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wo markets - the automobile market in the U.S. and the healthcare market in England - make interesting blog fodder this morning for free marketeer and big government junkie alike.

First, to the automakers, with the NYT reporting of General Motors:

G.M., the world’s largest automaker for decades, said Tuesday that it was in such dire straits that it would deeply cut jobs, factories, brands and executive pay as part of its plea to get $12 billion in federal loans and an additional $6 billion line of credit. …

G.M.’s president, Frederick A. Henderson, said the company would be insolvent if it did not receive federal assistance, including an infusion of $4 billion in cash before the end of the year.

“Absent support, frankly the company simply can’t fund its operations,” Mr. Henderson said in a call with reporters.

To which I say, why did it take having to grovel before the US taxpayers before you would promise to do what you should have done years ago on your own, Mr. Henderson?

Had GM dealt with its bloated workforce, eliminated costs associated with keeping Buick, GMC, Saturn et. al. afloat, and stopped paying its leadership losership as if they were actually accomplishing something, insolvency wouldn’t be just around the corner and Henderson wouldn’t be begging for $14 billion.

This is both a troubling and a glorious moment for any free marketer.

It’s troubling because we’re seeing the desperate lust for government money accomplishing what the free market should have accomplished on its own. And it’s glorious because we are seeing an admission by one of the world’s largest corporations that it is NOT anywhere close to the free market, and it’s killing them. Or it should be killing them … they may yet get hooked up to financial life support.

And speaking of life support, that takes us to another NYT article, this one a much more troubling tale of government’s influence on the free market.

RUISLIP, England — When Bruce Hardy’s kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.

“Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can,” Joy Hardy said in the couple’s modest home outside London.

If the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European country other than Britain, Mr. Hardy would most likely get the drug, although he might have to pay part of the cost. A clinical trial showed that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000.

But at that price, Mr. Hardy’s life is not worth prolonging, according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen’s life.

This is a tragic but familiar type of real life story that girds our loins as we fight against the Dems’ drive to impose universal health care in the US. But wait, there’s more:

Drug and device makers, which once routinely denounced the British for questioning product prices, have begun quietly slashing prices in Britain to gain NICE’s coveted approval, especially because other nations are following the institute’s lead. Companies have said that they will consult with NICE to help determine which experimental compounds enter the final stage of clinical trials, so the British agency’s officials will soon influence which drugs enter the market in the United States.

The British government created NICE a decade ago to ensure that every pound spent buys as many years of good-quality life as possible, but the agency is increasingly rejecting expensive treatments. The denials have led to debate over what is to blame: company prices or the health institute’s math.

After seeing the auto execs fly to DC in their three private jets and looking at Wall Street execs rake in hundreds of millions as their companies fail beneath their incompetent feet, there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s more lurking behind the cost of pharmaceuticals than legitimate R&D expenses.

Government has no moral authority to use the lives and quality of life of citizens as bargaining chips in a price war; that’s verboten. While the cruel effectiveness of NICE can’t be ignored, we free marketeers must realize that whatever NICE is accomplishing, it is not doing it in a free market. Access to pharmaceuticals is highly regulated, and the companies are using that to their advantage.

If there were a free global market for these drugs (with only patents protected), then we could take our prescription to Canada or Mexico or Khartoum for filling, picking the market where Pfiser or Glaxco offers the best price. And if that were to happen, the global price would quickly fall to the best price. That price would support needed R&D and salaries at the level necessary to provide effective managers, but it would cut out excesses.

Meanwhile, Bruce Hardy will die a little earlier and his widow will be not just sad but rightfully very angry.

Hot! Hot! Not!

I

t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded - excuse the pandering Paris photo - and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post.

Sunday Scan items are published as each is completed; most recent at the top, so be sure to click through if you see the “continue reading” note at the bottom of the post. This note will be removed after the last item is posted, so if you’re reading this, please come back for more.

Palin Packs ‘Em In

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ere’s the report from Shawn Steele (fomrer Cal. GOP chair) from last night’s Sarah Palin event in SoCal:

Not since Ronald Reagan’s final campaign rally at Orange County’s Mile Square Park on the eve of the 1984 election, have thousands of Californian Republicans gathered. Neither Bush could do it. None of last year’s Republican presidential candidates could fill the Home Depot Tennis Center.

