i told somebody a couple weeks ago, there are two things that now look stupid as dirt: unbacked bets against bankruptcy and state-level zero-tolerance budget balancing requirements. both practices were taken up on the assumption that Nothing Could Ever Go Wrong. now they are time bombs.

Did anybody notice how Diamler-Benz bought out Chrysler so they could ruin the Dodge Diesel? At 165 to 185 horsepower, that engine was medium duty, meaning it would go about 400,000 miles. Dr. Z offered it in a choice of horsepowers, knowing that the average consumer is stupid enough to think that more horsepower means heavier duty. The end result is that Dodge makes that engine put out 325 horsepower, making it LIGHT duty, meaning that it will be worn out in only 100,000 miles. It won’t do you any good to try to get less horsepower out of it by staying off the gas pedal. When the peak horsepower goes up, so does the idle horsepower. Now that the Dodge diesel is ruined, Diamler-Benz sold Chrysler. There is a Mack truck near here with 1.7 Million miles on without an overhaul. Mack doesn’t make them that way any more because the drivers wanted more “efficiency.” There is no possible way to make a heavy duty engine out of a medium duty engine. If you want a car that will go a million miles, buy an SAE Class 8 truck, like the tractor part of an 18 wheeler. To get insurance, you will have to put a camper on it so you can register it as a motorhome. There is no engineering reason why cars can’t go a million miles between overhauls. It is purely that management won’t allow it. It shouldn’t cost more than 10% to 15% to make cars last 400,000 miles instead of 100,000 miles. All you have to do is let the engineers follow the SEA Class 6 reliability standards. Cars are SEA Class 1 dependable and pickup “trucks” are SAE Class 1b dependable. There is 4 times too much capacity to build cars and pickups.

I read something in the last couple of days (can’t remember where) about Cerberus being legally prevented from putting more money into Chrysler, or even loaning them money.

As I recall it had to do with investment contracts that they had with retirement funds, etc. who were invested in Cerberus.

This is something that I hope the next Congress will revisit.

One easy thing they could do is to take back the ability to declare war. The Constitution gives Congress that power. They could reclaim it.

Something that I hope they discuss is a Constitutional limit to the president’s pardoning powers. A president should not be able to use the power of pardons to allow himself or members of hie administration to disregard laws.

As it is now written in the Constitution it appears that a president could murder his wife and grant himself a pardon. At least, he could hire someone to kill his wife and then pardon the hit man.

Then there are the “signing statements”. Where do they occur in the Constitution or Amendments? If they aren’t supported by the Constitution it would take only a super majority to ram through a law that did away with them. And with Obama in office it might take only a simple majority.