What a wonderful last day I had yesterday. We had a party, a talent show, and all of the clients signed a card for me.I must admit, in all my years of working, this is the first time this has ever happened to me. I have just usually snuck off into the sunset, never to be seen again. I am a little embarrassed to be the center of attention like that, but it also feels good. I made a positive difference in these peoples lives, and they truly hate to see me go.
The good news is I’m not going very far. I will still be serving this portion of the community, so it’s not like I took a job in the IT sector and will never see them again.
I must admit, I am a little sad to go myself, but things must change in order to grow. I have reached my full potential in this pot. I must be repotted and be allowed to grow some more.

I’ve jumped up and down on this subject since well before I started this blog: Sprint Service Lets Parents Track Down Kids Via GPS.
It sounds like a good idea, it really does. But there is a difference between good, sound ideas and ideas that sound good.
The secret to changing any society is to start with the children. If you can get the children to accept it, then by the time they are adults, the changes are in place and permanent.
So now we are being tracked everywhere we go. Is there any privacy anymore? Are you truly free if someone is always looking over your shoulder? For example, say you and some friends went to a bar to socialize. You are the designated driver. Prove that you didn’t drink. A suspicious wife or parent would accuse you of drinking, and there is nothing you can do to prove that you didn’t drink. Guilty by association.
And so it is with law enforcement. If they get hold of these records, or even live data, you will have to prove a negative to them for every move you make. I thought the burden of proof was on the state, not on the citizen?
And so it begins. Look for the death of privacy of any type within my lifetime.

And so it begins. Today, while not a normal work day, is my last day at work. I’m off tomorrow for Good Friday, and that’s it. I am officially unemployed until the 25th or so. Then my new adventure starts. I’m working today because they were going to give me a going away party Tuesday, but forgot the food. Oh, well…. That’ll happen today.
I’m actually kind of sad to go, but a little relieved, I’ve been driving 4 hours a day for the last 4 years and it’s gotten a little frustrating because I wasn’t able to get anything really done between runs. It seemed that I just got done brining everyone in when it became time to start taking everyone home. Looking at the clock, I only had 60-90 minutes, 2 hours on the outside any way.
In any case, the die is cast, and I’m on my way.

Acquaintance Lissakay has some points to make as far as immigration. All of them very good, and quite logical. It makes you wonder why Congress hasn’t thought of the same things.
Unfortunately there are other forces at work against Congress. For one thing, big businesses who employ illegals will complain to their Congressman when INS raids their place of business. Which leads to the Congressman telling INS to not enforce the law. And so it goes.
But I think we are being set up. Congress routinely has a penchant of coming at a problem backasswards, in other words they attack a problem on the flank where there is no problem. Instead of directly attacking the immigration problem, they will come after citizens and make them have a National ID and call that “seriously impacting the problem.”
Don’t worry, my words aren’t going anywhere any time soon. You can come back for me to say “I told you so!” in a couple of years when they pass the National ID Act. Which will require one ID for everybody, except illegals. And it won’t do a damned thing about the problem, except exert another layer of bureaucracy on the regular law-abiding citizens.

The title says it all: Kiefer Sutherland Signs on for More ’24′.
Kiefer just signed up for three more seasons, and is also a new co-executive producer of the series. All good news. This is my favorite show, and it keeps you on the edge of your chair for every minute. Good stuff.

Follow this link. Now. I demand it. And if you’re not shedding tears of pride, sorrow and happiness, then you have no heart.

Yes, the French are surrendering again. This time to rioting youth who want lifetime job security. This is what you get when you make things like jobs a right instead of something to be earned.
Just look at the job system over there. If you want to fire someone, you need a paper trail a mile long and a major reason, like embezzling or other gross job misconduct. If you want to lay someone off because of a down turn of business, you can’t. Your choice is to pay them three years severance pay, or park them in a corner and give them nothing to do, hoping they will quit from boredom. Which is why it’s almost impossible to get a job, because once you’re in, you’re basically in for life.
Such is the Socialist Utopia called France.

