Year: 2007

Tom Shales – Dan Rather Takes On Network News With His Tart Remark – washingtonpost.com

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Never been a great fan of Rather, but I’ve always respected him as a journalist.

He said the truth, and that’s why people are squealing like the pigs they are.

Tom Shales – Dan Rather Takes On Network News With His Tart Remark
By Tom Shales
Wednesday, June 13, 2007; Page C01

‘It may not have been the wisest thing I’ve done this week,’ Dan Rather joked yesterday by phone from his office in New York.

Wise or not, the former CBS anchor’s comments about the network’s evening newscast have created a firestorm — the kind that is probably good for the TV news business.”

Rather sparked the controversy during a radio appearance Monday morning when he said CBS executives have attempted over the past year to lure viewers to the “CBS Evening News” — which has plummeted in the ratings — by “dumbing it down and tarting it up.” He said they have tried to graft the ” ‘Today’ show ethos” onto the program, which just happens now to be anchored by former “Today” star Katie Couric.

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And in The Get A Life Department

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Sorry, but I want my women in meat space, not cyber space.

Playboy takes a ride to Second Life

Adult magazine unveils virtual rabbit head-shaped island populated with female avatars and merchandise.
June 12 2007: 1:07 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Playboy Enterprises, Inc. slipped into the virtual world known as Second Life Tuesday with the launch of Playboy Island.

The adult entertainment company said it is offering Second Life residents a taste of the Playboy lifestyle on a rabbit head-shaped island, which houses a retail store and will feature events and social opportunities.
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Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick talks about what he sees as the future implications for Second Life and the 3-D Internet.
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The virtual Playboy store includes merchandise from PlayboyStore.com and ShoptheBunny.com, and is staffed by female avatar employees wearing Playboy-branded apparel or Playboy Bunny costumes. Playboy-branded apparel can be purchased in the virtual store for real-world wear or Second Life avatars.”

US Air Force seeks replacement for high-explosive cannon rounds-12/06/2007-Washington DC-Flightglobal.com

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Anyone out there know how frequent in-bore explosions for the PGU-28 A/B there are?

This round replaces the venerable M56 round, and is supposed to offer better ballistics, and a fuse that will detonate at lower velocities (hence higher ranges) than its predecessor.

It sounds like the fuse is just a bit too sensitive.

The PGU-27 (bottom) and M56.

US Air Force seeks replacement for high-explosive cannon rounds

By Stephen Trimble

High-explosive incendiary (HEI) rounds fired by most US Air Force fighters may soon be replaced in the inventory by inert 20mm bullets.

The General Dynamics PGU-28 A/B 20mm semi-armour piercing HEI round entered service during the last decade with the M61 cannon installed on the Boeing F-15, Lockheed Martin F-16 and Lockheed F-22. As of 2001, the USAF and US Navy had stockpiled 8 million PGU-28 rounds, each of which features a pyrotechnic fuze and a pyrophoric explosive.

But the USAF is now seeking a replacement round, launching a market survey on 1 June to identify potential sources for a “non-fuzed, non-explosive round with PGU-28/B [aerodynamic] performance”, an acquisition notice says. The market survey is being conducted by the Joint Munitions and Lethality acquisition centre at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey.

The current stockpile of PGU-28/B rounds “limits mission effectiveness,” the notice adds. Concerns about the safety of the HEI round have surfaced involving in-bore explosions. An upgraded version of the PGU-28/B has satisfied the navy’s Boeing F/A-18 community, but not the air force.

Unlike the F-18, the air force’s fighters have cannons mounted directly beside the cockpit, making in-bore explosions an injury risk for the pilot.

Anticipating the requirement long in advance, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) has licensed manufacturing rights in the USA for a round designed by Germany’s Rheinmetall.

The Penetrator with Enhanced Lateral Effect (PELE) round would provide a tungsten casing that would be shattered on impact by a plastic slug. The effect is a blast of shrapnel spreading outward, or laterally, from the impact area.

The 20mm PELE round for the M61 cannon was designed with the air-to-air role of the fighter as the main focus. However, its utility in strafing runs against ground targets – an increasingly important mission for the USAF – has never been tested, says Rodney Ward, a business development director for ATK Ammunition Systems.

In 2004, ATK received a USAF contract to test the air-to-air effectiveness of the PELE round, Ward says. An operational test and evaluation phase is ongoing and should be completed in the fourth quarter of this year.

