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This dispatch from Bloomberg got a lot of attention yesterday:

The U.S. government expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from the renewable-energy loan program that funded flops including Solyndra LLC, supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.

The Department of Energy has disbursed about half of $32.4 billion allocated to spur innovation, and the expected return will be detailed in a report due to be released as soon as tomorrow, according to an official who helped put together the data.

The results contradict the widely held view that the U.S. has wasted taxpayer money funding failures including Solyndra, which closed its doors in 2011 after receiving $528 million in government backing. That adds to Obama’s credibility as he seeks to make climate change a bigger priority after announcing a historic emissions deal with China.

I think the gist of this report is almost certainly correct. The faux outrage over Solyndra back in 2011 was entirely manufactured for partisan reasons, and there was never any real reason to think that Solyndra's bankruptcy represented a broader failure of the loan program. Quite the opposite. Any loan guarantee program is not only going to have failures, it's going to expect failures. Solyndra just happened to be one of them.

And yet....I'd still remain a bit cautious about the overall success of the program. Out of its $32 billion in approved loans, half represent loan guarantees to nuclear power plant developers and Ford Motor. These are not exactly risky, innovative startups. They're huge companies that could very easily have raised money without government help, and which represented virtually zero danger of default. If DOE is including returns from those loans in its forecast, color me unimpressed.

The genuinely risky half of the loan program is called Section 1705, and it includes everything that most of us think of as real renewable energy projects (wind, solar, biofuel, etc.). DOE hasn't broken that out separately, saying in its press release that "The best perspective for assessing LPO’s financial performance is to look at the portfolio in its entirety." Maybe so. But before I declare success, I'd still like to see how well the 1705 program is doing on its own. That would be a fairer representation of how well things are going in the piece of this program that's truly dedicated to risky new renewable energy projects.

Yet again, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was forced to defend her decision to remain in leadership following the disappointing midterm elections, a position she says she would not have to uphold if it weren't for being a woman.

Speaking at her weekly press conference on Thursday, Pelosi schooled reporters with the following:

"What I said to the most recent person who asked 'Well you’ve lost now three times. Why don’t you step aside?' And I said, "What was the day that any of you said to Mitch McConnell, when they lost the Senate three times in a row, lost making progress in taking back the Senate three times in a row, ‘Aren’t you getting a little old, Mitch? Shouldn’t you step aside?’ Have you ever asked him that question?"

This is far from the first time Pelosi, who at the age of 74 is just two years older than McConnell, has been the target of sexist inquiries from the media. In 2012, Luke Russert asked Pelosi the very same question about stepping down to make room for younger leadership, to which Pelosi slammed as "offensive."

Pelosi's defense today comes in the the midst of similar jabs aimed at Hillary Clinton, after Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested in a Politico interview Clinton may be too old to run for president.

Watch below:

Justice Antonin Scalia

The Federalist Society kicked off its national convention Thursday in Washington, DC, with a speech from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who is one of two justices headlining the event. The other is Justice Samuel Alito, who is on tap for the conservative legal group's big dinner Thursday night.

For years, liberal good-government types have been criticizing Scalia and the other conservative justices for participating in Federalist Society functions. The events also serve as fundraisers for the organization, which promotes conservative positions in the nation's ongoing legal debates. Critics contend that the involvement of Scalia et. al. violates various legal ethics codes. In 2011, for instance, Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas attended the annual dinner associated with the Federalist Society's national convention—hours after the Supreme Court decided whether to take up the main challenges to the Affordable Care Act. And it just so happened that the law firms representing the Obamacare challengers were sponsors of that dinner and that lawyers from those firms were among the guests rubbing shoulders with Scalia and Thomas.

Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, said at the time, "This stunning breach of ethics and indifference to the code belies claims by several justices that the court abides by the same rules that apply to all other federal judges. The justices were wining and dining at a black-tie fundraiser with attorneys who have pending cases before the court. Their appearance and assistance in fundraising for this event undercuts any claims of impartiality, and is unacceptable."

But such complaints have not caused Scalia and his conservative brethren to rethink their cozy relationship with the Federalist Society, and this morning the group could once again boast a big get—the often fiery justice who is a hero within conservative legal circles. But if any of the conventioneers were hoping for fireworks from Scalia, they were sorely disappointed. Rather than opine on Hobby Lobby and religious freedom or the Affordable Care Act and government overreach, Scalia spent 30 minutes at the dais lecturing on the history of Magna Carta—"No definite article!" he insisted—and its influence on American law.

