Martin Winterkorn lost his job over the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, but his head should be the least to roll. Lord forgive us for saying something that could be misconstrued as supportive of Donald Trump: If the Trump phenomenon is a revolt against “stupid” elites, there is much to revolt about.
A consensus has formed, in a remarkably short time since the VW scandal, that Europe’s rush to embrace diesel cars was a colossal policy error. For a meaningless cut in greenhouse emissions, Europe got higher emissions of nitrogen oxides and diesel particulates. While claims of thousands of additional deaths from this diesel pollution are questionable, Europe now realizes it converted half its cars to diesel for no good reason. And this is just the beginning.
If carbon dioxide is a problem, cars were never the solution. Cars and light trucks account for less than 8% of global emissions; U.S. cars and light trucks account for less than 3%. U.S. car makers are being required by government to spend hundreds of billions on fuel-mileage improvements in the name of global warming that will have virtually zero effect on global warming.
The real carbon problem, if it’s a problem, is upstream in power plants and heavy industry. If those problems are solved, cars might as well go on burning gasoline. If those problems aren’t solved, cars contribute little. What if we insist on carbon-free cars anyway? Even then, the internal-combustion engine is far from obsolete. Hydrogen, manufactured using non-carbon energy, could fuel the cars we have on the road now. So could biofuels. Electric cars, which we subsidize out the wazoo, not only are insufficient to solve any carbon problem. They are unnecessary.
Much remains to be learned about the VW scandal, but the Economist magazine, blindly marching along, already thinks the answer is more rigorous testing to make sure cars achieve their meaningless emissions goals. And adds: “If VW’s behavior hastens diesel’s death, it may lead at last, after so many false starts, to the beginning of the electric-car age.”
The electric-car age? Why?
Expect, even now, a decorous investigation of the VW scandal. Don’t expect a full exposure of the panic when the company realized it could not hit the U.S. emissions targets for nitrogen oxide, plus the Obama fuel mileage requirements, plus customer expectations for price and performance in an affordable sedan.
A private study, carried out by West Virginia University and the International Council for Clean Transportation, set off the scandal in the first place. The study focused on three diesel vehicles: two modest VW sedans and a much larger, more expensive BMW SUV.
The BMW was a full 1,600 pounds heavier—thus naturally suited to diesel, with its low-revving torque—and carried twice the sticker price, helping to accommodate elaborate clean-diesel technology. The BMW’s mileage was good, not spectacular, and the vehicle met EPA’s nitrogen-oxide limits.
It’s easy to imagine BMW whispering in somebody’s ear that VW’s claim to have generated low NOX emissions, high mpg, excellent drivability, at a small sedan’s price point, just didn’t add up. And it didn’t.
Yet the iceberg here is much deeper. As we’ve pointed out many times, the Obama fuel-mileage rules are designed to bite after he leaves office. In the meantime, they were mostly designed to prop up Detroit’s SUV and pickup business. Volkswagen itself is partly owned by the German state of Lower Saxony. The company is largely controlled by IG Metall, a German union deeply entwined with German politicians. Don’t believe any guff that the company and politician class did not share a goal of evading any mandates that endangered VW’s growth and employment.
Call it a go-along mind-set in our elites: Politicians who accept huge costs on behalf of the public in order to pose as saviors of the climate, for policies that will have no impact on climate change; business people who play along out of self-interest or fear; a science community whose members endorse the RICO Act to prosecute people who question the claims of climate science.
As a historical note, the mental antecedent here is the energy crisis of the 1970s, which became conflated with the environmental crisis of the 1970s, bequeathing an intuition that requiring higher-mileage vehicles would solve some actual problem (it wouldn’t).
Alas, a genuine coming-clean would be very different from what we’re about to get out of the VW mess. Let car makers build the cars the public wants; these cars would likely be roughly as safe and clean—or more so—than those churned out under regulatory mandate. Naturally, readers will doubt this last bit: They are wrong, because, in their innocence, they believe reason plays a bigger role in our regulatory designs than it actually does.
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No comments on Die Diesel-Betrüger
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The number eight song today in 1958:
Today in 1967, the Beatles mixed “I Am the Walrus,” which combined three songs John Lennon had been writing. The song includes the sounds of a radio going up and down the dial, ending at a BBC presentation of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Lennon had read that a teacher at his primary school was having his students analyze Beatles lyrics, Lennon reportedly added one nonsensical verse, although arguably none of the verses make much sense:
The number 33 single today in 1973 …
… 32 slots behind number one:
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No one conveys a tone of patrician disgust quite like George Will:
America’s loopy Left is enamored of someone who becomes cranky about bobblehead figurines. Sober Democrats are queasy about nominating Hillary Clinton, who has much to apologize for but no aptitude for apologies. Those Republicans who hope she is denied the nomination are perhaps imprudent. And even Republicans who recoil from Donald Trump’s repulsiveness might want to defer the delicious pleasure of witnessing his apoplexy when he joins, as surely he will, the ranks of those he most despises — “losers.”
