The crackerjack car management team at the White House says GM got it wrong on Volt.

The Chevrolet Volt may wow the media when it arrives in dealerships next year, but the Obama administration believes the plug-in electric car will cost too much and won’t attract enough buyers.

“While the Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term,” the administration said in its evaluation of General Motors Corp.’s restructuring plan. The car “is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.”

Glad we found that out before we dumped $17B into Detroit….

Having problems with your car payment – maybe you need a new job

Rep. Charles Rangel $777 a month lease for  GM Cadillac DeVille

Rep. Gregory Meeks $998 a month lease for Toyota  Lexus

Clinton says must bring in moderate Taliban

THE HAGUE, March 31 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that Taliban members in Afghanistan who abandoned extremism must be granted an “honorable form of reconciliation.”

In search of the elusive “moderate Taliban”

Maybe some of these guys fit the bill.

The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault on a Pakistani police academy and said the group was planning a terrorist attack on the White House that would  “amaze” the world.

That’s about as moderate as it gets….

Another great move by local politicians trying to go green….

SPOKANE, Wash. – The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don’t work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation’s strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

But it’s not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.

Like so many of the “green” initiatives….they just don’t work.

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe’s left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds.

A new black market in dishwasher soap in the making?

“It’s nice to be on the cutting edge,” Spokane resident Ken Beck, an opponent of the ban, said sarcastically.

For his part, Beck has taken to washing his dishes on his machine’s pots-and-pans cycle, which takes longer and uses five gallons more water. Beck wonders if that isn’t as tough on the environment as phosphates.

“How much is this really costing us?” Beck said. “Aren’t we transferring the environmental consequences to something else?”

Maybe we need to cut to the source of the problem and outlaw dishwashers? I bet car wash stalls are doing the same thing hey?

One has to wonder….

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox addresses the Future Leaders Conference at the UTSA Main Campus.
By Elaine Ayala – Express-News

Fox also delivered a message of hope — hope that someday Canada, the United States and Mexico, indeed the rest of Latin America, would function like the European Union.

“It’s an extremely successful model,” said Fox, whose wife, Marta Sahagún, accompanied him. “My vision is to speed up the process of further integration.”

Fox acknowledged the difficulty of establishing a European Union-like structure in the Americas, given those who’d oppose it. But Fox said, “Hope is back again,” referring to the new U.S. president and the United States’ “capacity to fight for ideals.”

“The border between Mexico and the United States is not as fluid, stable or open as the border with Canada,” Fox said. “This certainly is because there is a huge difference in the levels of development.”