Meet the 2012 Fisker Karma!

The All New 2012 Fisker Karma!

Please, I need a moment.  A moment alone. 

A moment of 'ME' time so that I might continue to gaze lustily at the Fisker Karma above.  Seriously, as I gaze upon this limited-production electric sex-mobile, I wonder -- can it get any better than this? 

Look at the great lines, the low profile, the sneering mustachioed front end (must be Italian?), and, dare I say it?  The awesome rubber.  The hybrid Fisker Karma screams, "Take me!  Take me now!!!" to the unsuspecting automotive ogler passing by.

She's pretty, she's expensive, and she's waiting; waiting, for someone JUST like you!  Hold on, am I describing a car, or a prostitute, or, something worse, both??? 

In reality both, and there's only one (or two, or three, or four, ah, seven) itsy-bitsy problems with this can-be-had-for-cash-bad-Karma-mobile:

1. MSRP on this Hybrid is $ 103,000
2. It weighs over 5,800 pounds (same as a Ford Expedition)
3. In gas-only mode it gets 20 MPG
4. In all-electric mode it gets 56 MPG-e (for 32 miles worth of charge)
5. Fisker received $529 Million in Taxpayer Dollars (because of its 'greeness')
6. All Fisker Karmas are being built, right here, in...  Finland (last I checked, this was not a US Territory, so, um, why did they get $529 MILLION of our money?)
7. And, lastly (and this is a BIG ONE), as of December 30, 2011, Fisker is recalling all of the 239 Karmas, because of the risk of Fire ("Holy Chevrolet Volt, Batman!!!  They've done it again!") 

As found on New York Times Online:    Fisker Automotive is recalling all 239 of its 2012 Karma luxury plug-in hybrid cars because of a fire hazard, according to a report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Prices on the 2012 model start at $103,000, including the destination charge.

In a report filed recently on the agency’s Web site, Fisker said some hose clamps were not properly positioned, which could allow a coolant leak. “If coolant enters the battery compartment an electrical short could possibly occur, causing a thermal event within the battery, including a possible fire in the worse case,” the company told the safety agency.

Fisker said the problem was discovered on Dec. 16, when workers at the Valmet Automotive assembly plant in Finland noticed coolant dripping. Fisker said it was not aware of any consumer complaints, warranty claims or “any other reports related to this condition.” It said fewer than 50 vehicles were in the hands of consumers.

Then, from DailyTech Online:  The official EPA numbers came out recently for the Fisker Karma and they were much, much lower than many expected. The EPA rated the Karma at a scant 20 mpg on gasoline. Considering the car was supposed to be a green hybrid, it's rating is disappointing, especially when you think that other hybrids of the size can achieve much better numbers. The all-electric (battery) range is rated at 32 miles for a combined 56 mpg-e.

If you were wondering why a car with a hybrid power plant was rated so low on gasoline power, it’s due to the massive weight of the Karma. The Karma has a curb weight of 5,300 pounds. Most of the weight is due to the heavy and expensive lithium-ion battery pack that motivates the Karma in electric mode.

With the low economy rating of the Karma and the fact that Fisker was one of the green firms that was loaned $529 million in federal funds, some are afraid it will be the next Solyndra. Solyndra is the solar firm that went under after receiving Federal funds for operation. While the EPA thinks its numbers for the Karma are accurate, Henrik Fisker thinks that drivers will see a better driving range.

So once again, the Federal Government places its bets on yet another manufacturer of a technology which it wants to see as a 'Winner' in the marketplace.  Free Markets are sooooo over-rated.   

The only problem is, of course:  The Feds spend OUR money on THEIR 'hunches' (or other progressive 'feel good' projects). 

Why is this so?  Why do the FEW (1%) continue to take from the MANY (99%)?  (Sorry, had to go there...)  Let's go straight to the man in charge of determining Economic Outcomes in the United States of America, Mr. George Soros... 