The market survey is an indication that the air force will seek alternatives to the PELE round to replace the PGU-28/B. Ward says the programme reflects a major change in combat capability for the air force, rather than just a straightforward replacement for a round already in the inventory.

“This is a whole new capability,” he says. “They [will] have a round that is effectively inert that has a lot of blast effect.”

Here is the scoop on on PELE.

Penetrator with Enhanced Lateral Effect (PELE)

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PELE technology makes it possible to produce fully inert projectiles. The new technology modifies the projectile performance characteristics,significantly enhancing the accuracy of tank and artillery fire, while substantially reducing the risk of collateral damage. Non-explosive PELE ammunition consists of a high-density casing containing a core made of low-density, low-compressibility material. Upon impact with the target, the low-density material inside the shell is compressed to such an extent that the casing bursts, generating numerous fragments that are propelled in the direction of fire. This way, the round’s lethal impact is restricted to a defined space or limited area, reducing the likelihood of collateral damage. PELE and ALP make it possible to manufacture warheads containing little or no explosive. Moreover, existing ammunition can be inexpensively retrofitted with PELE and ALP technology. Both technologies can be integrated in full- and sub-caliber rounds, and fired from current and future weapon systems.

US Air Force to expand Boeing F-15C active radar upgrade with Raytheon-05/06/2007-Washington DC-Flight International

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My guess would be that the US is expecting to see more cruise missile threats, and this upgrade is about dealing with this.

Then again, it may be that the F-22 is too damn expensive to buy enough to use in a meaningful defense of the US, and the JSF is behind schedule.

US Air Force to expand Boeing F-15C active radar upgrade with Raytheon

By Stephen Trimble

Raytheon is reviving a programme to upgrade the US Air Force’s Boeing F-15C fighters with active electronically scanned array radars, expanding on an initial phase performed on a single squadron of 18 Alaska-based aircraft in the late 1990s.

The emergency supplemental funding bill for fiscal year 2007, signed by President George Bush in late May, contains about $62 million to upgrade a small number of active duty F-15Cs with an enhancement of the ‘brick’ array APG-63(V)2 radar previously integrated to now use a tile design, says Mike Henchey, Raytheon business development director. Raytheon has previously designated this as the APG-63(V)3, but it is likely to enter service under a new designation in the APG-series, he says. The (V)3 variant refers to the active array of transmitter/receiver modules, with this front-end to be mated with the APG-63(V)1 radar processor already installed on most of the USAF’s active duty F-15Cs.”

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Pictures: First Australian Airbus A330 MRTT air-to-air refuelling tanker rolled out-12/06/2007-London-Flightglobal.com

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This is significant in terms of the Boeing EADS competition for tankers, because both now both companies have their tankers flying, and either in deployment (Boeing), or months from deployment (EADS) with a foreign military.

Pictures: First Australian Airbus A330 MRTT air-to-air refuelling tanker rolled out

By Barbara Cockburn

The first of five Airbus A330 multi role tanker transports (MRTT) ordered by the Royal Australian Air Force has been rolled out of the hangar at the conversion centre of EADS Casa in Getafe near Madrid.”

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Warplane nose art Done in by PC RAF

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Another grand tradition lost.

PC brigade ban pin-ups on RAF jets – in case they offend women and Muslims

In killer heels and little else, they have a definite deadly charm.

But the risque images of women that have decorated warplanes since the First World War have been scrubbed out.

The Ministry of Defence has decreed they could offend the RAF’s female personnel.

Officials admitted they had no record of any complaints from the 5,400 women in the RAF.

But commanders are erring firmly on the side of caution and “nose art”, as it is known, has been consigned to the history books.

Harrier jump jet bombers currently launching daily airstrikes against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan have been scrubbed clean to comply with the orders.

Critics said the MoD should be focusing on more important issues – such as the quality and quantity of equipment available to British forces sent off to war.

Nose art first appeared on warplanes during the First World War and enjoyed a golden age during the Second World War when thousands of American fighters and bombers were decorated with pictures of glamorous women.

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Some Interesting Pieces of Economic News

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Some news that, when taken together, sounds like a perfect storm.

