Saturday at the auto show

Saturday we spun on down to the San Diego Auto Show which was being held at the convention center. With the opportunity to check out some cool wheels we were also very interested to see how our tax dollars were being spent, particularly at the General Motors displays.

Long story short, heavy on the Camaro, Corvette and their SUVs.

Here’s a nice look at the Camaro at one of GM’s central displays.




And here’s the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid.

You know, for $54,000, we better be getting more that 22 highway and 21 city.
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It gets better.

For a mere $59,000, you can roll off the lot in an ethanol-burning Tahoe getting 21 highway and 15 in the city.


And while we’re on a green theme, here’s the Fisker, available in the fall of this year. Fisker you will recall is an automotive company backed by Al Gore which received a $529 million U.S. government loan to manufacture in Finland this little hybrid gem upon which you are affixing your gaze.

Copy price: $89,000.

Hey, no one said going green was going to be cheap. Or ethical. Or sensical.






Jeep had a cool little obstacle course set up.





The man on the left is off-road legend and El Cajon native, Ivan “Iron Man” Stewart. The guy just emanates a rugged, western dudesmanship. People young and old alike were coming up to Stewart, chatting, taking pictures with him and getting his autograph.

Photo image of the day

(click on image to, ahem, enlarge)


With czars crawling out of the woodwork at every turn, we figure adding two or three more won't hurt anything.

But do you know what would look better here, instead? Fir. Douglas Fir.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department's forecasts "have caused considerable concern" among farmers and ranchers.

(italics... all of them, ours)

This is just insanity.

And haven’t we been down this road of “altering” data to “hide the decline” to fit snugly into a political agenda just recently?

The article goes on to say that Vilsack wants his chief economist to work with the EPA to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."

Well, we certainly know what some of the intended consequences of agriculture are: abundant and cheap food that will feed this country’s and the world’s growing population. Unfortunately, we are not really concerned with that. Radically altering the business model of our agrigulture sector based upon junk science is apparently trumping starving ourselves.

The dairy industry is already heavily subsidized in order to prop up prices, so we guess this is just the Obama administration’s way of extending a cash for conifers program to the rest of the agriculture industry.

We’re beginning to wonder: are they really that incompetent or do they sit around and make-up the most blatantly retarded crap just to make blogging easy?

P.S. Looking forward to more green on green violence as the ethanol industry clashes with the Cash for Conifers lobby.

It's become apparent we are not going to modify our way out of this

From the Dept. of Inevitability overseen by the Bureau of We-told-you-so…

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

“The choice we appear to be making is trying to modify our way out of this, which has the effect of lengthening the crisis,” said Kevin Katari, managing member of Watershed Asset Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund. “We have simply slowed the foreclosure pipeline, with people staying in houses they are ultimately not going to be able to afford anyway.”

We’re not quite sure where to even begin with this. The article goes on to contend that banks have been using temporary loan mods as a justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books. We are attempting to recover a segment of the economy in which we still don’t know how much of it is toxic because we are papering it over with tax dollars and kicking the can down the road? Terrific.

Kicking the can down the road instead of letting the natural market forces to wring the excesses and toxic assets out of the system.

But by artificially propping up the housing prices, people who cannot afford their homes are poring money down a black hole and keeping their home ownership dream alive on promises from the government. And capital that would have been otherwise freed-up to other parts of the economy as those people moved into a cheaper rental while they got back on their feet is now lost forever.

And, obviously, this artificial housing price prop-up, keeps out people who really would be able to afford a home in normal circumstances. But normal has nothing to do with radically transforming the American way of life or something.

And even with all this “help” don’t expect things to get any better.

In 2008, more than 1.7 million homes were “lost” through foreclosures, short sales or deeds in lieu of foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Last year, more than two million homes were lost, and Economy.com expects that this year’s number will swell to 2.4 million.

“I don’t think there’s any way for Treasury to tweak their plan, or to cajole, pressure or entice servicers to do more to address the crisis,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “For some folks, it is doing more harm than good, because ultimately, at the end of the day, they are going back into the foreclosure morass.”

Oh, but they will. Trust us on that because we all know that the statist solution to failed statist policy is more statism and we guarantee you that Moody’s prediction was based partly on that.

Quote of the day

It speaks eloquently to the Obama administration’s priorities that it took the White House four days to acknowledge the “catastrophic breach of security” that led to the failed bombing of a US-bound jet on Christmas Day — but a scant four hours to accuse Dick Cheney of coddling terrorists.

That about puts a nice neat bow on an administration that appears to be in constant campaign mode but entirely unwilling or unable to lead. From horribly inappropriate “shout-outs” in the wake of a terrorist attack on our soil to its open scrap with Fox News, all one gets is a sense of misplaced priorities and general cluelessness.

An atmosphere of innovation

Freedom of the press. Freedom of religion. How about freedom of booze?


Back in 1976, the U.S. exported $6 million dollars worth of wine. By 2006, however, that figure climbed to a staggering $1 billion dollars. How did it happen? California’s great climate and the shocking results of a blind taste test set up by French wine makers in 1976 certainly helped but perhaps the most important factor is the California wine makers’ ability to innovate and create. Where the government here largely stays out of the wine making business, the French government sticks its nose into about every aspect of the wine-making process from deciding alcohol contents to dictating which type of grape can be grown in what region.

