This is disgusting. Eminent Domain in N.J. – Now They Just Steal Land.
It’s the tale of a man who wanted to sell his property to a developer. He worked hard and invested a lot of money to acquire the property and when he gets ready to sell it to a developer, the city council that must give its approval, says no. Then they start talking about Eminent Domain and their own developer.

Carol Segal has a problem: He wants to build townhouses on the six acres of land he owns in New Jersey’s Union Township and has contracted with a developer to build 100 townhouses there.
But the township government wants to develop the property themselves, and – incredibly – they have voted to take his land through the eminent domain process and let a local developer with political connections do the job.

This local developer just so happens to be the head of the local Democrat Party, and the Council members are, guess what, Democrat.

“They made it clear I needed them to get it done,” Segal told the newspaper, adding that he didn’t like the deals they offered, and said he told them he wanted to develop the land himself. Around April, Segal said, the meetings stopped.
“At first, I thought we were working together,” Segal said. “Now I realize they were trying to steal my land the whole time.”

Of course, this is nothing new. There is a 1.5 million sq. ft. regional mall, plus another 1.5 million sq. ft. in pad buildings around one corner here in Memphis. Plus the development all up and down the street separating the two areas. And all of the developers were either very cozy with the City Councils involved, or they were on the Council itself.
What is new is Kelo, which allows local governments to do just what they are doing in their case, and that is stealing some $12 million from Mr. Segal.
Like I said, disgusting.

Ronnie Earle is a poor excuse for a human being. DeLay Offered Deal Before Indictment.
This… person, who indicts companies, then drops the charges when they “donate” to his causes, offered a misdemeanor charge to DeLay, before he was ever indicted. It usually goes the other way around. You indict someone for a particular charge, then plea bargain it down to avoid the trial. To offer someone a misdemeanor plea before the indictment is just… unheard of.
This is on top of first indicting DeLay on an ex post facto charge, getting a no-bill on the 2nd grand jury, then before the results of the 2nd grand jury can be posted, he convenes a 3rd grand jury who finally gets him what he wants.
Ronnie Earle is a partisan hack who will stop at nothing to convict DeLay. What animosity drives him I don’t know, but he is making a fool of himself and everyone around him.

Well, as Sherlock Holmes puts it, “the game is afoot.” Time to see if my resume can open some doors and my winning personality can get me a job.
I spent a couple of hours last night going over figuring gross incomes over tax tables so I know how much taxes to withhold. This way I can at least break even with my current income. The baseline is lower than I thought, but still steep enough that it will take some doing to break even.
I have so far received one phone call and three emails. Let’s hope that all of these will translate into interviews. Let’s also hope that more headhunters will contact me. I need headhunters, you just don’t find the positions I am looking for in the paper.
If you know of a company that is looking for an experienced IT manager, please let me know and we can talk.
In the mean time, I’m heading over to Monster to see if there are any positions for me. Later.

I’m running behind, and the only thing worth commenting upon I can’t get to.
There is an article out there that says that Al Frankin’s co-host has left. Reasons to me are unknown. Most likely she is one of the rats leaving a sinking ship. Hopefully Al will have picked up on how to run a radio show by himself by now. Maybe ratings will increase with her gone, but after listening to their garbage, I doubt it. Air America is nothing but foul-mouthed, spiteful anger directed at anything Republican.
Also, Mike at Half-Bakered is down. His computer died and he is unable to get on-line. I am going over to help him out with it, but the prognosis looks grim.
That is all.

Well, I am starting to get run down over my present job. I have a lot of things I want to do on Saturdays but can’t, because I work then. I have approached my boss several times with ideas on how to get me out of that day, so I don’t have to constantly take it off, but she’s not listening.
So, Tuesday night I put up a basic resume on Monster, and yesterday out of the blue I got a call from a recruiter. I was not prepared to get a call that fast! I also thought with my record (being on disability and out of the IT work force for 6 years now) I was not a very appealing candidate. Anyway, I plan on meeting with him next week and seeing if these jobs he has open can meet my salary requirements. I need at least as much as I get with disability and my job pay, just to break even. I am barely scraping by as it is, I don’t need to go to work just to take an unaffordable pay cut.
Keep your fingers (toes, etc,.) crossed. I’ll keep you informed as to how it goes.
This may or may not affect my blogging, I don’t know if I’ll go to an evening format, or just get up at oh-dark-thirty (military slang for the middle of the night) and do it then.
Anyway, I have a lot to do between now and next week, I better get on it.

