Hey, maybe it saved the Senate

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Alternate headline: Solyndra: the scandal that keeps on giving


'Suppose it just wasn't enough to give a completely ill-advised $537 billion loan that was opposed by the Treasury Department and independent auditors and with near-zero interest rates far more favorable than similar DOE loans (with a loan restructuring that put private interests ahead of that of tax-payers') and to a company with ties an Obama bundler/fundraiser.

OK, then, how about delaying announcing your closing up shop until after the 2010 midterms at the behest of the White House?:

The Obama administration, which gave the solar company Solyndra a half-billion-dollar loan to help create jobs, asked the company to delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress, newly released e-mails show.

The announcement could have been politically damaging because President Obama and others in the administration had held up Solyndra as a poster child of its clean-energy initiative, saying the company’s new factory, built with the help of stimulus money, could create 1,000 jobs. Six months before the midterm elections, Obama visited Solyndra’s California plant to praise its success, even though outside auditors had questioned whether the operation might collapse in debt.

As the contentious 2010 elections approached, Solyndra found itself foundering, and it warned the Energy Department that it would need an emergency cash infusion. A Solyndra investment adviser wrote in an Oct. 30, 2010, e-mail — without explaining the reason — that Energy Department officials were pushing “very hard” to delay making the layoffs public until the day after the elections.

The announcement ultimately was made on Nov. 3, 2010 — immediately following the Nov. 2 vote.

Aside from the blatant impropriety if not outright illegality of this, we find it almost quaint, cute, in a way.

Now, we can work ourselves into a righteous lather with respect to the aforementioned transgressions of this Solyndra mess but thinking that delaying the announcement of 1,000 layoffs was going to make one iota of difference in that "hotly contested" midterm election shellacking of 2010 has to be one of the more amusing things we've heard in a while.

An ass-kicking that anyone with a pulse could've seen coming would somehow become not so or lesser so due to delaying a layoff announcement of a company no one had really heard of at the time. Awesome.