Ford Revenues for the same year.

And for DaimlerChrysler.

With me so far? All that adds up to $557,666,400,000. Which is 557 billion dollars.

Are you starting to get it? What percent of $557 billion is $15 billion. The answer?


What is that? How to make it real and understandable to us ordinary folk? Let's say you're a struggling entrepreneur with business problems so acute you can't survive without an immediate infusion of cash. Let's say you're a one-man business and you're presently taking in $100 a day. Would you hand over an ownership interest and some degree of management control of all your future operations for $2.60 a day? That's not a bailout. It's a pittance. It's a slap in the face. It's tip money. You could achieve the same financial effect by trading your daily Starbucks Vente for a cup of java from McDonald's. Even if your business is in immediate danger of closing its doors forever, $2.60 a day or $13 a week isn't going to save it. Even if you can get the whole $676 total right now, it's not going to save your ass. It's barely more than one week of income. It's just a bad joke.

What the hell is going on here?

It's not a bailout. It's a sellout. The CEOs of the American auto industry are in the process of delivering a huge chunk of the American economy into the hands of the federal government for the purpose of absolving themselves of all responsibility. The computation they've performed doesn't even require a calculator: "In for a penny, in for a pound." That's their arithmetic. Once the tap opens, they figure they'll be able to drink from it endlessly forever as wholly owned vassals of the state. $15 billion? Try a long-term pricetag of $15 trillion, with no end in sight. This insultingly cheap and easy betrayal of their shareholders and the American public makes Judas's 30 pieces of silver look like a princely fortune. They're pretending they can save their grossly mismanaged companies for the corporate equivalent of a cup of coffee a day.

How do you feel about that? Do you want to consider gravely the oh-so-complicated yes/no question of the Great Detroit Bailout? Or do you want to grab a pitchfork and head to Detroit and Dearborn to administer a serious ass whuppin'?

I know how I feel. But why can't anybody else in the MSM or the financial press perform two simple operations of arithmetic? I'd love it if somebody could explain that to me.

More Obama Appointments:

The Obama Miracle. Can't help it. We're HUGE fans.

CLOCK FUN. We understand that the lefty netroots are starting to get antsy about the upcoming Obama administration. We'd like to allay their fears. The Obama Revolution has always been about turning the clock back to simpler times when the standard Democrat nostrum of piling on more federal government programs still seemed like it might work. The truth is, nobody in Washington really believes that anymore, and the rare occasion of a Democrat presidency is more like a Time Out than any serious attempt to resolve the nation's problems. The wisdom of scheduling a Time Out at this particular juncture may be questionable but it's moot. We have opted for it in an electoral landslide, and that's what we're going to have.

The good news is that the Obama Administration also perceives that it can't hope to accomplish anything productive, ameliorative, or even positive in the next four years. All they can do is indulge a wave of nostalgia that will make all the time-displaced persons in America -- Viagra-dependent Clintonites, Alzheimer hippies, fossilized union activists, decrepit anti-war radicals, Civil Rights era relics, post-post-menopausal feminists, retro-psychotic Watergate obsessives, wheelchair-bound Great Society lampreys, two-foot-in-the-grave New Dealers, and mummified Soviet Communist apologists -- as happy as possible in a new world they can't possibly begin to comprehend. It's too bad for the young'uns who bought all the hope'n'change hokum, of course, but it might ultimately prove a history lesson for them. If they can't learn to bury themselves in the long defunct past, they're just not going to have much of a place in the Democrat Party. Call it a Coming of Age experience for them. Their best bet would be to research their elders at Nickolofeon, where they might gain a glimpse of the future in old episodes of "The Love Boat" and "Love American Style"-- where they'll learn that fame means the hopelessly old and obsolete keep coming back in ever duller roles.

At any rate, the appointment strategy of the Obama Administration will, in fact, be a new American political phenomenon. It will be modelled on the smash hit television series called "Fantasy Island" (with an assist from "Survivor"). The political appointees nominated and confirmed by the Democrat Congress (led by septuagenarians Reid and Pelosi, lest we forget) will not be intended as long-term office holders so much as Guest Stars, each flourishing for a brief time in the admiring cataractic eye of the blue-haired MSM. (Barbara Walters and Andy Rooney will have what passes with them as an orgasm.) Each will have his or her own little story behind their selection for renascent adulation, and they will bask for days or weeks on the pre-yellowed covers of Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Magazine before being tactfully retired and replaced by another before they can do serious harm. It's going to be great. And much much easier than trying to find any Democrat who has actual competent and relevant experience at running anything, unless you count running various enterprises wholly into the ground.

