Geeto67

I was always impressed with the Dakota pickups and just how tough they really were. I think the first gen trucks didn't let that reputation down any. I still see many first generation durangos on the road and they are fast approaching 20 years old. I loved the R/T 5.9 and the shelby ones when they were new. I was also impressed that dodge saw the direction the "midsize" SUVs were heading and hit the ground running almost a decade before Chevy dumped the S-series for the trailblazer and ford plumped the explorer. the second gen trucks were kind of a letdown by comparison, mostly for the rust issues that made them look beat up before their time. I like the new ones. After hitting a soda palette in the road last night the wife is hating lowered "sporty" cars and wants an SUV. The new R/T durango was the second thing I thought of after a subaru XV (because manual). The SRT GC did wonders for the image of the grand cherokee, I'm hoping the same happens here.

You are talking about one branch of government with a specific mission, it is not representative of the whole. Many books have been written regarding the military's balance of financial efficiency vs resource efficiency vs operational efficiency and the only underlying theme is some kind of waste is a constant. I think a lot of government institutions have low customer satisfaction and low employee satisfaction, but I don't necessarily think they are all worse of being run by the government. The military is one thing you can't have run any other way - there is no other option and it's gigantic and hugely bureaucratic. Remember the Federal government doesn't run your local schools - it sets the standards and provides some funding but they don't micromanage the whole of the system. To think the school system is run like the military misses the point entirely. It's not a liberal mindset. It's a fact that absent regulation people and organizations will eventually gravitate toward operating in their own self interests. We have laws against monopolies because they were a problem, we have laws against discrimination because it was a problem, we have rules to protect the weak from being taken advantage of by the strong because that's how you end up with tyranny. You can always count on the selfish prick to ruin it for everyone.

That's a fair point, however, with the current system's lack of oversight there are certainly less restrictions to cheating. I don't see the new boss as one amenable to increasing oversight of the charter school programs. I also don't think these things start of with bad intentions, but migrate there when they lose sight of the original goal of education. Again the for profit college model is the closest corollary but it is not an approximate match. Educational funding is really interesting when you dig into it because overall the end result success rate isn't just affected by the school but by outside factors as well such as post high school educational opportunities. The state and local tax funding goes directly to the school your kid attends. Federal funding can go directly to the school your child attends but it can also go towards programs that your kid qualifies for that supplements his/her education while in school and increases opportunity post graduation, as well as go directly to the child to facilitate opportunity. These are things like grants, scholarships, after school programs, facilities improvements, etc... State funding on it's own can't carry the day. when Federal funding goes down, even if state funding goes up, the metrics measuring proficiency and growth suffer, as well as post graduation employment statistics, college acceptance/attendance rate, etc... No amount of charter school competition is going to fix that issue. I agree that one of the goals of education is to insure the quality of the education that all children in America receive improves, but it isn't the only goal, and often the other stuff tied to federal funding has a greater effect. The federal government theory of education is to provide everyone (as best it can) access to pretty much the same secular education, and if different education is needed it is on the students and parents to seek that out on their own. Do they meet that goal? no they don't in practice but they continue to try, and rely on the states to make up the difference based on geography, resources, etc.... Part of the difficulty is that federal funds can't be used for religious purposes, and a lot of private schools and charter schools are religious based and opening up the charter model pushes some restrictions on them as well. In the context of Devos, I don't trust her to act in the best interests of students, and her philosophy on education (particularly religious education) and general lack of experience with education in this country is inviting trouble, despite charter schools having some overwhelming positives.

yes but it may not breed the innovation you want if the student is no longer viewed as the product. This is one of those areas where things get dicey. Private not for profit might continue that line, private for profit - the innovation might be how to cheat children out of education to maximize profit. It's a way more complex issue without a simple solution. I'm fairly sure most of US history would disagree with you.

because he's grabbed all the eagle pussy in the District of Columbia already;) by the way I was not being sarcastic in any way. Big V8 hammers is what the american auto industry does best and we need to get it in before gas spikes up to $5 a gallon again. Also cars like this make others in the line seem more awesome by association and FCA needs to move some durangoes. It's an awesome car and I applaud anybody who buys one (because I want one in the used market).

