Barely two years later, I’m still amazed by a few things about the financial crisis of 2008. It doesn’t help that it was a complicated mess, and we have propagandists using it for their own ends, and yeesh that midterm election, but they boil down to this:

1) Most Americans have no idea how close to the cliff we came, and
2) How much of the bailout money has been paid back, and
3) What life would be like in this country without it.

Every so often when I’m on Facebook, I drop in on my former Indiana congressman, who has discovered the joys of social networking. I don’t dare friend him — it’s not him, it’s his commenters — but he’s capable of insight here and there, and it was fascinating, earlier this week, to see him trying to school his talk radio-listenin’ former constituents on just how essential TARP was. This being a Facebook thread, it’s pretty incoherent taken a piece at a time, but it would seem Mark Souder, bless his wicked little heart, gets it:

One of his friends says: Who touted the $700 billion? Obama and his “the sky is falling” GOP whimp friends. Members of Congress have no idea of what things cost when they pass bills like this. Don’t revise history.

Souder replies: I’m sorry to be aggressive on this but we absolutely do know. For example, National City Bank (number one at the time in our area) was toast and would have taken down much of our area’s businesses. We were getting a call a day of businesses having their loans foreclosed. Instead of a bank run, the govt floated cash and forced a merger. …It was incredibly scary. I got phone calls and e-mails at all hours of the day. It was Its A Wonderful Life on all fronts. …Stop acting like everyone in Congress is stupid. Too many liberals but most knew exactly what we were doing. The Republican members kicked all staff, including leadership staff, out of the room and argued for four and one-half hours. Business majors were furious at all the lawyers – bluntly said – who were clueless. But, unfortunately, many who knew better just told you what you wanted to hear. EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of Congress knew that 700 billion was a credit card limit, not the actual spent. It was useful for political purposes to smear the Democrats by acting like 700 billion was spent – unless you wanted to have to defend yourself, like I did, to the Tea Party groups.

“It was useful for political purposes to smear the Democrats” — heh heh. Yes, it was, and it would have been nice to have heard a few more honest Republicans speak to this, but ah well.

If you’re not inclined to go spelunking on Facebook, try this NYT piece based on Fed documents, which gives you more information:

As financial markets shuddered and then nearly imploded in 2008, the Federal Reserve opened its vault to the world on a scope much wider and deeper than previously disclosed.

Citigroup, struggling to stay afloat, sought help from the Fed at least 174 times during one remarkable 13-month period. Barclays, the British bank, at one point owed nearly $48 billion to the Fed. Even better-off banks like Goldman Sachs took advantage of Fed loans offered at rock-bottom rates.

The Fed’s efforts to stave off a financial crisis reached far beyond Wall Street, touching manufacturers like General Electric, the Detroit automakers and Harley-Davidson, central banks from Britain to Japan and insurers and pension funds in Sweden and South Korea.

I remember listening to a “This American Life” piece from the time that spoke of what happened when, one scary fall day in 2008, the U.S. banking system “broke the buck,” i.e., had NO money to lend. I recommend it to anyone who thinks enormous multinational corporations should run their finances the way your grandma does — i.e., McDonald’s shouldn’t roll out cappuccino machines in all its stores until it has saved the money in that coffee can in the cupboard. Everybody likes the car metaphor when it comes to economies these days. When I think of economics at this level, I think of early cars, how you had to be a mechanic yourself to keep one running, how a purring engine was a matter of manually adjusting fuel and air and spark juuuust right, then readjusting, then readjusting again, and being prepared to start from scratch when need be.

Economics is complicated. There’s a reason people get doctorates in it, and why so much of its study involves theory, theories that frequently don’t pan out. I only wish we had someone willing to break this stuff down in ways average people can understand, and then explain it on prime time. Kind of like the way Glenn Beck wraps his racism up in nostalgia for the good ol’ days.

As it shakes out, the TARP program will end up costing closer to $25 billion, not $700 billion. As for these nitwits who think the economy would be better off “in the long run” if it had been allowed to go off the cliff, I have this to say: Fuck you. Even Mark Souder agrees with me on that:

Bankruptcy (of the automotive companies) was discussed in depth, many times. Chrysler is much more marginal than GM. But for car companies, it was not understood by most Members initially about the Pension Guarantee Fund that people pay into. If a company goes bankrupt, those on pensions only get half their pension amount (we have far more people on pensions in our area than employed at the big companies) and the govt pays the whole thing. It would have cost far, far, far more for the govt to cover the pensions. And that is just one small part (unemployment, medcaid, GM is the largest employer of people with disabilities in america – most who would have then become taxpayer dependent, and on and on).

