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April 14, 2008 - April 7, 2008

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

REALLY -- PSAYINGS.5A.9 LocoPunk got us thinking yesterday. While we were all writing email to our Senators protesting the coming Z-Visa there was some landscaping being done here in the Southland by people that don't look all that legal -- so, some of us felt conflicted.

But it is time to embrace the future. And -- we have a few ideas.

Once they're available, everyone should get at least one Z-Visa. Ideally, we think that you should get five. We're not sure that you'll want to go down to a clinic, present your Z-Visa, and get medical services, but we're are sure you'll like this idea.

First, give your name a bit of a Spanish flair. For instance, Joseph Mannix could become Jose Manuel. Wear a big straw hat. Put on a fake mustache. Have fun. Be creative. Then, go get a social security number. Now, you are all set. Go get four more for expanded fun and profit. [Note: If it needs to be said -- do not use your real address.]

What you do now is pay Jose out of your business. If you don't have one, start one. Now Jose is going to want a lot of money, so pay him often and mightily. This will produce a loss in your business, or at least reduce the profit of your business thus reducing your income tax bill -- Federal and State in most cases. Go to the bank and cash Jose's checks. Take the money home and store appropriately.

Then, after a year or so, stop paying Jose and go onto the next of your Z-Visas. Repeat. For the next five to seven years you can effectively store up quite a collection of non-sequential, small denomination versions of U.S. currency. The rest is up to you.

If you could do this with $150,000 per year, you would save approximately $60,000 in income taxes. Over five years, that's $300,000.

If anyone comes looking for Jose or Rodrigo or whomever, you simply show them the dutifully kept copies of thier Z-Visas and any other documentation and say, "I haven't seen [insert Spanish name here] for a long time. He did some work for us some time ago, but I haven't seen him lately." Seem like you are recalling a distant relative or former spouse. Work on the line in a mirror. You'll have at least two or three years to practice.

Some of you are saying, "But we don't have a couple of hundred grand to run through a Z-Visa." Not to worry. Just get your Z-Visas and sell your services. You're in the business of returning tax free cash to businesses or individuals who require your service. How about 15 percent? That seems fair. Simply follow the above example. You could use all your Z-Visas in the same year as part of this service. And, you won't even have to talk to any governmental tax collecting personnel. Return the cash to the payor less your fee and there you go. Everybody wins.

Of course, you might not even want to get your hands dirty at all. Just go get the Z-Visas anyway and sell them to the highest bidder. There will be enterprising groups all over the country -- especially in the Southland -- that will gladly pay you for your Z-Visas to be used in the ways identified above and other ways yet to be imagined. Feel free to leave any of your suggestions in the comments section. We're all ears.

Monday, June 04, 2007

PSAYINGS.5A.9. This morning, the Washington Post (h/t Drudge) is telling us that Republican lawmakers in particular are confident they'll be able to pass the big immigration bill.


Okay. Fine. The endangered species called Congressional Republicans apparently does suffer from the death wish Glenn Reynolds alluded to last week. Somehow, they've convinced themselves that this WAPO poll is good news for their own prospects with voters:


I mean, that is the finding that's "really turned things around," isn't it? So what percent of the 44 percent opposed is Republican or conservative? What would you guess?

I've previously referenced Ace of Spades's plan for all immigration bill opponents to formally withdraw from the Republican Party. I will now fearlessly predict that Ace's plan won't work. It requires the participation of politicians who are actually bright enough to recognize when the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. The Republican Party doesn't have any politicians like that. Sorry, Ace. It was a nice try.

It's time for Plan B. Let's all jump on the bandwagon. Think about it. Who among us wouldn't enjoy the opportunity for a fresh start devoid of any accountability whatsoever? When the bill is signed into law, let's all go get our own Z-Visas. Pick whatever hispanic name appeals to you and go register. They can't possibly do background checks in 24-hours, so we'll be instantly entitled to all the benefits of being an illegal alien. Cancel your health insurance. You'll get free healthcare at every hospital in the country. Quit paying your property taxes. Your kids are entitled to go to public school anyway. And no matter where they want to attend a state university, they'll qualify for in-state tuition rates. If you get pulled over for a traffic violation, just twirl your mustache and tell the arresting officer how much paperwork he's going to have to do. If he still doesn't let you go, all you have to do is not show up for court and not pay the fine. Best of all, when it comes time to file your income tax return with the IRS, don't do it. If the heat really gets serious (Ha ha. It's ICE we're talking about here...), just move temporarily to a big city like New York or San Francisco, and every cop on the force will be your accomplice in escaping your pursuers. It's perfect.

