Five for the Task Force

We note the receipt of five new applications for positions on Obama’s auto task force:

William P. Wetboots: Mr. Wetboots, executive director of the Native Ecosystems Resource Foundation (NERF), is a climate change expert who has lobbied Congress to have the EPA classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant. (It is currently classified as the fun gaseous component of beer and soft drinks.) A microbiologist with a law degree, Mr. Wetboots learned to drive in a Comet and has stated his belief that its reentry into the atmosphere after speed runs beyond 100 mph might have caused rivers in his home county to go dry.

Maud-Evelyn Flâneur: As an Upper East Side Manhattanite, Ms. Flâneur has often suggested that her domestics ride bicycles to work rather than smelly buses or noisy subways. At interviews with headmistresses and headmasters of premium preschools, at one of which her two-year-old daughter, Flannery, will enroll next autumn in advance of matriculating at Yale in 2024, and at art openings and in the Missoni collection at Saks, she has consistently emphasized her position that automotives should hybridize their efficiency.

Joseph L. “Stepside Joe” Stevenson: Personal motto: “It’s as obvious as deer in a field of soybeans.” Mr. Stevenson produces grain on more than 2000 acres he owns or leases in central Nebraska. In his quest to join the task force, he enjoys the backing of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, with whom he once shared his secret recipe for bison and noodles. (Secret: Cube the bison and let it molder for up to twelve weeks in a root cellar.) As an aficionado of the pickup, Mr. Stevenson would be the task force’s first advocate for personal-use and commercial trucks. He has likened proscriptive rules against trucks as “being akin to breed-specific legislation against pit bulls, not that I mean to come down on their side of the equation.”

Dodi Sadicamot: An engineer and thermodynamicist, Professor Sadicamot once told the Washington Post, “Don’t bolt your food—use space-age adhesives.” At his Afterglow Laboratories, in Richland, Washington, he has refined the jet pack, which is now deemed practical transportation for veterans of NASA astronaut training weighing 47 pounds or less who are comfortable using night-vision devices while recycling their own urine into drinking water. Often dogged by accusations that he has connectivity issues, not to the Internet but to society in general, Professor Sadicamot has typically responded by saying, “Incarnadine transmutational heliotropism!”

Eddie Szynwelski: More than three decades on the line at Chrysler’s Warren Truck Assembly Plant has left Mr. Szynwelski nursing a shitload of grievances and wishing he could enjoy deer season twelve months of the year. When the auto task force visited his plant March 9, he complained to the shop steward, “Even the lady wore a suit!” Since then he has expressed his interest in representing the average worker, declaring, “Hell, I betcha it’d be a rivetin’ experience.” Sources close to the situation deny that The Attitude, as he is already being called in D.C., has demanded permission to drink Natural Light during task force meetings, just to maintain a working atmosphere.

 

“Even the lady wore a suit!”: http://www.freep.com/article/20090309/BUSINESS01/90309060/1002/rss02