Chrysler deal clears SCOTUS:
Ending more than three days of intense, round-the-clock and high-stakes legal maneuvering in the Supreme Court, the Justices on Tuesday evening without dissent removed a legal obstacle to sale of the troubled auto industry giant, Chrysler.
Insisting that it was denying a postponement “in this case alone,” the two-page order said the challengers had not met their burden of showing that a delay was justified. The reference to this case alone perhaps was a signal that the Court did not want its order to appear to give advance clearance for any other government rescue plan — such as that to save another auto company, General Motors.
It is all over but the screams of soci-alism.
TenguPhule
You forget the sweet sweet tears of asshole Repubs.
dmsilev
That’s just background noise now. Ironic, really. By tying it to everything they don’t like, including things that the people at large like (such as President Obama), the GOP has basically neutered soci-alism as an effective insult.
-dms
kid bitzer
yeah, i like it when they cry. i just hope we’re not all going to be crying down the road.
i’m not saying the obama admin is doing the *wrong* thing. it may be the best of all the bad choices. but it still is a lousy situation.
i had a ’66 plymouth valiant. never shoulda give that car up.
Comrade Stuck
I hear the new soci-list cars will come with right wing gas bags. Low Co2 and they never run empty.
Linkmeister
@kid bitzer: I raise. My family drove across country in a 1962 Valiant, the one with the pushbutton transmission on the dashboard. ;)
Ruckus
@Linkmeister:
Raise again – my first car was a 1960 valiant with the pushbutton trans. Man that car was chick magnet. And if you believe that I’ll make you a deal on 12 bridges, not just one in NY. But try as I might I couldn’t kill that car. But that’s the only good thing I can say about it.
Martin
So, if Fiat now owns part of Chrysler, and we’re boycotting Chrysler, are we now also boycotting Fiat?
What kinds of cars am I now allowed to buy in my support of capitalism? Can someone publish a list and charge me money for it, lest I worry that it was assembled by some government employee?
PeakVT
Ex-Valiant owner here, too. It was a 1973 with a Slant 6, beige exterior, and dark green vinyl interior. The engine was pretty clapped out by the time I bought it for $300 (paper route money, FTW) but it started, drove, and drifted to a halt if you prayed really hard. Good times.
jcricket
I wonder if, much like their vitriol over gay marriage, this will back-fire. People will come to like socialism (or quasi-socialized medicine, and other government-run programs) as they stop associating it with Stalin, lazy brown people and other such nonsense, and start thinking of socialism as just “government helping protect us from the razor-filled minefields of naked capitalism”.
JGabriel
The GOP has done wonders for sociaIism, merely by making it synonymous with “low gas mileage”. I mean, that’s pretty much something everyone wants these days.
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JGabriel
Modereratered, dammit. Via the usual political philosophy gaffe.
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kay
The debate in the local papers was just crazy. Back and forth. If Chrysler is liquidated, the state loses massive amounts of tax revenue. But, the hold-outs (two, anyway) are state employees, and so of course dependent on money in the state coffers for a paycheck. That came up.
Basically, no one could get all het up and outraged and stick to any one position, because, well, we don’t know what the hell is going on, but we’re optimistic!
The Chrysler employees are going back on June 29,. and dealers say they need inventory, that sounds promising, right?
I’m just going with the Obama plan. It’s not like anyone offered an alternative.
Texas Dem
The socialism slur no longer works because the cold war is over. Socialism was an effective charge against a political opponent only because of its association with communism, but communism (in the European sense) has been dead for a very long time. Most people under the age of 50 have no working memory of the cold war and probably have no freakin’ idea what socialism really is.
Bootlegger
Those damned Activist Judges! How dare they allow the sale of a bankrupt company!!
SCOTUS is going sosialist (sic) now.
