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.
New Jersey Approves Photo Enforcement
Photo enforcement is the latest euphemism for using traffic cameras as a way to generate revenue. Governor Corzine, who himself has little regard for traffic laws, has signed the piece of garbage into law.
Assembly Transportation Chairman John S. Wisniewski (D-Middlesex) first wrote the measure with a complex set of requirements that would force localities to adopt one camera manufacturer’s specific technology. The initial draft mandated that: “the violation images are captured by a single, digital camera unit which produces a set of two images for each violation.” This would have excluded several vendors who use multiple camera setups and wet film to achieve the same result, but a subsequent amendment dropped the single camera requirement.
Someone check Wisniewskis portfolio or associations, and I’m sure you’ll find a link to the company that made that camera somewhere!
Local governments had lobbied heavily for the legislation as means of shoring up tight municipal budgets. To take advantage of the new ticketing program, they must submit a list of high-volume intersections to the state transportation department which has final approval over which locations can use cameras. Like Arizona, New Jersey’s proposed law would require each ticket to be “served by a law enforcement official.” This means that motorists may avoid paying a citation by dodging process servers for forty business days after the date of the alleged violation.
Tickets should not be about raising revenues for local governments, they should be about public safety. Any photo enforcement centered around raising revenues as an argument ought to be rejected, and the fact that the local government openly tout this reason is another example of government being arrogant and out of control. Sadly, I wish this was limited to The Garden State, but it is not. We have to remind these people who they work for.
I could do my own New Hampshire prediction …
… or I could just agree with everything Uncle says. Yeah, I’m lazy today.
Where’s The Outrage From the Left?
I guess it’s hard to get upset about police state tactics when there’s no easy way to blame George W. Bush for it:
“I’ve been (Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario’s) longtime supporter, but I tell you what, to send a SWAT team down there was just absolutely over the hill,” he said. “Inappropriate is not nearly strong enough a word. It was gross irresponsibility and stupidity. … Is this Russia? I don’t know what we’re coming to when they think your kid needs medical help and they send a SWAT team.”
You think? Tam has more. So does Uncle.
UPDATE: Other sources are indicating to me that the state isn’t entirely insane here:
A search warrant and order for medical treatment says there was good reason to believe Jon needed treatment. It states that two social services caseworkers tried to explain to Tom Shiflett they believed the boy needed medical treatment after observing injuries including a “huge hematoma” and a sluggish pupil. They offered to pay for treatment, and said they would have to obtain a court order for treatment if they couldn’t get Shiflett’s consent, the warrant says.
That would justify the warrant in my opinion.
“Shiflett shouted at this worker and advised this worker that if he obtained a court order, he better ‘bring an army,'” the warrant states.
A first responder with West Care Ambulance wrote in an affidavit that she and others in an ambulance crew also believed the boy needed medical treatment.
The responder wrote that paramedics left the residence for fear of their safety after Tom Shiflett refused to let them treat his son and became “verbally abusive” to the ambulance crew.
OK, that probably warranted sending out a few officers to serve the warrant, but the SWAT team?
I Wouldn’t Want to Be Ed Either
I pretty much agree with Tony Phyrillas that Ed Rendell has had a bad year. Any year that’s bad for Ed is good for us.
None of the governor’s initiatives made it past the Legislature. Rendell sought $2.5 billion in new or expanded taxes to pay for his agenda. He got none of it. Rendell proposed an $850 million energy plan, a multi-billion dollar plan to provide health insurance to the uninsured and a proposal to lease the Turnpike to continue sinking money into the state’s failed mass transit systems. He struck out on all three.
A personal plea for more gun control was shot down by the Legislature late in the year and Rendell couldn’t even get a smoking ban passed by the time 2007 ended.
Rendell squandered what political muscle he had going into 2007. My theory has always been that Rendell lied too often about property tax relief. While voters still liked Rendell and rewarded him with a second term, they stopped believing anything the governor had to say.
I guess I’m odd. I never believed anything he had to say.  Read the whole thing. Also bad news for Ed Rendell’s gun control agenda, Representative Lisa Bennington, who voted against us in the Judiciary Committee last month, had decided to quit after her term ends, because the pace of reform is just too slow for her.
We should all pat ourselves on the back for this one. I for one am happy to help contribute to frustrating the anti-gunners out of the Pennsylvania legislature.