Chapter 11: The New Shape of Solar?

Once hyped as a prototypical green jobs pioneer, Solyndra Inc., a California-based maker of high tech solar modules, has filed for bankruptcy. One thousand workers are back to pounding the pavement, and $535M in Department of Energy loan guarantees to Solyndra are in jeopardy, triggering an FBI investigation. Sounds like a bad thing, but—if you're a Republican—bad things are good. Indeed, right wingers are doing victory laps, lambasting Obama's green jobs proposals with Solyndra as their cause célèbre.

Shift The Power: The American Dream Movement Is No "Left-Wing Tea Party"

Ronald Radosh's Pajamas Media piece "Can Van Jones Create A "Left-Wing Tea Party"? Don’t Bet On It" is only one of several recent articles about the American Dream Movement, but it's arguably the most comically irrational. Radosh has made something of a cottage industry out of hissing rather ineffectively at film director Oliver Stone, and occasionally frets about Russian spies and other bogeymen, but Van Jones and the American Dream Movement are the latest targets of his rapier illogic and willful ignorance.

Warren Buffett Stinks up the Billionaires' Garden Party

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has been preaching higher taxes for the extraordinarily well-to-do for more than a decade, but his August 15th Wall Street Journal op-ed was apparently the last straw for some of his pampered fellows in the velvet pantaloon club. Buffett had the temerity to remind us once again that despite his extraordinary wealth and income, he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than ordinary working class Americans. He asked Congress to finally stop "coddling billionaires" and make them pay their fair share, a vulgar indiscretion prompting a fusillade of grunting protests from the ivory towers of Koch Industries to the grimy corridors of the right wing blogosphere.

Dancing with the Devil: Obama's Perilous Pragmatism

President Obama's much-ballyhooed and much-maligned bus tour was reputedly an attempt to "pivot back to jobs" and reconnect with voters increasingly dubious about his ability to right our listing economy. Predictably, Republican Presidential candidates were quick to disparage Obama's message and his performance.

Same old same old...