30 years....that would be a public education system that suffered under Reagan Funding cuts, Bush I funding cuts, Bush II funding cuts, and only Clinton and Obama who couldn't secure as much funding as were cut out of the program for 20 years (12 of them consecutive). If there is one thing that has been proven is that education in this country responds to money. When we pour money into education we go to the moon. When we cut educational spending over 12 years you get get a 38% competency rate (like we had in 1990 following Bush's administration). Clinton and Obama both saw improvement for their investments, but it's just not enough to undo Reagan's damage (which is seen as some of the most drastic cuts made by a president) compounded with Bush's cuts. Here is why I don't like Devos - she represents a lot of the negatives of charter school system with not a lot of the positives. Currently the accountability is weak, and it needs to remain weak for religious based charter schools to continue to discriminate on several basis (like accessibility and gender) as well as continue to allow parental influence into the overall structure. I don't agree with this tact. I am also very leery on the for profit model of education. As we have seen with technical schools like ITT, a for profit model with little accountability has the potential to turn into a scam more than it does to educate. Personally I feel core education (k-12) should be a non-profit endeavor. A symptom of this is the general less qualified workforce that tends to work at charter schools, since they don't have to meet public school teaching requirements and the pay is lower it doesn't attract the best candidates. Keeping costs low to maximize profits means keeping pay low and invites anti-union activities.

Turn it off from the regular cruise control? or either you use CC with it or you don't use CC at all?

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/melissa-mccarthy-sean-spicer-234715

does that mean we get to call them cucks? Could be, or you could just be be ignoring all the recent hate crimes (from grafitti to personal assaults) because in your mind they don't equate. I mean if you aren't being objective the news source really doesn't matter. The overwhelming majority of protests occurring are liberal because let's face it, they are protesting a conservative agenda so conservatives aren't going to protest themselves when they have (some of) the power. but the overwhelming majority have also been peaceful - holding an entire political group responsible for the few isolated acts of idiots who can't control themselves in a crowd well...that's just not being objective (and it's kinda dumb). Noting political about a black friday sale and riots sometimes break out at those.....some people are just animals when in groups.

As opposed to the cowering the right seems to be doing? I despise Marco Rubio's policies, but I have to say I admire that he has more integrity and spine than Mitch McConnell at the moment. I mean I get it McConnell is a party politician and not a real conservative so it pays for him to lay low and dodge so he can advance a party agenda rather than the right thing to do but hey...that's who you seem to want in the party because someone keeps electing him. Also if you think the right isn't shouting then maybe you haven't really been paying attention to all the empowered nationalists in the party that are suddenly shouting that he isn't going far enough. Dude is controversial - every one is shouting at something (except the few who are laying low and working the long con).

That's the hope. Although I didn't expect the country to pull enthusiastically toward a platform that was largely built on intolerance when it was initially challenged. One other thing I hope it does is show the political parties are brands as well as being platforms. What do I mean? they sometimes sell on stereotype image rather than what the represent. This is why we have the Nazi/libtard insults flying (although to be fair there are actual Nazi's empowered by the current administrations actions, I am not talking about them), this is like rooting for a sports team more than it is making rational policy based decisions regardless of political affiliation. I wonder how many people know that conservative democrats and liberal republicans are a thing? or that the platforms switched economic policies in the 1930's (Democrats were all conservatives when Lincoln was in office) and Social policies in the late 1960s and early 1970's (When secular-ism drove the religious groups to the republican party). Moose-Lambs, McCarthy is crushing it. a) credit to Sean Spicer for finding the joke about himself funny, and b) I love that just the fact it was a woman lampooning him drives DJT into a foamy rage.

Is there a way to get these cars without these systems? or are they heading to being mandated? I like cruse control, but I also like driving so an adaptive cruse control doesn't seem like a thing that I want. now get off my lawn.

would you say the same thing about fox? The one thing (and it may be the only thing) that I like about DJT is that he is forcing the republican party to deal with the split in the party between people who just hate liberals as an abstract concept or because of moral fundamentalism, and people who actually have conservative based political values. Appealing to a social conservative agenda that is largely based on religious morality has cost the party key figures and supporters who have conservative economic and foreign interest outlooks. Do you want to have a conversation about this or do you just want to shout your frustrations into the void?