Oops, this of course, would be President Barack Obama.  When asked about the whole 'Solyndra' thing, President Obama responded (October 3rd, 2011):  "the loan guarantee program is important to developing clean-energy technologies and demonstrating that that U.S. can be an exporter of manufactured goods, rather than only an importer." 

[Moos Note:  But by selecting to invest in Finland's Fisker, isn't the President banking on the U.S. to be an 'importer' of these manufactured goods, rather than an 'exporter'?] 

"If you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees that have been provided, overall it's doing well," Obama said. "What we always understood is that not every single business is going to succeed in clean energy. But if we want to compete with China which is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this space, if we want to compete with other countries that are heavily subsidizing the industries of the future, we have to make sure that our guys here in the United states of America at least have a shot. 

[Moos Note:  Well, as long as China is 'pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this space'...  Cool!  We should too, right?  Hey, wait a minute, don't WE borrow a LOT of money from the Chinese?  So, we borrow money from China to keep up with the, um, investments, of China?  That's like spending more money to keep from going bankrupt - yes, we've done this too...] 

Now there are going to be some failures, and Solyndra is an example." - President Barack Obama, October 3, 2011.

Great, this clears it all up for me!  The President acknowledges that there will be failures, and as long as he's not personally paying for them...  We, as a Nation, are pretty much Good-to-Go!

It seems extremely odd that so many of the ventures this Administration has invested in have 'gone up in flames' (either financially, or, quite 'literally').  Re-visit the Chevy Volt discussion linked above for more detail here. 

I do, however, take comfort knowing that this President wants an additional four years to select the winners and losers in the technology sectors which HE feels 'good' about, as this permits an advantage to US.  

Here's the premise:  If he could tell us in advance of a company receiving their Federal welfare check, we will have the opportunity to invest in the firm, then sell out nine months later, prior to their going belly up?  Shoot, the folks in Congress have been doing this legally for years - how about giving us kids a chance to beef up our 401Ks for the next four years or so?

I hear lots of talk about 'Fairness' coming out of DC, but I wonder, when will we (99%) benefit from the Beneficence of the People's House?

Since when is 'Fairness' a single-sided equation?

 

Yakety Yak (a.k.a.: "Up-ton Yours America!!!")

Take out the papers and the trash,
Or you don't get no spending cash.
If you don't scrub that kitchen floor,
You ain't gonna rock and roll no more.

Yakety yak (don't talk back)

Don't talk back!

The Coasters, "Yakety Yak", 1958

I came across something yesterday which may, or may not, be news to anyone.  Discussing it here is kind of like hearing that a well-known neighborhood alcoholic was involved in an alcohol-related motor vehicle accident.  It's news, but it's really not.  

But maybe if your alcoholic neighbor were piloting a SPACE SHIP (while drunk) at the time of the accident?  Okay, THIS would be news.

"Marvin" One Very Angry Martian

Unfortunately, no Martians, no space ships, and no alcoholics piloting alien craft events occur in today's post.   

Today's post is about your run-of-the-mill-after-5pm-on-a-Friday-Obama-Administration action which everyone in the White House hopes no one in Your House sees, reads, or talks about.  Yeah, THIS is one of THOSE posts.

As reported in the Huffington Post: 
WASHINGTON -- The White House Counsel's Office has formally rejected a congressional subpoena of documents relating to the $535 million loan guarantee that the administration shepherded for Solyndra, the now-defunct solar energy company.

In a letter to the chairs of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Kathryn H. Ruemmler, counsel to the president, calls the request for documents made by House Republicans a "vast fishing expedition" and a "significant intrusion on Executive Branch interests."

...

