Car Company Gets U.S. Loan, Builds Cars In Finland

Update: Fisker Karma Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV...

by Warren Meyer

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad?  Unfortunately, it’s a sham.  This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article.  In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place [by assuming perfect conversion of the potential energy in the fuel to electricity, the EPA is actually breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics].

In the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) created a far superior well to wheels MPGe metric that honestly compares the typical fossil fuel use of an electric vs. gasoline car, using real-world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes to figure out how much fuel is used to produce the electricity that goes into the electric car.

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis.  In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19.  This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

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Obama approves 2 solar loans worth $1B for bankrupt Solyndra

by Associated Press

Facing a Friday deadline, the Energy Department has approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower in Nevada, and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant in Arizona.

The loans were approved under the same program that paid for a $535 million loan to Solyndra Inc., a now-bankrupt solar panel maker that has become a rallying cry for Republican critics of the Obama administration's green energy program.

The latest loan program, approved under the 2009 economic stimulus law, expires Friday. At least seven projects worth about $5 billion are pending.

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Did White House Snub Fraud Fighter?

Elaborate Welfare Housing Project

Rand Paul Smackdown!

Abortion Drug Kills 14 Women, Injures 2,200

by Steven Ertelt

The Food and Drug Administration has quietly released a new report about the deaths of and injuries to women from the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug and the Obama administration has done nothing to make the information available to women.

Following its approval during the Clinton administration, the FDA released a report in 2006 that received widespread attention for showing more than 1,100 women had been subjected to “adverse effects” resulting from their taking the abortion drug mifepristone, commonly known a RU 486. Pro-life advocates have waited five years for the FDA to come out with a new report of problems associated with the drug — despite mounting evidence that the abortion drug continues to kill and injure women across the globe.

The FDA, with no fanfare, has released a new report, dated April 30, 2011. The report indicates 14 women in the United States alone have died from using the mifepristone abortion drug and 2,207 women have been injured by it.

Of the women experiencing medical and physical problems resulting from the abortion drug, 612 women required hospitalizations, 339 experienced blood loss significant enough to require a transfusion, 256 experienced infections and 48 women experienced what the FDA labeled as “severe infections.” Given that the RU 486 abortion drug caused sepsis, a potentially lethal infection that resulted in the deaths of women from around the world, the “serious infections” were very likely life-threatening situations.

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U.S. Gov. Ends Chrysler Investment With $1.3 Billion Loss

by FoxNews.com

The U.S government has sold its shares in Chrysler LLC at a likely loss of $1.3 billion in taxpayer money, the Treasury Department said Thursday, announcing the end of a controversial investment that resurrected the troubled auto company.

Italian automaker Fiat SpA, which has run the company since it emerged from bankruptcy protection in June 2009, purchased the U.S. government's remaining 98,000 shares in the auto company for $560 million.

The financial loss irritated Republican lawmakers.

"I am deeply disturbed to learn that the Obama administration left $1.3 billion taxpayer dollars on the table in resolving its bailout of Chrysler," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"The administration has sold out an American icon to a foreign company using TARP funds underwritten by taxpayers. Now they are essentially give that same company $1.3 billion of taxpayer money," he said.

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The Obama Legacy

Obama Chief of Staff Says he Can't Defend Obamanomics

by Ed Morrissey

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley took heat from business executives Thursday for the Obama administration’s regulatory expansions. Daley also said he didn’t have any good answers for some of what President Obama is doing and expressed frustration about the “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.”

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” Daley said at a National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) meeting.

Daley couldn’t answer basic questions and continually faced criticism from the executives in the room. The business leaders even applauded each other’s criticism of the administration. “At one point, the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts utility executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government ‘throws sand into the gears of progress....’”

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New EPA Rules Will Increase Cost of Energy

by IBD Editorials

Overregulation: The Environmental Protection Agency has two new rules it wants to impose on utilities that use coal. But the rules make sense only if you want less energy, higher prices and fewer jobs.

Remember then-candidate Barack Obama's comment in January 2008 that the price of electricity would "necessarily skyrocket" once his policies went into effect?