OK, it’s getting late. A little bloggage?

Via MMJeff, a heartbreaker about a survivor of a terrible crash between a distracted tractor-trailer driver (cell phone) and several vehicles, including a van carrying a group of Amish people. The survivor is Amish; she forgave, didn’t sue and tried to recover. Alas, the rest of the world doesn’t work that way:

“English people told us not to worry about it, they would be paid,” Eicher said, using the term the Amish bestow on outsiders. “We assumed they were paid.”

Then, this fall, the same bills started up again. One letter seemed particularly menacing, printed on bright fuchsia paper.

Pay up, the letters said.

She owes $23,273 to the hospital and $2,360 to a radiology group. She can’t see her chiropractor anymore because the insurance company just rejected $6,624 billed since the crash.

Shudder.

New Yorkers, spill: Is Andrea Peyser really as crazy as Gawker regularly makes her out to be?

No one is saying what’s wrong with Aretha Franklin, but everybody’s praying for her.

If you ask me, blind items and the internet were a match made in heaven.

At Wayne. Gotta go. Have a swell one, all.

One of the things I really regret about not having a second child was missing the whole second-kid experience, from the neglected baby book right on through the casual attitude toward the necessity of properly supportive infant footwear and software that will develop a child’s “mouse skills” on the computer. (Both representing products someone tried to sell me during Kate’s infancy.) Even though I caught on early to this racket, I still feel like I flushed many dollars down the drain for no good reason, and I have the Infant Sleep Wedge to show for it. When you’re a parent, someone is always trying to sell you something. I looked forward to smiling and saying, “No sale.”

In this case, a little more is called for than just a flap of the hand. “Psycho” violins, maybe:

As a fitness coach in Grand Rapids, Mich., Doreen Bolhuis has a passion for developing exercises for children. The younger, it seems, the better. “With the babies in our family,” she said, “I start working them out in the hospital.”

What an amazing country we live in. I’d chase this woman away from my house with a gun, but she has identified a market niche, and is making a killing. Not only that, she’s killing childhood. And she’s being rewarded with flattering publicity. Sure, there are sports doctors and child-development experts in there disapproving, but she won’t read them, and even if she did, they won’t matter. Her business was just launched like a rocket. Her next brand extension will be fetal workouts, some simple manipulations done by mom, coupled with the soundtrack of NFL films piped in through belly speakers.

Today, half my Facebook friends have informed me, is Pay it Forward Day. Well, I’m doing my best.

I was reminded of the lasting power of the country’s rapidly dwindling major-newspaper presence last week, when I wrote a piece for my other website on John Durant, urban caveman. He was featured in a Sunday Styles section last January, another ridiculous trend story, joining the ranks of the Man Date and the Great Unwashed. Being featured in a story like that is like being hit by a freight train full of money, and he got extraordinarily lucky, landing on Stephen Colbert’s show as well. Now he has a book deal, with an advance “big enough to live on” (in Manhattan), and a burgeoning career as a lifestyle guru, with a lifestyle that essentially boils down to low-carb eating, interval training and barefoot running, with, admittedly, some thoughtful consideration of how our bodies evolved and what they’re adapted for. Still. I think it’s pretty obvious that stepping into that diorama at the Museum of Natural History for a dumb picture was the smartest thing he ever did. And he graduated from Harvard. So there.

Mama’s feeling a little testy this morning. Need more coffee.

People who are making me testy, coffee or no:

John Conyers. The conventional wisdom around here is that the venerable (81) congressman took a wife (Monica, currently imprisoned) late in life to quash persistent rumors about his sexuality, and that he is otherwise a saint, but I’m sorry, just because your kids came as add-ons to the deal doesn’t absolve you of any responsibility for them. And what the–? His personal, taxpayer-paid vehicle is a Cadillac Escalade? I believe in supporting the home team, but show a little restraint, man. You can tell how widespread the conventional wisdom is by all the snark in comments about the fruit not falling far from the tree.

