Last Look at Year of Woe

The headline for my column here two years ago bawled, “Good riddance to 2006.” The Iraq war was raging, the Redskins flopping and the Congress turning Democrat.
I’m now even happier to drop-kick 2008 right through the goal posts of life. The stock market is crashing, unemployment is soaring, and the Redskins…Pardon me while I wipe the tears from my keyboard.
But change is nigh! The Democrats have won total control most everywhere, even Virginia. They’ll soon overrun our Nation’s Capital, literally. But by God and Obama, we will be saved.
“In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” All of us, that is, except GM, Ford and Chrysler. Plus, I nearly forgot to include our own local champion of lost causes, Stafford Supervisor Paul Milde.
Paul has to be the nicest loser hereabouts. Last summer he led the charge to defeat imposition of a hateful new BPOL tax on businesses. To no avail despite a mighty effort. In recent months he’s championed a change to permit voters to select a countywide chairman. Again, by an identical 4-3 vote, his idea was stomped on—and stamped out. But he’ll be back. After all, it wasn’t long ago that he led the charge to preserve his beloved Crow’s Nest. And won.
Indefatigable? I hope so. Just stick around and get elected again next fall, Paul, and maybe the voters will choose more friends like you to serve on a board less dysfunctional.
Characters like Milde keep the editorial juices flowing. There’s never a shortage anyhow. Think newcomers Blagojevich and Madoff. Plus Obama, who swears we’ll become energy independent while stiffing domestic oil exploration and ignoring nuclear energy. Oh, my.
The turn of the year is also when I critique some of the stuff I wrote in this space, for good or ill, in my 13th year for the Stafford County Sun.
I’d say there was good among the ill despite the deteriorating economy.
I commended the humor so pervasive on the airwaves as last year began, mentioning those laughing babies in a commercial reminding us that laughter adds eight years to your life. Then the clincher: “Never outlive your money.” It was sage advice at the time from huge AIG, now itself in the toilet as that financial Goliath our tax dollars tried to bail out.
I poked fun at Aquia Harbour’s new Bark Park and the spate of Super Bowl commercials. I commended a separate one from Anheuser-Busch depicting a typical airport lobby’s crowd scene when troops in fatigues, obviously just returning from overseas, start passing through the waiting passengers. They start applauding — a memorable and touching tribute.
Afterwards I tried gutter politics with my endorsement of ABC — Anybody But Clinton — and a diatribe against those dangerous and costly new light bulbs being pushed on us in the name of energy savings (even as electric plug-in cars are being hyped).
Life remains good, I preached, while quoting a book’s case “for the dark night of the soul (that) brings a much needed corrective to today’s mania for cheerfulness.” I’d say we’ve now absorbed enough corrective to last a good while.
Then there were my takes on the value of service clubs and the recent cooling of the globe, now a decade-long trend that wasn’t predicted by the hallowed global-warming computer models still venerated by the sky-is-falling crowd.
One of them, John McCain, won my endorsement anyhow. He’s a younger Republican fellow — I noted on my 75th birthday — who talks like and looks like my white-haired friends..
Lawyers caused the mortgage mess, I claimed. Who in their right mind ever reads all the fine print in those new-home contracts anyway? Nevertheless, the darkening financial clouds last spring (when I should have dumped my stocks) led analyst Steven Pearlstein to warn: “Don’t be fooled by the latest sucker rally on stocks or predictions that the worst may be behind us.” Prescient, sadly.
Less predictable were gasoline prices. They soared into July above $4 a gallon, then slumped back to today’s $1.50. Someone will try to explain why. Don’t believe what they’ll say. All are wrong. The world as we know it, like this week’s column that covers some of last year’s rants, is spinning wildly out of control.
Save us, Obama.

That red light ain't Rudolph's nose

Bless the festive sights of Christmas. The decorations, the colorful displays, the myriad red lights...

But wait. Lest you get the wrong impression, this piece isn’t about ho-ho-ho and all that.. Rather, it’s those traffic stoplights.

You know, those that we are so richly endowed with hereabouts, especially on Garrisonville Road, as daily commuters there can woefully attest. It’s also becoming nearly as bad lately on U.S. 1 in the area.

Besides enduring those multiplying red lights, neighbors traveling beyond our confines must be even more vigilant than usual or else they risk getting their vehicles’ pictures taken and notice of violation mailed with a demand for monetary sacrifice to boot.

A few years ago, when they were all the rage in Fairfax County, I got nailed for extending the yellow too long at a light on the Fairfax Parkway at I-95. So, 50 hard-earned bucks went, alas, to enrich the bureaucratic coffers in one of the richest counties in the nation.

Look for many more of these sleazy municipal money-makers to crop up as hard times take hold in more jurisdictions. Item: “NYC on Ticket Blitz; 200 traffic agents added...Cash-strapped City is Out to Raise $66 million.”--WCBS TV.

Oh swell.

And you surely know that Washington, D.C.’s red light and speed cameras are thick as fleas, and thieves. Same goes for Maryland. You can check out particular locations at photoenforced.com. Be forewarned.

Thanks to instant movies and cell phone snapshots, such technology increasingly attracts the attention of Big Brother, but not for entertainment.

As a writer for McClatchy newspapers noted recently, “Chevy Chase Village (Md) is a great place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there. At least not by car. Easy-to-miss automated speed cameras on its half-mile main drag, where the speed limit is 30 mph, caught 3,500 speeders on their first day of operation last fall.”

He adds darkly that more than 300 U.S. communities use similarly automated cop-cam systems. “They're after not just speeders but also red-light violators and railroad-crossing jumpers.”

