By the way, I’m having some real problems with my server and setting up Samba so that it works properly.  If anyone’s good enough to give some advice, or better yet, a tech hand (I live in the western suburbs of Chicago), I could really use it.

Now, back to work.

This works for either me or Meredith.  There’s some question as to whether Susan has been in Mexico; if she was, it was to take two steps over the border in Tijuana or something.

This is Mere’s states.  California from when we brought her home, Massachusetts from a trip to the Boston Worldcon, and the rest are family visits of one sort or another.  Consider that she has a sister in Alabama and Susan has major family in South Dakota, plus side trips, and you can dig this.

This is me.  Aside of California, all the rest were covered with my family before I was 20, and mostly when I was small.  California got hit at the San Francisco Worldcon in the mid 1990s, and three more times in mid-2000.  Alaska got picked up in 1971.

And this is Meredith’s ‘places she wants to go’ list.

Ford CEO Mulally’s corporate jet is a perk included for both he and his wife as part of his employment contract along with a $28 million salary last year. Mulally actually lives in Seattle, not Detroit. The company jet takes him home and back on weekends.

Wagoner’s private jet trip to Washington cost his ailing company an estimated $20,000 roundtrip. In comparison, seats on Northwest Airlines flight 2364 from Detroit to Washington were going online for $288 coach and $837 first class.

AIG, despite the $150 billion bailout, still operates a fleet of corporate jets. The company says it has put two out of its seven jets up for sale and is reviewing the use of others. Though there are no such plans by GM or Ford.

The recount for the Minnesota Senate seat starts today, with the final before the recount starts - 200-odd vote difference of nearly 3 million votes.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Susan’s knee is better, but she’s still not anything close to 100%.  Mere apparently ran herself ragged at the con, and she was really tired the rest of Sunday and all of today and tonight.

Susan says that my wound is looking a whole lot better / more closed up, and that sounds awful damn good to me.

When I was at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, we partnered with G.M., Ford and Chrysler to speed the technological development of hybrid gasoline-electric cars, given that increased fuel efficiency and advanced hybrids vehicles were (and remain) clearly the best hope for cutting vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and ending our oil addiction. This partnership was an informal deal between the Clinton administration and the car companies. We did not pursue fuel economy standards and the car companies promised to develop a triple-efficiency car (80 miles per gallon) by 2004.

In one of the major blunders in automotive history, G.M. and Ford and Chyrsler walked away from hybrids as soon as they could when the Bush administration came in — and after taxpayers had spent over $1 billion on the program. Ironically, the main result of our government-industry partnership (which had excluded foreign automakers) was to motivate the Japanese car companies to develop and introduce their own hybrids.

Worse, in the past quarter-century, G.M. has spent millions of dollars lobbying to stop Congress from increasing fuel economy standards — standards that might have forced them to build the kind of cars people actually want when oil prices are high. And despite the recent temporary drop in oil prices, there’s little doubt we will be above $4 gasoline in a few years, headed for $6 and higher within the decade.

Also, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change requires cutting automobile oil consumption by a factor of five over the next three decades. Yet Detroit has been waging a four-year legal battle against efforts by California and other states to regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases.

In other words, Detroit has not only been suicidally lobbying against its own inescapable future, but it has been lobbying against the future of all Americans who want to end our oil addiction, and against the future of all humans who want to preserve the health and well-being of our planet for future generations.

Read it all, along with Maha’s comments on it:

On the other side of the fence are conservatives and “free market” economists who would rather let the Big Three go under than allow any government interference with the Free Market. These are the same people who for years have fought CAFE standards and national health care. In other words, they helped create the problem. Enough said.

There are lots of opinions out there about what should be done. I personally would insist that anyone who has served on the boards of directors or as a CEO for more than a year should be told to go away. No golden parachutes, no bonuses. They can keep the stuff they’ve got, which I’m sure is plenty to tide them over. If they think they have more to offer the auto industry they can damn well get in line and apply for whatever’s available. At the very least, they should have no authority whatsoever on how the money the government gives them is used.