Jul 4/04

Back from various trips and full of stories to tell, especially the cars... Listings here will be sporadic through September, in preparation for a paper I will be presenting there. Meanwhile, thanks for visiting and enjoy!

May 18 / 04

Guv McGreevey is at it again! Someone buy this man a new office, or an extended vacation. And I'm not talking about this slice of populist stupidity:

McGreevey proposes millionaire's tax to fund property tax rebates
... The first aspect of McGreevey's plan would enact a 2.6 percent tax on income over $500,000.

Or is it half a millionaire, Guv? That aside, here's the latest on automobiles from the Guv. Now he's gonna solve the price of gasoline "crisis" by opening the spigots at Costco:

NJ Orders Costco To Open Pumps To Public
Motorists searching for cheap gas need not bypass the pumps at Costco if they are not members of the warehouse retailer, according to the state. Costco's membership requirement violated New Jersey laws regarding fuel sales, state consumer officials said.

Well, problem solved. Nah, the Guv that won't sit still will have another solution soon enough. Here's a suggestion: why not a gasoline tax rebate paid for with a millionaire's surcharge on gas for SUVs? But that won't do, for -- believe it or not -- New Jersey has among the lowest total state taxes per gallon of gasoline in the nation. See here (warning: Adobe pdf file):

Nationwide and State-by-State Motor Fuel Taxes, January 2004

Must make Guv McG's hands itch.

May 10 / 04

Where do we go with this one, out of Billings, MT:

Towing services lose money disposing of automobiles
On a recent winter day, a tattered BMW sat hoisted in one of the four stripping bays at Hanser's Automotive & Wrecker on South Billings Boulevard... a rollover had finished the car off. Too many miles and too little care rendered the compact sedan beyond redemption. Tread on the tires was nearly gone, and its seats were in shreds. The engine and transmission were shot. Nothing on the ancient hulk could be salvaged ... Since it was recovered after a rollover, the tow could have cost as much as $300, Hanser's Automotive owner Ralph Hanser said. Then Hanser's had to invest another $400 in paperwork and in the processes of draining the fluids, recycling them and stripping and cleaning the car in preparation for the crusher. "So we've got $700 into a car with no value,'' he said.

Perhaps it will make more sense when we look at this article:

China auto production up 25 percent in first quarter
China's burgeoning auto industry produced 1.3 million automobiles during the first three months of the year, up 25.63 percent from the same period in 2003, statistics showed.

Of these, 1.28 million were sold, a 28.98 percent rise on the previous period, the China Automotive Industry Association said. Some 576,900 sedans were made and 567,000 found buyers, up 41.86 percent and 44.47 percent respectively.

Welcome to the automobile glut, c.1928. Back then, worries were to too many used cars, too many old cars to junk, and too many new cars to sell. The worries were dead-on, as it turned out. 1929's record production of some 4.5 million cars wouldn't be matched until 1949.

Now, before you go gittin' all paranoid: Just because there was an automobile glut and a surfeit of useless old cars in 1929 and again today doesn't mean we're headed into a depression. Today's factory overcapacity could be trouble, but it doesn't have to be. Let's look at the up-side of it all, again going back to 1928. The year before, Ford shut down Model T production. Americans had dumped the T for bigger, faster, and better. 1929 brought the triumph of the eight-cylinder engine, and makers of the day's exotics were planning launches of twelve and sixteen cylinder engines (Cadillac and Marmon). Newer was always good and consumer credit was easy and spread. You want a car, you got it. The summer of 1929, however, makers noticed an increase in inventories. The glut had begun. Still, and even following the Market Crash and a million-1/2 drop in production, bottoming out at 1.1 million in 1932 (and thereafter building to 3.9 million in 1937, with ups and downs from there to WWII), people wanted cars. There just wasn't enough cash to go around. There were, though, lots of cheap used cars, including salvaged junked ones.

What kept 1932 down was not industry surplus. It was the general economy and stupid governance of it by way of shanking credit and currencies and tossing about of trade barriers, price controls, and workplace/labor regulation. 1929's surfeit of cars didn't have to last. So, God bless Chinese consumerism. I just hope we can all survive the inevitable crash. If they want the benefits of free markets, they're gonna have to lay off the command economy when the free lunch is over. Otherwise, it'll be all over.

Meanwhile, I'm glad there's no money in junk cars in Montana. Must mean good cars are easy to find.

May 4/ 04

General Motors founder Billy Durant has made Business Week's "innovators" list:

Billy Durant: Greasing Detroit's Wheels

William Crapo Durant was a maniac wildman who changed the world. Move over Henry Ford. Ford made fortune and history by making millions of the same thing. He had one brilliant idea and he beat it silly. Billy Durant was daring, and more visionary He would bring various makes and types together to provide large efficiencies to the production of a variety of vehicles in styles, prices, and brands. He made modern industry by making various things to fuel consumer demand for one or the other. Following Durant's GM, mass production must be variable, not just massive.

Durant was a maverick from beginning to end. He made and lost GM twice. He made and lost another car company in the 1920s. He was the sole dissenter of 1909's high automobile tariff, and he p.o.'d the industry with it. He was also a prescient voice in 1930, when he called for free trade in the face of protectionism that only magnified the economic crisis.

Billy Durant: American hero. Thank you, Business Week, even if your article on him is lame -- and wrong in a few places. For starters, the article gives too much credit to Ford. Also, if you read it, please note that Durant formed GM in late 1908, using Buick, which he took over the year before, as the platform. He definitively did not try to buy Chrysler in 1907 (as the article suggests) because GM wasn't yet formed and neither was Chrysler -- which came in the 1920s, and when he tried to buy Ford, the deal collapsed not because Durant didn't have bankers behind him, but because Ford wanted cash not stock.

Durant was playing chess to Ford's checkers. While Ford pumped out millions of Model T's, Durant's GM, which he lost then took over then lost again, was taking over the market based on Durant's original business model. In the mid-1920s, Ford nearly collapsed because GM proved that Americans of all buying power wanted style as well as function. Ford caved. His attempt to replace the Model T with another single, updated model, the A, failed, and Ford ultimate adopted the GM strategy of mixed, scaled products and prices.

Apr 30/ 04

As the last Oldsmobile falls off the line in Detroit (see here), The Washington Times reports that the Russian auto maker, ZIL, has been,

Saved by the Bell
As the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade ago, carmaker AMO ZIL faced a daunting challenge confronting thousands of state-owned enterprises: competing in a brave new world of open markets. The question was especially troublesome for ZIL, a producer of luxury limousines used by top Soviet-era Communist Party officials as well as less-glamorous trucks. Both lines saw plummeting sales as consumers opted for newly available Western imports. ZIL, in turns out, was saved by the bell.

...The company produced about 220,000 vehicles in the late 1980s. This year it made only 17,000. As Soviet communism and ZIL's vehicle sales began their slide, a professor of acoustics, Boris Nunin, suggested a new venture to Mr. Mashin. He noticed that Russian Orthodox churches all over the country were rebuilding after decades of neglect and destruction under Soviet authorities. The churches were filled with worshippers who were rediscovering their Orthodox roots.

Founded in 1916 (see here and here for ZIL history), this Soviet-era factory that has been unable to compete in the world economy now finds salvation in church bells. Yes, the irony is too good. Re-named in 1931 from AMO to ZIS (ZAVOD IMJENI STALINA), for Stalin, and later, after Stalin's death, to ZIL (Zavod Imeni Lihacheva), for its director, the company is now making church bells for those churches that Stalin destroyed. Delicious.

At the recent American Historical Association (AHA) conference, I represented automotive history. In and out of the interested few (wonderful folks), the largest attention to our beloved subject, I found, came from remnant academic Sovietologists who were interested in labor and automobiles only insofar as it included communist automobiles. I only wish I had this article to share.

The Washington Times gets it wrong in that ZIL made only trucks and limousines for Communist Party elites. ZIL produced hundreds of thousands of automobiles (and millions of trucks), obviously the cars were not all limousines. The Times might have gotten it better by pointing out that, while ZIL made limousines, it didn't make the millions of automobiles that a worker's paradise might require -- as did, uhuhm, the United States. The ZIL was not the everyman's car.

God bless American consumerism, of which Oldsmobile was an original and century-long, prominent factor. I will lament the demise of Olds, a result of market forces and bad management exactly the same as I will applaud ZIL's re-creation as a church bell manufacturer.

Hoorah!

Apr 29/ 04

I've had my fun with NJ Guv McGreevey, especially his lunatic solutions to road problems. Today, instead, we'll send our sympathies:

James McGreevey Involved in Car Crash
 New Jersey Governor James McGreevey was in a car accident Wednesday afternoon.

He's okay, but aide Sean Brennan was slightly hurt. State police say the governor's car was on Route one in Lawrence Township, when another driver made an illegal left turn in front of them.

He's always getting into trouble with turns to the left...

.Apr 28/ 04

Oh my, a long, long month... Got the slide show up of my Dayton presentation:

Early Automobiles and Airplanes: The Cultural Lag

The full article will show up in print later in the year. Enjoy this, meanwhile.

Apr 5 / 04

Breaking! Breaking! -- Honesty in traffic enforcement... get this:

White women more likely ticketed when pulled over
.... According to the data, white women were most likely to get ticketed when pulled over by police — 93.3% of the time. By comparison, black men were ticketed 88.2% of the time they were stopped.

No, no, that's not the news. In this article on that old story of racial profiling comes an amazing admission from  Nashville Police Chief Serpas, who stumbled into this amazing admission:

''The officers are using their experience and knowledge. I can't second-guess every decision they make,'' Serpas said. Giving a warning can also help remind people to pay more attention to their driving, he said. ''What we're out to do is change behavior,'' Serpas said. ''The No. 1 predictor for collisions is failing to pay attention.''
[underline mine]

All hail Chief Serpas! You let it slip, bud, and I know you didn't mean it. Running away from charges of racial profiling, you let slip this unmentionable in traffic policy and enforcement: "failing to pay attention" causes most accidents. Read between the lines: speed doesn't kill, stupidity does.

Perhaps NJ Governor McGreevey can go after stupidity rather than its by-products, such as stupid speeding, stupid drunk driving and stupid cell-phone use in cars.

Meanwhile, that dumb bitch in a Merc who the other day cut me off from the right lane to get into the Anthropologie parking lot, and who hadn't a clue I was next to her, was not Driving While Cell-phoning, she was driving stupid. After braking hard to avoid being hit, I busted around her and made the cell phone gesture to make sure she knew that she cut me off. I then followed her into the parking lot, as I was going to that store, too. She scatted away, probably whining to whomever she was talking to that some bald dude in a beat up Ford Escort was stalking her. She is but another of the idiots who provoke the Guv McGreevey's and their willing accomplices in the legislatures to criminalize cell phone use in cars.

 Cell phones don't cause accidents, speeding doesn't cause accidents, stupidity does. So glad to see that Chief Serpas has, and on behalf of traffic enforcers everywhere, finally admitted it.

Apr 4/ 04

Back from the Dayton conference at which I delivered a raucous, rockin' lecture on the origins of the Motor Age: Henry Ford, Wright Brothers, my man Taft, and the back-ass, anti-automobile politics of Theodore Roosevelt that suppressed the achievements of the Wrights and Ford and their respective industries as a whole. Taft liberated them all. I converted the audience. An historian came up to me afterwards and said in his years-long studies of the early 1900s he never realized the politics of it. So glad he caught on.

I'm posting a photo essay for a glimpse of the lecture (under construction). The paper will be published at the end of the year by the Society of Automotive Historians. The lecture was off-the-cuff and fun. Sorry you missed it!

Mar 15 / 04

Off blog while preparing for the SAH/NAAM  conference presentation on April 2 at Dayton (see News above).

Got lots to talk about when time avails. If you need some amusement, meanwhile, check out this anti-automobile website (anti-everything, actually, but this page is dedciated to protests against automobiles and Big Oil... oooh). Too funny!

See you soon!

Mar 10/ 04

Breaking news: a rare act of stupidity from the State of New Jersey that doesn't have Governor McGreevey's name on it!

Nissan sued over stolen headlights
New Jersey authorities sued Nissan North America Inc. on Monday, alleging the automaker failed to warn customers that the super-bright headlights on its Maximas were hot targets for thieves.

... "We allege the company sold cars with these fancy lights, but kept consumers in the dark about how attractive the headlamps were to thieves," said Reni Erdos, director of the state division of consumer affairs, which filed the suit. "Nissan's actions, or lack thereof, rendered consumers vulnerable to the criminals who targeted their vehicles."

A Google news search of  "McGreevey"  and "stolen headlights" didn't get a match. Maybe he's too busy hiding under his desk after this story broke: McGreevey's office hit with U.S. subpoena. Too bad for the Guv. What a great issue, defending Japanese car buyers and car thieves both! We've had fun with McGreevey and his hyperactive governance, so I'm frightfully sad his name isn't on this one.

Mar 9/ 04

Hope at home:

Buick Beats BMW in New Car Rankings, Survey Says
For the first time in 25 years, the influential Consumer Reports magazine says the reliability of Detroit car and truck brands is now slightly better, on average, than European brands, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported. Prestigious European brands Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Mini and Jaguar all ranked below average for reliability in 2003, based on results from the magazine's annual subscriber survey, which this year got 675,000 responses.

For cars less than a year old, the average problem rate for European cars was 20 per 100 vehicles, compared with 18 problems per 100 for traditional U.S. brands, such as Buick, Saturn or Dodge. U.S. makers still significantly trail Japanese and Korean auto makers, though. Asian auto makers held steady at 12 problems per 100 in the latest survey.

Watch out: Buick might just be the next great American car -- again. Oh, that and Cadillac. Check out this sucker: the Return of the Sixteen:

Sixteen - XV-16
The new GM XV16 concept engine, unveiled in the Cadillac Sixteen show car, builds on GM's leadership in advanced overhead-valve engine design and showcases a number of novel fuel-saving technologies in a surprisingly compact package.

.... GM's XV16 concept engine is a naturally aspirated, all-aluminum 13.6-liter V-16 that generates more than 1000 horsepower (746 kW) and 1000 lbs.-ft. (1356 Nm) of torque. Building on GM Powertrain's small-block V-8 engine architecture, the V-16 features many of GM's advanced next-generation valvetrain and fuel-saving technologies including 3-step Displacement on Demand.

Awesome stuff.

Feb 26/ 04

Just sent off an article to the great Automobile Quarterly magazine for which I spent the last three weeks insanely trying to secure information that couldn't be found. To know what you can't find is as important as finding it, although the uncertainty of it all is maddening. One can never prove a negative. Nevertheless, history deserves the best effort.

I've been dying to get back here and rant. Will have to start with a lovely incident on the way back from my journey tonight to Fedex to send in the AQ article. At a stop light I noticed that the Volvo S60 in the left-turn lane was shining its white reverse lights. The idiot had probably pulled into the intersection at the yellow or the red, backed back into the lane, and forget to get out of reverse. You've probably seen it before. I have. No matter how often seen it's a glorious sight: you count down the seconds to green knowing that the car will go backwards, not forwards at the press of the accelerator. No disappointment tonight: this Volvo shot backwards ten feet before the bastard hit the brake.

Oh, so lovely it is to enjoy someone else's pain... Now, off to my own.  See ya soon!

Feb 24/ 04

Apologies for the absence. Been working hard on a magazine article and a paper for a conference coming up next month. Been collecting things for you, meanwhile, and I can't wait to find a moment to put them up. Please check back in soon!

Feb 9 / 04

Lookie here, people voting with their free hand?

Drivers Soon Ignore Hands-Free Cell Phone Rule
...In March 2002, New York State put into effect a ban that prohibits all drivers from talking on a handheld cell phone while driving .... Before the ban, 2.3 percent of New York drivers talked on a handheld cell phone but this dropped to 1.1 percent immediately after the ban. But the effect was not long lasting. By March 2003, 2.1 percent of New York drivers were talking on a handheld cell phone, a percentage that was hardly different from before the ban.

You can't mess with Americans and their automobiles. Just as surely that a new law will follow the latest road disaster it will be ignored by the multitudes who will face neither enforcement of that law nor the laws of physics. Every American driver is a lawbreaker. Get in a car, and you break a law. Think about it: did you have your lights on at that first drop of rain? Did you remove your seatbelt to get your wallet to pay that toll? Did you do -- horrors! -- 42 in that 35 mph zone? You criminal.

The risk of being caught talking on the hand-held cell phone is either lower than the State needs or the consequence of getting caught isn't a deterrent. Either way, folks who break this law are making a simple economic choice: using the phone is worth more than getting caught costs. With cars, it's the same old story, starting with the first speeder over a hundred years ago. From day one the automobile has made scandals and scoundrels of us all.

Heh, that's just another great reason to celebrate it!

While you're here, see the Graphic of the week for the latest technology to assist chatty New York drivers.

Feb 6 / 04

At the January 1930 New York auto show, Cadillac presented the Sixteen, an astonishing marvel of that many cylinders and infinite dreams. Sixteen cylinders!

Who cared that the Cadillac traditional V-type engine meant those sixteen cylinders fit into a hood no longer than a Duesenberg straight eight, and that they produced fewer horses than the Duesy? Sixteen cylinders! Bad-ass, automotive bliss.

The Sixteen launched Cadillac. From its inception in 1903, when backers of Henry Ford bailed on that dreaming, scheming perfectionist for the second time and went to Detroit's best machinist, Henry Leland, to apply his "one-lunger," a brilliant and powerful one-cylinder engine, to a plain Ford chassis, instantly creating a perennial best car, to its 1909 test of stripping three cars into a common pile then reassembling them into three working cars and running them 500 miles, to its 1950s and 1960s supremacy in style, design, technology and comfort, Cadillac was the best built automobile in the world. Of all its cars, including the outrageous shark-finned 1959s, the 1930 Sixteen was the most outrageous, made altogether more outrageous for its timing, coming three months after the market implosion of October, 1929. That was not planned, as the Sixteen had been in development for three years. No matter, for over the next year the Sixteen sold out and drew attention and buyers to Cadillac dealers like nothing else, even amidst economic collapse.

Come the gas crisis, the EPA, and Jimmy Carter, Cadillac sank to what the moderns came to think of as a cushy, beastly, once-great old-folks' machine that once had a great name that no longer meant anything.

Over the last two years we have seen a brand repositioning the equal to the stunning 1930 introduction of the Sixteen. In business, this is revolution. You can't buy it. And if you could, it wouldn't last. While advertising operates in image and slogans, it has to stand somewhere. No base, it floats away. Cadillac took on not only a hot Zeppelin guitar riff, it has built a platform to sustain it. One result: the word "Cadillac" is back.

Cadillac, Mercedes battle over hip-hop throne
Move over Mercedes-Benz, Caddy is this month's king of cool, according to Americas trend-setting rappers and musicians. While the German luxury brand was the favored status-symbol of rappers last year, a review of the top 20 best-selling records in the United States in January shows that Cadillac was the hottest set of wheels this month -- at least in the eyes of America's music-makers.

"Don't want to meet your daddy, just want you in my Caddy," runs a line from "Hey Ya!" a tune by hip-hop band Outkast.

"If you ain't got no man, hop up on my Brougham, I keep it pimpin like an old man," says rapper Twista in Slow Jamz.

 I'm so glad to have Cadillac back. While I enjoyed LL Cool J yapping about his three Rolls-Royces, and while I have no problem with Dr. Dre and his Benzo, R-R is too alliterative (and what's up with "Benzo," anyway?). "Mercedes-Benz" just ain't lyrical, and no matter how Andre or Janis Joplin sing it, those four, equal syllables are plain. Compare it to Snoop Dog''s "Mutherfuckin' Cadillac," and you'll see what I mean.

Try "mutherfuckin' Mercedes-Benz." Only a good MC can say it right, and even then it's not natural. Snoop's goes four syllables to three, with accents on each of the last three. M-B requires two down-beats, whereas Cadillac has but one, or, if properly pronounced, none, as it properly has but two consonants -- an alliterative cannonball. It's all abut the K's at either end.

No matter the sounds, as GM learned in the Eighties and Nineties, without the product, there's no word. It don't work to rap about your father's Cadillac -- it's gotta be your own. I'm gratified not only that Cadillac is back in the popular lexicon, but that, finally, we have an American automobile ad campaign with a car to match. It's been a m-effin long time coming.

Feb 2/ 04

In my 9/30/03 column I suggested that the Administration was out to starve the Congress of highway funds, daring Congress to jack the gas tax or cave and go pay-as-you-go via tolls. (See also the 10/27/03 and 9/29/03 entries in which I warned that special interests and congressional hogs were after your gas tank.) Well, the Administration has won, and congratulations America:

Petri, Kennedy lead dueling visions for transportation bill

No, it's not that Kennedy. It's this one:

...Rep. Mark Kennedy, a Minnesota Republican in just his fourth year in Congress, has gained momentum for his more unorthodox solution: Allowing states to build tolls on interstate highways, to fund construction of new optional "FAST" lanes.