In 2011, Bernie Sanders said “we’ve got some very, very serious problems” because the Founding Fathers bobbleheads sold at the Smithsonian Museum of American History were made in China. He exclaimed: “A museum owned by the people of America — a museum which talks about our own history — cannot even have products manufactured in the United States by American workers?” In a hilarious video assembled by the high-spirited folks at Reason.TV, Sanders summons Smithsonian officials to his office to grovel and promise to mend their ways. Sanders’ wrath did not produce a complete purge: The museum still sells imported gimcracks.
Clinton, who could lose to Sanders, might actually think she apologized concerning her private e-mail server. What she said (really: parse her ABC interview) was that she should have been clearer and quicker in explaining why she has nothing to apologize for. Joe Biden may be one of those knickknacks that look better in the store window than in your living room, but he probably would be a stronger nominee than Clinton, whose campaign operatives believe, oxymoronically, that she should adopt a policy of spontaneity. Some operatives thought it shrewd to share this calculation with the New York Times, which headlined its scoop “Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say.” (The Onion’s take: “Campaign Staffers Making Progress Conditioning Hillary Clinton to Replicate Emotions.”)
Trump believes he should be president because of his business savvy. But he has, in effect, shrunk the large inheritance he received from his father. In 1982, Forbes reported Trump’s net worth at $200 million. Vox calculates that if he had put that in an index fund “at a 0.15 percent fee, he’d have $6.3 billion today after dividend taxes, almost certainly more than he actually does.” And an AP analysis showed that if in 1988 he had put his money in an index fund he would have $13 billion. (He has not really revealed his net worth, but any Trump reticence is as welcome as it is rare.)
Only Trump is thinking transgressively, which the intelligentsia encourages us to do. Sanders just wants a lot more of wealth redistributions. Clinton wants a bit less than a lot more. Trump, however, has made something novel discussible: He proposes turning America into a police state in order to facilitate ethnic cleansing.
When asked whether the forced deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants — almost as many people as passed through Ellis Island in 60 years — might take five or even ten years, Trump scoffed: “Really good management” will get this done in at most two years. To meet a two-year deadline, his “management” wizardry will have to quickly produce a network of informers to assist at least 100,000 new law enforcement officers equipped with battering rams and bloodhounds.
Some Republicans think such ideas are not altogether helpful to their party’s attempt to present a pleasant face to temperate voters who are fond of civil liberties. However, some Republicans also worry that if Trump’s inevitable collapse comes too soon, his supporters might move en masse to Ted Cruz before the “SEC primary” of Southern states on March 1. On that day, there and elsewhere, at least 704 delegates will be chosen, more than five times the 133 allocated by February’s four events (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada). Some Republicans say Cruz has a real if narrow path to the nomination, but no plausible path to 270 electoral votes. As the nominee, Cruz would, these Republicans warn, lose so badly in red or purple states choosing senators in 2016 (Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Illinois) that he would cost Republicans control of the Senate.
It is, however, unclear that Trumpkins will all migrate to one candidate when their hero departs, strutting while slouching. And although deferring delights can be virtuous, nothing is now more virtuous than scrubbing, as soon as possible, the Trump stain from public life.
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I used the old saw “Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan” to describe the recriminations around the end of the Scott Walker presidential campaign one week ago.
Matthew Continetti adds more:
One day after Scott Walker dropped out of the presidential race, the Politico headline read: “Walker’s campaign manager unloads.” The same day, the Washington Post had an article, “Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid,” that also drew heavily from Walker’s campaign manager, GOP consultant Rick Wiley. It’s almost as if Wiley had an agenda.
You’ll be shocked to discover that Wiley was preparing an “all-in Iowa plan” that would have slashed personnel, moved headquarters to Des Moines, and rejuvenated the campaign. But Walker and his wife said no. “Campaign sources said Tonette Walker, the Wisconsin first lady, had never warmed to Wiley,” Politico reports. Gee — I wonder who those “campaign sources” were. Did one call himself “Wick Riley”?
