From a Guardian blog:


Joan Fabiano, who organizes tea parties as part of a group called
Grassroots in Michigan, e-mailed supporters asking them not to show up
Monday (at the Detroit auto show), saying such action could hurt
business in the state.

"I'd like to think I had something to do with that," Fabiano said
of the low turnout Monday.

Fabiano, of Holt, Mich., worked at GM for 30 years and believes
protesting at the auto show sends the wrong message.

"I think it was ill-conceived," she said. "It only hurts fellow
Michiganders and Michigan commerce. Businesses are already hurting."

So in other words, government intervention is evil, except when it's
not, which is when it's for us. Lovely.

This gets to a larger point that the Democrats have made over the past
year with their usual effectiveness (which is to say, not). Everyone who
think the government should have done nothing for Detroit and nothing
for the banks and nothing in the way of stimulus (except the very small
mostly tax-cut variety the GOP was proposing) should be made to answer:

All right, then, you'd let Detroit fail? Up to a quarter million jobs in
the auto and related companies? You're really prepared to throw 100,000
or more families on the bread line? You really think it's okay for
Citigroup or Bank of America to go under? The knock-on effects in both
micro- and macro-economic terms of the collapse of two of America's
biggest banks -- the lack of credit, the shuttering of small businesses
all over the country, the attendant unemployment; the effect on the
markets and on the country's debt posture -- are just fine by you?

The D's never really forced these arguments, forced R's to answer these
questions. And now we see on the ground that when people are directly
affected, they think twice. But, alas, only then. Disgusting.