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Re: Car Sales [driver100]

by graphicguy on Fri Oct 03 13:08:02 PDT 2008

driver.....looks like demand for oil is dropping world wide..... Just saw this article..... The market was dragged down this week by a surprise jump in crude inventories in the United States, the world's biggest consumer of energy. The US Department of Energy (DoE) said Wednesday that crude stockpiles rose 4.3 million barrels in the week ending September 26, surprising traders who had expected a fall of around 1.7 million barrels. US oil demand sank 7.1 percent over the past four weeks compared with the same period a year ago, according to the DoE data. Analysts at Merrill Lynch meanwhile slashed their 2009 global oil demand growth estimates to 400,000 barrels per day. Oil prices have dropped sharply from record high levels above 147 dollars reached in July on concerns that demand will falter badly. "People are realising that the decline in demand is probably not just a US phenomenon," said David Johnson, an oil analyst with Macquarie Securities in Hong Kong. "I think people are just becoming a little bit more bearish (negative) over their outlook for oil consumption over the next 12 to 15 months."

Re: Senate passes some light reading [steve_]

by gagrice on Wed Oct 01 21:19:40 PDT 2008

The list of Senators voting NO on the bill are a bipartisan group. 9 Democrats, 15 Republicans and 1 Independent. Allard (R) Barasso (R) Brownback (R) Bunning (R) Cantwell (D) Cochran (R) Crapo (R) DeMint (R) Dole (R) Dorgan (D) Enzi (R) Feingold (D) Inhofe (R) Johnson (D) Landrieu (D) Nelson (FL) (D) Roberts (R) Sanders (I) Sessions (R) Shelby (R) Stabenow (D) Tester (D) Vitter (R) Wicker (R) Wyden (D) I cannot imagine them getting the House to act by Friday. Will they add another 451 pages of PORK? Will the 110th Congress go even lower than their lowest 8% approval rating? They should.

Re: Whose to Blame By Hale "Bonddad" Stewart [dallasdude1]

by gagrice on Tue Sep 30 20:21:47 PDT 2008

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 or CFMA (H.R. 5660 and S.3283) repealed the Shad-Johnson jurisdictional accord, which had banned single stock futures in 1982. The legislation also provided certainty that products offered by banking institutions would not be regulated as futures contracts. This act was incorporated by reference into H.R. 4577 (see below). The legislation thus became law as a part of H.R. 4577 - Public Law 106–554, §1(a)(5) signed by Bill Clinton December 21, 2000. I got one question. Why did Bill Clinton sign it? Was he just that stupid or too busy looking for a new intern? It was never debated in the Senate or the House. It included the infamous "Enron Loophole". Bill Clinton and those that proposed the bill should all Hang in front of the Jefferson Monument. And let the birds peck off their flesh.

Re: Honda Acoord 2008 vibration is noraml according to Honda Motor Company [elliott2]

by ncjim on Sat Sep 27 13:07:39 PDT 2008

Agree 100% with this post. I noticed that the new Pilot commercials are touting the VCM...something about 3-cylinder mode, etc. Wasn't paying much attention to the ad at the time and have not seen it since. I will lay claim to preventing a friend from buying a V6 Accord within the last week, my very small contribution to trying to make Honda hurt. Honda needs to take a lesson from Johnson & Johnson when the Tylenol scare erupted in the 70s or 80s: fess up immediately, make it right, and continue to thrive. In the absence of Honda doing this, I'm one of those bigmouths who will make sure that not just 10, but 100, of my friends are aware of Honda's disdain for consumers who have gotten stuck with this vehicle.

