Transportation

"Sorry, guys.”

“We apologize."

"Sorry.” By now we're sorry we ever heard the word. From Tiger to Toyota to even D.C. City Councilman, former Mayor and nonstop delinquent Marion Barry, they're all "sorry."

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Either television's star is rising again or this is the final nova, exploding into the Internet black hole. It doesn't matter. Forget primetime. Stay glued to your sets for the Daytime Olympics. Or at least set your DVR.

The television spectacular began last Friday, as we cringed while watching that golf automaton mechanically recite the contrite words and phrases his advisers had programmed into him. It was eerily amazing to see how human he almost seemed to be.

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Let's be blunt. One hundred and seventy-three Toyota dealers in the United States are plainly, simply un-American. They are the members of an association that covers five Southeastern states, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina, that have decided to pull their advertising from ABC affiliates in their coverage area. Why? Because ABC news has been giving what they've determined to be "excessive stories on the Toyota issues.” As I said, un-American.

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Thirteen years ago, living in Durham, N.C., when my wife was starting grad school, we finally ditched the family car, a great light-green Buick station wagon. It had been the last “last year’s model” in Alexandria, Va., where we bought it cheap after our first son was born and we needed something a little bigger than the Subaru. It gave flawless service for a dozen years and over 200,000 miles and had hauled sheep, chickens and a total, at one point, of 43 animals, including multiples of dogs and cats and the four young’uns.

There was a program then to give or sell old cars cheap to the poor on government support. And possession of an old car like that was supposed to be considered tangible evidence that you qualified for support. We sold it to someone in the neighborhood and I saw it driving by long after, a triumph of American vision and innovation that just wouldn’t die. Read more...

Congress has been obsessed with cars, car sales and car dealerships all week — and today is certainly no different.

The plight of the incredible and immediate shrinking number of car dealerships nationwide gets more attention today as Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) holds another Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing with the usual suspects of Fritz Henderson, CEO of General Motors, James Press, president of Chrysler, and John McEleney, chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association. Read more...

Tuesday's announcement on fuel standards came just one week and one day after President Obama made another key announcement on healthcare. At both announcements, Obama was heralding an unprecedented moment of cooperation he organized and executed, in which formerly uncooperative industries had been dragged to the negotiating table.

It is hard to deny that this is change. Seriously. Read more...

President Obama did his most chilling Donald Trump impression over the weekend.

He told Rick Wagoner of General Motors those two famous words (counting the contraction as one word). He told him, “You’re fired.”

But this isn’t another version of “The Apprentice.”

This is real life. Notwithstanding the efficacy of firing Wagoner (it may be the right thing to do), there is something wrong about the president telling a private company that it had to fire its CEO. Read more...

Just getting the word out about one use of the Web for better service. The TSA blog from the Transportation Security Administration has been groundbreaking in providing two-way communications that have resulted in real improvements. It's used to gauge public opinion, act on public feedback and change or update policy and operations based on that feedback. Complaints about screening procedures have resulted in actual changes in days, as opposed to months. Read more...

Tom Friedman has some good ideas. He wants us to wake up, reboot, get going. He’s been at it for months, years, now. We need his energy, his maturity and his perspective.

In a column this week he talks about riding a state-of-the-art fast train across China, then arriving home to the wasteland of Penn Station in New York and heading south on the broken trail to D.C.

We need fast trains and new cars. But to get these new things, we need a fresh start. And instead of looking north to south, from New York to D.C., we might have better luck looking east to west; traveling, like Frasier, from Boston to Seattle. We could make new friends across the way in Canada. Read more...

Today, the president basically said that GM wasn’t going to go bankrupt on his watch.

Congressional Republicans, predictably, are livid. But I don’t really know what choice the president had.

Republicans lost the last election. They lost especially in the Upper Midwest, Northeast, and in the West. The remaining Southern senators and representatives seem intent on making this a fight between labor and Republicans, and dragging GM down as a point of personal privilege. Read more...