Back to Basics

When you read this it might be easy to forget that in the past few years Al Gore has gotten much of what he asked for. Gore endorsed Barack Obama for President. He won. Gore rallied Democrats in 2008 to take over full control of Congress and the White House, which they did. Gore urged Congress to pass the stimulus because it would be an important step in addressing climate change. Check. Gore spoke out on the importance of passing the health care reform law. It passed. The list goes on.

On the surface you wouldn’t think the mega millionaire has much to complain about, but as long as there’s money in the world that isn’t yet under the purview of Goracle Inc., he will have issues:

In a wide-ranging talk about the Internet and government, Al Gore urged the techie crowd at South By Southwest to use digital tools to improve government.

The former vice president sat for a conversation with Napster co-founder and Web entrepreneur Sean Parker on Monday at SXSW in a flashy tete-a-tete that drew an audience of thousands at the Austin Convention Center and more viewers via a live stream.

“Our democracy has been hacked,” said Gore, framing Washington gridlock and the effects of special interest money in digital terms.

To fix what he called a no-longer functional U.S. government, Gore urged the audience to begin a new “Occupy Democracy” movement. He pushed for the creation and implementation of digital tools and social media to “change the democratic conversation.”

Gore talked of a “Wiki-democracy” of “digital flash mobs calling out the truth” and “a government square that holds people accountable.”

I assume that when he claims the democracy has been “hacked,” Al’s referring to the 2010 election, which brought remaining Democrat plans (such as Cap & Trade) to an unscheduled stop like a Fisker Karma on a test track. Those democratic elections can be a real threat to democracy if they don’t go your way.

Finally:

“In the print era, when this country was founded, reason and truth and facts played a bigger role,” Gore said. Now, television and money have overtaken the American political system and lowered the level of discourse, both he and Parker said in an interview that was added to the schedule of the Austin-based interactive conference over the weekend.

So says the co-founder of a cable television network stocked with former MSNBC hosts.

The Fisker Karma is an over $100,000 “green” car that Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio and Colin Powell love to which the Obama Energy Department gave a $529 million loan only to have the company move their operation overseas and lay off US workers. I know… it all sounds too good to be true. But wait, it gets better.

The car more than makes up for all that downside in performance. Or maybe not.

From Consumer Reports:

Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.

We have owned our car for just a few days; it has less than 200 miles on its odometer. While doing speedometer calibration runs on our test track (a procedure we do for every test car before putting it in service by driving the car at a constant 65 mph between two measured points), the dashboard flashed a message and sounded a “bing“ showing a major fault. Our technician got the car off the track and put it into Park to go through the owner’s manual to interpret the warning. At that point, the transmission went into Neutral and wouldn’t engage any gear through its electronic shifter except Park and Neutral.

We let the car sit for about an hour and restarted it. We could now engage Drive and the same error message disappeared. After moving it only a few feet the error message reappeared and when we tried to engage Reverse the transmission went straight to Park and again no motion gear could be engaged. After calling the dealer, which is about 100 miles away, they promptly sent a flatbed tow truck to haul away the disabled Fisker.

We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.

The government’s reaction will be “clearly we didn’t throw enough taxpayer money at the project.”

Well done, Gorebots. These fools would be hilarious if they weren’t dragging down the US economy with them.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivhp-i6i3vE