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Empire, CA Car Consumer Discussions

Re: [isellhondas]

by graphicguy on Mon Oct 06 13:47:55 PDT 2008

isell.....it could have even been 1996. It know it was whenever the forums first opened up here. I remember you, mack, maybe even rroyce....were the first people I came across. Yeah....after the changeover, all of our Edmunds benefits started all over again. j....there have been plenty of times where I said "enough is enough" and took my ball and stayed away. As I'm sure you (and isell) can attest to, we've seen a lot of knuckleheads come and go. There have been the people who know everything. There have been some people where the car dealerships are the "evil empire". There have been other people who viewed both buyers and sellers as the people who needed to be "one upped". There have been salespeople who thought they knew everything. And, there have been buyers who thought the same. In both instances, they were wrong. I've even made my fair share of faux pas. Fact is, everytime I log in to read messages, I learn something new. Some of it I wanted to learn. Some of it I could have done without. Always...always a surprise when I log in, which is why I keep coming back.

Re: Spectra5 is really Cerato [herotakesafall]

by spectraman on Tue Jul 18 17:35:57 PDT 2006

My point is that the number of next-gen Spectras sold since 2004.5 is closer to 130-170k. And as regarding the number of posts in *this* forum, I'm also including the numerous other KIA-centric forums I follow. I still contend that the number of paint issues I've seen online are low. That said, I'm not denying your empirical/observational data regarding bad 2005 paint. Seeing is believing to be sure. Can you snap some digital pics and post them somewhere online on a free hosting space and then post the URL's here? I think that seeing the actual flaws would be very helpful for other KIA owners to compare to as well as giving KIA an eyeful as to a potential problem. -SM

Re: Terrible ads [fintail]

by gagrice on Sat Oct 04 12:02:23 PDT 2008

I think we are putting a lot of ideologues into cult status. You would like to turn the tide that started with our defeat of the British Empire in the late 1700s. We have been conquering and coercing expansionism from the time Columbus found the new world. We have made a lot of mistakes. Trying to pin it all on the Israel connection or the neocons is a stretch. Our current money crisis is all our own making with little outside help. I would probably agree that there is a One World Order that is hard to pin down. There are people from every persuasion that think that is a good idea. I don't share their view. I doubt I will have a say in it. I think only few credible voices have shared some of your views of Israel. Possibly Buchanan and Buckley. When you look at people like Richard Perle that have been in the US Government for decades under both Democrats and Republicans. Perle was one of the few voices fighting for human rights in the Soviet Union. Because he is a Jew I would expect him to have some allegiance to Israels fragile existence. And yes we give billions to Israel. We give billions to Egypt and dozens of other countries. Obama wants to give $85 billion more to other countries. We are generous with the tax payers dollars. We are never going to become isolationists. We may as well buy a few good allies. Who would you suggest as a solid ally? I have tried to see what you see in Barack Obama. How you can think he is qualified to run this country. He has done NOTHING in his short career to prepare him to manage this country. I assume you are talking about the 48% of a couple thousand prospective voters that are for Obama. The same people that were 49% for McCain last week. I think he appeals to intellectuals because of his background. It is hard to tell if he is really bright or not. He mumbles a lot when he does not have a script in front of him. I just do not see the attraction. I could have voted easily for Collin Powell. He may not be as bright. He just shows more common sense to me. That would be the top priority in a President in my opinion. If Obama had common sense he would not have surrounded himself with some of the undesirable people he has.