One reason Republicans hate political consultants is that so many of them seem to have absolutely no conception of loyalty or reticence or even self-awareness. Scott Walker is a talented governor who won three elections in a blue state. He deserves the respect of his employees, who were happy to spin best-case scenarios for him as long as the money was good. Now, though, Walker’s campaign manager is suddenly out of a job. So what does he do? Like a true Washingtonian, he absolves himself of responsibility for the collapse while explaining to the press — and to his future clients — that it was entirely the governor’s fault.
“I think people just look at it and say, ‘Wow! Yeah, you know, it’s like he’s a governor and he was in the recall and blah, blah, blah — he’s ready,” Wiley told Politico. “It’s just not like that. It is really, really difficult … I’m just saying, you know, like it’s a f—ing bitch, man. It really is.” Poor baby — who knew presidential campaigns were tough?
I’m not a consultant and I didn’t support Walker. But even I recognize that it’s incumbent on political professionals, who reap great sums of money for advising and crafting messages for candidates, to inform their employers of the rigors and requirements of the trail. To level with them when the situation is dire. To rehearse answers to questions they surely will be asked. And if the candidate is unreceptive to this advice, if he turns out not to be the man the consultant thought he was, if the whole affair is “really, really difficult,” then these professionals have an option: quit. Return the check. It’s not like there are no other candidates this cycle. Find someone you believe in. Work for him.
And if you stick with your candidate, and he continues to disappoint you, and ultimately he fails — well, shut up. Please, shut up. Fall on your sword. It’s the honorable thing. You don’t have to scurry to the coffee shop to call Dan Balz. You don’t have to unleash the furies of hell on Twitter, and say the candidate lost because he didn’t listen to you. Republicans have Bush. What they need is Bushido.
Using the Washington Post to re-litigate internal fights is unseemly. Using the Washington Post to blame the candidate? That’s disgusting. “We didn’t have a spending problem,” Wiley told the Post. “We had a revenue problem.” Got that? It’s not the highly paid consultant’s fault — it’s the candidate’s for not bringing in the donations. We wouldn’t want people to think otherwise: That would limit Wiley’s earnings potential!
This outpouring of back-stabbing vindictiveness and self-seeking puts me in mind of the 2008 McCain campaign, when strategists Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace leaked disparaging material about their vice-presidential candidate even before Election Day. The tell-all mentality became more pronounced as soon as Sarah Palin was back in Alaska. Schmidt and Wallace became popular with the liberal press because they went out of their way to belittle and criticize their boss’s choice of running mate behind his back. What courage. Schmidt’s prize was an appointment as a MSNBC contributor and a ticket to the premiere of Game Change. Wallace got to listen to Whoopi Goldberg for an hour five days a week — more punishment than reward if you ask me. She has since been fired.
Yes, of course, using the media to bad mouth rivals and provide behind-the-scenes accounts is exactly “how the game is played.” But it is precisely this game that so disgusts the Republican base: Operatives who turn to media, social or otherwise, to settle scores and deflect criticism are the very face of Washington establishmentarianism, of the incest and cronyism, the duplicity and betrayal that the public opposes. You don’t have to make excuses. You don’t have to blame others. You don’t have to betray the confidence of your boss. And you certainly don’t have to do it before the body of the campaign is cold. The fact that so many consultants do all of these things nevertheless says something about the character of our political establishment: that it is inward looking, selfish, unaware, moronic. What doomed Walker? Fundamentally he was a local politician, schooled in municipal and state issues, unprepared to address the full spectrum of controversies in a presidential election. He was not a dramatic speaker, Donald Trump caught him off guard, he spent too much too quickly, and his heart just doesn’t seem to have been in it. He doesn’t seem to have been able to choose loyal advisers — and you get what you pay for. In this sense alone we should listen to Rick Wiley: Politics is a f—ing bitch indeed.
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Proving that there is no accounting for taste, here is Britain’s number one single today in 1963:
Five years later, record buyers made a much better choice:
The number one U.S. album on the same day was “Time Peace: The Rascals Greatest Hits”:
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The Police had a request today in 1980:
That same day, David Bowie’s “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” was Britain’s number one album:
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The number one song today in 1960:
The number one song today in 1964:
Today in 1965, Roger Daltrey was fired from The Who after he punched out drummer Keith Moon. Fortunately for Daltrey and the Who, he was unfired the next day. (Daltrey and Pete Townshend reportedly have had more fistfights than Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.)
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The inspiration for this blog post was an effort to get a photo of an airplane whose pilot aborted its takeoff and ended up considerably past the airport’s runway. Getting a photo of said plane wasn’t easy because of local geography and because the airport manager wasn’t enthusiastic about my presence. (I seem to have that effect on people.)
That prompted this idea: What should journalists drive?
Note that second word, “should.” The journalists I know, because of journalism’s poor salaries, drive cars that are either small or old, if not both. So perhaps this is a fantasy exercise, but it’s my blog.
