Driving on the Edge of Disaster

Long gone are the days of huffy, right-wing nationalists shaking their heads as American after American drives home a Japanese car.

For decades, my conservative father clucked his tongue when neighbors drove home their shiny yellow B210s and sporty Celica's, one of the sexiest cars ever built.

He didn't think so. He thought it was un-American to send money to the Japanese. Unfortunately, too many of his peers felt the same way for far too long. They'd buy cars from the Big Three, even though the Japanese models were undeniably better cars all the way around, launching a generation of loafing car companies.

They ruined themselves, and now, my father's generation is gone, or has quit buying cars at all. To be fair, American car companies are building better cars. In fact, I would say many models are even superior to foreign cars. Experts say so, too. But there's so much further to go.

While in Spain two years ago, I rented a Ford Focus wagon in Barcelona. I cringed when the rental agent handed me the keys. I'd driven a Ford Focus before in Denver. It was a shuddering, anemic excuse of a car. It seemed that no one on the design team at Ford had ever worked together on the design. I'm not sure the people who developed the engine even ever had lunch with the power-train folks.

This was not my father's Ford Focus, folks. It had five speeds, a peppy diesel engine and handled like a European car. I had to keep checking the logos to see that it really was a Ford. It turns out that the Europeans would never stand for the garbage we pay tens of thousands of dollars for here in the United States. Ford is not only welcome to build cars in Europe, they've been pretty successful at it. But they must build them to a much higher standard, and fuel efficiency, than what Americans demand of the Big Three over here.

Now, the majority of Americans feel like I do about American cars. Most likely, the either don't own one or wish they didn't have to. So when the three auto companies that pay themselves and their employees luxurious wages and benefits comes begging for tax-dollar handouts, it's hard to feel charitable. Most of us don't want their cars anyway. Who cares if they go away and let the experts run the auto industry?

You do. Or rather, you will.

While some Washington pundits are moaning over endless warning cries from the Big Three and their unions that one in 10 American jobs depends on GM, Ford and Chrysler, the truth is that may not be the truth. It could be that only a mere 1 in 15 jobs depends on the survival of the Big Three.

If you're not getting this by now, I hope you're not in charge of the Washington bailouts. With the U.S. economy deep in recession and teetering on a real, honest-to-gawd depression, losing even one in 20 American jobs right now would be a calamity like the United States has never seen. That is no exaggeration. Immediately, the steel states would collapse, drawing huge financial and military resources into the region. Even during America's best financial days, it's unlikely we could have managed such a disaster for any length of time. But with the precarious state of economics right this very minute, do not doubt that the United States could some how shrug this one off.

I'm not suggesting that we just heave a collective sigh and write a check. I'm saying that the Big Three bring and their unions bring acceptable financial plans to Congress, their new banker, and get a chance to make good on so much bad. The plan would include real changes in auto designs to accommodate the fuel efficiency and performance we, too, are learning to discriminate for.

But may no mistake. Having more than one of the Big Three collapse, and it appears that if one goes, the others will almost certainly follow, will make us long for the days when another $25 billion would turn back the clock to where we are now.

If there were ever a good reason to open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this is it.

Our "friends" the Saudis are beating a physician every day for weeks to come because one of his patients became an addict. The patient, it turns out was a Saudi princess. The doctor is an Egyptian. The story is all too familiar.

See what you think:

Egyptians decry doctor's sentence of 1,500 lashes
By SALAH NASRAWI
Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt | Demonstrators in Cairo demanded Tuesday that Saudi Arabia release an Egyptian doctor sentenced to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes after he was convicted of malpractice — reportedly after treating a Saudi princess.

His wife said she feared the punishment would kill him.

Raouf Amin el-Arabi, a doctor who has been serving the Saudi royal family for about 20 years, was convicted last year of giving a patient the wrong medication. Egyptian newspapers reported that he was accused of driving a Saudi princess "to addiction."

He initially was sentenced to seven years in prison and 700 lashes, but when he appealed two months ago, the judge not only upheld the conviction, but more than doubled the penalty to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes.

Family members, friends and colleagues gathered at the headquarters of Egypt's doctors' union in downtown Cairo and urged Saudi King Abdullah to pardon el-Arabi.

"My children want their father to return swiftly and safely," the doctor's wife Fathiya el-Hindawi told the Associated Press. "I hope the king will give them back their smiles."

She maintained her 53-year-old husband was innocent and feared he would die if given the full penalty.

"1,500 lashes is unprecedented in the history of Islam," read one banners carried by protesters. "Who is responsible for the humiliation of our doctors abroad?" read another.

The case has drawn nationwide criticism in Egypt and local human rights groups have demanded that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who maintains close ties with the Saudi royal family, intervene to free el-Arabi.

The Saudi government has refrained from comment but Egyptian newspapers report that el-Arabi was treating a female member of the royal family when he was accused of "driving a patient to addiction." The newspapers identified the princess as one of the wives of Abdullah's nephews.

Saudi Justice Ministry officials did not answer the phone on Tuesday to comment on the case.

Egypt's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that diplomatic and political efforts are under way to resolve the problem, but warned that relations between the two countries should not be affected.

"The ministry is very much concerned with this case," said Ahmed Rizq, a ministry official, in a statement. "However, the Saudi judicial and political system should be respected."

Egypt's state-owned Middle East News Agency later reported that Cairo's ambassador to Riyadh, Mahmoud Auf, met with the powerful mayor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, to discuss "the status of Egyptian expatriates in the kingdom."

