PSAYINGS.5A.19. We chanced to hear some of Sean Hannity's radio show yesterday and were dumbfounded at his air of suspicion about the $250 billion aid package being requested by Louisiana's two U.S. Senators, Mary Landrieu(D) and David Vitter(R). It's a bit pricey, to be sure, but it is bipartisan, and $250 billion represents only a $1000 contribution by every man, woman, and child in the United States. But to hear Hannity talk, you'd have thought these two statespeople were trying to pull off the biggest heist in history. The things he said about Louisiana! As if corruption and graft and greed were built into the very landscape of the state, infecting earth and air and water to the point where no one is to be trusted, not even the first Republican senator since, well, ever. Does Hannity know that Huey Long is 70 years dead and buried? Just because this happened on the exact anniversary of Long's death is no reason to give in to some spooky paranoia about Louisiana larceny.

We think it's appropriate to take a deep breath at this point and remind ourselves of the catastrophe that got us here. That's why we're posting the following gallery of New Orleans flood photos. So no one will forget the pitiful state of things we all want to correct. We just hope that Brother Hannity will take the time to study the photos as carefully as we have done. He might learn something.

ED.24.1-7. Neal Boortz is all worried. Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney have been chopping away at Air America with giant scandal axes, which doesn't help even if the New York Times politely turns its head away from the prospect of any wrongdoing, and now the fledgling network is in so much financial trouble that it's resorted to an NPR-style fundraising gimmick: worthless little knickknacks in exchange for cold cash.

Neal's afraid that Air America is finally going to crash into oblivion, which means the Democrats in Congress would suddenly remember how important it is to have a Fairness Doctrine again. By their definition of "fairness," Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Neal Boortz wouldn't be allowed to have any free speech unless everything they said on the radio could be immediately refuted by liberals.

No more Neal Boortz. Think about it. No more Sean Hannity. Think about that. But the consequences wouldn't all be good. Not every talk radio conservative is a half educated ninny in love with the sound of his own voice. Or, eventually, some could come along who aren't. Only they won't be able to if there's a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. So maybe we should consider giving Air America some good advice about how to raise more money and stay on the air.

We had a pretty intense session about it. There was a big bottle of bourbon involved and some hot towels wrapped around our heads to warm up the big brains inside. The result was a three point plan, beginning with some long term strategy and concluding with some immediate steps to fend off the wolves at the door. Here's the gist.

1. Long Term. Air America's on-air personalities should make a few changes in their broadcast styles. For example, they could try to be at least slightly interesting, entertaining, funny, and perceptive. Yes, it's not easy, but all kinds of untalented people do manage to make a living in radio, and a lot of them do better than zero in the ratings. What do they do that's so different? They don't spend half their time talking about a five-year-old election, a three-year-old decision to go to war, a one-year-old election that wasn't even that close, and a President who will never run for office again. They also do very few unpaid commercials about how glorious it is for women to have fetuses sucked out of their uteruses with hospital-white vacuum cleaners. And they don't spend the rest of their time turning over every rock and pebble looking for racist insinuations. These are all subjects that everyone has already heard everything they want to hear about, and it's just boring to bring any of it up again. If you want to captivate an audience, try having an idea about how to fix some problem that doesn't involve taking and spending more of the money your audience would like to spend for themselves. It's possible there are classes at your local community college in how to become interesting, entertaining, funny, and perceptive. Or maybe you could find an on-line course on the Internet. The truth is, even if you spent all your time telling your audience about how hard you were looking for courses like this, it would be more interesting and entertaining than a bunch of sly innuendoes about how much smarter you are than everybody else. Remember, the longest journey begins with a single step.