The gas tax assumes that automobiles and trucks will pay their share by their consumption of fuel, and that highway costs will be carried by specific users of fuel on behalf of society which in general benefits from that specific highway usage.

An alternative view is that since society in general benefits from highways society in general ought maintain them through general taxation. This has been generally expressed in the form of bonds which are to be paid by the gasoline tax or by general revenue.

Both solutions require general federal taxation. The debate in Congress has been over how much and not what. As noted by your host last September, this is about to change. With the federal debt escalating due to lower general tax receipts, and with antipathy of tax increases (thanks to tax cuts), general payments or increasing the gasoline tax is a dead trail.

The viable alternative -- and this is driven by the Administration -- is more and more specificity in the tax burden via direct user payments, i.e. tolls. Oops. Here's the opposition, coming from the office of gas-tax-hiker Rep. Young of Alaska:

"Tolling is one of the least popular ways to raise revenue for roads and bridges ... People who are subject to tolling would rather pay a little more at the pump than go through the entire process that tolling encompasses. If you had a national highway system set up on tolling you'd never get anywhere."

But what about everyone else who doesn't pay tolls?

They'll never notice. Hit 'em up boys. They'll yelp, but they're but a small corner of the pound.

Jan 29 / 04

A really fine definition of traction control from the great Click and Clack:

Magliozzi: Skid control not necessarily necessary
Tom: Basically, there are several skid-control devices now. There are antilock braking systems (ABS), which keep you from skidding when you're stopping. There's traction control, which keeps you from skidding when you're accelerating. And then there's electronic stability control, which keeps you from skidding when you're turning.

Ray: What about Liquid Tide? Doesn't that have something to do with eliminating skid marks, too?

Tom: Ignore my brother, Meg. Stability control corrects for oversteer and understeer. Basically, it looks at where you put the steering wheel and compares that with where the vehicle is actually going. If the two lines are different, stability control uses the ABS system (and, in most cases, throttle position) to correct the line of the car and keep you on the road.

Even I undestand it now with that simple, clear definition. Much to be learned there, and not just about cars. My compliments to the boys.

Jan 27 / 04

Got into a touch of trouble over my essay on SUVs, Hating Life (and the SUV). One reader demanded to know if she owns an SUV because she's "arrogant," "vain" or "nervous about her marriage." None of the above, I told her, it's because she's short. Elsewhere, I've been challenged on the link between breast implants and suicide, which, you must understand, was relevant to my dissertation on the SUV. So I put up a link to a medical journal article on the subject. Ah, the onward march of science...

Other readers pointed to the incomprehension by inhabitants of the New Yorker offices as to the U in SUV. One gave proof by way of a Snopes.com photograph of some idiot who loaded a pallet of plywood onto a subcompact. You gotta see it: The Lumber Car. That oughta settle the matter of the Utility of the larger car.

Meanwhile, teen angst played out against SUVs down in Houston:

Teens arrested for smashing 'decadent' SUVs
A former Cy-Fair High School student serving five years' probation for felony arson in a flag-burning case headed a group of self-described environmental guerrillas who vandalized almost 50 sport utility vehicles, officials said Tuesday.

"Environmental guerrillas"? Too much knowledge, or just a product of modern anti-automobilism? Damn, as kids, we never, ever conjoined philosophy with vandalism. It was a purely aesthetic experience, in between doing really, really stupid things in my mom's station wagon... 9, maybe 10 mpg coming from that old Buick 354.

For my essay on automobiles and philosophy c.1912, see The Motor Bandits: The Motor Bandits: Cars, Crime, and Philosophy. These guys were much more amusing -- and deadly, than today's enviro-punks.

Jan 26/ 04

Your host v. the New Yorker Magazine on the SUV

Jan 23 / 04

Photographer Helmut Newton Dies in Crash
Newton, 83, was pulling out of a parking lot at the Chateau Marmont Hotel just off Sunset Boulevard at about noon when he lost control of the Cadillac he was driving and crashed into a wall

Here for a photo of the crash. Ten bucks says the airbag got him. (Oh, it was a Caddy SUV...)

While you ponder your financial future, enjoy this story:

Streakers Watch As Their Car Is Stolen

Jan 21 / 04

Yesterday your host went on about drunks and legislators and toughening laws against the worst offenders (Jan 20). The news today brings confirmation:

Proposed law would prevent drunk drivers from buying automobiles
...White said the initiative is one more step his office is taking to try to keep the most dangerous drivers off the roads of Illinois. White pointed to a fatal crash that occurred last year as the impetus for the legislation. A drunk driver whose license had been revoked since 1995 slammed his vehicle into a porch killing four people. The driver had purchased his vehicle just three months prior to that wreck despite the fact he was ineligible to drive.

What, no license no car? What will the ACLU have to say about this? Reality says that the guy would find a way to buy a car if he wanted to buy a car. He'd go to New Jersey (calling Gov. McGreevey!) or Maryland. Why, we must make it a Federal law, then!

Sausage making at its best, friends.

Jan 20 / 04

Had a fascinating conversation with someone who is in the business of promoting automobile safety. He's all about seatbelts and teen and drunk driving. Some people just don't wear seatbelts, it seems. I'm not one to demand legislative enforcement of it. I'd rather the States outlaw stupidity first. Neither that nor seatbelt laws would change much, I'm afraid. As for teens, they just get into more and worse accidents than any other demographic, and States are vigorously chasing them down with such laws as to limit them to driving with one adult passenger, etc. That, too, strikes me as futile, but, heh, it's the democratic way: legislatures must act! Unless, of course, some influence pulls harder the other way. Teens, drunks, and the seatbelt-less don't have much of a lobby. Sure, libertarian types are out there protesting the safety nannies, but they do it on behalf of principle, not the teens and the drunks.

Wait a minute -- I'm told that the drunks do have a lobby. I shoulda known it. But of course!

Drunk driving is ever a problem. The drunks won't go away. States have lowered tolerance levels (such as .08) and outlawed what in the South they still call "toters" -- that drink you take with you on the drive. Now they're going after the serious drunks, the ones who don't mind being arrested, who don't mind losing their license, and who don't remember having run down that nun. The noose is going up for those types. But that's about it. There won't be any further tightening of the blood alcohol levels, it is the theory of my informant, for no matter the demands of MADD and the AAA, the average, lamented and regretful drunk driver indeed has a champion. Standing between you and MADD and that fourth drink is none other than... The Lawyers.

But of course! They make serious cash off drunks, defending them, suing them. They'd rather not see the problem go away. And, guess what profession is most common among State legislators... You got it, The Law. And, says my informer, as far as the good old boys in the State capitols are concerned, keeping blood alcohol limits high is an act of self-defense... So go ahead and test your body. Your attorney was a D.A. He'll cut a deal.

So is it two or three beers an hour? Was that shot of whiskey really the equivalent to one beer, or did that nice tip you gave the bartender return a double on round two? You've got a guardian angel. Go right ahead. $200 an hour.

Jan 12 / 04

Just up a new essay on the outrageous and the outrage of the Motor Bandits

Enjoy!

Jan 4 / 04

Back from Christmas vacation, and survived severe testing of the earth's gravitational pull, a.k.a. skiing the Mt. Sugarloaf, Maine ice. As for automobiles, the trip was built around testing/ breaking in a lovely new LEXUS GS300. No, it's not mine, and, yes, its owner was mighty scared about it all, a test that included the upper half of I-95, dirt and ice Maine roads, two children, and my CD collection. And yes, one of said children puked in Connecticut. The fine, leather interior and parchment white outer paint was, mostly, spared. The rest of the trip the slightest "Daddy?" sent the front seats into Code Orange.

The Lexus fared it all magnificently, especially my final pull around the left-lane bastards at the I-495/I-270 split just before the final exit to back home. Said owner got nervous with my driving -- or showed it -- for the first time all trip as I popped the electronic manual shifter into 3rd at about 65 and jammed it up to I-Won't-Say how many mph's, then smashed brakes at the exit. I had to suppress that "woo hoo!" I'd perfected on that one good run at Sugarloaf (damn!).

Too much fun.

So here's the review: entirely solid car with no defects, starting with enough trunk for the four of us and winter clothes. Road feel is good, and not too-good, as one gets with the Teutonic "driving cars," while far better than the old American floaters. Didn't for an instant feel OOC, although I didn't try. Heh, it happens sometimes, and it didn't once, not even under serious at-speed gittin' around the New Haven construction between Jersey walls and huge trucks. Eight+ hours driving and I didn't get leg-tired once. The engine doesn't lack a thing. It's ever there when needed, especially in the tranny's automatic "sport" mode, which allows higher rpm shifts than standard auto. The manual shifter works great, but quickly becomes tedious. It's fun to have, though, and fun when in the mood.

My favorite luxury feature is the open-windows button on the key. You stand by the car, hold down the unlock button, and all the windows open, sunroof included. The best we could figure was it'd be useful if a baseball or missile or something was coming, and you could lower the windows to let it pass with no shattered glass, or if a quick escape requires jumping into the driver's seat through the sunroof from the 3rd floor of a Monaco hotel. I really can't think of any other reason to open the windows from the outside, and that includes airing it out on a hot day, for the machine's got a fine and strong A/C to which that'd be an insult.

Best of all, it's a true sedan -- four doors, poised, and comfortable -- yet and ever the proper coach for riding and driving. The GS300 is a marvelous car, and the owner is justifiably proud.

Web review of the car here: automotive.com
Lexus website: GS specs

Dec 17 / 03

Back from NYC and full of motoring thoughts, especially after near death from crazed New York mothers and ramming baby carriages. I'll take New Jersey turnpike 18-wheelers in snow storms over maniac driven, twin-infant, drop-top, all-weather plastic-draped baby carriages that own 5th Avenue sidewalks.

More on that soon. Meanwhile, here's a fun one:

Parking ticket finally gets paid
The Athens [Georgia] Downtown Parking System received an envelope Friday with payment for a downtown parking violation on Clayton Street - from 1965 .... the $1 cash payment came in an old Parking System envelope, with an old 5-cent stamp - and a newer 32-cent stamp - attached. In addition to the fine, the envelope came with a note: ''I forgot to send this dollar back in 1965. I added a 32-cent stamp to the envelope. Sorry, Gary Peacock.''

Awesome! And now for some serious bizness...

While it may be smog-free, smugness is the worser pollutant of the Toyota Prius. One owner of this "hybrid" gasoline-electric automobile bragged to the Oregon newspaper, the Register-Guard:

"It's very easy to drive, it's very comfortable and it saves a lot of money," he said. "And it's environmentally sane."
 (Current Trend: Hybrid cars give owners a charge)

But wait-- the self-satisfieds are in for a fixin' I'm not sure they can handle. The same article notes:

Toyota plans to unveil a hybrid Lexus RX 330, its luxury SUV, next fall. And late next summer, Ford will start selling its first hybrid electric vehicle, the Escape SUV. The Saturn Vue SUV and the GMC Sierra, Chevrolet Silverado and Dodge Ram pickup trucks also are slated for hybrid versions.

An environmentally-friendly SUV? (See the August 28 entry for the Eco-terroriests and SUVs.) What are the hyperactives to do? Can they, as F. Scott Fitzgerald defined intelligence, hold opposing thoughts in sanity, or is there, ultimately, no incongruity between hatred of a gas-guzzling SUV and hatred of a 50mpg SUV? Until it gets 75 mpg it's a damnation. Or 100, or, or... no matter what, it's the killer of Kyoto accords and flying emblem of America at its worst.

It's the SUV and not the engine that offends. Back in the anti-automobile early days, nobody complained about yachts, for hardly anyone ever saw them. But get in the back of a limousine, and there was hell to pay. Indeed, appearances are everything. They'll still hate the SUV, hybrid engine and all. Don't count on feel-good satisfaction from car owners who just want a good ride. It ain't mpg one wants out of an SUV, and it ain't gonna get a pass from car-haters and Prius owners.

I wonder if the greenies at Ford marketing have really thought this one through. Doubtful.

Dec 10 / 03

Off to NYC for an awesome time! See you next week!

Some busy work, meanwhile, can be found here:

Want a cigarette blackmarket and all the violence that goes with it? Raise taxes super high and go here: The deadly butt-leg war

Good speeding (bad driving): Unsafe at Any Speed

Bad speeding (good driving): Speeding Isn't Funny 

But no, Hillary's gonna save you from it all!: Hillary Clinton Joins Fight for National Seatbelt Law Yikes.

And If Hillary doesn't get you to feeling the flu, here's George Soros... again... Shut Up! The Bubble of American Supremacy

 Alright, you've got your homework, politics and automobiles.

Dec 7 / 03

Catching up on some stories today. First up is a sure winner for NJ Guv McGreevey, Superhero to the Oppressed and Fixer of All Things. If he hasn't got his hands in this one, he'll be there soon. No more worry (and new laws) over sleepy drivers, Guv McG, here's the latest bogeyman for ya, from the TimesLeader, "Northeastern PA's homepage" (and, yes, the article comes of Trenton, NJ)::

Collection agencies targeting E-ZPass violators
Thousands of E-ZPass users who have failed to pay their fines will be hearing from a collection agency. Violators have racked up $12 million in unpaid tolls and fees since late March, officials said. That includes $125,000 owed by the top ten toll cheats, who are now receiving letters demanding that they pay up.

I'll google "EZ Pass and McGreevey" in a few days and see what comes up. I'll bet he can't resist. Okay, I couldn't resist. I did it now. Google brings 644 hits. The good news is that the first story ain't so bad:

Governor McGreevey unveils high speed E-ZPass

Speed is good. It's funny, though. Let's see how nearby Guvs do (I'm choosing the highest counts from the various spellings of E-ZPass EZ-Pass, EZ Pass, etc.): NY's Pataki gets 551 hits. MD's Ehlrich gets 134. PA's Rendell and EZ Pass" lands 111.  Guv McGreevey -- you da man!

Playing Google and McGreevey brought me to this one, dated Oct 31/03:

NEW POLL: McGreevey's Troubles Go Beyond Approval Ratings
Voters Rank Him "One of the Worst Governors," in New Jersey History by a 3:1 Margin, Say They are "Embarrassed" by Him, and that It's Time to Give Someone New a Chance The New Gray Davis?

"The New Gray Davis"? Ouch.

Regulars here will recognize the McG name. (See the end of the Dec 2 cars entry for links to other McG entries). Really, it's not my fault. I landed on the McG by accident. He does silly things. I just report it. Oh, Guv McG, if you'd have let us alone, we wouldn't laugh at you so much. Oh, and this:
QUIT MESSING WITH OUR CARS!

Next up are a couple fun stories for ya. No comments, for they speak for themselves:

Stylist's Hair Catches Fire at Gas Pump
ALBANY, Ga. -- A hair stylist was pumping gas into her car when her hair burst into flames. "That scared me to death," said stylist Traci Marshall. The fire was probably caused by static electricity from Marshall's hair rubbing against her clothes, said her husband, Camilla firefighter Lt. Bill Marshall. The static electricity apparently mixed with gas fumes and ignited the fire Sunday.

Man with over 400 arrests sent to prison
ANDERSON, Ind. (AP) - A 74-year-old man who has been arrested at least 400 times was sentenced Monday to 17 years in prison on drunken driving charges. Virldeen Redmon of Anderson was arrested in July while driving even though his license had been suspended for life following scores of alcohol-related offenses. Redmon's latest conviction was on charges of driving while intoxicated, endangering a person and driving while suspended.

Police have been arresting him since 1947, including three times since June. Redmon has had his driver's license suspended for life five times. In 1996, a judge sentenced him to 9-1/2 years in prison for driving under a lifetime suspension and public intoxication. The judge reduced the sentence in 2001 and released him after a doctor testified that Redmon suffered from health problems.

Dog Caught Opening Car Doors: Video Captures Canine Seeking Shelter Inside Family Car
Members of the Leroy family in Washington thought they were the target of a prankster when they kept finding a stray dog inside their parked car. Intent on catching the culprit, they set up a video camera to record the vehicle. However, they were surprised at what they caught on film. The video captured the dog as she opened the car door on her own and climbed inside.

Dec 2 / 03

Had a "there but for the grace of God" moment yesterday when I got to watch a woman wipe out on the Capitol Beltway at 60 mph. Merging on to the highway, I noticed that a car ahead was heading off the road. You see this, as drivers get distracted. Usually they correct it over the line or the rough pavement. This car kept going, moving steadily over the oversized shoulder and boom! into the wall, which it struck at an angle. The driver reacted just before the impact, and threw the wheel to the left. That, with the impact, shot the car back across the highway. I can see it in slow motion, crossing in front of three lanes of cars. Somehow, it slipped threw and landed on the median containing wall with another Boom!

I stopped to the right, now ahead of the car. Seeing that others had stopped from behind her, I moved on, figuring I could be no more help and that I'd only get in the way being on the other side.

Reminded me of the time in the pre-cell phone days that I had to run over a field to make a 911 call for some old man that went off Route 29 just north of Charlottesville. A doctor had stopped, too, and he attended the guy while I made the call. When I got back, the doctor headed for his car. He told me that the man was okay and just not to let him move. He didn't want to be around when names were taken. He probably already had lawyer burns for helping someone, and he didn't want to be around for another run in court.

I'll assume the women was okay. She was upright and the car, an economobile, amazingly, didn't flip. One of the cars that almost hit hers was an SUV. The irony there is that while her small car would have been crushed by the SUV, if she were in a SUV, she would have flipped.

Two morals here: 1) you never know; and 2) don't do your make-up in the car. Shall we ask Governor McGreevey of NJ to make a law against it? (For Guv McG's stories, see the Nov/11 and Nov/17 cars entries and the Oct/21 politics entry)

Dec 1 / 03

In 1908, Jules Jusserand proclaimed that the automobile was the fulfillment of man's long dream for locomotion:

This the men before us could do only in their imagination. The Orientals had King Solomon's carpet, Ruggiero had his hippogriff, Rabelais had his movable road, we have our automobiles, and we equal them all.

Jusserand's enthusiasm has, c. 2003 fallen to this from the Sacramento Bee:

Another crisis for Schwarzenegger: Increasing traffic congestion
We Californians' symbiotic relationship with our cars and the roads we traverse is a well-established sociological phenomenon, born of our notion, perhaps misguided, of freedom to go anywhere and do what we want, whenever we please. And we exercise those assumed privileges by driving over a quarter-trillion miles each year.

Our writer, Dan Walters, ain't exactly enthused by the automobile. So much for Ruggierio and Rabelais. The automobile is no longer legend, it's a "sociological phenomenon."  And now to the Guvernator and his problems with modern sociology:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who used to drive a Hummer on Los Angeles freeways when he was a private, if famous, citizen, paid homage to that special connection in two gubernatorial decrees. The new governor reversed two unpopular actions by predecessor Gray Davis -- one of those rare Californians who didn't drive -- by reducing property taxes on cars by billions of dollars, and pressuring the Legislature to repeal a new law that granted driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Schwarzenegger's governorship, however, faces a more serious, if less evident, transportation crisis. Simply put, the state is rapidly running out of money to expand its transportation systems, especially highways, in the face of ever-increasing demand, largely because billions of dollars have been diverted into the state's general fund to cover deficits.

Walters can't even find joy in the Governor's victories over the car tax and licenses for illegals (oxymoron alert!). Screw that, Walters. In 1902, your kind complained about speeders. In 1906, your kind blamed socialism on the envy created by rich automobilists. In 1932 your kind complained that President Hoover's car was too nice. In 1952, your kind said that a national road system was impractical and expensive. It's always and ever the same: nope, can't do it, won't do it, na na na. I'm not a non-believer, Mr. Walters. We've got mighty bad traffic here in DC, and I just deal with it, screaming included. No matter how bad it is, though, I'll ever love the automobile, including my own (no matter how crappy it is). And no matter what, I'll never give an inch to Walter's and his self-loathing. Is it, Mr. Walters, "misguided" this "freedom to go anywhere and do what we want, whenever we please." (Mind the speed limit, please..) No thank you. I'm with Mr. Jusserand.

Long live the automobile!

Elsewhere, and for some positive thinking, see the Graphic of the Week (link above) for a new idea in auto-motion.

Nov. 28 / 03

Just back from Miami, where I got in some amazing car-watching. Like L.A., South Florida is an automobile marketers' toy house. Miamians would blow the insurance money on a down-payment towards seven-years of monthlies on a new Merc before fixing the roof of the house after a hurricane. They'd rather no house than no car. The car to Miami is the all and the everything. L.A. ain't nothing to Miami, if only because in Miami all they've got is the car. I wandered parking lots of cheap condo parks and counted hood ornaments. I followed one guy in a new and very yellow Corvette into an apartment building that'd embarrass even your worst New York lanlaw. Never mind the bed bugs, damn, he was gonna look good in that car. Ya gotta wonder what he does when he actually gets the girl into the car. "Heh baby, wanna go to your place?"

