Over at NRO, Andrew Stiles asks some questions Solyndra executives won’t be answering about how they squandered tax-payers $535 million:

Top Solyndra executives are scheduled to appear today before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. But that’s all they’ll be doing.

Here: National Review Online: Seven Solyndra Questions.

SacBee reports, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has said that she registered to vote as a Republican in another state in 1998 prior re-registering in California in 2002 (she became elligible to vote in 1974!). But, it looks like her 2002 decline-to-state registration in San Mateo, CA was the first time in 30 years that she even thought of participating in the electoral system.

The Whitman campaign now refuses to discuss her voting history. When asked for records of her ’98 registration or voting record in an interview Whitman replied “Go find it.”

UPDATE: Whoops! Tokoni Inc. Meg Whitman’s million-dollar internet firm posted this story from SacBee’s homepage today,  calling Meg out on a possible lie about her voting history, and tweeted it from three different accounts! (The tweets seem to have been posted by a bot). 

…In the first six months of 2009, Meg Whitman paid Tokoni $943,067.54. As of this posting the story is still up on Tokoni’s home page. Let us know if they remove it, we have screen-shots.

In a record-setting year, California has set a new record.  First it was the biggest tax increase in the state’s history.  Then the longest budget delay ever.  Today we have the highest unemployment rate since we started keeping records: 12.2%.  And that rate only includes active job-seekers; the “discouraged” are left out. One in five Californians could currently be jobless.  I don’t know, but maybe these three things are connected.

The state raised taxes in February in a foolish attempt to keep up government spending: The result? We got a deficit of $26 billion, a stalled legislature and hundreds of thousands of IOUs for taxpayers who were already just scraping by.

Now our sales tax and income tax are higher, the auto registration fee is doubled, and state revenues keep going down.  Do the policymakers think twice about a tax cut? No. Instead A special session is prepared to hear how the Commission on the 21^st Century Economy plans to raise taxes even more with their stealth business tax proposal.

When you jumped on the bed, your parents would tell you to stop or you’d fall and hurt yourself. Sacramento has already fallen and broken its legs, but it keeps getting back up to jump again.

Over 700,000 have lost their jobs in 2009 and counting. It seems like the policymakers won’t learn until California becomes a scene from Oliver Twist, with every citizen in a soup kitchen asking “can I have some more.”

From Peter Hannaford at The American Spectator:

She’s tall, blonde and looks you straight in the eye on meeting. You tell her about a local shipping port issue. She asks for more details and clearly understands the economic significance of the issue in the greater scheme of things.

A few minutes later she’s at the podium telling her personal story in an engaging way, then shifting to the very large problems facing the state. In clear, crisp fashion she tells her audience what she wants to do about them.

She is Meg Whitman and she is running for Governor of California. Like Ronald Reagan more than four decades earlier, she is traveling the state introducing herself to potential supporters in cities and towns large and small. [Read More]

The week of August 17 was a special one for the men in uniform who are considered the fathers of the modern Special Operations Forces so critical to today’s armed forces: The Marine Raiders, whose heroism in World War II was saluted with the opening of Raider Hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The crucial role played in the Pacific by the four Raider battalions in the early days of World War II was highlighted in remarks delivered by a former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Alfred Grey. Raider Hall features equipment and exhibits about the Marines, who conducted amphibious landings in the island battles in the Pacific and operated behind enemy lines.  [Read More]

(H/T John Gizzi at Human Events)