In 1951, with Churchill once again prime minister, African Kenyans demanding decolonialisation were presented with a take-it-or-leave-it transition deal for a local assembly which would represent white and mixed-race Kenyans, but not full Africans — a move which made armed struggle pretty much unavoidable. The British response was to imprison more than 300,000 Kenyans in concentration camps, and unleash a campaign of brutal repression which left between 30-50,000 dead.

One of those detained during this period was one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather, who was tortured for information. Churchill’s addled policy of clinging to the maps pink bits also caused pointless death and delay in Guyana and Malaya. What better gift to give the western world’s first black-white, north-south leader than a life of the last great racialist imperialist?

It’s got nothing to do with “Marxism”. It’s family

Senator DeMint: Legislative chaos and people are losing confidence and what we need to do now — I don’t want to give up hope. I think we’re close to the point of no return with socialism, but we can still fight this. People need to let the bush administration know the same way they let senators know we don’t expect him to come in and do anything because these companies can continue to operate under the protection of Chapter 11 and that’s the only way to fool the rule of law here and they’re not going to close down unless they just ignore the obvious. The people who held their debt were willing to take a two thirds loss yesterday when we were negotiating this. Everybody involved, the CEO’s were going to take caps on salaries. Everybody but the unions were willing to negotiate and now I see more than ever what has happened to these car companies. These unions have pushed their back against the wall and the government shouldn’t come out and bail out the unions because that’s really what’s happening here.

from interview

Detroit missed the boat big time when the market demand called for fuel-efficient vehicles in a time of $4/gal petrol. Detroit was too busy pimping their gas guzzlers on TV.

Those auto execs could have nonchalantly shown up to Capitol Hill…but no, they had to make a spectacle after being taken to the woodshed over flying their corporate jets. Hey, look at us in our ‘fuel efficient’ hybrids they all exclaimed. Turns out that those hybrids aren’t exactly fuel efficient after all.

20/22, 26/34, 31/34??? You call that fuel-efficient?

My Toyota gets 25/31 and it’s hardly meant to be an econobox.

On the other hand, should the big 3 fail, we’re talking about millions of jobs going up in smoke overnight. It doesn’t stop with manufacturing; there are the parts suppliers, mechanics, salespeople, advisors, uniform delivery/cleaner services, and detailers. Then you have the vehicle owners themselves. They’ll have nowhere to go for parts and service and more than likely they still have payments to make.

It stinks.