Over in the United Kingdom, he notes, cop-cams are 10 times more widely used, There, saboteurs have shot out cameras’ lenses, disabled them with bolt cutters, and pulled them down.

The contraptions do reduce accidents, except for more rear-enders--those sudden stops on yellow at intersections where drivers know that the light is camera-monitored. And by the way, cop-cams can be cash cows. It’s said that Washington's dozen cop-cams have taken in more than $200 million since 2001.

And check out this analysis by a Tennessee think tank: There are no incentives for communities to solve the problem of red-light running using other proven means, such as longer yellow-light times. It’s said that a simple one-second increase in yellow-light duration has proven a far safer alternative to red-light cameras. Ah yes, but consider all the foregone loot in an era of pinched local budgets. And there you have a truly infectious disease, spreading rapidly.

A 2001 paper by the Office of the Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives reported that red-light cameras are "a hidden tax levied on motorists." The report came to the same conclusions that all of the other valid studies have, that red-light cameras are associated with increased crashes and that the timings at yellow lights are often set too short on purpose to yield more tickets.

As far as Virginia is concerned currently, there is no legislation allowing speed cameras but there is for red-light cameras, I‘m told. They are being used throughout the state, primarily in urban areas. Spotsylvania was looking at using them at a couple of intersections on Route 3. In Stafford County, the Board of Supervisors would have to approve their use here. So we’re OK...so far.

On a similarly heartening note, here’s a neat traffic story about older drivers. A st ate trooper sees a car puttering along at 22 mph. So he pulls the driver over. Approaching the car, he notices five elderly ladies inside, wide-eyed and white as ghosts.

The driver, obviously confused, says, "Officer, I don't understand. I was going the exact speed limit. The trooper, trying to contain a chuckle, explains to her that 22 is the road’s route number, not the speed limit."Now, before you go, Ma'am, I have to ask--is everyone in this carOK? These women seem awfully shaken.""Oh, they'll be all right in a minute, officer. We just got off Route 95."

On that happy note, I wish you all Merry Christmas!

Let the Big 3 Crash, but not mine

So let the Big 3 crash, but not mine.....
I love my car. Just like my four Town Cars before it--not one of them bought new--my current ‘04 model has heated seats. They suit my aging bottom just fine this winter.
I hate to think of ever buying what may be a better foreign car. After all, my dad’s old Texas National Guard comrades were prisoners in those infamous World War II death marches the Japanese wrought.
But now the Detroit automakers are being forced to change, to get more like those of Japan (and the red-state South), featuring higher mpg’s, less pollution, and of course much lower wages.
If they won’t, they’ll not get that $25 billion pledged by Congress to make them become greener, or the extra $25 billion of our tax money they say they need to avoid bankruptcy.
Don’t they know we’re hurting, that our spendthrift government shouldn’t be bailing out companies which can’t cut it? Never mind how unfair it was to bail out the fat-cat bankers but not them.
Listen to Mitt Romney, son of George of American Motors fame: “Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retir ee burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.”--in New York Times.
In other words, we’d just be pouring even more of our tax money down the drain. Yes, but what about the death of Detroit otherwise? Baloney. Remember, the steel industry died years ago in Pittsburgh, and the last I heard, the Steelers were doing quite well.
That’s easy for me to say, you’re growling. True, given my age, I may never again need to shop for another car and besides, my foreseeable financial needs are covered by a handsome government pension.
So I’m set, just so long as Eddie’s Repair Shop right here in Stafford remains viable. Which reminds me. While I love my Town Car, its dealers are intolerable and should be taken out behind the barn and shot. SPCA and PETA be damned.
Dealers charge lots more than Eddie’s does for repairs and maintenance, do no better a job, act like they’re doing you a favor, and “When are you going to trade that rattletrap in for our shiny new one over yonder in the showroom?” Even their coffee is lousy. And in cahoots with Detroit automakers, they're trying to squeeze out shops like Eddie's.
I really won’t miss them. I know. Dealers hawking foreign models may be no better. But that’s a problem for the greenies driving their oh-so-environmentally-chic models, not me.
Aside from agreeing that it’s good to have cleaner air, you know what I think of saving my heirs from the imagined ravages of global warming. Hock-tooie.
In the first place, our world stopped warming 10 years ago, or hadn’t you noticed? True, NASA “scientists” announced last month that October had been the warmest for that month on record.
But wait. There was a teensy error. October really wasn’t. Seems it was only the 70th warmest October in the past 114 years. So all the draconian save-the-environment things we’re going to have to do to avoid global warming aren’t necessary. To wit: it’s getting colder.
Yeah, I’m one of those few wacky deniers on climate change, right? Perhaps not. The last time lots of citizens got to express themselves on such matters, via the November ballots, they smeared Al Gore’s greenies.
Consider: Among five major energy and environmental ballot initiatives from California to Missouri, voters turned down all but one. And by the way, don’t you feel sorry now for last summer’s panic buyers of costly new gas-saving models, now that prices at the pump are down again to way less than $2 a gallon? You betcha.
Maybe, like with the easing concern over gas prices, some of us folks might be getting wiser. Good. As a recent survey by Texas A&M scientists showed, “More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.”
Finally, as for Detroit’s Big Three, I’d guess it’s pretty soon going to be survival of the fittest, after Chapter 11 bankruptcies, of course. The nail in their coffin might have been the private jets they flew to attend those Washington congressional hearings. (And now, Greyhound?)
In any event, Mr. Obama will surely do something soon to ease the impact on the union auto workers who supported him so much. He’d better, or they just might become racist.