2. Medium Term. Radio is, contrary to what your friends at NPR may have told you, a business. The key to becoming successful at it is called "selling advertising." We'll explain. Whether you know it or not, there are tons and tons of people in your broadcast markets who make their living not by screaming imprecations at Republicans, but by selling goods and services to people who want or need them. Now -- and this is key -- the role that radio can play in all this is to help the people who are selling goods and services to inform the people who might want or need them how they can procure them and for what price. These kinds of communications are generally prerecorded and played in between your hysterical rants for money. That's right. People will pay you money to play their recorded communications to potential customers. To get hold of this money you need to do two things: 1) go look for people who want to pay you money for running their advertisements; and 2) make sure the stuff you air in between the advertisements is interesting, entertaining, funny, and perceptive (See Long Term item above.) This is definitely a subject you could learn about in your local community college, and you could learn it for a lot less money than you shelled out to learn that crap you studied at Harvard.

3. Short Term. Yes, we know. You're liberals. This is the only one you're interested in. So we're going to be very very specific, and maybe just a little bit brutal. That web page of yours? The one where you're begging for money in exchange for bumper stickers or a tote bag? It's a total loser. Sorry. Hell, you're not even offering that thong you used to show on your website. If people are going to give you money, they want something in return that's at least cool, if not valuable. "Cool" means with it, up to date, au courant -- in other words, Now. We understand that you Democrats don't have anything like that. Everything you've got is a retread like Hillary, a throwback like Dean, or a creaky dinosaur like Gore and Kerry. So here's what we suggest. Find something, or someone, that is popular, exciting, sexy, provocative, and capable of attracting beaucoup attention. Create some product  which leverages all that appeal and link it as well as you can to Air America. Our suggestion? The Air America Ann Coulter Doll pictured above, decked out in your overstocked thong and a bikini top sporting your dumb Department of Homeland Hilarity logo. (She made money with a doll. Why shouldn't you?) Pay Ann Coulter a percentage of the gross to record something nice about Air America. Then sell the whole kit and caboodle for $1000 a pop. It just might work. But whatever else you do, lose the tote bag and the bumper stickers. Nobody cares. Nobody.

That's the best we could do. Tell Neal we tried.

POPPYCOCK. This is an entry that could be posted at almost any time because the comparisons never cease. The most recent mass media example is from Bill Maher's show on HBO.


Not the worst you've seen? Well, wait a few more minutes and someone is bound to say something worse. This kind of characterization is not, as some would have you believe, an isolated instance. Here's what you get if you do a Google image search for Bush Hitler. That's the first page of 2,650 entries, and it's only the tip of the iceberg. Try Google searches for Bush nazi, Bush fascist, Bush reich, Bush adolf, and other permutations. Invariably you'll receive pages of Photoshopped images like the one above.

But both sides do it, right? Wrong. Here's a Google search for Clinton Hitler. It nets 109 images, many of them showing neither Clinton nor Hitler. Or would the evil Republicans be more likely to depict Clinton as Stalin? Here's that search. Just 32 images, almost none of them a Clinton-as-Stalin likeness.

The reason for leftists' obsession with Hitler was extensively covered by InstaPunk's precursor back in 2003, so there's no need to analyze that aspect of the phenomenon. What remains is to illustrate the absurdity of the comparison on its face.

You see, Bill Maher thinks he's smart. He knows he speaks for hundreds of thousands of the self-styled intelligentsia who can't look at Bush without seeing the infamous toothbrush mustache. But Bill Maher and all his glib, unthinking snob friends on the left are idiots. They make their snide comparisons and repeat them and repeat them and repeat them as if sarcasm becomes funnier and truer as it hardens into cliche. It doesn't. What they're far too brain damaged to do is imagine what Hitler would have done if he were in George W. Bush's shoes. That's what we'll take a moment to do now.

1. After winning a close election (Hitler became chancellor with 33 percent of the vote compared to Bush's 50 percent in 2000), President Hitler would have looked for the first excuse -- say, 9/11 -- to terminate democracy in the country by declaring martial law and seeing to it that the U.S. Congress never met again. There would have been no legislation to create the Patriot Act or the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, a secret and all-powerful gestapo would have hunted down and killed all immigrants of middle eastern origin. Islam would have been outlawed in the U.S. by edict. A draft would have been implemented within days of 9/11 (and by 2005, the army would number in the tens of millions). There would have been no presidential election in 2004. All of the opposition leaders from former President Clinton to John Kerry to Howard Dean to Hillary and all their propaganda flacks would have been jailed or caused to permanently disappear.