Scalia mostly stuck to legal issues from the 13th century. He might well have been a curator from the Library of Congress, where the Magna Carta is currently on exhibit (sponsored, incidentally, by the Federalist Society). Scalia ended his speech by urging everyone to go see the 800-year-old document.

In years past, the conference has drawn an all-star lineup of firebrand conservative politicians and aspiring presidential candidates: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Republican Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). But this year, the only politician of note on the schedule is Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R). The rest of the usual suspects are basking in the glow of the GOP's Election Day victories and preparing for their takeover of the Senate. As for Scalia, if attendees want to see him let loose, they might have to wait for his next Supreme Court opinion.

Noam Scheiber takes on one of the lessons du jour that always crop up after a party gets shellacked at the polls: how do we appeal to demographic group X that voted so heavily against us? In this case, the party is the Democrats, and the demographic group is the infamous white working class, which voted Republican by a 30-point margin last week:

At first blush, the white working class would appear to pose a real dilemma. The set of issues on which the Democratic Party is most coherent these days is social progressivism....But while these issues unite college-educated voters and working-class minority voters, they’ve historically alienated the white working class.

....How to square this circle? Well, it turns out we don’t really have to, since the analysis is outdated. The white working class is increasingly open to social liberalism, or at least not put off by it. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin observed this summer, 54 percent of the white working class born after 1980 think gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, according to data assembled from the 2012 election.

....Long story short, there’s a coalition available to Democrats that knits together working class minorities and college-educated voters and slices heavily into the GOP’s margins among the white working class....The basis of the coalition isn’t a retreat from social progressivism, but making economic populism the party’s centerpiece....The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a “message” that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects, as Harold Meyerson recently pointed out.

I'd like to offer a different interpretation. I don't have a bunch of poll data readily at hand to back this up, so it's possible I'm way off base. But I don't think so, and at the very least I welcome pushback since it might clarify some things that need clarifying.

Here it is: I agree that social liberalism isn't quite the deal killer it used to be. Scheiber and Teixera are right about that. It's still an issue—especially gun control, which remains more potent than a lot of liberals like to acknowledge—but it's fading somewhat in areas like abortion and gay marriage. There are still plenty of Fox-watching members of the WWC who are as socially conservative as ever, but I think it's safe to say that at the margins social issues are becoming a little less divisive among the WWC than they have been over the past few decades.

But if that's the case, why does the WWC continue to loathe Democrats so badly? I think the answer is as old as the discussion itself: They hate welfare. There was a hope among some Democrats that Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform would remove this millstone from around Democrats' necks, and for a few years during the dotcom boom it probably did. The combination of tougher work rules and a booming economy made it a less contentious topic.

But when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That's just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn't matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That's because they're closer to it. For them, the poor aren't merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They're the folks next door who don't do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn't for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that's responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

This is a big problem because these are all things that benefit the poor but barely touch the working class. Does it matter that the working class barely pays for most of these programs in the first place, since their federal income taxes tend to be pretty low? Nope. They're still paying taxes, and it seems like they never get anything for it. It's always someone else.

It's pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But it's there. And although it's bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic¹—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn't vote for Democrats either.

I hate to end this with the usual cliche that I don't know what to do about it, but I don't. Helping the poor is one of the great causes of liberalism, and we forfeit our souls if we give up on it. And yet, as a whole bunch of people have acknowledged lately, the Democratic Party simply doesn't do much for either the working or middle classes these days. Republicans, by contrast, offer both the concrete—tax cuts—and the emotional—an inchoate but still intense rage against a government that seems not to care about them.

So sure: full-throated economic populism? That might work, though everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means. But here's one thing it better mean: policies that are aimed at the working and middle classes and that actually appeal to them. That is, policies that are simple, concrete, and offer benefits which are clear and compelling.

This is going to require policy wonks to swallow hard. Remember Cash 4 Clunkers? Economically, that was probably a dumb program that accomplished little. But it didn't do any harm, and people sure loved it. Multiply that by a hundred and you're on the right track.

¹The Democrats' problem with the white working class is far worse in the South than anywhere else. Nonetheless, I think we're kidding ourselves if we crunch a bunch of numbers and somehow conclude that it's not a problem elsewhere. It's not as big a problem, but in an electorate that continues to be balanced on a tightrope, five or ten percentage points among a sizeable group of people is still a pretty big problem.