Clue is my family’s cult movie. If you spend the whole movie drunk and distracted it comes across as utterly typical mid-eighties camp, but the more you pick at it (and there’s a lot of picking going on in a family of Ph.D.s*) the better it holds up.
I told you about Clue so that I could make this reference:
Wadsworth: A double negative!
Colonel Mustard: A double negative?
[whispering]
Colonel Mustard: You mean you have photographs?
Wadsworth: That sounds like a confession to me. In fact the double negative has led to proof positive. I’m afraid you gave yourself away.
Colonel Mustard: [angry, to Wadsworth] Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?
Wadsworth: You don’t need any help from me, sir.
Colonel Mustard: That’s right!
(Okay, I’ll stop now.)
Further, I made that reference so I could relate this:
- GM’s Lutz whines about unfair treatment (The Liberty Papers)
General Motors Corp. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said he is looking forward to having a “car czar” in place so U.S. automakers have someone sympathetic to its needs in Washington.
“We will have someone to talk to about the pain being inflicted on use [sic] for no unearthly [sic] reason,” Lutz said Sunday on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show.
The man is entirely correct: there’s no unearthly reason for GM’s troubles. As we’ve had explained, profit comes down to a question of what a company can reasonably expect to charge and what it incurs as overhead… and as we’ve also had explained, GM can sell cars just fine — it just can’t sell them at a profit. Nothing supernatural about that.
Of course, General Motors may be generating a fantastic profit from its crawl snivelling to the federal government division:
- Can you say, “moral hazard?” (Coyote Blog)
Immediately after GMAC became eligible for TARP money, GM reduced to zero the interest rate… on certain models. This, of course, penalizes GM competitors, including Toyota, Honda and other “transplants” whose cars are made in America by Americans for Americans, and Ford, which does not have the freedom of maneuver conferred by TARP money because Ford is not taking any….
GMAC has begun making loans to borrowers with credit scores as low as 621, a significant relaxation of the 700 minimum score the company adopted just three months ago as it struggled to survive. America’s median credit score is 723….
Tell me again about what a fine fiscal conservative George W. Bush is, won’t you?
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* Okay, I haven’t defended mine yet — I’m a mere ABD. Shut up, it scans better this way.
Blunt Object 
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