What results is perhaps some great tradition but also a stultified industry that is hog-tied by wine certification laws that prevent experimentation and innovation.

Check out reason.tv’s take on how all this went down in video below.



If embed no worky, please click here.

Photo image of the day

It’s come to this.




Forget email, FaceBook or even texting. We have now come the full circle in memorializing guy-a-log , i.e., what cool bands and music nephews think their uncle needs to check out on Youtube and Itunes as detailed at a 21st birthday party a few evenings ago.

And a trip down Memory Lane?

We’ve read and heard much about Japan’s Lost
Decade and we wonder if it’s incorrect to use that term in the singular. We are optimists at heart but we look at the economic policy being pursued by our government and can’t help but think that we are merely repeating the mistakes of bailouts and stimulus programs that only served to prolong the Great Depression and which is making a mockery of Japan’s economic struggles being confined only to the 90s.

B-Daddy has an excellent breakdown of the situation, here.


P.S. Much discussion about what term is best to tag the first ten years of this century. We've heard the Aughts and the Naughts among others. Anyone up for the Oh-Nos?.

And down the memory hole we go

Nidal Hasan, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and who….?

Chief Thomas said investigators believe that Mr. Muhammad acted alone. He seemed to be familiar with the Army recruiting office because it was not far from his home, the chief said, but might have been on the prowl for anyone in uniform.

If you are wondering who Mr. Muhammad is, he is Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad who back in June of ’09 gunned down Private William Long and injured another member of the Army while they were on break outside a Little Rock, Arkansas recruiting office.

If your memory is a little hazy, you can’t be blamed because no one really wants to talk about this, certainly not the President who still has not made a single statement nor mention of the first political/religious-motivated assassination of a member of our armed forces here on our soil (going from memory – if we’re wrong, please correct us).

You might think a terrorist attack of that nature might get some ink and coverage of it would be extensive. You would think.

We did a Google search for “Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad” and the first six pages are all news and internet postings in the immediate aftermath of the assassination but nothing dated much past one or two weeks of the incident.

Finally, on page 7 we get some info from a crime news aggregator that Muhammad’s lawyers filed a motion back in October for more time to go through the evidence. The current trial date is Feb. 15th. That’s it. That’s all we know about this trial at this time.

But like Hasan and Abdulmutallab, we take great comfort in the fact that Muhammad acted alone and was not, repeat not, part of some larger terrorist plot.

Quickies

Top 10 conservative movies of (last) decade,

Yet another reason to revile Obamacare: Trial lawyers will wet their beak to the tune of $50 million over 5 years for a program designed to encourage states to consult them on "alternatives" to malpractice claims. That should bear some positive results.




Who has the stronger lobbying presence in Washington D.C., the Botox industry or the tanning industry? According to Obamacare, definitely the Botox industry.

As US senators prepare to vote on the healthcare reform bill today, an unlikely casualty of one of Barack Obama’s keystone policies has now emerged: tanning salons.

A 10 per cent sales tax on salons that use sunbeds was slipped into the bill at the last minute, replacing a tax on cosmetic procedures such as Botox injections, which became known as the “Bo-tax”.

No doubt, Speaker Pelosi was pleased by this development.
H/T: Harrison




Former major leaguer, Doug Glanville, totally knows where Tiger is coming from.

It was like a kid finding Batman’s belt in the lost and found. No point in giving it back until you’ve tried all your new powers.

Victor Davis Hanson on the use of adverbs:

When we do know for a fact that Mutallab tried to blow up a plane, we get a presidential "allegedly" ("a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire"), and yet when we don't know all the facts, as in the Professor Gates mess, we get instantaneous certainty ("the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.")

Amazing stat(s) of the day:

According to Transparency International, Iran is today one of the most corrupt economies in the world. It also has the ignominy of topping the list of all countries in terms of brain drain. Each year, between 150,000 and 180,000 of the country's best and brightest leave the country. The yearly cost to Iran for this brain drain alone is estimated to be almost equal to the yearly cost of the Iran-Iraq War, according to the World Bank.

And finally, and to prove our hearts are in the right place for the upcoming year... another economist predicting a double-dip recession.

So what we're left with is the type of government-sponsored orgy of spending and money creation that Washington used to condemn with all-knowing righteousness when undertaken south of the border. But the effect of our doing it is far more consequential, since America possesses the exorbitant privilege of minting not only its own but the world's money.

As we move into 2010, no doubt the horns will be blowing for the long-awaited U-shaped recovery. I suspect it won't be long before we realize we've drunk too much, and that the second dip of a W-shaped recession awaits us.

New Years 2010

In what we hope is the dawning of a BwD tradition, we will be embarking on a pub crawl today hitting up some of San Diego's more venerable and historic haunts and dives. This presents a win-win as now we have the perfect excuse to turn in early on New Year's Eve and foregoing the night's trite and contrived celebrations.

Needless to say, all further posts today are of the canned variety.

We want to wish everyone a Happy New Year's and hopes for a tremendous 2010.