Sally Quinn haz a sad:

In April, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, my husband, Ben Bradlee, and I found ourselves sandwiched between the Kardashians and Newt and Callista Gingrich. Heavily made up and smiling for the cameras, the reality TV family and the political couple were swarmed over by the paparazzi, who were screaming and shouting the celebrities’ names to make them look toward the cameras for that million-dollar photograph.

I was shoved up against Callista’s hair and nearly broke my nose. It was scary. I felt as if I had been caught in a crowded theater and someone had yelled fire. Ben and I (he spouting expletives all the way), grabbed onto each other and managed to escape to the equally crowded hallway where desperate celebrity guests were heading toward the ballroom, murmuring to us as they passed, “Get me out of here.”

It was telling that Vanity Fair had bought more tables at the dinner than most of the Washington news organizations.

On the way home (we skipped the after-parties), I suddenly realized that this grotesque event signaled the end of power as we have known it. That dinner — which seemed to have more celebrities, clients and advertisers than journalists and politicians — was the tipping point.

As Tom Brokaw noted the next day on “Meet the Press,” it’s time to rethink the “glittering” annual dinner. The event, he said, “separates the press from the people they’re supposed to serve, symbolically.”

The decline of power has been happening for a while. In 1987, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “The Party’s Over.” In it, I chronicled the demise of the Washington hostess. That was 25 years ago, and people were complaining even then that Washington would never be the same.

But power still trumped money in those days. Today, money trumps power. If Katharine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, were having a party today, and politicians or statesmen received a conflicting invitation to a party put together by Sheldon Adelson (Gingrich’s super PAC guy), where do you think people would go? Adelson. No question. Now, at a party, if you find people staring over your shoulder to see who’s more important in the room, they’re usually looking at someone rich, rather than someone powerful. (Or perhaps they’re staring at themselves in a mirror, as I once observed.)

Power in Washington used to be centered on the White House, the Congress, the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps and the journalists. Today, all of those groups depend on money for their very existence. The real power lies with the lobbyists, the money-raisers, the super PACs, the bundlers, the corporations and rich people. The hottest ticket on the planet is not an invitation to the White House but an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The irony is that in New York, I’m told, people are interested in power. In Washington, people are interested in money.

Think about it. The White House’s power comes from the money people give the president. He wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for his big donors. He had a Hollywood fundraiser last month  at George Clooney’s house where he raised $15 million. Those are the people who count. If the president thought that there was real power in Washington, that the Congress, the diplomatic corps or the journalists could help him in any way, then he and the first lady would surely go out more often.

The Obamas have been roundly criticized for not being part of the Washington social scene. The question is, does it matter? Could Obama win or lose the presidency because he has dissed the Washington community? I suspect the answer is no. It doesn’t matter anymore.

It's about damn time, if you ask me. But someone had better tell David Gregory and Chuck Todd, who still think nibbling cocktail weenies (interpret that however you like) at the Sally Quinn Salon means something. (via TBogg. Also, too.)

Labels: fatuous windbags, hack journalism, pretentious assholes

After watching the Mets get swept by the Yankees this weekend, I needed this: (Apologies to JP, but this was just too good not to share.)

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets, sheer awesomeness, Some Things Are Universal

It's Mr. Brilliant's birthday, and that means banana cream pie for breakfast! Here at B@B, we're saving a nice slice for The Economic Populist.

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day, economic death watch

It almost seems like part of a grand plan to keep future generations from the middle class, doesn't it? Claim that there's a massive skills gap that requires more education, then watch people pay through the noses to send themselves and their children to college, taking on massive debt in the process. Make those educational loans impossible to pay off, and you have an entire class of deadbeats with lousy credit ratings who have to take whatever shit you want to shovel out.

As the spouse of a truly crackerjack network support guy who is now in the "struggling to get even contract work" stage of his career, I've seen the laundry list of qualifications that companies put out first-hand. And as someone who was laid off in 2008 at the age of 53 and spent some time looking at ads for web developers, I've also seen it. Mr. Brilliant routinesly sees ads with laundry lists of over twenty "mandatory" qualifications, most of them completely unrelated. An ad might ask for someone with experience as a network administrator, desktop support specialist (ok so far), C# programmer (uh-oh), with experience with AJAX, Ruby on Rails, and ten years of experience with Drupal (which would mean you'd have to have started with Drupal at its inception). And oh yes, you also have to have experience in Web design, which means you also need to be a commercial artist with Photoshop, InDesign, and FinalCut Pro.

