The principle being, “I’ve got mine. You can go pound sand.”

Read the real reason in the article Sen. Shelby: How Sweet Is the Auto Business in Alabama? Not Very

In case you have missed the news, Senator Shelby is one of the most vocal opponents of a federal bailout of the big three American auto companies.

Maybe the other principle is that the (federal) government should not bail out the American auto companies, let Alabama bail out only foreign auto companies.

This must be how the Republican’s put country first.  Maybe this is the second round of the Civil war where the South fights the industrial North again. We forgot to ask, which country are they putting first.

Maybe this just proves the point about Obama’s call to sit down and talk to your adversaries without preconditions.  If you know where your adversary is coming from, maybe you can work out a mutually agreeable solution.  If the Southern congress people felt that the bailout had been going too lopsidedly to northern industrial and financial concerns, it would have been nice if we had had an atmosphere in Washington where they could have just come out and honestly said what their concerns were.  Then all the congress people might have been able to get together to work out a deal that saved the entire country.

We could then leave behind the phony idea that government should not interfere with business and pick winners and losers.  The article shows how much Alabama has been doing just that while they protest other people doing that. Maybe Shelby is just using his seat in the Senate to try to kill the competition to the winner that he has chosen.

How I wish Charlie Rose had been armed with all this iinformation when he did the piece about the auto bailout.