I’m a huge fan of electric vehicles. I love the idea and the recent advances in the technology have begun to indicate that we might actually see some real, functional EV’s coming up soon. If you’d like to see a report on one that’s going to be hitting California’s roads soon, check out Wired Magazine’s test drive of the Aptera. Sure, it’s weird-looking. But hey – that’s not a bug, it’s a feature! (Hat tip to Instapundit for that one.)
The problem with EV’s is simple. While they can deliver similar performance to gas-powered cars in terms of torque (actually, way better than gas), acceleration, and top speed, they lag woefully behind in terms of range. My Toyota Matrix can take me over 300 miles on a tank of gas, carrying 4 people and a decent amount of luggage. The Aptera, linked above, can give you about 100 miles with 2 people and their bags. That wouldn’t necessarily be a killer until you examine what happens when either vehicle type hits the end of their range. With my Matrix, I pull into a gas station, fill up the tank, and hit the road again in less than 5 minutes. The Aptera requires no less than 4 hours to recharge and that’s assuming you have 220-volt, 30 amp power available. Drop that to house current and you’re looking at an overnight recharge rate. That’s pretty inconvenient if you’re out in the middle of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The fix to that is to provide some ability to charge the batteries enroute or to supplement their power delivery to the electric motors. Toyota’s Prius does this with a hybrid electric/gas engine system delivering motive power to the transmission in tandem. Chevy’s new Volt will do that with a “range extender”. That’s basically a gas-powered engine built into the car that does nothing but provide electric power for the motors to run on. I don’t know the details of Chevy’s system, but it sounds like a pretty standard small internal combustion engine. That’s OK, but it’s not the most efficient engine out there.
Enter ETV Motors and their micro-turbine. Turbine engines are used in the aviation field because they’re reliable, fuel efficient, and actually simpler in terms of mechanical action than a piston engine. The reason you’re not using one in your car today is that its advantages only accrue when running at a fairly constant speed. The accelerate-decelerate cycles common in driving don’t do a turbine any good. However, for providing electic power to electric motors at a constant rate, the turbine is tops. ETV’s turbine looks positively tiny and that’s a wonderful thing in a small vehicle like a passenger car.
I have high hopes for this one and I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
When I sat down at my desk this morning, my laptop had fired up and gone about accessing the various systems I’ve got it set up to do. E-mail is, of course, one of the primary chores it handles and I’ve got 3 accounts to manage. This morning’s deliveries included e-mails from 2 of the 3 GOP nomination candidates, John Brownlee and Ken Cuccinelli. Reading over the two of them has left me with an inescapable situation: one of them isn’t telling the truth.
You see, one of the things I’ve noticed about the 3 candidates is that their focus appears to be on very different things and it affects their approach in their communications. Both Dave Foster and Ken Cuccinelli are elected members of legislative bodies. John Brownlee is not. That why, I believe, both Foster and Cuccinelli have spoken often about matters of business and jobs creation where Brownlee has not. This, unfortunately, raises the question of what Foster and Cuccinelli see as the primary responsibility of an Attorney General. As I see things, it’s most certainly not the creation of jobs, nor the advancement of business. Those are responsibilities of the legislature. The Attorney General’s role, as I understood things, was to provide legal advice to the Governor and the legislature as well as direct the prosecution of criminal violations on a statewide level. Also, to oversee the actions of Commonwealth Attorneys across the state and make sure, through direction of those attorneys, that both the law and the civil rights of Virginians are upheld and protected.
That I’ve seen, only John Brownlee has spoken as though he believes that, too. Which brings me to this morning’s e-mail.
The Brownlee Report is an e-mail newsletter sent out by the campaign and, usually, available at the Brownlee website. (This morning’s doesn’t appear to be available there, yet. In this age of new media, that’s pretty sloppy. Since it’s not up there on the site, I’m going to reproduce parts of that report here. I’ll update this post with a link when available.) In today’s edition, Brownlee’s campaign points to his stance on illegal immigration and immigrations law enforcement as compared to a statement made by Cuccinelli:
A new, somewhat surprising contrast between the Republican candidates for Attorney General came to light at Saturday’s debate sponsored by the Virginia Federation of Republican Women. In response to a question regarding illegal aliens and undocumented workers, John Brownlee said he strongly supports “the use of the U.S. government’s E-Verify system.” Brownlee supports making the use of E-Verify mandatory for all employers in the Commonwealth, including the state government, in an effort to reduce the number of illegal aliens in Virginia. E-Verify is a proven and effective resource for employers to verify citizenship / residency status and screen out illegals who are seeking employment. In a response to the same question, State Senator Ken Cuccinelli said he opposed requiring private employers to use E-Verify, suggesting the system was too flawed to be reliable. As one conservative analyst put it, “Our political leaders cannot hide behind the ‘[E-Verify] needs further improvement’ mantra forever, because doing so is the functional equivalent of not enforcing the prohibition against hiring illegals in the first place.”