The only way they could ever catch you is if you decided you wanted to be an American citizen, and why on earth would you ever sign up for a silly program like that? We've already been American citizens, and so we know better. Life with a Z-Visa is going to be the best deal on the planet. Heck, it won't be more than one or two election cycles before we'll even be able to vote for our favorite politicians, and then we'll be able to write our own ticket for how much more free stuff we want.

Cool? No.

Muy bueno? Si.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

DAD. A week ago, I told you about Andrew barking at turkeys. I didn't tell you about how incredibly handsome Andrew is, or about the broken rib that sticks out from his side like a burr. We don't know why he's so timid, but he is. Apart from barking at turkeys and goldfinches, he can't seem to bring himself to meet anyone. He won't take food -- not even an irresistible treat -- from anyone's hand.

All we do know is that Andrew is a sweet, gorgeous boy, and he succeeded an incredibly beautiful greyhound named Patrick, who was the fastest thing to a hundred yards anyone here has ever seen -- and who had the gravest, most dignified personality anyone here has ever seen.


I saw Patrick explode out of the box and do the hundred in about three seconds.. I saw Patrick racing in the yard, changing direction 180 degrees in an instant just for the hell of it. He weighed 80 pounds, because he was always fit as a fiddle, and the only time he ever lost his temper was when a 95-lb greyhound at the park growled at his deerhound. Patrick curled his lip and flexed his massive thigh muscles. The other greyhound hid behind his mommy. I would have done that too. It was always clear that he was faster than the lovely Molly, because she never had that explosiveness except when somebody was holding  a cheeseburger or a potato chip.

Now it turns out that you can get the complete history and pedigree of your greyhounds from the internet, with nothing more to go on than the tattoos in their ears. It was no surprise at all that Molly lost all her races. Beautiful as she is, she still would have preferred any opportunity at food to winning a mere race. Patrick won four times, though. Amazing to me, because his forte was so clearly the hundred yard dash. Anything more than that and it would be so easy to see him issuing perfunctory statements to the press about how there would be no records this year because he'd strained a leg or a thigh and would have to do a month of rehab on the weight machines.

Only Andrew never ran a single race.Which makes him the ultimate softy. Except that his daddy was the final proof of why Andrew was a timid barker rather than a racer. Nobody could live up to Andrew's Daddy. Here's the record of the dog called the Dominator, Andrew's papa: He ran 148 races, and he won 63 of them. Jeez.  How could anyone compete with that?

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

PROOF. I was going to wait six months before pulling this trick, but I'm too full of myself to wait another 30 days. The crisis is already approaching. When all is said and done, Republicans won't nominate Giuliani because he's pro-abortion. Voting for him is more than a compromise; it's a betrayal of moral principle. Republicans also won't nominate John McCain, because he's crazy. Not in any ordinary way, perhaps, but in the special way that happens to good men who are captured, tortured, and held in isolation for too long by the most evil denizens of our species. Yes, he's brave, but he can never again be trusted as a warrior because our enemies found the weak spot we all have and used it to destroy him. Now he will pay any price to defeat terrorism except hurting an enemy in custody. He also has the broken man's hair-trigger temper, which will doom his chances in the final stages of any national election. The MSM may not be as badly dressed as a North Vietnamese interrogator, but they're every bit as ruthless and unscrupulous. They won't hesitate to apply the cattle prod to McCain's weak spot and prove how crazy he is when all the chips are on the table.

