GM Gives it up – Discusses Hybrid License with Toyota

Toyota continues to build volume for it’s supplier network by discussing a deal for hybrid auto technology with GM. Ford did the same with it’s Escape small SUV Hybrid. Generally bad news for domestic parts suppliers.
This looks interesting: Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy

Feingold’s Big Business Tax Cut

Russ Feingold voted for this giveaway (I’d like a 5.25% tax rate, please). Alex Berenson looks at one of the windfalls: Large drug companies:

A new tax break for corporations is allowing the biggest American drug makers to return as much as $75 billion in profits from international havens to the United States while paying a fraction of the normal tax rate.
The break is part of the American Jobs Creation Act, signed into law by President Bush in October, which allows companies a one-year window to return foreign profits to the United States at a 5.25 percent tax rate, compared with the standard 35 percent rate.
…….
Though the companies stand behind their accounting, financial analysts and tax lawyers say that the drug makers’ claim defies reality and that their profits come mostly from sales in the United States.

Happy Mother’s Day

Jon Carroll on “Our Mothers, Ourselves“:

She learned to scuba dive. She was active in the League of Women Voters. When I was 28, she and my stepfather moved to Ethiopia. She worked for the World Health Organization, preparing educational materials that said, in essence, “Please do not defecate in the river.”

SUV Slowdown

Michael Taylor:

Salvador Sotello, for example, recently paid F.H. Dailey Chevrolet in San Leandro $41,000 for a new Chevy Tahoe LT (yes, with leather) SUV that had a sticker price of $58,000. The sale was an anomaly in what is otherwise a pretty dismal selling season. “It’s been pretty quiet,” saleswoman Crystal Gonzalez said the other day. “Been pretty slow.”