Glenn Beck. He opposes the new food-safety law because he senses, yes, another government plot, “to raise the price of meat and convert more consumers to vegetarianism.” If he stuck to clowning it would be one thing, but…

Maybe a shift to the pleasing? OK:

One of these days, we’ll say the best journalism about the Great Recession was done by second-tier cable reality shows. Thanks, Hank, for this review of “Storage Wars,” which I think I’m going to have to watch.

This is very cool: Deconstructing “Gimme Shelter.” Of course, it doesn’t explain how, exactly, they unwound the individual audio tracks on the Stones classic, but it’s fun to listen to, especially Keith Richards’ part. Fun fact to know and tell: As I was 12 when this record was released, I believe I heard the Merry Clayton cover that came out a year later, first. For some reason it was played on Top 40 radio, briefly, and the Stones’ version only went on the prog-rock station. A great, respectful cover, but like the song says, the original is still the greatest.

Off to Wayne State. Feeling less testy after two cups of coffee. Better have a third.

Well, folks, I’ve been sitting here for two hours, staring at the screen and trying to think of something to get the fingers moving, and I have? Nothing. It appears it’s a rare dry day here, and in the meantime, I’ve got some work backing up, so I’d best get to it. A few linkies for those who care.

I think Prospero was asking about the Grande Ballroom here in Detroit a few days back. There’s a new documentary coming out; you can watch the overlong trailer here, including many many shots of the place as it looks today, i.e., wrecked.

Now here’s a WikiLeak I can get behind: A “major U.S. bank still in existence,” coming soon.

It’s been 10 years since Bush v. Gore. Jeffrey Toobin considers the worst Supreme Court case ever.

You might not recognize the American South’s version of the Civil War being “celebrated” next year.

I think I need a crossword puzzle and a quick walk. Let’s try again tomorrow.

I say this with all the affection and love in my heart for you guys, but it sure is good to get away from this place for a while. I thought it would be Blog City over the weekend, and to be sure, we had all the necessary materials:

The aging folks catch up with one another while the Millennial considers analog space.

I count four laptops in that photo (one closed and hiding), plus an iPad. But it’s deceiving. John was working on getting our stupid printer on our wifi network, which is one reason we’re so glad they stop by a couple times a year.

The stupid printer now works. And we didn’t spend the entire weekend laptopping separately. We made several big meals, shopped at Eastern Market, toured the DIA, ate at Good Girls Go To Paris and got up off of our thangs, except when felled by wine. I got four DVDs from the library, in case we felt like a movie, and discovered “Bottle Shock” is worth your time, but “Synecdoche New York” is not. In fact, it’s self-indulgent nonsense, the result of what happens when a quirky, neurotic screenwriter produces several great, memorable scripts (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and then says, “But what I’d really like to do is direct.”

I dunno, maybe you liked it. I didn’t. (Shrug.)

What I did like was this amazing story, which I read all the way through even with guests in the house, a cautionary tale for everyone who is convinced the internet always offers a better shopping experience. Short version: Shopper goes online in search of cheap eyeglass frames, wanders into Crazytown. Somewhat longer version: Bad internet actor finds way to game Google’s allegedly genius algorithm. As I read this more than 24 hours ago, I’m now mainly immersed in the reaction, which ranges from “well, it’s her fault for not Googling more deeply” to overly technical discussions under Google’s hood. Combined with this story today, about not a brain drain, but maybe a brain trickle away from the company, you could get the impression that Google has moved into the next phase of its existence, i.e. crusty old fart-ism. The 21st century, it is so full of wonders: A company goes from shining light of innovation to General Motors in 12 short years.

This pleases me, and has ever since I tried to reach Google with a problem a while back, and discovered it’s as easy as placing a person-to-person phone call to the moon. Everything’s automated, no one has a phone number or even an e-mail address, and if you have a problem with that, screw you and welcome to Dodge City.

And now it is Monday, and guess what? My next-door neighbor has a tree-trimming crew here today. The lead chainsawer is one of those guys who can’t just turn the goddamn thing on and cut a limb. He’s like one of those guys at a red light on a hot motorcycle, who has to go rev-rev-rev-REV and rev-rev-rev-REV every few seconds until you go insane. That’s what I’m hearing now, and so it’s either earplugs or get the hell out and start manic Monday.

Better do the latter. I had a great birthday, and thanks to all who wished me one.

It’s cabbage-as-flowers, now that the flower-flowers are dead.