Cars in Miami are tricked out one way or another. The most expensive option at the Honda dealer is no spoiler for the Accord. Try blue neon on the dash of the Infiniti. Try low riding in a 320i. They even trick out '84 Impalas, jackin' 'em with truck tires and purple velour over the seats. Yes, you can still buy velour in Miami. And yes, you can get that Boxster in chartreuse.

The great thing about Miami, though, is that they actually drive these things. It's been years since I was run down by a sports car in DC. In Washington you get lawyers with 160 mph speedos and self-imposed rev-limiters that left-lane sit at 57 mph. They actually use the dashboard in Miami. Coming over the Miami Beach causeway I could only cheer when a Porsche blew smoke at the green light. That baby had to have hit triple-digits at the top of the bridge. Yeah, yeah, death and ruined lives and all that. Go up to the top of this page and hit the button for my article on speeding in 1902. Your outrage is that old. And so is joy at a fast car actually driven fast.

I'm sorry, I like that kind of thing.

Nov 20 / 03

Bromley's off burning his scalp in Miami for a week. Best to all, and please check in for tales and adventures on the trip starting up again right here a week from today.

Nov 17 / 03

Been that long since I logged on? Hurrump. Thanks for your patience. Maybe I've been busy having more fun that you.

So here's the latest on automobiles. First up comes from our wacky friends up north:

P.E.I. throne speech promises limits on automobile insurance rates
A promise of new legislation that will put limits on Island auto insurance rates was formalized in this week's speech from the throne.

You think that's confusing, hell, not only do they have a throne, they think they can just cap insurance costs, and voilá, liberté, fraternité y insuré.

Calling NJ Guv. McGreevey, calling Guv McGreevey! (see 11/11 entry) Your socialist friends up in -- where the hell is this? Prince Edward Island? yeah, whatever -- have a plan for you. Snap of the fingers, stroke of the pen... cool, law of the land. Ain't fairy tales nice?

Sorry, P.E.I and your thrones, you just made auto insurance expensive for everybody.

Nov 11 / 03

Here he goes again. Our good friend, New Jersey Guv. McGreevey is back at it to save us by killing us (see entries Nov 3 cars and Oct 21 politics). I dont know what it is about this guy. He's got bad Bromley Karma or something, but I can't swing a cat through the newspapers without scaring up another of his inanities. I swear it, I'm not tracking the guy. I see something stupid in the news and two out of three times it's old Guv. McGreevey again. Here's the latest:

$1 a day keeps some motorists legal
CRANBURY -- Gov. McGreevey went to a New Jersey Turnpike rest area yesterday to frame the announcement that low-income motorists can purchase auto insurance for a dollar a day in the state with the nation's highest premiums. "There is no longer any excuse for any citizen to refuse to drive without auto insurance," said McGreevey at the Turnpike's Molly Pitcher Rest Stop. New Jersey law requires motorists to carry insurance. This has been a burden on many inner-city residents who need transportation to reach jobs in the suburbs and industrial parks.

A buck a day, that's all it takes. Go Guv McGreevey. Straight to France or some other socialist country where State policies are all about the unfairness of wealth. Guv McGreevey is like the cop who stopped a suicide by shooting the guy. And he needs a similar reprimand from his superiors: "Not an acceptable method." McGreevey's little plan to make New Jersey auto insurance affordable for the poor is going to make it more and more and more expensive for the rest. NJ is already tops on the premium list of all states.

Please, please, Guv. McGreevey, please stop trying to save us from ourselves.

Nov 6 / 03

From the Christian Science Monitor,

Court weighs legality of roadblock searches
.... Anyone who has flown on a commercial jetliner has endured random, suspicionless searches by government authorities. In a different venue, such government action would be a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. But metal detectors, luggage scanners, and pat-downs at airport departure gates are authorized as "reasonable" in recognition of the threat posed by terrorists. So what about a police roadblock set up to help investigate an unsolved crime?

No, no, no, says a drunk driver who was nabbed at an "informational" roadblock set up as a dragnet for another crime. Who's he kidding? This is the Rhenquist Court, and it counts to ten like this, "1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10." Ain't no such thing as a Fourth Amendment in that math. At least not if Justice O'Connor's in a mood that day. The Monitor continues,

The case is significant because it is expected to clarify when law-enforcement officials may use roadblocks - including sobriety checkpoints. And it comes at a time when the government is adopting increasingly tight security measures in the on-going war on terrorism.

One last drink, anyone?

Nov 3 / 03

The Nov/Dec AAA World magazine (sorry, no link) advises that we'd better not Drive While Fatigued (FWT) in New Jersey.

Wake Up Call (p. 20)
Jersey drivers could be thrown in jail for driving fatigued.

How they gonna know? Too much yawning on the Turnpike? ("Gee, Mr. Ossifer, I'm not tired, I was just bored by the stupid traffic.") Or will there be a coffee count at rest stops? ("Sorry, son, that's the fourth time you've peed in an hour, and you peed on your shoes this time. You're under arrest.")

The law comes to us, as do all Nanny Laws, in reaction to a horrible incident, and yes, yes, the lawmakers shall act! This one is "Maggie's Law," named for some poor innocent slaughtered by a moron driving on 30 hours of open-eyed fatigue. Under the new law he'd have gotten a 2nd degree charge and the full 10 years in jail and $100K fine.

Of course, like all these idiot laws such as cell-phone bans, responsible fatigue is out the window with one bad classmate. At least NJ Governor McGreevey can feel better at not getting his anti-growth bill (see politics entry here). Cool, slash of the pen, law of the land, no more dead Maggies.

What the Jersey legislature should have done is to make penalties more severe for harm caused by negligent acts, such as DWF, cell phone use, etc., rather than outlaw such behavior altogether. Really, it makes more sense, it is more fair, and it would make for much more fun in the courts. Instead, we outlaw potential rather than consequence.

Can't go there -- might lead to reasonable drunk driving and speed laws, won't it? Okay, make that argument, but what about the opposite, the severe restrictions on our liberties just because someone else abused them? I find that much more dangerous.

Oct 27 / 03

Here comes another newspaper serial story on the dismal state of American roads, this time from the Washington Post yesterday:

A Cheaper, Faster Way
Whenever Tina Kinney hears politicians offer ways to fix the traffic jams that extend her hour-long commute and determine everything from where she lives to when she buys groceries, she rarely hears solutions that would ease her pain today, this year or even next. Most often, Kinney said, discussions about reducing traffic seem to get stuck for years in debates over whether to build mega-projects that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and do little to help her life in the short-term ... "I get very frustrated because I feel like there's so much that could be done -- simple, common-sense things," Kinney said. When asked for relatively quick, affordable ways to reduce traffic, Kinney and other Post readers had plenty of ideas: Crack down on double-parked vehicles that create bottlenecks. Remind highway drivers, particularly on the Beltway, that the left lane is for passing...

... other solutions are same old, such as telecommuting, parking restrictions, better timed lights, bike paths, and so on. What's really going on here is that the hated "big" projects are tied up in politics, lawsuits and bad leadership.

Advocates for expanding the highway network say only more roads .... Environmental groups say the long-term solution lies not in building and widening roads, but in focusing development around transit stops and moving away from the car-dependent sprawl that creates more traffic.

The debate has grown more contentious in the past decade, often blocking attempts to reach any agreement on plans to combat congestion, local officials said. But today, many public officials and transportation experts are beginning to focus on shorter-term, affordable and less-controversial fixes. That is partly because nobody has the money to fix the big problems, whether they be via transit systems or roads. Some transportation planners also say shifting the focus could help the region get beyond a roads-vs.-transit stalemate that has diverted attention from other potential traffic busters.

"I think there has been a kind of paralysis of decision-making for the years I've been here," said Ronald F. Kirby, transportation planning director for the Council of Governments since 1987. "The little things that could have been done kind of got lost in the larger debate. . . . The bigger issue of whether to build more roads or not was so overwhelming in people's minds that they just didn't want to talk about anything else until they settled those issues."

At least he admits it. So what of those small projects? Today's article in the Post is on telecommuting (here). Ain't gonna happen, or it ain't gonna clear the roads. None of the small projects will change a thing. It's either more roads or not. The Enviros are clear on this issue. What about you? Me, I want more roads. And I will take one of the small projects, only I want action, not advice. From the article,

Remind highway drivers, particularly on the Beltway, that the left lane is for passing...

When's the last time you were "reminded" not to drive 85? I want the left lane huggers gunned down, or ticketed, or something. But reminded? Never ceases to amaze how reporters prefer mush.

Oct 23 / 03

Just one of those stories that if you haven't seen it you just got to: Remember the Chevy "No va" that read "Doesn't Run" in Mexican? Well, GM marketing has committed rhetorical suicide once again, this time up north:

Embarrassed GM to Rename Car With Risque Overtones
General Motors Corp will rename its Buick LaCrosse in Canada because the name for the car is slang for masturbation in Quebec, embarrassed officials with the U.S. automaker said on Thursday.

There's gotta be a market for it somewhere... I mean, why not go with it? With with the LaCrosse and its U.S. cousin, the Wanker, Buick could pull the fastest repositioning in marketing history. Just no explaining that sudden popularity of the stodgy old brand with 16 year old boys. What's next, an endorsement from Peewee Herman?

See graphic here

Oct 22 / 03

A friend sends some interesting links on speeding, the first one with the comment, "why the f-- does a state government need to have a speed limit resource page?" here:

Speed Limits Resources
MN. Statute 169.14 establishes statutory speed limits on most typical roadways under ideal conditions. All other speed limits are set by the DOT Commissioner based upon an engineering and traffic investigation.

Actually, this is a good thing it's up on the web. State traffic engineers are a peculiar breed who vary from the contemptuous to genius. My sad experience in Virginia was with one of the former category. What an ass. The first thing out of his mouth in reply to my question about a lunacy-causing 35-mph speed limit on a four-lane stretch of road was, "So how much was your speeding ticket?" Not a good start. I didn't endear myself to him with, "I didn't, and if I did it'd be none of your effin business, outside of it paying your salary. And you, sir, are an asshole." I did not receive a satisfactory answer to my question -- and not because of mutual contempt. His explanation was stupid, something to do with average speeds, distances between intersections and merging traffic, all of which led me to the conclusion that the limit at that very favored Fairfax County Police speed trap ought be fifty at a minimum.  So check out that link, for it does the citizens a service with its easy glimpse into the tortured thinking behind speed limits

The other link my friend offers is a has a history of traffic control in Great Britain:

Road Safety and the Institute of Road Safety Officers

And yes, I detailed the development of speed limits in my book, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency. And yes, Taft was pulled over for speeding. And finally, this fun link:

Alabama's SPEEDTRAP LOTTO

Oct 16 / 03

Some car ad during the ALCS game had a polar bear getting into the passenger seat. Struck me as a misrepresentation of the species -- I mean world's largest carnivor wouldn't settle for a ride in the passengers seat, would he? Well, seems like he wouldn't. From the News.com.au site:

Polar bear kills last villager
 A polar bear has killed the last villager on Russia's Vrangel island off the northern Chukotka peninsula, scientists at a local reserve said today. The reserve's workers attempted to save Vasilina Alpaun, who was attacked on her own doorstep, but were too late. ... Bears roam free on the island and are rarely aggressive, the reserve's director Leonid Bove said, adding that the woman most likely provoked the animal.

The island's last resident? What'd she do to the bear -- invite it into her U-Haul?  This ain't right.

Oct 12 / 03

Last week was a busy one and was away, so no new entries.  Started out with the taping of an interview of me for a History Channel "Modern Marvels" show on presidential transportation. The producer and cameraman were excellent and mighty professional. It was great fun, and I can't wait to see the product.

Meanwhile, while I'm catching up, you can catch up on me at the new entry to the website, Bromleyism Archives, with assorted essays from back when I had more time for that sort of thing. Although a few years old now, you might have some fun with the stories of my really bad car, thoughts on speeding,  speed limits and enforcement, and a body-slam at bad drivers of good cars. Also some political stuff therein.

Thanks for your patience, and have fun at the archives!

 Oct 4  / 03

Here are two gems for ya, on fun and games with cars and crime:

Man Steals $729K Ferrari After Test Drive
ARDMORE, Pa. - Where do you hide a $729,000 Ferrari during rush hour? That's what police in the Philadelphia suburbs want to know, after a con man drove off with a red Ferrari F50 during a test drive. The Ferrari F50 — which can hit 60 mph in less than 4 seconds and tops out at 203 mph — hasn't been seen since. Police theorize it was hustled into a trailer and quickly shipped overseas for sale on the black market.

The company made just 349 of the eye-popping Italian roadsters — described by one car-enthusiast Web site as "part Batmobile, part ballistic missile" — in 1995 to commemorate its 50th anniversary. It was designed to be a street version of a Formula One race car. The thief, a nattily dressed man who claimed he had flown up from Atlanta and had a limo waiting nearby, took the test drive Sept. 16 without producing a license. The ID, he said, was in the wallet he had left at the airport. ... Now they're looking for the con man, described as a 6-foot, slender white male with reddish-brown hair and glasses.

 Ah, the power of image -- a limousine still works! And then there's this one, a classic case of brain freeze:

Suspected Staged Accident Turns Deadly
A car crash allegedly staged for insurance money took a deadly turn, and investigators said the suspect and the victim were working together. ... Lawrence Police Chief John Omero said staged accidents are a thriving business in Lawrence. The city has the highest level of automobile insurance fraud in the state, four times the state's average. Omero calls the accident that took the life of a grandmother a shameless crime.

Police said Hairo Gomez was driving the target car, or car to be hit. Altagracia Arias, 65, was in the back seat of the bullet car, or car intended to hit the target car, police said. "What was supposed to happen was that the two vehicles were to strike, and the people were to claim injuries. What happened, the individual driving the bullet car continued accelerating and went on to hit a lamppost, resulting in the woman in the car dying," said Omero. ... Police said there were five other passengers between the two vehicles, and the district attorney said he expects additional charges in the case...

According to police, hours before she was killed, Arias was seen recruiting passengers at a local senior center, offering $200 a seat.

Can't make this stuff up, folks.

Sep 30 / 03

In yesterday's entry regarding federal highway funding, I warned that there's gonna be a fight over your gasoline tank. And lookie here, there's a little lobby called Americans For Transportation Mobility (ATM) that's been pressing hard for increased spending. From the website:

ATM's mission is to educate the public, elected officials, and other opinion leaders about the value of transportation to the nation's economy and quality of life.

I looked real hard through the website, but I couldn't find the words "gasoline tax." They'll help you contact your congress-itter. They'll hold a meeting in your town to "educate" folks about the need for more spending. They'll tell you all about how important the roads are to the economy and the American way. But you won't find nowheres that dirty little word, "tax."  So who is the ATM?

Launched on June 26, 2001, Americans for Transportation Mobility (ATM) -- a national coalition -- works to ensure our nation's transportation infrastructure is improved to handle current and future demands.

Well, who benefits the most directly from increased road monies? Click on that link "national coalition." Aint' it sweet how business and unions cozy up with each other when it comes to your wallet? Cats and dogs, sleeping together on your doorstep.

While the ATM won't say it, sounds of "T-A-X" are polluting the halls of Congress: From the Rocky Mountain News,

Lawmakers spar over gasoline taxes
"It's time for us to make that difficult choice," Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, told 400 business leaders attending the sixth annual Colorado Congressional Transportation Summit. "... We've got to invest in the future and we've got to do it now." More money is needed for roads, agreed Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Fort Morgan, but it shouldn't be done "on the backs of the people" by imposing higher fuel taxes.

The Engineering News-Record says it more precisely:

Senate Approves 5-Month TEA-21 Extension
... On one side is House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska), who with a group of House allies and support from some construction groups, wants a $375 billion... But reaching that $375-billion total requires raising the federal motor fuels tax.

On the other side of the divide is the White House, which has objected to a fuels-tax hike. The Bush administration has proposed a more modest new transportation bill pegged at $247 billion over six years, 19% higher than TEA-21.

Whose side are you on -- I mean, how many cylinders does your car have...?

Sep 29 / 03

Here we go!  Get ready to hear all about how Spain has such great highways and how come the roads here suck, and besides, Americans are spoiled by cheap gasoline and if they'd just pay five bucks a gallon they'd stop buying SUVs...

Transportation Funding Hits Gridlock
Nearly everybody in Congress wants roads and mass transit systems. Lawmakers just can't figure out how to pay for them ... The National Highway Trust Fund, which is funded through an 18.4-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax, generated about $98 billion during the past three years ... But the Transportation Department estimates that meeting the nation's transit needs during the next six years will cost $375 billion ... "We're going to have to figure out a way of financing it," said Rep. Thomas E. Petri (R-Wis.), who chairs the transportation subcommittee on Highways, Transit and Pipelines. "As a society, we're going to have to pay for it one way or another."

Don't panic -- yet. The reporter didn't do her homework, and if she did she'd understand that the dire panic of Bush critics is about to get worse. Tax cuts are just the start  The Administration is out to change government, and highway funding will be one of the battlegrounds. Unheard in this article is a vibrant movement to get road building off the gas-sniffing addiction. Self-pay, tolls, and private roads are just some of the ideas that will surface when Congress finally takes on the issue. Don't look for it during the election, however. Just vote for Bush next year, and you won't have to pay the equivalence of airfare for the family to Madrid when filling up the Suburban.

Waaaaitt!!!

Before I get too gushy over Bush policies on road building, the Washington Times warns of the regulatory hysteria at the Federal Highway Administration sister group, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA):

Regulatory mania at NHTSA
Last week, the bureaucrats at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a new regulatory scheme to standardize dashboard control displays, warning lights and function indicators for every single car model sold in the world. According to the agency, an international standard should make some controls on all vehicles identical.

The idea comes from the new head of the agency, appointed by the Administration. Oops. The good news is this guy is the exception among Bush appointees. Still, as the Times says, he needs to get with the program, or be gotten out:

 We understand that the federal government is a leviathan with lots of jobs to fill, and that a conservative president's appointees are not all going to be politically impressive or ideologically solid. But there has to be a minimum standard — especially for a pro-business conservative president — because there is so much in our out-of-control bureaucracy that needs to be restrained. Millions of Americans who voted for Mr. Bush did so partly to get a break from nanny-state overregulation. Conservatives do not vote Republican to get stuck with federal administrators, such as Dr. Runge, who seem to believe we are just one more federal regulation away from mandating a safe world. He should be given his walking papers.

Sep 27 / 03

Sitting on the deck of a woods cabin (yes, you may be jealous of my August in Maine), we heard a tree fall nearby. I got to wondering if it actually fell, or did we hear something that didn't happen. That is, if I could find the fallen tree I might resolve an old philosophical problem. So off I went in the canoe to about where I'd thought the noise came. Around the bend of the cove, I found a cousin in a fishing boat, and he was not happy. There it was, a fallen tree -- the tree that nearly fell on my cousin. Yes, trees do make noise when they fall, whether you're just below one or not. And enough of them fall the same night, you're without electricity for a week.

We're on automobiles, right? Well, here are two stories that have shaken my belief in the objective nature of the automobile:

Man Dies After Horse Strikes Car
An elderly man is dead from injuries sustained when a car he was riding in was struck by a 1,500-pound horse. Myron Marmorstein, 74, was riding in the passenger seat of a 1998 Buick when the saddled, but riderless, horse slammed onto the car's roof.

The horse was killed, too. So much for philosophy...
And then there's this one:

When Is a Bicycle a Car?
A fellow named Daniel Wells decided to have a few drinks and go for a bicycle ride in the small western Washington city of Montesano, Washington. He made the mistake of doing so about 3 a.m. and passed before the watchful eye of Montesano police officer Steve Needham, who was on patrol. Officer Needham knows a drunk driver when he sees one, and he saw Mr. Wells swerving and making wide turns on his bicycle. The red and blue lights came on and a surprised Mr. Wells soon found himself arrested and charged with drunk driving. His breath test result was .13 .... A trial was held and Mr. Wells became distinguished as perhaps the only person in the state of Washington to have been convicted for operating a bicycle while drunk. It was not a distinction he had hoped for.

Thankfully, the Court of appeals overturned the conviction under the theory that DUI punishment is related to the potential harm of a drunk driver, and that one on a bicycle poses much less harm than one in an automobile.

Sep 24 / 03

Woohoo -- power's back on! Hurricane Isabel: you got me, babe -- seven, count 'em, seven days in pre-Edison, Bethesda, Maryland. Makes one lose sympathy for Baghdad. Ain't nothin' to living without power, 'xcept a cooler, ice and more beer.

Welcome back.

Sep 15 / 03

September 15, 1857, and a large one... Happy Birthday, William Howard Taft

(Why cars? My man, he launched the motor age)

Sep 12 / 03

More from the Kommies & their Kars  file...

Teen Jailed for Luxury Car Race
HANOI (Reuters) - A 17-year-old Vietnamese boy was sentenced to three years in jail for organizing a luxury car race along a city street in a case that exposed reckless, free-spending youth in the conservative communist country

Uh, "conservative communist"?
I like it! 'Bout time someone used the word correctly, that is, one who "conserves" a present order. The liberals are today's conservative. Glad to know that teenage car nuts are the liberals of Vietnam. The world needs more of it!

