AARP has been having some troubles with their membership over their apparent stance on the Obamacare proposal. I say “apparent” because even though AARP’s brass is saying they aren’t endorsing any specific plan at the moment, their actions and words are indicating they are, in fact, supporting Obama’s initiative. The AARP rank-and-file aren’t pleased and that situation came to a head back on August 4th when an AARP meeting turned out badly for AARP. When they offered a “town hall” meeting with their membership to talk about the health care debate, the AARP staff didn’t take too kindly to getting questioned by the members in the room. When the seniors who showed up wouldn’t sit down and shut up, the staff decided to just end the meeting and pack up the microphone.
As a result of their stance and, from the sounds of it, the kind of attitude AARP had on display at the August 4th meeting, about 60,000 members have canceled their membership. I’m not surprised by that, but the story reporting on this has a truly remarkable comment right at the end:
>p?Meantime, the AARP’s image suffered with this town meeting already seen by hundreds of thousands on YouTube.
Faced with skeptical questions from the audience, the AARP representative ends the meeting abruptly. When the discussion continues, she pulls the plug on the microphone.
AARP says for a group with 40 million members that adds hundreds of thousands each month, losing 60 thousand is just a drop in the bucket. But to the much smaller American Seniors Association it’s a flood.
Emphasis mine. Did they really say that? I mean, it might be true that AARP’s got millions of members and that 60,000 is a small percentage of that but it’s a quick way to turn that trickle of cancellations into a hemorrhaging of lost membership to trivialize those people who canceled their membership accounts. Assuming they actually said that as reported, that’s yet more evidence that AARP’s not the friend to seniors that they claim to be.
August 18th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Medicine, Politics |
no comments
I’ve mentioned the Chevy Volt a few times here and I haven’t changed my mind about it: it’s a great idea. The notion of a completely electric car that carries a generator to charge its own systems is good one, neatly removing the big concern about electric cars in general, namely getting stranded with a dead battery. Aside from the fact that they really homogenized the styling when they designed the final production model (the concept look was way better in my opinion) I think this could have been a serious step toward getting a car on the road that might break the internal-combustion engine grip on automotive travel.
That is, I thought so until I heard on the radio that they’re planning on a $40,000 price tag at launch.
So much for my dream of owning one. The equivalent mpg is supposed to be a staggeringly high 230 miles-per-(equivalent) gallon but does that even come close to justifying such an extravagance? I was going to do that math but Eric Peters over at The American Spectator beat me to it:
But, $40,000? That is almost exactly what you’d pay for a new BMW 335i ($40,300) and not too far off the asking price of a new Mercedes-Benz E-Class ($48,050). These are fine cars, but not exactly marketed to people who are concerned about their pocketbooks.
Forty Thousand Dollars. That is a lot of coin. Even with a government subsidy (on top of the subsidy GM has built into the car’s price) expected to be as much as $7,500 (thank you, fellow taxpayer), the potential Volt buyer is looking at a bottom line price that is right there in the entry-luxury range — and roughly three times the cost of a new econobox.
Does it compute? Well, let’s see… .
For the sake of discussion, we’ll take GM’s 230 mpg claim at face value. This figure is about four times the published mileage of the 2010 Toyota Prius (50 mpg, average). But the Prius costs just over half as much ($22k). So, the Volt buyer would have to “work off” the approximate $18,000 difference ($12,000 or so, if you subtract the proposed $7,500 government subsidy).
Twelve grand buys one helluva lot of gas — even at $3 per gallon. Four thousand gallons, to be precise. If whatever you are driving now gets an average of 25 mpg (half what the Prius gets) that 4,000 gallons would keep you going for 160,000 miles.
Who here knows anyone with a GM product that they were still able to drive at 160,000 miles? I don’t – they usually peter out a long time before that. And, as Eric notes, there are cars with nearly as impressive mpg ratings as the Prius for considerably less money which makes the Volt even less competitive. I mean, I’m trying to be a cheerleader for this kind of thing but – c’mon, GM, ya gotta work with me!
At that price I can’t see the Volt being anything other than the kind of “oh-I’m-soooo-much-greener-than-you” status symbol the Prius was when it first rolled out. And though the Prius was priced a little high for its size and utility, it’s at least in the ballpark. $40K for a car is more than we paid for our minivan which offers far more power and carrying capacity than the Volt. I don’t see this giving GM much traction unless they find a way to lower the price tag.
August 18th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Environment, Technology |
3 comments
Journalist Robert Novak has died of brain cancer at the age of 78.
Columnist Robert Novak, one of Washington’s most well-known political commentators, has died after a battle with brain cancer.
He was 78.
Novak died early Tuesday morning at his home in Washington. He had been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades as well as a prominent television commentator.
In recent years, he was perhaps best-known for being the first to publish the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. He came under criticism from many for that column, which Novak said began “a long and difficult episode” in his career.
Novak retired back in August to put his energy into his treatment. He called the situation “dire” when he announce the retirement and I guess he was right. My sympathies to his family and friends for their loss.
Novak is best known to contemporary audiences – meaning those who started paying attention to the news in the last 5 years or so – for his involvement in the Plame issue. It’s been almost 3 years since the truth became known about how Novak found out about Valerie Plame and how wrong the Left was in accusing people for being Novak’s source. As I mentioned at the time, an apology is certainly owed for those wrongly accused. It would have been nice to have had that happened while Novak was still alive.
August 18th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Human Interest, Politics, The Media |
no comments
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