Oh Boy! EPA Revises New Car Window Price Stickers!

One of the downsides of having tens of thousands of bureaucrats mucking up the works in Washington is that they always need to appear busy. The obvious way to do that is to simply continue cranking out more and more regulations.

The byproduct of this eager-beaver approach to inflating one's worth at the good old EPA is the new-look of the window price stickers on new cars beginning in 2013.

It's the EPA's answer to the Surgeon General's warning on a pack of cigarettes. To read more about it, go to my blog at Interest.com. Here's the link:

http://www.interest.com/auto/advice/new-auto-fuel-efficiency-stickers-coming/

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Environmentalists' Efforts Are All About Making a Happy Earth, Right? Wrong!

I am currently rereading Steve Milloy's Green Hell. It's a study of how environmentalists are colluding to control our lives and force us back into preindustrial-revolution living. Yes, I know; this is in sharp contrast to their sunshine and moonbeams PR; but their brainwashing success aside, their true goal is to kill our free enterprise system.

If you doubt this assertion ask yourself this one question: Why are the people and groups who foil every effort to drill for more oil in the name of "green" energy the same people and groups who have blocked every proposed wind-turbine farm and solar field?

I posit that their ultimate goal isn't to force us out of carbon fuels into green energy, but to drastically curb consumption, slow progress and eventually reduce the population.

Their effort is a relentless onslaught on our quality of life that encompasses everything from our incomes to procreation.

I am including a link to a commentary that effectively documents how the success of environmentalists is responsible for the huge wild fire burning out of control in Arizona and New Mexico. It's worth the read.

http://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2011/06/11/catastrophic_wildfires_thank_the_greenies_and_forest_service/page/full/.

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NHTSA's Latest Target? All that Cool Technology in Your Car

They are at it again.

Thank, God, those of us who are among the drones of this society have the federal government to look out for us.

With what may be its most recent effort (It's difficult to keep up.) to protect us from ourselves, the federal government is searching for ways to disconnect us from our mobile devices when in our cars.

New regulations are being cobbled together by NHTSA to restrict what in-vehicle communications systems can do. This from NHTSA's Chief Nanny David Strickland.

Among the systems NHTSA is targeting are GM's OnStar and Ford's Sync, along with systems that integrate smartphones and the like.

I am the first to admit texting while driving is dangerous and a bad idea; but so is sky diving, eating a burrito from a roadside stand and online dating.

We do stupid and dangerous things every day.

Limiting what an in-vehicle system can offer, I guess, is one way to control what people do.

If you don't want drivers looking at a navigation screen, listening to the local weather or having their recent Facebook postings read to them, simply outlaw these features in in-vehicle systems.

Bureaucrats can punch out at 5 pm feeling good about themselves because of all the mayhem and carnage they have prevented on our highways with the stroke of a pen.

But where does it stop?

An argument can be made that in-vehicle audio systems are also a distraction and therefore must cause accidents.

Likewise conversations can distract. A driver participating in a conversation with passengers certainly isn't giving his full attention to the road. Let's legislate shutting up.

What about kids in the car? Talk about a distraction! Maybe NHTSA can create a few regulations making it illegal to drive around with your kids. I know a couple of dads who would be positively giddy over such laws.

But, some may argue, what about all the lives that have been saved in areas where talking on a cellphone while driving has been outlawed. Isn't that proof that such regulations are beneficial?

Here's something you may not know: According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety when I last posed the cellphone question to them about a year ago, there is no evidence that prohibiting cellphone use has reduced accidents or loss.

In those areas where such anti-cellphone-use laws exist, there has been no impact on the number of accidents or property loss.

Although it seems counter intuitive, that was IIHS's position a year or so ago.

Far too often regulating is more about justifying a bureaucracy's existence and exerting control than anything else.

Bureaucrats live to regulate.

In academia the mantra is "publish or perish." In government bureaucracy it's "regulate or irrelevancy."

So the regulations just keep on a comin'.

You can't outlaw stupidity. If someone is going to put on makeup, read a book or text while driving, all the regulations in the world aren't going to matter.

For those who believe we are just one more regulation away from making each individual perfect or just one egghead short of having the ideal team in central planning, there will never be enough regulations on the books or enough elitists in Washington running our lives.

It is all for us, after all.

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Toddlers & Tiaras: What's Even Creepier than a Photo of Anthony Weiner's Junk?

 

I am officially creeped out.

As I was jogging on the treadmill at the gym the other morning, I was watching the Military Channel and saw a promo for a TLC show called "Toddlers & Tiaras." OK, I wasn't jogging; I was briskly walking.

But I did see the promo. "Toddlers & Tiaras"!

It was a 30-second string of images of what appear to be 5- or 6-year olds participating in beauty contests. Determining their age was tough because 1) I don't know that much about kids and 2) they were made up like $10 hookers.

It is JonBenet Ramsey to the tenth power.

I had no idea something this disturbing was on the air. All right, it's not as disturbing as "Jersey Shore," but it's close.

I had to Google "Toddlers & Tiaras" to learn more.

Apparently this look at the underbelly of kiddie beauty pageants has been on TLC since 2009. What?

How did I miss this? I feel like I just came out of a coma and the world went haywire while I was out.

"Oh, Mr. Heaps, after four years you're finally awake. Guess what? We're courting Hamas. And there is a show about pubescent skanks in training on TLC."

"Could you put me back under please?"

This show completed its fifth mini season in February.

