Key Solyndra Players Reward Obama With Large Campaign Donations

What do you get for giving a half a billion dollars in green money to a company headed to bankruptcy? You get a lot of campaign cash if your name is Barack Obama.

US President Barack Obama shook hands with some of his wealthiest supporters Tuesday night at a fundraising shindig in San Francisco. Also on hand, though, was a matter the commander-in-chief just can’t seem to shake: his failed deal with Solyndra.

Around sixty patrons paid $35,800 a piece to attend a party in honor of President Obama this week, including a pair of gentlemen who have become central figures in an energy debacle that has haunted the Oval Office since last year. Among those in attendance were two key players in the Solyndra scandal.

President Obama touted Solyndra, a California solar-panel start-up, as an example of perfect American entrepreneurship early on in his presidency. Last year, however, the infant green energy company filed for bankruptcy, despite the president earlier approving a gigantic loan guarantee worth $535 million for the Silicon Valley start-up. The company had borrowed all but $8 million of the massive loan before calling it quits late last year, a move that prompted Obama’s opponents to ridicule the president over what some said was “a dubious investment” and even initiated an investigated by the FBI.

Rangel Using Campaign Cash to Pay Legal Bills

Charles Rangel, a key member of Pelosi's most ethical congress "evah," is using campaign money to pay his legal bills while fighting ethics charges. This is obscene.

The NY Daily News reported:

That leaves the Harlem Democrat with no choice but to run for, and win, a 21st term in the House to keep raising campaign money to pay legal fees - which top $1.7 million, records show.

"It's perverse - he's got to keep doing it," said Solomon Wisenberg... Read more here.

SEIU Is Funneling Cash from Illegals Into US Elections? (video)

This is very troubling. The SEIU may be the most dangerous union to our democracy in American history.

From Naked Emperor News via Breitbart:

Cash for Clunkers is Destroying Perfectly Good Cars

In an example of bureaucratic and leftist inefficiency, perfectly good cars are being destroyed under the guise of the 'Cash for Clunkers" program. What a waste.

From The Examiner:

The Cash for Clunkers program is stupid for a lot of reasons. Not only is it just another tax-payer bailout of the unions automakers, who can sell more cars at artificially depressed prices so they can keep the doors open. It also screws with the free-market (big surprise there) by pulling forward demand that isn’t there now, only to kill demand over the next 1-2 years. Killing off the clunkers also hurts the used car market, the spare parts market, and the auto repair business. If there aren’t any old cars to buy or fix, those guys are all out of a job.

But one of the most asinine parts of the plan is that they take old cars, many of which were being used as functional day-to-day transportation the day before, and destroy them. A perfectly good and useful machine destroyed for political reasons…

I know people will say that some of these cars were maintenance disasters to own and if the blue book is less that what someone will pay you for it, then there is no point in keeping it. But the Cash for Clunkers program requires that a working vehicle be destroyed. What about giving it to charity, or to your teenager, or to whomever deems the thing more useful than a $4,500 credit on a new car.

Watch a perfectly good Volvo engine bite the dust.

Car purchases generated by "Cash for Clunkers" will cost taxpayers $20,000 each

The "Cash for Clunkers" program gives new car and truck buyers $3500 to $4500 for each vehicle turned in if they meet certain requirements. However, respected car site Edmunds.com has determined each additional vehicle purchased under this program will actually cost taxpayers $20,000. How is this? Many "clunkers are already traded in every month. We will be paying for these even though they don't stimulate an additional new car sales.

From Business Week:

Edmunds.com, which is benefitting from all the extra site traffic generated by CARS nonetheless issued a report Monday saying that each car bought under the progream would actually cost the U.S. tax-payer $20,000 per vehicle sold, not the $3.500-$4,500 actually paid out.

Edmunds figures that CARS will only help drive about 50,000 incremental new car sales. How is this possible? Edmunds.com’s research shows that typically 200,000 vehicles worth less than $4,500 are traded in for new vehicles every three months. At best the current Cash for Clunkers program will fund 250,000 such transactions in the same time period—a gain of only 50,000 vehicles, says the company. Given that this program is budgeted to cost $1,000,000,000, this increase will come at the cost of $20,000 per extra sale. (accent is mine)