Herewith, the projected list of Obama Administration appointees They'll all take their turn as cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, presidential commission chairmen, 'czars' of this, that, and the other momentary cause of the instant, and eternal spokesmen for the permanently inept... BUT we'll be able to vote them off the island every week by calling (or texting)  the numbers posted at the end of "Democrat Idol," as hosted by the brilliant young androgynist Ryan Seacrest. Sound cool? Of course it does.


Are you happy yet? Are they "Hope and Change"-ey enough for you? No? Well, wait till the Fox Fantasy Administration series starts airing twice a week. You'll love it. LOVE IT. Even rotting dinosaur carcasses look good with enough makeup on. Ask Tom Brokaw.

We can get back to trying to run the country in four years or so. Let's hope you're all still with us then.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

OLD OF DAYS. Of course it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but last week we saw a History Channel program about the most spectacular Egyptian tomb find since King Tut. It's called KV5, and it represents the answer to one of the most enduring mysteries in ancient Egyptian history. Ramses the Great, purportedly the pharaoh defied by Moses in the Bible, lived for so long that he survived twenty-some sons, and no one has ever been sure what became of the men who would have succeeded him if he weren't -- as the priests of his time declared him -- a living, in fact deathless, god. This status was so official that many of his sons served as pharaohs themselves, carrying out all the traditional pharaonic duties under the remote, celestial authority of their father, who watched them, guided them, and ultimately buried them.

But where? Where did he bury his sons? Thanks to the work of Kent Weeks, an American archeologist, we now know that he buried them all together in the single largest tomb ever constructed in the Valley of the Kings.


It contains over 150 rooms and is so extensive that most of the underground chambers still haven't been cleared -- even after more than 10 years of digging -- of the three millennia of debris that fills them to the ceiling. But the excavations completed to date have turned up nine mummies, all of them identifiable as sons of the greatest pharaoh who ever lived.


Obviously, we can't prove a thing. (Though there is precedent for this kind of analysis...) But it's damn suspicious, don't you think?

Thursday, December 04, 2008

What to Do:

WHEN IS ALWAYS THE QUESTION. We all like to think we'd have been heroes if we'd been put into that one precious place in time which never corresponds with our own humdrum experience of life. We'd have died with the Spartans at Thermopylae. We'd have stood with Arthur against Mordred. We'd have charged Napoleon's troops at Waterloo. We'd have attacked from the heights of Little Roundtop with Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg, We'd have gone over the top at Verdun. We'd have protectd the Jews and joined the Resistance against Hitler in occupied Europe.

It's a fallacy. The hard part isn't being a hero. It's recognizing the historical moment when heroes are required, which is always just before the shit really hits the fan. When you finally know for sure how huge the stakes are, it's easy to go the extra mile and lay down your life if necessary. But when you're still in doubt, you might be risking everything for nothing, and that's when good men go weak in the knees.

Here's the good news. The time for heroes is right now. You need have no doubt about that. Everything that's going bad is going to get worse. The economic situation will continue to deteriorate. The Democrats will make every possible attempt to increase federal power in every arena of life. The world itself will keep getting more dangerous. We are now less than four years away from a nuclear war of some kind -- in India, Pakistan, and/or Israel and Iran.

Everything we have always taken for granted is going to be gone. Prosperity. Peace. Predictability. We have entered a time when men will be judged not by how much stuff they have, but by how they conducted themselves in a series of dire crises, some of which will be catastrophic beyond belief.

Will we be up to it? I like to think so. America has never been only or even mostly about money. It's been about liberty, the right to life, and the pursuit of -- no, not 401Ks -- but happiness.

The whole world, including the U.S. government, is preparing to descend into chaos, one result of which will be the annihilation of Israel. The day after it happens, what will you say to yourself?

What will you say? I was too busy... I didn't know... I didn't realize... I believed in the hope and change spiel... I really thought we could all just get along...

