"These are solar panels we are now seeing reports that said they worked as long as you didn't put them in the sun."

Will Abound Solar be the next Solyndra?  The Obama administration gave the Colorado solar panel manufacturer $68 million in subsidies — a down payment on almost $370 million approved by the Department of Energy – before the company suddenly closed its doors and went bankrupt.  The district attorney in Weld County has now opened a [...]

Read this post »

What actually happened.

Super PAC American Crossroads GPS is set to drop $16 million on ads this week in battleground states and targeted races, mostly hitting President Obama on stimulus spending and his jobs record. From CNN: The conservative super PAC American Crossroads said Tuesday it was buying $11 million in television time this week to air an [...]

Read this post »

Outcomes.

Debate continues over whether Barack Obama’s command to waive the work requirement of the 1996 welfare reform is legal, and if it offers states a way out of effectively enforcing the Able-bodied Adults Without Dependents rule that required those recipients to start working at some job in order to receive benefits.  A new report from [...]

Read this post »

"No one was running Washington."

Barack Obama wants a second term as President, but was he up for even the one term he’s already had? Bob Woodward tells ABC News that significant “gaps” still exist in Obama’s leadership skills, and that he’s primarily the one to blame for the exacerbated partisanship that exists in Washington. Even Democrats admit that at [...]

Read this post »

Disappointment.

As Democrats head to Charlotte for this week’s convention, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is heading back on the campaign trail later this week with a new message: the hope and change that President Barack Obama promised four years ago has left people disappointed… “It has been a disappointing four years,” Romney said. “And I [...]

Read this post »

Rewarding failure.

Congressional investigators probing the Obama administration’s actions in the collapse of Solyndra have discovered that the White House’s own budget office warned against the second cash infusion for the now-defunct solar panel manufacturer.  Analysts at the Office of Management and Budget also warned that the second cash infusion would violate the law.  Their concerns were [...]

Read this post »

Boom.

I could have added this Matt Lewis find to my earlier post, but this deserves its own thread for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s much more on point than comparisons to Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Valerie Jarrett.  Two, it’s yet another reminder of the bad decision made by House Democrats after their 2010 midterm [...]

Read this post »

Backfire.

Now that Team Obama has opened up a debate on outsourcing — when they really mean offshoring — they may live to regret it.  They’ve been attacking Mitt Romney for having offshore bank accounts, but apparently didn’t bother to vet their own team very well before doing so.  Yesterday, the Weekly Standard reported that DNC [...]

Read this post »

"You're struggling, Andrea. You're struggling."

Via Business Insider, your feelgood video of the day. Think of it as a companion piece to Gallup’s new poll showing the steep decline in respect for the media over the past 20 years. She’s out to prove that Romney’s the real offshorer-in-chief despite ample evidence to the contrary; Sununu’s having none of it, and [...]

View the video »