The World's Cheapest Car: Tata Nano

Some things are more important than politics, as we all know.  The children, for example.

Also personal transportation.  And today there was a milestone in personal transportation. 

You can get a measure of the excitement from Richard S. Chang of the New York Times reporting from India. 

Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

And now it is here, the 4-passenger Tata Nano, available for a price of 1 lakh rupees later this year.

The Indian media is naturally very proud.  The Hindustan Times reports:

Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs 1,00,000 "people’s car" unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi on Thursday will help the common man shift from two-wheelers to four-wheelers, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.

“This is a proud moment for India,” he said.

Unfamiliar with rupees and lakhs?  Oh, fie, what kind of a multiculturalist are you?

A “lakh” is 100,000.  The Indians also have another important number, the “crore.”  The crore is 100 lakh, or 10 million.  You can check out the Indian number system here.  One interesting aspect of this is that a crore is written as 1,00,00,000.  What do you think of that?

The confusion is that we have a mixture of Greek in “nano” and Indian in “lakh.”  Are you still with me?

OK, I’ll stop with the multi-culti stuff.  The Tata Nano comes in at $2,500.  Which is some kind of a price.

Some people are upset about this.  They are worried about saving the planet.  Imagine tens of crores of Indians driving around in these little Nanos!  It will kill the planet and cause glaciers in Greenland to melt.

But I am thinking of something more prosaic.  Right now, people of modest income in the developing world tend to ride around on 125ml Honda motorcycles.  Sometimes the whole family is draped across the bike.  This is not safe.  Now families can ride in their four-wheeled Tata Nano with its 2-cylinder 33 hp 660ml engine.  It will be much safer.

Other people are worried about “chaos” on the pot-holed rural roads of India.

There’s solution to that, of course.  Build more roads!  Most of the populated areas of India are dead flat, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.

Clinton Gender Card Threepeat

Nobody ever accused the Clintons of modesty.  So it is not surprising that, in the crisis of New Hampshire, they played the gender card.  They did it before, and it worked.

But to play the gender card three times in one weekend.  That’s positively Clintonian!

It even got to Andrew Sullivan:

The Clinton machine is now poised to pull every partisan lever and deploy every cheap tactic: the gender card, the elderly card, the 527s, the teachers’ unions, AFSCME, the Human Rights Campaign, the super-delegates, and the core Democratic base.

And you could tell it was all planned by listening to Bill on the morning after, retelling the story of Hillary tearing up.  Writes Toby Harnden, quoting Bill:

"She was genuinely moved that in the middle of a political campaign another person would actually express a genuine level of concern for her," he told Telegraph.co.uk after had she eked out a surprise two-point victory.

"It was quite touching. You know, people forget that the people that do this are human. She was just very moved by it."

Er, not exactly.  Many of us constantly marvel how candidates manage to keep going.  And we are especially aware that Hillary is 60ish and John McCain is 70ish.  What they forget is just how ruthless the Clintons can be.

As for me, I’d like to know who those “iron my shirts” chappies were.

I expect that there are several professional investigative reporters from the mainstream media interviewing them at this very moment. Not.

It’s time for Barack Obama to play the race card.  It’s not as if he hasn’t pulled any stunts in previous campaigns.

These guys deserve each other.

Is the Right Wrong?

Ten years ago, Daniel Finkelstein was an advisor to the doomed Conservative government of British Prime Minister John Major.  He knew that the Conservatives were going to lose, and that the Conservatives had to change.  “Then what are you waiting for?” said an American friend.

Now FInkelstein wants to return the compliment.

What do the Republicans do if they lose? They have to change, and change profoundly. They will have to move towards voters. And are they going to lose? It is extremely likely that they will. So what are they waiting for?

But this is to confuse tactics and strategy.

