>>First, your opening sentence is in conflict with the House Energy and Commerce Committee analysis of Treasury Department data. Somewhere between 20- 25% of the 16 billion eventually wound up in Spain, as well as other European/Asian companies. Bottom line, stimulus funds at the federal level did next to nothing to help the country.

LOL. First, $16B sounds like a lot, but compare it to the total value of stimulus. Second, even if all of this cherry-picked piece ended up in Spain, it doesn't prove the second sentence.

Third, when you say "wound up in Spain" you actually mean that "the US subsidiary of a Spanish company won a quarter of around 1% of the stimulus $." Why do you supposed this happened- let me guess- Michelle Obama went to school with a Spaniard? In any case, fact is that you have no idea how much of the $ "wound up in Spain" and even if it all were awarded to companies owned by true blue Americans 1%ers, most of the $ would have "wound up in China" or wherever it could be offshored to maximize profit. Maybe that's why all the $ didn't go to them - typically Spanish and Japanese companies do employ locally which is one of the goals of stimulus.

>>there was substantial private investment in Solyndra...definitely a venture capital bust. But this is PRECISELY why Obama's senior advisors warned him against this. Much of that 1 billion pre-dated the decision by the administration. Writing was on the wall. Solyndra had already gone through devaluation by a factor of nearly five, in a 12 month period. (Yes, certainly not the only game in town to take a nose dive). But still, you're helping to make the argument about bad judgment of the administration.

The administration wasn't making investment decisions but trying to stimulate the economy- which doesn't seem to merit a single sentence in your presentation. Instead you write off private incompetence and bad judgment (your words) by saying simply that it was "a bust", while harping on and on about Obama. Meanwhile you ignore the other stats that don't agree with your argument, so here they are again: government is better than private industry at managing risk, typically costing 94c compared to each $100 allocated. If you persist in ignoring the beam in the eye to focus only on the mote, that "prejudice" principle is back again.

>>Once again, this goes back to the very questionable judgment of the administration, when China was flooding the market with cheap labor to the point where it made no sense for the govt to bankroll it.

They weren't making investment decisions, they were trying to stimulate the economy. It never could have made up for all of the jobs offshored by true blue Americans like Mitt, but if US firms like Solyndra were being swamped, wasn't it worth a try with less than a % of the available funds? If you insist on treating it as an investment decision, even the very best investors agree that you're going to be wrong some of the time- including Warren Buffett who would be nothing if people held him to the standard you've come up with here. Meanwhile venture capitalists assert that they're happy if 9 of 10 investments fail because the 10th one makes up for it all. But when the Obama administration makes a decision, if has to be correct 100% of the time or you call it incompetent and blow the $16B up into a damnation of well over $1T of stimulus money.

>>John, you can try to re-arrange the facts any way you like....and I'll acknowledge that some of the philosophy that led to the failed stimulus goes back to Bush. But there is a context here that cannot be denied - the stimulus payments to green energy companies was politically motivated and not based on any kind of merit.

I agree that some claims here reek of politics and that it's wrong to try to contort facts into misleading configurations, but IME such attempts usually start to unravel as soon as I pull at a thread.