Which leaves us with Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. Actually, it doesn't. Mitt Romney will never be elected president. He may be a good man. He was probably a good governor. He was almost certainly a good business executive. But on the national stage he's a fish out of water. Nobody -- not even Republicans -- wants a goody-goody for president. When even a moron like Ben Affect can make you look ridiculous, you're done.


True, it's not hard to make Ben Affect look ridiculous, either. His whole career is reprised in the movie that first made him famous, Good Will Hunting, in which he played the numbskull friend of Harvard alum Matt Damon. In the movie, no one thought Ben was smart because Matt Damon was. In real life, some people do think Ben's smart because Matt Damon is. But it's really pretty easy to collapse a house of cards. In Ben's case, we did it a long long time ago. In the final analysis, he's a completely average dumb guy who got lucky by having a smart friend. Period.

But this time, we should all pay attention. He's right about the "Ken doll" thing. It takes one to know one. Mitt Romney really is too plastic to be elected president.

Which leaves Fred Thompson. Who isn't even a candidate yet. But say he does throw his hat in the ring. What then? Who's going to write all his lines for him? Who's going to cue him with the the right riposte when Hillary takes his head off in the first debate? Is Bruce Willis going to rush in from the wings and take the bitch out with a .45? No. The people who miss Reagan ought to be more aware than anyone that Fred Thompson is not Reagan. Sometimes an actor really is just an actor.

Let's face it, folks. The only chance the Republicans have in 2008 is to accept that they are going to lose in 2008 and do what's right rather than what's expedient. Soldiers are most dangerous and effective when they go into combat assuming they're already dead. It clears the mind marvelously. That's why I'm re-running this post from January word for word:


Conservatives, reach into your pants and find your balls. Republicans, find a conservative and ask him what it feels like to have balls. Then -- all of you -- get on your knees and beg Newt Gingrich to run. I mean, what would you do if you knew we were going to lose? You'd want them to pay for the privilege, right? Forget the nice guys. And the damaged guys. And the plastic guys. It's time for a fucking gladiator. And we have one.

Did you find anything in there, you conservatives? Well, keep looking. Maybe they'll turn up.

UPDATE, It seems that Michelle Malkin is also skeptical about Fred Thompson as the Second Coming of Reagan:


You could say what you know and never admit: InstaPunk is always right.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

RED FOLK. For several presidential elections now, New Jersey has shown up in the "blue" column, giving a strong edge to Clinton (twice), Gore, and Kerry at the polls, as well as two successive Democrat governors, a Democrat state legislature, and a string of Democrat U.S. Senators.* In the mathematics of the left, this means we're solid with the rest of the post-modern, anti-capitalist peaceniks of the northeast, demonstrating our dyed-in-the-wool liberalism to a degree even Massachusetts can't match. (Remember Romney?) So, when the lefties color New Jersey in on their political maps, they must be looking deep into the Crayola box for that one special, truly pure shade of cobalt blue which to them signifies near unanimous immunity against the conservative retrovirus they're battling in the red states. There shouldn't be any more jingoistic pro-military yahoos in Jersey than in, say, Marin County, California, right?

Wrong. The lefties who view the states as monochromatically good (blue) or bad (red) would have been dismayed by what happened in Millville, New Jersey, over the weekend. Millville is the home of the annual Millville Air Show. You probably haven't heard of it because no MiG has ever burned down half the town in a display of state-of-the-art Russian technology. If you've noticed the graphic above, you might even be skeptical that luminaries like the Blue Angels would show up to perform their death-defying act at a small airport bordering the scrabbly wasteland called the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Especially after their tragic loss a few weeks ago. Isn't the whole world supposed to come to a standstill if a single 'boy' dies in a military-related event?


Two reasons. First, Millville Army Air Field (MAAF) was a World War II training facility for P-47 fighter pilots. P-47s were the A-10s of their time, destroyers of trains, trucks, tanks, factories, artillery, bridges, and everything else that can be struck on the ground.  That's why the official name of the A-10 is, like the P-47, Thunderbolt. The P-51 Mustang was more glamorous, perhaps, but the P-47 was the real workhorse of American fighter planes:

The City of Millville, small as it is, has never forgotten the part it played in World War II and works diligently to keep this heritage alive in the MAAF Museum. The annual air show is an essential part of that effort, and it has become one of the biggest and best attended in the east.