El-Arabi is in a jail in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah and is believed to have received at least one of his weekly installments of 70 lashes so far.

Nasty stuff. What a relief it would be to tell these people that their "friendship" and their oil are not longer needed, and if they want to play with the rest of the world, they're going to have to place nice.

California Dreamin' for Equality

The Nov. 7 election wasn’t unlike a big gala where all the giddy guests wander away after the gaieties rung in by the Obama election and congressional ousters of those who supported the Bush regime. As that last guest leaves and the balloons begin to float back to Earth from the ceiling, one of the guests stays behind, devestated.

In the good time America had in watching the country lurch ahead, tens of thousands of California residents were kicked in the face by voters insisting on illogical discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The irony is tragic. In a state where even the Republican governor supports the rights of gays to marry, a state that clinched the Barack Obama presidency, blowing the lid off of eons of bigotry and discrimination, just over half the voters in the state denied equal rights and liberties to their homosexual neighbors.

It looked like America had moved so far last week. But it just wasn’t far enough.
Americans just can’t shake off their odd preoccupation with sex and especially the sex lives of others.

Just like other minorities before them, the vote seeks to dehumanize gays and lesbians, trivializing their quest for equality by marginalizing their rank in society. Maybe not this year, but soon, and more and more people will understand that our gay and lesbian neighbors are us, just as are Americans who are disabled, Spanish-speaking, old or white.

Just as those realizations about blacks and other minorities eventually made interracial marriage legal and segregation unconstitutional, I’m convinced that Americans will eventually see discrimination against gays for the folly it is.

Give Me an F, but Hold the U

Oh yeah, talk dirty to me Justice Roberts.

He and the rest of the Supremes took up the matter of potty talk on the airwaves yesterday. If you missed it, the FCC and broadcasters are in a battle over a 2004 FCC policy that says even fleeting use of the world’s worst English dirty words will net the networks colossal fines.

TV execs says the policy is f****d.

Roberts, who without a doubt sports the tightest sphincter on the high court bench these days, says that the F-bomb and anything that comes out of your body that starts with the letter “s” is so obscene, that even spoken so fast as to cause a double take, it’s punishable by fines larger than the gross sales of most companies in this country.

No spit.

Roberts says the F-bomb is indecent because it’s sexual in nature and therefore off limits. What a boob,
It took a little deeper thinker like Justice John Paul Stevens to point out that most instances of the F-word actually don’t refer to the sexual act to where Roberts’ mind runs when he hears it, or almost hears it.

Roberts never worked in a newsroom or a restaurant where there’s much dirty talk and little sexual innuendo and even less sex, at least compared to the judicial quarters out here in Colorado where judges walk the walk and talk the talk.

I remember the first and only time I heard my father utter the Big F. I was 13, standing in the hallway of our home. It was after dinner one night just after Christmas. He was carrying a yellow basket of clean clothes and the hot ashes from his pipe emptied into the basket. I turned as red as the glowing tobacco wad that fell from his pipe and onto my mom’s harvest gold polyester pants suit. It made that kind of an impression on me even though I launched the word among my pals with all the regularity and consideration of heartbeat.

It doesn’t matter whether your f*****g around or talking about finding a way to be fruitful and multiply, the word and it’s associated synonyms are vulgar. I say, stay the course. There’s nothing like whacking even the richest of the rich with a million-dollar fine to get their effing attention.

Then we can all go back to pretending that people don’t talk like that.

Haunted by the Ghosts of Elections Past

How different today would be had the Supreme Court not declared George Bush the winner of the 2000 presidential election.

It could well have led to the same race we face today: Obama v. McCain, but there’s little doubt the campaigns would look anything like they did.

It is inarguable that if a President Gore had faced the trials of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Obama and McCain would not have battled about the Iraq War. There simply wouldn’t have been one. Instead, arguments would certainly have focused on troop levels in Afghanistan and whether the United States could afford to continue to occupy that country.

It’s equally inarguable that Obama and McCain would be fighting about details of how best to handle global warming, since Gore would have steered the country directly into the issue instead of being like Bush, who ignored it.

It’s hard to say what difference there would have been in the economy. Certainly, Wall Street would have been under a much shorter leash with Gore writing veto messages that Bush would never have dreamed of.

There would have been no Abu Grahib disaster, no Guantanamo mess, no spying on U.S. citizens, no Karl Rove or PlameGate. No one would have cared who Dick Cheney shot or what he hid in the office of the vice presidency. There would have been no scandalous shame around Bush illegally suspending the concept of habeas corpus, or having tortured prisoners of war, and hen defended it.

Now, the next president has to undo eight years of malfeasance and mistakes before we can make progress on what Bush was handed to him in 2001. Good luck, Mr, President.

Big Mac attack

Whoa. The Mac IS back. Or at least he was Saturday night.

Sen. John McCain resumed his former self during a comic appearance on Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey’s reprisal of Gov. Sarah Palin wasn’t nearly as entertaining as McCain’s reprisal of who he was eight years ago when he ran against George Bush.

I had forgotten that he was funny, happy and sincere, just like he was Saturday.

It’s so sad that somewhere along the way, McCain either wanted to or had to pander to Republican elements far from who is really is, or used to be. It was that John McCain who would never launch the desperate, bizarre attacks against his opponent, just like Bush and Karl Rove did against him in 1999.

Maybe after the election, McCain can reprise that role in the Senate to help get things done, just like he used to.