Hippies and Rednecks - hipnecks

In The Hippy and the Redneck Can be Friends, Reason's Jesse Walker reminds us that there was a time when these seemingly disparate people might have been seen together at Eagles concerts or watching Burt Reynolds movies. Those days seemed to be gone forever as the country has been artificially divided into "Blue" and "Red" states. People, I think, have a tendency to focus on their differences rather than their common ground, and politicians are highly motivated to exploit that tendency (hence the use of "wedge issues").

Fortunately, it is possible for them to find some common ground despite themselves and despite the best attempts of the politicos thanks to that one-man nexus of hippy-redneck culture, Willie Nelson. A longtime supporter of American farmers, it seems that Willie has become a fan of biodiesel, drives a Mercedes diesel that he refills at Pacific Biodiesel (in Hawaii), runs all of his tour buses on biodiesel, and is now involved in marketing a brand of biodiesel called BioWille.

Now, if only someone could figure out how to educate the Uninformed Union of Concerned Scientists, where apparently someone bought a hybrid ... and all of the hype that came along with it. Hybridblog is the companion site to the decidedly and irrationally anti-diesel hybridcenter.org, which features this topic center on "Hybrid incentives, or dirtier diesel?" and this panic-stricken petition to favor tax incentives for hybrids but not diesels (why do we need tax incentives for either when rising fuel prices seem to be sufficient? If Ford, Honda and Toyota are selling more than they are making, incentives won't increase the rate of ownership at all). In this post, they conjecture over whether VW is going hybrid. I hope they do, and I hope the fuel-burning side of the drivetrain is a diesel, just like in their 80 mpg diesel Lupo. Judging by this post, I think their main concern is with oil imports. Guys - no matter how many hybrids are on the road next year, if they burn gasoline, we will be importing most of it. Only biodiesel gives us any hope of becoming an autarky self-sufficient.