The Center has 13,000 court side seats. All those seats plus the suites were filled to capacity. Still thousands more were slowly streaming into the stadium quickly filled up the court yard. Thousands more found standing room around the rim of the stadium. Over 20,000 people were there to celebrate, shout and scream.

SNL can continue to poke fun at Palin, but real people get her and want to get close to her. If you have any doubts what she’s done to the ticket, check out who introduced her:

Shelly Mandell, the current President of Los Angeles National Organization for Women [NOW] — in the Republican OC suite several of us were scratching our heads— introduced Sarah Palin. It was an awkward introduction. . Mandell, stated she didn’t agree with Sarah on everything, that she is a democrat, that she Mandell supported the failed Equal Rights Amendment campaign but the crowd exercised tolerance. Ms. Mandell will get a lot of angry calls from the hard left, but she embraced the moment and stood with Sarah Palin.

The OC Register also covered the event:

“Electrifying,” “genuine” and “inspiring” were a few of the adjectives that Orange County voters used to describe Sarah Palin after her rally at the Home Depot Center in Carson on Saturday.

The lead of the LA Times story was a bit different:

You can’t say she didn’t warn them.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation with a now-famous joke about lipstick being the only difference between a certain dog breed and a hockey mom. On Saturday, the Republican vice presidential nominee unleashed her inner pit bull, accusing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of being someone who would “pal around with terrorists.”

The reporter let us know that in her opinion (yes, yes, it was a news story, I know) Palin’s new tone was “abrasive.” That’s a fine alternative for “truthful,” isn’t it?

Putting The Freak In Eco-Freak

“I

‘m crying,” emailed Incredible Daughter #2, “because I’m laughing so hard.”I laughed too, but I also was more than a little troubled by the clip she attached to her email:

(If link is broken, click here)

This wailing and flailing over fallen trees is terrifically funny because they all seem so foolish, so out of whack with normal priorities and sensibilities, so ignorant of the cruel ways of nature.

But these people are the reality of the hardcore environmental movement, and watching them you look into the soul of the movement and discover how sick and extreme it really is.

So watch, laugh … and ponder.

I

‘m writing this in my usual spot in the kitchen nook, the good Lord having returned our little expedition safely home. The last day was like the others in that I was completely, blessedly, out of the news loop with VP selections not even approaching my consciousness. Lucky me. But it was entirely unlike the other days, as well: One of high-tailing it down a freeway, not arcing through curves along the shore and through the redwoods. Out of the foggy forests we flew, across wine country, through a traffic-choked San Francisco, into the Silicon Valley, on a flight, and home.

But against that benign backdrop is this: I will shortly reveal Bookworm’s identity. The secretive Bay Area conservative blogger has been masked for far too long!

But first, a tale prefaced by this: Incredible Daughter #1 is a serious BMW fanatic. She tracks her Z4 at various raceways, regularly goes to meets and drives with other BMW owners, and is a moderator at Bimmerforums, a very popular BMW page. So yesterday, when the drive turned out to be less engaging than on the earlier days and we found the conversation lacking, we made the simple decision to play “spot the German car.”

Even including Volkswagens (think VW bus in NorCal) the pickings were few, and after 20 or so challenging minutes, our count was around five. A VW or two, an old and a middle-aged Mercedes, a BMW 3 series. Then after a long-ish dry spell, we came down a hill and onto a straightaway through a little, picturesque farming valley, when suddenly there appeared a vision: A glorious 1930s vintage burgundy and cream BMW roadster. This is almost certainly the same car, from a photo I found of a 2004 vintage BMW rally.

It was immediately followed by a silver 507, a 1950s era luxury sportscar BMW put up against the Mercedes gull-wing coupe. It almost put BMW into bankruptcy, but is achingly beautiful and technologically hyper-advanced. It was easily worth $500,000 and who even knows what the vintage roadster would command.

Incredible Daughter #1 was making sounds I’d never heard from her before: Squeals, screams and ooohs strung together in a very easily understood if not particularly well articulated expression of delight and shock. There followed another classic roadster from the 30s, plus various newer models. The count of German cars soared to the teens, and the rest of the game, which ended in the 50s as we approached the wealthy Bay Area, was a let-down.

