Everybody slow down! Is what Anne writes in Slate:

Here is what happened: I was driving home from a friend's house in a Warsaw suburb Saturday night when my engine died. I tried to restart it, pumped the accelerator, heard a small explosion, and saw a flame. Smoke started coming out of the hood, which I didn't want to open. (This was a bad move, in retrospect, but I've seen what happens to smoking cars in the movies.) Someone called the fire department, which clearly didn't take my car problems very seriously.

When they finally arrived, around 20 minutes later, the scene did admittedly look rather spectacular. Columns of billowing white smoke, flames, the works. Still, it was only the engine burning, not the entire car, and the policeman who showed up agreed that the cause was probably some weird mechanical malfunction.

Then the cops heard her husband was a big politician, and they called in the Secret Service, and then the tabloids arrived, and the photographers, and the story spread, and next thing you know she was reading about herself on this very blog, which she calls "the high point of the entire day."

Honored! Whether it is Washington Post columnist car explosions or Washington Post newsroom fistfights, we stand ready to sensationalize!

"Car" maker Ford Motor Company, or "FoMoCo" if you want to say it in a more snappy manner, has turned a profit! No one could be more floored than Ford, its investors, the media, and the public at large! Nobody thought they were worth a poot! But they are. They made a billion in cash, so if you were dumb enough to invest in Ford, congrats!

And let's not forget university presidents. Twenty three of them make a million bucks a year. As well they should! Particularly the top three best compensated, the presidents of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Suffolk University, and the University of Tulsa, the traditional "Big Three" of American collegiate education.

Of course, there are other opportunities out there to make ca$$$h. You can move to Philly and take New York's garbage. You can become a microbiologist and figure out lucrative new ways to divert waste from garbage. You can import cheap fake Native American jewelry, which is garbage.

All you garbagemen wish you had taken that university presidency gig when it was offered, don't you? Live and learn. And eat garbage.

The most important thing that happened during Barack Obama's press conference last night: One reporter named Steve stood up and asked a question when in fact Obama had called on a different reporter named Steve. "I've apologized to Steve," said Steve. But will America-Steve relations ever recover?


Here's a beautiful Flickr gallery of the New York Times' printing factory. See it while you can!


Hurrrrummmm...the outgoing CEO of Porsche is getting a $71 million check on his way out the door, and he's decided to donate $1.4 million to associations that "serve as a support for elderly and suffering journalists." Love him, journalists! Love him!


The 174 year-old Ann Arbor (Michigan) News published its final issue today. It's folding. "Ann Arbor today becomes the first city in the country to lose its only daily newspaper." You can still follow them on Twitter.

NYC closed down Times Square to cars. It's for the people now! Andrea Peyser despises the people.

Yesterday, as New Yorkers dragged themselves back to work, they found cheap beach chairs thrown into the middle of Times Square, replacing buzzing, honking, vehicular traffic with gas-producing tourists, who really ought to lay off the Starbucks venti chocolate mint frappuccinos, anyway.

She just thinks it's dumb, okay? And stupid as well. It attracts foreigners, for one thing:

I spied a group of fit, tanned men smoking up a lung, and immediately determined they were from Europe.

"It's very, very inviting," said Bertjam Van Der Molen, a tourist from Holland.

"We have a four-hour layover in Newark," he said. "Enough time to come over here" — and stink us out.

You close Times Square to traffic for one day and what happens? A motherfucker from Holland comes out and smokes a cigarette right there, in Times Square. Hope you're happy, Hollandaise-swilling surrender monkeys.
There was no hot teen sex to be had, either.
[NYP]

I'm no "expert" on economics, but isn't all those billions we gave to GM a little bit like trying to fill up a bucket with a big hole in the bottom? Today the company said its cash reserves are "dwindling." As in "we are just burning that shit, in huge piles." GM's cash stockpiles are disappearing at the rate of $113 million per day. Well I'm sure it's worth it, whatever they're doing with it!

Better that GM have it, than, say, the increasing number of residents of our nation's capital who line up at a church every day to get free food, so they do not starve to death. They would just eat it right up!

Idea for our government: instead of giving billions to money-losing corporations, why not invest that money in something that will appreciate in value, like antiques? There are literally dozens of antiques lying around the White House at this very moment. The rich are still bidding up the prices of fancy old furniture, on the theory that hey, at least you can sit on it if all else fails.

And who can blame them? It's either antiques, or medieval torture devices. And GM is determined to get those tongue-removal pincers at any cost.

EXAMPLE: You thought the great American Chrysler brand would be going bankrupt? Fucking forget about it! They have a deal in place that may avert bankruptcy.

So there!

EXAMPLE: GM has a turnaround plan. Once upon a time they had hundreds of thousands of workers, now they're going to cut their workforce down to 10% of its all time high. Slim and trim baby! Fighting shape! Let's sell some automobiles, shall we?

EXAMPLE: Don't believe the USA muscle car is soon to controlling the fucking road once again? How do you explain this headline, hot shot? "Honda Swings to Quarterly Loss."

Loss. Loss of power. Loss of prestige. Loss of the lead which has been retaken, by America.

Win: What American cars are doing. Case fucking closed. Let's ride.

Chrysler—always trying to stay one step ahead of GM!—is on the verge of a bankruptcy filing. Who cares?