By Ralph Z. Hallow

by dallasdude1 on Thu Sep 25 19:52:25 PDT 2008

Conservative activists fear that they are not exercising as much influence on the Bush White House as they did in previous Republican presidencies. In a memo to hundreds of fellow conservatives, a former Reagan administration official says traditional views are being edged out by a neoconservative "national greatness" ideology that accepts big government and advocates interventionist foreign policy. "Today, most conservative pressure ends up as simple cheerleading for the White House," Donald J. Devine, who was President Reagan's director of the Office of Personnel Management, wrote in the memo. "That can be helpful, but there is nothing that pushes politics further to the right, leaving conservatism and the Republican Party to drift." For nearly half a century, conservatives nudged American politics, Republican ideology and government policy toward modern conservatism's founding principles. Chief among those principles is limited government. Yet "government keeps growing," says Mr. Devine, now vice chairman of the American Conservative Union. "Journalistic conservatism is silent about this growth of government, which is especially fueled by neoconservative dreams of empire and which threatens the whole project of American liberty." Veteran conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans agrees. "By far the biggest political disappointment for me — and I think for many other conservatives — has been our failure to get a handle on the problem of big government," he says. "This very much interacts with the question of the GOP, which always runs pretty hard on this issue, but has trouble translating its rhetoric into practice." The close identification between the conservative movement and Republican politics is part of the problem, said former Reagan administration official Floyd Brown. "The Republican Party is becoming more and more entangled with big government," said Mr. Brown, now executive director of Young America's Foundation. "As that trend continues, the movement needs to stand up and differentiate itself from Republican politics — not that I am not a supporter of the president's, because I am." At a recent White House briefing, visiting conservative leaders urged the administration to fight harder for Senate confirmation of judicial nominees, even though some of the nominees were considered moderates who had served in the Clinton administration. "It is strange that conservatives are pushing us so hard on this when normally you would be opposing us for nominating a judge with a relatively moderate record and who served under Bill Clinton," Mr. Devine quoted White House political adviser Karl Rove as having told the assembled conservatives. "The Democrats have been so relentless that the whole battle has been between the left and the political center." Mr. Devine said, "Rove put his finger directly on the nub of the matter: Conservatism today is not even on the battlefield." In the resulting vacuum, Mr. Devine said, so-called "national greatness" conservatism — first articulated in the Weekly Standard — "replaced limited government as the ideal and filled the pages of journals on the right. ... As a result, today, Reagan mainstream conservatism lacks a public, intellectual voice." Mr. Devine doesn't find that voice in Pat Buchanan's new magazine, the American Conservative, or in William Kristol's neoconservative Weekly Standard, because neither places a premium on limited government. William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, opposes the kind of "Wilsonian interventionism" advocated by leading neoconservatives. "The kind of Wilsonianism that Bill Kristol advocates, I think, is wrong [because] it over-stretches our power [and] takes insufficient account of the institutional requirements for genuine reform, to simply impose a constitution on Iraq or anybody else," Mr. Buckley recently told Human Events, a conservative weekly. "If we cannot rise to oppose empire, the movement deserves to fail," Mr. Devine says in his memo. "All we need to do is ... speak up for our principles. "Philosophically, either [Mr. Buckley] was right that building an American world empire was against conservative principles, or Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Paul Johnson — with some National Review and Wall Street Journal support — were correct that a new American colonialism was required to bring peace and democracy to the world," Mr. Devine says. "Even President Bush had said: 'America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish' — but neoconservatives were still trying to push him there anyway."

Re: Bluetooth and Navigation [themerg]

by jlindh on Wed Sep 10 15:22:10 PDT 2008

A local shop installed the same bluetooth into my '08 Sonata as the dealer or his out-source shop will install on a '09 Sonata. I also happen to have a Parrot 4200 in our Ford Explorer, and also have a Garmin Nuvi with built-in bluetooth that can be used in either vehicle. First of all, the Garmin bluetooth is basically unusable due to poor audio quality. It also only integrates with the car audio system if you happen to be playing the audio from the Nuvi over your car radio via the FM transmitter. If you live anywhere near a large city, you're not going to find a clear FM channel to play the Nuvi thru. Forget the Nuvi bluetooth IMHO. The Parrot does integrate with, and silence, the Explorer radio using the radio mute input on the radio. Therefore, the radio will automatically mute when a call comes in or you make an outbound call. The audio will come from the car speakers. The Parrot can also be removed when you sell the car, but certainly doesn't look very "integrated" into the dash. The Parrot is voice operated although you're going to have to do a moderate amount of repeating in order for it to understand. The dealer installed bluetooth is made by Johnson Controls and is available online for $250 or so. The unit is not voice activated so you'll have to mute the radio with the steering wheel lever and push the button on the unit to initiate a call. After the initial "wake-up" button push, the unit does understand voice prompts. Not a big deal to accomplish. You can set the Johnson unit up to auto answer incoming calls, but you'll still have to mute the radio. Despite the small built-in speaker, I'd say the audio is slightly better from the Johnson unit than the Parrot. Of course, the Johnson unit looks better installed than the Parrot. I never used the overhead cubby for sunglasses, anyway. Yes, you could have a Parrot installed into your Hyundai and get the auto mute function and audio thru the speakers. They are both good, functional units. If I were forced to chose one or the other, I'd pick the Johnson unit because of the audio quality and appearance. One final suggestion, don't get 2 different type units if you're doing installations in multiple cars. The operational differences will drive you nuts.