The person with these qualifications does not exist, but that doesn't stop HR departments from adhering to the If We Just Look Long Enough We'll Find This Perfect Person doctrine.

Peter Capelli, a Wharton School of Business professor, explains:

Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.

One of my favorite examples of the absurdity of this requirement was a job advertisement for a cotton candy machine operator – not a high-skill job – which required that applicants “demonstrate prior success in operating cotton candy machines.” The most perverse manifestation of this approach is the many employers who now refuse to take applicants from unemployed candidates, the rationale being that their skills must be getting rusty.

Another way to describe the above situation is that employers don’t want to provide any training for new hires — or even any time for candidates to get up to speed. A 2011 Accenture survey found that only 21% of U.S. employees had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years. Does it make sense to keep vacancies unfilled for months to avoid having to give new hires with less-than-perfect skills time to get up to speed?

Employers further complicated the hiring process by piling on more and more job requirements, expecting that in a down market a perfect candidate will turn up if they just keep looking. One job seeker I interviewed in my own research described her experience trying to land “one post that has gone unfilled for nearly a year, asking the candidate to not only be the human resources expert but the marketing, publishing, project manager, accounting and finance expert. When I asked the employer if it was difficult to fill the position, the response was ‘yes but we want the right fit.’”

Another factor that contributes to the perception of a skills gap is that most employers now use software to handle job applications, adding rigidity to the process that screens out all but the theoretically perfect candidate. Most systems, for example, now ask potential applicants what wage they are seeking — and toss out those who put down a figure higher than the employer wants. That’s hardly a skill problem. Meanwhile, applicants are typically assessed almost entirely on prior experience and credentials, and a failure to meet any one of the requirements leads to elimination. One manager told me that in his company 25,000 applicants had applied for a standard engineering job, yet none were rated as qualified. How could that be? Just put in enough of these yes/no requirements and it becomes mathematically unlikely that anyone will get through.

Want to know how I got my current job after being laid off? One of my colleagues, who wasn't laid off, had a friend who worked for my current employer. She asked this person to look at the internal job board and see if there was anything there. The friend sent a job description, and I decided to apply.

I had to apply to one of the online job application systems that most employers use these days. I was completely unable to get my information into this system, which would not accept my salary as a valid entry. After about a half-dozen tries and near tears with frustration, I sent my resume to my colleague's friend, who got it to the hiring manager. The position I was applying for was already filled, but there was another for which the hiring manager wanted me to apply -- using that same online job application system.

Somehow I managed to get the application through, and I got the interview.

I remember two things about this interview: the number of times I answered "No....Nope...No, we had a guy who did that...No.....No, we didn't do that", and when I answered the global head of the group's question about where I wanted to be in five years "Still alive, still healthy, and still employed" -- since I'd figured out by this point that the whole enterprise was a waste of my time.

As it turned out, the group that I was applying to was being built almost from scratch, and to this day I believe that my main qualifications, despite what was on the jub description, was possessing a brain and a pulse.

This was August 2008 -- a month before the economy went through the crapper.

I visualize my experience sort of like those scenes you always see in Titanic documentaries of the engine room guy who gets out of the flooding watertight compartment just as the door is closing. But get out I did.

Of course once I started, I was pretty much on my own, and when I look back at the steep learning curve I had, I'm amazed that I made it at all, never mind scoring a promotion and some pretty nice raises over the next three years. But there's one indisputable fact: The reason I got this job was because I was able to bypass the automatic resume-rejecting submission services that companies use. The reason I was considered for this job was my employer's commitment to training. My own initiative is only responsible for me having done well at this job. Everything else was because I knew someone who knew someone.

There is no skills gap in this country. There is no shortage of people who are willing to learn and willing to work hard. There is, however, a prevailing attitude among those in a position to hire people that investing in people is a waste of money. There's a perception that there's no reward in investing in people. And that is why there's this constant race to the bottom, to ever-lower-wage-paying countries. There's no amount of education an individual can go into debt for that will change that.

Labels: greed, R.I.P. American Middle Class, Teh Stoopid

During the George W. Bush years, a T-shirt or poster could get you a visit from the Secret Service.

