Why We Shouldn’t Bail Out GM

…Their record for money-losing is beyond comprehension. David Yermack, professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has calculated how much capital the car companies have destroyed over the last few decades.

He writes, “General Motors and Ford…between them…destroyed $110 billion in capital between 1980 and 1990…. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and 2007. The total depreciation of GM’s physical plant during this period was $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society’s capital has been pumped into GM over the past decade — a waste of about $1.5 billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not been as adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155 billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998. As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion.“

And now we’re supposed to toss ‘em another 25 billion? Hmm.

No.

New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers

Nov. 20, 2008 | FORT CARSON, Colo. — Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. — including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died — were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator’s office, have since been relocated for their safety.

Bill Clinton Sends Donor List to Obama to Help Hillary’s Bid

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) – Bill Clinton has sent President- elect Barack Obama’s transition team a list of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation, according to a Democrat familiar with the process, the latest sign both sides are trying to clear obstacles to Hillary Clinton’s possible nomination as U.S. secretary of state.

Vetting Bill Clinton is easy:

Kosovo

Iraq sanctions

Mogadishu

See, that wasn’t hard. No one named Clinton should be allowed ANYWHERE near our government again. Bill Clinton and the sanctions against Iraq, which lead to the deaths of most likely a million Iraqi children, makes him as big a butcher as Bush could ever hope to be- and the only reason he’s given a pass on his genocide by the left is because he wasn’t an arrogant dickhead about it, unlike Bush. But make no mistake, my blind in one eye obese pug who sleeps 23.5 hours a day would make a better Secretary of State than Hillary Clinton. A lot fewer people would die, at least.

But if Obama ends up picking Hillary, he embraces all that is wrong with our foreign policy, and makes him no better- or really, any different- than the monsters who preceded him.

Now this guy would be a dandy pick.

Councils to be banned from using anti-terror powers to snoop on people who overfill bins or drop litter

The Government is planning action to stop local councils using surveillance powers designed for terrorism and serious crime to deal with trivial offences like dog-fouling, a Home Office minister said today.

Mr Coaker also defended the scale of the national DNA database, which contains samples from 7.39 per cent of the UK population – more than in any other country in the world – and includes those detained by police but released without charge.

Boy, we’d be in a sorry state if there were actually bad people out there intent on killing us all, wouldn’t we?

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.

And my goodness, people are getting their tighty whities in a bunch about it.

Probably because they know she’s right.

And considering its up against the economy, capitulation on torture and Judas Lieberman, that’s saying something.

But this is an absolutely appalling story that should shame us all:

50 percent more US children went hungry in 2007

WASHINGTON – Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Meanwhile, the rich get richer, our economy tanks, and the number of hungry people will only massively increase once businesses go under as our empire collapses from the weight of fraud and greed.

Here’s an idea. Instead of using bailout funds to stuff a bit more greasy pork into the snouts of incompetent and immoral Wall Street failures…give the money to food banks instead.

Even better, take the hungry from states like Iowa and New Mexico, feed ‘em, put them on buses headed for New York, and give them shotguns. Let nature take its course.

Putting the past behind us, moving forward. That has always been the way, ever since that Sunday morning in 1974 when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, an act that most of the punditocracy has since hailed as one that healed the nation (although, frankly, during the malaise of the Ford and Carter years it was hard to tell). But did letting Richard Nixon remain a free man truly save the republic, or did the pardon embolden the Reagan administration to defy Congress and carry out the Iran-Contra scheme, knowing that America didn’t want a rehash of Watergate. And did the lack of impeachment and the subsequent pardon of key Iran-Contra figures like Casper Weinberger and Elliot Abrams (recycled in the Bush administration!) encouraging bolder moves, including fishy pardons by Bill Clinton that weren’t investigated by the Bush Justice Department, with the ensuing lack of outcry convincing the president there was zero downside to commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby, and now today we have President-elect Obama determined to pull a Gerald Ford, even when the alleged crime is as abhorrent as torture.

Nothing.

WSJ Columnist: Obama Should Give Stephen Hadley The Medal Of Freedom

In the Wall Street Journal today, President Bush’s former Chief Speechwriter William McGurn writes that National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has “earned” the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for work that made possible the success we are now seeing in Iraq.” McGurn argues that though “it’s possible that George W. Bush would award” Hadley, it would be better “for the country” if President-elect Barack Obama were to honor Hadley:

Were President Obama to do so, a good man would receive an honor he richly deserves. The American people would see a new president confident enough to acknowledge the success of a decision he opposed. And the world would know that when the United States does leave Iraq, we intend to walk out with honor instead of being helo’d off an embassy rooftop.

To remind Mr. McGurn of a few things:

The war in Iraq was illegal. It was unnecessary. It has taken the lives of over 4,000 US troops, and thousands of Iraqi innocent civilians. It was sold on lies- lies pimped by slime like Hadley.

Hadley should hang- first on the Washington Mall, then once we’re done spitting on his remains, fly the bag sack to Iraq, and hang him again in the public square where the Iraqi people supposedly pulled down the statue of Saddam in glee over his removal. Supposedly, because like everything else about this genocidal debacle, it too was a lie.

These war pigs make me sick.

Bush Administration: Dismiss RFID ‘Mark of the Beast’ Lawsuit

The Bush administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of Amish farmers in Michigan claiming RFID chips required on cattle “are a mark of the beast.”

The Amish farmers claim (.pdf) Michigan regulations requiring them to use radio frequency identification devices on their cattle “constitutes some form of a ‘mark of the beast’ and/or represents an infringement of their ‘dominion over cattle and all living things’ in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs,” according to the farmers’ lawsuit filed in September in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Silly Amish, everyone knows this is the Mark of the Beast:

Exposed: Federal Air Marshals Too Busy Smuggling Coke and Molesting Kids to Protect You

Shawn Nguyen bragged that he could sneak anything past airport security using his top-secret clearance as a federal air marshal. And for months, he smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was “the man with the golden badge.”

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

Yet another post-9/11 bit of security Kabuki, hiring foxes to watch the henhouse on our dime.