I’m not a fan of The West Wing, I find the characters a lot too self-important, and they all speak too fast, as if they have to get more dialog in than a regular show. But just out of morbid curiosity, I do find myself watching it from time to time, despite the heavy left-wing politics of the show.
So now comes this, via Drudge:

SURPRISE! DEMOCRAT WINS ‘WEST WING’ PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!
Sun Apr 09 2006 18:11:08 ET
**Exclusive**
The presidential election depicted Sunday night on NBC’s ‘WEST WING’ would have had a different ending had it been held four months earlier.
The reversal of fortune for Matt Santos — the Democratic nominee, played by Jimmy Smits, who was the victor — had nothing to do with any shift in opinion among voters or a liberal ideology of the show’s writers and producers.
No…
Instead, Lawrence O’Donnell, an executive producer of the show, said he and his fellow writers had declared Santos the winner only after the death, in mid-December, of John Spencer, who portrayed Santos’ running mate.
At the time of Spencer’s death, the plot for Sunday night’s episode had been set: The election was to be won by Alan Alda’s Arnold Vinick, a maverick Republican (modeled a bit on Sen. John McCain), whom many Democrats (including the Democrats who write the show) could learn to love.
But after Spencer died, O’Donnell said in a recent interview, he and his colleagues began to confront a creative dilemma: Would viewers be saddened to see Smits’ character lose both his running mate and the election? The writers decided that such an outcome would prove too lopsided, in terms of taxing viewers’ emotions, NYT reporter Jacques Steinberg will claim on Monday.

More condescension from left-wingers, who think the average person can’t handle anything approaching real life on the tube.
It says a lot about how they view regular people.

It seems that ABC is catching up with the rest of the world. Report: ABC to Put Shows Online for Free.
They plan on putting shows on line, but it looks streaming instead of Podcasting, because the article makes a point that you can’t flash through the commercials. It is unlikely that this will go anywhere, simply because when people spend their time, bandwidth and disk space downloading what they want, they don’t want commercials.
We’ll see how this plays out.

I didn’t think this was possible: Ponte: Couric Further Left Than Rather.

Katie Couric’s politics “are apparently even further to the Left and more partisan Democratic than Dan Rather’s,” commentator Lowell Ponte writes.
“For this reason, she is unlikely to restore CBS’s credibility or redeem CBS’s well-deserved reputation for left-wing bias.” If Couric’s previous work is any indication, she could bring to CBS not only her liberal bias but also her penchant for making potentially inflammatory comments.

The story recounts a couple of times where The Perky One opens her mouth and sticks both feet in. Comments that would have gotten anyone else fired, just roll off her like water off a duck.
The story includes her resume, including getting kicked off the air at CNN and on and on.
Even Salon.com didn’t pull any punches:

In a March 18, 2004 profile in the Left-leaning Salon.com, Rebecca Traister detailed the stories of “Queen of Mean” Couric “throwing temper tantrums on the set, bullying her staff and using her influence to get people fired, mailroom boys and network executives alike,” Ponte reports.
“Ann Coulter was right to describe Couric as the ‘affable Eva Braun of morning TV … she hides behind her Girl Scout persona in order to systematically promote a left-wing agenda.’”

When you can’t get a sympathetic magazine to portray you in a positive light, something’s wrong. Very wrong.

Terry over at Possumblog has recounted his tale about getting DSL and having the modem die after one day on line. It’s humorous, in that sad sort of way.
Here’s what I wrote in his comments:

… I’ve had my cable service for almost 4 years now, and the one time I did have what looked to be a bad modem, the Help Desk just told me to go down to the local Time Warner office and exchange the modem. They put the new modem’s serial number on my account, I went back and installed it, and everything has worked fine since.

If you don’t know the difference between Cable and DSL, here it is:
Cable is one coaxial line that everybody taps into. Everybody takes a small share of the bandwidth. Since there are amplifiers on the line, anybody on the line can have Internet service. Unless there is someone doing something very bandwidth intensive (i.e. having a very busy website on a computer in their place), 98% of the time you have maximum bandwidth available. If a wire breaks, everyone is out of service and the cable company will be working hard to get everyone back up as quick as possible. You also don’t have to buy TV Cable to get Cable Internet service.
DSL is the other way around. Here you are the only user on the line and all of the bandwidth is yours. The bad news is you must be within 15,000 cable feet from the switching office. That is way less than 3 miles, since this wire has to jump from pole to pole. You also pay for gradients of service. You can pick fast, faster or fastest service, at increasingly expensive rates. If your wire breaks, the phone company will send someone out in their own sweet time to fix it, since it’s only one customer. Several poles or a switch must come down to knock enough users off-line before they put a priority on fixing the problem.
Hope that helps. Remember, friends don’t let friends use DSL.