This first one is most straightforward:

Home foreclosures leap 19 percent in May – Jun. 12, 2007
90% leap over last year; figure pushed up by slowing real estate market, subprime meltdown.
June 12 2007: 3:23 PM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Home foreclosures in May jumped 90 percent from a year earlier, reflecting a poor spring housing market and foreshadowing even higher levels later in 2007, real estate data firm RealtyTrac said Tuesday.

The May foreclosures – a sum of default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions – totaled 176,137, up 19 percent from April, the firm said in its May
‘After a barely perceptible dip in April, foreclosure activity roared back with a vengeance in May,’ James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, said in a statement.

‘Such strong activity in the midst of the typical spring buying season could foreshadow even higher foreclosure levels later in the year,’ said Saccacio. ‘Certainly not every community nationwide is seeing an increase in foreclosures, but foreclosed properties are becoming more commonplace and adding to the downward pressure on home prices in many areas.’

RealtyTrac said there was a national foreclosure rate of one foreclosure filing for every 656 U.S. households during May.

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The message here is very basic. We are headed for some VERY bad times in real estate.

Even if one assumes a 24% YoY increase in foreclosures in the next three years, that puts foreclosures down to about 1 filing for every 328 homes at the end of that, and we have a few TRILLION in mortgage resets on adjustable rate mortgages coming down the pipe.

I’m not sure if the market will drop significantly, or just become illiquid. The latter is MUCH worse, becaude it means that you can’t sell a house period.

The next one is a bit more complex. Basically, the private equity frenzy is being squeezed by higher interest rates. This is yet ANOTHER bubble, in this case, it is driving the stock market, and it looks to be close deflating

The people who really drive these deals make their money on the transaction, and if they can’t buy, then they will sell.

Rising rates threaten the buyout boom

A shift in the bond market could signal an end to the cheap money that has fueled the surge in private equity buyouts.
By Grace Wong, CNNMoney.com staff writer

By Grace Wong, CNNMoney.com staff writer
June 12 2007: 1:08 PM EDT

LONDON (CNNMoney.com) — Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, took home nearly $400 million in pay last year and stands to reap billions when his firm goes public – a reflection of the booming success of private equity firms.

But the favorable conditions that have lined the pockets of Schwarzman and other kings of the buyout business are running into headwinds.

For years, Blackstone and other private equity firms – which have become the new face of dealmaking on Wall Street – have basked in an era of cheap money and low interest rates. But turmoil in the Treasury bond market is raising worries that this golden age may be coming to an end.

Bond pricesfrom Tokyo to Frankfurt to New York have sold off in recent weeks amid concerns that interest rates are marching higher worldwide. That’s pushed up bond yields and fueled worries that it will be harder to borrow money. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.

“This is the end of the cheap money cycle,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald.

In the United States, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note has kept pushing higher since it eclipsed the key 5 percent level last week. Early Tuesday, the yield was around 5.21 percent, up from 4.88 percent just two weeks ago.

Analysts say the rise in bond yields means bond investors are finally coming to terms with big changes in the global economy – such as rising commodity prices and rising labor costs in former low-cost countries like China – and many expect long-term yields to keep heading higher.

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Finally, we have inflation heating up in China. This means that the Chinese central bank will have have to raise interest rates, which will have the effect of strengthening the Chinese Yuan, which will have the effect of weakening the dollar, increasing US inflation.

This will likely, for both currency and inflation reasons, lead to increased rates from our central bank, the Fed.

Food costs send inflation in China to 27-month high – Jun. 12, 2007

Rising cost of pork sends food prices soaring in May; more interest rate hikes expected.
June 12 2007: 3:50 AM EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) — Surging food prices boosted China’s annual consumer price inflation in May to a 27-month high, extending a rising trend and reinforcing expectations that interest rates will rise further.

Inflation quickened to 3.4 percent from 3.0 percent in April, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday, as food prices, which make up a third of the consumer basket, rose 8.3 percent from a year earlier and a shortage of pork caused meat prices to jump 26.5 percent.

The overall inflation figure was in line with the median forecast of a Reuters poll of economists, but Shanghai’s benchmark stock market index fell as much as 2.1 percent at one point on expectations of tighter monetary policy. It recovered in early afternoon to stand 0.65 percent higher.

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Look for This on Ebay

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Remember my post about Bush getting his watch stolen?

Here is a description.

From Mystery of President Bush’s watch in Albania

Italian media reports said that Mr Bush only noticed his watch was missing when he got back to his armour-plated people-mover to be whisked back to Tirana airport. By the time he stood on the aircraft steps to wave goodbye someone on his staff had given him a replacement watch. He is said to wear a $50 Timex with the Stars and Stripes on the dial.

