Petroschadenfreude from Ted Rall

Today's cartoon from Ted Rall distills the joyful message of my post from May 2 into one frame.

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Remember to check Ted's comics and blog posts regularly at gocomics.com/tedrall and at rall.com.

True Blue Liberal celebrates high gas prices: “The era of the truck-based large S.U.V.’s is over”!!

The New York Times today had a great article celebrating the fact that gas prices are finally having some effect on the mix of new cars leaving America's showroom floors. For the first time in my life I spent over $40 to fill the empty tank of my Volkswagen Golf last week, but the negative shock to my wallet was overcome by the positive Schadenfreude when I thought of the effect on those driving Hummers and Escalades!

... with oil prices expected to remain high for years, auto industry executives are seeing a turning point.
“The era of the truck-based large S.U.V.’s is over,” said [not the] Michael Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, the nation’s largest auto retailer.
Sales of traditional S.U.V.’s are down more than 25 percent this year. In April, for example, sales of G.M.’s Chevrolet Tahoe fell 35 percent.

Where was the fire?

Governor Jon Corzine's piece-of-shit full-size SUV was traveling at 91 mph on a 65-mph highway before his crash last Thursday according to the Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police today. It also seems to have been scaring other hard-to-control trucks out of their lanes with its hectic approach. At least this "accident" didn't claim any innocent victims.

Is anyone else pissed about this? I voted for Jon Corzine and I probably will again, but I also drive on the Garden State Parkway in a Volkswagen, and I have a son with a fresh driver's license. What am I supposed to say to him about speeding when the New Jersey State Police not only do NOTHING to stop an average speed of 75-85 mph on a crowded 65-mph highway, but they treat this busy highway as their own personal racetrack. It's bad enough when they do it in their cruisers, but these top-heavy oversized trucks are potential murder weapons when driven at that speed.

I have this naive belief that nobody is important enough to speed unless they're responding to an emergency. The Governor of New Jersey is not a fireman, and he was not on his way to the scene of a crime. I know that most people in his position probably do it routinely, but I think they need to explain why (though the obvious answer, I'm afraid, is "because I can").

New drivers are also told that they are responsible for making sure that their passengers are belted. Why didn't this State Trooper/Chauffeur insist that his front seat passenger wear his seatbelt?

Jon Corzine needs to answer a lot of questions about this "accident" when he heals enough to resume his duties.
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UPDATE on 4/18/07: This morning's New York Times article on this news says:

"...the trooper driving the vehicle, Robert J. Rasinski, had told investigators that he did not know how fast he was traveling as he led Mr. Corzine’s two-car caravan, emergency lights flashing, from an Atlantic City speech to a meeting at the governor’s mansion in Princeton."

Funny, but "I don't know how fast I was driving" is never an acceptable answer for a civilian to give a trooper.

The article is also very good on describing how the official SUV caused the crash, and also how it was breaking the rules of engagement for non-emergency government vehicles.

And let's impose super-secret double-life imprisonment in Gitmo for liberals who publicly disparage the sacred patriotic ribbon magnets on our SUVs!

From The Guardian, "Democrats Fear GOP Push on Flag-Burning" 23 June 2005:

The GOP-led House voted 286-130 on a measure Wednesday that would give Congress authority to ban desecration of a U.S. flag. Its prospects aren't good in the Senate, but Republicans could still get what they want - an issue that divides or even conquers Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

The GOP wouldn't be that deviously political about something as sacred as the Red White And Blue, would they?


And from The True Blue Liberal Pronunciation Dictionary:

Remember that "GOP" is always pronounced to rhyme with slop or glop or flipflop! (And SUV rhymes with glove.)

FUH2 | Fuck You And Your H2 (especially on Earth Day)

Here's a happy site to celebrate Earth Day tomorrow:
FUH2 Fuck You And Your H2

After browsing through the photos on the site for inspiration, go out, find one (unfortunately it's not too hard if you're in the USofA), take a picture, send it to fuh2.com, and then pray for $4-a-gallon gas.

