SOLARGATE UPDATE: Megan McArdle:

Last week, I wondered if Solyndra, the bankrupt California solar panel firm, was going to be the first real scandal of the Obama administration. This week, I watched the Energy and Commerce hearings on the Solyndra decision, and there was some pretty fierce grilling going on, even though the Solyndra executives dropped out at the last minute. Meanwhile, though the White House has maintained that it did not intervene in the Solyndra loan, yesterday the Washington Post broke the news that the White House had pressed the Office of Management and Budget to greenlight the loan in a hurry. . . . Obviously, this story is still developing. But at the moment, it certainly doesn’t look good.

Plus this: “When banks engage in this sort of behavior, we call it a bubble, and try to figure out how to fix things so they won’t do it again. When government agencies do this, we call it a weekday.”