Heck…I’m tempted to put a similar model of watch up for bidding on Ebay.

And in the War over Spam Bots, There is Escalation

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A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

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“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.


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Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

He lives in the former Soviet Union there’s a surprise.

On the bright side, with the mob penetration of those countries, hitmen are cheap and plentiful.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

“For software, this is wildly hard,” said John Douceur, a Microsoft researcher. “Computers are tripped up by all the photos at different angles, with variable lighting conditions and backgrounds and the animals in different positions.”

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

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It would be nice if this were to get some of those animals adopted.

Adopt a stray. Mutts and alley cats are just as good pets, and they don’t have the flaws from inbreeding.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

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That is an insanely good “out of the box” application for this technology.

Doughy Pantload Wants to Eliminate Public Schools

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Let’s be clear about this. There are two goals here. Eliminating the teachers’ unions, because they support dems, and resegregating schools.

Do away with public schools – Los Angeles Times
Jonah Goldberg

Government is inept at running schools. It should subsidize education for needy students, then get out of the way.
June 12, 2007

HERE’S A GOOD question for you: Why have public schools at all?

OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government’s interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can’t leave any child behind.

he problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid “behind” is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run 90% of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?

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Brown Disses Tony Blair Over “Dodgy Dossier”

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Brown has pretty much said that Blair used maipulated intel on this.

When the Tories win, there will be an investigation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony Blair goes to gaol over this, as well he should.

Brown promises to avoid the mistakes that led to war in Iraq

By Andrew Grice and Ben Russell
Published: 12 June 2007

Gordon Brown has promised to prevent the “party political” use of intelligence material so that he would never repeat Tony Blair’s mistake in taking Britain to war on a flawed prospectus.

On his first visit to Baghdad, the incoming prime minister said he would learn lessons from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when Mr Blair based his case for war on intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Brown said he had already begun discussions with Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, to ensure security and intelligence material was collected “free of the party political process” and was ” fully verified” if it was to be made public. “That is learning the lessons from things that happened in the past, and we should make sure that we can do things better in the future,” he said.

His remarks were seen as a barely coded criticism of Mr Blair and an attempt to draw a line under a controversy which left a stain on the Government. Mr Blair’s official spokesman said measures to reform the use of intelligence recommended by the 2004 Butler inquiry were already being taken forward.

The Chancellor, who heard nine mortar shells land near by during his Baghdad visit, refused to be drawn on a possible cut in the number of British troops in Iraq. He said he was there to “listen and learn” and that such decisions were for another day.

In interviews, he declined to repeat Mr Blair’s pledge to the Iraqis that Britain would not “cut and run” but said Britain had obligations to the Iraqi people and the United Nations. He said the number of British forces would continue to decline as Iraqis took over more responsibility for security.

Mr Blair and Mr Brown rejected growing demands for an immediate inquiry into the mistakes made before and since the invasion, but Mr Brown left open the option of calling one after more British troops have left Iraq.

Last night a Tory attempt to force the Government to hold an inquiry into the conflict was rejected by 288 votes to 253 in the Commons. Ten Labour MPs backed the calls for an inquiry.

Earlier, the Government amendment saying that a further inquiry would ” divert attention” from the campaign in Iraq was passed by 274 votes to 229, a majority of 45.

During the debate, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, had dismissed the idea as self-indulgent and poured scorn on Conservative calls for the Government to accept the principle of an inquiry, insisting that there had been four inquiries into the war.

She said: “To carry this motion would be both an unnecessary and a damaging diversion of effort, focus and attention. All our time and energy is badly needed now to address the challenges of the present. It is our responsibility to the people of Iraq which should receive our focus and attention in the critical times ahead.”

William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, urged ministers to bow to the ” gathering consensus” and called for an inquiry by privy councillors. He said: “It’s not true that our troops would be demoralised or our enemies would take heart if we took the trouble to find out what’s gone wrong. In a democratic society the examination of successes and failures is a sign of strength not of weakness.” Michael Moore, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, told MPs: “The Government is still trying to avoid an inquiry while hinting that there will be one, simply ducking the question of when.”

Fox News Doesn’t Do News

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Yes, they spend more time on she who must not be named than they do on the Iraq war.

