Where's Fox News? What? No breaking news, urgent bulletins? What's up with that? After weeks of creating a faux scandal over the failure of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, they're not all up in arms over Mitt Romney's fundraising party with one of their lobbyists?
Sam Stein at Huffington Post has the story:
Romney is holding a fundraiser with nearly two dozen members of Congress on Wednesday, after which he will attend an event at the American Trucking Association with top K Street operatives. The list of attendees revealed by POLITICO includes Alex Mistri, managing director of The Glover Park Group.
Despite working at a predominantly Democratic lobbying firm, Mistri is a reliable GOP donor and Romney supporter. He has donated $2,500 to his presidential bid so far this cycle, on top of the $1,000 he gave to Romney's Free and Strong America PAC. But work he did at Glover Park as a lobbyist for Solyndra seems a touch discordant with the views of many in the Republican Party, who have worked to portray the company's failure as a referendum on alternative energy development and the administration's embrace of it.
If your reaction is to shrug and say "so what", that's great. It's exactly what Fox News and the rest of the traditional media should have done to the ginned-up Solyndra faux scandal. But given their penchant for making issues out of nothing, it deserves attention.
After all, on Monday Mitt glommed onto Solyndra as an example of cronyism inside the Obama administration.
First came Solyndra, the solar-panel maker backed by a major Obama campaign-funds bundler, which President Obama hailed as a "true engine of economic growth." It turned out to be a true engine of bankruptcy. Even as the administration trumpeted its accomplishments, the firm was careening toward insolvency. Taxpayers were left holding a $500 million bill, and the firm was left facing an FBI investigation. Nonetheless, at least one Solyndra-linked fundraiser is helping to organize Tuesday's presidential cash call in San Francisco.
And now at least one Solyndra lobbyist is gladhanding Mittens. So I suppose this would be the time for me to introduce the pot to the kettle?