Happy Earth Day,
True Blue Liberal

so, what are YOU driving? the Times examines blue cars and red trucks in today's issue

Click Here: The New York Times
> Automobiles
> Driving: Your Car: Politics on Wheels

So, what are you driving? I'm in a VW Golf, which may tell you a little something about my politics even before you see the Kerry bumpersticker fading on its back window. This article is interesting not only for the prejudices it confirms about insecure Republican males and their big trucks, and the fact that Democrats are more likely to live in cities where parallel parking spaces favor the nimble and small, but for the surprises:

• There's a whiny country singer with a hit song about what happens when a liberal lady in a minivan makes fun of the patriotic bumper sticker on "The Bumper of my SUV." Boo Hoo Hoo. (Another piece of conservative claptrap about those oppressive liberal elites with all their keying of bush/cheney bumperstickers, spitting on Vietnam veterans, burning of flags, and other [sub]urban legends.)
• "Porsche owners identified themselves as Republican more often than owners of any other cars, with 59 percent calling themselves Republicans, 27 percent Democrats."( I would have thought Hummers would be at LEAST 75 percent Republican. And I used to dream about driving an old 911 Targa.)
• Steve Sailer, "a conservative journalist who has analyzed the red-blue divide" tells us that NASCAR has an American-made requirement (no smart remarks about what might have been if Dale Earnhart had been driving a Volvo, you liberals you!) and that "In truth, a lot of fans would be sore about ending the all-American monopoly. Nascar has become a covert ethnic-pride celebration for red-state whites of Northern European descent."(COVERT? The only things they lack are the conical hats and white sheets.)

So, what are you driving and what are your politics? (Full disclosure: I've owned an MG, 3 VWs, a Fiat, and a Datsun in the thirty years I've been driving and I'm a True Blue Liberal.)

. . . an alternate path toward the extinction of suvs? casting them as anti-american?

So now, according to today's Washington Post article, "An Unlikely Meeting Of the Minds ", it's patriotism that's going to give us fuel-efficient vehicles. Even diminutive right-wing nutjob Gary Bauer has signed on to this new effort! While yesterday I wrote that only ridicule could kill the SUV (rhymes with glove), today it seems like this coalition of strange bedfellows may be pointing to another form of death for those dinosaurs:

"While skeptical about links between autos and global warming, the conservatives have concluded that cutting gasoline consumption is a matter of national security [. . . ]Last week a survey sponsored by the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute in Boston found that two-thirds of Americans feel it is "patriotic" to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle."

And of course the only way to sell anything in today's U. S. of A. is to wrap it in a flag.

True Blue Liberal

... or is ridicule the best way to neuter america's love for the suv? (and remember that SUV is rhymed with luv just as GOP is rhymed with flop)

Stumbled upon this interesting and heartening bit in Common Dreams today: "Unlikely Bedfellows Lobby Against U.S. Gas-Guzzlers." It's great to see the right-wing security concerns of a Robert McFarlane and friends coinciding with the left's traditional ecological concerns. Of course it makes sense for everyone, and the earth we live on, that -- if we insist on driving private vehicles -- we drive smaller, more-fuel-efficient, less-polluting private vehicles.

Do SUVs have any advantage other than their large profit margins for General Motors and Ford?
Safety? How many people now claim to be driving SUVs only to protect their children from other SUVs that are threatening to tip and roll across the highway toward them. It may be, like the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, a false sense of security, but we love our security blankets as much as Linus loved his.
Space? We have too much shit already. Our houses are too big. Our vehicles are too big. And we've grown fat to fill our spaces. You may not be able to bring home the bargain vats of Spaghettios from Wal-Mart in the trunk of a Mini or a Prius, but that may not be a bad thing. (Tall people have no excuses to drive oversized vehicles either -- I'm 6'3" and the biggest car I ever owned was a 1972 Datsun 510 wagon.)
Style? No. They are boxes.
Speed? No. They are big boxes.
Handling? Ha. Big top-heavy boxes.

As much as people remember the Gas Crisis of the seventies as the sole cause for the temporary death of full-sized sedans and station wagons of that era, I remember another cause -- Ridicule. I was in high school and college at the time, and NO ONE I know would have been caught dead driving a full-size vehicle of ANY kind. If you did, you were old, you were impotent, you were a family man or driving your grandfather's car. Let's make it clear that despite the ads featuring Kayaking and Cliff-Diving Youngsters, that SUVs are cars for soccer moms, that no real man or independent woman would EVER be caught dead driving that symbol of domesticity, whether it has a "Hemi" or not.

Small is beautiful.
Full-Size is for hearses.
True Blue Liberal