Second, the Blue Angels don't quit performing when one of their team dies. What they do is dangerous. That's a given. Their aviators are not 'boys,' any more than our combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are. Hence, as scheduled, they performed in Millville on May 26 and 27, 2007. (And for one of their technical support team, the two-day event represented a homecoming.)

Happily, Mrs. InstaPunk and I were there to see it, and what we saw went far beyond what we could have expected. The experience of the Blue Angels was... well, I'll get to that, and it's worth waiting for, but the rest of the show was also well worth the 90-degree heat, the lack of shade, and the miles of walking involved.

Mrs. InstaPunk was most taken with the current military hardware on display, like the F/A-18s flown by U.S. Marines in Iraq and attended at the show by their young pilots.


Once I lost her in the crowd, but I used my head and went looking for the biggest cluster of marine pilots. There she was, of course, chatting with them about their latest tour in Iraq. But she wouldn't let me take her picture with them because "all women look awful in this kind of heat."


I liked the modern jets just fine, but I was enthralled to see so many vintage WWII aircraft on display, including Stearman and Texan fighter-trainers, a Corsair, a Thunderbolt, a Mustang, a flying boat I couldn't identify, and a B-25 Mitchell bomber like the ones General Doolittle flew to Tokyo.


And much more than these, of course, including veteran aircraft from Korea, Vietnam, the Berlin Airlift, Desert Storm, and even Coast Guard rescue craft. I can't possibly do them all justice here. The same goes for the flying demonstrations. Words can't convey the shock to your ears, and your visual sense of physics, of a B1-B or F-15 passing over your head at a few hundred feet and then climbing to an altitude of invisibility within a matter of seconds. Contemporary warplanes seem to be merely the visible lead point of a tidal wave of sound, which unrolls behind them like a dense sheet of thunder stretched so taut and thin by the force of flight that the whole sky becomes a loudspeaker.

Like music, the roaring and screaming of this sky feels like the harmony of mathematics translated into sensory terms, so that the extraordinary power of the minds behind the intricately menacing machinery permeates your body from brain to bones. This singing human thunder contains in every moment the entire history of flight, without a word, from the blackboards filled with tiny computations to the daring of the Lindberghs and Yeagers, to the decades of dogfights between competing pilots, planes, nations, technologies, and times. Without thinking, you simply feel the life and death and danger and exhilaration of aerial war and the heroes who have taken to the skies in our defense. And you know, without the smallest calculation, that no one on earth, however arrogant or evil, wants to be on the receiving end of this magnificent flying shield of ours which can also deal out utter devastation in an instant. It's frightening, joyful, and awe-inspiring all at the same time, and the shifting shapes of the planes themselves, on the deck or vanishing into the ozone, are a continuous permutation of the dread side of beauty.

I'm not making this up. The organizers of the air show and the people who attend it are intensely aware of the simultaneity of history and the all encompassing present of warplanes climbing and diving without gunfire in the free skies of our home. After the F-15 assaulted our senses, a newly restored P-51 Mustang mesmerized all of us with the synchrony of its Rolls-Royce engine and its ability to turn and roll and charge in a phantom solo dogfight over the D-Day battlefield symbolized by the black stripes on its wings. While the pilot pushed the old bird on and on, big band music played, summoning that brave, desperate era before almost all present were born, when 19-year-olds fresh from college and ordinary civilian dreams clambered into machines not much longer than a good-sized family room and risked everything for their country after only a few short months of training. Maybe the youngest only stared up at it and smiled at its grace, but every face with a few lines on the brow looked up with appreciation and a kind of reverence: God bless this machine which did so much and brought so many safely home. There were hardcore bikers there, with their headscarves and bellies and boots (and a separate parking lot filled with choppers), and they, too, seemed as humble and grateful as children who've gotten the rarest of treats.