Well shit Chrysler workers and their families do, you monster, but you know who probably doesn't? Various state workers across the country. Because they're already preoccupied by the fact that they're being hit with involuntary furloughs, which amount to a pay cut and a cut in services! You media industry employees are already familiar with this tactic. If you're a state worker, furloughs are at least preferable to outright pay cuts, because at least you get a few extra days off. But if you're a state citizen, and you want to, say, use the courthouse, or go to the DMV, or take advantage of some other government service that your tax money paid for, you're shit outta luck. Come back Monday!

Or, if you are Queens resident Valentin Garcia, you may choose not to wait until Monday. Instead, you may choose a different plan: knock an ATM machine off its foundation with your van at 3 a.m., then flee on foot when witnesses call the police, then jump into the East River and attempt to swim away, then be scooped up by harbor patrol, proclaiming "I was not in the van. I don't know anything about ATM machines" while they pull you out of the river, and then, when you get to the police station, using your one phone call to call your accomplice at home and loudly tell him to remove the money from your mattress, where you were hiding it. Do this well enough and you will make the papers. But not the front page. Valentin, if only you had enlisted the help of a night monkey, a lemur, a guanaco, a caiman, a porcupine, an Arabian oryx, and a blesbok—that is front page material.

You could have done it, too, Valentin. Those animals have all been laid off. They want that ATM just as bad as you do.

Sure, we've all been concerned about what this recession will mean for Ferrari, Maserati, and other patriotic European "ultra expensive" (direct quote!) car manufacturers. Well, have no fear: Porsche's net profit in the first half rose strongly, and auto execs are expressing the confidence that will get us all through this mess:

[Ferrari's North American chief Maurizio] Parlato says he's not too worried about the attacks on Wall Street bonuses and the troubles in the financial industry. "Our customer base is not mainly those people," he says. "Those people are quick buyers" who favor other brands that don't require a waiting list.
"Our people," Mr. Parlato says, "have serious money."

And thank god for that. Among those with less-than-serious money, the American dream has gone from "owning a house in the suburbs" to "subletting a small efficiency in a subdivided foreclosed house in the suburbs." Which is okay, because plummeting oil prices will help them save money on their lengthy commutes to their new jobs at the Orange Julius, where they are working, pluckily, to make up their 14% stock market losses in the first quarter.

America!

"The news has a negative effect on customers as well as employees," according to auto dealers, as well as the drone ABN salesman in this video clip. In other words, things that are happening, in the world, are bad for your business, as a seller of cars. True.


But even in the fucking ABN commercial, they couldn't avoid "DOW DOWN 500+ POINTS" in the background. Probably because of the auto industry.

Update: Jeff Bercovici reports that Couric didn't authorize the use of her ABN clip for use in their news-bashing marketing materials. So, CBS News sent a C&D letter to CBS Outernet which runs ABN and forced them to take down the clip. They complied, but there's still plenty of Couric littered throughout the site. For instance, this:

Millionaire real estate brokers have suffered like everyone; the recession has stolen their very identity:

Sharon Baum, one of Corcoran's top-earning agents (she sold the $40 million Duke mansion on Fifth Avenue in 2006), has decided to get rid of her Rolls-Royce, a car she has made her trademark since 1996...
Ms. Baum made the Rolls a key part of her brand, even showing the car and its driver, Abdul Jaffeer, in the promotional page she included in every Corcoran folder she handed out to a prospective buyer.

Philosophical question: does she deserve credit for putting her Rolls in the garage purely for symbolic reasons, or does she deserve scorn for talking about doing so with an NYT reporter? (Your answer reveals how many rich friends you have!). At least she's smart enough not to leave the Upper East Side, where people still regard a Rolls as something to smile at:

They didn't look like they resented that passenger; they looked like the sighting had made their day, as if they'd spotted a rare and delightful bird in flight.

Pretty sure that didn't happen in one of those "it's the next Williamsburg!" neighborhoods. [NYT; Pic via TRD]

Media beef-starter Michael Wolff strongly implied that the New York papers had done Steven Rattner—former NYT reporter turned mediacentric private equity guy—a favor by seeing to it that news of his wife's drunk driving arrest on the Throgs Neck Bridge didn't get covered. (True? Maybe, maybe not. Whether Rattner's wife is famous enough to qualify for scandal coverage is a borderline call). Rattner was reportedly one of Obama's leading choices for Car Czar, to save our great US auto industry. Today: the Car Czar job has disappeared.

President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful "car czar" to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night...

It was not clear why the administration changed course or whether Mr. Rattner would have a role on the task force.

Considering all the Obama scandals so far, it's definitely possible they ruled out Rattner to save themselves some headaches. If so, Michael Wolff has a fun new enemy! [Pic via Esther Dyson]

This is an ad for Zurich Financial Services, an insurance company. And you will wish you had purchased their insurance when you come back to your parked car and find it scratched, or with a window shattered, or tagged up. Oh wait, it's just a sticker, telling you about Zurich Financial Services! Now you can have a nice, relieved laugh before you set out to find the person who put the sticker on your car, and run them over. Keen insight into the consumer psyche: That's the Zurich way. [via Copyranter at Animal]

If you give rides at $100 a pop, only 10,000 rides until you get to Profitville—population you and a sweet Chrysler 300 Series C. [Ebay via Swampland]

Jesus, Chevy Traverse, why? Her nodding bombardment at the end is particularly soul-searing. [I have been looking for this awful commercial all week so thanks to Brandfreak for digging it up. May it now die.]

[via Adfreak]