Boy, the Hack Thirty is really presenting some heavy betting possibilities. If you’d have asked me to rank the lazybones of the punditocracy at the start of this project, I’d have had Jonah Goldberg and William Kristol at one-two, or certainly in the top five. But Kristol is on the board at No. 17 and Goldberg at 7, which makes me wonder who, possibly, could top them.

I figure they’re saving Tom Friedman for late in the rollout, but who else? James Lileks long ago slid into irrelevancy and graphomania; have you read his 40,000-word debrief on his fourth Disney vacation, or are you still plowing through his day-for-day, wave-for-wave, blow-by-blow of his National Review cruise? Mitch Albom doesn’t write about politics. Ann Coulter has been reduced to clowning for the gays — those boys loving a good tranny as they do — and only appearing in front of the Barbara Walters ™ SuperSoft camera lens. Kathleen Parker? Maybe, but there’s no way, as awful as she is, that she could punch her weight with Goldberg. This bears watching. Good call on Laura Ingraham, though — the poor gay man’s Coulter.

Truth be told, I think the problem is column-writing itself. Talk about a gig whose time has come passed. I’m glad I had my time in the game, but all I miss is the regular — not generous — paycheck. The best columnists, then and now, have to walk a very narrow line between reporter/observer and opinion monger, and that is hard enough to do in a normal city, virtually impossible in Washington, where everyone with skin in the game (which would be everyone, period) is whispering in your ear and buying you drinks and inviting you to their dinner parties and winking as they slap you on the shoulder. It’s all just a crazy game, isn’t it? Sooner or later even the sharpest minds and pens go dull. Usually sooner.

What do they say about opinions? And right now, the best ones are showing ’em for free on the internet. That’s not a business model, that’s a hobby.

No. 6 just went up. Marc Thiessen. Can’t quibble with that one. Keep it up, guys.

The holiday weekend is in progress, and this will be the last regular blog entry of the week, although with a house full of wired company, I expect we’ll do some mini-blogging here and there, so by all means, stop back. Also, tomorrow is my natal anniversary, and if there’s anything a girl deserves on her birthday, it’s a day off (and some cake). Thanks in advance for all your good wishes, and no, that’s not a nudge to leave any. I just know what good folks y’all are.

A li’l bloggage? Maybe:

Another great feature from Detroitblog: The people who live — legally — at the Packard Plant. A touch of country in the city:

Besides Hill’s dog, a shaggy rottweiler named Baby, they’ve got a couple of pet raccoons, and they feed lettuce and carrots to a family of rabbits who moved in during the winter. The pheasants that flock around here have provided food in the past. “We do a lot of hunting here,” says Lott, 47. “You ever ate city pheasant yet? Oh, it’s good eatin’. They’re homegrown.”

Rats run wild, kept in check only by the several cats Hill keeps or the sharpshooting skills of Lott and fellow tenant Greg Erving, 65. “We shoot rats in here all night,” Lott says. They use high-powered pellet guns. “It’s a real war going on. You can hear them fighting amongst themselves. Biggest rats in the city. They’ll come over and rob your food in a heartbeat. They’re bold.”

Thanks to Jezebel (I think) for teaching me about Dickflash. If only I could unlearn it now.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and many happy leftovers.

We have a saying in our house: It’s just not Thanksgiving until there’s a plumbing emergency. And guess what? It’s really and truly Thanksgiving now.

Eh, it’s not really an emergency, unless you consider it absolutely essential to have running water in the kitchen. I suspect it’s a failing faucet, nothing my husband can’t handle, but this week he is Sick, Sick with a capital S, and if there’s anything unpacking a faucet requires, it’s a clear head. I could call a plumber, I guess, but I know Alan will veto that one out of hand. He comes from a long line of men who solve their own problems. And so this problem will be solved with much cursing and misery.

We have an extra day in all this, as we both have to work on the holiday, and we’re not celebrating much until the day after, when Alan’s sister arrives, along with NN.c’s webmaster J.C. Burns, along with his plus-one, Sammy. So there’s time. But it’s dwindling.