It turned out we had stumbled upon the BMW Vintage & Classic Car Club of America’s Aptos to Eureka to Tahoe to Aptos rally. Read more here.

Discounting the visit with Bookworm, which I’ll get to next, the next most exciting thing was seeing a Prius - a Prius! - in Marin County - Marin County! - with a McCain bumper sticker on it. Albeit, a small one, but still …

So we (Incredible Daughters #1 and #3 and me) carried out our stealth meeting with the secretive proprietress of Bookworm Room in a coffee shop somewhere in Marin County. She is delightful, as expected. We had a wide-ranging discussion on everything from history (she’s reading about Einstein, I’m reading about the American West) to stealth conservatism, to raising kids and how acorns may or may not fall far from the tree. Talking to Bookworm is something of a cross between electroshock therapy and a perfect hot fudge sundae. Your brain gets quite a work-out, but it’s a fabulously indulgent pleasure. Blogging can make a good friend out of someone you’ve never even met - and I see the feeling was mutual.

So why would I destroy Bookworm’s confidentiality and expose her secret identity? Why would I put my blogfriend at risk of negative social stigma, of being treated like a leper in her home town?

It’s simple, really: Once a journalist, always a journalist. You really can’t trust me with a secret.

Besides, what right does she have to write about public persona while keeping her own persona secret? The public has a right to know her identity that overpowers her right to keep her identity secret.

And no, it doesn’t matter one whit that the public will not benefit much at all from the considerable harm I’m about to cause her. The only important thing is the relentless rush of knowledge, and knowing her identity is just one more piece of the puzzle; one of little consequence purchased at great price for sure, but I’m willing to hurt her in the name of the public’s right to know.

So,

without further delay,

here is a photo of me

with the until no longer unrevealed

Bookworm:

Incredible Daughter #1 went to a Classic Car show yesterday at the Orange (CA) circle and got some very fine pictures, including this one of a ‘58 Chevy.

I remember this car very well. We were in San Francisco in September of ‘57 — the month all the new ‘58 models came out — on the eve of leaving for my dad’s first posting in Japan. I was six at the time and was very disappointed that we would have to leave the States before the ’58s came out, because this was going to be the first year of double headlights. Whoo baby!

But then, in the taxi on our way to the docks where our MSTS liner was waiting for us, I saw a ‘58 Chevy, a ‘58 Ford and a ‘58 chrome-laden Buick, all on that one short run, so I left for Japan and its then-primitive Toyotas and Datsuns with dazzling visions of American beauty in my head.

See more of her photos here.

Loser

Joy around the GOP political campfires is muted on the news that Ralph “Upchuck” Nader is in the race, because as I said a couple days back:

It would be nice if a Nader run would steal votes from the Demobama candidate and seal the deal for the GOP, but just put the sour, dour, fatalistic Nader up against the Man With Hope and you can see that a Nader campaign will be utterly without consequence.

The Dem responses to Nader’s announcements were interesting, per AP: Obama lied and talked nice; Hillary didn’t lie and told it as it was:

Obama, promoting his specious persona of the man who brings people together: “In many ways he is a heroic figure and I don’t mean to diminish him.”

Hillary, being transparently Clintonesque: “A passing fancy.”

I run into Nader-like people all the time in my work; they are, basically, my consistent opponents. They fight change and progress, because they are utterly distrustful of corporations, and just as distrustful of government, which they see as sold out to the corporations.

Sounds like perfect model for a president from Hell, eh?

Imagine That!

60 Minutes is doing a Karl Rove expose tonight. Libs are giddy in anticipation: “This piece will undoubtedly be worth watching,” says Glenn Greenwald. Here’s the jist of the story:

A former Republican campaign worker claims that President Bush’s former top political adviser, Karl Rove, asked her to find evidence that the Democratic governor of Alabama at the time was cheating on his wife, according to an upcoming broadcast of “60 Minutes.” (AP)

Hold the presses! A political campaign operative looking for goods on a member of the other party! The only reason this story is being covered at all is because the subject is Karl Rove, and the BDS-sufferers in the media frequently show symptoms of Rove Derangement Syndrome as a side effect of BDS.