2. President Hitler would never have attempted to gain the consent of the U.N. if he planned to invade Iraq. Just as Chancellor Hitler swallowed up Austria, President Hitler would have acted first and told the U.N. to go to hell. (And weapons of mass destruction would have been found in quantity, by the way.) If criticism had persisted from the U.N. headquarters in New York City, he would have closed it down or burned it to the ground a la the Reichstag fire.

3. Anti-war protests would have been preempted by presidential decree, with harsh penalties announced ahead of time for protesters and their families. If actual protests had nevertheless occurred, they would have been put down by the U.S. Army with ostentatious loss of life and public hangings of the captured ringleaders.

4. There would have been no reporting from the front, only government written propaganda. There would have been no Abu Ghraib scandal, and no camera would ever have been permitted within a hundred miles of the Guantanamo facility.

5. The entire mainstream media -- including everything from the NYT to Bill Maher's little corner of HBO -- would have been seized by the government and closed permanently or restaffed with handpicked toadies of the government. Bill Maher would likely be dead or breaking rocks with a pickaxe as he starved to death on minuscule rations. Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins would be dead or forced prostitutes for security guards in press concentration camps.

6. Hollywood and show business in general would have ceased to exist as we know it. Any surviving studios would be cranking out pictures glorifying the President and promoting both the Victory in Iraq and the subsequent wars with Iran, Syria, North Korea, and just possibly France and Germany too. No American citizen would be safe in even uttering the names of Barbra Streisand, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, Madonna, or the producers of Law and Order -- all of whom would have vanished from the public eye without trace or explanation. We would never have heard of Cindy Sheehan or Kanye West, who would have known better than to say a word against the President under any circumstances long before Hurricane Katrina.

7. No books bashing the President would ever have been published in the United States.

8. If it proved technically impossible to find and silence bloggers who insist on bashing the President, the Internet would be declared illegal and ruthlessly destroyed.

9, Creating the kinds of images disclosed by a Bush Hitler Google search would carry an automatic death penalty.

10. In carrying out his military ambitions, President Hitler would already have used nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons against any and all enemies, including civilian populations. The death toll of the War on Terror would stand in the tens of millions.

This list could be extended indefinitely. But there's no point. The left will never give up making such odious comparisons. That they can do so with impunity is absolute proof of how silly they are. But they're too damn stupid to comprehend even that much.

UPDATE. Apparently, Michelle Malkin thinks the libs have given up on the Hitler comparisons. She needs a refresher.

THE WAY OF THE YANKS. Yes, the end of the world is finally here. All the mass media are up to their ankles in watery goo and indignation about the Bush administration's failure to prevent two successive natural disasters. What do we have to look forward to now that the Day of Judgment has arrived? Terrible terrible things. Higher gas prices. More dumb celebrity telethons. More speeches by Al Gore and John Kerry. A great deal more idiocy from Jesse Jackson and Louis Ferrakhan. More volatility in the stock market. More federal giveaway programs. All kinds of stuff too awful to contemplate. Hard to think that only a couple of weeks ago there was a future to plan for, and ordinary citizens could imagine a life that wasn't completely full of FEMA-induced misery and Republican-style hopelessness. Fortunately, we have an idea about how to fix everything.

But first we have to comment on a couple of more important matters. We believe -- very very strongly -- that Martha Stewart should sue Cybill Shepherd. Martha looks good at 190 pounds:


Cybill Shepherd looks like this:


Only not that attractive. (It's impossible to airbrush every frame of a TV movie.) Cybill was okay when she was a young bad actress. Now that she's an old bad actress, she just doesn't have the features or the bone structure or something to get away with pretending that she's the smartest ex-model who ever lived. Sorry. When the end of the world has come, we don't need to be made even more depressed by a television hatchet job starring a hatchet-faced old porker who'd do absolutely anything for 90 more minutes in front of a camera.