It's now coming to pass — just as OPEC has decided it doesn't want to pump more oil. Get the picture? We're being systematically starved of energy, and our economy is suffering. Just don't ask the White House to help.

Broadly, the new EPA rules seek to clean up the air. Everyone's for that, of course. But at what cost?

According to a study the economic consulting firm National Economic Research Associates conducted for the coal industry, the two new rules mentioned above will by themselves cost electric utilities $184 billion by 2030 and kill 1.4 million jobs.

So why do it? Coal, our nation's No. 1 energy source for making electricity, is "dirty." And granted, coal isn't the cleanest available energy. But clean-coal technologies make it cleaner than ever.

It's also the least expensive and most easily available energy we have. For a pittance, it provides fully half the power we need to heat and cool our homes and run our TVs and computers.

But if these EPA rules go into effect, the cost of energy will shoot up 11% to 23% in just a few years.

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High Speed Rail Subsidies in Iowa: Nothing for Something

by Wendell Cox

The Federal government is again offering money it does not have to entice a state (Iowa) to spend money that it does not have on something it does not need. The state of Iowa is being asked to provide funds to match federal funding for a so-called "high speed rail" line from Chicago to Iowa City. The new rail line would simply duplicate service that is already available. Luxury intercity bus service is provided between Iowa City and Chicago twice daily. The luxury buses are equipped with plugs for laptop computers and with free wireless high-speed internet service. Perhaps most surprisingly, the luxury buses make the trip faster than the so-called high speed rail line, at 3:50 hours. The trains would take more than an hour longer (5:00 hours). No one would be able to get to Chicago quicker than now. Only in America does anyone call a train that averages 45 miles per hour "high speed rail."

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Taxpayers Face Multibillion Dollar Loss from Auto Bailouts

by David Skeel

President Obama's visit to a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, on Friday was the culmination of a campaign to portray the auto bailouts as a brilliant success with no unpleasant side effects. "The industry is back on its feet," the president said, "repaying its debt, gaining ground."

If the government hadn't stepped in and dictated the terms of the restructuring, the story goes, General Motors and Chrysler would have collapsed, and at least a million jobs would have been lost. The bailouts averted disaster, and they did so at remarkably little cost.

The problem with this happy story is that neither of its parts is accurate. Commandeering the bankruptcy process was not, as apologists for the bailouts claim, the only hope for GM and Chrysler. And the long-term costs of the bailouts will be enormous.

In late 2008, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson tapped the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Fund to lend more than $17 billion to General Motors and Chrysler. With the fate of the car companies still uncertain at the outset of the Obama administration in 2009, Mr. Obama set up an auto task force headed by "car czar" Steve Rattner.

Under the strategy that was chosen, each of the companies was required to file for bankruptcy as a condition of receiving additional funding. Rather than undergo a restructuring under ordinary bankruptcy rules, however, each corporation pretended to "sell" its assets to a new entity that was set up for the purposes of the sale.

With Chrysler, the new entity paid $2 billion, which went to Chrysler's senior lenders, giving them a small portion of the $6.9 billion they were owed. (Fiat was given a large stake in the new entity, although it did not contribute any money). But the "sale" also ensured that Chrysler's unionized retirees would receive a big recovery on their $10 billion claim—a $4.6 billion promissory note and 55% of Chrysler's stock—even though they were lower priority creditors.

If other bidders were given a legitimate opportunity to top the $2 billion of government money on offer, this might have been a legitimate transaction. But they weren't. A bid wouldn't count as "qualified" unless it had the same strings as the government bid—a sizeable payment to union retirees and full payment of trade debt. If a bidder wanted to offer $2.5 billion for Chrysler's Jeep division, he was out of luck. With General Motors, senior creditors didn't get trampled in the same way. But the "sale," which left the government with 61% of GM's stock, was even more of a sham.

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Obama administration pushing for same-sex foster care

Andrew Klavan: Obama's Beach Blanket Recovery

Police Testing Standards Lowered for Blacks and Hispanics

Herman Cain: You Mess With Israel, You Mess With the U.S.

Gene Simmons Slams President Obama's Israel Policy

Security Adviser Tries To Defend Obama's Terror Policies

EPA Admits Jobs Don't Matter

National Right to Work