Posted on 09/14/2005 5:58:06 PM PDT by doug from upland
FReepers, this report is to follow up earlier reports regarding Al Gore and Arianna Huffington at the Sierra Club Summit in San Francisco last weekend. I was under deep cover at the event.
For Arianna - DRIVING MISS DAISY
ARIANNA FOLLOW UP PHOTO THREAD
On Friday, after giving a stirring speech about global warming, saving the planet, bad George Bush, Katrina, etc., the former Vice President, who was subjected to massive FReeper verbal abuse in 2000 with "GET OUT OF CHENEY'S HOUSE", actually walked out of the Moscone Center, looked at the display of hybrid vehicles, and got into a Cadillac Escalade.
There was some question as to whether Gore had control of the vehicle chosen or whether it might have been a Secret Service requirement for his protection at a crowded event. I made calls today and left messages at the field offices in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. I don't know which office returned the call, but I got the answer.
The agent told me that Al Gore is a private citizen. He would have had Secret Service protection for no longer than six months after his time as VP.
DemocRATS sometimes make it so easy to mock them. Gore is the featured speaking at a major Sierra Club event in a major green left wing city. He arrives at the event and leaves the event in one of the biggest vehicles on the planet. Just amazing.
For good measure, Arianna Huffington departed in a gas guzzling Chevy Suburban after her speech on Sunday.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
Al who?
The coming SUV wars
Is the tide of public opinion turning against these metal monstrosities?
By Arianna Huffington
Nov. 25, 2002 | Once again, America is a nation divided.
I'm not talking about the irreparable, brother-against-brother split between those who think the Bachelor should have proposed to Brooke instead of Helene. I'm talking about a contentious clash that is just beginning to rage. Call it the SUV war. As you read this, the opposing camps are staking out their turf.
On one side sales of the gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing, downright dangerous behemoths continue to soar. And apparently, the more fuel-inefficient the better: Dealers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand for the Hummer H2, GM's new $50,000 barely domesticated spinoff of the Gulf War darling, which struggles to cover 10 miles for every gallon of gas it burns. The symbolism of these impractical machines' military roots is too delicious to ignore. We go to war to protect our supply of cheap oil in vehicles that would be prohibitively expensive to operate without it.
There seems to be no shortage of Americans who think that consuming 25 percent of the world's oil just isn't enough. Maybe the next model, the H3, will need to be connected to an intravenous gas-pump hose all the time. And there would still be people eager to buy it.
These are the same folks who don't give a whit (this being a family newspaper) that at an OPEC meeting last month, the oily group's secretary general announced that one of the few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy world was the U.S.'s seemingly unslakable thirst for its product. How nice it must feel for SUV owners, knowing that their swaggering imprudence is helping the world's anti-democratic oil sheiks sleep just a little better at night. Call this camp the Bigger Is Better crowd. Their motto: "Burn, baby, burn ... 30 percent more carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons and 75 percent more nitrogen oxides than passenger cars." How about this for a bumper sticker: "Honk if you hate the ozone layer!"
Lining up on the other side of the SUV DMZ are a disparate collection of groups and individuals whose aim is to win the hearts and minds -- and change the driving habits -- of the American public.
These include the Evangelical Environmental Network, which is promoting greater fuel efficiency through a provocative TV ad campaign that asks: "What would Jesus drive?" Hint: I don't think the answer is a Hummer. (Turning water into oil wasn't really his thing.) This comes at the same time that Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars, a group I co-founded with film producer Lawrence Bender, environmental activist Laurie David, and movie and TV agent Ari Emanuel, is producing ads parodying the drugs-equal-terror ads the administration is running. In this case, we're linking driving SUVs to our national security. When Hollywood progressives and the "WWJD?" crowd independently hit on the same idea, you know that something is up.
Even as SUVs continue to roll off the assembly line and out of car dealers' showrooms at a record pace, there is a growing sense that the tide of public opinion is turning against these metal monstrosities. A tipping point in the push to wean ourselves from foreign oil has finally been reached. The SUV makers have won a few battles, but they may be about to lose the war.