Wendy McElroy has drawn a very important line. Victims Versus Victimhood.
It’s like the difference between broke and poor. Broke is a temporary condition, inflicted on you by circumstances and easily rectified by a little hard work. Poor is a mental condition that weighs down on you and prevents you from getting a handle on your condition.
Being a victim is a matter of circumstance. Victimhood is a mental condition that tells yourself that you are being pushed down. Very rarely in this world today is it true. There is no concerted, coordinated effort to keep any group of people down. Except, of course, by the people who are telling you that you are being held down. And they are the only ones who are holding you down.
By telling you that you are oppressed, and telling you that they are the only ones that can rescue you, they give you the mantle of self-oppression and if you believe the bunk they put out, you willingly take on that yoke and oppress yourself.
Do you have a yoke on you? You should know, you most likely put it there.

This greatly disturbs me. The Police State Is Closer Than You Think.
Any circumvention of the rules that are linchpins in our legal society, no matter how innocent or well-intentioned, is still a violation. And like the tip of the sword, the rest of the violation will soon follow.

Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate.
The hysterical aftermath of Sept. 11 has put into place the main components of a police state.
Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.
President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the United States, the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

Our pursuit of terrorists on our own soil is a laudable goal, but not at the expense of the laws that have protected us since this country was created.
I am not all that sure that this author is entirely right, but I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong either. I present this to you for you to decide on your own, don’t take my (or any one elses) opinion as gospel. Do your own research and arrive at your own conclusion. That’s all I ask.
But remember, if this is true, then the end of the America I was born in has come to a close.

Here’s your future: You need not be paranoid to fear RFID.
The articles goes into several scenarios, where it shows you how you can be tracked by Radio-Frequency Identification Tags implanted into your clothing and accessories, and finally you.
Every time technology has been advanced, someone has found a way to abuse the use of it.
And here’s the point, driven home:

Somebody needs to sit down and think this through. Dozens of companies and government agencies are planning to use RFID to track nearly every move we make. And although many of the individual applications make sense, what would happen if they were all implemented, without oversight or restraint? We’d then live in a world in which everything we own gossips about us behind our backs.
And it would be too late to call the IBM Help Desk to ask for our privacy back.

I’ve said this so many times. If you are tracked wherever you go, are you truly free?

If you don’t know who he is, he’s the “spokesbird” for the National Rifle Association. He is used to teach children what to do with guns. You can get his training materials and other things here.
His message is simple, meant for kids in the preschool to 3rd grade range.
The message goes thusly: STOP! Don’t Touch! Leave the Area! Tell an adult!
No reading anything about guns being “evil” or anything like that. Just a simple message that beats anything that anti-gun groups could teach.
Well, Fox News has this article, Program Teaching Kids About Guns Draws Fire.
Most of the article is spent explaining the Eddie Eagle message and how effective it is. Then comes this paragraph:

But others disagree. Local emergency room doctor Art Kellermann has treated his share of juvenile gunshot victims. He’s skeptical of any plan that puts the burden on a young child to make a critical judgment about firearms.
“Nobody should trust Eddie Eagle to make their child any safer than before they took the program,” Kellermann said. “Rather than try over and over again to gun-proof our kids, I think we ought to child-proof our guns.”

This is not a critical judgment. It is meant to be a reflexive action. And the words decry his standing. How many 6 year-olds were shot by another 6 year-old? Usually the 6 year-old is shot by an older kid who is playing with the gun. If we can get the younger kid to leave the area, he can’t be shot.
And I’ll tell you right now it’s impossible to “child-proof” anything, let alone a firearm. When kids get old enough, they can figure out how to get around the child-proofing. It is way better to properly train the child how to deal with the firearms.

There is a movement underway to take control of the Internet away from the United States and place it in the control of the United Nations.
This anti-American conglomeration of thugs and dictators wants control of the “root” of the Internet. America may have no choice but to surrender it. Hopefully not.
While the United Nations Charter says it allows freedom of speech and the Press, it also says in Article Article 29 Paragraph 3. “These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
Which means that you have freedom of speech, et. al., only until you come up against the UN. Then they will take it from you.
Which means that if the UN controls the Internet, they could shut me down for saying BOO to them. Some exercise in free speech, eh?
We can’t let this happen. I don’t know what to do, but we can’t let this happen. I would rather have a US Internet by ourselves than allow control of my freedom speech and expression to be threatened by some French pencil-necked geek who doesn’t like what I have to say.
We invented the damn thing, we set it up, and we won’t let it go without a fight.

Do you remember back during the 2004 Presidential campaign, where Whoopi Goldberg made some nasty comments about President Bush? Do you remember when Slim-Fast dropped her as a spokesperson like a hot rock?
Well, the same thing just might be happening to Donald Sutherland. James Hirsen Blasts Non-U.S. Citizen Donald Sutherland.
In this article, it explains that Donald Sutherland is a Canadian citizen. And while on a trip abroad, he delighted in bashing the United States.
And being the “Heartless Republican” on the “Hillary Clinton campaign commercial” Commander in Chief, Sutherland makes a lot of people uncomfortable. He may have got himself fired from the show. His comments have certainly upstaged the show, creating a potential firestorm. Being such a central figure, he could even be a direct reason for the show being canceled.
But we won’t see it as such, at least not as directly. Since episodes are filmed months in advance, Sutherland could be fired today and we won’t see the episode where he leaves/dies until February or March.
Only time will tell.