In rejecting the subpoena, the White House has taken one of its sharpest stands to date against the House GOP's oversight capacity. When Republicans gained control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections, many predicted that these types of standoffs would become routine. Only recently, however, have investigations into administration actions or programs, such as the loan program in which Solyndra participated and the gunrunning initiative known as Operation Fast and Furious, gained real national attention

Yes, it's certainly nice to know that the Three Branches of Government all begin, and end, with the Executive Branch.  I found the following graphic on a site called 'Congress for Kids', I'm including it here in case anyone from the Senate stops by to read this post (we must keep all these LARGE hard-to-follow concepts understandable to the average Harvard-educated Lawyer in Congress - you know, in case they nodded off during US Government Studies 101):

"To avoid the risk of dictatorship or tyranny, the group divided the new government into three parts, or branches: the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch."

Re-reading this last statement again, I'm trying to find the part that says, "Unless the Executive Branch doesn't WANT to..."

Hold on a moment, nope, I'm still not seeing it. 

So what's going on here?

Evil Republicans in the House want to find out why the Obama Administration loaned $535 MILLION of your money to Solyndra, a company, which, if you believe the US Treasury Department: 

The Department of Energy was not following re-finance guidelines AND the loan itself was a, "Really Bad Idea". 

• Was it because of something they read in Solyndra's "Green Technology" brochure? 
• Was it because the President thought it would be cool to take over another company / industry, as he did with Automotive Manufacturing, Finance, and Banking? 
• Was it because he felt like he 'owed' it to someone to do his 'Fair Share' (with your money) to help out some nice folks who helped him get elected? 

Shoot, I don't know, and apparently, the President doesn't want anyone else to know, either. 

Not because he has anything to hide, but rather, because this request would be such a burdensome undertaking on the part of his Administration.  His team doesn't have the time required to respond to the request 'as is'. 

They're too busy taking Victory Laps after having driven unemployment all the way down to an unbelievable 9%! 

(Yes, I know it was 5.4 % when the President was elected, but why pile on now?  That's news from YEARS ago, and I'm trying to discuss YESTERDAY's news...)

Yes, the Administration will agree to produce 'several' of the items requested in the "Legally Prepared and Delivered Subpoena", but no, that other branch of the US Government is just asking for 'Too Much'...

Okay, this Administration is WAY too busy to answer questions, but House Committee Chairman, Fred Upton, R-MI, has a few questions of his own (if it's not too much trouble)...

The following quote was found on The Washington Examiner:

“We have been reasonable every step of the way in this investigation, and it is a shame that the Obama Administration and House Democrats continue to put up partisan roadblocks to hide the truth from taxpayers. Solyndra was a jobs program gone bad, and we must learn the lessons of Solyndra as we work to turn our economy around and put folks back to work.

Our judicious and methodical work over the last eight months has garnered tens of thousands of pages of documents from DOE and OMB that have proven we are on the right track. Now, we need to know the White House’s role in the Solyndra debacle in order to learn the full truth about why taxpayers now find themselves a half billion dollars in the hole.

The White House could have avoided the need for subpoena authorizations if they had simply chosen to cooperate. That would have been the route we preferred, and frankly, it would have been better for the White House to get the information out now, rather than continue to drag this out.

Our request for documents is reasonable - we are not demanding the President’s blackberry messages as we are respectful of Executive Privilege. What is the West Wing trying to hide? We owe it to American taxpayers to find out.”

Oh Rep. Upton, you some kind of crazy man, aren't you???  Aren't YOU!!!???!!!

No, but if you believe the reporting seen and read in other news outlets, you'd think that he were... 

I end this post in the manner in which I began it:

Yakety yak (don't talk back)

Keep your mouth shut, America.  They'll tell you what you need to know. 

Well, maybe.

Have a nice weekend folks...

Fool(s) On the Hill (II)

Washington, DC, where "Dopes spring eternal"

I wrote a post the other day entitled, "Fools On the Hill (Part 1)".  If you missed that post, start there and come back to this one, it's 'linked' above if you want to click to it.  Will you learn anything more by starting there first?  Don't know, that's up to you, I suppose.  This was part of that post, but after running out of time and its being way too long, well, I lopped it in half to even things out. 

Read Part 1 if you like.  Regardless, I'll try to ease you in to this post I call...  Part 2.

