National Review Strikes Again

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,”

The latest cover is an obvious take on Sonya Sotomayor's above statement. Naturally, the clueless are in high dudgeon. The comments over on a confirm Sotomayor forum run around 10:1 against, but this one made me laugh out loud:

"How DARE some one depict their opponent as a peaceful, smiling, centered, Master of Enlightenment with the hand posture of a Teacher rising above a Lotus of the Open Mind to the Universal! How DARE they"!

This one must take the prize for the most obtuse:

"Exactly! TNR is doing a really good job of alienating everyone but the radical right...thanks, guys! Keep up the good work"!

Uh, the "offending" cover is from National Review, not The New Republic. You can tell because it says National Review, you know--right on the cover you are commenting on...

This week's runs

My Chelmsford half marathon 13.12 1:51:17 8:29 31-May-09

Bedford Neighborhood 4.1 31:35 7:42 1-Jun-09

short dog run 2.5 24:00 9:36 2-Jun-09

Landing Strip 020 11.8 96:00 8:08 3-Jun-09

Bedford Neighborhood 4.1 31:28 7:40 4-Jun-09

Faun Lake 5.5 42:18 7:41 5-Jun-09

You Go! Indian-American Girl!

Indians, especially Indian women are few-and-far-between in athletics. In my last two races there were a couple of trailblazers.

Landing Strip 020

I used roads to get from home to the start of the bike path. After running the bikepath (seen as railroad tracks on the above map), I use other roads to get back to the start of the path again. Run the bike path a second time and then go back home via roads. It is sort of like when an airplane is doing practice approach and landings: Except, all on the ground with no aircraft.

11.8 miles and it was roughly 96 minutes. This makes about 8:08/mile. I had my ironman set to time, since I needed to be home at a certain time and I was cutting it close. Coming up our road, I saw that our elementary school girls were walking home from the bus stop, so I raced them the rest of the way home and Jemma beat me. Anyway, that is how I got distracted and didn't make sure I had stopped the timer when I got home.

Will Obama be able to pound a square peg into a round hole?

Or rather, a burly blue-collar factory worker into a pencil-necked green shirt?

Okay, enough of being oblique. Foreign auto makers are good at making small, efficient cars because their home markets demanded this. There were lots of factors: They had (and have) much higher fuel prices, smaller roads, less parking and were in general, not as rich as Americans.

Here in the U.S. with our vast distances, wealth and cheap fuel, our auto companies were very good at making big powerful vehicles.

CAFE and unions

Our powerful unions have been able to extract very nice salary and benefits from U.S automakers, but the only way to support that is for the companies to have profitable product lines. Government regulations force automakers to meet an average fuel economy for their fleet. As a result, they make big profitable cars and little cars that loose money.

This little car gets good mileage and currently sells for $700 under the invoice price.

Now the government essentially owns GM and wants to run it in a way that makes Democratic interest groups happy: Environmentalists want high fuel efficiency. Unions want cushy jobs--the more the better. You can't have both.

In a rational world, we would notice that there are plenty of economical cars available, so those who want them are able to get them.

This Camaro goes for $4,500 over invoice ($3,500 over list) and has 426 hp.

There is no need to meddle in the decisions of companies; they will make whatever consumers demand.

If the government wants less fuel used, they can cause its price to rise through taxes (I don't think this is a good idea, but that is a subject for another post).

Update: Telling my wife about CAFE standards, she asked if it was a nice place to get coffee and tasty pastries. Me: No. It is a place to bankrupt major American industrial companies.

Sunday Run

I ran this same course May 13th and did it 4 minutes faster than today's 1:51:17 I just ran out of steam around the half-way point and sort of trudged the remainder. It was a bit warm, so that could have had some effect too.