That’s pretty damning. As anyone who’s been reading here for longer than a few weeks knows I am a strong advocate for strong enforcement of our immigrations laws. I have supported the use of the E-Verify system for government employees and contractors as well as for recipients of state welfare services. To have a candidate for our Attorney General say he doesn’t support requiring businesses to make use of the system to verify hiring eligibility would be a serious deficiency for them, in my opinion.
But hold on. This just in from The Cuccinelli Compass, the newletter for the Cuccinelli campaign:
John is out of bounds in his attack that I am somehow against E-Verify (a program established to ensure illegal aliens don’t get hired). His attack is patently false – and like other attacks, John Brownlee also implies that I’m somehow soft on illegal immigration.
It’s pathetic especially since it’s aimed at me, the one State Senator in Virginia who has been more successful than any other State Senator in getting legislation passed at curbing illegal immigration – but folks – desperate campaigns in desperate situations – well, they do desperate things. It sure would be nice to run positive, issue oriented campaigns and when you have issue differences, to accurately state them. Unfortunately, John Brownlee isnt doing that.
For the record – I do not oppose any effort to verify the status of someone’s legal residency. Unlike John Brownlee, I have a proven record in the State Senate opposing illegal immigration. No where in my comments did I say I opposed E-Verify. But don’t believe me – long time party activist, VFRW member and party leader Helen Blackwell was there – and this is what she said:
Cuccinelli then provides the quote from Ms. Blackwell, which I’ll get to in a moment. Here, Cuccinelli is absolutely denying he said any such thing as what Brownlee reports. However, he clearly implies that the comments were from a specific event. Since he’s relying on someone alleged to be a member of the Virginia Federation of Republican Women (VFRW), I went to their website to check what events they might have had recently. Turns out it was their 2009 Convention, held in Arlington. The event itself was a private, members-only thing so there are no videos or transcripts on-line. (Yet, anyway.)
But this is a pretty critical item: Did Cuccinelli say that or not? If he did, then he’s trying to gloss over the truth. If he didn’t, then Brownlee is smearing him. As a delegate who has been, up to now, undecided on the matter I need to know this. Does anyone have any video or transcripts from the comments given at this event?
A hat tip to The Loudoun Scoop for pointing me to a number of sources of information on the arrests made in the Lansdowne murder case here in Loudoun. The Loudoun Independent has great coverage of this as well as of the crime in general:
Residents of Lansdowne and neighboring Potomac Station may sleep a little more soundly after the news. Sources have reported to the Loudoun Independent that four suspects are in custody related to the March 22 murder of William Bennett and the brutal attack on his wife, Cynthia Bennett.
Loudoun County Sheriff Steve Simpson, Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman and several local elected representatives met at a Saturday, April 25 press conference only feet away from where William Bennett’s body was discovered.
The story has details on the crime itself and the ongoing investigation. John Geddie, the writing reporter, puts a keen eye on those details and lays them out well so citizens can get up to speed on the situation.
Also at the paper’s website is a video report from the press conference Geddie mentions. It covers the Sheriff’s public address on the matter and follow-ups with the district Supervisor, Lori Waters, and Leesburg’s Police Chief Price. It’s a good, 4½ minute vid that lets you not only know the words spoken but also see the delivery by the Sheriff. Nice going, LoudounI.
Like Geddie, I am a bit concerned about the gang connections to this crime. The Sheriff has said explicitly that this wasn’t some action taken in furtherance of a gang, true, but between this and the Leesgurn Guns robbery (which also involved people related to gangs) I sense an escalation in the gangs’ abilities and aggressiveness. This is something that needs to be watched and, more, dealt with. I support the Sheriff’s effort in this regard.
Two people briefed on GM’s plan confirmed that it includes the demise of Trans Am sports car brand Pontiac, 83 years after the first Pontiac car was introduced. Within three years, half a million Pontiacs were sold, and the brand quickly grew in popularity, from early models like the Chief and the Master Six Coupe, to the Bonneville convertible, to the GTO — one of America’s first muscle cars and so popular it inspired Ronny and the Daytonas to immortalize it in song.
But efforts in the last few years to market Pontiac as performance-oriented brand failed. The company had said it wanted to keep Pontiac as a niche brand with one or two models, but is buckling under tremendous government pressure to consolidate its eight brands, several of which lose money.
Kinda sad. But only kinda. The fact of the matter is that this kind of move was long overdue. I’ve owned several Pontiacs in the last 15 years and, while they were generally reliable, the 6-cylinder engines in a couple of them had a pretty bad design flaw that resulted in a warped manifold that required a $2100 repair to correct. They were serviceable cars and decent transportation, but they weren’t anything to write home about. We had excellent luck with the 1 Montana minivan but even she had her moments.
This is the kind of business decision that should have been made long ago – well before GM’s holding out a tin cup for taxpayer money – and it shouldn’t be the last such, either.
Update: Here’s the official story on the announcement. Obama-selected GM Chairman Fritz Henderson announces that production of the Pontiac line will cease and 21,000 jobs will be cut.
In catching up on local news I found this story over at the Loudoun Times-Mirror titled, “Guns could be allowed in county parks.” (Cue the scary music!)
