Today's NY Fishwrap Daily Double: The Cobra & The Flatster

The Cobra examines the Wasilla Wardrobe Controversy and advises The Mighty Quinnette to put her high-priced undies on eBay. That online venue worked so well for the sale of the state-owned jet that offended The Mighty Quinnette's down-home, real-folks sense of propriety. Following The Cobra's evisceration of the Caribou Barbie, The Flatster continues to beat the drum for innovation by calling for the installation of Steve Jobs as the CEO of GM. First, the iPod (an amazing device), then the iPhone (an even more amazing innovation), and — with Steve Jobs — running the show: a GM iCar! If this is (fair & balanced) witty punditry, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] The Cobra's Advice To The Mighty Quinnette: eBay, Baby
[2] The Flatster Calls For An iCar

[x NY Fishwrap]
[1]—Back To Directory
Boxers, Briefs, Or Silks?
By Maureen Dowd

Sarah Palin represents a huge historic leap forward for women.

When Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton ran, their fates were inextricably linked with their gender. If they failed, many women felt, there was an X through the whole X chromosome. A blot on the female copybook.

If not this woman now, Hillary’s supporters would ardently ask me, what woman ever?

But Sarah Palin can come across as utterly unready to lead the world — or even find the world on a map — and that doesn’t reflect poorly on the rest of us.

It only means that she doesn’t have enough mind grapes or thoughtsicles, as Tracy Morgan refers to brain droppings on “30 Rock,” to be president soon.

(It’s W., Cheney and Edward Liddy, the C.E.O. of A.I.G. — who can’t seem to stop the conga line of bailout beneficiaries from going on luxury retreats, even though taxpayers have to keep ponying up — who may have clinched the case that overprivileged white men are biologically or cognitively unsuited to hold higher office.)

Palin told Greta Van Susteren Monday on Fox News that her faith will guide her on a 2012 run. “I’m like, O.K., God, if there is an open door for me somewhere — this is what I always pray — don’t let me miss the open door,” she said. “Show me where the open door is, even if it’s cracked open a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it.”

The Alaska governor, who now thinks she is even bigger than her vast state, has certainly not missed an opportunity to throw open the door to the national press this week, letting them hang in her Wasilla kitchen as she makes moose chili and cake and baby formula and hefty servings of spin.

After her brutal transformation by the McCain campaign into a shopaholic, whack-job diva — “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” as one angry McCain aide characterized it to Newsweek — Palin is now trying to unmake that makeover and morph from uptown cloistered girl back to down-home accessible girl.

Just hanging in the kitchen with her family and a bunch of camera crews, washing lettuce and washing John McCain and his tattling, gossiping sewing circle of aides right out of her fluffed-up hair. The same McCain aides who blasted the press as sexist for wondering if Palin was hopelessly over her head swiveled around and blasted Palin to the press as hopelessly over her head. The snippy McCain snipers once loved Palin’s sassy ability to burn Barack Obama and Joe Biden with snide little remarks.

So let’s see how they like the burn turned on them? She said that the anonymous aides scapegoating her were “cowardly” “mean-spirited,” “immature,” “unprofessional” and “jerks.”

She’s right. And where was the usually gallant John McCain during all this? Usually Republicans protect their own. There was plenty W. didn’t know during his coaching sessions when he was running for president, but it never leaked out from staffers.

And yet, Palin still seems disturbingly unconcerned about how much she does not know.

Calling Tina Fey. Here’s Palin defending herself on the contention that she got confused about Africa:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told The Associated Press over the weekend that his daughter was “frantically” trying to sort out the clothes she got as Eliza Knowlittle so she could send them back.

“You know,” Heath said, “the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.”

As Michael Shear reported in The Washington Post, on top of the $150,000 first cited in F.E.C. filings, Palin spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on more clothes, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for the First Dude. The campaign was charged for silk boxers, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry the designer duds, Shear reported, adding that one source said, “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her 'Saturday Night Live' performance” in October. Silk boxers and custom-designed underpinnings? Sounds like Sarah and Todd were treating the vice presidential run as a second honeymoon.

Palin should follow her own reformer precedent and put the borrowed underpinnings on eBay. The windfall would undergird her new presidential bid.

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]
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[2]—Back To Directory
How to Fix a Flat
By Thomas L. Friedman

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it. It led to a situation whereby General Motors could make money only by selling big, gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and trucks. Therefore, instead of focusing on making money by innovating around fuel efficiency, productivity and design, G.M. threw way too much energy into lobbying and maneuvering to protect its gas guzzlers.

This included striking special deals with Congress that allowed the Detroit automakers to count the mileage of gas guzzlers as being less than they really were — provided they made some cars flex-fuel capable for ethanol. It included special offers of $1.99-a-gallon gasoline for a year to any customer who purchased a gas guzzler. And it included endless lobbying to block Congress from raising the miles-per-gallon requirements. The result was an industry that became brain dead.

Nothing typified this more than statements like those of Bob Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman. He has been quoted as saying that hybrids like the Toyota Prius “make no economic sense.” And, in February, D Magazine of Dallas quoted him as saying that global warming “is a total crock of [expletive].”

These are the guys taxpayers are being asked to bail out.

And please, spare me the alligator tears about G.M.’s health care costs. Sure, they are outrageous. “But then why did G.M. refuse to lift a finger to support a national health care program when Hillary Clinton was pushing for it?” asks Dan Becker, a top environmental lobbyist.

Not every automaker is at death’s door. Look at this article that ran two weeks ago on autochannel.com: “ALLISTON, Ontario, Canada — Honda of Canada Mfg. officially opened its newest investment in Canada — a state-of-the art $154 million engine plant. The new facility will produce 200,000 fuel-efficient four-cylinder engines annually for Civic production in response to growing North American demand for vehicles that provide excellent fuel economy.”

The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote. That shielded General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from environmental concerns, mileage concerns and the full impact of global competition that could have forced Detroit to adapt long ago.

Indeed, if and when they do have to bury Detroit, I hope that all the current and past representatives and senators from Michigan have to serve as pallbearers. And no one has earned the “honor” of chief pallbearer more than the Michigan Representative John Dingell, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who is more responsible for protecting Detroit to death than any single legislator.

O.K., now that I have all that off my chest, what do we do? I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

[Thomas L. Friedman became The New York Times' foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third (The earlier Prizes were awarded in 1983 and 1988.) Pulitzer for this paper. Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, (2005) won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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