Oct. 17, 2011, Sacramento, CA — President Obama today said Republicans are to blame for taxpayers' losing more than half a billion dollars in loans made to the failed solar panel company Solyndra.

"I'm with the ninety and nine," the president told journalists today as he toured PDT Power, a new federally funded rodent-powered generating plant at Deadwood, South Dakota. "After the guys at Solyndra took our $535 million, they all ended up in the top one percent of Americans in terms of income. And we all know that 99 percent of the top 1 percent are Republicans."

Obama said Solyndra would have succeeded if Republicans had not funded companies that unfairly competed with the California-based solar panel manufacturer.

"Even after I promised to make the cost of energy skyrocket," he said, "Republican investors defied me and continued to fund almost every company that makes energy cheaper than Solyndra could do.

"I'll tell you one thing, if you look who's behind coal mines, power plants, nuclear energy plants, oil drilling companies, oil refineries and natural gas companies, they're almost all funded and owned by Republicans.

"That is one reason I promise to raise tax rates on big companies and the people who run them. And I'll keep raising taxes until traditional energy costs so much that people will be willing to buy solar panels, Chevy Volts and rooftop wind generators."

Energy Czar Dr. I.Q. Lowe, said Solyndra represents only the tip of the iceberg in alternative energy companies that have received millions in federal loan guarantees.

"If Republicans don't stop unfairly competing with alternative energy," he said, "the solar and wind companies could all go broke, and guess who will be left holding the bag? That's right, federal taxpayers."

Lowe said most Americans should not be concerned with any investments made by the Obama administration because just over 50 percent of citizens pay no federal income tax at all.

"So if we lose a few trillion here or there, you should be happy," he said. "The top 1 percent of wage earners pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, so that means they are also the biggest losers when the government makes a bad loan."

Vice-President Joe Biden, also touring the PDT plant, said he might have been mistaken about the 1,000-plus permanent jobs that were to be created by Solyndra, but the rodent-powered plant will more than make up for that loss by creating 50,000 permanent jobs. He admitted, however, that the vast majority of those jobs will go to the prairie dogs who keep the turbines turning at PDT, an acronym for the cylindrical source of the company's electrical production, Prairie Dog Treadmills.

"The workers here will have a job as long as they care to work," he said. "And if somebody naps on the job, there's always another worker ready to jump through the hoops to get a job."

Deputy Energy Secretary Burn N. Cole said each permanent job at PDT comes at a far lower cost than the $479,000 spent for each three-year job at Solyndra.

"We pay the bulk of PDT workers in peanuts," he said. "So we get a lot of bang for our buck."

Cole said technology has come a long way since the first rodent-powered electrical generator was conceived by cartoonist Walt Disney after watching his pet hamsters exercise.

"We soon expect to generate enough electricity to power all the needs of the plant," he said. "Within a few years PDT should be producing a net positive in electric energy. We think that for a few hundred dollars in nuts and grains, we should be able to recharge several thousand AA batteries per month."

A reporter for Fox News, Ray Z. Kane, questioned whether PDT would ever make up for the energy consumed by Air Force One to transport the president to South Dakota.

Flight Engineer Dee Zell Burner said Obama since his inauguration has refused to ride in anything but solar powered vehicles. He explained that the president fuels his jet airplanes as well as his limousines with energy originally produced by the sun.

"We call this process photosynthesis," Burner said. "The fuels we refine from altered cellulose stored deep inside the earth are actually renewable though it does take a long time to complete the process — like 65 million years."