I meant that about the plumbing emergencies. In back-to-back years, we had clogged drains, first at my parents’ and the following year at my sister’s. It was the classic Thanksgiving clog — potato peels. As I didn’t learn this until I was 35 or so, I say this now to those of you who might not know yet: Don’t put potato peels down a garbage disposal. They don’t get chopped, but slip out the vertical slots in the unit to form stubborn boluses downstream, generally about one inch past the reach of whatever drain snake you might own, and no number of goddammits will free them. You will end up calling a plumber, most likely. The plumbers’ lobby is the reason DON’T PUT POTATO PEELS DOWN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL isn’t tattooed on every turkey, and the focus of all those tiresome Today show segments on how to eat healthy at Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, plumbers gather at the union hall and wait for the desperate holiday-rate calls to come in, while their wives stay home and shop online for resort wear, as they’re all headed for a warm climate as soon as the checks clear.

As for me, I have a million things to do today, and that’s without considering parent-teacher conferences, for which I should at least shower. This will be my first F2F with Mrs. Algebra, who terrifies half the class and bestowed the first B Little Miss Honor Roll has gotten in two years. Better wear the sparkly earrings.

Half the world is already phoning it in, so let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh?

And with that, a thousand sad journalists took their copy of “All the President’s Men” to the dumpster. Sally Quinn, today:

My husband and I are “Dancing With The Stars” fanatics. We plan our social life around it, often regretting invitations that fall on the night of the show. Only in emergencies would we try to TiVo.

Of all the things I could have gone the rest of my life happy not to know, it’s that Ben Bradlee watches “Dancing With the Stars” fanatically. Well, he’s an old man now.

I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait to see the Coens’ remake of “True Grit.” Cannot wait.

I’m really enjoying Salon’s Hack Thirty.

And now it’s 9:30, and I’m supposed to be dialing someone’s digits right now. So best get going.

How far will you go to win an argument with your spouse? Below, behold the old plastic wrap, and the new plastic wrap. Alan does not believe what I told him Saturday, that the original two-pack of 750-square-foot wrap was purchased at Costco in 2005, and therefore we have gone five years between plastic-wrap purchases. He doesn’t see how this is possible, even allowing that I am not given to Marabel Morgan-type stunts with the stuff. We agreed to write “November 2010” on the ends of both boxes of the new stuff, and see if it lasts until Kate’s freshman year in college.

Who is Marabel Morgan? some of you are wondering. Boy, am I dating myself. OK, for you young’uns: Morgan was an early squall in the culture wars, a retrograde Anita Bryant type who peddled a series of extremely successful books for women, advising them how to put the zip back in their marriages, “zip” being defined as sex, mainly, although she did write a cookbook along the way, too. Probably her most famous advice was for wives to wrap themselves in nothing but Saran Wrap and greet their husbands at the door with an icy martini. I guess the martini was a consolation prize for seeing his wife’s sweaty, mashed privates encased in plastic, but whatever blows your hair back. Morgan followed the Biblical formula of wives submitting to their husbands. What’s the flip side of that one, Bible people? I guess the Promise Keepers model, which also requires submission from our side of the aisle, alas. I’m not much of a submitter, all things considered. I guess that’s why I didn’t get married until I was 35. I guess that’s why I fight with my husband over plastic wrap instead of dressing in it.

One final note: Martin Cruz Smith’s new novel features a torture-execution featuring plastic wrap. I’ll spare you the details.

So how was everyone’s weekend? I went to Costco. Got some plastic wrap. I also went to the opera — “La Boheme” — and saw “The Kids Are All Right.” Enjoyed both very much, but it was the film that left me grinning. I love movies where you can luxuriate in the writing, and this was one of them. The story of a lesbian couple and family under stress when their sperm donor enters the picture gets so much right, I don’t care about the little things it gets wrong, and now that I think about it, I can’t really recall any. Highly recommended for Thanksgiving weekend DVDing, as long as there are no kiddies in the room. (There are several brief-but-explicit scenes of boinkage.)

Busy Monday, as always. So let’s get to the bloggage:

I know that sometimes I beat up on the Free Press, but they actually do have a few writers worth their generous paychecks, and one of them is columnist Brian Dickerson, who shares my curiosity about that line in all the Cialis, Viagra and related ED medicine ads: See your doctor if you have an erection lasting more than four hours. I always chuckle over that, and frequently remark to my long-suffering husband, “Someday I’d like to see a scene in a movie where a guy walks into an ER and announces he’s had an erection for four hours.” (He never laughs. I think we’re headed for divorce court.) Anyway, here’s Dickerson’s excellent Sunday offering: It’s been four hours. Now what? It answers the question everybody wants to know: Why four hours? And what happens afterward:

Q: So it’s like a heart attack in your penis?

