US transport chief rides 300-mph Japanese maglev

[Nitro Express]

I grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho and live in Jackson Hole now. Both are ski resort towns. I lived in upstate New York in the snow belt but I never saw snow like the blizzard of 78 in Detroit. Our hotel room was way up the center tower in the Renaissance Center and I would lean against the window and look down. With all the snow and darkness at night and the lights from the building it looked like you were looking down into the Death Star on star wars. Sometimes it would clear up and you could see Windsor across the river but it was really coming down hard for days.

[kwame k]

Remember that blizzard well......we lived in Northern Michigan an hour and a half from the Mackinaw Bridge, on the Lake Huron side.....the morning after the blizzard we had to jump out the second story window to dig out the front door.....our plow truck was buried, too. We had snow banks on the side of the road way over 6 feet tall....kinda fun on the snowmobiles and my brother jumped a two lane road with his......he was the coolest among our friends!

[Nitro Express]

I can still smell the funky grease smell of that factory thinking about it.

[Nitro Express]

I remember going to the Pontiac factory when I was really little and I can remember the engines and transmissions being mated with the chassis of the car. We actually got to see them put the engine in the station wagon my dad bought. That thing was a beast too. He used to pull a HUGE trailer with the thing. LOL!

[Nitro Express]

Given a level playing field....I'd put Michigan up against anyone!

I would love to see Michigan come back. My dad would always drive to Detroit to pick up a new car. He took me out of school for a week to fly to Detroit to pick up an new Cadillac and we got snowed in the Renassance Center in the blizzard of 78. I have never seen so much snow in a city ever. The hotel was running out of food and all the employees were snowed in with us. The last two days we ate nothing but shrimp cocktail. It was a fun place to run around as a kid though and hey it had an indoor swimming pool.

[Nitro Express]

I would lean towards buying a Ford since they didn't take any bailout money. I have not been impressed with too many GM products. My sister bought an Acaidia and I drove it. Poor visiability and it shifts shitty. Whoever designed the interior and how the seat move and fold over did an excellent job though. That is the best aspect of the car.

[kwame k]

Given a level playing field....I'd put Michigan up against anyone!

[Nitro Express]

Fuck Granholm........never been a fan..........she had a chance a few years back to just sign a pledge that Michigan would get something like 10% of it's energy by renewable sources by 2015 or something like that......refused to sign it and Michigan lost millions of Federal dollars because of it.

Thank God that twit is out of office this year!

I remember watching a speech Obama gave here in '08.......saying that Detroit should be the world leader in manufacturing Green Technologies, that we had the skilled labor, factories and resources already in place! The only thing Michigan is leading the world in right now is Rust and Decay

Fuck, it's worse here now than when I left for Colorado and I only left Jan of '09!

I helped Michigan by buying a new Kalamazoo belt sander with a MADE IN USA Dayton motor. It's top quality and will last generations.

[Va Beach VH Fan]

I rode the Bullet Train from Tokyo to Fukuoka in '85 or so, that thing was fuckin' sweet.... I can only imagine what this thing is like....

[kwame k]

The small business tax here is killing all these offshoots of the auto industry but the reality is the auto industry is kicking ass. Ford posted a quarterly earning of a billion dollars, GM's paid off it's loans with interest, Chrysler is coming out with the new Phoenix engine, that according to my buddy who's building it, will be the engine of the future and what will give Chrysler a competitive advantage.....

I still think it was all smoke and mirrors, to an extent with the auto industry.......here's the way I see it now in hindsight. The auto companies had signed shitty UAW contracts for years and were too bloated with factories, dealerships and employees. If they didn't use the panic, the sky is falling and tried to get the UAW to take a pay/benefit cut, fucked their retirees, closed factories, laid-off a ton of workers, closed a shit load of dealerships and their only excuse was they needed to trim the fat to be more profitable in a global market.......every motherfucker and their brother would of thrown a hissy fit and probably trashed and vandalized anything with a Big 3 logo on it.

The smart play was to say if they didn't get the bailout they would go bankrupt.......have the government tell them that they had better streamline their companies and trim all the fat or else the government would do it for them. Make a few execs squirm on Capitol Hill, give some TV time to a few Senators up for reelection, looking like they really give a flying fuck about the Big Bad Auto Execs and at the end of the day do exactly what happened but without any repercussions from Joe six-pack!

[FORD]

Yeah, she's the typical DLC'er. All for the corporations... nothing for the working class. And in Michigan's case, even the corporations aren't doing so well.

I'm not a fan of her either, but I thought she might take advantage of this obvious opportunity to make up for some of her failures.

[kwame k]

Fuck Granholm........never been a fan..........she had a chance a few years back to just sign a pledge that Michigan would get something like 10% of it's energy by renewable sources by 2015 or something like that......refused to sign it and Michigan lost millions of Federal dollars because of it.

Thank God that twit is out of office this year!

I remember watching a speech Obama gave here in '08.......saying that Detroit should be the world leader in manufacturing Green Technologies, that we had the skilled labor, factories and resources already in place! The only thing Michigan is leading the world in right now is Rust and Decay

Fuck, it's worse here now than when I left for Colorado and I only left Jan of '09!

[FORD]

I know where there are some abandoned factories we could get real cheap

Yeah, this could resurrect Detroit if they went about it the right way. Maybe that's why Michael Moore had the article on his website?

LaHood should get Granholm on the line and make this happen.

[chefcraig]

The idea of a high speed bullet train operated by Americans seems like a really bad idea. As a people, we can't even get into a movie theater without being directed by a series of ropes. The whole thing reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons when Springfield got a monorail and figured things would work out swell if Homer was hired to drive the damned thing.

[kwame k]

I know where there are some abandoned factories we could get real cheap