Best of Instapunk.com (2004 to 2014)

 


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My World and Welcome to It

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     UPDATE: This post was last updated 4:15 pm, Feb 21, 2025. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made my own pilgrimage there once in my youth to have drink in the bar and imagine my favorites — Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Thurber — at play in black tie. The place felt empty and sad, darker in the afternoon ...
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The Constitutional Crisis that Isn’t

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The spelling authority relied on here is from the U.S. Gazetteer in Shuteye  Nation ,  which is also the source, by omission, that Rode Island doesn’t even exist. Not a Constitutional Crisis? What is it then? A judicial coup attempt launched by 6 shopped judges in 3 states, plus DC. Actually, only two states, since ‘Rode Island’ is just a Brahmin trick to give ‘Machusetts’ four senators. Of the judges, three are wymyn, three are myn, however these are defined anymore, three have Harvard law degrees, two have law degrees from anti-Christian formerly Catholic universities (one law degree doesn’t even count because it’s from Uhio), and all are left-wing Democrats.  Two kinds of proof are offered here. One is derived from ancient ritual practice called Logic, presently either unknown or odious to post-modern ‘Progressives,’ who need nothing more than the right drug regiment to arrive at the ephemera they describe as Truth and Justice. The other proof will be visual, whic...
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A Reclamation Project Begun

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As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.  There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’.  This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The orig...
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The Secret Life of a Clouded Brain

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  Click on the pic. It leads to a post describing a Tom Hanks skit on SNL.  That’s  what this post is about. More precisely, it’s about who this very  fortunate man really is under the greasepaint. He’s not James Stewart. Have you clicked and read the story about Hanks pissing off half a country that’s always wanted to love him? The caption might be a little overstated, true as it is, but it’s only one of three things this post is about. Tom Hanks, sure. But also the fact that I’m thanking him at the moment for making me do some long overdue reclamation work on a piece that has been effectively lost for a couple years now. I’ll get to the third thing later. The stupid Hanks performance reminded me that I had written a satirical piece about him that got effectively lost when one of my biggest blogs suddenly lost all its formatting in some administrative change by its provider, who were still billing me but could not be reached for troubleshooting services. They’d been...
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Tempest in a Foxhole — Mixed Metaphors & Mixed Messages

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  It’s kind of a big deal when the NYT slips a story through the paywall. Why this one? I was going to leave this story alone or tag it with a quip at Facebook when I first read about it at Gateway Pundit. They’ve already dumped it from their morgue of recent posts, but there were two more stories this morning that changed my mind. One at Breitbart about an on-air TDS one-liner at Fox Sports and another about the hairdresser’s lawsuit in the sports newsletter leaked through the paywall of the New York Times. The Times piece is excerpted above. The Breitbart post is a mere throwaway item, located far down the Main Page of the website with no names mentioned.  Here’s a quick clip of the show Breitbart was referencing: I think both publications sense that something significant is going on here, but they just don’t quite know what it is. That’s when the title of this post occurred to me. “Tempest in a Foxhole.” Mixed metaphor obviously. Tempest in a teapot is a standard dismissal....
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The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

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Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in ...
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