ITEM: Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles recalls the vanity plate of the owner of a Ford truck that reads “14CV88” on the grounds that it’s actually a secretly coded racist message, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.


I’ll take CAIR’s word for it that the number is a white-supremacy code of some kind. The thing is, though, I’m not sure that rejecting the plate accomplishes anything when (1) most people who aren’t already white supremacists presumably would never understand what the code means, and (2) the truck looks like this.


I’m not saying people who spout bigoted bullshit should be censored (because I don’t believe they should be). But if the issue is concern over people expressing racist sentiments on their vehicles, the license plate is not the biggest problem here.

Coded language,

This is dF

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EDITED TO ADD [30 APRIL 2010, via bedsitter23 ]: The owner of the truck tells his side of the story – the license plate is a reference to NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Tony Stewart. "There is absolutely no way I'd have anything to do with Hitler or Nazis," he says.

Then he goes on to denounce Islam. Then someone finds his Facebook page, which has lots of white supremacist links on it. And this is his bio:

Yr Darwinian lede of the day:
The best part: the woman had been convicted of a DUI the previous day.

The razor’s edge,

This is dF

I guess I should say something about the demise of The Hummer, seeing as how I got to drive the pre-commercial version.

I was in the Army once, you see. And my primary job was driving and looking after the squad M151 Jeep. Shortly before I was kicked out left, the Army decided to start swapping out the Jeeps for the Humvee (or, as we never called it, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV).

I forget the reasoning they gave us for the switch, but the general pitch was something like: “It’s bigger, it runs on diesel and it’s not 20 years old like that M151. Go play.”

Close enough, Jim.

I took it on one field maneuver, and we really put it through its off-road paces. (No one ever said it wasn’t fun to stress-test govt vehicles.) In the end I thought it was a fun new piece of equipment, but the only real advantages were that it was newer and you could fit more stuff in it. And it was less likely to flip over like the M151. The automatic transmission was not an improvement, for my money.

Anyway, that was my experience with it. So I was rather amused – though not surprised – when AM General released a civilian version (which, supposedly, was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s idea).

I never wanted one, myself. I thought it was way too big for the roads, a pain to park, and yes, the gas mileage sucked. I could see getting one if you worked on a ranch or otherwise did a lot of off-road driving. But not if you were a soccer mom. Or a rap artist.

So naturally they became hot items. Especially after 9/11, for reasons I still don’t quite understand.

“Fight al Qaeda by purchasing the biggest gas-guzzling American-made car possible! If yr not driving a Hummer, yr with the terrorists!”

Then the stupid liberals made up stupid global warming and ruined it for everyone and that’s how Hummers lost the War On Terrorz. The end. Stupid libtards.

Something like that.

Anyway, I’m not particularly sorry to see them go. But then cars stopped being cool since 1977, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Fill ‘er up,

This is dF