I wonder if today, lynching the first black president in effigy will do the same:



Yes, "Pastor" Terry Jones is a kook, but is he really all that much different from Newt Gingrich calling Barack Obama "The Food Stamp President", or public officials distributing photos of Obama's face photoshopped on a monkey? When it's just a matter of degree, is there really a difference?

Labels: assholes, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, faux piety, racism, right-wing hatemongers

It was over long before the Wisconsin recall election, but given an ignorant electorate, a willfully blind, clueless, incompetent and equally corporatist Democratic Party, and billionaires coming out of the shadows now that they realize they can, in fact, buy themselves a U.S. government, it's impossible to believe any longer that the country I grew up in can survive. In many ways, the sociopath Willard Rmoney will be the perfect president to preside over the final stage of metamorphosis of the US into oligarchy. So let's take a short drive, shall we?

If you want to follow Netroots Nation at home, you can do it here.

At The Reaction, The Unwritten Rules of Political Conquest. Richard Barry is far more optimistic than I am; I think we will be beaten about the face and neck with Wisconsin right into November.

Ramona reports on how while Wisconsin is getting all the press, Michigan is under siege.

I don't know about you, but after reading this, I'd pay to watch our good friend Bustednuckles take on Jonah Goldberg in a no-holds-barred steel cage match.

Mochizuki at Fukushima Diary on a public service ad campaign that likens nuclear danger to an angry wife.

Hillary Clinton is a highly accomplished woman in her sixties. Kimberley Johnson reports on how Ed Klein thinks that Clinton's lack of fuckability in his eyes is a genuine campaign issue for 2016.

Physioprof reminds us of what "freedom" meant to the founders of this country.

Driftglass eulogizes Ray Bradbury.

Robert Reich on the billionaires' slow-motion coup.

ShortWoman says there's reason for hope. Any chance she's right?

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

"Tomorrow is the day after the election. And tomorrow, we are no longer opponents. Tomorrow, we are one as Wisconsinites." - Scott Walker

"When deer hunting comes, nobody is talking politics, even though it's November. This year was different. We had people leave family gatherings. That's not our Wisconsin. Our Wisconsin has always worked together." - Dee Ives, RN, Republican voter, Barrett supporter

Back in the late 19th century, Black River Falls, a small town in Wisconsin, went completely insane, becoming a hotbed of murder, suicide and madness. It was chronicled in a 1973 cult classic entitled Wisconsin Death Trip that was later turned into a documentary. In order to find anything even close to a parallel in American history, one has to look to Salem, Massachusetts between February and May of 1692 in which three girls fingered countless dozens of innocent people of being witches and were treated like 17th century rock stars. What made the residents of this tiny Wisconsin town go mad over such an extended period of time?

Well, there are no hard and fast answers any more than there are for Salem's highly communicable insanity that resulted in the wrongful deaths of at least 25 people. Yet there was a severe recession sweeping across America at the exact same time and Black River Falls, Wisconsin was hit especially hard. Unemployment was high, crops failed. The local newspaper actually offered recipes for sheep's head soup in a pathetic attempt to keep the townspeople from starving. Men murdered their wives over suspicions of infidelity, in some cases their entire families.

There was also a diphtheria epidemic that claimed the lives of many children. Essentially, Black River Falls was a real-life Twin Peaks, producing characters rivaling the weirdest creations of David Lynch, including Anne Sweeney, who was obsessed with breaking windows, and a faded opera star who'd later be committed to the local insane asylum. When the townsfolk would dredge the river for dead bodies, as they often did, Norwegian custom would require a person to sit at the bow of the rowboat holding a chicken and, according to legend, the chicken would cluck when they were directly over the body and they'd stop to drag the river.

And now, 120 years later, progressive-minded folks still smarting from last night's recall election of the most staggeringly, shockingly and stupendously corrupt Governor since Huey Long have two choices: To conclude that Wisconsin is either now the stupidest or the most insane state in the union, proving, if Florida in 2000 already hadn't, that Democracy is not a synonym for intelligence, informed voting or even a sane political system. And Citizen's United ensured last night that democracy has little to do with the will and voice of the biological individual and much, much more to do with that of corporate individuals.

