Didn't they see it coming?

Talk of the bailout plan for the Big 3 has been in the news for almost a week now and I've been wanting to say something about it since the first time I heard about it so here it is:

They got $25 billion back in September for R&D and now they want another $50 billion on federal loans. Half of that would go to retooling their factories because the geniuses running these companies thought that the SUV craze would last forever even amid the rise of gas prices and the increasing sales of more efficient foreign cars. There has been talk about building more fuel efficient vehicles for years and year and yet they continued to make these gas guzzlers and didn't bother with fuel efficiency and hybrids. That's besides the point though. Let them retool, save jobs pay us back our tax money with interest.
The big problem is the other half of that $50 billion. It's going to pay for union benefits. Us tax payers are going to pay for union benefits. According to Bloomberg:

United Auto Workers says it wants $25 billion to help fund the union- run retiree health-care trusts being started in 2010.

Why should we pay for this? Because they can't afford it. Common sense would then ask why would they have this health care plan if they can't afford it. If they can't afford to pay for it maybe they should adopt one that they can instead of using our tax money to pay for it. In a perfect world I guess...
Can you imagine if the EFCA passes and it becomes easier for unions to take over? How many businesses are we going to have to bail out because they can't afford union demands and how many are just going to close down because the government doesn't see them fit for saving. Common sense tells me that this is just not the best idea.

Moving on. Camille Paglia has this to say about Sarah Palin:

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

Read the whole article it's really good.

And now I'm going to study. The book I'm reading tonight is infuriatingly biased but that is a post for another day.