The biggest mansions on Burling and Orchard provide owners with 10,000 to 20,000 square feet of living space and likely cost them somewhere north of $20 million. But those with more modest fortunes can pick up a three-story home on a single lot for $3 million to $4 million...Chandler | Tribune
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General Motors Corp. said Tuesday it will lay off salaried workers, cut truck production, suspend its dividend and borrow $2 billion to $3 billion...yahoo AP/KC*
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Ford Motor Co.'s June sales drop 27.9 percent as high gas prices, sluggish economy take toll.Google/AP
With General Motors shares trading near their lowest levels in more than half a century and gasoline prices rising to record levels, the auto industry braced to deliver another bleak monthly report
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Post impetus generated by this from PWeiss:
Obama's biggest backers include members of Chicago's "billionaire first families," both Jewish: the Pritzkers and the Crowns.There was a show on TV in the 60's when everybody had a TV at home but everybody only got 3 channels (plus PBS) to pick from, and pretty much everybody watched TV at night, and so millions and millions, a big chunk of the American population watched this show called "The Beverly Hillbillies" which treated of the lives of a passel of twang-talkin white folk from some place in the mid-South who'd struck oil back home and moved to Beverly Hills with their new-found fortune. Buddy Ebsen was in it.
Here's a Tribune article about the "mammoth mansions" that Penny Pritzker, Obama's finance director, and a member of the Crown family are building right across the street from one another...
It had nice theme music if you like banjos, pretty young girls, handsome young guys, humorous crusty old folks etc.
And then in the 70's 80's and 90's with the culture of the television rerun retro thing a whole bunch of more millions were watching that show.
A lot of the humor hinged on the hillbilliness of the protagonists. It was alright to ridicule hillbillies then, in a way other distinct ethnicities could never be, as it had been since the word entered the lexicon.
It still is alright, as witness how often that descriptor was publicly linked to Lynndie England et al.