That said, stories like this are why I’m a public affairs guy who doesn’t do political campaigns.

Most Ridiculous?

I‘ve found a post I’m considering including in this year’s competition for Most Ridiculous Post of the Year. It’s from Chris Floyd Online, and it’s called Empire and Burlesque: Permanent Bases Rise While Public Gawks at Geeks.

I complement the writer on a well-written piece, bringing us up to the cliff of his torrid anti-Americanism through a discussion of the remaining 2008 candidates as chicken-chomping carnival geeks … but I fear him as a man so obsessed with America as evil that he can’t recognize true evil when he sees it. In that, he reflects the thinking of the Left quite accurately, so it’s a piece worth reading … even if it sets your teeth on edge with passages like this:

It is also obvious – albeit far less openly acknowledged – that these policies are themselves a form of terrorism: state terrorism, on a massive scale, which has already killed at least a million people in Iraq alone.

Besides overstating Iraqi war fatalities by four-fold, Floyd manages to call us the terrorists of the world. Perhaps Floyd will join the geeks voting for Nader.

Military and Corporations? Puh-leeze!

With Nader and the rabid Left blog post noted above, there’s been a bit of an anti-corporate theme today, tied at the ankle in a global three-legged race with the companion anti-military theme.

So a quote like this, from Thomas P.M. Barnett’s weekly column, must drive Nader and Floyd nuts:

Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command, says the role of the military is largely to buy breathing space for better, nonmilitary solutions to emerge. That’s something America needs to remember as we work the Middle East in this long war: The lasting solutions will arrive wearing business suits, not desert cammies.

Specifically, Barnett is talking about FDI in MENA, or Foreign Direct Investment in the Middle East/North Africa region. FDI is “sticky money,” in that investments in business and infrastructure create long-term benefits of jobs and income — which is particularly important in the MENA region, where idle hands can lead to terrorism. Look at Jordan as an example:

… I can’t help but be struck by what a huge difference America’s 2001 free-trade agreement with Jordan has made in that country’s future.

Jordan is the size of Indiana, where I currently reside, and it possesses approximately the same population. The big difference is that Indiana is full of arable land, so agriculture is big here. In Jordan, only 3 percent of the land can be farmed, so 85 percent of Jordan’s GDP originates in the service sector. If you’re a small, resource-poor and service-heavy economy, the only way you can really grow is to super-connect with the global economy - the Israeli model.

This is where America’s free-trade agreement, along with King Abdullah II’s ongoing trade liberalization and economic reforms, has dramatically brightened Jordan’s prospects. That agreement, along with a similar one concluded with the European Union in 2002, allows Jordan to serve as regional gateway to more than three-quarters of a billion consumers with disposable income.

Jordanian exports to America have skyrocketed since the treaty went into effect, increasingly 14-fold since 2000. The kingdom, which attracted $50 million of FDI annually in the late 1990s, pulled in roughly 36 times that amount last year.

Jordan still has 30 percent unemployment, but by Middle East standards, that’s not all that bad, and it’s moving in the right direction.

Wow. The U.S. military for temporary stability and corporate investments for long-term stability — what a nightmare for the Lefties!

Speaking Of The Military/Industrial Complex …

Right on cue, I came across a briefing out of Iraq that underscores the way the U.S. military buys time for home team to build up its security and economy. Speaking is Colonel Tom James, the commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division:

The brigade combat team also conducts numerous operations focused on extremists and criminals over the past two and a half months. In December we conducted Operation Marne Roundup, a successful combined operation to clear AQI in the Euphrates River Valley west of Iskandariyah, in the vicinity of the town of Khidr. During the operation and with assistance of SOIs, or Sons of Iraq, and local citizens, we killed approximately 18 extremists, captured 25, found and cleared 51 IEDs, and found and cleared 43 caches. We established Patrol Base Kelsey, named after a soldier that gave his life during this offensive operation.

Since we established the patrol base, 100 families have returned to their homes. We initiated numerous projects, to include rubble removal, school refurbishment and electricity repair, just to name a few. We also organized a local sheikh council to capture the needs of the people, as required.

