Year: 2008
Attention Young People
Socialism doesn’t work. Please stop voting for socialism.  Thank you.
Candidates That Are Toast
After New Hampshire, I think you can stick a fork in the following candidates, even if they aren’t going to drop out:
- John Edwards
- Ron Paul
- Bill Richardson
And it pains me to no end to say this:
- Fred Thompson
Senator Crapo’s Hold
Senator Crapo explains the hold he’s put on the Sullivan confirmation:
I recently had the opportunity to meet with Acting Director Sullivan to inform him of multiple concerns that I have had in recent years with BATFE treatment of small firearms dealers. Mr. Sullivan conveyed his belief that BATFE is fair and impartial in its treatment of these businesses, and only revokes federal firearms licenses when it has no other options. I am not satisfied with Mr. Sullivan’s response.
I’m not pleased either. The question is, will he look into this for real or keep pretending there’s no problem? I have no doubt this is what his underlings are telling him, but pretty clearly he’s not too interested in digging deeper. Sullivan remains in charge of the ATF even with his confirmation on hold, so I don’t know how much incentive he’s going to have to kowtow.
HR2640 Signed Into Law
A little birdy told me that HR2640 has Bush’s John Hancock now affixed to it. It is now law.
I’ll let this be an open thread for folks to have their say, good or ill.
Cowboy Up
Interesting article about a man who retired from Massachusetts to Arizona and took up what, for Massachusetts, would be an unusual hobby: Cowboy Action Shooting.
He and wife Debbie, aka Ruby Tucson, have gone to several shooting events, including one held in October in Tombstone.
At these events, says Gretsky, “only the top 1 or 2 percent are national competitors. The rest of us are just there to have fun.”
Even so, Gretsky has wound up with an arsenal that includes two six-guns, one shotgun and a rifle — something he says would have been tough to do back East.
“In Massachusetts there are very strict gun laws,” says Gretsky, who stresses that he’s “not a gun nut.”
Not long after moving to Tucson, Gretsky went to a local firing range. “It was the first time I’d held a gun since I’d used a .22 in Boy Scouts,” he says.
But he soon found out just going to the range “was kinda boring.” Then someone told him about cowboy action shooting.
He’s not a gun nut, but he acknowledges his completely leigitimate pastime would have been difficult to do back in Massachusetts. Cowboy Action is a quickly growing segment of the shooting sports with an apparently wide appeal. I think it will probably get wider as the baby boom generation, who were raised on westerns, start to retire, and head to places with sunshine and “easy access” to such lethal killing machines as a Ruger Single Six, which I’m not sure are on the Massachusetts “approved” list. Even if it was, you have to convince your local police chief that you have a good reason to keeping one, which he’s completely free to disagree with and tell you “no constitutional rights for you.”
Cowboy shooters are people we need to be reaching out to. I think their numbers are going to keep getting bigger.
Rolling Bombs
The big problem with using hydrogen for fuel is that it’s a gas. The combustibility of the gas is of little matter when it comes to using it as a transportation fuel. The problem is that in order to have enough of it to get anywhere, you have to liquefy it. There are two ways to do this, temperature and pressure.
The space shuttle uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel source, but stores it cryogenically, which is why the fuel tank has to be insulated with foam that likes to occassionaly fly off and damage the heat shielding. Cryogenic storage is expensive and impractical for use in earth bound transportation. It’s really impractical and too expensive for rockets too, but the alternatives kind of suck.
The other option is to pressurize the hydrogen to such a degree that it becomes a liquid at normal atmospheric temperatures. The first trade off in this kind of scheme is that it takes about 30% of the energy stored in the hydrogen to get it to a liquid state. The other major disadvantage to storing hydrogen in liquid state is that it has to be stored at about 10,000 psi, which is essentially bomb. And not just any bomb, a bomb that will spew cryogenic liquid everywhere. There’s also the issue with the tank material needing to stand up to wide temperature fluctuations as you start to draw off hydrogen, thus cooling the liquid down to a cryogenic state.
The other solution is to store it as a gas a very high pressures. This still has the problem of creating a bomb. It’s not the combustibility of the gas that’s a problem, it’s the energy stored up as pressure.
Find a Job for Bitter
Bitter is looking for a job around my parts.
I need to get out of here. Anyone got job tips for the northern suburbs of Philadelphia? Feel free to shoot me an email. This apartment complex, since being sold a few months ago, is quickly turning into slums. Crime will start going up. I always figured such a dramatic turnaround took longer because leases had to end, new people had to come in, it would take them a while to start causing trouble.  Even Sebastian can tell a difference only being down here every other weekend.
It would help me out too, because I’m tired of driving to DC, and her apartment complex does indeed suck rocks. I have indeed noticed it heading downhill. Right now, there’s a lot of noisy tenants who like to play loud music and leave trash laying around, but it’s only a matter of time before real problems start, like people breaking into cars and other such behavior.
Nutter Causing Waves With FOP
John Street is out as Mayor of Philadelphia. Michael Nutter is in. He started out pissing off the local FOP right before his inauguration.
 The Fraternal Order of Police is angered by Mayor-Elect Michael Nutter’s choice for his cabinet. His selection was a defense attorney for a man accused of killing a police officer.
Nutter’s appointment of Everett Gillison to Deputy Mayor of Public Safety is drawing the ire of the Philadelphia Police Department.
“It’s a mistake, I know our officers out there aren’t happy,” FOP President John McNesby said.
While working as a public defender, Gillison represented the man who shot and killed Officer Gary Skerski in 2006.
I’ll be honest, I’m going to stand with Nutter on this one. Every man is entitled to a fair trial, and entitled to have the assistance of council in his defense. There might be other reasons for not liking Gillison, but the fact that he did his duty as public defender is not among them.
Trial Day
Today Greg Rotz is going to court to challenge the unlawful revocation of his License to Carry Firearms by Franklin County Sheriff Robert Wollyung. Rotz had his license revoked for carrying openly, an activity not forbidden by Pennsylvania law, in a place he had a legal right to be while armed.
I talked about this story previously here, here, and here. For the sake of all of us in Pennsylvania, we do hope he prevails. I will let everyone know the verdict as soon as I can find out.
UPDATE: It would appear from folks who attended his hearing that Mr. Rotz has had his License to Carry Firearms reinstated. Excellent! Sheriff Wollyung has a lot to answer for in regards to abusing his authority.