In a heated hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman called upon the billionaire Koch brothers to be subpoenaed over their alleged monetary interests in the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Republican Congressman Ed Whitfield angrily cut off Waxman. “We’re not going to be subpoenaing the Koch brothers … because the Koch brothers have nothing to do with this project,” Whitfield snapped. “Point of order!” Waxman exclaimed. “You cut me out in the middle of a sentence!”

If you have a talking point handy to wave around every time you duke it out with your opponents, you better be prepared in case they try to use the same point on you. But apparently that didn’t happen on Fox News Sunday today when Chris Wallace kept pressing Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to be consistent in her charge that Mitt Romney was directly responsible for laying people off at companies owned by Bain Capital. If that was the case, Wallace asked, why isn’t President Obama responsible for the job losses at Solyndra?

Thursday night, Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren sat down with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to discuss various topics, perhaps most notably the Solyndra scandal.

Van Susteren posted the full, 17+ minute interview on her blog, but we’ll try to hit some of the highlights. Van Susteren kicked things off by asking Bachmann about Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s recent testimony concerning the White House’s ties to the failed Solyndra corporation, particularly its decision to hand the company a tax payer-funded loan.

House Speaker John Boehner recently spoke with Newsmax editor David Patten about a variety of issues relating to the White House. Up first: The Obama administration’s role — or lack thereof — in the House’s probe into Solyndra’s bankruptcy.

Is that part of a pattern of obstruction?

On Thursday’s edition of Fox News’s The Five, Dana Perino admonished panelist Eric Bolling for haranguing Energy Secretary Steven Chu and mocking him with a mask on a stick. “I think it’s disgusting the way we name-call here on both sides,” Perino scolded. “This is a guy who was an accomplished scientist. Maybe he should haven’t been in charge of the green energy loan program going out. It wasn’t as if the both Republicans and Democrats didn’t ask for the program in the first place.”

At Friday afternoon’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney responded to a story that’s scorching up the conservative blogosphere as the next Solyndra-style “scandal” to emerge from a loan guarantee program begun by George W. Bush, and expanded by the Obama administration. ABC News‘ Jake Tapper asked Carney to respond to his network’s report on a $529 million loan guarantee to a company called “Fisker,” that is producing an electric car in Finland.

Currently, the news catnip du jour for conservatives are Solyndra and Fast and Furious. Today, conservative media watchdog Newsbusters expressed outrage that a Fast and Furious question was left out of ABC News broadcasts of Jake Tapper‘s exclusive interview with President Obama. Fortunately, we’ve got the exchange here.

As part of a lengthy promotional tour for his new book Killing Lincoln, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly appeared on The Daily Show for a spirited and respectful discussion with host Jon Stewart of the current political rhetoric of the day. Government spending, tax rates and the price of Government-bought muffins were the topics of the conversation in the segment that aired, but as is often the case with interesting TDS interviews, the second segment, saved for Internet-only release, was more interesting that the first.

Executives from bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra elected to plead the 5th over a dozen times during a congressional hearing. Earlier, the company’s CEO, Brian Harrison, and its chief financial officer, Bill Stover, had notified the House Energy and Commerce Committee that they were planning to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to decline to testify in order to avoid self-incrimination. That didn’t keep lawmakers, however, from asking the executives about the company and how it managed to lose roughly $528 million in government loans — questioning that lead Democrats on the Committee to complain that House Republicans were “badgering” the witnesses.

As the White House continues to reel from the fallout of the recent Solyndra debacle, it’s little surprise that a certain higher-up within the Obama administration at the time is professing to have had little to no knowledge of the administration’s involvement with and promotion of the solar energy company. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former Chief of Staff, told a Chicago radio station that he does not recall the administration’s loan $500 million loan to the company. “I don’t actually remember that or know about it,” he said. “So, what I’m dealing is with what I’m dealing with here today.”

On Sunday’s sophomore edition of Up with Chris Hayes , freshly-minted host Chris Hayes took on the burgeoning Solyndra “scandal,” and made the case that it was, at worst, a case of bad optics. House Republicans have been trying to make a dollar out of this fifteen cents, and the conservative media have been peddling it like funnel cake, but despite Jon Stewart‘s credulous purchase of the “scandal,” it doesn’t really amount to much upon closer inspection.

Science writer Chris Mims this morning wondered how the Solyndra investment of $535 million compared to some of the military’s biggest investments that didn’t pan out.

So I looked it up. Using this chart from the New York Times for reference, I created the chart below.

You guys have been waiting for this, huh? Try not to kiss (or punch) your computer screens too hard, y’all. So. Solyndra. (Imagine we’re whispering seductively in your ear, perhaps whilst wearing a Ronald Reagan mask, if you’re into such things.) Solyndra is a solar energy company that declared bankruptcy late last month, letting go of each and every one of its 1,100 workers. That’s incredibly bad timing for the Obama administration right now as the President gears up for 2012.

Bob Beckel has no problem making it clear when he’s not interested in a particular topic being discussed on The Five (for example: watch him amusing himself and deconstructing a segment on the disappearance of tourist in Aruba). Recently he’s made it very clear that he has no desire to talk about the failure of the solar company Solyndra and the questions over the stimulus money they received.