That’s ignoring the pundits who are dishonest, stupid, and just plain insane.

War takes up less time on Fox News – Yahoo! News

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer Mon Jun 11, 9:52 AM ET

NEW YORK – On a winter day when bomb blasts at an Iraqi university killed dozens and the United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians in Iraq had died in 2006, MSNBC spent nearly nine minutes on the stories during the 1 p.m. hour. A CNN correspondent in Iraq did a three-minute report about the bombings.

Neither story merited a mention on Fox News Channel that hour.

That wasn’t unusual. Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months of the year, and considerably less than CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN’s daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC’s. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time.

The independent think tank’s report freshens a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas, and it comes at a delicate time for Fox. Top Democratic presidential candidates have refused to appear at debates sponsored by Fox. Liberals find attacking Fox is a way to fire up their base.”

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The Surge is Working—NOT

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We’ve already lost. Let’s get out before we lose any more troops.

Bombings target 3 key bridges in Iraq – Yahoo! News
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 41 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday — the third bridge attack in as many days in an apparent campaign against key transportation arteries.

The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber. Three U.S. soldiers guarding that bridge were killed in Sunday’s blast.

The explosion at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday — not thought to be a suicide bomb — struck a bridge linking the villages of al-Qariya al-Asriyah and al-Rashayed in northern Babil province.

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We’re F&^%ing Up Afghanistan

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This is why Iraq is so dangerous. There are places in the world that need those resources.

U.S. Troops Kill 7 Afghan Police

U.S. Troops Kill 7 Afghan Police
Tuesday, Jun. 12, 2007 By AP
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(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Afghan police mistakenly thought U.S. troops on a nighttime mission were Taliban fighters and opened fire on them, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft, killing seven Afghan police, officials said Tuesday.

U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops, meanwhile, killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during an eight-hour battle in southern Afghanistan on Monday, the coalition said.

President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman labeled the shooting at a remote police checkpoint in the eastern province of Nangarhar ‘a tragic incident’ caused by a lack of communication.

‘The police forces were not aware of the coalition’s operation,’ said spokesman Karim Rahimi. ‘The police checkpoint in the area thought that they were the enemy, so police opened fire on the coalition, and then the coalition thought that the enemies were firing on them, so they returned fire back.’

The commander at the post, Esanullah, who goes by one name, said U.S. gunfire and helicopter rockets killed seven policemen and wounded four.

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Dennis Kucinich Charging Windmills Again

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To describe Kucinich as Quixotic is an understatement.

If he charges at any more windmills, the USA will be a windmill free zone.

Let’s be clear. A 50 degree F delta creates only a 3% difference, and since gas is almost always in underground tanks, you won’t see more than a 10 degree delta, or a 0.6% delta, the equivalent of less than $0.02/gallon.

It’s a non issue.

Expanding gasoline a heated issue – Los Angeles Times

U.S. lawmakers press for service stations to install devices to give customers what they pay for in the summer.
By Elizabeth Douglass, Times Staff Writer
June 9, 2007

Federal lawmakers took aim at oil companies and service station owners Friday, accusing them of cheating customers by ignoring fuel’s tendency to expand with higher temperatures. U.S. motorists could pay an extra $1.5 billion this summer because of it, they said.

“It is a little-known industry secret that the amount of gasoline you put in your tank when you fill up in the summer is less than the amount in the winter, in terms of weight and energy content,” said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), who conducted a congressional hearing on the issue Friday.

“People are paying for gasoline they’re not getting.”

The “hot fuel” price penalty is legal — and not in dispute. But consumer groups, truckers and others say the cost to drivers is soaring along with gasoline and diesel prices. They want gas stations to install devices that would end the inequity by automatically adjusting volume according to the temperature at the pump.

“You’re not getting a real gallon when it’s hot,” said John Telles, a Pinole, Calif., trucker who joined one of several lawsuits filed last year against fuel retailers over the practice.

“I figure every time I fill up my truck, it’s costing me probably anywhere from $5 to $10, and every time I fill the car, it costs me a buck or two. I lose money on it,” Telles said in an interview.

The cost of the problem is most evident in California, where the weather is consistently warm and motorists pay among the nation’s highest prices for fuel. During the summer, fuel expansion could cause motorists here to overpay for gasoline by $228 million, according to a new report by the House subcommittee on domestic policy, which held Friday’s hearing.

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