In the present US election cycle after Iowa and New Hampshire it is clear that the Reagan-Bush coalition is hurting.  One after another, Republican primary voters seem to be trying out the non-Reagan-Bush candidates.  First Mike Huckabee won in Iowa.  You could call him a social-only conservative.  Then John McCain won.  You could call him and national-security-only conservative.  The voters seem to be dancing nervously around Mitt Romney, the official candidate of the full-spectrum conservative right that includes the full menu of social conservatism, economic conservatism, and national conservatism.

But will it matter?  Chances are that the American people will choose “change,” either the meat-and-potatoes change of Hillary Clinton or the change-as-hope change of Barack Obama.

That’s what happened to the British Conservatives in 1997.  The voters were tired of the Conservatives and enamored of change.  So they voted for the charismatic Tony Blair.  It was Wordsworth time:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

They didn’t want Conservatives.  Anything but that.  And they loved Tony Blair.  “Education, education, education,” he said.  “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime.”

Now we are ten years later.  The British people have had ten years of tax increases and ineffective government.  Education is in the toilet.  Crime is on the rise.  Welfare is in the toilet.

In response, the Conservative Party is coming out with a radical conservative program.  They just announced a radical welfare reform program and the media asked them why it wasn’t stronger.  They have a radical education reform program coming up that will feature choice.

What has happened is that the voters are fed up, and they are now willing to listen to the Conservative Party.  That’s the way the political system works.

Republicans have been in power on and off for 25 years.  They have made a lot of changes, and a lot of people are tired of it all.  They think it is Time for a Change.  They are right.

Of course, tactically, Republicans should keep in touch with the voters.  But strategically they should be planning for the next round of reform.  That will probably not come until Social Security and Medicare and the public schools “hit the buffers,” but that is the way the political system works.

"Liberal Fascism" Hits the Shelves

I got an email today from Barnes & Noble to tell me that my Liberal Fascism is on its way.

But I almost wish I had decided to go out and buy it at the store. Author Jonah Goldberg reports that some buyers are getting the dead fish treatment from the liberal store clerks, as in:

“The clerk made me say the name three times. She looked for it. Couldn’t find it. I made her go in the back. They were still in the box apparently. She looked like she wanted ice tongs when she picked it up.”

Or this:

“I had to ask the lady at the info desk to look it up - she had trouble. Couldn’t find it under the title, but found it under your name, and walked me over to it. Handed it to me like she was handling a dead fish. Heh, that last part could be my imagination, but as a conservative who loves bookstores I always brace for the stereotypical lib clerk in the big box bookstore.”

The importance of Liberal Fascism is of course that, in the words of Daniel Pipes, it contradicts

the political spectrum that has shaped our worldview since the late 1930s, which places communism at the far left, followed by socialism, liberalism in the center, conservatism, and then fascism on the far right.

In the 1920s and early 1930s every fashionable was a socialist or a national socialist or a fascist. It was Stalin’s idea to call everyone he disagreed with a “fascist.” His followers immediately understood that there was something profoundly different between socialism and national socialism. And they wrote the history books to make sure everyone else did too.

But Goldberg’s book offers a new way of looking at political allegiance.

His revised political spectrum would focus on the role of the state and go from libertarianism to conservatism to fascism in its many guises — American, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and so on.

You could also use the same spectrum to indicate the involvement of the little platoons, voluntary associations outside the political sector, with libertarians maximizing voluntary associations and the various fascisms eliminating them.

Winning the Obama Way

They say that the Clintons invented and patented the politics of personal destruction.

But then there’s Senator Barack Obama.  According to Kyle-Anne Shiver in the American Thinker Obama won his first elected office with a bit of fancy footwork.  He was running for the Illinois State Senate against the incumbent Alice Palmer.  Palmer had failed in a run for Congress and filed to run for her old job.  According to Shiver:

[Obama] sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice Palmer’s signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her off the ballot altogether.  And indeed, some of Alice’s signatures were fake.  The aides also found enough other fake signatures on opponents’ ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.

Well whaddya know?  That’s what you call the Al Davis way: Just Win Baby.