The P-51 made a second appearance -- a deeply moving one -- flying in wing-to-wing formation with the F-15 while the air show's PA system played Tommy Dorsey's "Sentimental Journey." This was the show's "Heritage Tribute," and we all watched in open-mouthed solemnity mixed with a curious sense of paradox. Yes, the F-15 was flying at a fraction of its top speed, but the two planes turned and rolled gracefully in tandem and so close together that one could feel the trust that had somehow been created between the professional Air Force pilot in the Eagle and the civilian amateur in the Mustang. It was a brief, beautifully executed time warp with a perfect musical accompaniment.

My own favorite flying performance of the day was a four-fer: the P-51 (again), a blue bent-wing Corsair, a silver P-47, and an olive P-40 Warhawk chasing one another in a great ellipse above the crowd. I had never seen the latter two actually flying, and the performance was not listed in the program, so their appearance was an unexpectedly dramatic delight. On each circuit the oldest of them, the P-40, lagged farther behind, and I remembered my dad's explanation of why his unit had their Warhawks replaced with Thunderbolts: "We were supposed to fly bomber escort, but we couldn't keep up with them... That's not a good thing." But the P-40 still belonged with the others, a smaller, slower, older brother of the more famous P-51, and it had its own unique place in history as the weapon of the daredevil Flying Tigers, legends in their own right in China and Burma.

I keep wanting to say more about the crowd, but there isn't much to say because they were not the bloated, intrusive, oblivious beast you encounter at the mall. The children were well behaved, closely tended by parents who understood the responsibility of bringing them into the presence of dangerous machinery on a very hot day. So there was no running, no pushing, no yelling, no cursing, no annoyance of any kind perpetrated by kids. Among the adults, there were no cross words, no dirty looks, no beer coolers, no shoulder bumps, no grumblings or signs of complaint (well, I did hear one guy get cross about paying $3 for a cupful of ice), and amazingly enough in a crowd this large and dispersed, no smoking. Only the trashcans communicated the stricture against lighting up in the vicinity of so much aircraft fuel, but I didn't see a single rebellious exception in four hours. It's amazing how a vast crowd of seemingly average Americans simply slides, lubricated by plenty of "excuse me's" and "that's okay's," into the background of an experience everyone is simply glad to attend. And so they are memorable for having been in no other way memorable. Sometimes it feels good to be an American, even in 2007.

But it was also punishingly hot. Three-and-a-half hours in, Mrs. InstaPunk, who's so Irish she's actually in danger of bursting into flame from contact with too much sun, confessed over funnelcake that she was probably going to expire of heat-stroke before the Blue Angels performed. Since that was the one thing she had been most determined to see, I knew it was serious and started steering her toward the exit. "We can watch the performance from the parking lot," I reassured her, "after we've resuscitated ourselves with a blast of air-conditioning in the car." Eventually she agreed, and we started the mile long hike to the car. We walked slowly, to preserve her strength, and finally attained the target objective under our own steam 15 minutes before the Blue Angels were slated to take off. (To be fair, her version is slightly different; she claims she had to drag my inert body only part of the way, and a kind Millville cop drove us the last three-quarter mile or so back to the car. But you know how women are. They always exaggerate.)

I confess to feeling disappointed. While Mrs. InstaPunk waited in the car, I looked past the hangar rooftops that obstructed our view of the airfield and listened for the PA system to announce the beginning of the show. The first indication I had of the Main Event was the unmistakeable chord set that launches "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. This was followed by "Wild Thing" as the jet engines of the Blue Angels' F/A-18s leaped into life wth billows of smoke that could be seen even from our distant vantage point. By now I had detected that across the street from our lot -- even farther from the action than we were -- the Millville Eks Lodge seemed to have the full membership on hand, ensconced in lawn chairs on their porch as well as lawn chairs arrayed in the beds of innumerable pickup trucks. We were DEFINITELY going to be able to see something.

We heard the takeoff. It sounded like the naval guns beginning the bombardment of Normandy on D-Day. But still no sign of those blue and yellow machines we had seen lined up on the tarmac. "They can't do all their maneuvers ten feet off the runway," I offered lamely. "Of course not," said Mrs InstaPunk.

