Palin Rips FLOTUS’ Anti-Obesity Drive

Sam Stein at Huffington Post reports:

An appearance by Sarah Palin on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Wednesday morning drew a bit of pre-Thanksgiving buzz for a swipe she took at Barbara Bush for suggesting that the 2008 vice president nominee would be best served in 2012 by staying in Alaska.

“I don’t think the majority of Americans want to put up with the blue-bloods — and I want to say it will all due respect because I love the Bushes — the blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition,” said the former Alaska Governor.

But it was another swipe at another first lady that stood out in a notably charged interview. For the second time this week, Palin threw jabs at Michelle Obama (the first instance came with the publication of Palin’s book), this time calling her campaign to improve child nutrition another instance of a philosophical devotion to big government.

I think she has got a different worldview and she is not hesitant at all to share what her worldview is. And I will take heat again for saying it on your show Laura but she encapsulated what her view of America is, I believe, unless she has evolved and things have changed in the last two years, but she said it on the campaign trail twice that it was the first time that she had been proud of her country when finally people were paying attention to Barack Obama. I think that’s appalling. We can think of this infinite number of reasons to be proud of American exceptionalism and it baffles me that anybody would have that view and then allow that view to bleed over into policy.

Take her anti-obesity thing that she is on. She is on this kick, right. What she is telling us is she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children, for their own families in what we should eat. And I know I’m going to be again criticized for bringing this up, but instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician’s wife priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions and then our country gets back on the right track.

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A Brief Drive in the 2011 Hyundai Equus Raises a Small Gripe

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — I got the chance last week to drive Hyundai’s coming $60,000 luxury sedan, the Equus, here in the Hudson River Valley.

First of all, yes, Hyundai is entering the luxury market — six words you never thought you’d see in a sentence. Even more surreal was the presentation Derek Joyce, manager of product planning for Hyundai, made to a handful of journalists before the drive. Mr. Joyce, who has worked on the Equus for two years, compared the new flagship sedan to the Mercedes-Benz S550, Lexus LS 460L and Audi A8L.

He showed how the Equus — a model that’s been available in Korea and other parts of Asia for more than 10 years — matches up with the three cars (and also the BMW 750Li) in interior space and horsepower. I had but two hours with the car — just enough time to get acquainted with it (a full review will be coming in the Automobiles section).

I drove up Interstate 87 and around some of the smaller roads around Bear Mountain, where the car behaved itself very well. The 4.6-liter V-8 puts out 385 horsepower — not enough to really make much of an impact.

There is a Sport button, which adjusts suspension damping, the transmission’s shift schedule and steering response for more spirited driving. I kept that button on all the time. Mr. Joyce said that Hyundai had yet to record a zero-to-60 acceleration time, but was expecting something in the high five-second to low six-second range. That seems reasonable.

There were dozens of other buttons controlling ?things like a wide-angle front camera and the lane-departure warning, prerequisites for the luxury market these days. But as we all know, the selling point of luxury has some to do with mechanical prowess and gadgets and gizmos — and everything to do with brand awareness. And so the first half of Mr. Joyce’s presentation was how Equus would personalize the sales and ownership experience. The second half showed all the features that the Equus would provide standard on one of two trim levels, Signature and Ultimate.

One highlighted feature was the iPod interface into the Equus’s Lexicon 608-watt surround-sound, 17-speaker audio system. Shortly after I got into my test vehicle, one of the other journalists plugged in his iPod loaded with 50 gigabytes of music. In a tribute to Gregory Isaacs, who died recently, he started scrolling down the artists’ names. Below the shifter, there’s a big knob that controls most of the interface functions. And so he scrolled — and scrolled and scrolled.

After a considerable amount of scrolling, he was still in the A’s. The Equus iPod interface doesn’t have a speed sensitive dial, like the Apple iPod. It’s a linear response, so if we wanted to listen to, say, ZZ Top, it would have taken us quite a while to get there — a minute? Three minutes? After landing on Isaacs, we didn’t bother searching other artists.

Later, Mr. Joyce joined us in the car, and I asked him about the issue.

He told us that we could “page jump” through the list by pulling down or pushing up on the control knob. But that wasn’t much faster. And there was no other shortcut.

Hyundai, by no means, is the only company that needs to work on its iPod interface. And it’s a relatively small gripe when you’re talking about a car that has an automatic damping system and 12-way automatic seat adjustment with massage. But I can’t imagine not listening to music — and never having Yaz’s “Upstairs at Eric’s” at my disposal — in the car, so cumulatively, it’s an issue that will need sorting out before the model’s midterm refresh.

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