What else? Barry Bonds has publicly criticized the federal govenment's response to Hurricane Katrina. Maybe we should repeat that. Barry Bonds has publicly criticized the federal govenment's response to Hurricane Katrina. Let's see. You're a disgraced liar at the end of a tarnished sports career, struggling to hit a few legitimate homeruns in order to break a record you don't deserve to hold, and when you finally open your mouth in public after months of pouting silence, what do you choose to speak about? You criticize the federal govenment's response to Hurricane Katrina. Wow. Wow. WOW. Does anybody else think that now that we've reached the end of the world, it might be just the right time to gather up all the spoiled, overpaid bigmouth athletes in the country and throw them off a cliff?

Actually, that brings us back to our scheme for fixing the terrible situation that has utterly destroyed the United States of America so that everything is underwater now and there's no more gas and all the poor black people are starving to death in the Astrodome. It's obvious this whole Christian thing is over. That man Bush is a Christian and he can't do anything that isn't wrong or evil or stupid or harmful. It's time we went back to the kind of religion they had before all the evil white European Christians arrived with their guns and hurricanes and things. The Aztecs and the Mayans would have known what to do if their world were being destroyed by high winds and some rain. They would have sacrificed some people to their pagan gods. Like so:

The plan was simple. Dozens of Traffic Division patrol cars took up positions outside the city with their radar and laser guns aimed at the sky. Then, according to Sergeant Neck, "When she made an early flyover, we we were able to ascertain that the suspect was proceeding at a velocity in violation of both state and municipal ordinances, so we pulled her over."

A member of HPD's communication's division said the suspect offered little resistance and had been cooperative during police interviews. "At this point we're inclined to believe she was suffering from a kind of emotional breakdown. She'd recently lost a very high-visibility job in television, and on her new network her only viewers are the cameramen and the technicians in the production booth. She missed the attention. So she made a poor choice about how to regain the public eye."

No charges have been filed, pending review by the Houston district attorney's office, but city officials were confident that Rita won't be able to pose any threat "in the foreseeable future."

That's what they think.

TRUST. Glenn Reynolds has finally figured out how the blogosphere can help the victims of Katrina and Rita. He thinks we can help our local elected representatives identify pork barrel spending targeted for our own states. He calls his plan Porkbusters. Gosh, how I'd like to help Glenn out. That would be so cool for an unimportant little blogger like myself.

My own state is NJ, shown above. I live somewhere between the snout and the eye. It's real easy to see where one swift deep cut with the right kind of knife would do the most damage -- start at Camden and proceed due southeast. The effect would be to immediately empty the troughs that feed local and state governments, as well as the enormous stomachful of federal monies that are excreted year after year in bottomless latrines like Newark and Jersey City. Down where I live, everything would be better if the bloated porcine budgets went away -- the schools haven't educated anyone in my county in a generation, and the only growth industry we have is the construction of more and more ugly government buildings to house the unfireable do-nothings we pay those ridiculous salaries to.

But there's a problem, which I think you can see on the map. If you cut the throat of the beast, the gush of arterial blood would likely drain south, burying Salem, Burlington, and Cumberland counties under more fluid than Katrina produced. And other states wouldn't be safe, either. The thrashing of the hooves would savage much of eastern Pennsylvania, while the inevitable intestinal spasms would probably blow New York City apart.

I just don't think it's safe, Glenn. Why do you think we've put up for decades with the most corrupt slate of U.S. senators, governors, and legislators of any state in the union but Louisiana? If we voted them out of office and reclaimed control of our lives from Trenton and dumbasses like Corzine and Lautenberg, there'd be hell to pay. We'd practically have to start over from scratch.

And I'm also confused about something else, Glenn. Why do you think local politicians need our help in identifying the pork that's wasting the money of federal taxpayers? You think they don't already know where the pork is? Who thought it up in the first place, who fought for it and made dirty deals to pass it, and who stands to benefit by keeping the budgets as fat and happy as they are today?

I'm sure the ten percent of educated people who read and write blogs can dream up a big noise, but how do you turn a silent explosion on a computer into honest-to-God  legislation when there's no political majority on earth that would ever pass it without first engineering foolproof escape hatches? I don't see it.

