Melissa Yeo/The Chronicle
Upset in election to replace Weiner
For the first time since 1923, a Republican is representing the 9th district of New York, a district that contains parts of Queens and Brooklyn, in the House of Representatives. His name is Bob Turner and he defeated Democrat Dave Werpin to claim the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner, who disgracefully resigned after a scandal that I can’t seem to recall the details of but I believe it involved Twitter and his intimate male genitilia.
Despite the fact that the district has three registered Democrats for every registered Republican, presidential races show that the district may not be as liberal as one would think, with President Obama only receiving 55 percent of the district's vote in 2008. However, that shouldn’t detract from the fact that this is a huge upset for the Democrats and is extremely bad news for Obama, as Bob Turner often cited unpopular Obama policies as a reason to vote for him. Politics aside, this win counts for very little since it appears very likely that this district will be wiped away in the New York’s redistricting process next year.
Obama administration faces scandal
Since it became clear that Barack Obama was a viable candidate for president, Republicans have tried desperately to create some sort of scandal to sully his record. From birth certificates to Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, nothing the Republicans have put on Obama has seemed to stick, but it seems like Republicans might have finally found there long-desired scandal in the collapse of Solyndra.
Solyndra was a company that manufactured solar panels before they filed for bankruptcy earlier this month and was then raided by the FBI. The reason the collapse of Solyndra is so problematic for the Obama administration is because Solyndra received $534 million in loan guarantees from the administration. But that is only the beginning of this still-breaking scandal.
Obama has toured Solyndra and touted the company in speeches. The administration made Solyndra the poster child of their green jobs movement and now they are paying for it. Sadly for the Obama administration, it gets worse. Investigators have found emails from within the Obama administration that warned that the loan deal was ill-advised and that the project would run out of money in September of 2011, which ended up being true.
Now all of this is plenty scandalous, but there is nothing here showing that the administration did anything intentionally unethical. That is where George Kaiser comes in. George Kaiser is a billionaire who happens to be a major campaign-fundraiser for Obama and associated with a foundation that is a major investor in Solyndra. Republicans are already flooding the airwaves with accusations of cronyism but the full details of the scandal are still coming out.
Crowd steals the show at GOP debate
At the CNN/Tea Party GOP Debate this week, Republican presidential hopefuls sparred over various issues with Social Security fueling perhaps the most contentious debate. That being said, it wasn’t the candidates that made news—it was the crowd for this incident: GOP Debate
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