A: Yes, I guess it would be sort of like that.

Now that’s service journalism.

Have you ever seen an Oprah’s Favorite Things show? I have, once. I found it equal parts compelling and repulsive. For those who haven’t, this is the giveaway show the big O does around the holidays, in which an unsuspecting lucky audience — it’s never revealed until it’s in progress — finds themselves gifted with a truckload, literally, of free stuff, thanks to Oprah. (Along with, I’m compelled to add, a huge tax receipt for the IRS.) You can’t imagine the audience reaction when they learn they’re the lucky ones. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Kenneth Jay Lane is selling knockoffs of Kate Middleton’s engagement ring. How did the company turn them around so fast? I’ll tell you how: They’re leftovers from the Diana-ring knockoffs. That’s one advantage to being old enough to remember Marabel Morgan. You remember other stuff, too.

Paul Krugman says: There will be blood. Oh, I don’t doubt it.

Off to the police stations. Let’s see what fresh hell our leafy Edens endured over the past week. My guess is: Not very much.

I took a different path from my car to the journalism department at Wayne State yesterday, and came across this monument:

Maybe my friend Michael, who once chaired the school’s Board of Governors, can explain why Alexander, and why there, but my guess is, there’s no particular story, just a bit of Greco-American pride. Metro Detroit is such a diverse place, not just racially but also in nationally identified groups that I had previously thought of as simply “white people” maybe trending to demi-swarthy — Albanians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Greeks, Croatians, that whole southern European salad, with extra olives (although Chaldeans are Iraqis, actually). Walking across campus, I’m as likely to hear Arabic spoken as English, although also Spanish, Russian and any number of other polyglot tongues.

Anyway, back to Alexander. That island nation has produced scores of individuals worthy of a bust, enough that it’s sort of sad to see the one who wept because there were no more worlds to conquer gazing out over Warren Avenue in Detroit. Although I’m sure the locals would give him a fight.

The term at Wayne is dwindling. I think yesterday will be the last or next-to-last office hours I’ll hold, which means less time out of the house but more time to work on other stuff. I like being on campus, any campus. Yesterday I was offered an opportunity to maybe do a master’s program at Wayne State. (I say “offered a maybe” because that’s entirely how vague it was.) I’m trying to clarify my thinking over the next few weeks, and one of the things that I will have to set aside is what a natural student I am, and how much of my self-worth is tied to how well I do on stupid bullshit like the Pew Research Center’s news quiz. I got a perfect score [preen, preen]. For now, I’ll concentrate on feeling smug. It’s not an entirely noble emotion, but it’s better than considering that only 14 percent of Americans know the current inflation rate.

The good news: I can pursue a degree outside of journalism/communications, which is where the graduate assistantship opportunity lies. The bad news: I’m unqualified for almost any practical field of study — Sigh. Should have taken more math. — and the idea of spending the price of a cheap new car on a master’s in something like English makes no sense when I have another college student coming down the pike in a few more years. There are other options — economics, history, maybe urban planning — but at this point I’m thinking grad school after 50 is a luxury for Peter Weller, but not me.

Which is a segue to the bloggage, and brings us to this charming follow-up item: The littlest Robocop, the sequel: Robocop 1.0 weighs in.

The right wing triumphs, and now they’re gettin’ sassy! Heeeyyyy, Roger Ailes! But it’s not like he doesn’t have a history of this sort of thing.

OK, time to pack my chute and start the real work of the day. Tonight we’re going to see “La Boheme” at the Michigan Opera Theater, and at the moment Alan is coughing up a lung. How appropriate, as Mimi dies of consumption onstage, to have a little side soundtrack.

So have a great weekend, all.

Not much time this morning, so let’s dig up a little snack platter of linkage, shall we? There is much to discuss:

The Center for Automotive Research said the bailout of GM and Chrysler saved more than 1 million jobs, and today’s GM IPO will return more than $13 billion to American taxpayers. (Thanks, American taxpayers!) Imagine the last two years with 1.14 million more people out of work. I’d be shooting squirrels out of the trees, like in “Winter’s Bone.”

It’s deer season in Michigan! Let’s check out the buck pole!

Kittens with kitten filling. And purring.

For locals and tourists only, Jim Griffioen from Sweet Juniper has the best Detroit guide evah. I’ve been to most of these places, and now I want to go back.

And with that, I have to run. Sorry, it’s been one of those mornings.