Man has always used powered vehicles, whether powered by engines or animals, for work. The first known pickup truck was a Ford Model T whose owner added a flat bed behind the front seats. Ford quickly picked up on that. Those who used cars for business, though, and wanted creature comforts of cars (for instance, heaters) instead of trucks (namely, none) would buy what were called “business coupes,” a car with a front seat and a large trunk to carry, for instance, salesmen’s samples.
Pickup truck manufacturers have occasionally ventured into the world of more-specific-application vehicles, but usually that’s left up to body manufacturers instead of the Big Three.
Dodge advertised “Job-Rated” trucks in 1947. Chevrolet had a W/T model of its half-ton pickup that was pretty stripped of such niceties as non-vinyl seats and carpeting. The Land Rover Range Rover was developed for, believe it or don’t, British farmers to use on the farm during the day and take the wife to town at night. And for decades GM, Ford and Chrysler have had law enforcement-specification vehicles, though only in the past 20 or so years have they offered police-spec pickups and SUVs. Ambulances were first hearses, then station wagons (sometimes run by police departments), and now mounted on van or truck chassis. Fire trucks often use commercial chassis.
In the early days of TV, converted buses or box vans hauled the 100-pound cameras and lights out into the field for live broadcast, while station wagons or panel deliveries (station wagons without side windows behind the front doors) carried film cameras. One of the unusual stories about John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the mobile unit of the Fort Worth NBC station, whose engine blew up on the way to Parkland Hospital and had to be towed from place to place until after Lee Harvey Oswald’s death.
For this silly exercise the medium of the journalist doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter anyway because journalists now work in more than one medium, with newspaper and radio reporters shooting video. Our vehicle should be designed as much as possible to be a mobile office. (In seven years of working for one employer I had four different offices and almost a fifth. In three years of working for another employer I had three different offices. I suggested finding a used moving van and moving my desk, chair, filing cabinets, computer and other parts of my office into it. If you choose to do that, find an International moving truck with the DT466 diesel engine, which provides remarkable performance for moving your house. For that matter, I once thought it would be fun to live in a motor home until I determined that (1) motor home furnishings are not like a house’s, you need external access to (2A) electricity and (2B) water, and (3) living in a motor home is illegal in most incorporated communities.)
Even with the electronic tools of the journalism trade much smaller in size than in the old days, journalists still need storage space for them, which is why the best vehicle would be a hatchback, station wagon, SUV, pickup truck or (the horror) minivan. (You can always not use space you don’t need; you can’t use space you don’t have.) Space is needed to write on or download photos to a laptop or tablet. In keeping with the goal of any journalist worthy of the title, staying out of the office as much as possible, we need space for lunch on the go, and perhaps even for sleeping in case of long-duration on-the-scene work. (I draw the line at a bathroom, because, number one, men only need trees.)
I would lean toward the SUV or truck because they are more likely to have four-wheel drive, and getting to where you’re going regardless of weather is a necessity. (Or for getting to various assignments. I once had to get the newspaper’s brand new truck pulled out of a farm field by a tractor, when I was doing a story about a house being moved, because said truck lacked four-wheel drive. I also once slid off the road delivering newspapers when I hit ice, and avoided getting stuck looking for The Point of Beginning, where the Wisconsin-Illinois state line and Grant-Lafayette county line meet and from where the entire state was surveyed, only because I abandoned looking as the alleged road to the location decayed.)
The other reason for a truck-like vehicle is that they might be stout enough for you to stand in the box or even on the roof, to be able to shoot from above and be able to see where you’re shooting. (I could have used the ability to do that earlier this week.)
Photographer Ansel Adams shot photos of the American Southwest from the top of his Pontiac station wagon. I haven’t done this, but some people I know have announced games from their vehicles in the case of inadequate on-site facilities. (There are still some athletic fields without press boxes. Those usually were places without telephone lines, too, but the advent of cellphones means you can broadcast pretty much anywhere you can get a cell signal. In the early days of radio sports, decades before games were broadcast over telephone, one announcer broadcasted a game from the passenger seat of his car parked on the sideline, which worked fine until the players crashed into the car and knocked them off the air for 45 minutes.)
The first vehicle that came to mind is from old video I saw on YouTube of a Studebaker Lark Wagonaire being used by a TV station.
The sliding roof on the Wagonaire was supposed to allow owners to haul items taller than the back of the wagon. Apparently TV stations in the early 1960s used that feature to mount a camera (which was much larger than today’s minicams) in back for field video. Apparently few others used it for that, or any remotely similar, purpose because the Wagonaire died with Studebaker Corp.
