Big blue wants a handout but still wants to dish out tough love

Slashdot has a story about IBM (big blue) canning thousands of people in a city where taxpayers paid $45 million not to cut additional jobs. What's amazing about the story is that IBM is asking for a bailout and still planning on cutting those jobs. I can just hear execs moaning "we're just cutting un-profitable ..." but they've already been paid a couple of times specifically to keep people on the payroll. It sounds like a big money grab to me.