Neff Zone Column -- January 12, 2008

Print Edition: January 12, 2008

HILLARY, WILLARD, AND SOME GADGETS

Outta the Zone… The big news this week came out of the New Hampshire primary. Some of my Republican friends seem to be in a state of confusion, as someone named McRomHuckiani seems to be their leading candidate for president. On the other hand the NH primary produced some great news for Republicans. Hillary Clinton was the winner among Democrats. You see, there is only one person in America who can reunite the Republican party and assure a Republican victory in 2008. Her name is Hillary Clinton.

*This week the campaigns are yammering at Michigan voters. I’m already tired of Willard Romney’s ad in which he says ‘the way to strengthen American families is to make sure people get married before they have children.’ OK, fine. Now what? If elected president is he going to pass a law mandating marriage before children or enact penalties for those who have children before marriage? Seriously, no president is going to devote even a millisecond to this. It’s meaningless conspicuous piety. Willard, let the pastors do their jobs. You want to strengthen families? Well, since financial difficulties are a main cause of divorce, how about telling your rich industrialist buddies to quit sending our jobs to China.

*Outside the political realm, the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics made headlines. This is where they show us all the nifty technology that is in our future. By now I’m sure you’ve read about the driverless car that General Motors is developing. Our Flint correspondent, Big Rob, who spent 30 years working for GM, asks this question. If your driverless car is pulled over by the police and they find you passed out in the back seat, can they ticket you for drunk driving? After all, you were not driving the car. Would GM get the ticket?

Sort of along the same lines, there’s an interesting case going on right now in Arkansas. It seems that Sharp County does not allow the sale of liquor, so residents have to travel to places outside the county to buy their booze. Two women have gathered 2,000 signatures in an attempt to put alcohol sales on the ballot. Their argument is that forcing people to drive elsewhere to buy alcohol causes more gasoline to be used and therefore contributes to pollution. Simply put, allowing people to get snockered locally is the environmentally responsible thing to do. That’s an interesting take on the green movement to say the least.

*Also at the Consumer Electronics Show are a couple of gadgets that, in my opinion, prove that sometimes more is less.

Whirlpool has a new refrigerator that has docking stations for your iPod and laptop computer. The frige costs $2,000 and you’ll have to shell out another $700 for the laptop that fits into the dock. All this, they say, so you can keep track of your shopping lists. Hmmmm, unless you’re going to undock the laptop and take it to the store with you won’t you have to print out your list? At our house we already have technology that generates shopping lists – we call it paper and pencil.

There are also two companies showing off pet tracking devices, GPS units so you know where in your yard Fido is romping. The cost is $200 for the unit and $10 per month for the service. When I was a kid our family had a dog and we had technology to keep track of him – we called it a rope and a window.

*Four small items in the news may have slipped past your radar. The first one is from Harvard University. From now on students from families earning as much as $180,000 will get financial aid for 10% of their family’s income. This means while you try to scrape together your kid’s tuition, some Harvardite whose parents make $180,000 will automatically get $18,000 in aid. It’s true, the rich are different.

The U.S. dollar continues to plunge all over the world. The latest slap in the face comes from India where tourists are no longer allowed to spend American currency at the Taj Mahal and other Indian tourist sites. Gee, isn’t it nice that they’ll accept our outsourced jobs but not our money.

Near India, in Afghanistan, opium production registered another all-time record. After a record haul in 2006 they actually increased the poppy harvest in 2007 by 34% and now produce 93% of the world’s opium. Virtually all of the money generated from this production goes to fund terrorist activities. Maybe that’s why things have quieted down in Iraq; all these guys are back home getting rich on opium sales.

Speaking of Iraq, whose country we are supposedly saving and whose people are thusly supposed to be our trusted allies, I have a question. If we like the Iraqis so much, why won’t we let any of them into our country? While literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have applied for entry into the U.S., we only let in around 889 per month (only 245 last month). Basically, the message is ‘we like you but we don’t want to live next to you.’ Maybe our government is afraid the Iraqis will take jobs no one else wants, thereby taking employment opportunities away from the thousands of illegal aliens who stream across the Mexican border each day.

*Finally, you remember that website I told you about over the holidays – elfyourself.com? You could go online and place the faces of yourself and your friends onto dancing elves and then e-mail your creation to others. The sponsors of the site report that in just eight weeks 123 million elves were created, more than the populations of Canada, France, Sweden and New York City combined. People spent a combined 2600 years making their dancing elves, enough time to date back to the 6^th century B.C. The amazing part is that no one wasted any time at their work place doing this – wink, wink – so I’m sure no potentially productive was time was lost.

Jim Neff is a local columnist. Comments to neffzone@gmail.com. Read Neff Zone columns online at www.neffzone.com/cadillacnews.