Amazing. I just got an email from GM trying to get me to pester my senators and congressman to bail their improvident, incompetent, inept corporation out with my tax money. I don't remember giving them my email address when I bought my Aveo, but apparently I did.

I'm thinking "no". I'm thinking of pestering Specter to *not* give them a thin red cent, since NPR was gassing on about him being friendly to the idea. In fact, I just sent this to Specter and Casey:

I am contacting you as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and as a voter to vehemently and emphatically demand that you *NOT* support or vote for any scheme which extends one more dime's worth of public credit underwritten by our hard-earned taxes to those incompetent, improvident, hopelessly inept clowns who run the Detroit automakers.

I cannot think of a greater waste of public resources and a more shameless appeal to the squalid self-interest of a pack of over-paid, over-compensated, over-indulged UAW retirees and "employees" than these repeated and utterly futile 'bailouts' of a company which is not so much dedicated to the production of quality automobiles, as to the ongoing support and subsidy of bloated union pensioners and their dependents.

What justice is there in the extraction of payroll taxes from unpensioned, impoverished convenience store clerks, grocery-store stockboys, shoe salesmen, and other losers in life's lottery - all of them either going without health care or scrambling and scrimping and saving to afford sky-high premiums - in order to subsidize the obscene "Cadillac" health plans and bloated, underfunded pensions of these Princes of the Union?

Let GM die. Let the monster go bankrupt, and complete the process of capital-destruction which has brought that once-great company to the brink upon which it now totters. Do not throw good money after bad, do not piss away the public's wealth in an attempt to salvage long-lost private wealth.

The pensioners of the UAW can rely on Social Security and Medicare and their own personal savings like the rest of retired America. They were paid and over-paid throughout their working lifetimes. If the end result of all those wages is nothing but empty bank-accounts and the broken promises of a defaulted pension - well, those self-same excessive wages, fairly bargained by an over-enthusiastic pack of union jackals in defiance of the interests of now-destroyed investor capital, came with their own eventual price-tag, did they not?