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Republicans have been all over the teevee telling us what a swell place that Guantanamo Bay can be. Club Gitmo! And if we close it down, we'll be getting terrorists in our neighborhoods!

So of course, Senate Democrats quickly caved on funding the prison's closure:

WASHINGTON - In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison.

The 90-6 Senate vote — paired with similar House action last week — was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.

But listen to the Republican arguments and you just have to scratch your head.

There was John Ensign saying the health care was better than most Americans get. Then Sen. James Ihofe of Oklahoma went on Fox yesterday with Neil Cavuto and declared that "there's no place like it, the treatment is good."

But Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby really took the cake this morning on with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:

Shelby: The Democrats saw the vote coming, should have, and saw that nobody in America wants a terrorist in their neighborhood. That's the bottom line.

Scarborough: Well, the Democrats were so sure six months ago they were going to shut down Gitmo. What happened?

Shelby: Well, they might shut it down. But I don't know why they would want to shut it down and bring terrorists into the United States of America, even into some of our neighborhoods, if they deem them not to be terrorists anymore. That's a dangerous road to go down, Joe.

Evidently, Shelby doesn't believe that when it turns out that some of these suspects are innocent that we should permit them to go free.

And, as Glenn Greenwald says,: "Is there anything the right wing isn't afraid of these days?" (His column on this is a must-read, as always.)

Moreover, Republicans (including Cavuto) are claiming that no one in the USA wants the prisoners. But that's not true. Already, folks in Hardin, Montana, are lining up:

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How can this country ever get through this economic nightmare with leaders of the Banking Committee that are Republicans like Sen. Shelby, who just want the banks to go under:

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said today on "This Week" that the government should let troubled banks fail.

"I don't want to nationalize them, I think we need to close them," Shelby told me this morning.

"Close them down, get them out of business. If they're dead, they ought to be buried," he said. "We bury the small banks; we've got to bury some big ones and send a strong message to the market. And I believe that people will start investing [again] in banks."

I asked Sen. Shelby if he was referring specifically to Citigroup, the struggling bank that has received about $45 billion in taxpayer money.

"Well whatever. Citi's always been a problem child," said Shelby, who has long opposed giving federal TARP money to struggling banks.

But Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed.

"It's not practical to talk about closing a bank that is integrated throughout the whole global economy," he said. "It is practical to talk about buying some of those assets away from those banks and holding them in an institution that would have both public and private money." Donohue said federal bailout money for the banks was the right thing to do for the economy

How can we accomplish anything with a ranking member giving us the Hoover treatment? The banks are so interconnected to the global economy that you just can't treat them like a mom and pop grocery store, but thi sis what Republican leaders want to do.

From Josh Marshall:

Something like this is both heartening and insanely distressing at the same time because what exactly does he think people are talking about when people talk about nationalization? They're talking about some form of FDIC-like takeover, though probably one that would take longer and be much more complicated since you simply can't find another bank that is going to buy up most or all of Citi's assets at some knock-down price over the weekend -- certainly not in the present climate. You either clean the bank up (which would require what amounts to a de facto bankruptcy proceeding) and sell it back into private hands or break it up and sell it off in individual pieces -- likely some combination of the two.

It would be one thing if Shelby were just one more Fox News robot. But he's the ranking member of the friggin' Banking Committee.

C&Ler David emailed me this:

Keith Olbermann: Shelby didn't just say the banks should be left alone to meet their own fate to fail if that's the case. He suggested having federal regulators come in and shut them down. How is that not government intervention? How is that not nationalization?. And just because there's no bank standing at the end of this, how is that not socialism by [Shelby's] own terms and definitions?

Richard Wolffe: Well, I love the "socialist" debate. It's just so
amazing that people throw the word around and they have obviously no idea what it actually ever meant. You just have to be grateful that this congress wasn't dealing with the Soviet Union otherwise they would have threatened Sweden with nuclear annihilation.

From Face the Nation Feb. 15, 2009 on the stimulus bill and executive compensation.

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As Heather wrote earlier, Shelby is threatening a filibuster if there is an Auto rescue plan. At least Carl Levin calls him out over his obvious conflict of interest with the big three American automakers since his state went out of its way to bring foreign auto makers to Alabama. I've been calling for someone to call him out on this publicly since he has been given plenty of air time to attack Detroit while never revealing that the companies in his home state would stand to profit the most out of the bankruptcy is is pushing for.

Wallace: Sen Levin, you said the other day that southern lawmakers like Senator Shelby and you have mentioned his name. have an agenda because they have foreign, non union car companies in their states who will benefit if Detroit goes down, do you really believe that"

Levin: I think there would be some companies that would benefit if Detroit goes down I'm sure. They're competitors. A number of them have opened up plants in the south which they have a right to do, but there will be winners and losers and the big losers will be the American people here

Wallace: Do you have as Sen Levin has an agenda to help your local foreign auto makers?

Shelby: I don't have an agenda, but I'll tell you this, in the south, from South Carolina to Kentucky, Geprgia, Tennesse, Mississippi, Texas, we have about 124,000 people employed in the automible industry. They are competing. They are competing. GM, Ford, Chrysler can compete, but not under the model that they have now.

Notice he never tells the audience what car companies that are in his own state. He just brings up the number of people being employed.

UPDATE: He does remind me of Herbert Hoover too.

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On Fox News Sunday Richard Shelby threatened to filibuster any bailout of the auto companies.

Wallace: Sen. Shelby you've been one of the leading critics of any bailout. From what you're hearing, $15 billion get them through till March, gonna' have an administrator to make sure they keep their promise. Will you support that?