Okay, here's the real question, and the reason we're in the automobile column:

Six others in the race -- that featured a BMW, a Lexus, a Mercedes Benz and a Toyota -- were given suspended sentences, state-run media said. Cars are well beyond the means of most of Vietnam's 80 million people.

... pt. 2, from today's Kommies & their Kars

DaimlerChrysler Signs $1.1 Billion Deal to Build Luxury Cars in China

Told ya so!  See the 8/29/03 column on Chinese cars. I wonder how many are gonna be sold in Vietnam?

Sep 11 / 30

God Bless America!

Sep 10 / 03

There's been some flack about a Pennsylvania law to remove the requirement for head protection on motorcycles (see Motorcyclists finally allowed to feel the wind in their hair). You'd expect the insurance companies & etc. to whine and moan, but hooda thought of this one:

Bikers to ride nearly nude tonight to protest repeal of helmet law
If you're going motorcycle riding with a bare head, you might just as well ride in the buff, a group of angry bikers say.

Okeedoke.  (Angry? Try, "stupid"?) Not good for tourism, me thinks. Quoted in the article is a 29-year old:

"Of all the things on your body, your head is the most important thing to keep protected."

That guy really 29? No way.

Within two days of the law (no update on the nude bikers), the Allentown Morning Call decried 2 motorcyclists hurt in 2 crashes.  Then we get this story today from Minnesota Missing Motorcyclist Found Alive In Ditch. Pennsylvania better get busy requiring motorcyclists to carry a tent.

Sep 09 / 03

More today on red light cameras and black boxes in cars from the Washington Post (see Bromleyisms 9/1/03 and 8/28/03). No surprise that the Post takes a positive view towards the nanny- and gotchya!-boxes. While admitting that the AAA expressed some concern over the timing of certain lights (with a shortened yellow, 14,000 tickets were issued from one intersection in Bethesda, MD). As for the black boxes, the Post somehow managed to find a kid who said its the squawking at his 70mph speed helped him become a better driver.

I'll let you do your own yelling and screaming here:

The Snoop in Your Coupe

Montgomery Cites Benefits Of Cameras at Traffic Lights

Sep. 07/ 03

More SUV attacks here. This time New Mexico. O.K., we're bored now, so you can go away eccoterrorists. Really, Greenpeace charges on nuclear aircraft carriers were far more charming than night-time key-scratching and grafitti raids on parked Chevy Suburbans. Even the tree sitters are more exciting.

Sep. 05/ 03

Can't resist this story: It's Good to Be the King, of the Swaziland monarch's annual wife tournament. According to Reuters "bare-breasted young maidens danced in front of King Mswati on Friday -- many hoping to catch his eye and become his next wife." The next paragraph counts 50,000 of 'em, although with no confirmation that this means 100,000 breasts. Either way, it's one hell of a thought.

Why, you ask, is this an automobile thing?

While women's rights activists have slammed Mswati's marriage habits as feudalistic and health care workers have raised concerns they send the wrong message about AIDS, the prospect of joining royalty has a strong allure for many young Swazi women. "I want a limousine, and a house like they give the queens. I want my children to school in England," said 14 year-old Phindile Thwala, one of this year's dancers.

For more on this line of thought, see Stretching It: The Story of the Limousine by Michael L. Bromley and Tom Mazza (SAE 2002)

Sep. 04/ 03

Car That Can Park Itself Put on Sale by Toyota

I dunno, the ERA finally enacted?

...elsewhere...
here's the latest on SUVs: Is Big Bad? from Reason, a critique of a critique of SUVs by a critic of SUVs. Here's all you need to know: the government created SUVs with CAFE fuel standards and tariffs that exempted and protected light trucks. Guess what Detroit did with the rules? That's why you idiots think you want cars with a center of gravity higher than Britney Spear's belly ring.

I once traded my Mercury Sable wagon for a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I loved the Jeep, especially when it snowed three feet the week after I bought it and I dug mazes into the grocery store parking lot (yeehaw!). But the damned thing had no real space like my wagon, and it didn't feel so good into the netherlands of 90+ mph on I-95.

I miss wagons, and I don't mean Volvos. My brother and I learned to drive on a 70s-sumthin Buick "Sport Wagon"  and its 355. All I know is that while my bro got the better of it, it could still fly come my day. Oh, and boy did we make it fly on Burdett Drive with my idiot buddies flopping like white perch on the roof while clinging to the luggage rack. Don't try this at home, or with a Chevy Blazer -- you'll bounce like a cowboy, and land like one, too.

Sep. 03 / 03

The same day there's another article on China and automobiles (here), we find this wonderful little notice from the Land of Rasta and Dr. No:

Jamaica Exports First Locally Made Auto
Excel Motors, a fledgling Jamaican automaker, exported the Caribbean island's first locally manufactured car to the Bahamas on Friday.
The two-door Island Cruiser, one of 22 built this year at the company's plant in western Jamaica, sells for $11,500.

Bravo, the "Island Cruiser"!

Since you were wondering, yes, the engine is Japanese. One may also wonder if AP got it right with, "The car's box-like, fiberglass chassis is made with local materials..."
Fiberglass chassis?

Ain't no shame in a third-party engine. Might as well put in the best. In the old, pre-Great Depression days, they called these "assembled" cars. Makers bragged that theirs were made from the best parts available. Excel Motors has made 22 so far. I wish them many, many more!

Sep. 01 / 03

The AAA has finally caught up with our heroes at the Washington Times over camera traffic enforcement. The Times has refused to go down smiling into the surveillance age. "Cheese" tickets-by-mail is the DC area enforcement game. No surprise there, as DC and Virginia long ago banned radar detectors. The Feds started it all with speed cameras on the G.W. Parkway, a major commuter route that runs along the Virginia side of the Potomac River. Locals know not to get caught speeding there, cuz you end up in Federal Court with Federal rules. (Never, ever rob a Post Office, or light one up in a National Park, OK?) After a few hearings that nobody heard about and in which no dissent was heard (I organized a small and, obviously, ineffective campaign to protest the hearings), the Park Service opted to take snap shots of license plates moving at some degree over the 50 mph speed limit. What's the tolerance? I have no clue, and I don't want to find out, so I go easy in that spot.
Either way, it sucks.

Anyway, please see the Washington Times on the AAA's complaint over DC's abuse of motorists:

D.C.'s abusive traffic laws

It's about time the AAA came to the defense of road miscreants. After all, the organization was founded on the principles of good motoring, good roads and good law, and implicit in that last was avoiding the law. Early AAA publications detailed time and place for speed traps.
 Welcome back to your first principles, AAA!
Glad to have yaaa back.

Aug. 31 / 03

Deming's ghost is upon us! 

Toyota poised to become top car seller in U.S.

Do we care? Do you care?

Yeah, I admit it. It bothers met. A lot. But what bothers me isn't that Toyota is the top brand (GM sells far more cars & trucks in the U.S. than Toyota). What grates is that my corporate and union brothers can't make a decent car. I'm glad for Toyota, and sad for Detroit.

But it won't be for long. In marketing perception outlasts performance, and the domestics have been making far better cars than their reputation allows. We'll be discovering Detroit's new-found quality over the next few years. It's already happening. Well, I mean, I wouldn't
 bet a Lexus on it..

...but if you do, think "Buick."
What'd that word just do to you? Did it feel like a jacket that just doesn't fall off your shoulders right? Or can you picture it? Not that you'll rush out and buy one, but we'll see what happens to the word. I think it's on the way back.

Aug 30 / 03

An unnamed friend, a certain NY banker once known for purple hair and the Buzzcocks, broke all records by getting ticketed for speeding twice by the same cop within a couple miles and minutes. It's a great story, and since many of you know whom I'm talking about, you can ask him to tell it.

Sorry, bro, looks like you've been outclassed:

Driver racks up 2 DWI charges in single night
A Raleigh man was arrested twice Friday morning on charges of drunken driving -- once after an accident and again three hours later after returning to his car and driving it away from where it was parked.

Magnificent!

Aug 29 / 03

In our book, Stretching It: The Story of the Limousine, Tom Mazza and I ridiculed Commies and their cars. From Eric Honecker to Gorbachev to the Chinese government, we laughed at their limousine hypocrisy. (Tom chauffeured Gorby in the 1990s, and he recalls how the man was fascinated by all the gadgets in Tom's stretch limousine).

Communism and automobiles have never enjoyed company.
 Castro's runnin' on 1950s Chevys and Buicks yet today. For decades Soviet cars eerily resembled Packards. The country's post-War automobile industry was salvaged by tooling sent their way by Packard after WWII.  Too bad they kept the styling thereafter.

Now, according to the Beijing People's Daily, another set of commies have succumbed to automobiling -- sort of. In the city of six million, the PRC's official mouth tells us, there are now almost two million registered automobiles:

Beijing Records 2 Millions Automobiles
The number of registered automobiles in Beijing exceeded 2 million on Monday, which include1.28 million private ones, according to sources with the local automotive administration.

Wow!  The end of communism?  Perhaps.
But I'm not so sure. One of the communist bastions of our own, L.A. County, has six million cars for its almost ten million in population. That's about the same ratio as for Beijing, give or take 800,000 non-"private" automobiles there, whatever that means, and one of our own highest poverty rates (*&*&% la Migra!).

 Really, 800,000 of the 1.9 million Beijing cars are non-"private"?  I'd venture a guess that a good portion of the growing R-R, BMW, M-B, and Bentley sales there are included in that 800,000. The more things change...

Well, good luck commies. When you really want to belch Global Warming from your tail pipes, your gonna have to sell your sons and daughters to Visa Card and the Ford Motor Credit Corp. Child labor? Nah, that don't getya nowhere. Give 'em a credit line and they'll be enslaved forever.

Aug 28 / 03

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune filed an AP story on Aug. 22, Vandals attack SUV dealers) regarding the eco-terrorist attacks in that area. I'm sure you've heard about it. Other than a spike of pathos for idiocy, I hadn't give it much thought, either. Just decided to look into it today, which led me to that article, and one Rick Genovese, a Fire Marshal quoted therein. Seems my initial reaction was dead-on, only I hadn't figured out exactly how. As Mr. Genovese sublimely pointed out,

"There's a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime."

A bit like the end-result of the Al Queda attacks. Bin Laden wanted the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia. He engineered it alright. As I type, the U.S. military is shipping out of the Kingdom of Saud. Please forward all mail to Baghdad.

Aug 27 / 03

The Washington Post prints today a column, "In Wal-Mart's America" by Harold Meyerson, editor of the American Prospect. Meyerson writes,

If you had to pick a time and a place where the 20th century (as a distinct historical epoch) began in America, you could do a lot worse than 90 years ago in Highland Park, Mich. It was there, in 1913, that Henry Ford opened his new Model-T plant and announced, a few months later, that he'd pay his workers a stunning $5 a day on the revolutionary theory that the men who built cars should make enough money to buy them. ... Within a couple of decades, it wasn't just cars that the men on the assembly line could afford ...home ownership...

Whatever Meyerson has to say for unions (which he credits for increasing wages so that workers could purchase houses; note: Walmart is a non-shop house), he's got his history wrong on Henry Ford's five bucks a day. Ford had no interest in selling cars to workers. He and his partner James Couzens couldn't make enough cars as it was, without their own workers hopping onto the waiting lists. Ford and Couzens were looking for something else from their workers, and it wasn't buying power. Ford couldn't keep workers on the payroll long enough to make them efficient tools. Worker turnover, inexperience and general chaos were the loose cogs in Ford's factory line.

Solution: pay more for better workers. (And you had to stick around for a while before you got those five bucks).

It was a smart, and entirely logical -- and had nothing to do  with selling cars or houses to workers. Ford tried that one  later on with his pink-houses worker-paradise villages that  Meyerson surely would have loved. One wonders, though,  what he'd think of Ford's enrollment policies: no unmarried,  unhealthy, or smoking, spitting or cursing neighbors allowed.

 Sorry, Meyerson, five bucks a day was all about corporate profits, not worker happiness.

Walmart applies the incentive pay idea to management, and you can bet they buy a lot of houses and cars.

Now, how to find the perfect Isle 37b clerk...

- Bromley

... and Politics...

July4/04

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY and
GOD BLESS AMERICA!

May 17/ 04

See TollRoadsNews for a Bromley comment on the great Vanderbilt Highway, the first automobile-only road in the world. Fed up with anti-automobile laws, cops, and judges, and tired of dodging carriages, rails, and chickens, in 1906 Vanderbilt started to build his own road, the Long Island Motor Parkway.

Why is it relevant today? It's part of a coming revolution in road building that is sorely needed. The lesson for today is that the private-sector in 1906 was years ahead of the public-sector. Today's ways of building roads just ain't working. Are you satisfied with your local roads, with your nearest highway? If so, count yourself lucky, for very few of us are. The public-run highways just ain't doing it anymore. The system needs a jolt, and new ways and new ideas are coming, thanks to the Bush Administration and innovators at the Federal Highway Administration -- and in private industry. See here for a speech by Federal Highway Administrator Mary Peters and a power-point presentation by the Agency's Chief Counsel, DJ Gribbin (both Adobe .pdf files) on Public-Private Partnerships in road building. Same old is over.

Vanderbilt's 1906 vision offers a re-birth. Check it out.

May 9/ 04

Arrived now is the first of several-to-come, including my own, books on the election of 1912:

May 4/ 04

From MSNBC.com

Why Vietnam remains a campaign issue

Blah, blah, blah.  So what do Vietnam and Iraq have in common? Only this: a bunch of idiots trying to re-live or recreate protest days with any, any excuse to wave a banner. John Kerry claims moral superiority for having served both sides of the Vietnam war, in the Navy and as a protestor. It's an extraordinary claim, one that challenges the history of the period itself. Is it meaningful? Supporters claim valor for him on both sides of the war. Critics say his service was negated by his later protests against it.

I say it matters not a damn.

The Vietnam-obsessed see it as the seminal event of the late 20th century. They define the world and history itself by it. It gives meaning to their lives such that one wonders where they'd be without it. Without Vietnam, the Left would be there just the same. Vietnam was an excuse to protest, not its object. Sure, there were devoted and concerned protesters who were worried about the war only. But they were sucked in, like the useful idiots who walk DC streets to today's A.N.S.W.E.R. protests -- a Marxist front organization. (Don't believe me? Google the bastards. They're putrid.)

The "New Left" of the 1960s wasn't after Vietnam, it was after America itself. Listen to Mr. Kerry, c. 1971:

Our democracy is a farce
(cited here)

Just as terrorism is warfare taken to civilians by the weak, anti-Americanism is the politically-sterile's desperation at the American people's wisdom in ignoring them. Back in 1912, the Socialist party called for the abolition of the Supreme Court, the US Senate and private property. They were laughed off the electoral map. Still, some of their agenda has been adopted, particularly regarding labor rights, minimum wages, social security, etc.. Sympathetic historians look upon these successes as justification for the Socialist movement entirely. That's like throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater. No, just because they made demands that Americans later found reasonable, their core demands were altogether rejected. Same goes for Kerry and his 1971 protestors.

John Kerry's high tide was in 1971 at the Congressional hearings where he spewed anti-America. If he hadn't served in Vietnam, he wouldn't have become prominent in the anti-war movement. Had he not turned protestor, he'd never have gone before Congress. Had he not testified before Congress, he wouldn't have become a Senator from Massachusetts. And so on. Same thing for today: he wouldn't be his party's choice for President in 2004 not for his Vietnam service but for his later protests against it. 

He' ain't gonna get the White House. All he's got is those hearings back in 1971. No wonder he won't shut up about Vietnam. It's all he's got.

-----------
*Note from above:
Here for the fools at ANSWER Yes they are insidious anti-American loons who hide behind legitimate political dissent within the American political process. They want nothing of America. I got curious if it's a tax-deductible corporation. No where in the website is corporate status mentioned. Only in an affiliate group do I find this:

To be as direct and effective as possible, and be unrestricted in its activism by the government, contributions to the VoteNoWar's Action Team are not tax deductible. (Votenowar.org)

I give credit either to ANSWER for honesty about its purposes or, which is more likely, to the American government for not subsidizing these fools in the tax code.

May 1/ 04

Two new Stalin biographies are upon us, as reviewed in The St. Louis Today:

Getting to know Joe Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore has written a supremely important book about Joseph Stalin, a biography that other scholars will find very hard to equal.

Okay, you already getting an idea of the perspective: "supremely important"? Perhaps. Unfortunately, the superlatives prevail, such as with:

...The story really begins when Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (the dictator's birth name) had climbed to the top of the greasy pole (to use Benjamin Disraeli's wonderful analogy), having pushed aside Vladimir Lenin's expected successor, Leon Trotsky, and then cleverly defeated first the leftist group and then the rightist group.  (emphasis mine)

Okay, fine: Stalin was good at the "greasy pole." Nice. (Not). Then we're off to this kind of misery:

...Not to put too delicate a
spin on the matter, he had members of the Politburo tortured and murdered with sadistic glee, and then had many of his appointed murderers wiped out as well .... While he was at it, vast numbers of lesser functionaries and a wide swath of ordinary Soviet citizens were shot, hanged or sent to the ghastly Siberian gulags. The wiping out of millions of "kulaks" - non-poor farmers - in the early '30s had been atrocious, but at least there had been some rationality about it; this was sheer viciousness. In the process, Stalin grew ever more cynical and paranoid. (emphasis mine)

Am I "cynical and paranoid" that the American academy and press can't bring themselves to take off the velvet gloves and "delicate spin" on Communist atrocities? Good Lord, help us: "at least there had been some rationality" about "wiping out of millions"?

Quick, an antidote, please: Back in March of 1961 a statue was unveiled in Washington in honor of Taras Shevchenko, the 19th century Ukranian poet and champion of liberty. See here for two speeches by U.S. Congressmen at the statue dedication. In 1961, there was no confusion over "rational" and "genocide," no delicacy for, no attempt to understand or explain, Stalin. God speed to you, dear Ukraine, to conquer and regain history:

Crimes of Communism Against Ukraine And Her People

Apr 29/ 04

Fallujah, Fallujah... has become the answer to the best fantasies of both the hard Left and hard Right. Albeit for different reasons, the extremes are hoping for failure. I'm disgusted.

The doubters and white flag wavers want all or nothing. Instead, genius Marine and Coalition leadership is giving both. A threat is only so good as it can be enforced. The Marines have established the threat. Now, instead of Marine units, the political side is probing, testing, seeing who fires back. We've boxed the insurgents into small sections of Fallujah, and, likewise, we have boxed the political powers of Fallujah into treating the insurgents as enemies. The insurgents no longer send their wounded to the hospitals for fear of being interrogated. This was not the case a week ago.

Fallujah politicos don't want to face up to the responsibilities of power, for it means helping the U.S. They'd rather give it to the insurgents to toy with AK47s and jihad -- so long as it doesn't interfere with them. The Marines (and air support) have changed it all, especially the snipers. Fallujah will quiet to the responsibilities of power.

It's an insanely magnificent orchestration of political and military might -- utterly brilliant.

Apr 4/ 04

The worst condition of the here and now is that undying urge to know the next. A friend told me that since Sept. 11 she can't get away from cable news. I understand it conceptually, but not having cable I've never practiced it. I only get a dose at hotels when I travel, such as just now on a trip to Dayton. With that remote and its 114 channels of something -- never sure what, but something, dammit -- I felt that need to flip and to land on something new. What's next? What now!

What a disaster. The nice thing about studying history is that you know what happened next. I'm now writing a book on the election of 1912. As I read through the journals, the newspapers, the letters, and as I write of the events leading up to it, I have that distinct advantage over the players of the day in that I know what happened next. They're all busting up over President Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, and Speaker Champ Clark (What? You don't know the name?  He had the Democratic election swiped from him by William Jennings Bryan, who gave it to Woodrow Wilson). But I know, and they didn't, that the headlines of April 15, 1912 meant nothing to the next two months. That day, they were all about the coming elections and the outrages of the day. The morning after, it was all Titanic, 24/7.

The longest tense is the present tense. Bear down, steady as she goes, and we will prevail.

Mar 9/ 04

Sorry, more Gaps.

Socialist writer and hyperactive Upton Sinclair complained that in his 1906 book, The Jungle, a socialist exorcism of capital's evils, he aimed for America's heart and he struck its stomach. Standard history points to Sinclair's work as a crucial moment in the Progressive Era, with its exposure of corruption and disease in the meat-packing industry that led directly to the 1907 Pure Food and Drug Act, passed by Congress after President Theodore Roosevelt spewed outrage upon reading Sinclair's fictionalized account of the industry. The book described rats crawling over decayed, diseased meat, its stench and discoloration disguised by chemicals, and workers falling into and being boiled in vats of lard that ended up in America's pantries.