While the majority of this article describes an incident in England, there is an American story as well, and they both point to which way society in general is heading: Did Pedophilia Hysteria Cause Child’s Death?

On Nov. 28, 2002, 2-year-old Abigail Rae died by drowning in a village pond in England. Her death is currently stirring debate because the ongoing inquest revealed an explosive fact. A man passing by was afraid to guide the lost child to safety because he feared being labeled “a pervert.”

This fear is well founded. Look at the other example:

Last summer, an Illinois man lost an appeal on his conviction as a sex offender for grabbing the arm of a 14-year-old girl. She had stepped directly in front of his car, causing him to swerve in order to avoid hitting her.
The 28-year-old Fitzroy Barnaby jumped out his car, grabbed her arm and lectured her on how not to get killed. Nothing more occurred. Nevertheless, that one action made him guilty of “the unlawful restraint of a minor,” which is a sexual offense in Illinois. Both the jury and judge believed him. Nevertheless, Barnaby went through years of legal proceedings that ended with his name on a sex offender registry, where his photograph and address are publicly available. He must report to authorities. His employment options are severely limited; he cannot live near schools or parks.
Arguably, the law would have punished Barnaby less had he hit the girl or not cared enough to lecture her. Perhaps that’s the equation that ran through Peachey’s mind.

This is what our litigious society has brought us to. We must ignore children in distress, or be branded a sex offender. Some choice.

Remember back in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was reelected in a 49 state landslide? Do you want to guess which single state didn’t vote for him? That’s right, the Peoples Republik of Massachusetts. Well, the PRM has taken another step towards Socialism: Mass. Lawmakers Approve Mandatory Health Care Plan.
Under this “plan,” people who don’t want health care will have it forced upon them by taxes and penalties until they get health care. So much for free choice.
And with every time Socialism has been tried, it’s been shown not to work to any appreciable degree. Oh, I guess you could say it works, but at a very basic substance level, and everyone is miserable. Just look at the riots in France over jobs. This is what happens when things that should be earned become rights.
If you want to see how socialized health care works, just look at places like Canada. People are flocking from Canada to the United States for tests and procedures that they would have to wait for months in Canada. Look at my state of Tennessee. We tried offering health care to everybody and it damn near bankrupted the state. Twice.
When you guarantee health care to everybody, three things will happen: 1) Taxes will go up, 2) Health care quality will go down, and 3) when the program is dropped, no one will be happy.
Remember this: The government that is powerful enough to give you everything is powerful enough to take it all away.

For those of you who haven’t been reading very long, a while back I posted on the USS New York and how her bow was cast from metal recovered from the World Trade Center. There is a new story out, Navy Ship Built With World Trade Center Steel, and this one not only documents how the USS New York withstood everything that Katrina could throw at her, but her sister ships that will be joining her in the fight.
The USS New York is being joined by the USS Arlington (where the Pentagon is located) and the USS Somerset (The county in which Flight 93 crashed).
May God grant them the power to smite the enemies of this country.

From AlphaPatriot:
Senator Hillary Clinton recently went to a primary school in Ithaca, New York, to talk about the world. After her talk she offers question time.
One little boy puts up his hand and the Senator asks him what his name is.
“Kenny.”
“And what is your question, Kenny?”
“I have three questions:
1. Whatever happened to your medical health care plan?
2. Why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office?
3. Whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the White House?”
Just then the bell rings for recess. Hillary Clinton informs the kiddies that they will continue after recess.
When they resume Hillary says, “OK, where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”
A different little boy puts his hand up. Hillary points him out and asks him what his name is.
“Larry.”
“And what is your question, Larry?”
“I have 5 questions:
1. Whatever happened to your medical health care plan?
2. Why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office?
3. Whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the white house?
4. Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
5. What happened to Kenny?”