The new mood is very similar to the consciousness-raising that followed the efforts of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Designated Driver campaign. Before that, the prevailing attitude was, "Hey, what's the big deal?" The campaign hammered home a very compelling answer to that question, and the public's perception of drinking and driving was changed forever. Getting loaded and getting behind the wheel went from being cool to being antisocial. With luck, getting behind the wheel of a loaded gas-guzzler is about to undergo the same transformation.
To see how the SUV fight is going, take a look at the media, usually an excellent weather vane when it comes to these kinds of societal shifts. In the last week alone there has been an explosion in the amount of positive coverage given to the anti-SUV movement, including segments on all the networks' nightly news shows. This is no small thing when you consider the megamillions in advertising dollars the auto industry represents.
And in Washington, after steadfastly opposing any raise in fuel efficiency standards, the Bush administration let it be known last week that it is considering a proposal to increase the standard for light trucks and SUVs by 1.5 miles per gallon by 2007.
While Team Bush hailed the proposed boost as a major victory in the battle for energy independence, Sen. John Kerry, who along with Sen. John McCain last spring proposed raising the SUV standard by 50 percent, called the 7 percent increase "window dressing." Others labeled it "political theater" and "almost an insult in its modesty." A thousand dittos.
It does seem woefully inadequate -- especially when you consider how many loopholes have already been driven through by light trucks and SUVs, which are currently allowed to average 7 miles per gallon less than regular cars. And the ultimate absurdity is that if an SUV is massive enough, it is entirely exempt from federal fuel economy standards. That's right, build one with a gross vehicle weight of over 8,500 pounds -- like the Ford Excursion or the new Hummer -- and the leviathan's lousy gas mileage doesn't even have to be reported to the government.
Chew on that one and see if it doesn't rev your engine: Automakers are rewarded for being particularly inefficient. There's the Bush Free Market for you.
Even the muckety-mucks in Detroit are starting to get the message. Ford, for instance, whose executives met last week with representatives from the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign, has pledged to boost the overall fuel efficiency of its SUVs by 25 percent over the next three years, and plans to introduce a hybrid gas-electric model that will get around 40 mpg.
Of course, much of the industry's "we care" message is little more than a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable and put a pretty P.R. bow on a very ugly reality. Their real message is: "We care about making money, and if doing that now means we have to make it seem like we care about the environment, then so be it." Take, for example, this "faux" socially conscious reminder offered in the new Hummer brochure: "With the power to cross any terrain comes the responsibility to protect that terrain and its potentially fragile ecosystems."
The war's not going the SUV makers' way, and they know it. So now they want to make it look like we're all on the same side. At the moment, they're trying to figure out just how far they have to go to quell the uprising. It's in all of our interests to let them know that a 1.5 mpg improvement is not enough. The consequences of our addiction to foreign oil are no longer an abstraction.
Real Algore - circa 2005 - looking the part of a Pillsbury doughboy 
Arianna Huffington heads The Detroit Project, a pressure group lobbying automakers to start producing "cars that will end our dependence on foreign oil". The Project's 2003 TV ads, which equated driving sport utility vehicles to funding terrorism, proved to be particularly controversial, with some stations refusing to run them. Huffington herself drives a gas-electric hybrid car, the Toyota Prius.
Huffington was an independent candidate to replace California governor Gray Davis in the 2003 recall election. She described her candidacy against front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger as "the hybrid versus the Hummer," making reference to Schwarzenegger's ownership of that gas-guzzling vehicle. She dropped out of the race on September 30, 2003, to try to get the recall defeated saying it was the only way to prevent Schwarzenegger from becoming Governor. "I'm pulling out, and I'm going to concentrate every ounce of time and energy over the next week working to defeat the recall because I realize now that's the only way to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger," she said. Huffington's name still appeared on the ballot and she placed 5th in a field of 135 candidates, capturing 0.6% of the votes.
Heard you on the Snow Show.