I guess I'm not going to be much help. Again.

BRILLIANT. It seems like a good time to remind one and all that the predictions about where Hurricane Rita will make landfall, at what force, are based on the same kind of computer modelling technology that "proves" global warming. Except, of course, that the data entered for Hurricane Rita are likely to be much more accurate and reliable than global temperature data which is, at best, a mere sample of a sample. Yet, today, all the meteorologists who are certain that the planet is getting hotter are at pains to tell us no one knows exactly what Rita will do in the next two or three days.

They can (and would) nitpick this argument to death, but they can't explain away the bald fact that they expect us to believe they can predict the temperature for the next century when they can't speak with certainty about a huge weather event that is unfolding right under their noses in the present.

I know that makes us much more devoted to the Kyoto protocols. How about you?

UPDATE. La Malkin is keeping track of all the newest predictions, as well as the political grandstanding that makes the whole situation so much fun.

UNTOUCHABLE. The best thing about fall is that the new prime time season begins on network TV, which means we can finally get some relief from the disturbing news images of violence in Iraq and drowned and murdered people in New Orleans. This week should be one of the greatest in the whole history of television because not only can we feast on the returning entrails of CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, and NCIS, but we can also plunge our hands wrist deep into the brand new gore of shows like Bones, Killer Instinct, and (for all we know) CSI Alamagordo, CSI Bangor, and CSI Cleveland.

There's talk that the reality show craze is fading and that the up-and-coming genre is science fiction, but when the dust settles it's our bet that the forensic procedurals will still be the bedrock on which network ratings stand or fall. When you think about it, what could ever be better than the blue late-night light of a morgue and the fascinating interactions of the Cast* with their laboratory equipment? Those fibers! That blood spatter! Bug larvae! Pollen grains! Partial fingerprints lifted from used Kleenex! Security cameras that catch the action in 1024x768 screen resolution! Desktop forensic computers with more graphic FX than Grand Theft Auto and more processing power than a Cray supercomputer! Twenty minute DNA tests! Luminol glowing on the seats of dissected SUVs! Severed body parts! Y-incisions on large-breasted dead women so nude you could see EVERYTHING if that damned old fart of a medical examiner would just move a hair to the left! And always ALWAYS a constant stream of new dead bodies shot, poisoned, burned, strangled, beaten, mangled, violated, disembowelled, crushed, melted, and turned inside out for our viewing pleasure.

*You know, the unsmiling middle-aged white boss, his beautiful, brilliant, busty girl(s) Friday, and all their tall, short, thin, young, gorgeous, spiky haired, and occasionally ethnic technical weenies, not to mention the the dumb-as-rocks detective and the world weary old medical examiner with a half-empty whiskey bottle in his autopsy cart.

That's why we figure it's about time to make some money from our own favorite part of the CSI circus -- the riveting segments when the key pieces of evidence are analyzed in the lab against the driving beat of some nameless track of electronic Muzak. We've done what nobody else has dared to; we've compiled the very best of forensic lab music into a fabulous CD called The Very Best of Forensic Lab Music. Now you can enjoy the shows even when they're not on (a remote eventuality, we admit, owing to the round-the-clock CSI schedule of Spike TV, but hey, we're just trying to turn a buck here). Just fire up the CD, kick back, close your eyes, and imagine your own glorious kaleidoscope of guts, tweezers, fingernail scrapings, semen stains, post-mortem bruises, corpse eyes, churning computers, and lab coats tailored like bustiers.

All you have to do is send us $19.95 (plus $8.95 for  shipping & handling), and we'll send you The Very Best of Forensic Lab Music. In fact, if you order right now, we'll sweeten the deal with two half-sized copies of the CD and a three-month supply of genuine white plastic forensic gloves.

Our guarantee: You won't experience a single moment of nausea induced by footage from the sickening war in Iraq or the needless carnage in Louisiana for THREE FULL MONTHS or your money back (except S&H fees, natch). How's that for a deal?

We thought so too.