Category Archives: government, law, and politics

Driven Crazy

Detroit Fights California Bid to Open Car Pool Lanes to Fuel-Conscious Import
By DEAN E. MURPHY

Aides to the governor say he will sign legislation approved on Thursday that could allow up to 75,000 hybrid drivers, mainly those behind the wheel of a gas-sipping Prius, to use car pool lanes even when taking to the road alone. The governor hopes the perk will encourage more people to buy the cleaner-burning cars, but by doing so, he will give the Japanese-made Prius vaunted status in a state where nearly 30 million registered vehicles compete for every inch of open asphalt.

[…]

But Mr. Schwarzenegger might as well promote a “Buy Japanese” campaign, William C. Ford, Jr., chairman of the Ford Motor Company, said in a letter to the governor. An official with the United Auto Workers National Ford Department also wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger, urging him to veto the legislation because no American-built vehicle would qualify. The combined offensive nearly killed the bill in the Legislature; it passed the 80-member State Assembly with the minimum 41 votes.

It’s great seeing how Ford is complaining of prejudice, whereas in fact this law will only prefer the Japanese incidentally, insofar as they’re the ones building hybrids rather than whining about technical and economic difficulties. You’d think that a company like GM, with a gross income greater than many countries’ GDPs, would be be able to do it, but nooo….

Needless to say, I consider only buying American to be utter bunk with cars, especially with so many foreign companies building plants here. It’s like our "Dream Team" in basketball. Taking a dive might be beneficial for them in the long run.

Sock Monkey in ’04

5 Replies

Prior to primary and caucus season, the battle cry of all but the staunchest supporters
of Bush was “Anybody But Bush in ’04”. Then people saw what the Democratic
party had to offer and suddenly it was “Does it have to be one of them?”
Many ex-Democrat non-Republicans began to brace themselves for a clothespin vote
or contemplate third party candidates.

The owner of JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButI’mVotingForHimAnyway.com
is trying to lure the disenfranchised and disaffected and even conservatives to
the Kerry camp. Not all of the site’s articles are up yet, but they ought to be
interesting. NOTA BENE: The language on the site is rather coarse.

In a related note, here’s another reason why pro-lifers
won’t touch Kerry with a ten meter cattle prod.

For the hat trick, here’s an article
about the man whose “lack of vibrancy…[and] utter dearth of sex appeal
made Al Gore look like Charo”. Then again, some say a d-bag is better than
Bush.

Mother, Should I Trust the Government?

3 Replies

Hooray! I’m not alone as a moderate Catholic who feels disenfranchised by the two-headed monster in Washington. This bit sums things up quite nicely:

"…by the time I was an adult, the Democratic Party had begun to shift its primary focus away from meat-and-potatoes issues of social justice, to Big Government support of an increasingly un-mainstream ideological platform that had more to do with social engineering than with social justice. This shift was epitomized, of course, by the Democratic Party’s fierce embrace of pro-choice feminism, with all its attendant pieties, from gay marriage to abortion-on-demand, from surrogate parenting to stem-cell harvesting to Orwellian bans on "hate speech."

But I knew I could never be at home in the Republican Party, either. Although ostensibly pro-life, the GOP has remained, as ever, the party in the pocket of Corporate America. (And the bigger the corporation the bigger the pocket, not to mention, pocketbook.) Sure, the Republicans toss us pro-lifers a tasty morsel now and then. I rejoiced mightily when Bush signed the ban on partial-birth abortions; but as an increasingly convinced supporter of small-is-beautiful Catholic social teaching, I remain haunted by Eisenhower’s prophecy about the Military-Industrial Complex, for which Dick Cheney could serve as poster boy. There was nothing for this ex-Democrat, non-Republican to do, in our lesser-of-two-evils bi-partisan mess of a political system, but turn (gag) Independent."

AstroTurf Activism

1 Reply

Cut-and-Paste
Propaganda Infiltrates Opinion Pages
By Paul Farhi

Reader, beware! Some of America’s newspapers have become
unwitting conduits for campaign propaganda. Thanks to some nifty Internet technology, the campaigns of President Bush and John F. Kerry are making it easy for their supporters to pass off the campaigns’ talking points as just another concerned citizen’s opinion. Pro-Bush or pro-Kerry letters bearing identical language are flooding letters-to-the-editor columns.

Ales Rarus

A Rare Bird, A Strange Duck, One Funky Blog

Category Archives: government, law, and politics

Driven Crazy

Sock Monkey in ’04

Mother, Should I Trust the Government?

AstroTurf Activism

Come Mister Tally Man