Here you go...

Random Opening Thoughts:

• The 'average' Recession lasts sixteen months
• The Recession which began in December 2007 'officially ended' in June 2009 - just over eighteen months, making it the longest Recession since World War II
• The 'Great Recession' of 2007 - 2009 was the deepest ever (with respect to job losses) since the 'Great Depression'
• The majority of Americans believe that we are still IN a Recession
• In the months following a Recession, the economy 'typically' adds jobs rapidly and consistently (See graph below)
• Six months' after the official end of our 'Great Recession,' the US workforce had job growth of -.5%

Source:  New York Times "The Recession Has Officially Ended"  September 20, 2010

From the article quoted above, the following graph represents the 'post-Recession' job growth for each Recession throughout the past fifty years...

I added the 'YOU were here' balloon
I love balloons

Excerpting from the article referenced:
Still, the magnitude of job losses was certainly worse in the 2007-9 recession, he (Robert J. Gordon) said. From December 2007 to June 2009, the  American economy shed more than 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs; through December 2009, the month that employment bottomed, the economy had shed more than 6 percent of these jobs.

In terms of unemployment, which is measured by a different government survey and considers only people who are actively looking for work, the rate most recently peaked last October at 10.1 percent. It had gotten higher in 1982, when it reached 10.8 percent. But the composition of the work force looked very different in the 1980s — it was younger, and younger people tend to have higher unemployment rates — and so if you adjust for age, unemployment this time around looks much worse.
...

But the anemic growth since the cycle trough in June 2009 is still extraordinarily worrying. The deeper recession of the 1980s was followed by a strong, robust bounce-back in growth; this current recovery is barely trudging along.

“What’s really unique about this recession is the amount of unemployment in combination with the slowness of the recovery,” he said. “That’s just not happened before. We had a sharp recession followed by a sharp recovery in the 1980s. And in ‘91 and ‘01 we had slow recoveries, but those recessions were shallow recessions so the slowness didn’t matter much.” 

...

“That’s why the political news is so entirely dominated by the word ‘jobs,’ ” he said. “The amount of unemployment we’ve already got and the slowness of recovery lead to predictions that we could have 9-plus percent unemployment even through the next presidential election.”  -- Robert J. Gordon, Professor of Economics, Northwestern University, September 2010

Quinnipiac released a poll on October 6, 2009, regarding a sample of the Average American Citizen's feelings regarding the state of the economy. 

The Result? 

77% of respondents (overall) believe that the US Economy is STILL in Recession.  I guess no one told them how much 'better' things are getting 'out here' since we turned the clock back on the 'failed policies of the past', blah, blah, blah...  

For details of the survey, check out the following graphic, you can click on the image to enlarge it:

Even worse is the discovery that 44% of Americans overall believe that the Economy is on track to get 'Worse' than it is today.   Source:  Business Insider.com 


The economy continues to be in the dumper as the American workforce sheds roughly 400,000 jobs per month, the Department of Justice, headed by Eric Holder, is facing 'really uncomfortable' questions about the 'Fast and Furious' investigation (according to Fox News, the "Subpoenas are in the mail"), and funding for Solyndra continues to raise questions about the White House's involvement in flushing roughly $535,000,000 down the proverbial 'green' crapper. 

Ah, this is old news.  Let's set our sights on the things which are impacting our Nation's recovery under the enlightened oversight of President Obama and his gaggle of Nobel Prize winning Laureates.  After spending TRILLIONS of dollars to jump start the economy, there must be significant and substantive issues holding America back.  The above items, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and influence buying in the White House?  Nothing more than Republican Partisanship at its worst, and political posturing at its best.  Right? 

The answer, as always, is that it depends upon who you ask... 

