Romney makes surprise visit to Solyndra

Mitt Romney made a surprise campaign stop on Thursday at the solar-panel firm Solyndra LLC, where he sought to use the bankrupt company as an example of how he says President Obama is hostile to job creation.Features useful information about glassmosaic tiles,

The presumptive nominee's visit to the failed solar-energy plant culminates a week-long push to depict the president as clueless when it comes to handling the economy. By focusing on Solyndra, a company that was selected for a $535 million Energy Department loan-guarantee but later filed for bankruptcy and laid off its entire staff,Ekahau rtls is the only Wi-Fi based real time location system solution that operates on any brand or generation of Wi-Fi network. Romney argued that Obama doesn't understand the free market and has wasted taxpayer dollars.TRT (UK) has been investigating and producing solutions for indoortracking since 2000.

"President Obama was here to tout this building and this business as a symbol of the success of his stimulus," Romney said. "Well, you can see that it's a symbol of something very different today."

Romney noted a recent Treasury Department inspector general's report that the loan guarantee was "rushed," something he said was done to reward Obama administration supporters running the company.

"It's also a symbol of how the president thinks about free enterprise. Free enterprise to the president means taking money from the taxpayers and giving it freely to his friends," he said.

Republicans have not found evidence to back up claims by some lawmakers that the loan was approved for political reasons. But Solyndra has been a popular punching bag for conservatives, who have used its collapse as a focal point for attacks against the White House's green-energy policies.

Two wealthy outside right-wing interest groups reportedly have spent more than $9 million attacking Obama on the issue. House Republicans also have probed deeply into the company's demise and what the GOP contends has been the Obama administration's obstruction of their efforts.

But polls last year showed that voters did not yet share that outrage. Former California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he considers the debate narrow-minded in a world moving faster toward renewable energy.

Romney's visit to Solyndra was conducted under strict secrecy. It was not on his daily advance schedule and reporters were told not to report his visit there until right before he arrived. The event was held across the street from the company,Professional Manufacturer for ceramictile. with Romney positioned on a podium just off the road.

"I think there are people who don't want to see this event occur, don't want to have questions asked about this particular investment, don't want to have people delve into the idea that the president took a half a billion dollars of taxpayer money and devoted it to an enterprise that was owned in large measure by his campaign contributors," Romney said when asked about the secrecy.

Nevertheless, the Obama campaign was ready for the Solyndra salvo. It issued a news release before Romney's visit accusing their rival of ignoring "his own record of using taxpayer money to pick winners and losers--some who were donors to his campaign" when he was Massachusetts' governor.

"The reality is that Solyndra received funding through a Department of Energy program created under the Bush administration - a program that has supported tens of thousands of jobs across the country and is moving forward with investments in innovative projects like the first nuclear plant built in the U.CMI moulding sells to retailers,S. in decades and the world's largest wind farm," spokeswoman Lis Smith said.