Vladimir Putin called President Obama today. What he called him the White House isn't saying.
The F1 circuit is racing in Malaysia this weekend. Normally people would hear that and say, "Where?"
I never know how to answer the question, "How's your church doing?" First, because I never know. Not only is something like a church difficult to assess in a sound bite, I'm not sure I could fairly answer the question if I had an hour. I'm so close to it, mentally and emotionally, that I'm pretty sure I don't see it accurately or objectively. So I usually give a bland, meaningless reply and the questioner moves on to something else.
Some day I should try giving a totally unexpected answer to see what response I get.
"Well, last Sunday twenty Buddhist monks showed up, sat in back, and spent the entire service quietly singing 'Eleanor Rigby'."
GM issued a "stop sell" order for some 2013 and 2014 Chevy Cruz models but they didn't give a reason. Apparently "Because they're butt-ugly pieces of junk" didn't seem like good press.
I've been very careful as I take the truck apart, taking pictures to help me remember how things went together and following a "tag and bag" process. Pam got me a supply of two different sizes of ziplock bags. I write out a little slip of paper - "door panel mounting screws" - put that slip and the parts in the bag, and then put it in a box with similar items. Say, items from the dash.
Today I switched from "tag and bag" to "grip it and rip it." As I worked removing all the guts from under the dash I quickly realized that almost nothing was as it should be, most of it will have to be replaced, and I'd waste time doing things carefully. Wires? Get out the cutters, hack the harness apart without any regard for looking at where wires went, and pitch it all in the trash can.
Somebody has been up in there before me and they were not anal. The first clue was the Budweiser bottle cap used for a choke cable knob. Or the JC Whitney toggle switch where the two-position wiper knob should have been. Wires hanging everywhere and connected to nothing. Twist ties holding wires to braces.
I have NO idea how I'm going to figure everything out when it comes time to put things back together. I'll start with a new harness and new switches, and hope I get as lucky as I did with the VW. Today the goal was get the cab gutted so it's ready to load on the trailer when Josh comes to help Sunday afternoon.
Back to the GM mess. The recall of cars continues to grow and now includes brands they don't make any more, like the Saturn. The death toll linked to failed ignition switches has climbed to 303, and the question is, what did they know and when did they know it. The answer seems to be more and earlier than they said. It now appears there was a coverup.
So where were the feds while all of this was going on (is going on?). Did they know what GM knew? If they didn't, should they have? And did the bailout of GM have any effect on what happened?
Part of the bailout legislation stipulated that any legal liabilities before 2009 are part of the "old" GM and don't carry over to the new, govt.-owned company. Did GM make use of this Get Out of Jail Free card that gave them legal immunity and motivated them to keep the ignition failures under wraps? Had Congress known about the problems would they have approved a bailout plan with that immunity?
Would an administration that had put so many political eggs in a bailout program basket have been complicit in that coverup?
Naw.
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