Then in 2004 Obama ran for the United States Senate and Obama was up against a multimillionare businessman Blair Hull in the Democratic primary.  Then came the bombshell, as David Mendell reported in the Chicago Tribune, and

multimillionaire Blair Hull plummeted from front-runner status amid revelations that an ex-wife had alleged in divorce papers that he had physically and verbally abused her.

Just Win Baby.

In the general election, Obama was up against wealthy, goodlooking Jack Ryan, According to CBS News reported Dean Reynolds:

Unfortunately for Ryan, he also spent time frequenting some shady bars in Paris where live sex acts were apparently part of the draw. Nor did it help that Ryan’s ex-wife alleged that he urged her to participate in said acts when they were married.

So Obama ended up running against perennial candidate Alan Keyes, who wasn’t even a resident of Illinois, and the rest is history.

Al Davis would be proud, don’t you think?

But we need another term for the “politics of personal destruction,” forever associated with the Clintons and their War Room. 

Because Obama is a nice guy, not like those evil Clintons.

Some people might say that Obama and the Clintons deserve each other.

What Is This Thing Called "Change?"

Dear old Rush is in better case today than he was Friday, on the day after the Iowa caucuses.

But he confesses to being flummoxed by all this talk of “change.” That’s because, as far as he can tell, a chap like Barack Obama doesn’t represent change at all, but just same-old-same-old adding another layer of government programs on the already rather substantial government program cake.

Rush is thinking like a political activist, not like an ordinary voter.

Voters are not saying that they want to change the government programs; they are just saying that they want a change at the top. They are tired and frightened by the “stress” of the Bush years, which has been one thing after another. First there was the tech bust and the biggest bear market in a generation. Then came the housing boom, which was reported as an exciting party but was probably, for many voters, very frightening. Now we have the housing bust and a possible recession. People are right to be scared of that Dynamic Duo.

Then there’s the Iraq war. Voters might be less worried about Iraq if the political parties had been united on it. But the Democrats, driven by their anti-war base, have been using the Iraq war for partisan political ends, and so the voters are torn and conflicted.

That’s why I keep saying that we need a Democrat in the White House in 2009. We need to know what Democrats would really do if they were in charge of the war on terror, and we need to know what they would really do in reforming the domestic programs of the United States.

Then Republicans could do some serious thinking and policy analysis. There’s plenty to do. The welfare state has been growing for 70 years and is more or less completely unreformed.

What do the voters want? Who knows?

The SST BizJet

Enough of the sainted Barack Obama starring in “The Fall of the House of Clinton.”  Enough of the end of the Romney campaign.  Or is it the mean-spirited John McCain and his Straight Snark Express.

Let’s talk about guy stuff, like a new $80 million business jet that’s designed to carry 12 important executives at Mach 1.6 non-stop for up to 4,600 miles.

Of course, it is nothing to do with prestige and getting there before the ordinary hoi polloi in their airborne Greyhound buses.  As Ben Webster reports, it has nothing to do with that.  At least that is what the chaps at Aerion say.

“There is a saying that you can tell the men from the boys by the price of their toys,” said Brian Barents, Aerion’s vice-chairman and a former supersonic fighter pilot for the US Air Force. “But while prestige is a factor, this is primarily a timesaving tool to make executives more productive.”

Yes.  Of course, no ego stuff here, merely hard-working executives trying to be more productive!

To get a flavor of the design, you should go to Aerion’s website.  But think about this.  First of all, this 12-seat plane will have Pratt and Whitney JT8D engines.  That’s the turbofan that powers the twin-jet100-seat MD-80!  Got enough power, chaps?

Length	148 ft
Width	62 ft
Max Speed	Mach 1.6
Max Takeoff Weight	90,000 lbs
Max Fuel Weight	45,400 lbs

Imagine that!  The plane is half the length of a football field. Half of the takeoff weight will be fuel.  Well, when you strap on a couple of 20,000 lb thrust engines, what do you expect?

How soon will it be when everyone who is someone will have to have one of these?