Just south of Khidr is the town of Jurf al-Sakhr. Four months ago, it was a war zone dominated by extremists. It is now a secure community with positive governance and economic growth. An active police station and Sons of Iraq program secure the area, and over 40 businesses are growing, based on small-business education and microgrant stimulation.

This is a model community concept that will be adopted throughout our AO. Just the other day, I was at Jurf and witnessed a government-funded road crew paving a once war-ravaged street.

We continue relentless pursuit of the enemy and denying extremist sanctuaries throughout our AO. Over the past 83 days we conducted over 70 combined operations, both coalition and Iraqi security forces. We captured over 50 high-value enemy targets, cleared over 100 caches and cleared over 70 IEDs.

With the security window opened, we continue the exploitation phase, focused on governance and economics. We have an embedded reconstruction team resourced with governance and economics experts. Mr. Van Franken (sp), our EPRT leader, has a team, and as his team is an essential part of our brigade combat team, we include them in all operational planning and execution.

Under economics, they focus on developing small businesses, agricultural associations, poultry and fish farms and reconstruction projects. Under governance, they focus on local governance training, governance linkages and beladiya assistance, which are the public works and the essential services for the people.

Just another profile of the ruthless bloodsuckers who make up our military, eh?

Up against stories like this one, the rabid tirades against our military by the Left — calling them fixated only on violence, and not smart enough for “real” work (like, oh, being a social worker on the government dole) — just make me sick.

Pity The GM PR Guys

The GM PR department is going full-tilt on establishing GM’s reputation as a green company — not an easy task under the best of conditions — so they must be reeling in light of this:

General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a “total crock of s—,” saying his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles.

Lutz, GM’s outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.

In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those “spewing virtual vitriol” at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were “missing the big picture.”

“What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is … hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support,” he said in a posting titled, “Talk About a Crock.”

How about truth as a defense? Works for me.

Cat Haiku

I‘m a dog guy, and this cat haiku just may explain why:

Humans are so strange.
Mine lies still in bed, then screams;
My claws are not that sharp.

Or this one:

The rule for today:
Touch my tail, I shred your hand.
New rule tomorrow.

For 13 more cat haiku, click here.

Yesterday, Incredible Daughter #1 — who’s off to Paris next week for a collegiate visit — and I did what we often do. We spent the day with some wonderful cars.

First we went to the Saturday morning meet at Irvine Spectrum, where every week a few hundred million dollars worth of some of most amazing automobiles you’ll ever see are there to be seen.

Like this one:

If you’re a BMW fan, you’re probably an ubber-fan of the Z8, the powerful two-seater BMW produced 5,703 of from 2000 to 2003.

Well, ever seen 13 of them all lined up together?

Unless you were in Irvine yesterday, too, you haven’t, at least not in the US.

Then we joined a few dozen BMW owners for a drive through OC’s canyons and along its coast to end up at Crevier Classic Cars in Costa Mesa, where we saw such beautiful sights as this:

That’s a Lincoln in the foreground and a Packard to the rear. American car makers have a gorgeous history. Speaking of history, this is one of several of Cong. John Campbell’s cars that was at Crevier.

Anyone care to hazard a guess why the Congressman’s Ferrari has a license plate with “NERO” on it? Fiddling while Washington burns? Not Campbell, who Hugh Hewitt listeners know well.

Update: On-the-ball Campbell staffer Janelle Froisland spotted my post and sent this clarification:

Congressman Campbell’s license plate reads: “NERO328” because “nero” is “black” in Italian, and 328 is the model number of that car (Ferrari 328 GTS). So, the license plate “NERO328″ means that it is a black Ferrari 328 and the word “black” is in Italian since it is an Italian car.

Could you ask for a more thorough explanation? No, so I thought I’d ask her if I could have Campbell’s red ‘64 T’bird, also on display at Crevier. I haven’t heard back yet. (end of update)

Etymologically speaking, this photo of a Caddy from the 20s gave me a pretty good idea of why we call the place we stow our luggage a “trunk.” (The Brits call them “boots,” but the booty in matching blue to the … er, rear is purely coincidental.)

