And we don't hate American cars. We just don't want them. I think it's pretty simple. Still, most cars I see are US made. But how many can you manufacture and sell every year? That whole thing depends on people getting into leases, which are loser deals unless you need a new car every year for some vain reason. And then the stupid car company has to buy it back!

The problem we have with the Big Three is the same one we have with the financial messers. They're right now stuffing the bailout money into their rectums to sneak it out of the building. They are incentivizing themselves, despite the fact that their businesses are in the toilet due to a combination of their failure to sell what they make and reality creeping in.

Detroit lost its tax base over a few decades. They didn't get new industry to come in, because it's friggin' cold there. Now it's probably too late.

Check out Coatsville, PA. Used to make some stuff, but now they just produce unsupervised kids with nothing to do because their parents commute to the surrounding areas to spend their day shuffling paper in offices. The city fathers haven't made any changes, and so reality creeps in.

And it is creepy, but not as creepy as blaming the failing auto industry on bad quality in the '80s. Everything sucked in the '80s. They're just making too many cars and people aren't buying them.

No, people aren't buying them. So they went to the Feds to get some money they can lend to Joe Six Pack, who on paper can't pay for them. How many cars is he going to buy now?

I'm trying to write a mantra we can all recite. People aren't buying your cars because they aren't buying your cars. They aren't buying anybody's cars. Your business is screwed, and that's that. Shed some brands, close some factories.

And now the Volt. I heard Wagoner interviewed on NPR, saying the Volt would be significantly more expensive than what we're used to, so this life-saving vehicle is to be sold at a loss.

It's over, Rick. People aren't buying the cars. And we're not getting raises. And we're screwing up the world economy putting the feed corn in the gas tank so we can commute to the meaningless redundant jobs most of us do.

Forget about the car. What the heck is next???

1) Why is he the only one?

2) Has only one committed suicide? Wait- he was a victim of sorts.

But they're all dirty. The greed industry, it's all dirty.

Not sure if it would be different if I shared in that kind of greed.

They're trying to create some space between themselves and Obama for branding, and they're trying to define themselves to stand out in his long shadow. Who, after all, is this new kid, with his fancy suit? He just got here. But he can't keep it up without us.

It's not something we can feel harmless about getting worked up over though. If we pick a side, we're actually endorsing something.

We're avoiding Africa too, but that may be my fault due to the incompatible method I tried to use to edit a recent long-winded alarmist post about how we're not watching and China is taking the high ground away from us in Africa without improving a molecule about the moral situation there which will in fact only keep it in the mud.

We're also avoiding a second, third or fourth gorilla: the Three Too Big To Fail got another quarter to figure out how to turn a profit by prolonging Petroleum hegemony over our future.

I know this isn't going anywhere, and it's okay to know stuff. But what the heck are we going to DO? I used to think it would be enough to balkanize the Republican Party. But that didn't solve anything yet.

Joy,

That said, here is my presentation of the back story: Recently, the people of Gaza, the 'Palestinians' elected Hamas candidates to be their representatives in the assembly administering the phony authority granted the governors of that ghetto. Hamas is a creature of antizionism, and the only benefactor in the typical 'Palestinian' life. They were in effect saying, "Fuck it," after decades of subordination in a state they can't recognize.

I'm setting 'Palestinian' in quotes because it isn't a nationality, but I have to stop now. It's what was left after the previous residents and their families left if they could. It's probably a polyglot of ethinicities with two things in common: They aren't Jews and they are Muslim. Hamas is not the only political party representing them, but it's running the place. It has been running the place since Arafat's Fatah movement was defanged after one of the other intifadahs. The Palestinians are in the same boat as the European Jews were: unwanted.

Isreal is our colony, and couldn't exist without our largesse. We, the people of earth, demanded that Arafat's ruling coalition get things under control. Smack (attempted humiliating slap in the face)- get it together fool. Whap! (Can't import food or construction material) Get this place under control! Wham!(Blew up the police station) Get these punks off the street! 

Complicating the issue, we have a legitimate problem with Hamas. It crosses borders, it is floated with money from Iran and Syria and whatever other misanthropic source, and it is a double agent. The philanthropy and charity wing, call it the left wing, provides the only health care, the food choices, the fuel, the construction, the education for more Palestinians than Israel does, more than Fatah did. Arafat employed boss politics, doling out money to suicide bombers' families, but also shrewdly funding cooperative politicos while the Palestinian on the street was left to suffer under the occupation.

But however complicated that stuff may make it, it's pretty simple to see that there's an impasse stemming from the installation sixty years ago of a state where there was none, when the Western Bloc repatriated the unwanted European Jews to someone else's backyard. And who'da thunk it: The neighborhood around the lot where we put the Jews was pissed. Were they wronged? Yes. Did we do a good thing by the Jews? Yes. Was it in our interest to put a satellite in the middle of the middle east? Yes. Does everybody but us openly discuss the fact that it's a calculated risk to inconvenience lots of Arabs and Persians and miscellaneous Palestinian ethnic groups as a means to put a military base on the Mediterranean?

