In addition to the 4.8 million vehicles recalled for various problems ranging from dodgy ignition switches to non-deploying airbags, an additional 1.3 million are now being recalled due to a problem with the power steering that could cause an accident.

"If power steering assist is lost, a message displays on the Driver Information Center and a chime sounds to inform the driver. Steering control can be maintained because the vehicle will revert to manual steering, but greater driver effort would be required at low vehicle speeds, which could increase the risk of a crash”, says the carmaker in its official press release.

An economist at the Guardian recounts GM's recent recalls:

Overall, GM has recalled 6.3m cars over the past couple of months – so far. The range of makes and model years present an impressively sprawling display of incompetence:

* 1.6m Chevy Cobalts had faulty ignition switches that would turn off the carÂ’s engine if bumped by the driverÂ’s knee and which may have caused 12 deaths.

* 1.3m Chevy Traverses with faulty airbags.

* Another 700,000 cars – ranging from Chevy Silverados to GMC Sierras and Yukons – had loose transmission lines that could cause fires.

* A batch of Chevy Cruzes had a problem in which the front wheels might lose power, even though the engine would keep going.

* Over 300,000 GMC Savana and Chevy Express vans were recalled by the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration over other airbag problems. (GM built those vans between 2009 and 2014, the same years the company was creating a victorious comeback narrative around its bankruptcy.)

* Just yesterday, the company issued a wider recall of 1.3m Chevy, Saturn and Pontiac cars for power steering issues.

Then there are cars GM didnÂ’t bother recall: 2005-vintage Chevy Cobalts and Pontiac Pursuits, which had incorrectly wired airbags that could inflate so aggressively that they would injure, not help, the driver and passenger during a crash. GM chose instead to send a mildly-worded note to dealers, according to one report.

GM isnÂ’t legally liable for the problems with its cars before 2009, because the bankruptcy wiped out its responsibility. But thereÂ’s plenty more to answer for, after the bailout. The range of cars includes those made in 2005 all the way up to 2013, 2014 and 2015 models.

Jim Geraghty notes the very underplayed angle here -- that the government knew about some of the problems at Government Motors and did nothing, if you can believe such a thing.

Nitrobahn reports:

Seven years ago, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration manager recommended investigating the reason for the non-deploying airbags in General Motors’ 2003-2006 Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion cars. This was revealed in a memo issued by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The chief of NHTSA’s Defects Assessment Division e-mailed other officials in the Office of Defects Investigation in September 2007, saying owner complaints from 2005 and “early warning” data about warranty repairs and injuries justified an investigation. According to an interview between current NHTSA officials and the House committee’s staff, the agency reconsidered after reviewing the data thus deciding not to open a formal investigation.

Geraghty asks: Where the hell is the press? This is not just a GM story; this is a government story. So where the hell are the stories?

Possibly prodded by Geraghty, the useless Howie Kurtz shows why people call him "One of the six thousand best media critics in the business."

The General Motors safety debacle is about everything thatÂ’s wrong with Washington.

And yet somehow it hasnÂ’t caught the imagination of television news.

Apparently, at least 13 people dying from a car defect that was covered up by a giant American automaker and has led to a recall of 2.6 million vehicles doesnÂ’t hold a candle compared to, say, a missing Malaysian airliner.

But the federal government is complicit is more ways than one.

Howard Kurtz' main role in the media is identifying a situation of media bias and then explaining to you why it's not bias. So, after identifying the problem -- the media is embargoing an important story about Washington -- he then says it's just a structural problem with the media.

My theory is that in a television culture that thrives on heroes and villains, itÂ’s hard to know who to blame.

You canÂ’t single out President Obama because the governmentÂ’s failure to act stretches back to the Bush administration, so it doesnÂ’t make for a left/right slugfest.

You canÂ’t fault Mary Barra, the new GM boss, because she didnÂ’t know about the cavalier disregard for safety until she was promoted into the top job.

You most certainly can blame a Beltway culture of coziness between the regulators and the regulated—but that’s an old story and perhaps too abstract.

Really?

Geraghty's not so sure of that.