By now the sound was firing at us from, seemingly, all points of the compass. We, and a few others camped pathetically in the parking lot, craned our heads in every direction. Where were they? Where was the sound coming from?

Then I saw them. Four planes climbing straight up to the north. At our distance from them, there was no separation among the triangular shapes. Each wingpoint was welded to another, and the ascending formation was but a single unit through which you could see small triangles of sky. Behind us a shattering engine scream announced the arrival of a fifth plane, and a sixth, returning to the airfield from the south at very low altitude. They disappeared, and apparently parted company, behind the hangars that blocked our view west, but after their exhaust blasts diverged, I suddenly saw them through a wide gap between the two biggest hangars -- passing each other in opposing directions nearly six inches apart just a couple hundred feet over the runway. "There!" I shouted. "Jesus."

There were seven planes in all, but it seemed like more. We got the feeling of being at the epicenter of a vast virtual armillary sphere, around which various combinations of planes were orbiting in all possible directions, in impossibly tight formations, to the limit of the invisible tether that bound them, until the gravity of the center pulled them back together at the reckless velocity of a brand new universe. When they converged and flew past one another, the colliding onslaught of sound resembled Stephen Hawking's version of the Big Bang, an incipient mega-explosion that doesn't ever quite happen because you can never get closer than a trillionth of a second to the birth of physics.

"We can go now," announced Mrs. InstaPunk. "I've seen the Blue Angels."

So we started the car and began the drive back home.

That should be the end of it. But it isn't. When you leave the ballgame or the concert, you're almost immediately outside the action and whatever you hear of it is muted, diminished, and subsiding. When you leave the epicenter of a Blue Angels performance, you are merely plotting the direction of subsequent, incredibly immediate encounters.

We hadn't thought of that. But the residents of Millville and the surrounding rural areas had. We reached the heavily wooded main road that would lead us back home, and the first clearing we came to was lined on both sides by cars, pickup trucks, motorcycles, lawn chairs, blankets and dozens of people. We followed the direction of their upturned faces, and here came the Blue Angels again, four planes locked together as one, slowly rotating as they shivered the pine trees en route.

"Should I pull over?" I asked. "They've obviously got the perfect spot here to watch from. I don't want you to miss anything."

"No. Keep going. It's okay."

We still hadn't gotten it. Nobody had to go to the air show to experience the power and majesty of the Blue Angels. As we proceeded down what I'd always known as a back country road, every gap in the trees, every crossroad was jammed with cars, bikes, and people. Where there were houses, there were crowds, and the American flags flew, and the Blue Angels obliged by flying past and back again, showering us with waves of sound that rattled windows and rippled the wading pools.

Through one stretch of pure woods, we experienced a flyover so low that both of us ducked inside the car. The sound of the plane overhead was like a a yard of duct tape being ripped off your naked eardrums. Farther on, more people, more cars, more flags, the occasional, helplessly grinning state trooper guarding an intersection, and oddly unhurried traffic away from the show. I drove just under 50 and was astonished that an old biker who could have been Paul Teutle, Sr, made no effort to pass. When he finally turned off, I tossed him a wave, and he gave me a nod.

I'm sure that Hillary and Obama believe there's no price to be paid for supporting the troops by defunding the American military machine. Maybe they're right. All I know is that there's a vast unknown reservoir of American devotion to the bravest and most heroic aspects of the American military. Even here in the blue states, we retain the ability to be inspired, to be humble in the face of our national greatness, and a desire to live up to that greatness when the critical moment comes.

This weekend we saw the Blue Angels. More importantly, we got a glimpse of the spiritual impact heroes can have on ordinary Americans. It's not just the noise and speed. It's more than that. 'Shock and awe' isn't about machinery. It's about what a proud, free people can do when they finally set their minds to do it.

UPDATE. Thanks to our friends at ColdFury.com for the link. What a kick-ass name for a blog.

UPDATE 06/08. There are blue states, and then there are blue states. Today, Michelle Malkin has a report that San Franciscans are seeking to ban the Blue Angels from their city during Fleet Week. These people really do need to be stood up against a wall and shot.

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