Okay, let's ask the President of the United States, Barack Obama:  In July, 2011 the President blamed our Nation's faltering Economy on several very specific factors:

1. The tsunami in Japan
2. The 'Arab Spring' for increasing 'tensions' in the Middle East 
3. Oil prices

Specifically, he said, "We’ve weathered the Arab Springs effect on oil and gas prices. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami’s effect on supply chains. The extraordinary economic uncertainty in Europe and recently markets around the globe have taken a bumpy ride,” Obama said this morning.     
Source:  InfoWars.com

"A bumpy ride?"  Folks, fasten your seat belts and make sure that your seat backs are in their upright and locked position.  You ain't seen nothin' yet.  While any real 'Captain' would turn his aircraft away from a dangerous storm front, 'Captain Obama' continues to steer US into the darkening horizon, towards the nastiest Thunderheads he can find. 

Why?  Is it because the President is a bad pilot?  No.  He's doing what he's been trained to do...  Just as a tick will latch onto your dog's ear and suck until it bursts (because it's what ticks, left un-checked, do), President Obama is genetically, philosophically, and morally compelled to do the things he does.  It's who he is.  He suckled upon the collective intellectual teets of Cloward, Piven, Mao, his Socialist / Marxist professors, Union Organizations, and even, (ewwwww)  LBJ. 

The following video clip is from the 'Think Progress' site.  They are proud of the President's comments.   I'm angry and (BONUS!) disgusted by the man's actions. 

Go ahead, click the video below, I'll be down there again when you get done.

Several months ago the President of the United States is blaming our regularly scheduled 'bumps in the road' upon un-controllable, external causes.   Certainly our continuously bleak economic outlook has NOTHING to do with his policies - right? 

He inherited the economy from GW.  He inherited the Tsunami from Japan.  He inherited oil prices from OPEC.  He inherited the Arab Spring movement (after HIS Administration encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow nations in the Middle East). 

None of this was HIS doing.  It was the 'bumps' which tanked, and continue to rack our economy, plain and simple.

Then last week, the President of the United States 'feels the pain' of the protestors 'occupying' (their word, not mine) cities across the United States.  

His words, "I think people are frustrated. And the protestors are giving voice to a more broad based frustration about how our financial system works."   

You want to know who's REALLY frustrated? 

Me.  And a lot of people like me.

I'm frustrated because YOUR freaking economic Advisors don't know "how our financial system works."  Or, perhaps, maybe they know too well? 

I am frustrated by you, you useless piece of detritus, continually siding with people who have nothing on their minds other than taking 'stuff' from those who earn it. 

I am frustrated by your always siding with those who break the laws which you swore an oath to 'Defend and Protect'.   

I am frustrated knowing that when you leave office in 2013 that you'll travel the world explaining how hard you TRIED to make America more 'open', more 'diverse', and more 'World-Friendly', only to be stopped by mean-spirited idealogues who want to kill old people, pollute drinking water, and poison the air.  Dictators, foreign governments, and New World order-types will line up to pay you to criticize US for the remainder of his useless existence.    

You want to call me a murderer, poisoner, and hater of the Earth?  Do it to my face you impotent misuse of cartilage.  But no.  You won't say it to me.  You'll say you were talking about 'other' murderers, poisoners, and haters.  You were talking about them, not me.  You'll say I took your messages 'Out of context', I didn't understand what you meant, because I wasn't 'smart enough', 'educated enough', or 'open enough' to really 'get it'.  

You say that people who want the Constitution of the United States to be read by the elected officials in Washington are 'Extremists', and yet, when ACTUAL extremists occupy private and public property, you side...  With them.

I am done with you.  The American people gave an unproven, un-skilled, and emotionally stunted half-wit a chance to hold the highest office in the world because they were mad at GW Bush. 

I knew GW Bush.  You sir, are no George W Bush.

Bush may have made some bad decisions by accident, you make them by design. 

Enjoy the remainder of your first, and only term as President.  Somewhere in the World a third-world nation is crying for mediocrity.

They cry for you.  You're 'their-kind-of-guy'.

Oh, and I hope you enjoy spending time with your new-found friends on Wall Street.

You deserve each other.