Amos who apparently regards his threads as personal accomplishments, has abandoned this thread. Now it is like an unsupported child abandoned by it's father. How cruel. Amos gets his rocks off creating a new thread and when he gets tired of supporting it, he disappears.

The Obama administration said on Thursday its top energy loans official was stepping down, following a widening probe into the embarrassing collapse of a solar panel company that got $535 million in federal support.

Jonathan Silver, a venture capitalist [Gasp! an evil capitalist working for the Obama administration!] who had also worked for the Clinton administration, was leaving because the loan program has allocated all its funding, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

Silver's departure, however, comes as Republicans in Congress probe the White House's role in backing government loans given to Solyndra, a California solar panel maker, in 2009.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in August, and is also under investigation by the FBI.

President Barack Obama, who spoke at a news conference before Silver's resignation was announced, defended the Energy Department's handling of loans program and said the government should not back down from its support for clean energy.

Silver joined the Energy Department after the loan guarantee was awarded, but he was in charge in February when the government agreed to restructure the debt as the company ran out of cash.

In that restructuring, some $75 million in private investment was ranked ahead of the government in the event of bankruptcy. That private fund was backed by a prominent Obama fundraiser.

Obama Fundraiser Boasts of Cashing In on Stimulus Package

A key unanswered question in the Solyndra loan investigation concerns the role George Kaiser, the Oklahoma billionaire and major Obama fundraiser whose Family Foundation owned a large stake in the failed solar-panel company. Kaiser made multiple visits to the White House in the week before the Department of Energy approved a $535 million guaranteed loan to Solyndra on March 20, 2009, and helped arrange 16 separate meetings between top White House officials and Solyndra executives around that time. Yet Kaiser maintains that he "did not participate in any discussions with the U.S. government regarding the loan."

Kaiser cites his "multiple trips to Washington" and his ability to secure meetings with "all the key players in the West Wing of the White House." He also touts his "almost unique advantage," through his foundation, of being able to match public dollars with private funding. That way, Kaiser says, the Obama administration will know "we’ll watch over it because we don’t want to be embarrassed with the way our money is spent and so we won’t make you be embarrassed with the way your money is spent either." Sure, what could possibly go wrong?

While Solyndra’s failure is an embarrassment for both parties, Kaiser’s foundation still stands to recoup a large chunk of its investment in the company, whereas taxpayers will recoup very little, if any, of the $535 million investment the White House made on our behalf. That’s because once Solyndra’s financial troubles became too obvious to ignore, the DOE negotiated a loan restructuring that gave priority status to private investors over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million recovered in the event of Solyndra’s collapse. As Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations pointed out last week, this appears to be a blatant violation of federal law.

Obama may take issue with the fact that "millionaires and billionaires" like Kaiser make too much money, but he obviously has no qualms about showering them with taxpayer dollars.

Forbes ranked #31 George Kaiser $10Billion net worth age 69 Tulsa, Oklahoma oil & gas, banking