Audi’s devastating Super Bowl commercial on America’s green police (though I’m not sure Audi actually intended this brilliant piece of social commentary):
Subhead: Behold the cratering of an economy, courtesy of one governor’s Obamaesque policies
by Henry Payne
Detroit – Most Americans are just getting warmed up to the idea of a self-centered chief executive who has divined America’s future as a green economy and is brashly installing the industrial-policy tools to get us there. But we here in Michigan have been living it since Gov. Jennifer Granholm took office in 2003.
On Wednesday night, the flashy second-term governor celebrated the “change” she’s brought to Michigan in her final State of the State address. Read it and weep. . . .
Detroit – According to news reports, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering imposing civil penalties on Toyota for failing to report defects in its accelerator pedals that have resulted in an estimated 19 fatalities over the last decade.
“Since questions were first raised about possible safety defects, we have been pushing Toyota to take measures to protect consumers,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
No word yet on whether Mr. LaHood is considering action against Congress for CAFE fuel-efficiency mandates that have cost an estimated 3,000 lives over the last ten years.
Yeah, a simple pun. But you’d be surprised how long it took me to figure out the setting for it. In the end, SYNC is aimed at young, digitally-oriented buyers, so I brought in a dude.
I love Groundhog Day. It inevitably provides the perfect backdrop for the latest political nonsense. Six more years of Iraq War (Bush). . . six more years of global warming (Al Gore). . . and now. . .
Kind of a crazy weekend. If I wasn’t drawing cartoons, I was in Daytona Beach at the 24-Hour race (see entry below) and when I wasn’t at the racetrack, I was editing copy and photos for the Motor City Open website, of which I am editor. The MCO is one the U.S.’s premier pro squash tournaments. I am an avid fan of the game (as well as a player), and pro squash players (the World #1 and MCO top seed, Karim Darwish of Egypt, is pictured below) are incredible to watch.
The website is themotorcityopen.com The finals were Monday, Feb. 1. And now my life can get back to a semblance of normal.
Readers of this blog know I have the need for speed. This weekend was a special motor racing experience. . . . I was at the Daytona 24-Hour race participating in their Heritage event – a celebration of past race winners. I took my father’s Porsche 907, the 1968 winner. The event honored both his great memory as well as the car’s. Porsche Club of America met us there and documented the weekend with this fabulous documentary. Vic Elford is the legend who drove the car 40 years ago. That’s me driving the car today.
Obama delivers one of the most obtuse, arrogant, tactless (attacking the Supreme Court justices five feet from him? Really?) State of the Unions I’ve ever witnessed. Mocked with laughter in the chamber. . . he also gave plenty to mock as a cartoonist.
Detroit — President Obama clean jobs of the future look an awful lot like the obsolete jobs of the past. “Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act,” said Obama last night in his SOTU speech about a new Orlando-Tampa rail link.
Trains are the future? Obamaphiles are convinced that Communist China and an economically sclerotic Europe are the future (“there’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains that manufacture clean-energy products,” said the president), but trains have failed in the United States because they are unable to compete against planes and autos in a suburban country of open spaces.
Florida take note. Here in the Midwest, passenger rail used to run between the major metro hubs of Chicago and Detroit. It dried up long ago.
No private entity has been able to make a business case to get back in the business. And government can’t either. Which is why the feds rejected Michigan’s request for $993 million in stimulus funding to build “high speed” rail between Chicago and Detroit just this week (despite Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm’s lobbying that such rail is necessary to combat global warming).
The business model is a failure. Better to con the public out of its tax dollars by building an entirely new rail in a virgin Florida corridor. That’s never been tried before, right?
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