I'm teasing a little. no harm intended. I find it funny that people don't look at cobras as usable cars. The point of a kit cobra was because the real car was rare and expensive, a kit is an alternative to wrecking a real one when using it as intended. In the 1970's my father was offered a real 427 street cobra by a friend of his who owned a gas station. The owner used it like a regular car (somewhere at my dad's house there is a pic of him pushing it out of a snowbank in Queens, I'll have to find it when I go home next week) and during the gas crunch he parked it at a corner of his station and just let it sit. The price he offered it to my father in 1977? $4800. Doesn't sound like a lot right? except at that time $4800 could have bought you a fully loaded brand new 1977 Buick (a cadillac was $7K). by the 1980's a cobra was a $30-40K car and a kit cobra was a $5K proposition. The AC Bristol was a real car, not a toy. It was intended to be used as transport, albeit fun transport, and Stuffing a 289 and then a 427 into it as a steeet car didn't change that, so why should a replica change that? If I had a cobra you bet your ass I would drive it daily. it's still a car, not some mythical haloed thing. here is a pic of a real street cobra with it's top up. I know most cobras don't even have tops so people forget this was a car that was meant to be driven: http://www.conceptcarz.com/images/Shelby/67-Shelby-Cobra-427-Street-DV-12-PBC_01.jpg what's missing from this pic are the removable side curtains (think jeep wrangler soft top windows, not actual curtains). and a 289 with the top up and side curtains installed: http://www.conceptcarz.com/images/Shelby/65_Shelby_Cobra_289_CSX_8002_BY_05_Cinci_006.jpg considering that most kit cobras have 302s or some other ford small block, how much different is this from driving a really drafty fox body convertible?

Its still his opinion. It's not reporting it's Op-Ed. He may support his argument with facts and citations but they are still his opinions and he gets paid to put a slant on things. It doesn't mean he hasn't been caught in a lie like the rest of the pundits or stretching his argument to meet facts. maybe he has been caught less than some of the other ones but it doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative if you are pundit saying opinionated things is your job. That may have more to do with you agreeing with him than it does with whether he is objectively "fair" or "Balanced". Remember he's opinion based entertainment catering to a market audience - not news. He's a pretty old school conservative and right now the real old reganites are having a hard time with the god awful mess they were unable to control holding the prized office as their representative. I honestly expect him to be critical of trump because I don't believe his core audience are diehard trump supporters.

Who cares if this sells well. Who cares if it gets 8mpg. Who cares if it is LOL auto. This is just bonkers and bonkers is what an automotive industry drowning in beige needs. The only way this could be better is if it was a Caravan and not a durango. The public needs cars like these. Wanna know why? to remind us that there are still car people are car companies that believe in the old american tradition of shoving as much power into literally anything that can take it. This is a statement on Americanism. the only way this could get more american is if it was eating a big mac while fucking a bald eagle. 'Merica Fuck YEAH!!!! 400+hp all the things, just because they are there. For all the people that whine that the auto industry is too safe, and they took the fun out of cars because of liability blah blah blah...this is your rocket. I approve this message

fixed it for you.

The same way people make fun of "Fox" for being "News". In terms of bias we are now entering an age where there are clear lines being drawn in terms of party support, which really shouldn't happen since news reporting is supposed to be objective. That's the influence of "business" on the news and reporting - catering to your audience and squaring off against competition. Right now you can mostly find in the middle ground a rough political polar opposite for each news source. For example CNN and Fox news have sort of squared off as politically biased rivals, esp in the pundit space. go further toward the pundit end of the spectrum and you find huffington post, Brietbart, drudge report, buzz feed, etc.... The thing is the more you move toward the pundit side of the scale, the less you are reading actual news. Rush Limbaugh, Bill Reilly, Rachel Madow, these are opinion reporters not fact reporters and often their stuff is dubious enough to be considered an outright fabrication (which is different from the actual lies the president and his administration is telling - reporting that exposes those lies is actually reporting). There are still objective sources but you have to run to the boring side of the scale. Places like The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg, BBC (not BBC America), the economist, etc.... Personally I would include the NYTimes there as objective because their reporting is still fairly objective, however they tend to get tagged as fairly liberal because their op-ed section is huge and tends to run liberal (but not inaccurate), and can often be mistaken for their other news stories because people generally have a hard time telling fact from opinion. So take it or leave it. so rather than bitch about CNN, which admittedly has lost its way, why not just elevate your news sources and draw your own conclusions. You have options, use them.