No. Those are nothing but excuses. It's 1933. It's 1860. It's 1776. Right now. Time to decide where you stand and what you're prepared to do about it.

Not to put any pressure on you or anything. Are you Spartans, and is this Sparta? No. Unless we're really really lucky.

THE FUTURE AWAITS. The answer is no. We're not looking at a third Bill Clinton term. (Even Media Matters* agrees with me on this.) The only real restraining factor in Bill Clinton's administration was Bill Clinton himself.  He's the one who chose a relatively moderate course after the disaster of his first 100 days. The people he surrounded himself with weren't political philosophers, moderates by education or inclination. They were political assassins, skilled at destroying all who opposed or threatened the president. Bill himself had no real political convictions. He was just gifted at gauging public opinion and moving swiftly to positions he thought would be popular. After HillaryCare failed, he never again took any big risks for any cause but his own survival in office.

Which is why the various Clintonian appointments make such great sense for an Obama administration. As a tyro in every discipline he will now be called on to demonstrate in office, he's going to need the very best political liars, stonewallers, parsers, apologists, mudslingers, and weaselling toadies available to cover his screwups. TA DA. He has them. The one thing they don't care a rat's ass about is his political principles. Whatever he wants to do, no matter how insane or destructive, they will be happy to do. Except for Hillary, of course. She has her own agenda, obviously, and her own unique skill set.

Let's face it. This is the single most interesting appointment so far. Why would Obama need a cabinet secretary whose only verified talent is quashing sex scandals? Isn't Michelle up to that job? Or is it that the greatest danger lies overseas, where all those people of variegated colors and snazzy dictator uniforms and aphrodisiacal anti-Americanism are to be found?

But that's a side issue. (Hopefully.) The main point is that the hard lefties needn't worry. Obama will stll be able to pursue whatever legislative program he wants to, and the talking points will go out to the talking heads like clockwork, and everything he dreams up will be reported and explained as the smartest idea anyone ever had, even if he wants to knock down the Washington Monument and put up a statue of Lenin instead. Or install a marble icon of himself in Lincoln's chair at you know where. or whatever else he wants. Rahm Emmanuel and Eric Holder and Bill Richardson and Jamie Gorelick and Paul Begala and Lannie Davis will be drooling in very public admiration the whole way. They don't care. They really don't. They. Just. Want. To be. At the White House. Again. Of course, these folks do have a habit of getting into messes of their own, Hillary included, and that part of the deal may begin to seem like deja vue, but on policy there's going to be absolutely, positively (and did we mention absolutely?) no problemo.

Does that make it clear to everyone? Good.
 

*Don't know Media Matters? They're the guys who ferret out all the right-wing bias in the mainstream media. They're very very talented.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

What to Do:

PNOTE 34. In a previous post I suggested that the right answers to the question "What to Do?" are to be found in local efforts. But what does that mean? Is everything really a matter of geographical location?

There's an old truism among fiction writers that "If you would be universal, first be local." It doesn't mean that we all have to be like William Faulkner, who wrote almost exclusively about Oxford, Mississippi. It means start with what you know. What you know and what you are interested in. Obviously, this can be a function of geography, particularly if you want to take action in the real world and not on the internet. For example, if you're disposed to get involved with party politics, your home town, city, or county are the places to start.

Geography can also be a productive focus on the internet. Patterico watchdogs the LA Times from his home in the Los Angeles area. There's a small mafia of bloggers who watchdog the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in Minnesota. During the 2002 election campaign, there was a blog called Cornfield Commentary, which made life miserable for the Des Moines Register in the same way. (I'm not going to discuss the value of such media-centered activity here, but I will get to it in a future post.)

But you can also be local without being tied to any particular place. David Hogberg, the author of Cornfield Commentary, subsequently moved on to produce a blog focused on health care issues, and he now writes for some national publications as well. One of our favorite bloggers (and a frequent commenter here), David Hardy has two specialized blogs, one dealing with the journalistic corruptions of Michael Moore and one that meticulously analyzes Second Amendment issues, including specific legislation and lawsuits. These are particular subjects he is interested in and has acquired encyclopedic knowledge of.

Another 'local' blog that has suddenly acquired definite national relevance is EagleSpeak, which has quietly tracked the facts and issues surrounding international piracy for years now. If you want to understand what's really going on behind all the news stories, go there and bring yourself up to date.