The closest more current vehicle to the Wagonaire was last decade’s GMC Envoy XUV. That, too, flopped in the marketplace. There is one Envoy XUV on eBay, and it’s a two-wheel-drive model instead of the more desirable four-wheel-drive version.
Not only does Reportermobile need enough space for laptop use (a design feature of the Dodge — I mean Ram — 40/20/40 seat), it needs to have plenty of power ports, preferably with 12-volt inverters. Work sucks the batteries of cellphones and laptops, and after a point professional-quality digital cameras. It also needs space for maps and even atlases, even in this age of the GPS, along with a place for better clothing than you usually wear when needed.
A public-service-band radio scanner needs to be inside, so that the journalist can find where the incident is. (There are scanner apps for cellphones, but imagine the bite out of your data plan.) Driving lights on the front would be useful for photos shot at, say, a dark crash scene if you’re not friendly with the local firefighters who turn on their scene lights for you. (Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.) Amber LED lights mounted in the back window might prevent getting rear-ended at said night crash scene. For that matter, a dashcam might be handy because you never know what you might drive into:
This is a Range Rover customized in Germany with additional headlights and fog lights, as well as a sunroof. Too bad Range Rovers have famously hideous reliability. You may think what I’m describing would have to be a fancy vehicle. That is really not the case. A journalist’s vehicle is likely to have pens that may or may not work, food wrappers (hopefully not with food still in them, though that probably cannot be guaranteed), old drink cups, old coffee cups, cigarette butts, receipts of unknown origin, napkins, and other detritus inside. One might be better off having an old pickup-truck interior with vinyl seats and rubber floor mats that can just be hosed off.
One other point: Should your vehicle identify yourself as being in the media? I believe the answer is yes, but quietly. (Which would not be defined as putting STEVEPRESTEGARD.COM in big letters on the side of your vehicle.) The Wisconsin Newspaper Association used to give out window stickers that said PRESS on them. Given that journalists are known for parking wherever they feel they need to park, something like that might be helpful in avoiding a parking ticket. Or so you hope.
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CNN used to have a nightly sports show, CNN Sports Tonight, which included a nightly Play of the Day.
One Play of the Day occurred at the end of a 1985-86 UW basketball game against Illinois, in which a Fighting Illini hit the game-winning shot at the buzzer. The video for the Play of the Day was shot from underneath the UW basket pointing at the Illinois second-half basket and, behind it, the UW Band. When the Illini player hit the game-winner, the video replay showed, in slow motion, his reaction, his teammates’ reaction, and the band’s reaction, including (at least) one UW Band trumpet player whose reaction was a word that rhymed with “puck,” even though this was not hockey.
I watched the video when it played at 10:30 p.m. I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. to watch the replay to see my, uh, national TV debut with one of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words you aren’t supposed to say on TV. It may be on a VHS tape somewhere in our house.
I only bring this up because I got into another play of the day, without obscenities on my part. (A few months later, in fact, I appeared extensively during the 1986 Wisconsin-Michigan football game, Camp Randall Stadium’s first night college game, only because I was in the front of the band and a camera was right in front of me. The following week I was placed on the band’s Dummy List, the chronicle of the week’s mistakes, for being on national TV more than director Mike Leckrone.)
UW-Platteville hosted North Central in one of two football games between Division III-ranked teams Saturday, and the highest-ranking pairing of the day. Two plays into the fourth quarter, North Central led 28-7. The Pioneers scored two touchdowns and got two defensive stops to force a punt. And then …
… punt returner Dillon Villhauer’s 75-yard punt return touchdown and subsequent extra point tied the game at 28-28. The game went into overtime, where Platteville scored and North Central did not, and the Pioneers had their biggest nonconference win in a long time, and a nominee for the D3football.com Play of the Week. (But not winner, which was a lateral run by a 280-pound offensive lineman.)
That is, believe it or don’t, not the best play I’ve seen this season. In the second game I announced this year, between Belmont and Black Hawk, also at UW-Platteville, Belmont quarterback Jon Bahr saw a snap soar over his head. Instead of doing what you’re generally told to do, which is to jump on the ball to prevent a fumble recovery, Bahr picked up the ball, ran to his left, dodged a couple of Black Hawk defenders, saw an open receiver down the field, and threw a pass to the essentially uncovered teammate. The play gained 35 yards from the line of scrimmage, but the throw went probably 55 yards.
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The number one song today in 1965 was this pleasant-sounding, upbeat ditty:
That was on the same day that ABC-TV premiered a cartoon, “The Beatles”:
The number one British song today in 1968:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 