So the Palestinians affirmed their frustration, elected the "Fuck it!" party, and chose denial of Israel's right to exist over acceptance of their status as lesser. And now they've chosen not to renew the cease fire that didn't get them the concessions they expected, and they're firing rockets from their ghetto.

Forget proportionality. There is no such thing. There is diplomacy, and then there is war, in which there is a winner and a loser. Israel calls it a war, so forget methods for slowing the attack. But it's really ethnic cleansing. 1.5 million non-state residents of Gaza are walled into a ghetto. Sure, the bad guys are firing rockets from kindergartens. But those kindergartens can't generate anything but bad guys anyway- who could grow up in a ghetto as some other-status human and have anything but hostility for their betters?

Sure the rockets are coming from hospitals and shelters. It's a city. Find the bad guy in New York, and see if you can hit him clean from Philadelphia.

It is extreme and unconscionable if the Israeli Jews have no memory of the hostility and sadism of the Holocaust, and unforgivable that they have not made the difficult moves necessary to include the Palestinian people in their own fate.

It's also a sickness that the irony is lost on the Palestinians, that they have chosen to be represented by the political party denying the right of the neighbor to exist and threatening to march them en masse into the sea.

And here I am on the sideline, bankrolling the 'good guys' who must protect their citizens from random murder at the hands of Hamas, Iran, Syria, whoever. We just blew billions of dollars and decades of moral credit toppling Saddam Hussein to settle Boy George's family beef and enrich Cheney's oil field construction buddies. We did. That's our priority?

I demand a complete freeze on money, materiel, food, clothing, shelter, flights, bank accounts and anything else we can lay hands on until Israel goes to the table, finds an honest broker willing to accept their existence, and then turns it into a credible representative of the interest of the dwellers of that ghetto, and I want to back it up with a blockade of Gaza, UN intervention, and the next step if nothing happens in three months is revocation of Israel's charter and a fresh start. Because maybe they really are a bad neighbor.

Fuck it.

First, I'm calling her Caroline. She's our sister. We know her- we've seen her baby pictures. By contrast, Sarah Palin is a small-town beauty queen, former talking head on local FOX, mayor of a town we'd call a neighborhood out here in the cosmopolitan northeast, and then governor of what should be the least populous state in the union. In other words, she's a nobody, and Kennedy is a somebody- not just any somebody, but a Kennedy.

Let's focus now on interview skills. Palin has been in the newspaper, on the radio and on television for several years as a public figure, allowing Alaska the honor being considered public, even though I could see more Russians in my garage than could see her on a clear day. She scoffs at Caroline Kennedy's near-illiterate responses, and she did sound a bit Barbie. But as a private citizen, her relationship with the television would be more like my kids and their relationship with Jim Lehrer. Sure there's a TV over there, and some old guys come on and Dad maybe yells at us to be quiet while he talks...the kids are too busy for Jim. They have lives and personalities. A real life and a personality don't mean you can snap your fingers and become Tom Cruise, who delivers lines he does not, in fact, make up as he recites them. But Sarah hasn't presented her defense for coming from television and then failing to become coherent when the camera came on.

Then there's privilege and public service. Caroline came from money and stayed there, presently lives in Manhattan where she rubs elbows with millions and greases the wheels of society by donating from her kitty. Palin was born on the frontier, stayed there, and presently interacts with dozens. Her attitude toward the role of the public in the public is grounded in her lack of experience with more than a handful of people, so she's the ultimate red-state ideologue, as if idiocy could suffice for ideology. When the current Mayor of Wasilla was interviewed, we learned there are no public services. Just police, payroll and snow plows.

Another important difference is the job they're applying for. Sarah Palin wanted to take her hyperthyroidism skills gained as a hockey mom national, to become the new president when McCain's ticker finally stops ticking. She wanted to win a national popularity contest. Kennedy's case is a state case, in which the people of New York are the sole standing parties. She's also not running. She would be appointed by the governor to serve out the remaining years of Hillary Clinton's term. As a fat cat, she already has more administrative and managerial experience than Sarah Palin. Twenty people probably work for her now.

And she's nice. You know which one I'm talking about. Caroline Kennedy can bet on people trusting her to do what she thinks is best, without screwing them. Sarah, by contrast, is a shrill opportunist with nothing in the treasury and plenty of want.

I didn't really care, since the Senate job will go to a democrat. But now I do, so we can see what quality does when thrust into service. I've been imagining the kind of work DuhByoo will do once he's out of office, and we should all be pretty confident he'll be a partisan hack, a wastrel and a shill. He's a grifter. What would Palin do? She would bitch and complain, because she bitches and complains.