For two decades automakers have been developing technology that could make vehicles go farther on a gallon of gasoline. But instead, they have chosen pep and size — making vehicles like the new Murano accelerate faster than cars like the old Mustang, and making them bigger.

The average vehicle, which 25 years ago accelerated to 60 miles an hour in 14.4 seconds, now does it in 9.9 seconds, a pace once typical only of sporty or luxury cars like Camaros and Jaguars. And vehicle weight now averages about 4,100 pounds, up from about 3,200 in the early 1980’s, as many buyers switched to larger, roomier cars or to sport utility vehicles and minivans, and as automakers added safety equipment.

Click here for link.

Couldn’t happen to a pair of nicer guys…(yeah, I’m being sarcastic)

Convertino, who resigned from the Justice Department last year and is suing senior Justice officials, is also charged with presenting false information at a sentencing hearing in a separate case in order to gain a light prison term for a defendant.

The indictments mark the latest embarrassing development in a case that was once hailed by the attorney general and others as one of the most important terrorism prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Click here for link.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Vietnam veteran who derved 31 years in the miliary, said in an interview yesterday that,

the lack of planning, the lack of post-invasion thought, even, was an ineptitude of the first order and possibly even the greatest ineptitude of the history of America.

Clearly concerned about the future of the Army, Col Wilkerson launched a damning riff against the administration;

I’m hearing from lieutenants, captains, majors, generals, many in uniform, many of whom were my students in years passed when I taught at the nation’s war colleges. I’m hearing from the civilians who were foreign service officers, civil service and so forth in our embassy in Baghdad and I can tell you that the morale in the uniformed military is being impacted and I can also tell you that our ground forces are stretched to the point where you hear talk about withdrawal from Iraq. Within 24 months, we’re going to have to withdraw from Iraq, whether the situation there, politically, economically and so forth, is adequate or not because we’ve stretched our ground forces to the point of breaking. We have officers who are leaving the Army and the Marine Corps now because they don’t want to do a third and possibly a fourth tour in Afghanistan or Iraq. We have people who are beginning to question their leaders, just as they did in Vietnam. We have families that are beginning to fall apart because of second and third tours in Iraq. This is a situation with which I am well familiar. The signs are there and the signs are available for anyone to see, which is what makes me consider Secretary Rumsfeld an inadequate Secretary of Defence at best because he doesn’t seem to see those signs, or if he does, he’s not doing anything about it.

Bush claims that the decision on when to withdraw will depend on the next administration, but it may end up being made for him.

Got this from Douglas Campbell on the Green All Views Listserv. It’s great! A scathing, yet humorous, essay on the Sport Utility Vehicle market segment.
Mercedes’ new SUV couldn’t come at a worse time. Can consumption be more conspicuous?

This segment is about want, naked and unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It’s well established that the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner’s childhood traumas.

Most people who buy the GL won’t know a Class IV hitch from a Mark 48 torpedo. And I, for one, am not going to congratulate some Bel-Air singleton for his wise vehicle purchase when it is so patently purblind and morally retrograde.

http://www.latimes.com/classified/automotive/highway1/la-hy-neil15mar15,0,721214.story?coll=la-home-highway1

5 minutes — Introductions; select timekeeper and (interim) Recording Secretary; approve agenda (Nathan)
45 minutes — Ed Boyd Speaks; Q & A; shall we endorse his campaign? (Nathan)
30 minutes — Les Evenchick speaks; Q & A; shall we endorse his campaign? (Nathan)
45 minutes — Kevin Zeese speaks; Q & A; shall we endorse his campaign? (Nathan)
20 minutes — Shall we stand a place-holder candidate against Van Hollen? (Nathan)
10 minutes — Officer elections (Co-chairs, Recording Secretary, Membership Coordinator, Outreach Coordinator) (Nathan)
10 minutes — T.P./S.S. Report (Mary)
10 minutes — M.G.P. Report (Nathan)
10 minutes — MGP ballot access petition (Nathan in place of Tim)
10 minutes — Shall MoCo endorse the BG&E rate hike protest? (Brandy Baker)
5 minutes — MoCo teleconference: When? (Nathan)
Because of a request that I could not deny, John A. Murphy will not be speaking at our meeting this month; instead, he will be speaking at our April meeting.

The Wisconsin Green Party gets a brief mention here…

The Watertown referendum, like most others in the state, began with the Wisconsin Green Party, which made a pitch to Eiler and her group in October. Drawing on a law from the Progressive Era that sanctioned “direct legislation” in municipalities as a curb on power, activists soon started gathering signatures — a number equal to 15 percent of the people who voted for governor in the last election.

Click here for link.

It’s easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, says University of Pennsylvania visiting professor Steve Freeman. That’s because Vegas slots are better monitored and regulated than America’s voting machines, Freeman writes in a book out in July that argues, among other things, that President Bush may owe his 2004 win to an unfair vote count. We’ll wait to read his book before making a judgment about that. But Freeman has assembled comparisons that suggest Americans protect their vices more than they guard their rights, according to data he presented at an October meeting of the American Statistical Association in Philadelphia.

Click here for link.

Got this from Scott Loughrey on his News_Junkie_GP Listserv.

Despite repeated reports over the past 18 months or so that the planned bourse would finally open for business on March 20, 2006 — and go head to head with the New York Mercantile Exchange and the ICE Futures Exchange in London — the start date has been postponed by at least several months and maybe more than a year.
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The theory is that all trades through the new bourse would be made in euros, not the U.S. dollar, which for decades has been the world’s primary reserve currency, as well as the one in which oil and most other commodities have been priced. As a result, European nations and other countries, especially Middle East oil producers, tired of having to buy billions of now weakening greenbacks to pay for their energy purchases, would no longer have to do so.

This, the conspiracy theorists contend, would knock the stuffing out of the U.S. currency and hasten the decline and fall of the American Empire, all the while allowing Iran to stick it to the Great Satan.

But, the theory continues, Washington will pre-empt all this by using Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a pretext for attacking the country.

http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_14125.shtml

Got this from Dennis Kobray at the Green All Views Listserv.

Many electric utility companies across the nation are collecting billions of dollars from their customers for corporate income taxes, then keeping the money rather than sending it to the government.

The practice is legal in most states. The companies say it is smart business.
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Among the electric utilities whose customer tax payments are not reaching tax coffers is Pepco, serving four states and the District of Columbia. Pepco collected nearly $546 million from customers to cover its income tax bill for the years 2002 through 2004. Yet the parent Pepco Holdings did not pay income taxes during those years; indeed, it received $435 million in tax refunds.

Click here for link.

Here’s yet another argument for a single, centralized, and nationalized health care system.

Startling research from the biggest study ever of U.S. health care quality suggests that Americans _ rich, poor, black, white _ get roughly equal treatment, but it’s woefully mediocre for all.

“This study shows that health care has equal-opportunity defects,” said Dr. Donald Berwick, who runs the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.

Click here for link.