Look for the guy whose nuts clank when when he walks. On the other hand, it's a kitcar, don't be so precious. My father's friend Marty had a 289 cobra he drove year round in NYC in the 60's. Street parked it too sometimes. If I had a FFR '33 ford, I'd drive it year round. Why not. Some pie crust snow tires and go for it.

sure, with no roof. Personally I fit fine in a cobra as well (my left leg hits the bottom of the dash if I am wearing any shoe with a heel), but do you think you would still fit well in one with a top? http://www.hallmark-cars.com/images/h3.jpg if you are 6' or taller I would hazard a guess not. I get that people who buy cobras really just want them for fair weather cars but that's kind of my point - the '33 doesn't have to be a fair weather car if you don't want it to be. Neither does the coupe, the RTM, and the 818. However, of those 4 the '33 is the only one that can become a roadster without a sawsall.

Well the nice thing about that 40K mile car is it has no title Give it time. I'm currently parts hunting stuff for dad's C4 zr1 and although the car mostly works now, he's stockpiling for when stuff does break. One of the things that makes C4 zr1's so cheap is because there are almost no parts for them. The viper and Lotus from the same era now carry a premium in comparison because parts are accessible (even if things like hoods are "expensive"). So don't be tempted. Ge a clear shelf and take everything off the bodyshell, put it in bags, and label it. No shell/vin to build - no temptation. Plus you'll know where all your parts are.

parts car? http://akroncanton.craigslist.org/cto/5945495213.html I hate to say it but as the really complex cars age out and parts aren't available it might pay to find a ratty, no title, car just to have a donor sitting around for when you need it.

actually they needed a quick influx of space. Last month they cleared out the inventory on Gen 2 Daytona coupes for a discount as well. In the last couple years they have added a 289 FIA cobra, an 818 hardtop, and are now going to offer a Gen 3 daytona coupe road car and competition car. So that's three new models on top of the 5 cars they already offer (Gen 3 coupe road car is replacing 2 so it's a wash) and I don't think they have expanded their facility any so it is a reasonable assumption this promo is to clear space for new inventory. As much as I love the cobra and lust for one badly, I have to say I think the most usable/versatile car they make is the 1933 hot rod. It has a real removable hardtop most people can fit in unlike the cobra. It can be an open wheel car or a full fendered daily driver. It has a really good suspension design and not old hot rod junk like leaf springs and solid axles. you can set it up to have a real trunk. because it is a 1933 ford skin on the car it appeals to a broad base and may be easier to resell later on. I'm actually surprised I don't see more of them around.

Tri-coat is a very fancy modern way of saying "candy" paint. It's a metallic base coat, a candy (transparent) color coat, and a clear top. Metallics can "tiger stripe" on their own (when the flakes clump in one area and thin in another making a "streak" metal). Candy mid coat layers can lighten and darken based on their thickness. Spray too much in one area and the color gets darker, to little and it is lighter. I mean you can try it if you want to, it will be a learning experience. If i were you I would go buy a sign blank and practice before pointing the gun at the car, this way you can get a feel for how it sprays. Also since it is a candy paint it's really temperature/humidity sensitive because unlike a clear it builds color hue, so your paint thickness needs to be adjusted to conditions.

because sports car shooting breaks are awesome that's why http://www.greenwoodcorvettes.com/Street%20Cars/Sportwagon/WagonOrigRearAbove.jpg http://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.corvetteforum.com-vbulletin/720x421/80-i006262_9a5f143b10e06afb9ebb2cafd86f7ad4499dda4d.jpg http://www.supercars.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1962_Ferrari_250GTBreadvan3.jpg http://auto.ferrari.com/en_EN/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013/07/Ferrari-FF-lateral-960x320.jpg