This isn't meant to be a definitive list of the things individual people can do if they're resolved to "make a difference." It's just a teaser, a way to prod the action-oriented into taking the right first steps. Begin where you are, based on who you are, and start looking for opportunities where you have or can define a unique competitive edge. That's why our definition of the internet as a 'bulletin board' is so crucial. It's such a huge board that any notice pinned to it must offer something that speaks to particular interests of passersby. Identify such a particular interest, make yourself very good at serving it, and you may very well find yourself making a difference.

Clearly, that's not the direction we have chosen here at InstaPunk. We belong to the vast, relatively undifferentiated throng of blogs whose only mission is to speak to anything and everything that pricks our interest in the human parade. Maybe that doesn't make much difference in the scheme of things, but it makes a difference to us. Which is something else we'll discuss in future posts.

That's all for now. There are many ways to jump into the rat race of national thought, advocacy, and action. We'll try to flesh out various opportunities in more detail as we continue pondering the question of "What to Do."

But we'll keep on doing all the usual goofy, pointless stuff, too. If you don't mind.

P.S. Speaking of goofy, pointless stuff, for those of you wondering where the strange audio file comes from, it's from Follow the Fleet, and the singer is Harriet Hilliard, who later became the Harriet of Ozzie and Harriet. She gives a heartbreaking little performance in the movie as a jilted wallflower, which you can see here if you're feeling a bit like a jilted wallflower yourself these days. Not that I'm intimating anything about you personally... What to do.

What to Do:

WILTED DICKS. We don't ordinarily spend much time studying Technorati because, as we've made abundantly clear, we're not running for Blog of the Year. But I did look today, aware that that the 'local efforts' message might seem to some like a gentle letdown -- don't feel obligated to act because there's not really much you can do and why try anyway?

When I looked, I found a lot of links I hadn't known about (our traffic has been increasing of late btw), including some bouquets like this one from Mending Wall:


I won't put Mending Wall down by citing traffic figures or comment volumes, just as I won't minimize the import of this post* by  The Department of Hate, a blog authored by one Snotty McShot (pictured above).



Despite receiving zero comments, Snotty still feels compelled to subdivide them into categories like "Mewling Pricks" and "Awful Cunts." He's an angry man.

This is the new reality we are facing. People who have been raised to be self-satisfied and superficially self-righteous sociopaths. The source of their superiority is that they don't care. About anyone. And they've convinced themselves their emotional deadness is a virtue. It is beyond the scope of their stillborn empathy that citizens of this country can feel pain for people who are not like them in certain demographic ways, can feel the historical ignominy of being attacked on our own soil for the first time in fifty years, can feel revulsion for the barbarism that irrationally targets the one great force for good in the world, can remember and experience the event as a personal blow which must never be forgotten because to forget is to consent in our own eventual subjugation and enslavement.

What to do? Every voice that speaks out against the enraged but numb solipsism of some 'Department of Hate' is a cancellation, a repudiation of the worst in us. Your expressed desire to build and believe rather than curse and contemn becomes part of a record which says, even if we ultimately fail or lose or die, that there were people here who knew better, people who preferred civilization to a pornography of sado-masochistic anarchy.

There's more than that to do, of course. But this is the minimum everyone can do. Even if it consists of no more than writing a blog that says, "I got up this morning, and I still love my family, my country, and life itself."

No more for now. But do check out the asterisk above.

*Uh, yeah. The same post also drew this response from the Old Fart's Blog.


We live in a market of ideas. Start doing your own bidding and bargaining. (And, yes, I know, we're giving DOH more traffic than he's ever had before. Make it worth our while.)

NOTE. It's also possible that we have in DOH is another Canadian posing as an American. Either that or a plain poseur. Consider this quote from his post:  "there’s just the ripped red and ragged frayed fibre of your last fucking nerve..." Hardly the kind of spelling we're used to from Air America. Well, he could also be a Brit living in the United States, because if you're a Brit, living in the United States is the smartest fucking thing you can apply the whole fibre of your being to doing. Sorry for the language. I'm just saying. If ICE ever figures out how to deport people, I'm in favor of starting with the Canadians and Brits. How about you?

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