To be sure, not all the news coming from Wisconsin was grim: Former State Senator John Lehman defeated his old rival, Sen. Van Wanggaard, in one of four senate recall elections. Lehman was the only Democrat to win a recall election last night, by a microscopic margin of 779 votes. But it was just enough to give Democrats control of the Wisconsin upper chamber. And Democrats could widen their lead in the actual elections in five months as 16 are up for grabs as well as all 99 Assembly seats.

Plus, Scott Walker won by 6.9% despite news reports filtering out in the 11th hour about him being a target of the Justice Department's John Doe investigation and a 13th aide being given immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for testimony, presumably, against Walker.

So, Walker's victory, obviously, is a pyrrhic one and it's increasingly likely that Walker still will not serve out his first term after being stigmatized as just the third Governor in American history to face a recall election. And it's not even worth belaboring that Walker wouldn't have stood a chance were it not for over $45 million dollars coming from wealthy right wing donors (66% coming from out of state, as opposed to the 26% out of state money that came Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's way), most of it, we can assume, coming from the Koch brothers and ALEC. The nearly $50 million, a stupendous sum for a gubernatorial recall election, enabled Walker to outspend Barrett 7 to 1.

Adding to Barrett's woes was the unwillingness of the habitually craven, wet-legged Obama administration and the DNC for refusing to get more deeply involved and essentially handing Walker the victory. Obama's 11th hour tweet and a video that didn't even feature him was akin to Mr. Burns crashing Homer Simpson's Super Bowl party with a tiny bag of chips.

Last night's bitterly contested recall election saw much higher voter turnout than the last one of 2010. More people than had voted for Walker in 2010 had signed the recall petition, almost twice as many as the 540,000 originally needed. And, once again, Kathy Nicklaus of Waukesha County was front and center, barely hanging onto her job just long enough for this final hurrah, still insisting she wasn't actually in charge of tabulating the votes.

We saw the usual Republican dirty tricks: Robocalls spreading propaganda and disinformation (telling voters if they signed the recall petition, they didn't have to vote) and the usual Republican thuggery through voter intimidation (Republican election "monitors", aka the King Street Patriots, a Texas Tea Bagger street gang, were dispatched to many polls throughout the state), verbal abuse and even vandalism.

The voice of the people? Hardly. The vox populi, in the wake of Citizen's United, is a mere afterthought. The Koch brothers, through their Americans for Prosperity front group, bought this election, fair and square. And Republicans didn't win this election as much as Democrats lost it through the failure of the Obama administration to let down its wide coat tails and the DNC withholding most of the money it could've given to the Barrett campaign.

But at some point, the people of Wisconsin also have to take the blame for their own defeat. 36% of union households inexplicably went for Walker despite his and the Wisconsin legislature's shameless (and illegally ratified) bill stripping public unions of collective bargaining rights.

To those of us who have strong, informed opinions, it doesn't matter how much money billionaires like the Kochs throw at us. We have a sharply defined sense of right and wrong. It requires no money to form an opinion on a candidate, especially one who dominates the airwaves and print media as Barrett had these past several months. But the American voter in general is constantly blinded by money. So-called progressive California proved it during Gray Davis' own recall election and they proved it again when they reelected a gap-toothed baboon action movie star and again when Mormon money flooded California and got Proposition 8 overturned.

In this Idiocracy prequel in which we live, in which the stupidest and most disingenuous make millions and millions and are idolized like those three little witch hunting girls in Salem, Massachusetts, money and its simulacrum of speech will always reign. And Wisconsinites, far from being united, should now say, "We are all Black River Falls."

Let the whirlwind be reaped.

There have always been stories of government for sale, but in the aftermath of Citizens United, it can now be done blatantly. But is it really all that simple?

Democratic Party ineptitude was on full display last night, both in Wisconsin and in the less-visible races here in New Jersey. It's tempting to attribute Scott Walker prevailing in Wisconsin just on the huge sums of money poured into his coffers from out of state, but Chris Cilizza in the Washington Post cites other reasons for the debacle in the cheese state last night:

* The Democratic primary: To hear those who worked in the trenches of the recall tell it, the fact that Democrats had a contested primary between Barrett and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk bears considerable responsibility for Walker’s victory.