At the time, Sinclair was plenty glad for the outrage, and he rode it hard. He challenged meat titan J.O. Armour to a legal duel. The New York Times published his letters. Congress read his testimony. He corresponded and met with the President of the United States. He buzzed high and hard for his full fifteen minutes. Only later did he lament that nobody read his book the way he wrote it. Sinclair's intended to expose how capitalism led to corruption of both worker and industrialist. Instead, America shook in horror that its lard might have a human limb or two mixed in, and, worse, that of a black man, as blacks were brought into the factories as scabs during strikes (Sinclair's racism is ignored in the standard histories).

There are a couple places to go with this. Sinclair's book did provoke the meatpackers to better practices, if only by spurring the Government to do the job it was already supposed to do (also, only 5% of its products were canned, the object of Sinclair's attack). Following truly scandalous shipments of bad -- canned -- meat to soldiers during the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. Government got into the meat inspection business. Contrary to what you will read in sympathetic accounts on the web, most of Sinclair's accusations were not true --the biggest problems were not in rats crawling over unsanitary conditions but in the use of diseased live cattle, which was supposed to be controlled by Government inspectors. Good for Sinclair and Roosevelt for getting the government to do what it was supposed to have been doing already, but they've both been rewarded beyond their usefulness over this one. TR jumped on it only after it Sinclair created the issue. At the time, Sinclair praised the President. In his autobiography he lamented that Roosevelt stole it from him. History typically treats it this way:

President Theodore Roosevelt read the book and reportedly threw his breakfast sausage out the window. He invited Sinclair to the White House and launched an investigation into the appalling conditions described. Legislation followed. (from Socialhistory.org)

Actually, Roosevelt didn't believe it when he first read it. But so much noise followed the book's release that he joined in and ordered an investigation. Roosevelt smelled the political value and made the issue his own. Sinclair's own success, meanwhile, failed him where he hoped to strike hardest. His book's hero, a victim of debt, low wages, alcoholism, crime, and prostitution --err, as a buyer thereof (the capitalists made him do it!), was made pure in the end by a socialist rally that, drunk and broke, he stumbled upon. The light struck him, and all was good and right again.

It didn't fool Sinclair's contemporaries. Yes, they got upset at tainted meat. But, no, they didn't buy his red flags. The New York Times, which flung itself upon Sinclair's accusations of the meatpackers, otherwise ignored his socialism, especially his next mission against Andrew Carnegie and the "steel trust," whom he blamed for the burning of a commune he had built with his royalties from The Jungle. The Times wouldn't have any of it. From Jurgis Rudkis and "The Jungle," March 3, 1906:

The greatest defect in the reasoning -- or the dreaming -- of all Socialists is that they put most of their carts before their horses. They assume that the unequal distribution of wealth is the cause of the inequality of condition, quite overlooking the fact that inequality of capacity is a somewhat important factor in bring about the disparity in earthly possessions.  They assume, too, that men and women need only to be emancipated from wage slavery and the barbarities of capitalism to become all at once high-minded, virtuous, generous, forbearing, honest, enamored of the Ten Commandments, and eager to do unto others as they would that others should do unto them.

I'll let the great and Sinclair-hated Andrew Carnegie give the final word here on income gaps. After being lectured by a socialist on the "unjust distribution of wealth," Carnegie instructed his secretary to fetch his account book and an almanac. Having determined his current holdings and the world's population, he scribbled on a pad, then said to his secretary, "Give this gentleman 16 cents. That's his share of my wealth."

Mar 3/ 04

Gaping Gaps (more praise for "gaps")

Sorry, I'm fascinated by the moderns' fascination with GAPS (see Jan29/04 & Feb5/04 entries). The classic satire of Gaps came in the War Room scene in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in which, after learning that the Russians had a doomsday machine, the George C. Scott character rants about the "Doomsday Gap." Today's usuals are equally excitable over income and other GAPS that might, maybe, somehow or another indicate that someone is doing better in life than someone else. Kill Success so that Misery may have more company.

The GAP comes to us, as so many other unfortunate political psychoses, from the early 1900s progressives who saw no progress in the creation of wealth. In my book on President Taft, I had too much fun with progressive Walter Weyl and his childish whining of 1913:

Our jogging horses are passed by their high-power automobiles. We are obliged to take their dust... We are creating new types of destitutes -- the automobileless... [also quoted in my Sep 30/03 entry]

Unfortunately, Weyl's disease was genetic, and you can hardly open a newspaper these days without falling into some GAP or other. Here's one:

Ex-Fed chair opposes death tax elimination
WASHINGTON, March 1 (UPI) -- U.S. Business leaders including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker came out Monday against President Bush's call to abolish the federal death tax. Volker says repeal of the death tax is "poor tax and social policy" but is also, given the recent increase in federal indebtedness, "fiscally irresponsible."

Working with a national network of business leaders and others who say they are "concerned about deepening economic inequality," Volker and others want to persuade Congress to reject Bush's call for permanent repeal of the federal death tax... [emphasis mine]

To The New York Times we go for a story on the last time and place there was no "deepening economic inequality"-- and I kid you not:

China's Wealthy Live by a Creed: Hobbes and Darwin, Meet Marx
...In 1980, when the turn toward a market economy started, China had one of the world's most even distributions of wealth.

Is this what you were talking about, Mr. Volker? The Times author continues:

Certainly, China before 1980 was a land of material shortage.

Certainly? Oh my God.

The story comes with a photo of a woman by a Rolls-Royce poster. Oh, the horrors of wealth! Why not some photographic evidence of real economic equality, say, of Mao's brotherhood of A-Rice-Kernel-a-Day? Read the article if you must. It's about how poor new-rich China is awash in consumerism, and the new merchant princes live in guarded enclaves named for icons of American capitalism such as "Napa Valley," "Upper East Side," and "Park Avenue." Now that's funny. Not funny is this idea that the INCOME GAP was conquered by Mao. Better a fine equality of misery and death than a Rolls-Royce in your face at a Chinese shopping mall. Must be; The New York Times printed it.

Back when Walter Weyl was spewing GAP nonsense, The Times evoked dollars and cents and much common sense. As Weyl's kind hollered that the Morgan and Guggenheim "interests" were make of Alaska a private bank, The Times actually, really did reply:

It is something like malignant stupidity to dismiss them with jeers at the "Morganheims," meaning thereby a group of the most powerful and intelligent financiers and captains of construction known to modern times, and, therefore, in all history.

So much for today's New York Times. Now we get regret for Mao's demise.

I will remind The Times and Mr. Volker that the Ford Foundation was created in order to avoid the severe New Deal death tax that swung before the Ford family like a noose in the 1930s. With Henry approaching the end of his life, he and his family put the majority of his shares into a tax-free trust -- a state-sanctioned business whose purpose was to avoid the inheritance tax under the guise of charity. The super rich don't pay taxes, Mr. Volker. They always find a way. Just ask John Edwards, who incorporated himself in order to take his jury-lotto millions as corporate dividends and not as personal income, which pays higher rates and FICA taxes -- perfectly legal, and a perfectly sensible, self-interested reaction to the tax code.

Human beings don't live in Prozacville, all placid and smiley and counting out white and blue pills all day. You can't legislate human behavior any more than you can force Bob Dole to put the football through the tire. You can give him some help, but, mostly, you just gotta give him and Liz some privacy.

American reformers ever try to blunt self-interest through regulation and taxes. All they do is redefine or re-direct it somewhere else. High income taxes screw not the rich but those trying to get rich and keeps them from getting rich. Thankfully, our core rights are greater than even the highest tax rates. When taxes "progress" too high, anybody who can -- usually the rich -- takes the money elsewhere. Just ask John Edwards. Every time government presses here, self-interest squirts out there. The only way to defeat human nature is by force. That's why we have criminal codes in our laws. That's how Mao got his equality.

America is great because America frees self-interest and balances it against the rest. Dictators and socialists -- but I repeat myself -- limit self-interest, which denies humanity, and, in its extreme, uh, New York Times, kills it. That's people, New York Times. People died for Mao's attack upon the Income Gap.

But what's a little genocide to "economic equality"?

Feb 22/ 04

Happy George Washington's Birthday!

Here's to the father of the nation, the man who unleashed upon the world and upon history the greatest civilization ever! 

Feb 17 / 04

Feb 14 / 04

With a happy Valentines to all, Bromleyisms will return on Feb. 17, with an homage to Presidents, that day being some half-way between the birth dates of Washington and Lincoln, today's nebulous in-between celebration, which we shall here celebrate sharply.

See you then!

Feb 7 / 04

My Nov 12 and Oct 24 entries discussed the 70th anniversary of Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and the politics of language and denial. It wasn't murder, it was "forced famine," according to the Associated Press, a description your host suggested might less unnerve the sensitive were it "involuntary not eating." And the lies continue.

You just can't keep the good commie apologists down. Here's the latest example of this insidious, vulgar deception -- and don't go there, for the Washington Post wants your email and your home address now, so trust me, it's in the article:

Two Countries, Two Lives: Soviet Defector Helped CIA Understand KGB
To his neighbors in McLean, Potomac and Bethesda for the past five decades, he was known as Martin F. Simons. To his colleagues in the KGB, the Soviet espionage agency from which he defected as a lieutenant colonel in 1954, he always would be Yuri Aleskandrovich Rastvorov, a traitor to communism who had been sentenced to death in absentia soon after his defection.

No, I'm not upset at stupid journalistic aloofness that deems the KGB's opinion news -- non-judgemental? my ass, Post, you printed it. No, we're back to history as bunk, and communism as, really, just another way to look at things. The brave Mr. Rastvorov, the Post tells us, was "a valuable espionage asset." He was "an excellent tennis player." He helped the CIA understand that Commies are people, too: quoted is a retired CIA officer who says, "he taught us that KGB officers were humans after all -- not stereotypical ogres." Oh, the joy! Well, at least the information was put to good use, as it "helped us immensely," the man said, "as we worked against them as case officers."

Do you see it, this vulgar, journalistic contempt for upholding one's own? Okay, we learn that a CIA chief thanked him for his assistance to the American cause, including information on how that Stalin had launched the Korean war and engineered the Chinese entry to it after the plan backfired. But no where, none, nada, is this celebrated in the article. The writer drops us on the floor, ending with the story of how his American daughter learned, late in his life, that she had a half-sister back in Russia. How awful! He hid this from his own daughter... blah, blah, blah. The man was a spy, dammit, and he came to our side, dammit, and he helped us win, dammit, and all we get from the friggin Washington Post (after it gets your home address; mine is 1 Mulberry Street) is that he was "he was extremely guarded about telling anyone who he had been," and that his daughter "had to beg him for permission to tell her husband" who he was.

But that's not what has me madly blogging this morning. Rastvorov's Ukranian grandfather, we learn,

...was accused in the 1930s of being a kulak -- a large landowner -- and he was dispossessed of his land. He died of starvation in the famine that followed the collectivization of Soviet farms, a fact that haunted Rastvorov and which, the CIA speculated, led to his disaffection with the Soviet Union.

Yes, of course, the man just kinda had his land stolen, the "collectivization" just kind of happened, and he just kinda died of starvation. Gold Almighty, please help: the man was MURDERED!

Imagine this a story of a turned German spy who became "disaffected" with the death camps. Have we not a hero, a moral giant who risked his life to defect and help defeat the monster Nazis? How brave he was to hide his identity, how brave he was to stay in the fight!

This is how the sickening bias of the Left permeates our culture: communism wasn't wrong, it was just misguided. This is how a major market newspaper comes to tell the story of a Soviet defector as if it's a football game, and, besides, winning isn't everything, knowing about your half-sister in Russia is. Why do we need to know what the KGB thought of him? Why is the one quotation from a CIA officer about how KGB agents were people, too? That's not the only thing said in that interview; it is what the reporter felt was the most quotable. Sure it's true, but isn't there something else?

Something else... like something to celebrate.

God bless you, Mr. Rastvorov -- known to your family and neighbors here in America as Martin F. Simons, just as it was written in your U.S. Passport. I'll bet you were damned proud of that passport. I am, too.

Feb 5/ 04

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has messed himself over my spewing at GAPS the other day (entry 1/29/04). Well, had he ever tripped over a Bromleyism, he couldn't have ranted a more ridiculous reply than today's Plutocrats And Populists.

It's all about my rant on GAPS and the disconnect between reality and populist rhetoric, and how right-thinking, "progressive" idiots like Harold Meyerson would rather a sympathetic shrug for the sinking ship than a Captain who can actually sail. Today he gives us:

John Kerry and John Edwards will be duking it out for a little while yet, which means there will be populist rhetoric aplenty on the campaign trail .... But the Democrats' populism isn't a matter of genetics, of a nostalgic reversion to a century-old battle against the House of Morgan. It is, to the contrary, a specific response to immediate policies of the House of Bush. It is a counter to the administration's tilt toward drug companies and HMOs at the expense of consumers. It is a necessary corrective to the most plutocratic administration since at least the 1920s.

Uhm, we won't get into Ted Kennedy's little, anti-competition, price-hiking, consumer-eating creation, HMOs. Nor will we discuss how J.P. Morgan twice salvaged the American economy from dumb politicians (like John Kerry), or how Morgan financed the greatest economic expansion in world history. What this is about, rather, is a sad story of a Washington Post columnist who chews his own paw.

He hates Bush so much he's lovin' it:

...Given the choice between serving the national interest and favoring the rich, George W. Bush has opted incessantly, even obsessively, for the latter. That is the main reason why he may well be unseated in November. If Bush tax policies are not class warfare, then the term has no meaning at all. Moreover, in the age of globalization, the interests of many U.S.-based corporations grow increasingly divergent from those of the American people.

The column goes on about John Kerry's manliness (really, I'll never understand that one -- I asked my dear hopelessly liberal mother if she truly, really, actually found Kerry attractive: let's just say she didn't give a straight yes), and about how Kerry will beat the President come November:

And as to why I think Kerry could beat Bush this fall, I suppose it's because Kerry is a national capitalist, who favors a role for government in boosting the domestic economy, while Bush is a crony capitalist who wants only to privilege the privileged. It's not that Kerry and the Democrats are reverting to an ancient politics. It's that plutocracy breeds populism, and under Bush, plutocracy is what we got.

So, Kerry is a "national capitalist." And these fools are out there calling Bush "Hitler"?

Long before Kerry, the Adolph called himself a "national socialist." You know the difference between a "national socialist" and a "national capitalist"? None. In the one the government runs business. In the other business runs the government. Same difference, except that the profits don't, uh, trickle down. And in both cases "solutions" and "compassion" are "national" and reality and the laws of economics and humanity (onee in the same), as ever, be damned.

So God Bless Bush cronyism: a favor or two ain't nothing to giving away the whole stable, and that's precisely what "national capitalism" is all about. So go ahead, J.F. Kerry, go run on "national capitalism."  Not even Harold Meyerson knows what it means. It don't matter, all some Meyerson needs to know is that you care. Just say you care, and tax away.

National capitalism! Lol!

Jan 29/ 04

The gap gap. I can't get away from it, and I wanna scream. I'm reading through a New York Times review of the book, "American Dynasty," by former-Republican now "more of an independent" Kevin Phillips (whom you'll know from 1969's "The Emerging Republican Majority"), and I'm happy in my anger. I'm pissed at Phillips, I'm pissed at the reviewer, and I'm smug about it all. All you need know about the book is Phillips' admission, "I didn't like the Bushes ... before their two presidencies."

But then we gotta get into gaps. That really pisses me off, and without any fun. In describing Phillips' happy escape from the G.O.P. (but a vowel away from a GAP), the reviewer, an editor at the Times, writes that,

...his recent writing has focused in various versions on the gap in America between rich and poor and the ways it has been exacerbated, in his view, by the policies of Reagan and the two Bushes

With all the loathing and worry for GAPS, one wonders how a company by the name survives. GAPS arrived with progressive era reformers who saw only ghosts and millionaires, and who just couldn't figure out where all that money came from. They never bothered to think it through. Allow me to get the door: if the poor stayed poor, then, clearly, the millionaires stole from the rich. What's to complain about that? Oh, the poor are still poor. Never mind that even the dullest Robber Baron understood that trickle down meant not losing from above but gaining from below. Yes, Virginia, that's where the great American middle class came from.

And never mind that the rich got much richer and the GAP grew much GAPPER under Clinton as with any presidency. That that goes unmentioned is unworthy of mention but for the friggin New York Times that keeps never mentioning it, while ever an endlessly mentioning it about this President. So what's a President to do to avoid the GAP? Raise taxes? Clinton did it, so he's off the hook. Didn't work. Remember the 90s? The rich got really rich. Maybe he didn't raise taxes enough? Not even the Times dares speak that one. (And don't mention those Clinton-era capital gains tax cuts.) Nah, the Times doesn't care about Clinton's tax hikes. All they care about is all the pain he felt on behalf of the GAPPED.

Ya gotta talk the talk. That's why the "rhetorical presidents" such as Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt escape censure for all those dollar signs stuffed in their campaign pillows, and for their business-friendly politics, while the McKinleys, the Reagans and the Bushes both, who talk economic and tax realities, are tossed aside as GAP MAKERS.

I hereby lodge my protest against the GAP, the GAPPED, the GAPPEES, the GAPPORS, and all GAPS, especially the GAPPERS at the New York Times. This is America guys. Yeah, yeah, we're an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and whatever Lewis Lapham comes up with next. Whatever, Louey, unlike your loving France or Sweden, where extreme income taxes ensure that nobody one gets rich -- NO GAP!! for the rich stay rich by not taking income they'd otherwise have to give to the government, and anyone who tries to get rich gets the rug taxed out from underneath... duh -- and where there is no economic and no social mobility, THIS IS AMERICA. We don't just have GAPS, we thrive on GAPS, we live on GAPS and we want more and more GAPS!

No GAPS and nobody wants to beat the GAP, at which point we're all GAPPED. Ain't no in between.

Oh, New York Times... go read, re-read and read again Alexis de Tocqueville.

Jan 26/ 04

Sorry, I just have to make sure you understand the dimensions of George Soro's ass-for-brains. (See Soros on Bush as Hitler in my Veteran's Day entry here.) Of Osama's grand scheme, he writes,

We have fallen into a trap. The suicide bombers' motivation seemed incomprehensible at the time of the attack; now a light begins to dawn: they wanted us to react the way we did. Perhaps they understood us better than we understand ourselves.

Truly, he wrote it. It's in the Guardian: The US is now in the hands of a group of extremists.

Gotchya, $oro$: Osama hits NY and DC, and we take down Afghanistan and Iraq, all according to plan. Of course! (Or, just maybe, Osama had his money on the other candidate in 2000? Soros sure did, and he can't stand it.)

Why the twisted story -- what's Soros after? It's beyond the usual whining about Iraq and the President, for truly, this statement is grotesque. Think of the analogies: what, exactly, did Japan want out of Pearl Harbor? Unless Soros has other ideas, seems to me that the Empire got far, far more fight back than it wanted. Same goes for Al Queda.

It's one thing to say that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq (and, by Soros' statement, Afghanistan). It's quite another to say we're there according to Al Queda's plan. That goes beyond defeatism to... well you figure it out. I'd like to say it's a self-delusion beyond repair, and it's Soros' right to be an ass. It's not -- and, well, he is, but there's too much logic in saying we're playing into Osama's game: the President is complicit to the Al Queda plot, awares or otherwise.

How do you suppose Halliburton fits in to all that? The conspiracy mix gets thickerer and thickerer... Let's see, FDR set up Pearl Harbor so we could...uh, lose to Japan? I wonder what Osama wants us to do next. Syria, anyone? Iran? 

What's with ya, Georgie? Ya did real well shorting the dollar against the euro. Did Osama trade some insider info with ya on that one, too?

No sadness for this idiocy. Just contempt.

Jan 25 / 04

The New York Times Magazine runs today,

The Tyranny of Copyright?

It's called the Mickey Mouse law: whenever Mickey's about to lose copyright protection the Disney lobby gets Congress begging for more. Now, as the Times article notes, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a.k.a. Don't Hit That Download, Sucker, it's become Bill Gate's protective wear.

Copyright protection is crucial, especially for software. In it creativity is rewarded, as the Constitution says,

by securing... exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

The sword strikes two ways, however, which modern copyright ignores. The fuller passage reads,

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

The goal is a public benefit, which is why copyright is a public grant. It is not an inherent right, like speech. It is for the benefit of society at large, not you, that you make money off your creation "for limited times," which was, originally, for fifteen years or so. Now it lasts a lifetime and a couple grandkids, none of whom have any interest in the creativity of the old man or society at large -- just the royalty checks.

Today's hyper-extended copyright pays no public dividends, inspires no competition, and breeds no new thought. Sorry, no little sperms escaping that prophylactic.