In another example of the phenomenon discussed in this piece, a wide variety of voices who are quick to lambaste “corporate greed” and “evil businessmen” – be it Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, health insurance companies, or any one of many others – are strangely quiet about a car company that manufactured and sold cars with a fatal defect. Why? Because progressives don’t begin from the principle, “a company must make safe products to be a good company.” They begin with “Barack Obama is the good guy.” Barack Obama supported and enacted the bailout of GM, thus that bailout must be a good thing. Thus, GM must be a company worth helping. Acknowledging that GM made dangerous cars, lied about it to the public, and then had the audacity to ask the taxpayers for money while keeping the danger of the cars secret would disrupt the “GM is worth helping, and Obama was right to help them” narrative, so it must be ignored, shoved aside, eyes averted, and so on.

That said, even Howie Kurtz' explanation -- he always wants to find non-ideological reasons to explain away ideological bias -- itself reveals ideological bias.

He says the press needs "someone to blame" in a story. Apparently, if it's not clear who to blame, they just have no interest.

Why should "Someone To Blame" be required to generate press interest?

Even if you don't know who to blame in the Government Motors recall, the story is still worth reporting. You might not know who to blame for the 2005 Thailand tsunami, but the story is still certainly worth reporting.

Let me modify Kurtz' proposed explanation for something closer to the truth:

When something awful has happened, and it's not clear that you can blame a Republican for it, or, even worse, that a Democrat may ultimately be to blame, the press cannot find any interest in reporting the story or asking questions.

The press likes asking questions whose answers they already know. They like asking "Are Republicans to blame?" when they think Republicans are to blame.

But in a case like this, where Republican blame seems unlikely, and where it could actually turn out to be the case that Barack Obama may share in the blame, the press just finds the whole situation rather "abstract," as Kurtz terms it.

Compare the media's vim in reporting on Bridgegate -- going so far as to speculate that maybe a ten-minute slowdown in an ambulance transport might put Chris Christie on the hook for involuntary homicide -- with its lack of anything resembling basic curiosity in the case of Government Motors.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (346)
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From @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar, the Daily Caller goofs on a goof.

Below, the actual Vox video, and then the DC parody. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (224)
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John Sexton calls it an application of the 80/20 rule, the idea that the first 20% of effort gets you 80% of the ultimate results, and the last 20% of the results takes 80% of the effort.

Byron York notes that the great bulk of "sign-ups" occurred not due to the mandate or blowing up the individual insurance market, but due to two smaller changes.

The Times says the numbers break down like this: 4.5 million previously uninsured people are now on Medicaid; 3 million previously uninsured young people are now covered because of a provision that allows them to stay on their parents' policies until age 26; and 2 million previously uninsured people have purchased coverage on the Obamacare exchanges...

By far the largest part of Obamacare's health coverage expansion has come from a) expanding Medicaid, and b) allowing young people to stay on their parents' coverage. The part where Democrats essentially blew up the health care markets, imposed the individual mandate, and caused premiums to rise and deductibles to skyrocket? That hasn't been such a success. If the Times number are correct, all of that -- placing new burdens of higher costs and narrower choices on millions of Americans, in addition to setting the stage for coming changes in employer-based coverage -- has resulted in two million of the previously uninsured gaining coverage.

Chuck Todd, whose "news" company, MSNBC, enjoys "declaring" things, like, for example, that Iraq was in a state of civil war in 2006, now "declares" Obamacare to be "unrepealable," due to all these people who've bought in.

The health-care law is here to stay

As the Obama administration and the uninsured race to meet todayÂ’s (sort-of) deadline for Americans to have purchased health insurance, we can now say something we werenÂ’t 100% confident about back in October in November: The health-care law is here is to stay. More than 6 million have now enrolled in a health-care plan under the federal and state exchanges, which is up from a mere 100,000 back in October. And given the recent enrollment surge, itÂ’s possible the final number is close to 7 million. WhatÂ’s more, when you add the folks whoÂ’ve gotten insurance via expanded Medicaid and those under 26 who are on their parentsÂ’ insurance, overall total could be as high as 15 million....