David Sirota Saying 'No Deal' to this New Deal

by dallasdude1 on Fri Oct 03 16:23:25 PDT 2008

The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair - stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror. As a financial crisis became a political panic, capitalism murdered democracy (ironically, while pursuing a vaguely socialist bailout). Only, unlike a typical horror story, the dead body wasn't hidden, it was dumped in the nation's public square. The fiasco started, like most, with unreasonable demands. Under threat of financial meltdown, capitalism's corporate lobbyists asked our democracy to forsake its usual deliberations and hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money in less than a week. Many were surprised when democracy responded with such valiant defiance. As television screens split between the floors of the stock exchange and the House of Representatives, lawmakers initially voted with their constituents and against the bailout. That's when this husband-and-wife argument escalated into a grisly crime of passion. CNN's Ali Velshi frothed that "the banks and the companies don't care about the intricacies" of democratic deliberations. A CEO angrily told CNN that "the money is being held hostage to the political process" - as if government resources are rightfully Wall Street's. And as the Dow tanked, the Chamber of Commerce threatened retribution against recalcitrant lawmakers. The final deathblow came from TINA, shorthand for "There Is No Alternative" - the motto that Margaret Thatcher used to peddle her corporatism, and that Washington and Wall Street used to promote theirs. Whether it was a Barclays Capital executive telling reporters "there is no choice" or Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., insisting that "this needs to be done and it needs to be done right away," responsibly democratic prescriptions were pulverized by capitalism's deranged mantra of inevitability and urgency. To even mention, as economist Dean Baker did, that the taxpayer giveaway could exacerbate the crisis was to risk flogging by columnists like Tom Friedman. The sycophantic flat-earther vilified bailout opponents (i.e., most Americans) as mentally incapacitated deadbeats who "can't balance their own checkbooks." By the time the fight hit Congress' upper chamber, senatorial morticians were embalming democracy's corpse. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid permitted consideration of just one alternative, and he rigged parliamentary procedure to guarantee its defeat. Yet, if capitalism took democracy's life through a perverse legislative process, then it robbed its grave with the bailout bill's substance. American democracy is defined by vesting government power in systems and rules, not in individuals and whims. We have been, as John Adams wrote, "an empire of laws, and not of men" - until now. Instead of responding to this meltdown by updating regulatory institutions or investing in job-creating infrastructure, the bailout proposes giving one unelected appointee - the Treasury secretary - complete authority to dole out $700 billion to bank executives, with little oversight. And here's the scary part: That lurch toward dictatorship was motivated not just by crony corruption, but also by a deeper ideological shift. We now face market forces uninhibited by democratic governance - Chinese dictators and Saudi princes can move trillions of dollars without so much as a press release. This bailout, marketed as a speed enhancer, is an attempt to discard democracy's checks and balances and pantomime that kind of autocracy. While our political culture still required a public sales job (thus, the fearmongering), the bill's czarism aims to permanently euthanize democracy in the name of improving our capitalism's global agility. In that sense, this week's spousal killing wasn't random. It was the beginning of a systematic assault on our Constitution and a radical departure from Franklin Roosevelt's original covenant - a dangerous "new deal" we must say "no deal" to.

Re: statesmanship or chicken? [rockylee]

by fintail on Sat Sep 27 12:26:57 PDT 2008

I won't get into all of that...my heritage isn't all German, in fact the greatest part of it is Dutch, then German, with a little French and English built in as there was a lot of migration between nations even eons ago. Both sides of my family have had some interest in genealogy, and the lines have been traced back around 400 years on both sides. Germany is the heart of Europe, I will say that much. I won't defend the Nazis, but if one wishes to be realistic, they were just an empire like any other, and in expansion committed crimes. It's history, it has happened before and it will happen again. Those who use the 'Nazi' slur today are either not very educated or wish to distract from the crimes of their own nation. IMO, the USSR was a winner in 1945, certainly moreso than England, maybe moreso than the US if one looks at the expansion of communism after that date. Russia has a lot of Soviet-style national pride still alive and was never held accountable for its own 20th century atrocities. They certainly didn't "lose" the cold war, they just reorganized. The cold war is alive and well in 2008. Those Germans being given preferential treatment (as countless civilians and others died of starvation and mistreatment) after the war shows why the US wanted in - technology. And regarding Israel, I can ask simply this - why doesn't anyone get a "homeland" bankrolled by someone else?

Re: statesmanship or chicken? [bristol2]

by fintail on Fri Sep 26 20:13:19 PDT 2008

So born to an occupier, I was right all along...I'm used to it :P I prefer the three pointed star to the propellor too ;) I haven't defended Germany in any way, Germany committed a nauseating amount of crimes. However, IMO these debts have long been repaid, and are in reality no different than the actions of any empire, whether it be Soviet, British, or even American. The Nazi bastards were simply another empire, nothing more. It's only the others who do little to nothing to take accountability for their past. All of this comes from my distaste for a British-born opinion writer who likened Obama's camp to Nazis, where the neocons seem closer to that ideal. Brits seem to love to use the "Nazi" slur. "since I have no idea of what you mean by a 'questionable policy" One that will within a short amount of time make the indigenous people a small minority in what was their homeland, and destroy the native culture at the same time - unless the policies are changed. Yes, I have a problem with lies and victor's justice. I also don't like self-righteousness and false moral high grounds - the currency of the British. The future of England will make Berlin or Dresden in 1945 look like Disneyland...