A story: for my book, Stretching It: The Story of the Limousine (written withTom Mazza), I reached back to various published material, mostly memoirs, for stories about the family limousine or chauffeur. It was always a side-story, such as in Brooke Astor's memoirs about how riding in limousines didn't make her much different from others (ha!), or how William Buckley noted that critics didn't mind his yacht but jumped all over him for his Cadillac limousine. Astor and Buckley control their material, which is protected longer than sentences of double murderers, life-plus 70 years or something like that, and both were kind and gave me permission to use a sentence or two without issue (Buckley wanted a copy of the book; Astor posed no conditions; I was flattered by Buckley's request). Whenever it fell to a publisher for permission, I got form letters demanding 150 bucks for one-time, U.S.-only, under-5,000 copies, renewable only by an Act of Congress. My reply, of course, was go kiss Mickey Mouse's derriere if you're gonna cower beneath his copyright show.

No thanks, I'd rather not pay you to publicize your out-of-print, forgotten work, and only three sentences of it that have nothing to do with anything but my one paragraph which is hereby O-U-T. The material remains dead, with nothing new of it, for their benefit, society's, or mine. Not what the Founders had in mind.

Jan 23 / 04

Not sure if this is automobiles or politics... anyway, we never should have heard it in the first place: from the shut up already file, in a speech in Saudi Arabia this month former President Bill Clinton declared that were automobiles around 1,400 years ago, the Muslim prophet Muhammad would have let his wife drive one:

"He probably would have made Saudi Arabia the first automobile producing nation on earth and put her in charge of the business"

Swear-to-God, he said it. You can get it from the International Tribune, or even Al-Jazeerah, which reported,

At times Clinton was more lighthearted. His call for greater women’s involvement saw him throwing in his support for women drivers in the Kingdom. Pointing to the fact that the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadeeja, was a businesswoman, he said that if cars had been around at the time, she would have driven one. The Prophet, he said “probably would have made Saudi Arabia the first automobile producing nation on earth and put his wife in charge of the business,” he added. The comments drew applause.

"Lighthearted"?  How 'bout "dumb?"

The Clinton family needs a sense of humor. Their jokes suck. While Bill was out making "light" of 1,400 year-old automobiles, Senator Hillary, drawing from later, yet equally arcane automotive history, quoted from Ghandi, explaining that “He ran a gas station down in St. Louis.”

Give her credit, however, for some truth in the inevitable apology -- apologies, of course, are a Clinton family specialty, but never have we seen a Clinton excuse laced with any truth. It was, she admitted, “a lame attempt at humor.”

(Say, Hil, so long as you're so into truth and introspection and self-deprecation, how 'bout them lost billing files and your "lame jokes" to congressional investigators over their, uh, disposition, or, say, when did you really learn about Monica and what, really, was your reaction, other than what a normal, loving wife would say, I mean, outside of tossing a lamp or two Bill's way, not for Monica but for getting caught, and so long as we're really getting at the truth, what, exactly, happened to Vince Foster on July 20, 1993?)

Back to Bubba: Yo, Bill, were the automobile around 1400 years ago, ya think Muhammad woulda had artificial turf in the back of his El Camino, too?

Or have you forgotten his "lame attempt at humor" to GM workers about his (supposed) El Camino,"

"It had astro-turf in the back. I don't want to tell you what the astro-turf was for..." *

Brings to mind William Howard Taft's recommendation for the correct disposition of ex-Presidents:

The proper and scientific administration of a dose of chloroform, or of the fruit of the lotus tree... the funeral pyre... might make a fitting end to the life of one who has held the highest office, and at the same time would secure the country from the troublesome fear that the occupant could ever come back.

Now more than ever, an imperative.

* Disclaimer: I helped the Clintoon Library (which Playboy proclaims the only presidential library to have an adult section) put together an exhibit of presidential automobiles... I had nothing to do with the El Camino exhibit.

Jan 19 / 04

Hear Hear to MLK Day!  It is right and proper that we celebrate this great American whose identity and role in history -- like Lincoln -- are a direct and intrinsic affirmations of the Declaration of Independence.

A happy MLK Day to you!

Jan 8 / 04

I'm sure you've heard that the woman who was going to sue over her "lost" lotto ticket has fessed up to the lie. Duh. You gotta wonder if she couldn't get an attorney. Nah. Of course she could. Or were they all too busy with equally stupid lawsuits? Here's a sampling of the day's catalog of the absurd and absurder in a court near you:

Couple sues Wal-Mart over broken grocery bag
A Mt. Pleasant Township couple wants Wal-Mart to pay for foot and toe injuries they claim were caused by canned goods and condiments that tumbled from an overfilled plastic grocery bag ... The 14-page complaint filed by attorney John Scales claims Brenda Sager suffered numerous injuries including cracked and damaged toenails ... The store, they claim, failed to properly instruct and train its employees to correctly bag products, negligently provided a defective bag, recklessly overpacked the bag by placing in it too many heavy items, failed to double- or triple-bag the purchases, and placed Brenda Sager in a "position of peril." She is seeking damages in excess of $30,000 ... Her husband also is seeking that amount in damages, claiming that as a result of his wife's injuries he has been deprived of her attention and comfort and suffered a loss of consortium. An official of Wal-Mart yesterday denied the accusations.

U-Haul Forbids Rentals to Explorer Drivers
... "U-Haul has chosen not to rent behind this tow vehicle based on our history of excessive costs in defending lawsuits involving Ford Explorer towing combinations," the company said in a statement released to The Associated Press on Thursday.

News Release - 911 Victim’s Wife, Ellen Mariani Requests Deposition of Saddam Hussein for her Civil RICO Lawsuit  Federal Court Complaint against President Bush et al
Philip J. Berg, Esquire, attorney for Plaintiff Ellen Mariani, wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when United Air Lines flight 175 was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 911 announced today, in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein, she will seek an extraordinary writ by the Honorable Court to immediately depose Saddam Hussein, a critical witness to support the merits of her RICO Act cause of action against Defendant George W. Bush, et al.

Man Blames Cable Company For Overwieght Wife, 'Lazy' Kids
Complaint: 'The Reason I Smoke, Drink Every Day Is Because We Watch TV Every Day'

Injured Goofy Sues Disney For $300,000
It's true! Goofy is suing Disney. It's the man who played the Disney character on the company's cruise ship. The man suing says the Magic turned into a nightmare for him. ... He blames, in part, the Goofy costume for his trouble. According to the lawsuit filed in federal court, the costume was defective, not reasonably suitable for its intended purpose. The reason: Ford claims he couldn't see a thing out of the suit while on stage. Because of that, a curtain came down on top of him at the end of a performance...

Black Chicagoan Sues President, Pope, Queen
A man filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against several U.S. officials, the Queen of England, Pope John Paul II and several businesses seeking their apology and reparations for their alleged use of slaves. Bob Brown on behalf of Pan-African Roots, filed a pro se lawsuit, meaning he does not have an attorney, in U.S. District Court seeking class status for the descendants of African slaves.

Oh, wait, no attorneys in that one. No money in it, perhaps, or a bout of sanity from the Chicago bar? Okay, enough fun with google.

Jan 5 /04

Sorry, this is too good to pass on...

In Why Hillary is 'most admired woman' ... why Laura Bush isn't, Doug Powers of WorldNetDaily.com reports that Hillary took 16% of the vote for the nation's most admired woman, the highest slot. Laura got 6%. Whatever. More importantly, Powers tells us, is that husband Bill took barely a slice:

Bubba's 3 percent compared to Hillary's whopping 16 percent tells us that, while a whole lot of people would like to be Hillary Clinton, hardly anybody in the world wants to be married to her.

Oh my.

Jan 4 / 04

Opened a newspaper for the first time in a week, and I haven't missed a thing, especially not the Washington Post opinion pages, which are full of nonsense today. We can start with the irrepressible dolt David Broder and his homage to Mary McGory, whom he calls "the great liberal columnist." That's all well and good, and I enjoyed the stories of Mary's parties and boozing, and I appreciate the honesty of her politics. We learn far more about Broder, though, than McGory. His epiphany comes of a description of his praise to her for a Republican, conducted, of course, with full-on apologia:

She had a limited tolerance for Republicans. I remember once going on at some length about a Republican I admired (perhaps George Romney), reciting his virtues and accomplishments. McGrory listened until I finally stopped and then replied with one word: "Really?" It was pronounced with a mixture of politesse and skepticism that Katharine Graham herself would have envied.

With Mary "George Bush was hiding on Air Force One on Sept. 11" McGory gone, someone needs to fill her champagne glass. Go Davey!

On the same page, George Will gives us some fine nonsense about the generally sane-if-only-because-he-has-a-bank-account-to-protect former SecTrez James Rubin (under Clinton) who claims -- and this with no objection from Will -- that the 1994 tax hike saved the economy (Reflecting on Rubinomics):

Rubin believes that a key predicate of the 1990s boom -- America's longest uninterrupted expansion -- was the mild Clinton tax increase of 1993. The income tax increase affected only the top 1.2 percent of income earners but reassured markets that Washington was disciplined.

Entirely insane, and not just because the boom was on before Clinton took office and long before the tax increase took effect. It can only be a deliberate self-deception. Never shall I forget that "mild Clinton tax increase" which was announced to me in a phone call from my accountant. I was among those "only" affected by it. It ruined more than a Winter vacation, and it more than ruined any faith I may ever have held in the "discipline" of Democratic governance. The markets were "reassured" by a tax increase? That's an oxymoron on Oxycontin. Does Rubin really need to say it -- still? (Going on ten years now). Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan is out there defending his role in the Clinton market bust (Greenspan Defends Himself on '90s Bubble). How about a tax increase circa 1998, Mr. Rubin?

Ya coulda been a he-ro.

The Post's only reasonable piece today comes from Jonetta Rose Barras: Black Votes -- No GOP Fantasy. Did you know that Ahnold took 17% of the CA black vote, or that Bloomberg snagged 22% in NYC? Lord almighty. Ms. Barras advises:

If Democrats want to avoid an erosion of their African American base, they can start by opening the door for more and younger blacks to assume leadership posts, and by abandoning the outdated left-wing politics they seem intent on playing. Most important, they can stop navel-gazing and do what Republicans are doing: Pay attention to the evolving African American electorate.

This much I guarantee: the 'Clinton tax hikes didn't win any votes for the Democrats, black, white or Wall Street. What's this all have to say about the Bush tax cuts?

Dec 27 / 03

Bromleyisms on vacation...

 Happy New Year!

Dec 25 / 03

A very merry Christmas to you!

Dec 18 / 03

When it comes to press bias, the worry is not politics, it's pretension of its absence. There is no objectivity, and the least our "take no sides" press can do is admit it. They don't. When the New York Times claims impartiality, think "Jason Blair." 

Contrary to conservative complaint, the press, for the most part, hasn't a leftward bias -- I mean, it does, it's just that it doesn't guide so much as it saturates. Washington Post reporters don't bow daily to the DNC and affirm jihad on Republicans. No, they are all that for insufferable ignorance of the world, not purposeful attitude. The Post's problem isn't political, it's problem is a lack of common sense and  judgment. (Common sense would lead one to comprehend the economics of tax cuts..). Yesterday's Post brings an ugly, nasty example of the disease:

The Pilot's Role Goes From Daring to Dull

Dateline: 100th anniversary of the first powered flight -- and what do we get page one from the editors of the Washington Post? Flying today is a bore. Atta boys, give us the worst of everything.

CAN'T YOU BELIEVE, JUST ONCE, ONCE!, IN GREATNESS?

 I guess not. Today's paper, the day after the centennial celebrations, treated it all as news, not as celebration. Pathetic.

Dec 17 / 03

The best line on Saddam comes from Mark Steyn:

The sight of Saddam looking like a department-store Santa who’s been sleeping off a bender in a sewer for a week will deal a fatal blow to the Baathist thugs’ ability to intimidate local populations.

Elsewhere...

HOLIDAY SALES: Mexican shoppers load up in Tucson: Sonora's good economy inspiring residents to drive north for bargains

Say what? Or, hear what? Yes, that's Sonora, Mexico. Is this that "giant sucking sound" we were supposed to hear following NAFTA?

As Ulises Lizarraga loads his new stereo, computer printer and other Christmas gifts into the back of his car, he knows he got some great deals. As far as he's concerned, the bargains are worth the two-hour drive from his home in Mexico to the Wal-Mart Supercenter here and the Mexican taxes to bring the goods home. "The prices are better here," the 31-year-old native of Caborca, Sonora, said. "There you can buy one; here you can buy two" at the same price. Lizarraga is one of thousands of Mexicans who cross the border to do their holiday shopping.

You decide. Is Walmart Diplomacy really gonna work? Will China drop Taiwan-envy in exchange for aisles twelve through thirty-five? Does prosperity really promote political reform? In Sonora things are looking up thanks to an "energetic new governor" and a new Ford plant that's pumping huger-than U.S. style black market, er, illegal immigrant salaries.  Ford pays well. Will the Guv ensure property rights?

China, Mexico and all the rest can't have it both ways. You want permanent prosperity ya gotta get the politics behind it. U.S. consumption drives China's new wealth (and its huge inventory of U.S. Treasury Bills, aka the Federal Debt). But it's not cheap labor that drives U.S. consumption. It's freedom. China and Mexico can have cheap labor and a richer rich, or they can have general prosperity. Closed, corrupt political systems are all good for running cell phone and automobile factories. Getting the workers into their own Chevrolets and Buicks is another story.

Good luck, boys. Meanwhile, bring 'em on to the Tuscon Walmart. They're just recycling those excess T-bills through Mexico and China.

Dec 8 / 03

Calling all "Wiccans, Druids and other pagans!" Calling all Wiccans, Druids and other pagans!" You're up at the Washington Post, and, damn, you're ire is up, too:

White House Aide Angers Pagans
H. James Towey, director of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has stirred up a pot of trouble by suggesting that pagans don't care about the poor. [Oh, such stereotypes, pagans and pots... Calling the ACLU, Calling the ACLU...] Wiccans, Druids and other pagans across the country, along with the Washington-based advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are demanding an apology from Towey for his remarks in a White House-sponsored online chat Nov. 26

Oh, hell, what's a Fiath-Based and Community Initiatives Director to do? Okay, okay, Pagans are people, too. And Wiccans. And Druids.

Wiccans? Get out of here. Not even the poor care about you.

What's so lovely about this article is that it's got the Washington Post all fretted about how pagans support the poor. Why, "In Massachusetts, they have given $20,000 for children with AIDS."  Oh, my, you mean that since the pagans help the poor, they're constitutionally clean? But what -- what, what -- if the Roman Cath-O-lics did the same? What then?

Calling the ACLU. Calling the ACLU. The Wiccans need you.

See the Dec 1 politics entry for news of SecWar --oops, SecDEFENSE -- God, I hate the "Department of Defense" --  it's WAR, dammit, WAR -- Rumsfeld's clarity of speech award. I thought it was great on both sides, what he said and what they said about what he said. Meanwhile, the great and unruly Mark Steyn gives his views of Rumspeak in Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook. 

Oh, well, Even the master ironist Mark Steyn misses irony at times. Sadly, Steyn had to say it:

[Rumsfeld's] little riff about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns is in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter.

Yes, Mark it was. Too bad you had to say it. Next time, let Rummy speak for himself, even in the company of the "Plain English Campaign." We here weren't fooled.

Dec 7 / 03

Pearl Harbor Day. Never forget.

This morning I accosted my dear father, thinker, philosopher, brilliant attorney, and economics ignorant, with the question as to why General Motors (remember this is the politics column) is sinking billions of dollars into the pension fund. Without looking up from his toast he threw back, "Because there's more money in it than in making cars." I almost fell to the floor. "Why, Father!" I cried, "You are wrrrrrrrr--ight!" He smiled like a baby after a good move.

Progress comes slow. It's been twenty years since we commenced our lessons in economics. He's set, finally, on supply and demand, which got him correctly to my next question about why prices of apples go up if the supply goes down. "Why, Father, I'm impressed." Alas, he failed, miserably and thoroughly at the last: "Why do price controls cause scarcity?" He just couldn't do it.

You're getting this story as a reminder of the Bromleyism motto, "All economics are politics." Dear old Dad comprehends the simple economic truth of supply and demand. It is simple. But Dad, like the rest, gets lost when politics enters, as it always must. Thoughts of society controlling markets gets him all lovey and warm. He just can't get past the fact that the government ought not set the price of apples.

In 1963, leftist historian Gabriel Kolko announced in his book, "The Triumph of Conservatism," that the Progressive Era was won by business, which he labels "conservatism." "...one of the most influential and important works of modern American history," it reads on the back of my copy. Fifty years before, long before, of course, becoming today's New York Times, the then right-thinking New York Times had it all figured out. In an editorial called, "Industrial Despotism," the Times declared,

Dec 1 / 03

Gotta love this one: Rumsfeld wins "Foot in Mouth" award. for "the most baffling comment by a public figure." The cause of the honor is magnificent:

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Go Rummy!

Nov 28 / 03

The President busted a hole the size of a 747 in the news cycle with his stealth trip to the front lines (AP article here). I wasn't paying any attention to the news, but this one caught my eye. On top of being a sweet play, such as laying a presidential five-card flush on top of a certain Junior Senator from New York, who hoped that a Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan and some whining about "failed policies that are harming our troops" would qualify her for military service as Top Chief (one wonders that successful policies harm troops less? Blood flowed in Europe far more than in Vietnam) or knocking certain editorial boards senseless, this is leadership. FDR and Lincoln both visited the troops -- FDR's was in stealth, too, a side trip to the lines on the Casablanca trip.

This President is a fascinating combination of styles. He enjoys the Teddy-Roosevelt big gesture, but he uses it sparingly. T.R. swung often and hard, and he ended his term not as "The Big Stick" but as a joke of it known as "Bwana Tumbo" and "The Big Noise." Bush prefers William McKinley aloofness with the occasional metaphor, reaching at times for Reagan or Kennedy, or even Lincoln, loftiness, and ever dodging LBJ and Clinton posturing. This latest is a careful use of the high perch, and most deft. He didn't need to say a word. Just fly in, serve some bird to the boys and girls, and git to Crawford.

No more hollering about the aircraft carrier landing. What's outrage gonna do now?

Nov 19 / 03

140th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, 268 words that rocked history. No political statement greater that it, except, of course, that document Lincoln's speech affirmed.

The Declaration of Independence contains the greatest political statement of all time:

At Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, Lincoln not only affirmed Jefferson's history-shattering, he reworked it into the most concise, most powerful statement of self-government ever spoken:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

You are living history, friends, even if Johns Hopkins Prof. Francis "Ain't No Mo History" Fukuyama don't git it. Remember this guy, who declared the end of history in the early 1990s? Just after September 11, he said of the Age of Terrorism (cited by the Economist):

America may become a more ordinary country in the sense of having concrete interests and real vulnerabilities, rather than thinking itself unilaterally able to define the nature of the world it lives in.

Something less than the spirit of Lincoln there. Fear not, for Americans still believe, and Americans still are. So Happy Gettysburg Address Day to all, including to Fukuyama.

Meanwhile, our President is in London reminding the Parliament that we are, indeed, special, something Alexis de Tocqueville called the "American exceptionalism." For more on that see that Economist article, A nation apart.  Part of a remarkable series on America, it's a ton of faith.

To save time, go re-read the Gettysburg Address.

Nov 17 / 03

Oh, the joy of it! Thank you, New York Times, for not only bringing to our attention a coming major annoyance but thereby ensuring that it be a major annoyance.

So kind of the dweebs at 42nd Street to run an article in the Sunday Magazine, right there amidst Esteé Lauder perfume and Chubb investments ads, of the "news" that there's to be some dumb-ass anti-the-world-as-we-know-it protest of the World Trade Organization this week in Miami.

I'm going to Miami on Wednesday. Screw you, too, New York Times.

I coulda been a celebrity, too. All I had to do was to declare eternal enmity to Starbucks and run up and down Alan Greenspan's sidewalk with a sign saying,

Me and My Cell Phone and My Apple Computer and My Rage Against the Machine CDs Are Against Globalization and I Take Back Every McDonalds French Fry I Ever Ate and Besides My Dad Put My Sorry Ass Through College by Suing Tobacco Companies and My Trust Fund is Up 46% Since Bush Stole the Election and the Clinton Recession Ended A Year Before Dan Rather Admitted It, and I'm Here in Miami and the Worst I've Done is to Make Michael Bromley's Flight Late and He's Really Pissed and I'm Glad, Even Though I Had to Duck His Wild Right Fist and What a Bald Guy He Is, I Just Wish I had a Goddam Sense of Humor and Maybe I Could Actually Understand What He Writes, But I Don't and I Can't, and I'm Totally Lame So the New York Times Writes About Me."

Wish me luck at MIA. Please.

Nov 13 / 03

From the "Can't we all just get along?" file, today's trash courtesy David Broder of the Washington Post:

Hastert Defends His Leadership
On a day of nostalgia and reminiscence, featuring appearances by all three of his living predecessors in office, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert defended his leadership against complaints that the House has become a partisan cockpit, where the rights of the minority are routinely trampled.