Yes, apparently enough people tuned in to this crap that TLC gave it five new runs.

The question isn't what is wrong with TLC, but what in the heck is wrong with us?

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Only the Profoundly Stupid Don't Realize that Once It's Out There, It's Out There

When I sat down to write this blog, my original intention was to use the current Anthony Weiner episode as a cautionary tale to discuss the potential dangers of social media. In the writing, though, it sort of turned into more of a political rant. I apologize to my left-leaning friends and readers for that. But it is what it is.

I don't know much about Anthony Weiner other than he's a far-left hysteric with a last name funnier than mine.

He's an appointed hit man for the far left; whether that's self appointed or a tool of Pelosi and other leadership of the uber-left. He's one of the mouthpieces that can be counted on to be trotted out to respond to whatever the most recent conservative affront to runaway big government might be.

One of his more notable appearances in the national spotlight was when he decided to call out Glenn Beck for urging people to buy gold as a hedge against inflation. He claimed that because a gold-investment company was a sponsor of Beck's radio and Fox News TV show, Beck was somehow bilking his viewers and listeners by suggesting they buy gold.

That great newsman of our day, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's top "news" anchor at the time, drew on his vast knowledge of National League batting averages to piously intone "For about three years the relationship between Glenn Beck and company Goldline International has been profitable for everybody except the viewers and listeners."

This was roughly a year ago when gold was at about $1,200 an ounce. Today it's at $1,545 an ounce. If you do the math, you will find that's roughly a 30% gain in about 11 months.

If you count back the three years Olbermann references, gold was at about $650 an ounce in June of 2007. How can nearly doubling your investment in three years be characterized as not profitable?

He then went on to interview Weiner who peddled the same claptrap.

Weiner had staged a news conference earlier making the same wild accusations.

The takeaway was that Beck clearly scammed his audience. Should I have been so lucky to be a victim.

I'm no hedge fund manager; I'm not even all that good at math; and I certainly can't tell you who won the 1967 World Series; but if you bought something for $650 four years ago and it's worth $1,545 today, wouldn't that be more? Sounds like a lot more to me, but then I'm not a sportscaster; so what do I know.

But I digress....

The point is, Weiner is somewhat of a star in the Democrat party. Before this little dust-up regarding texting photos of his junk to young women he evidently met online and then lamely lying to cover it up, he even had aspirations to run for mayor of New York City.

My question is, with his high-profile position among the far-left and his goal to run for mayor of New York, why would he be so stupid as to actually take a photo of his junk and store it on his phone?

Forget about stupidly sending it to someone he didn't even know; just having it wasn't simply a lapse in judgment, but colossally stupid.

The lamestream media has made much more out of Sarah Palin's statements regarding Paul Revere (despite the fact that her history is basically accurate) than it has over Weiner's not only being outed as a perve, but a remarkably stupid one.

I'll leave it up to Weiner's party and his constituents as to whether he should leave office. If the voters in New York's 9th Congressional District want this clown representing them and the Dems want him center stage, more power to all of them, I say.

Like much of America, I'm just hanging on for 2012.

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Hyundai's Guaranteed Resale Value = A Win for You!

Ahead in the game by 21 points at the start of the second half, and Hyundai tosses up a Hail Mary.

What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on?

Making a formal announcement on April 20, Hyundai established the all-new Hyundai Assurance Trade-In Value Guarantee.

With an eye on minimizing customer worries about depreciation, the program in a nutshell provides owners with a guaranteed value for their new vehicles in months 24 through 48 of ownership if traded in on a new Hyundai.

The guarantee applies to any new Hyundai purchased on May 1, 2011 or later.

At trade-in, the owner will receive the higher of the assessed value or the guaranteed value of a qualifying Hyundai.

A few mouse-print stipulations are tossed in for good measure, like the owner must be able to show proof of the scheduled maintenance having been performed at a Hyundai dealership; but generally the whole thing appears fairly straightforward.

I am stumped by Hyundai's motives. Typically this is the sort of ploy a struggling auto maker might concoct out of desperation.

Around 2000 or 2001, Mitsubishi was suffering lackluster sales. Some over-paid marketing genius came up with the bright idea to goose sales by offering "Zero down, zero payments and zero interest for a year."

What could possibly go wrong?

Buyers were stacked up four deep in Mitsubishi showrooms and two years later files of defaulted loans were piled four-feet high on the credit manager's desk.

Mitsubishi in 2000 was desperate; Hyundai today, not so much.

These guys are having a great year!

Sales for Hyundai's best April ever were up 40% over the same month last year; while sales for the first four months of 2011 are up 31% over 2010.

What is Hyundai's motivation for shouldering what could be a very expensive experiment?

I suspect it is simply to turn up the heat on the competition. Nothing else makes much sense.

But whatever Hyundai's reasoning, the guarantee seems to have no down side for you.

Short of Hyundai going under, no matter what the market does, the owner is covered.

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If They Take It, Get It Back!

Sure, I've been slacking.

Blame it on a recent VW trip to drive the new Passat. It was just to Chattanooga and Nashville, but still occupied a couple of days.

I returned home this morning, but am woefully unmotivated. So, here's a link to my most recent blog for Interest.com.

In a nutshell, the best strategy for recovering your car all in one piece if it's stolen is to invest in a tracking device like LoJack.

Check it out at http://www.interest.com/auto/advice/the-sad-truth-about-car-theft-you-cant-prevent-it/

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