Not only did the primary take place less than a month before the general recall election but organized labor spent millions in support of Falk (and against Barrett), spending that many Democrats believe weakened the eventual nominee. Democratic pollsters insisted that Walker was languishing in the early spring but rebounded as Barrett and Falk fought amongst themselves in the primary.

* Money: As of Monday, more than $63 million has been spent on the recall fight with Walker and his conservative allies vastly outspending Barrett and other Democratic-aligned groups.

Walker himself had raised in excess of $30 million for the recall campaign while Barrett collected just under $4 million.

Being outspent 10-1 (or worse) is never a recipe for success in a race. Democrats cried foul over Walker’s exploitation of a loophole that allowed him to collect unlimited contributions prior to the official announcement of the recall in late March. Of course, Democrats also pushed the recall and Walker played by the rules of the game — making what he did strategically smart rather than underhandedly nefarious.

* 2010: There was considerable internal discussion and disagreement between Washington and Wisconsin Democrats (and organized labor) about whether to push for a recall election this summer or wait until 2014 for a chance to unseat Walker. (Washington Democrats broadly favored the latter option, Wisconsin Democrats and labor the former).

As the recall played out, two things became clear: 1) There were almost no one undecided in the race and 2) those few souls who were undecided tended to resist the recall effort on the grounds that Walker had just been elected in 2010.

There's also the fact that the President of the United States, in his continued quixotic and delusional quest to "rise above it all", refused to get his manicured hands dirty in Wisconsin, and the national party refused to put any skin in that particular game until it was already too late.

I would add to this also that Americans have really grown to dislike and distrust labor unions, especially public sector unions. The reality that without the history of labor unions, there would be no 40-hour workweek and no minimum wage and no paid vacation has been completely obscured by high-profile battles over teacher contracts and hundreds of thousands of accumulated sick time payouts. When an ever-increasing number of Americans have been bumped from the full-time-permanent-job model and into non-guaranteed contract work that offers lower pay, no paid time off, and makes them completely dispensable at a moment's notice, it's difficult to get them to put together that part of the reason for this is that we turned our back on labor unions long ago after winning many of the perks for which they fought for decades.

It doesn't help that all too often, being in a labor union is like working for two sets of management, neither of which has your best interests in mind. My two experiences with being in a labor union are not exactly the stuff of which strong support is made either. In the mid-1970's, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen had me on strike for an entire summer, lest I be blacklisted from working at the A&P; the NEXT summer. And in the 1980's, the Newspaper Guild blocked my promotion into a non-union management position even though I would be replaced by a union employee. But if you want to know what a society without labor unions and the wage protections they represent looks like, you need only to look at Gilbert & O'Bryan, a Boston law firm:

The BBJ received an emailed tip this week from someone who says they’re an employed, Boston College Law School (BC Law) graduate. The tipster sent screen grabs of a job listing on BC Law’s career site. The post advertises a full-time associate position at a small Boston law firm, Gilbert & O’Bryan LLP, paying just $10,000 per year. (That's $10K, it's not a typo.)

Larry O'Bryan, one of the firm's partners, said he's received about 32 applications for the $10K per year job, since posting it one week ago. He said that while the pay is low, the lawyer who is eventually hired will gain valuable experience. "What we emphasize is that we do provide the opportunity for new associates to have their own case load right from the start," said O'Bryan. Workers working full-time with four weeks' vacation at Massachusetts' minimum wage of $8 would be paid more than $15,000. At the federal minimum wage of $7.25, a worker would earn nearly $14,000 in a year. Maybe BC Law grads should take a look at a slide show published by Boston Business Journal earlier this month: 50 Boston jobs under $50K.

The job post reads: “Compensation is mainly based on percentage of work billed and collected ... We expect an associate to earn $10,000 in compensation in the first year.”

Ouch.

Here’s what the BC grad has to say about the job post he found:

"I keep an eye on the Boston legal market for openings, because I work outside of MA, and hope to eventually return. Logging onto BC Law Symplicity today, I was shocked to see my alma mater is advertising a full-time job at a small Boston firm where the compensation is expected to be $10,000 per year. Assuming a 40 hour work week, 52 weeks per year, that’s less than $5 per hour by my calculations. To be exact, $4.81 per hour, which is a fraction of minimum wage. For a school that pays cafeteria workers a "living wage," I find it astonishing that BC Law permits a listing for such an unconscionably low salary."