Broder isn't a journalist. He is a cow. He chews on grass and passes it around fifteen stomachs. Mud pies result. Mr. Broder, a little history, and a ton of perspective, if you puhleez... Back in the good old days non-partisanship of the turn of the 20th century, a furious Democrat stormed the Speaker's podium, demanding,

"What becomes of the rights of the minority?"

Speaker Thomas B. Reed replied,

"The right of the minority is to draw its salaries, and its function is to make a quorum"

Grow up, David Broder. Just because some Congressional Research Service (CRS) conference brought up the subject and posed the question to Speaker Hastert doesn't make it true. Better reporting would have questioned rather assuming the premise that partisanship is either bad or Hastert's fault. In the House of Representatives, the majority rules, and it rules absolutely. CRS staffers may whine, but it don't change nuthin.

No thanks for the regurgitation, Mr. Broder.

Nov 12 / 03

In pt. 2 of the Oct 24 politics entry I wailed up the New York Times for being chumps about not rescinding a 1932 Pulitzer prize for a journalistic lube-job of the Soviet Union. The movement to fix this ugliness was started by Ukrainian groups who didn't appreciate Stalin's beatification in the Times while millions of their kind were being killed by the bastard.

Come across today this website from, of all places, the United Nations:

Exhibition on 70th anniversary of Ukraine famine caused by Stalin opens at UN

The UN, of course, calls it an atrocity brought on by "forced collectivization policies." I suppose this is to be expected. The Ukraine ambassador was more precise, although the UN reporter merely paraphrases what he said, setting the real thing in parentheses:

Ukrainian Ambassador Valeriy Kuchinsky told the gathering that the crime of Holodomor (literally murder by hunger) should not be forgotten but that the exhibition was not staged to avenge the past but to prevent any recurrence in the future.:

That's murder anyway you call it, literally, really, and totally.

Here for The campaign to revoke Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize by the Ukrainian Weekly, which includes an editorial on the entirely lame NY Times position that revocation of the award would be Stalinist "airbrushing history."

Ukrainians: 1.
New York Times: < 0

11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month

Happy Veterans Day. God bless 'em all, then, now and to come. If only for today, thank them when you speak your mind. Thank them when you pray prayers of your own faith. Thank them at least ten times, one for each of the bills of your Rights. You might even thank them 268 times, one for each of Lincoln's words in the Gettysburg Address (anniversary coming Nov. 19). Lincoln knew whom to thank.

Nov 11 / 03

George "Drop Yer Currency Now!" Soros is back to amuse us. Must be tired of shorting the dollar. He was far more entertaining when he was eating Southeast Asia (see The Crash) or demanding free markets for heroin (ya gotta wonder that he's got mixed feelings about Rush Limbaugh doping on Oxycontin). Now Soros is after the President. From the Washington Post:

Soros's Deep Pockets vs. Bush
George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush

Yeah, yeah, whatever, he don't like the Prez. But he really don't like the Prez. Get this:

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."  Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

I don't give a damn for George Soros, I mean, other than to wonder if currency trading and logic are hostile qualities. But do we have to get this on Veterans Day?

So Bush is Hitler. Soros, you sweetie pie, a little history, if you please, and a couple tons of perspective. Maybe you didn't know that Lincoln imprisoned newspaper editors for sedition during the Civil War? Maybe you haven't heard about Japanese internment in WWII (a.k.a., in part, "Saving Hungry from the Nazis")? Perhaps you're of the self-deluded who still won't believe Whitaker Chambers -- and KGB archives that prove it -- that Alger Hiss was a spy for the, oh-don't say it Ronnie, "Evil Empire." Looks like the USofA is gonna have to save your ass (and your freedom to plunder) against your will once again. Or you gonna take down Al Queda by dropping Euros on 'em? Freedom ain't free, dude.

And a Happy Veterans Day to all the rest. God bless America, and God bless those who fought and yet fight to defend Her from Soros' lesser-evils-than-President Bush. I can't wait for Soros' really, really bad day come the first Tuesday of next November.

Nov 6 / 03

The Prez got his Iraq funding the other day. Did you notice? The press was mighty dissapointed, for, having started with all kinds of furor and newsworthy dissent, it slipped through Congress like a teenager breaking curfew. The "Worlds greatest deliberative body," the U.S. Senate, didn't even cast ballots. So that's what we get for the news, that the Senate passed the President's request on a "voice vote." Who said yea or nay goes unrecorded. The Star Telegram finds it a...

Shameful silence
It's interesting that all the bloviating ended Sunday with a barely audible voice vote by a handful of senators. Passionate speeches dissipated into the somber Senate ether. Rhetoric gave way to … what? No means for constituents to hold the orators accountable for what matters when it comes to their praise or condemnation of the president's plan -- how they voted.

The article explains, duh, that it's an election cycle, and Democrats didn't want to go on record not "supporting the troops."

Whatever.

What I find fascinating is that the President asked for $87.5 billion and he got $87.5 billion. Since when has that happened? You mean, the President wasn't negotiating? You mean he really wanted $87.5 billion, and not fifty, or split the difference with a Congressional pay raise?

Back in 1910, President Taft was riding in his automobile with Speaker of the House "Uncle" Joe Cannon. Taft told Cannon that he wanted two battleships. Cannon couldn't believe it. Here was the President of the United States saying what he meant. Cannon was not used to this.

"Nothing illustrates better than this the difference between our last two Presidents. Roosevelt never wanted but two at a time and yet he always asked, even demanded, four a year, hoping thereby to get two. You, on the contrary, want two and ask for two..."

President Bush means what he says and says what he wants. That's the real news. My, my, what a change, as Uncle Joe said, from the last President.

Or maybe the news is this: with the voice vote cave, Senate Democrats dropped their long tradition of peace-time opposition to military spending. Of Taft's two battleships, Democrat Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman railed that Taft ought build the largest battleship in the world:

"Let such vessel be named ‘Terror' and become the peacemaker of the world."

Or, wait! That's it, this is NOT a peace-time military funding. Yes, indeed, that's the news! Even Democrats now believe we're at war. Welcome aboard the USS Terror, boys and girls, and that's precisely what we're fighting in Iraq with and for.

Nov 3 / 03

The judicial nominees fight is getting more fun now that Senate Republicans have discovered cartilage in the lower spine regions. Maybe it'll go full calcium and they'll put their heads up for a day or two and force a real night and day filibuster. Can't you just wait to hear Ted Kennedy read the phone book all night? Or Senator Hillary recite Leaves of Grass?

The President hasn't given an inch, and he keeps sending up nominees dressed up like real judges. One of the latest is Judge Janice Rogers Brown who is looking to jump from the Californian Supreme Court to the DC Court of Appeals. But no, Heaven forbid -- what to do with a judge who believes in the text of the law? Judge Brown actually spoke highly of a 1905 Supreme Court decision that overturned a labor reform law for its violation of private contract. Leave it to the Washington Post (editorial 10/30/03) to therein discover a judicial activism it can't like:

Fueling the Fight
.... Justice Brown is one of the most unapologetically ideological nominees of either party in many years. In speeches, she has openly embraced the Supreme Court's so-called "Lochner" era, during which the justices struck down numerous worker protection laws on grounds that they violated the supposed right of free contract. Across the spectrum of constitutional law scholarship, there are few points of greater consensus than that this period is a blot on the Supreme Court's history. The very word "Lochner" -- named for the 1905 case that forged the doctrine -- has come to be used as a pejorative shorthand for judicial usurpation of legislative authority. Yet Justice Brown has insisted that without such usurpation, "a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy -- a license to steal, a warrant for oppression."

It's nice to hear the Post speak lowly of judicial activism, only, and contrary to their words, they aren't. The Post is mimicking the progressives, especially those of unstable blood and mind -- a dangerous mix, highly combustible and leads to a Bull Moose -- who railed at the courts of the period for engaging in not what the moderns call "judicial activism" but quite the opposite: judicial standpattism.

Today's judicial activism comes of Courts making law that doesn't exist, especially constitutional law. What the Lochner Court did was to affirm fundamental law, and narrowly. Lochner did not make new law. It overturned existing law that the Court deemed unconstitutional. Compassion and good grades in Progressive Era 101 classes come in hating Lochner.

Well, good for you, Judge Brown! I'd have thought California would be glad to send you to DC. Which way will its Lady Senators vote? And would they stay up all night to be rid of Judge Brown?

Oct 30 / 03

The Washington Post brings bemusement to your blogger today, coming of the ever ludicrous, ever self-satisfied Richard Cohen, the Post's stupidest columnist. Really, there's nothing smart in this guy, and I'm not even talking about his hair. He needs to go away.

He hasn't, and I'm bothered. So here's more lame thought from the "communism wasn't so bad file"...

Vietnam It Isn't
In 1965 Lyndon Johnson gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University titled "Why Are We in Vietnam?" Two years later, Norman Mailer offered a somewhat different version in his book "Why We Are in Vietnam." Today, this column could be called "Why We Are Not in Vietnam."

Yeah, yeah, whateva, Dick. You're boring me. I coulda let it go but for this next spillage coming amidst your non-analogies on Iraq:

As Sept. 11 proved, the world is a lot more dangerous now than it was in the Vietnam era. The danger is not just "over there" but right here as well. So it was all the more stunning that the Bush administration went to war with a cockamamie plan for what was to follow, a muddle of wishful thinking that history will judge criminally stupid.

Finally, where Iraq is really different from Vietnam: There can be no premature, chaotic and shameful withdrawal. In the end, Vietnam didn't matter. Iraq does.

Alright, here it goes: Cohen, go away. Go, go, go!  Go, and take with you your 1960s guilt, your 1960s ego trip, your 1960s self-indulgence, and your insipid 1960s hatred of America. You can't get over it, fine. Leave us alone. Vietnam did matter.

You think America was safe in 1965? America had no Soviet nukes pointed down it's throat? America hadn't hundreds of thousands of troops walking communist tripwires? Sure, Castro wasn't yet in Angola, and Allende hadn't yet gone pink and gotten high on Stalin and his tens of millions -- yes, millions -- of murdered (for death by "forced famine," see below). Couldn't we all just get along?

Who kept the world together, Dick? Who stood down the commies who would bury you and your punk newspaper, all in the name of making you as bad off as the worst off working man? Who would shove the 1st amendment down your yappy throat, right after making you squat on the 2nd amendment in the parlor you used to own, stolen from you in the name of the people and over your 5th amendment rights?

So now we're worse off than 1965, you say. I guess that includes 1977, when Harvard economists declared the demise of the free market and the triumph of Soviet economics. Nah, no big deal. Who needed Ronald Reagan, anyway? Hell, real evil is now, now that we defeated communism and left a hole in the world that was filled by Islamicists because your beloved President Clinton wouldn't dare hurt anybody (outside of Washington), and Bin Laden rammed airplanes in New York and Washington because he couldn't believe what a bunch of panzies were these Americans, what, we've blown up two embassies, shot up their Special Ops in Somalia -- whom Clinton refused to reinforce, bombed their Navy, and they still don't do anything. What's it take? Maybe four airplanes?

Richard Cohen, you defame the victims of Sept. 11. You defame the heroes who avenge and redeem them. They're doing what brave Americans have always done, something you can't fathom: defend America. Same as it always was, and that includes 1965, just as today.

Oct 24 / 03

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek Dies in NYC at 105
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who became one of the world's most famous women as she helped her husband fight the Japanese during World War II and later the Chinese Communists, has died in New York. She was 105.

Madame Chiang and her husband were once major political forces in the Nationalist government that ruled China before losing a civil war to the Communists in 1949 and retreating to Taiwan. But the Chiangs' influence faded fast as Taiwan shed its authoritarian past and evolved into a democracy during the past two decades. Her supporters said she was a powerful force for international friendship, understanding and good. But her detractors called her an arrogant dragonlady and propagandist for her husband's corrupt, incompetent government.

R.I.P. Dragon Lady. You were in the eye of the storm.

Speaking of murderers (such as whom Chiang Kai-shek fought), let's go to a 1930s Stalin groupie who's in the news today:

Historian: Times' 1932 Pulitzer Undeserved
A 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to The New York Times should be revoked, according to a historian hired by the newspaper to review the winning work, which has been questioned for years .... A subcommittee of the Pulitzer Board has been reviewing the prize won by writer Walter Duranty for his series on Russia. The review was sparked by complaints that Duranty deliberately ignored in later coverage the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people.

Mark von Hagen, a Columbia University history professor, said in his report to the Times that Duranty "frequently writes in the enthusiastically propagandistic language of his sources," and that "there is a serious lack of balance in his writing." .... "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away," von Hagen said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. The New York Sun first reported the professor's recommendation.

Good for the people of Ukraine who were pushing this

Members of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America joined Ukrainians worldwide this year in urging the withdrawal of Duranty's award, a campaign that included more than 15,000 postcards and thousands more letters and e-mails sent to the Pulitzer Board.

You can expect a value-neutral statement from the Pulitzer Board, citing only journalistic errors, and nothing on the six to eight million Ukrainians murdered by Stalin during that period alone. Our AP writer, Sara Kugler gives us a preview of it by calling the subject of omission of fact a "forced famine."  Forced famine? God Almighty, help us.

I don't suppose Ms. Kugler ever wrote that millions of Jews died from "forced" gas showers and oven visits? This is sickening. To the Stalinists, just as to the Nazis, the killing was critter control. To the apologists like Duranty, the deaths didn't happen. Give him credit, then, for looking the other way. Today's Stalin apologists look upon it as involuntary not eating.

Heh, Ms. Kugler, listen up: while Stalin MURDERED THEM, Duranty waved the pom-poms. And he got a bloody Pulitzer for it. Meanwhile, the Gray Lady ain't losing sleep:

The Times has reviewed von Hagen's report and forwarded it to the Pulitzer Board with a recommendation from Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who declined comment on Wednesday.

The New York Times gets more worked up over tax cuts than mass murder. Oh, yeah, I forgot, the poor Ukranians didn't eat enough, that's all. Too bad there weren't any rich people for nourishment. Stalin murdered them, too. A tax cut with your salad, anyone?

Oct 21 / 03

Last week I heard a national radio talk show caller complain about Ohio Governor Bob Taft, at whom many in Ohio are angry over a sales tax increase. This guy, though, was all-round mad. The Governor, he said, is wasting millions of dollars fulfilling a campaign promise to widen state highways that, the caller said, will be gridlocked in a year anyway. Apropos, today's NY Times brings,

War on Sprawl in New Jersey Hits a Wall
Nine months after Gov. James E. McGreevey promised to wage the nation's toughest anti-sprawl campaign in its most crowded state, his bold growth-control proposals are all but in tatters. The governor and his staff conceded in recent interviews that a divided Legislature and opposition from builders made it pointless to introduce the most far-reaching anti-sprawl laws he outlined in a fiery State of the State address in January, when he vowed to take on "those who profit from the strip malls and McMansions."

Yeah, yeah, I hate McMansions, too, but you know what? McMansions ain't nuthin but Americans doing what Americans do best, keeping up with the Jones's. Alexis de Tocqueville had it right 160 years ago:

 It happened, however, on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to America by political and religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a master and a farmer at the same time. The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted.  A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.

Gov. McGreevey and our NY Times reporter need to listen up to Big Al. They sure didn't in Kalifornia. Every day that my sister can't evict the rent-for-life city-protectant living in her basement, every time rent-control shaves a thousand bucks off a Russian Hill bay-view apartment, every time some San Fernando Valley McMansion wannabe has to pay a million bucks for 2,000 square feet that'd go for $185K in Tulsa... Alexis de Tocqueville's wisdom is trampled. It may not be a landed aristocracy that benefits, but it sure is the owners of land. Today's vassals pay their tithe in higher prices. Thanks much, Sacramento, for putting good land off market. Makes one wonder why the NJ developers don't want it, too.

Instead, Mr. McGreevey, a Democrat in his first term as governor, will focus on less controversial legislative and regulatory changes. And on Friday, the administration abandoned the BIG map, for Blueprint for Intelligent Growth, which had divided the state into areas open for more growth, some growth and no growth. Those elements will be absorbed into another plan, officials said.

Kill my Lanlaw!.

Back now to de Tocqueville for a wrap:

Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of
them make agriculture itself a trade. It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the Far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it: he builds a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price
will be gotten for it. Every year a swarm of the inhabitants of the North arrive in the Southern States, and settle in the parts where the cotton plant and the sugar-cane grow. These men cultivate the soil in order to make it produce in a few years enough to enrich them; and they already look forward to the time when they may return home to enjoy the competency thus acquired. Thus the Americans carry their business- like qualities into agriculture; and their trading passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits.

Oct 16 / 03

Oh, hell, is this politics or cars?

Slang crosses up GM
It's game over for the Buick LaCrosse in Canada. A General Motors executive yesterday admitted that the future Buick model -- which is set to debut late next year -- will be re-named in Canada after GM learned LaCrosse is a Quebec slang term for masturbation.

Swear to God -- right there in the Toronto Sun (courtesy the "Canoe News" -- that canuck for something dirty?).
Continuing:

 GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz... said he wasn't aware of LaCrosse's racy roots although he speaks French and spent three years living in Paris. "I thought I knew every expression existing in the French language for self-gratification, including the crudest ones known to man," said the outspoken Lutz. He told journalists the proposed name for the new Buick has caused "a slight problem with your francophone fellow Canadians." This isn't GM's first name snafu. Sales of the popular Chevy Nova stalled when the vehicle was shipped to Spanish-language countries, where "Nova" translated to "doesn't run."

Actually, "doesn't run" is common to all GM languages. The "Nova" is for "no va," more properly meaning "no go," as opposed to "goes 48,001 miles, then dies," that being one mile after your warranty expires.

Yes, this is politics, and not cars.

Oct 5 / 03

A friend points out that the New York Times fact checkers let slip writer Rick Lyman's historical sloppiness. In this story about rich presidential candidates who discover their common man roots every four years (aka Democrats), we get:

Every Four Years, Blue Bloods Put on a Blue Collar
In 1908, the populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan had an idea: he'd expose the Republican nominee, the rotund Ohioan Robert Taft, as a rich elitist by using pictures of him playing golf. Golf! The sport of blue bloods.

In case it slipped by you, too, Robert Taft was in college in 1908. His father, Bill, was running for president. I have no problem with a typo -- got one on page one, second sentence two in my book. I will argue with bad interpretation. Lyman confounds the mistake with,

Even armed with his cross of golf, Bryan was unable to beat Taft in 1908. Earlier, Theodore Roosevelt did not deny his patrician roots but used them to highlight his reformist credentials.

Of course, the point of the story is is that in our times a Connecticut WASP has run off with the nickname Dubya and a common man's reputation the size of Texas. This doesn't play well at Times Square. Getting there, Lyman trips over both Taft and Roosevelt. T.R. didn't play up his privilege. You kidding me? Look it up, page 15-16, in the fabulous new book, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency":

Roosevelt was no commoner. His family was of the original Manhattan Dutch aristocracy, his Harvard degree and, better yet, Porcellian Club membership were as elite as they come. Roosevelt carefully maintained proper social form, fretting over decorum and the social blunders of others ... He loved the exclusive game of tennis, and he kept it out of the news. Roosevelt was a social patrician and a political populist.

Roosevelt very much did hide his silk stockings, tucked underneath his leggings. So dedicated he was to his horseman image that he withheld endorsement of the automobile, and at a crucial moment in the new industry, in order to avoid any associations with that vile "rich man's toy." In or out of Bryan's cheap shot, Roosevelt fretted over Taft's golfing, too. He told Taft to lay off the five iron lest western voters take offense. Of his own aristocratic sport, Roosevelt told Taft, "I never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear."

Here's the real story, and Lyman missed it because he didn't get it. Not only did Taft loathe a demagogue, he loathed "cheap popularity" derived of fatuous politics. Instead of hiding from his golfing, Taft turned it on Bryan (and Roosevelt) by publicly declaring it "democratic"! He wrote a friend,

You know, and I know, that there is nothing more democratic than golf; that there is nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one more on an equality with one's fellows, or, I may say, puts one lower than one's fellows, than the game of golf.

So what of Dubya? Nothin' more than a New York Times reporter's complaint that a Harvard MBA prefers a Texas ranch to Martha's Vinyard?

Oct 1 / 03

Today's Washington Post runs a column by Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of the 60s civil rights wars who refuses to turn in his commission. Lewis says that the work of Martin Luther King is unfinished, and he cites the example of the Freedom Riders Of 2003 as its heir.

These riders of freedom are a advocates for the rights of people who are in America illegally. But, oh no! -- Lewis doesn't once mention the word "illegal." Instead its the "Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride"

I mean, beside the obtuse and stupidly blatant perversion of the word "immigrant," does Lewis really think it's got anything to do with MLK? Is he reaching that far into the dry well for some legitimacy of protest? (see this entry).

Does the Hon. Lewis deny the United States government the right to define immigration? Has he invalidated your INS stamp at JFK, absolved you of lines at MIA? I'm not sure he means that, but we can extrapolate from Lewis' thinking and view it as an extension of civil rights for blacks, who were abused in law under Jim Crow here in the USofA. By Lewis' argument, the billions around the world are due U.S. constitutional protections, just as are illegal immigrants. The outrage of it!  What of the civil liberties of the Chinese? What of Tiananmen?