Most of the people who've purchased insurance on the exchanges did so because they had insurance which was cancelled due to Obamacare, and were forced to buy more expensive insurance there -- so five million or so of this alleged 6-7 million were previously insured. They just have worse insurance now.

The number Todd is crowing about is all those additional people covered either by the under-26 rule or the Medicaid expansion.

To the extent he's got a point here (which I'm doubtful about; this is a Viral Meme Stunt to get MSNBC linked), which part of Obamacare is now "unrepealable"?

The part responsible for 80% of the new insured cases, which caused only 20% of the disruptions (under-26, Medicaid expansion), of the part what caused 80% of the disruptions and produced only 20% of the sign-ups?

Posted by: Ace at 06:55 AM | Comments (240)
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To the shock of almost no one, the Obama/Kerry effort to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians is rapidly reaching the supposed deadline with no chance of success.

But Israel balked at releasing the last batch of prisoners on Saturday. We are now approaching the end of a renewed set of talks that have steadily moved away from their stated goal. In July, the original plan was for an agreement to be reached by the end of April 2014. As time passed with little progress, much like the past 25 years, Kerry downgraded hopes from an actual deal to a "framework" deal - essentially making the latest round of talks about more talks. The original "framework" of course dates back to the Oslo accords, signed in 1993.

Even that limited ambition now appears unreachable. Israel refused to release the final 26 prisoners over the weekend, essentially in order to create a new bargaining chip. If Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas promises to extend the talks (about talks) another six months, Israeli says it will release 400 more Palestinian prisoners at some point in the future. The Palestinian team has said talks are over on April 29 if the originally agreed upon prisoner release doesn't happen.

The reason for the failure of this round of talks, like all the others, is simple... neither of the sides actually involved in them want a deal. The Palestinians are holding on to the idea that if they wait long enough the world will force Israel to cave to them on just about everything (which would also basically include the existence of Israel, so don't bet on it). The Israelis on the other hand were willing to cut a deal during the Clinton years and all they got for their willingness to deal with the Palestinians was another intifada and rocket attacks from Gaza.

So with neither side all that interesting in cutting a deal but another US administration desperate to make history and build a legacy, everything is on the table. Including the release of one of the most damaging spies in US history. But Kerry needs his own Nobel Prize and Obama wants to try and live up to the one he got just for showing up so...maybe Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard gets to walk.

No decisions have been made about Pollard's release, which sources familiar with the talks have cautioned is far from certain and would need to be approved by President Barack Obama. Pollard's possible release was being discussed as part of a broader agreement that has not been finalized.

In exchange for the release, the sources have said that Israel would have to make significant concessions to the Palestinians, which could include a settlement freeze, the release of additional prisoners beyond the current group in dispute, and an agreement to continue peace negotiations beyond the end-of-April deadline.

Pollard was convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence in the United States. His imprisonment has been a source of tension between the U.S. and Israel.

This is nothing but the floating of a naked bribe by the US for Netanyahu to stick around and pretend a few months or more of "talks" (they don't actually ever seem to talk, Kerry just sort of floats around the region a lot) will do the trick.

I wouldn't blame Netanyahu for playing along. Any Prime Minister of Israel has to be seen as trying to be a good partner to the US so why not take something that would be immensely popular back home in the process?

Of course this would just be another example of Obama selling out to advance his own interests.

I don't care who Pollard spied for, I care about who he spied on. He literally sold America out (he didn't act out of conviction, he was paid for his treachery (pdf)). I don't care that Israel was supposed to get the information anyway. No country is entitled to America's intelligence products and if the proper policy makers withheld that information, it was not up to Pollard, anymore than it was Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, to decide otherwise.

My only disappointment is that Snowden likely will never be brought to justice and Manning only received 35 years. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison and that's where he should rot until the day he dies.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:05 AM | Comments (130)
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APRIL.

The Anchoress writes about finding a better term than "homophobia." (I tend to use anti-gay.)

Police misconduct in Ohio.

Mayor Emanuel to hang a giant sign in Chicago that says, "You'd be better off elsewhere."

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (320)
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