Shelby: Well absolutely not. I think this is a bridge loan to nowhere. This is a down payment on many billions to come. This is not something that happened overnight. This is thirty years in the making. These companies basically have failed, are failing. They probably need according to some people about sixty percent of the management to go and about forty percent downsize of the workers. They've got to compete. They can't compete today and the question is will they be able to compete tomorrow. We would like to save them but they've got to save themselves and I don't believe they're willing to save themselves because they could be restructured, the right way and they don't want to do that.

Wallace: Are you and other Republicans prepared to filibuster this bill?

Shelby: Well I would ah, I think we need to debate it and that's what a filibuster is about and this week would be a good time to do it. I hope that we will be able to have an extended debate on it. We'll see what happens.

Wallace: Do you think you have the votes to sustain a filibuster?

Shelby: I don't know. It depends on what happens. In the mean time I know people want to get home for Christmas. They want to get out of here and come back. But what I fear Chris.

Wallace: Sounds like you're willing to hold Congress hostage here.

Shelby: The first, the first down payment, it's just the beginning. It's an installment plan of billions and billions and billions and we don't know the end game.

If Richard Shelby wants to filibuster the bill will the Democrats actually make him take to the floor and debate? If the Republicans want a filibuster I say break out the cots and let's have an actual filibuster.

The Republican Senator from Alabama has been getting a lot of airtime lately because of the problems in the auto world, but here's a letter from Peter Karmanos, Jr., chairman and CEO of Compuware Corporation, to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a critic of bridge loans for American automakers, that gives us a little history on his political motives for why he'd like to see them all go under.

I trust it is safe to say that when you refer to "government subsidies," you are referring to subsidies provided by both federal and state governments. And if this is in fact true, then I am sure you were adamantly against the State of Alabama offering lucrative incentives (in essence, subsidies) to Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s to lure the German automobile manufacturer to the State. As it turned out, Alabama offered a stunning $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Additionally, the state also offered to train the workers, clear and improve the site, upgrade utilities, and buy 2,500 Mercedes Benz vehicles.

All told, it is estimated that the incentive package totaled anywhere from $153,000 to $220,000 per created job. On top of all this, the state gave the foreign automaker a large parcel of land worth between $250 and $300 million, which was coincidentally how much the company expected to invest in building the plant...read on

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Auto industry CEOs appeared on Capitol Hill today to ask for a $25 billion bailout. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked the top execs if they would be willing sell their corporate jets and travel home on commercial flights.

Sherman asked the CEOs, "I'm going to ask you to raise your hand if you are planning to sell your jet in place now and fly back commercial." "Let the record show, no hands went up," noted Sherman

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer and Mike Viqueira discussed the CEOs' lack of response. "I have to tell you, just listening to that is awkward," said Brewer.

These idiot CEO's are not helping themselves and they need to change their King Maker mentality very fast or they will go down in flames. Asking for a rescue package while flying in on private jets is freaking ludicrous.

No matter how we slice it, the Auto Industry is in big trouble and needs some help. We can't allow it to fold because of the ramifications that will be felt throughout the country and the good people who will lose their jobs. Millions of them actually. Matt Stoller told me in an email exchange: "What most people (including politicians I've talked to) don't realize is that the auto industry dying will hurt every single community in America through the dealer network."


Richard Shelby and his pals are hellbent to break the UAW and as many unions as they can get their hands on and that's what is really going on here, but the media will never say that. Shelby has deep ties into the auto industry that wants unions busted.

What Shelby doesn't mention, of course, is that Alabama is a right to work state. Shelby also doesn't mention that Alabama is home to Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes plants.

Shelby also doesn't reveal that many of the cars those manufacturers make in Alabama, without unions, are precisely the kind of behemoths critics attack Detroit for making--only these have foreign nameplates: M-Class SUV, GL-Class SUV (a new model), Pilot SUV, Santa Fe SUV, plus engines for Tacoma and Tundra pick-ups and Sequoia SUVs.
In other words, Shelby isn't opposed to car companies that are stupidly committing and recommitting to SUVs. Rather, he's just opposed to car companies that make SUVs with union labor.

If you remember, Shelby was the one who leaked NSA intercepts to Carl Cameron of FOX News and the media and then refused to take a lie detector test about it right after 9/11.

"A sharp disagreement ensued between the FBI and senior Justice Department officials overseeing the case, according to federal law enforcement officials. The FBI was convinced not only that Shelby leaked the information regarding the intercepts, but also that the senator might have misled the FBI when he was interviewed about his actions, according to sources. They advocated that Shelby be prosecuted." Read the whole article. Pat Roberts helps ruin the investigation.

He got off because Pat Roberts screwed up the investigation like he usually does. And he's the one on TV the most trying to force the auto industry to go belly up.

And Kathy G writes:

I've written about this before, but I'm doing it here again, because the wingnuts really need to put an end to this irresponsible bullshit, and pronto. Repeat after me: unions do not cause lower productivity.

The latest conservative to lie about this is Soren Dayton (who, last I heard, was "suspended" from the McCain campaign for peddling a sleazy, racially charged anti-Obama video). In a recent post about "card check," aka the Employee Free Choice Act (a proposed law that will make it easier to organize a union -- see here for more), Dayton wrote:

The unions and their lackeys in the Democratic party are intent on a path that will destroy our productivity for a significant period of time.

Um, not hardly. Even if you didn't know what the economic literature says about this topic, if you stop to consider that the postwar era saw the record high union density in this country as well as unprecedented economic growth and productivity gains, it might give you pause. Indeed, Ezra made just this argument recently.

I want an overhaul in the auto industry for sure, but this country is spending millions of dollars a day to pay for two wars while our country is going bankrupt. This is criminal and I think we have to remember that these are incredibly difficult times. Historic times and Obama is facing challenges like almost no other president has had to face as he gets ready to take office.