Or, you could look at Wisconsin.

But as Rachel Maddow has pointed out in the past, labor unions, as diminished as they are, still provide a sizable amount of money for Democratic political races. And if all the billionaires are going to pour unlimited sums into Republican races, the funding differential, combined with a lazy and craven press, Republican candidates like Willard Rmoney who are willing to baldfacedly lie (and know they can get away with it), and an inattentive and incurious American public willing to believe anything they see in a TV ad, and you essentially sound the death knell to anything approaching elections that offer a real choice.

Another example of what happens when the public doesn't pay attention is right here in New Jersey's 5th Congressional District. This is a highly-gerrymandered district that includes some of the most affluent parts of Bergen County, some of its more blue-collar areas, and the rural areas of Sussex and Warren Counties. For 25 years, this district was represented by Marge Roukema, a moderate Republican who would probably be drummed out of the party now. Scott Garrett ran against her twice, gaining the name recognition that made him the logical heir apparent when she retired. Voters in this district are so inattentive that when an independent candidate who was known in Republican circles ran in 2006 -- four years into Garrett's tenure in Congress -- he was asked, "Why are you running against Marge?"

Over the last decade, the Democrats have run candidates of ever-decreasing credibility against Garrett. Actually, that's not entirely true, because both the national and state parties have simply given up on this district, essentially allowing Garrett to become Congressman-for-life and disenfranchising all non-Republicans in the district. This year, Steve Rothman's district was eliminated, and the party offered him $2 million to run against Garrett in the 5th. Rothman is a bulldog of a candidate, not the kind of nobodies, blind rabbis, milquetoast Rotarians, and converted Republicans that have tried for this seat during Garrett's tenure. The 5th may be Republican, but it's not batshit crazy Republican, and Rothman could have had a very real chance to win this year. But instead he decided to run a primary challenge to another Democrat, Bill Pascrell, in the 9th. Last night Pascrell supporters smacked away Rothman like the annoying little fly the latter had chosen to become. So now, instead of a real challenger in the 5th, Rothman is gone from Congress, and running against Garrett is a crony of the old, corrupt, Bergen County Democratic Organization who couldn't even be bothered to show up to a debate against his primary challengers.

Oh, I'll go through the motions of voting this fall, in the last ever U.S. election that has even the slightest resemblance to an actual election. But I'm under no illusions anymore that democracy works here anymore.

Labels: 2012 election, Democratic sellouts, R.I.P. American Middle Class, wussy-ass Democrats

Wisconsin! Your day has come! Please get out and vote and encourage your neighbors to vote.

They sure are masters of projection, aren't they:

On Thursday, Mitt Romney campaigned at the headquarters of Solyndra — the first renewable energy company to receive a federal loan under the stimulus — and reiterated his debunked claims that its bankruptcy symbolized the corruption and cronyism of the Obama administration. But just one day later, a solar panel developer “that landed a state loan from Mitt Romney when he was Massachusetts governor” went belly up, the Boston Herald reports, creating an inconvenient storyline for the GOP presidential nominee.

The company, Konarka Technologies, “filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and will cease operations, lay off its 85 workers and liquidate”:

“Konarka has been unable to obtain additional financing, and given its current financial condition, it is unable to continue operations,” CEO Howard Berke said in a statement. “This is a tragedy for Konarka’s shareholders and employees and for the development of alternative energy in the United States.”

The demise of Konarka could become a hot topic on the campaign trail because Romney personally doled out a $1.5 million renewable energy subsidy to the Lowell startup in 2003, shortly after taking office on Beacon Hill.

Konarka is the second Massachusetts solar company, along with Evergreen Solar and Beacon Power, to receive taxpayer dollars under Romney’s tenure and subsequently declare bankruptcy.

Romney, meanwhile, routinely dismisses the nation’s 3.1 million clean energy jobs, even as clean energy is booming in Massachusetts. The industry has created 64,000 jobs across the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors.

Of course, under the IOKIYAR rule, you will not hear about this in the media, and Willard Rmoney won't be questioned about it -- anywhere. Because that would be a "vicious personal attack", as are all criticisms of The Man Who Would Be King.

Labels: hypocrisy, IOKIYAR, Mitt Romney Is A Sleazy Liar, Sauce for the goose