"We must stand up for human rights and democracy throughout the world. We have a chance to vote for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy."

So Said Rep. John Lewis, recalling Tiananmen Square. Very well, Mr. Lewis. Would you have a billion chinese immigrants here tomorrow, uninvited by the American people?

Sep 30 / 03

For a fine piece of class-warfare, see H.R. 1276, up for vote tomorrow morning:

Make the American Dream of Homeownership a Reality
More than two-thirds of all Americans own their own home; however, fewer than half of all African American and Hispanic families are homeowners. For these families, one of the biggest barriers to homeownership is the inability to afford the downpayment and closing costs associated with purchasing a home. This legislation seeks to help close this homeownership gap by making $200 million in grants available to more than 40,000 first-time, low-income families to help them achieve the American Dream of homeownership.

Woohoo! it's the "downpayment and closing costs gap."

Back in 1913, it was the automobile gap. Idiot, I mean,  progressive Walter Weyl complained

"Our jogging horses are passed by their high-power automobiles. We are obliged to take their dust... We are creating new types of destitutes -- the automobileless.

More things change... At least the progressives didn't give away cars. You did see it, right: it's "$200 million in grants." That's right, grants. Look it up in the dictionary.

v.t. to bestow or confer.... n. Law. a transfer of property ... syn. socialism.

Sep 29 / 03

Chant "tax cuts for the rich" ten times, or until it makes you either feel better or throw up.

Tax cuts for the rich? In the otherwise tedious Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, there's a gem of an article on the "400 top taxpayers" (sorry no link: see the Oct. 6 edition, pg. 60, "Unrealized Riches"). The story comes from an IRS study here: The 400 [highest] Individual Income Tax Returns (scroll down for the .pdf file). This group paid out 22% of its "income" in taxes. Forbes further notes that the total bill comes to one percent of assets.

Ok, think hard, or break into that painful memory bank of your 1040 last year: Did you pay less than 22% of your income in taxes? I doubt it, especially if you're a payroll slave. Duh. The rich don't take income as salary -- it comes as capital gains, and only as needed by selling off investments. They leave their money in the untaxed zone of "unrealized income." It's not a tough concept. In 1992 Capital Gains taxes (on a sale of stocks, for example) accounted for 36% of the income taxes of the IRS top 400 list. In 2000 it was 72%. Why? Cap gains tax cut.  In the 1950s, the income tax rate was some 90%. Who paid it? Not the rich. Money flows around the tax code like water in my basement (yes, we had to use buckets during the blackout -- gotta buy a generator for that sump pump).

Sorry to be long, but it's important: the Bush tax cuts are NOT for the rich (say it ten times). In fact, those cuts will cause the rich to pay more in income tax, since it will cost them less now. Meanwhile, you chumps out there in the $75,000 to a million bucks category (aww, you don't feel rich, do you?), taking it as salary, will get a true, if small break. This tax cut's for you, baby!

Sep 27 / 03

If you haven't met, allow me to introduce you to Mark Steyn, world's most biting observer. Steyn is a Canadian subject of the Queen whose heart lies in the American constitution. Tickets here for the best ride of the week:

Bring on the capitalists

Following the logic of bad pot grown by the Canadian government and enviro lawsuits over New Mexican shrubs, Steyn magnificently captures the activist endgame:

This would seem to be yet another example of how every do-gooding cause eventually floats free of whatever good it was trying to do and becomes a self-perpetuating business all of its own. The racism industry, for example, is now so large and lucrative and employs so many highly remunerated people from the Rev. Jesse Jackson down that it has a far greater interest than the Klu Klux Klan in maintaining racism. Thus, the African-American Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee was recently moved to complain that the naming of hurricanes is racist. Apparently, blacks are being discriminated against because hardly any massively destructive meteorological phenomena are given African-American names. The black community can't relate to some white-bread wind like Hurricane Isabel. Why are there never any Hurricane Leroys? It's deeply racist and insulting to imply that only WASPily appellated forces of nature are capable of billions of dollars of coastal damage.

Did you read that carefully? I mean, after you stopped laughing at former Senator(!) Sheila Jackson-Lee (aka, Sheila Jackson "We Landed on Mars" Lee), or at Steyn's own ignorance of WASP names -- I mean, when was a martini shaken by an "Isabel" other than that Mexican bartender at the Boston Four Seasons? -- perhaps you missed this line:

The racism industry, for example, is now so large and lucrative and employs so many highly remunerated people from the Rev. Jesse Jackson down that it has a far greater interest than the Klu Klux Klan in maintaining racism.

Steyn is killer.

--------------

Somewhere between Madison Avenue and that Walmart on Highway 57 lies truth in American politics. The Northeast just can find any comfort in the Bush Administration. It's truly mysterious to me, for you can't find better WASPS in Connecticut than in DC these days. It's just that the real WASPS ended up running Haliburton and Stanford. I mean, really, Condi Rice plays the piano. Shaken, not stirred, she is.

We understand why Jesse Jackson ain't on her mailing list, or vice-versa, but why hasn't Newport embraced one of its own? She's everything it should love: black girl civilized by piano lessons and the academy. Still, it's a bit more likely that Walmart will have a parking lot event for her than Saks will throw her a tea. So whose values are skewed -- I mean screwed -- these days?

Sep 26 / 03

Still catching up from the blackout -- which is the title, btw, of the disk that was in my CD player round about 4pm last Thursday, when the local transformer blew.  It's the latest from (Hed) Planet Earth, an awesome rock/hip-hop/punk/industrial act.  NOT recommended for the little ones.

First on the catch-up list is this link to a Washington Post Sunday pg. A-3 article (not bad!) on William Howard Taft's sleep disorder:

Taft's Nodding Off Attributed to Illness
Cardiologist Concludes President Suffered From Sleep Apnea

A medical man, a good man, John Sotos, tracked Taft's weight and disposition for daytime and spontaneous sleep, and concluded, in an article in the medical journal, Chest, that Taft suffered from "sleep apnea," a disruption of nighttime sleep that leads to daytime somnambulance. It's a serous disease, but the good doctor Sotos goes too far with the claim that the condition contributed to Taft's "bumbled" presidency. Your Taft biographer disagrees.  From the Post article:

...Does sleep apnea help explain any of this? If Taft had it, did it affect history?

Taft's most recent biographer doesn't think so. "To say that his success or lack of success as president is a result of his physical condition is to ignore just about everything that happened outside of his falling asleep at the opera," said Michael L. Bromley, whose book, "William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, 1909-1913," was published this month.

But what about all of those embarrassing situations?  "He fell asleep in a conversation with the speaker of the House, but it didn't change the conversation," said Bromley, who lives in Bethesda. "Joe Cannon still didn't get what he wanted, an appointment that was already promised to another guy."

Sep 24 / 03

Lots of idiots screaming at the power companies here in the DC area over the blackout. I can't say I was patient about it, but neither did I demand Congressional hearings. Imagine depriving DC of anything? God forbid. If Iowa grew volts, they'd have taxed it straight to Maryland Rep. Van Hollen's block, straight to his big screen Game Boy.

Bunch of wooses.

Sep 17 / 03

Happy Constitution Day!
This day in 1787 the special convention at Philadelphia sent the Constitution to the States for ratification. One of the most contentious issues in the convention was the number of states necessary for ratification. Nine of thirteen was the result. Like most everything else in the Constitution, from a 4-year term for the President, to two Senators per state, it was an outrageous -- and fortuitous -- compromise. In 1788, the Constitution was ratified by the ninth state. In March of 1789, the new government met for the first time in New York City, and George Washington was sworn in as President.

The ceremony was delayed by a disagreement among congressmen as to what to call the President. Some said he should be "His Highness, the President." Finally, the simple, beautiful, and very democratic, "Mr. President" was agreed upon, and George Washington took the office.

God bless America.

Elsewhere... here's one of the best takes on the "9th Circus" court of appeals decision to halt the CA recall election, from the Boston Herald:

Calif. democracy on hold
``The inherent defects in the system are such that approximately 40,000 voters who travel to the polls and cast their ballot will not have their vote counted at all,'' the court wrote.

While on the surface such a statistic might seem distressing, it's also exactly the situation by which California Gov. Gray Davis was elected less than 10 months ago. So the system that was good enough to elect Gray Davis is inadequate to recall Gray Davis. Hmmmm.

Truth from Boston? Maybe it is the year of the Red Sox.

Sep 16 / 03 pt. 2

Last June, I needed a calendar. I was heading into vacation, and I knew I'd better mark those few days that I really needed to be somewhere or do something. Usually, I don't know what day of the week it is, and in the summer I have a hard time with the month. I live my life by the seasons.

Anyway, I found the calendar section at the office depot, max, or whatever, you know, the one with warehouse stacks for shelves. It was full of 2003 calendars at 80% off. I asked the clerk why they didn't just pay me to take 'em all off their hands. I guess the rest of America bought its 2003 calendars back in January. Back home, I went to Sept. 16 to mark a conference I was to attend (Claremont's Constitution Day celebration -- it was great). I marked it up and then noticed that the Sept. 16 box read, "Independence Day (M)." I was bewildered, and otherwise figured it a typo for "Constitution Day." I browsed it more, and it was full of celebrations and important dates with the "(M)" and "(C)" marks. That's when I realized the "M" was for Mexico.

This is one part of NAFTA I can do without. I hate this damned calendar. Can't seem to find a new one for 2003. They must have sold out.

Sep 16 / 03 pt.1

Oh, my, lots goin' down today: the Ninth Circus intervention in the CA recall, aka the Revenge of the Courts. The whole recall business started as a protest against the courts, so we ought have no surpise at this latest turn. The only difference is the switch of conservative courts vs. the people in the 1900s and the liberal courts vs. the people in the 2000s.

If you're bored with the CA recall, here's a great story for ya:

Pupil's expulsion appeal denied
BEAVER - A Beaver County judge has dismissed an appeal filed by the mother of a 13-year-old South Side Area School District pupil who was expelled earlier this year after admitting to having oral sex with another pupil on a school bus.

Beaver County?  I'll go with that. But really, this one is too much:

The mother ... alleged the district violated her daughter's constitutional rights and was not clear in its written policies that oral sex on a bus was unacceptable behavior.

How did this woman become a mother? And I'm not being facetious. God knows accidents happen, but you think she really knows it?

Sep 15 / 03

September 15, 1857, and a large one... Happy Birthday, William Howard Taft!

(Politics, yes, but there's more: he saved the Constitution)

Sep 12 / 03 (pt 2)

One of the Vietnamese kids in the story in today's automobiles column (<<next door), tried to bribe a cop with $400. That's bad news for Vietnam: $400 bucks can't buy a street cop? So much for reform. They're in big trouble if corruption is still a sellers market. Here in the USofA you get a Senator's first son for $400 bucks, or at least dinner with him. Freedom and political diversity is measured by the price of a bribe. The more power is concentrated, the higher the back-entrance fees.

Sep 12 / 03 (pt 1)

While the polls reveal that Iraqis are OK by Rumsfeld (see What Iraqis Really Think), the NY Times is upset that the people of Baghdad don't obey traffic rules:

A Baghdad Traffic Circle Is a Microcosm for Chaos

Sacré bleu!
 One might think Chirac has won after all. Priorité a droit? But wait, your blogmeister recalls the dark days of Armageddon, when Dan Rather and Jim McDermott (D WA) saw the end of the world. Yes, while cruise missiles and smart bombs demolished Saddam's playgrounds, a certain Baghdad webcam recorded Baghdad's innermost secrets, or, at least, one intersection's display thereof. A camera feed from one of the Baghdad hotels kept watch over an intersection. Blog watchers noticed that whenever the bombs fell, red lights went unheeded. Self-defense, or chaos? Let the NY Times decide.

Let's just say that the red-light commissars of Montgomery County, MD, would have died of regret.

Sep 11 / 03

God Bless America!

Sep 10 / 03

The second half of the century has been incomparably more peaceful than the first, simply by putting power into the hands of those people who wanted peace.
- Edward Teller

R.I.P., Sept. 9, 2003
You helped save the world, bud.

Speaking of anti-commies, see here for the Graphic of the Week posting that's up today.

Sep. 08/ 03

Perhaps you heard about the life-line Gray Davis threw out for himself? Against all promises, he's signed a bill that authorizes CA drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Can you say "recall" election?  (This isn't today's point, but here's a precise example of how small minorities govern state politics. Since majorities don't vote, elections are moved by motivated groups who otherwise constitute minority views. James Madison would have to rethink Federalist No. 10's famed minority protections from majority rule, because he didn't count on majority apathy).

This is not in the car column, because Davis ain't talking about cars. It's called immigration policy, folks, and that's all there is to it. Illegal immigrants would rather a drivers license than a passport or a working social security number. It's more useful, and with it, they won't need any other documents.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Virginia is busy making it more difficult for illegals to get a license (see the Washington Times here). The Virginia DMV used to be the Walmart of drivers licenses: cheap, easy, and guaranteed. The client list included at least two of the Sept. 11 hijackers (for whom those licenses and box cutters were more useful than guns). With the new rules, life has gotten much harder for illegal immigrants in Virginia. The Mexifornia lobby wants the opposite. Muchas gracias, señor Davis!

Sep. 04/ 03

A reader kindly leads us to this article by James Q. Wilson from way back in 1997: Cars and Their Enemies. Wilson wonders if the automobile didn't exist, could it be introduced today? What, kill 30,000 citizens a year with the things? Pollute the air while burning precious dinosaur remains? Well, you get the idea: SUVs? Hell, they'd ban the internal combustion engine before you can say "trees are people, too."

Good for Wilson, but I'll have to take some credit for it myself. His "what if" already happened back in the early days of automobiles. Oh, yeah, they said it all back in 1906, when automobiles were just as un-PC as today, and they hadn't yet made their case.

So while you ponder Wilson's nightmare, thank the good Lord for William Howard Taft, who yanked politics from automobiles and set the nation to motoring. Now you gonna buy my book?

Sep. 02/ 03

A correction:

My entry of Aug. 31 of quagmires and presidential arrogance missed the correlation entirely. So did the author of the piece, which I trashed. No, arrogance and the Emperor's clothes have no say with Bush -- I was right about that. What I missed was the obvious: it defined the Clinton administration.

See Casper Weinberger's column (here) in today's Wash. Times . Cap is all too right. His column, prompted by the new book by Richard Miniter, Losing bin Laden, says,

The Clinton foreign policy was to get re-elected. Therefore, anything that might be controversial had to be avoided ... The president did not want to hear about bad news...

Read the whole thing and then get back to my Aug 31 entry and the article by Walt. History is catching up to Clinton. Wash. Times reporter Bill Gertz served the indictment a year ago. Now Miniter is getting it to the jury.

Sep. 01/ 03

It's like skirt, this business about how the Patriot Act has killed civil liberty. All I get is a flash of leg and no Christmas. A vast, I mean a vast majority of Congress voted for the law, and we must admit, it has kept the peace since Sept. 11. But all I hear is how it took down the Constitution, too. Well, let's see it?

I listened to the Reverend Ashcroft the other day. He made a great case for his Justice, and for the Patriot Act, and I could only agree with him when he said that critics are all fuss and no mush.

Finally, Nat Hentoff, the great jazz critic and civil libertarian speaks up. Nat and I don't always agree, but I'm glad, finally, for a little flesh from the critics. So spend the dime and visit Nat's splee on the dangers of the FBI lookin' through your library account.
 (Let 'em catch you readin' my books, K?):

The state of our liberties

Aug. 31 / 03

Oh, the joy of it!  The editors at the Washington Post are having too much fun quacking over Iraq. Man it looks bad over there, believe them.

Some real fun in today's Outlook piece by Walter Pincus:

A Quagmire? More Like a Presidential Fixation

Walt says the Administration don't want to hear bad news, just like in that other quagmire - err, presidential fixation, Vietnam. Walt, Walt!  Walt!  Too late, there he goes, straight in to the memoirs of Richard Helms, the 1960s CIA Director who helped two Administrations fool themselves giddy:

The word that comes to mind about U.S. policy when reading Helms isn't "quagmire." It's ignorance or maybe arrogance -- combined with a willful disregard of facts that do not correspond with the personal or political priorities of American decision makers.

What, no quagmire?  Heavens, no, it's much worse, it's, it's... arrogance. Says Walt, and highlighted by the editors,

In the cases of both Vietnam and Iraq, policymakers often disregarded what they didn't want to hear.

Visions of prickly imperials waving dissent like Henry II's "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" or Louis XIV's, upon walking out the door to find his carriage just then arriving, "J’ai faille attendre" ("I almost had to wait" -- sorry, sounds better in original). Visions of -- and correlations with Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, and, yes, the Domino theory. Here we have modern McCarthyism: Say it about something and the association is forever damned.

But not so fast, Walt. President Washington didn't want to
 hear about disturbances in western Pennsylvania any more than Johnson wanted to hear about problems in Vietnam. And Lincoln wasn't too fond of all that evidence of the idiocy and brutality of his generals, either.

Walt's given us your standard bad logic and tiringly typical demagoguery. Unless, of course, the wish is the father to the thought. Quagmire -- does he believe it,
 or is it that he wants it?

Lincoln might have been wrong at any given moment, but it's a good thing he didn't think it. No, he went headstrong and often alone into national salvation, damn the fools on all sides:

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Aug. 30 / 03

Oops. Apropros of my column to the left of this date, as reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics,

Vehicles in Households Outnumber Drivers

So much for L.A. County.
And so much for my theories of the PRC entry to the American Century (give or take a couple centuries). Looks like they've got quite a ways to go. If Beijing adds 200,000 cars a year, as the People's Daily claims is the current growth rate, it will take them more than a few years to get to garage-household parity in Beijing. That leaves about a billion autos short for China as a whole.

They'd better get with it, or we'll bury 'em with envy.

Aug. 29 / 03

The California recall... My reaction:
pathetic!

The Golden State recall comes of the progressive period, a "reform" championed by Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Progressive Party VP candidate, Hiram Johnson, a governor of California.  Johnson was an unstable maniac who never got over 1912, something that even the greatest ego of the day, Teddy Roosevelt, managed. Johnson would rather eat his hat than admit that he might have been wrong.  He carried his grudge into 1916, when he withheld his political machine (wasn't he against political machines?) from supporting the Republican and great Charles Evans Hughes.
 Hughes lost to Woodrow Wilson at the last hour in California.

The progressives were all about power to the people. The concept was as stupid then as it was in the 1960s, as it is now.  But, lo, irony of ironies, the party of the people, now in power, proves the golden rule of politics that he who controls the gold controls all, and the Democratic party would rather not give up the gold.

It's a great circus, and I can only applaud Hiram Johnson for having built the arena. 
Watch 'em play!

P.S. The recall election mimics the worst aspect of multi-party elections that go on in most countries. As the Republicans are divided and entering the election with no sole candidate as derived from a primary, there will be a multi-candidate general choice

Aug. 28 / 03

Black boxes for drunks and teens!

Apropos of yesterdays column below, today's
 Virginian-Pilot (Hampton Roads) carries a splee by
 Kerry Dougherty begging Richmond to ban all driving
 after the first sip. (Beware the cookies: this site asked
 for about twelve just to open the page.) She writes,

 How does a drinker decide if he ought to drive? He could be drunk, for crying out loud.

Uh...

When the going gets tough, the nannies get going.

Aug. 27 / 03

This month's Forbes mag has a sweet little pill for nannies and insurance companies. On pg. 84 of the Aug. 11 issue, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff sell readers on the profits and joys of "Black Boxes for Cars."

The arguments are good. For example, Audi could have saved some serious legal fees and market share had black boxes shown "sudden accelerations" came of clumsy feet rather than throttle problems.  That, and Ford's rolling Bronco problems, make the little black devils most appealing, but Ayres and Nalebuff close the deal with the teenager-leash. Just slap it on the back of the 17 year old, and no more teenage accidents. The authors write, 

Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed.

So let's affix concept to reality:

Teenagers are likely to heed
 onboard snitches.

If you and your insurance company want your kid to respond only to negative reinforcement, you can buy a black box $280, available next month.

Meanwhile, over in England, according to the Sun (newspaper), UK Transport Secretary Alistair Darling wants "Electronic Vehicle Identification" gizmos stuck to every car (see Machines will make criminal of every driver, 8/25/03 by Gary O'Shea and Nic Cecil). I'll bet the insurance industry has endorsed the concept.
The nation's police forces certainly have.

Anyway, the article title is wrong: such electronic enforcement won't make criminals of every driver.  They're already criminals. Think "Fifty Five." That's right, we're all criminals now, Mr. Carter.
It's the getting caught business that
 concerns Mr. Darling.

Btw, as this is the political column, I'll have to
 add one more political thought:

Did I get that right?

Well, whatever. All I know is that electronic enforcement makes knaves of us all.

 - Bromley