Later in the day, Incredible Daughter #3 and I took a drive to see another incredible machine. This one was a Giken, a $1.5 million Japanese number that uses hydraulics to generate gazillions tons of pressure to silently push 40-foot-long sheet piles into a deteriorating levee.

I feel good about this because my client, Shea Homes, is responsible for getting this done. Shea was prepared to spend $15 million repairing the levee and doing other significant flood control improvements, because the existing system didn’t even provide protection for a 25-year storm.

But as the Greenies fought us, years dragged by until we saw deterioration like this — thanks to the County redirecting levee repair funds to pay off the bonds that got us out of their stupid bankruptcy.

Shea brought the deterioration to the attention of the County and made enough noise that OC Flood Control District couldn’t ignore the problem — leading to the Giken silently shoving those long beams into the levee so it can be strong enough to survive a pretty significant storm.

Shea still has a lot of work to do to fulfill its commitments. It will still spend $15 million one way or the other … money the government should spend, but is forcing developers to pay instead since the levee protects thousands of citizen taxpayers. It looks like we’ll get about 125 homes to spread that $15 million over … or $120,000 per house.

If government took care of its own messes instead of forcing developers to fix them, the homebuyers would have enough additional money in their accounts for one of those beautiful Z8s.

And they say it’s greedy developers who makes houses expensive.

We went to an art show today … the LA Auto Show. If you, like Incredible Daughters 1 & 3 & moi , appreciate fine automotive sculpture, you’ll share our joy over these examples … like this Maserati Gran Tourismo. Be still my heart.

A BMW 328, the car, out of all the cars at the show, Incredible Daughter #1 would like to find in her garage one day.

One of three GM concepts for a new small car, this is the one slated for production.

Car enthusiasts are very excited that the Nissan Skyline is finally coming to America … although none of us are too crazy about that little crease on the C-pillar.

Not all art is original … like the tail lights on this new Jag, which is a thieving lift off my wife’s much prettier red Aston Martin Vantage.

I loved the little flying buttresses on this smooth 12-cylinder Ferrari.

And finally, ceiling lights reflected in the metallic copper paint of a stunning Aston Martin convertible.

Wooo Wooo Warmie, the global warming psychic, has a new mystical revelation: Greenies will fight zero pollution cars and LA will become a rain forest.

Wow, a double-revelation from Wooo Wooo, a first in C-SM history!

How does Wooo Wooo know such things will come to pass? His ways are mystical so I’ll just offer up this guess: He happened upon Honda’s Web site for its fuel cell car, the FCX, and his already mystical eyes got even more heebie-jeebie-ish when he read this:

Q. The FCX Clarity is a “dedicated platform hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.” What does that mean?

A. Honda has led the way in developing and improving fuel cell vehicle performance. The FCX Clarity was designed from the ground up to be a fuel cell vehicle that runs on electricity powered by hydrogen, and emits only water vapor and heat into the air.

Amazing technology, eh? It doesn’t have to be plugged in or fueled up; it just runs on its little fuel cell, happily carrying our greener-than-thou selves around town as little droplets of water and whiffs of hot air come out its tailpipe.

What a lovely way for we pipsqueak humans to stop anthropogenic [thanks, J.] global warming in its tracks! It is all our fault, you know, and now we’ve got the Glorious Solution!

But wait a minute. Water vapor and heat!? Wooo Wooo and I both live in the LA Basin, a big ol’ place of about 3.7 gazillion cars that is completely ringed by mountains that hold in the smog. Were we to convert our smog to water droplets and hot air, the humidity in the basin would soar from its usual low reading to New Orleans-like levels.

Streams would flow year-round, rain would fall on the mountains as if they were Hawaii’s Pali, and our summertime stretches of days of 100 degree plus weather would now come with 90 percent humidity.

Oh. Joy.

Of course, the Greenies will find themselves torn between the perfect green technology and the fact that the FCX and cars of its ilk would make SoCal’s climate more like Guatamala’s, thereby destroying most of the drought-tolerant vegetation and killing the critters dependent on those plants.

So Wooo Wooo says you will see Greenies fighting against these cars, and Warmies fighting for them, while in the distance, Honest Abe reminds us that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

So there’s trouble ahead for the enviros.

Note: J. Ewing sets Wooo Wooo straight in the third comment; be sure to read it.