General Motors Top Seller In Cash For Clunkers Rebate

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General Motors claimed the highest percentage in the Cash-4-Clinkers program followed by Toyota and then Ford. As of Wednesday, the program had racked up 184,304 trade-ins and consumed $775.2 million of it’s $1 billion budget, according to the Transportation Department.

Some Republicans have criticized the program, saying it subsidized sales of foreign manufacturers. However, the top selling Toyota Camry sold are built here in the United States. Additionally, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler vehicles account for 47% of the vehicles sold in the program so far.

Earlier last week, The Fox News Channel ran a segment where it was reported that “many” people where using the program to buy luxury vehicles they might not ordinarily be able to afford, such as BMW and Lexus. However, those claims appear to have been pulled out of thin air, which may not surprise most Americans, considering the source.

Dodge and Honda made the bottom of the list, so it’s unlikely that BMW or Lexus claimed any measurable piece of the Cash-4-Clunkers pie. Perhaps if Fox News personalities actually did some research instead of just reading what’s on the teleprompter, things such as this wouldn’t happen. But I digress.

The Cash-4-Clunkers program it set to get it’s tanks filled with another $2Billion dollars today after the Senate Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement allowing a vote on the extra money to keep the immensely popular rebate program running through Labor Day.

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Is Harold Ford Trying Out For The Republican Party?

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Harold Ford: I Would Have Voted To Approve Torture

This weekend, former Vice President Cheney repeated his claim that torture “saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives.” Of those, like President Obama, who condemn torture as making America less safe, Cheney insisted, “in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.”
This evening on MSNBC, former Democratic congressman Harold Ford, Jr., adopted many of Cheney’s right-wing talking points to defend torture, saying he was “not as outraged as some are about” what happened at Guantanamo. He suggested that he even would have voted to approve torture in order to “prevent the destruction of an American city”:
FORD: You have to remember when this was occurring. This is 2002, 2003. The country was in a different place, in a different space. And if you were to say to me, as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city, to prevent killings in American cities, and we have to use certain techniques, I’m one of those Americans that would have voted a certain way, Chris. And that polling said it might have been torture, but I’m not as outraged.
Watch it:


Matthews was incredulous, telling Ford, “You are veering into Cheney country here.” He said Ford’s talking point about the destruction of an American city was “Cheney talk.” “That’s what he used to justify torture,” Matthews said.
The ticking-time-bomb scenario Ford seems to invoke is simply a “red herring” that “doesn’t happen” in the real world. And according to the interrogators themselves, torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah — the two Cheney most frequently cites as “proof” of torture’ effectiveness — provided no actionable intelligence.
ThinkProgress released an extensive report today, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed.