Mitt Romney Was Right About Detroit

Back in November of last year, Mitt Romney advocated letting distressed automakers fall into a managed bankruptcy rather than be given "bridge loans" to keep them afloat. He was roundly criticized for not having enough faith in the American auto industry, nor enough sympathy for the plight of auto workers receiving free health care and guaranteed retirement perks.

He wrote in his op-ed in the New York Times:

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Today, tens of billions in government-backed loans later, it looks like GM and Chrysler are bankruptcy-bound. If they had listened to Romney six months ago, the painful but necessary restructuring would be well underway, and light may even be shining at the end of the auto makers' tunnel.

Instead, we're in a deeper hole and the auto makers are only now realizing that their ship is too obsolete and outdated to float.

For reasons such as this I still haven't removed my Mitt '08 bumper sticker. I can endure the tackiness for another few weeks, I think.

Harry "The Weasel" Reid

This is rich. Harry Reid earlier spouted off some inside information about yet another particular insurance company headed toward the brink of bankruptcy. Naturally, the markets bailed on all the major insurers, causing a huge drop to the already beleaguered stocks. Here are his comments:

"We don't have a lot of leeway on time. One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about." Reid said prior to the Senate's approval of the $700 billion bailout bill.

Oh, but Reid can't be held responsible for those comments. They were just "misunderstood."

"Senator Reid is not personally aware of any particular company being on the verge of bankruptcy. He has no special knowledge about [a bankruptcy] nor has he talked to any insurance company officials," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Sen. Reid, in an email to CNNMoney.com.

How does he get away with this? Why his constituents don't hold him responsible for such duplicity is beyond me.

Dear President Bush: No More Bailouts

Don't you just love it when people about to reap the rewards of poor judgment get bailed out by politicians at the cost of those who act more responsibly? Of course, that's the essence of the game in Washington, and it's no different with Bush's proposed interest rate freeze for the two million idiots who took out an adjustable rate mortgage that will be beyond their means to pay after it "adjusts."

Talk about rewarding stupidity! "Oh, I can afford a $300,000 home because the interest rate is only 3%! Because I can always refinance later." That's like building your home on a flood plain, and then expecting the insurance company to cover the cost of your bad judgment. It won't happen.

So Bush freezes the interest rate to save their homes. At whose cost? The investors in the lending companies. More simply, Bush proposes to transfer wealth from the business owners to the homeowners, just so families don't have to move into an apartment due to their own moronic decisions. Yeah, that sounds fair.