Here you go. A White Oppressor? Who Me?

Your daughter is enrolled at a major university that has well-defined policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race. She decides to attend a campus event. The organizers forbid her entry because of her skin color: white.
Under concerted pressure from the Student Government Association, which prohibits racial discrimination at school-sponsored events, the organizers grudgingly admit your daughter. But they make a point of publicly humiliating her from the podium for the color of her skin.

And so opens another wonderful story about the double standard of reverse discrimination.
When will this end? How many times have you seen a “Black Power” t-shirt that is accepted, nay demanded, but you’re a racist if you have a “White Power” shirt? I am not excusing by any stretch of the imagination the KKK or any similar organizations. But if you can’t have White Power, then you shouldn’t have Black Power. That’s called equality of outcome and that is something Liberals have been clamoring for years.
So now we cannot exclude Blacks from any of our meetings, but they can exclude White people from theirs? I don’t think that is fair. But then again Liberalism has never been about fairness. It’s about making todays people apologize for what their ancestors might or might not have done. I can trace my ancestry back almost to the War Between the States. I’m pretty sure that none of my ancestors were slave owners, considering that I can trace them to Massachusets, and if the records were there, to Europe before that.
So why should I have to bow down, scrape on my belly an apologize for something that ended 145 years ago? I shouldn’t have to. And I won’t.
What I am saying is people like this need to play by the same rules. These blacks are playing the race card, and it is against themselves that they are playing it.
So they shouldn’t be surprised when they get bit in the butt about it.

From Neal Boortz:

You’ve heard this one, haven’t you? Well, maybe not. I’m not sure — just guessing — but this won’t make it to the Washington Post or the New York Times, unless you find it buried in the lower inside corner of page 25. It’s about the foreman of the Texas grand jury that returned that first indictment on Tom Delay. The foreman’s name is William Gibson. He is in his mid-70s. Yesterday morning he told our Austin affiliate KLBJ that he had made up his mind to indict Tom Delay long before he heard one piece of evidence presented by prosecutor Ronnie Earle. And why was he determined to indict Tom Delay? Because, it seems, he didn’t like some campaign advertisements that Delay ran in the newspapers during his last reelection campaign. Here’s what Gibson told KLBJ:

All this came out way before I was on the grand jury, these (ads)were in your paper, in Austin paper, everyone else’s paper, they was flooding the market around here. But those were way before I ever went on the grand jury and my decision was based upon those, not what might have happened in the grand jury room.

So .. here you have the foreman of the first grand jury to indict Delay making a rather astonishing admission that his decision was made on the bases of campaign ads he just didn’t like.

Luckily the law that DeLay was indicted under wasn’t passed until a year after the “offense” took place. Which would make this charge an ex post facto, against the law in the United States (with the exception of the Domestic Abuse Act, but I digress). So he had to impanel a second Grand Jury. That’s where Neal picks it back up:

Wait! There’s more!
We learned yesterday that last Friday Ronnie Earle made what some people call a frantic attempt to get yet another grand jury to indict Delay on new charges; this after he learned that his first indictment was fatally flawed. The second grand jury returned what is called a “no-bill.” That is, they refused to return an indictment. The procedure is for a no-bill to be made public the day it is returned. This didn’t happen. It was returned last Friday, and only made public on Wednesday of this week. Some excuse is being floated about not finding a judge to sign it. So … while this no-bill was sitting around waiting for a judge’s signature, Earle rushes to yet another grand jury on Monday ,,, a brand-spanking new grand jury. He presents the same evidence to this grand jury that he gave to the grand jury on Friday. The new grand jury didn’t know, however, that the Friday grand jury had refused to return an indictment. The no-bill, which should have been public by then, was mysteriously sitting around waiting for someone to find a judge with a pen. The new grand jury then returns an indictment for money laundering.

If you think that Ronnie Earle isn’t acting like a shady character, just gunning for a prosecutorial misconduct charge, then you’ve got another think coming. You just can’t do what he did, and get away with it. But even a glancing blow could be enough, having that “formerly indicted Senator” title following DeLay around for the rest of his life.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Successories, the motivational phrases topped with beautiful pictures to bring home the point.
What you may not be aware of is Despair.com, which uses the same beautiful imagery to drive home points that do nothing but drive a stake into the heart of morale.
Here is the newest example that I have found:

The funk that I was in yesterday continues. Even with Mike visiting me before we go to play Epic, I’m just not in the mood to post. My apologies, but I think it’s SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) kicking in. This is a condition that makes people with depression more depressed over the winter months because of the lack of sunlight. It especially hits hard right as the season changes, because you can notice the days are getting shorter.
I’ll try again tomorrow.