...why they're fighting a package that leaves Detroit as ill-equipped to compete with their home-state factories' products as before

I think there are multiple players with different agendas here. The southern GOP senators may be getting manipulated by other people who can play a deeper strategy: Get the rednecks fired up and let them think they're kicking ass when they're really shooting themselves in the foot.

What do you see as the deeper strategy of those dark actors doing the manipulating?

There are plenty of people who would like to see unions reduced to insignificance or eliminated. Cheap overseas labor is nice, but shipping costs cut into profits, particularly when oil prices go crazy. Those overseas wages won't stay low forever when the standard of living is going up in the countries where the work is being sent. It might be nicer to have cheap labor here in the U.S., but unions often stand in the way.

What's good for G.M. is good for America.

Well, it would probably be nice for all concerned if people had the money to buy GM's cars right now.

It's all fine and dandy to argue that companies need to get workers for the lowest possible cost, but who's going to buy their products when the workers are just barely able to afford basic living costs?

What's killing the big three right now is that sales have tanked. Sales are gonna stay tanked as long as companies are cutting more jobs and sending more work overseas.

What's your plan for getting decent incomes for Americans so they can buy all those wonderful products?

A number of people accumulated great personal wealth from the activities that lead to our current economic crisis. Clearly there was an incentive for them to do things that ended up causing great harm. What are your suggestions for preventing this in the future?

... because the U.S. economy has too many leaks. We spend too much on imports and/or don't bring in enough money on exports. All the money we dump into the U.S. economy quickly disappears overseas.

And, as we speak, the problem is getting even worse. Companies trying to keep their heads above water have accelerated the offshoring of their work. Layoffs are bad enough, but offshoring is worse because those jobs aren't coming back in the foreseeable future.

Sure, but why are people building new houses when so many existing ones cannot be sold?

There goes another keyboard, killed by the old soda-out-the-nose trick. Thankfully, I have spares on hand.

Is this some bizarre plan to stimulate the economy?

Wouldn't that make more sense than mindlessly shoving money into a system which already has too much debt in it?

My best guesses are that either:

1) There people have no freakin' clue what they're doing, or

2) They know what they're doing, but it's not intended to produce the advertised result.

Pumping money into the economy is a waste of time as long as our economy has the huge gushing leaks of trade imbalance and job offshoring. All the money they pour in just vanishes overseas as fast as they can pour.

This is stupid because it dampens consumer confidence when consumer confidence is already horribly low.

Bush spent most of his time in office telling us that our economy was doing fine, but that didn't prevent it from tanking. Bush might have even made things worse by encouraging continued reckless spending when prudence might have served us better. Of course, the continued reckless behavior made Bush's wealthy buddies even wealthier.

I prefer someone who calls 'em as they see 'em to someone who calls 'em as they want me to see 'em.

They pretend to be offended by what was done while offering Reasonable Person theories to forget about all of it and even implicitly believe that it was done for noble ends. Most of all -- worst of all -- they seek to depict their own ambivalence about torture (American Torture, that is) as the only morally and intellectually respectable position...

My mother used to tell me horror stories about the bad things that nazis and communists did and tell me I was lucky that I lived in a country that didn't do those things. She's a rock-ribbed Republican-voting catholic conservative, and I know it's killing her to see her own country doing all the things she taught me were bad. She breaks down and cries whenever discussion turns to politics.

I suspect that the more devious defenders of Bush's policies have figured out that Bush created a real problem for a large chunk of the Republican base, and they're trying to salvage that part of the base by rationalizing away the evil.

If Bush can undo his own pardon, whose to say Obama can't undue 43's, or 42's for that matter, or Ford's.

I agree that Bush may have opened a can of worms, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Executive pardons can be abused, and it might help if presidents had to consider the possibility of subsequent reversal.

The basic problem is that we consume too much and create too little. Trying to continue excessive spending with inadequate income is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as we speak, the businesses that congress kowtows to are making the problem worse by sending more jobs overseas as fast as they can.

BTW, our politicians frequently invoke patriotism when they want something from the people, but has anyone ever heard a politician ask American companies to be patriotic and hire more Americans?

Barack Obama is a usurper.

You bet. All those extraordinary powers that the Republicans let Bush claim for himself were never intended to be wielded by anyone but a Republican. Now the Republicans are shitting bricks because Obama will have those powers himself.

The first thing to consider when deciding to grant new powers is whether or not you can tolerate an opponent having them.