Why is Ezra Klein considered one of the Left’s smartest bloggers / pundits? What criteria are they using? Does the ability to take the latest Center for American Progress’ talking point memo and rewording it make you “smart” among the Left? Or is it his ability to use some other Soros-funded think tank’s analysis in order to argue that up is down? It’s baffling. Naturally, MSNBC seems to be grooming him for TV — he guest hosts a few of their shows — but why?

This IQ-sapping post about the recent bankruptcy of solar-power technology developer, Solyndra, is a perfect example of Klein’s “smart” – read “not really very smart” – analysis. (via Washington Post)

I don’t know all the specifics behind Solyndra, the solar-power company that the White House touted as a successful renewable-energy investment but which went belly-up this week.

He should have stopped right there, but the failure is a very high profile one for progressives, the “green” agenda, and Obama, so Klein had to comment — and this is his problem. He takes it upon himself to be the guy who tries to explain to the peons out there why progressivism’s failures aren’t failures. For some inexplicable reason, editors and program managers out there keep paying him to do it, too. And then there are all the people who read his “analysis” and agree with it! It’s unreal.

To his credit, Klein did at least point to an article (also on Washington Post) which does a good job reporting how the $535 Million government-backed loan Solyndra received was sketchy. Chances regular Klein readers actually read the other article? Slim. They’re not there to read about the deal or if it was a wise investment. They’re on Klein’s blog to be told that a massive failure was okay. They want to hear that Obama made the right call and that Klein is going to give them a warm fuzzy feeling if it’s the last thing he does.

But as a general point, it’s entirely possible for the initial investment to have made sense and for the company to have eventually failed. If we’re going to try to support young companies doing risky things in sectors that we’re hoping to dominate, we’re going to have to be prepared for some of them to fail. In fact, we should be hoping some of them fail. If our success rate is too high, it means government is making bad investments.

There’s so much wrong-disguised-as-common-sense in this paragraph one could probably write a book about it. Klein seems incapable of asking himself if the Federal Government should be doing this at all. Should it be supporting young companies doing risky things? The question has probably never crossed his mind.

If “we” as a society are hoping to dominate the solar power sector, wouldn’t the private sector be all over it? The failure to ask these questions leads to the two ridiculous sentences at the end of the paragraph. No one hopes some of their investments fail. No one. And the government, particularly, shouldn’t hope their investments fail because they’re not investing their own money. They’re investing taxpayer money that is not being voluntarily given. They’d better have a really high success rate! If not, they shouldn’t be doing it!

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Jim Shankman, the Madison-based author of a now notorious, vile Internet screed directed at blogger Ann Althouse and her husband, returned my call late last night and we spoke for approximately 30 – 40 minutes.

WE WILL FUCK YOU UP. We will throw our baseballs in your lawn, you cranky old pieces of shit, and then we will come get them back. What are you gonna do? Shoot us? Get Wausau Tea Patriots to form an ad hoc militia on your front lawn? That would be fucking HILAROUS to us. You could get to know the assholes on your side in real fucking life instead of sponging off the civil society we provide for you every single day you draw breath.”

Shankman is currently unemployed, claims to not be a member of a union and says he most often works as a dishwasher when employed. He insists that he does not advocate for violence and in some ways sought to distance himself from his “manifesto,” while also acknowledging authorship. He says he’s done with the issue and was simply giving voice to thoughts and rhetoric he “regularly hears in the street.”

“I’m done with it,” said Shankman, adding that he intends to pull back some from social media. However, he did not back away from the manifesto, claiming he wanted to elevate the idea and that if others in Madison wanted to embrace it, then so much the better.

“Why Ann Althouse,” I asked. Along with Shankman claiming to have felt, or actually been threatened via multiple blog comments on conservative blogs over the years, Shankman said he believes Althouse wields her blog as a “bully pulpit,” telling only one side of the story intentionally designed to portray his friends and associates unfairly. He also believes Fox has been instrumental in elevating Althouse’s reporting, thought not always with attribution. “I see these stories on her blog, first, ” said Shankman, then later he sees them on Fox News, claimed Shankman.

Shankman believes reports of thuggery and other misbehavior by Leftist protesters in Wisconsin is “all over-blown.” He was most particularly offended by the notion that protesters didn’t clean up after themselves and that Tea Party-aligned individuals purportedly removed a “Solidarity” T-shirt from a capitol statue of Hans Christian Heg (video of Heg with shirt here). As an aside, last night John Nolte rounded up “20 Days of Left-Wing Thuggery in Wisconsin. The incident involving the Heg statue seemed to be sort of a last straw for Shankman.

General Hans Christian Heg, a Wisconsin war hero who fell at the Battle of Chickamauga of the Civil War.

Indeed, Shankman’s anti-Althouse manifestoincludes a line referring to Heg.

“You don’t fucking touch Hans Christian. Ever.”

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This piece originally ran on the Opinion page of the May 17, 2010, edition of the Washington Times.

Elena Kagan’s problem is not that she has too much empathy but that she has too little. President Obama famously made “that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” his key qualification for a seat on the Supreme Court. What little we know of Ms. Kagan’s record demonstrates that she does not meet even that nebulous standard.

Empathy would require that Ms. Kagan place herself in the position of the “despised and downtrodden,” as her mentor Justice Thurgood Marshall put it. And who could possibly be more despised than a United States Army officer assigned to recruiting duties at Harvard Law School?

Did Dean Kagan put herself in his place before enforcing her law school’s repugnant ban on military recruiters? Did she imagine the feelings inside that young captain, perhaps limping from the fragments still in his leg from an improvised explosive device that hit his convoy outside Ramadi, as he walked through Harvard’s gates? Did she consider the stares he drew at the training academy from the liberal elite, the palpable contempt directed at him as one whose mere presence Harvard had officially designated as morally unworthy? (more…)

When Air America Radio started on March 31, 2004, it featured a line up of amateurs and ideologues with the common goal of bashing the then Bush Administration, Republicans and conservatives in general. Its dubious stars were people like Al Franken, a fading comic, Janeane Garofalo, a sometime actress, comic and activist and left-wing radio personality Randi Rhodes.

After a scandal involving misappropriated funds from black school children it promptly filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy two years later. Franken, Rhodes and Garofalo abandoned ship.

But like most left-wing media ventures it has managed to keep going by being a sink hole for left-wing donors. In 2007 it was bought by Green Family Media, made up of New York real estate investor Stephen L. Green and his brother Mark J. Green for $4.25 million (US). Yesterday, “Air America Media” had to call it quits. (more…)