Saturday, August 9, 2003
Note to Robert Musil: The SUV Schwarzenegger drove in to file his candidacy papers was a regular GMC Yukon or Suburban, not a Hummer. So not only his he now driving domestic, he's moved several MPG closer to Arianna's Prius. ... Arianna was smart enough to recognize the vehicle and only attacked Arnold for driving an "S.U.V." ... Maria Shriver did not look terribly happy at Arianna glomming on to her husband's photo op, however. This behavior could delay any Arnold-Arianna Alliance for a few weeks, or decades. ... Also, as novelist Roger Simon notes, Arianna doesn't seem to have enough support in the polls at the moment to be worth courting. ... But the night is young and the election (according to the same Time/CNN poll) now looks very close. Expect lots of deals and machinations between now and October 7, especially among the GOPs, who are now suicidally splitting their vote between at least four candidates. ...
You can't make this stuff up.........it's like the libs are all trying to win a "Biggest Hypocrite" sweepstakes. LOL!
Al Gore - poser extraordinaire!
KAY SCHRENK: We knew we wanted a hybrid, and we found the Prius mid-dash display quite distracting. The Honda's mileage indicator and battery-charging indicator are down where the speedometer is, behind the steering wheel. You do watch, because that's the fun of it. Our car is blue.
GREG WETSTONE: I wanted to get a hybrid, provided it was big enough to cart my two girls around, and that it performed pretty well. I'd driven both the Insight and the Prius before, and liked the way they both drive. The Insight was too small for us. But I was excited about the Civic even before it came out. I like the way the 5-speed drives. It's very responsive, fun to drive. It's a bronze-gold color.
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| Long-time NRDC supporter Kay Schrenk drives a Honda Civic Hybrid |
For detailed consumer and technical information about hybrids, see the Union of Concerned Scientists' Hybridcenter.org website.
I was thinking algae
Everyone must understand that the liberal aristocrats can't be held to the same standards as scuzzy little nobodies like you and me. They are big important people with big important jobs to do. They need big important vehicles to carry them around. The masses can take public transit.
Too high of a life form.
Arianna Huffington at the Sierra Summit.
Photo by Tim Lesle.
by Eric Wesselman
Plenary Session
Arianna Huffington, Keynote Speaker
Closing the Summit before a packed hall, Arianna Huffington reminded us that we came here to find a new and better way and called on each Summit participant to "look into the mirror and see the leader in the mirror."
"The new and better way begins with recognizing that this is a true moment of leadership for all of us."
Referring to politicians, she said, "They are our followers and we are their leaders," calling indifference a weapon of mass destruction.
Echoing a common theme of the summit that we must organize around vision and solutions, not issues and problems, Huffington warned we should stop celebrating insignificant victories because then we settle for the "tyranny of low expectations."
"If there is one problem with the environmental movement, it is that we are willing to settle for crumbs. We can demand more because the American public is longing for true leadership and authenticity. Leadership won't come from politicians. It will come from us, the grassroots."
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Huffington called this a "teachable moment" that we should take full advantage of, and it is our responsibility to connect the dots between issues like global warming, over-reliance on fossil fuels, and national security.
"Hurricane Katrina's real name is global warming. It is tragic, but an opportunity to teach the American people. The Bush administration says this is not the time to point fingers, but this is precisely to time to point fingers. What we've learned from CSI and Law and Order is that you don't let the crime scene grow cold, and what happened in New Orleans is a crime scene."
Ultimately, Huffington said, it is up to us to keep hammering away on our visionary message of hope and solutions until something is done.
Between me, and my reflection in the mirror, that's just what I plan to do.
Anyone seen Al's old 'cycle and leather vest anyplace?
note to AL: eat a piece of fish for God's sake
Doug,
Heard you on the Mark Levin show last night telling him about this info.
Mark is my favorite host on WABC bar none!
Whenever I hear Arianna Huffington on the radio, I could swear I'm listening to Mrs. Douglas from Green Acres, aka Eva Gabor.
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