GM was building yet another plant.

According to The Truth About Cars, GM was building a brand new plant to make engines for the upcoming Chevy Volt. But, running out of money, they have postponed or canceled the project after spending a wad of cash on it.
More brain dead GM management. Here is a company with about twice as many plants as they need, yet they are building a brand new one? Dumb move.
Here is a company pinning its hopes on the new hybrid Chevy Volt, a technological first for GM, cutting edge battery, all new electric drive design. This is a high risk project, there is a good chance something won't work, or something breaks after they sell them. So, rather than picking an existing engine already in production, a low risk strategy, they were gonna use a brand new engine built in a brand new plant. And if anything were to go wrong with the new engine or the new plant, the entire Chevy Volt project is jeopardized. Only a brain dead project manager would make that decision.
First thing the GM bankruptcy judge should do is replace ALL of GM management.

They shut down theplants, but the UAW still gets paid

The big three auto companies are getting ready for Christmas shut down. Due to horrible sales, they plan to stay shut down for longer than usual. So far so good.
Except, the workers still get paid during shutdown. Nice deal and all, but with the auto companies broke and begging for Federal bailouts, it seems a little much to give the work force a month of paid vacation.

Will any amount of "stimulus" improve the economy?

Probably not. Consumers are fearful of losing their jobs, their health insurance and their homes. Plus money they thought they had in their houses and the stock market has been taken away. Given those two bummers, nobody in their right mind is going to buy anything that they don't absolutely have to have. Nobody has to have a new car, not this year anyhow, make the old one run a year or two longer. Likewise new houses, new clothes, appliances, luxuries, trips, sports gear and on and on and on. The only things we have to buy are food, furnace oil and gasoline. Lotta people are even passing on Christmas presents.
Until the economy looks less scary sales are gonna be in tank, no matter how much stimulus is thrown around.

And, while on the subject of Detroit

Ignore UAW's Ron Gettelfinger when he whines that only the union has been asked to make sacrifices. The stockholders have already lost heavily, GM stock is down to a couple of dollars a share. Banks and bond holders were willing to forgive 70% of GM's debt. But the wily and well connected UAW knew that Bush would cave to them even if the Senate Republicans wouldn't.

Don't Bailout Detroit

The big three automakers are in a death spiral. Their labor costs $75 and hour where their competitors, the transplant makers, pay only $50. They have too many me-too models of cars, and none of them are as desirable as Toyota or Honda. They are afflicted with brain dead management, particularly GM. No way can Detroit be profitable with higher costs and inferior products. Detroit's small cars must sell better than Corolla and Civic for them to stay in business. Giving them $14 billion now just lets them keep on losing money for a few more months.
Put them into chapter 11, rewrite their labor contracts to $50 an hour like the transplants, reduce the number of car models to something reasonable, replace their senior management and boards of directors, write off their debt, and close excess car plants. Reduce executive salaries to $250,000 max. Require that dividends and bonuses be paid out of profits after taxes. No profit, no dividends or bonuses. And clean up their books. Last year GM "wrote off" $35 billion of phantom assets they had been carrying on their books for years. What other scams are still hidden by the big three accountants?
Chrysler has a parent company, Cerberus, which has plenty of money to keep Chrysler afloat. I see no reason why us taxpayers should subsidize Cerberus.
GM is too big to be profitable ever. Break it up into four companies, Corvette, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and General Motors Acceptance Corp (GMAC). Ford might be able to make it on their own. Don't merge Chrysler and GM. Tying two troubled firms together merely assures that they both sink together. Leave them independent, there is chance that one might float by itself.

How Fannie and Freddie caused the 2nd Great Depression

Let's work backwards. Wall St brokerage firms failed after it became impossible to sell their "mortgage backed securities" when they needed cash. The "mortgage backed securities" promised high yield with low risk, and the brokerage houses printed huge amounts of them and sold them to gullible investors and to Frannie and Freddie. They were so profitable that the brokerages became willing to buy sub prime and "liar's loan" mortgages, because turning them into "mortgage backed securities" was profitable.
Things came unglued in 2006 when the gullible investors discovered that the price of houses had dropped so much that the mortgages were worth more than the houses. All of a sudden the "mortgage backed" part of the securities began to look risky. The gullible investors wised up and stopped buying them. Leaving the brokerage houses with barrels of "securities" that no one would buy. "Illiquid" is the Wall St jargon for "so crummy no one will touch it".
Why did the price of houses fall in 2006? A better question is why did the price of houses rise the rapidly in the previous decade? Answer, the price of houses went up because the banks were willing do higher loans on the properties. Remember a mortgage is a simple deal, I loan you money, you pay it back or I take the house. This only works if the house is worth MORE than the mortgage. Successful banks are good at assessing property values and would not do mortgages that exceeded their idea of what the property was really worth.
But then, a horde of eager stock brokers descended upon the banks offering to buy the bank's mortgages for cash. So they could turn them into "mortgage backed securities". Such a deal. Once sold, the bank was free of risk, if the mortgage defaulted the gullible buyer had a problem, not the issuing bank. The bank gets to keep the closing fees, points, and perhaps a markup, and hustles out to do more mortgages.
Now that the bank can sell mortgages, it ceased to care that much about the quality of the mortgage. Do a low quality mortgage, offer to finance a little more than the property is worth, offer to waive the down payment. Sell the result before something goes wrong. Result, price of housing goes up, 'cause the bank is willing to loan more money on the same old property.
Why were the brokerage houses so willing to do mortgage backed securities? Simple, Fannie and Freddie were willing to buy enormous quantities of them. They had the money (borrowed on the credit of the United States) and the returns promised by the brokerage houses looked sooo good.
What's the moral of the story? Simple, shut down the entire secondary mortgage market, force the banks to risk their own depositor's money. To a large extent this has happened, the market for "mortgage backed securities" has dried up, no one will touch them any more. When the bank risks it's own money, it will be more careful. Just to make sure the secondary mortgage market stays closed, close down Fannie and Freddie for good.
And, remember that Barnie Frank and Chris Dodd defeated all attempts to limit Fannie and Freddie's borrowing power, leaving us taxpayers stuck with the horrendous losses they racked up.

The Great Ice Storm of 2008

Up here, north of Franconia Notch, it was too warm to freeze. We got rain and snow. Came down all day, but no ice, the trees stayed upright and the electric power stayed on. Town plows did the roads, twice. About noon it started to cool down. The driveway had a inch of very very wet snow which I decide to shovel off before it froze hard and gave me an ice coated driveway from the entire winter.
Down south, the ice put a lot of people in the dark. It also messed up our cable TV. Most cable channels froze up, leaving a frozen image and no sound. Channels 2 thru 13 and the Weather Channel stayed alive. Dunno how they managed that, I would have thought that dead channels would go dark rather than freezing up. The didn't get the cable working until just a few minutes ago.