Moving in line with state regulations on firearms, the county Board of Supervisors took up the question of guns in county parks at its meeting April 13.
The board voted unanimously to forward the question to the Public Safety Committee, which meets April 22 at 4 p.m.
“I’d like to understand just what kind of protection we’re offering our citizens,” said Chairman Scott York (I-At large), who said he was unclear what the amendments to the county rules would be. “I pick this up and I think, ‘Well that’s great, fine and dandy, but what happens when somebody pulls out a gun at Franklin Park because we have just done this? What protection have we left residents?’
Actually, Chairman York, you’d hit the nail squarely and asked precisely the right question. I, too, would like to understand just what kind of protection you’re offering Loudoun’s citizens. You see, literally every time I’ve entered one of the county’s parks, I have never seen either an armed security guard or a Loudoun County Sheriff’s Deputy there with me at the same time. Considering that an armed criminal won’t care whether the act of carrying a weapon in the park is a crime – carried openly or concealed, I might add – then the absence of either that guard or deputy means you’re offering no protection to Loudoun’s citizens.
Someone who’s in the park pulling a gun on someone who’s minding their own business is, by definition, the aforementioned criminal and they can and will do that with or without the Board’s say-so. When that happens – should the Board neglect to step and and allow Loudouners to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights – then the Board has left Loudoun’s residents with no protection at all.
By all means, Chairman, go through the process and send this matter to the Public Safety Committee. But insist that the Board either get to offering that protection in the form of armed law enforcement or security personnel or clear residents to arm themselves as they see fit while in the parks.
I got a robo-call today featuring former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore urging me to declare for John Brownlee. The VA AG race is a tough one, from my perspective. I continue to weigh the options.
That line out of the commonly-known Miranda warning won’t be in there much longer if the Obama administration has their way. I noted this back on Thursday but didn’t have much of a chance to comment until now. The case in question is Michigan v. Jackson which was appealed to the Supreme Court in 1986. In that case, the Court ruled that police were not allowed to initiate questioning of a suspect who has asked for a lawyer until that lawyer is present. The administration’s position is that the Court should overturn that ruling.
The justices could decide as early as Friday whether they want to hear arguments on the issue as they wrestle with an ongoing case from Louisiana that involves police questioning of an indigent defendant that led to a murder confession and a death sentence.
The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said the 1986 decision “serves no real purpose” and offers only “meager benefits.” The government said defendants who don’t wish to talk to police don’t have to and that officers must respect that decision. But it said there is no reason a defendant who wants to should not be able to respond to officers’ questions.
At the same time, the administration acknowledges that the decision “only occasionally prevents federal prosecutors from obtaining appropriate convictions.”
Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air wrote on this on Friday saying that the only outlet covering this was a British paper. Apparently he missed the Fox News story I’ve linked. His primary complaint, however, is spot on:
Can you imagine what the outcry over this would have been had President John McCain, or for that matter President George W. Bush, had tried this? Newspapers around the nation would have decried his assault on civil liberties. PFAW and the ACLU would have staged rallies in every American city, and they would have called Bush, McCain, or any other Republican a fascist for denying legal counsel to people under police questioning. We’d have an endless line of appearances on television news programs from people who got coerced into false confessions after having been denied counsel.
Indeed. The story I’ve linked speaks of how “disappointed” civil-rights groups are but there’s been precious little they’ve had to say on the matter. Were this happening just 6 months ago, it would’ve been “outraged” not “disappointed” and there’d be an endless litany from the media instead of just this 1 story.
It’s almost as though all that concern about people’s civil rights were just political smokescreens. Hmmm.
I’ve made mention before that 1) America needs more domestic energy production, 2) the technology with the most promise to provide that with minimal environmental effects is nuclear, and 3) that we should be doing this now. Here’s Sen. Lamar Alexander in this week’s GOP address with thoughts on just these matters.
Conficker, the worm that has compromised thousands of PC’s globally, was giving everyone a fit on April 1, the date experts said it was destined to fire. That date came and went with nothing happening so the subject just fell from the public radar. Well, it’s coming back on the screen now that it appears to be activating:
A malicious software program known as Conficker that many feared would wreak havoc on April 1 is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm, security experts said.
Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware, they said.
Folks, you have to follow a few simple rules to protect yourself out here. First, make sure your system is updated. Microsoft put out a patch to Windows that neutralized Conficker back in October of 2008. If you’re up to date on that patch, you should be fine.
Second, keep your PC’s firewall up and the anti-virus software updated. Yes, you need both.
Third, exercise caution in what programs you install on your machine. Yes, buying anti-virus and anti-spyware software from the store or from the major players in those spaces is more expensive. It’s also less likely to contain unpleasant surprises.
I found an e-mail waiting for me when I got home showing that all 3 of the GOP candidates for Virginia’s Attorney General, John Brownlee, Ken Cuccinelli, and Dave Foster (that list is alphabetical, not by preference) have endorsed Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling for re-election. That’s good to hear.
For the record, so do I. Bolling has done a great job and his credentials more than justify re-electing him to his post. I’ve voting for Bill Bolling and so should you.
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