Janet Strange
@kid bitzer: ‘Nother ex-Valiant owner here. Can’t remember now if it was a ’65 or ’66. But it had a V-8 in it. Don’t ask me how – the guy I bought it from claimed it was “special ordered” with the V-8. Whatever. It would f’ing fly. I used to love to leave sports cars behind me like they were standing still when the light changed. Often sports car driving guys would do the “vroom vroom” thing at the light and I’d “vroom vroom” back at them. In my . . . Valiant. They’d laugh like I was nuts. But then – – –
Heh.
Joshua Norton
@Martin: Bentley’s are nice, and not as pretentious as a Rolls.
tc125231
@Janet Strange:
Chuck Butcher
I’m a bit confused about the part where Chrysler is an American automaker since they were Krautsler, Cerebrusler, and now to be Frogsler. I’d rather the jobs don’t go away, but…American?
How’s this play in the soshulist mantra? We’re soshulizing shoshulist France?
Calouste
@Chuck Butcher:
Fiat is actually Italian, so it would be Pastasler. For even more fun in the soc-ia-list meme, Fiat had factories in the Eastern bloc countries from the 70s, when they were still solidly communist. The Fiat factory in the Soviet Union was located in a city that was for the occasion renamed after a famous Italian communist leader. It seems the wingnutosphere hasn’t picked up on the meme yet, but it is history and foreign and stuff, so it might all be a bit too complicated for them to handle.
JGabriel
@Texas Dem:
Fixt. I’m only 44 and I have a pretty good memory of the cold war going through the 70’s and 80’s. In fact, I’d even bet that most people over 25 have some memory of the cold war. Even if it’s only hearing adults discuss The Day After or the fall of the Berlin Wall when they were kids.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
31 years old. My first political memory is casting my first (and so far, only) Republican vote for Reagan in the class election in first grade. I knew nothing about his policies, but he looked like Gumby, and that won him my vote. (Same as with most of the adult votes he won.)
My only other political memories before the first Gulf War are getting pissed off that Bush won in 1988, hearing about some ruckus in Beijing in 1989 that I had no comprehension of whatsoever, my Dad making jokes about what an asshole Oliver North was(is), and something about some kind of wall in Berlin going down.
Does playing with GI Joes count as a Cold War memory? How about the civil defense drills in the third grade, where they made us hide under desks for reasons unknown?
bob h
Given that an opportunity to embarrass Obama would have been a high priority to Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Scalia, trumping even the law and the Constitution, Chrysler has dodged a very big bullet.
JGabriel
Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
Yes to both. When boomers talk about remembering the cold war, hiding under desks during civil defense drills is one of the most frequently mentioned tropes.
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WereBear
I was okay with hiding under the desk up to about fourth or fifth grade, when I started going to the adult section of the library with my Dad.
After that, I was aware of the sense of futility.
BenA
@Martin:
Well I would say Ford, but they own Volvo and
likemarket to gay people so they’re flat out. You can’t buy any car made by asians… cause, you know, they bombed Pearl Harbor. Hummer used to be the go to car, but the Chinese own them now… no GMs Obama and Canada own sizable portions of the company… and Canadians, they socialize the crap out of everything they touch. BMW, VW, Mercedes, MINI, and Smart cars…. made by Germans… they have a woman as the head of state so… they’re out. Now Saturn is being bought by Penske… and Penske did the car racing thing…. NASCAR… sounds promising… donated tons of money to the GOP… I think we have a winner…. but wait they’re still made by GM and just distributed by Penske… plus they make a lot of hybrids.Your winner by default: AMC Gremlin.
Slugger
Thank you people for talking about the Valiant. I’ve noticed that in all of the newspaper, radio talk, and blogging about the car companies there has been much discussion about finances, unions, corporate structure, and very little said about cars. Maybe, if the car companies had spent more time on the cars than on all the high finance stuff, these problems would not have happened.
I was driving a ’69 Ford when the first Honda Civics showed up in America. The Hondas were 1000% better cars than what I was driving. If the American car companies had been attentive then, I would still be their customer.
I have a Toyota Fourrunner with 90,000 miles on it that is a better car than my 1979 Jeep was brand-new.