Late last year I received notice about the floor mats in my Toyota that they could present a danger to my safety. This was about the time when there was the rash of Toyota recalls with regards to the acclerators, and they were also instructing people not to use floor mats. I immediately ripped them out and for the longest time I have had no floor mats at all in my car. Recently I decided to purchase some new floor mats, so I went on a Toyota RAV4 Floor Mats Google search spree. Luckily I found some great options that were not going to cost me a bundle and best of all I can keep my car clean.

Since I had ripped out the floor mats, my car had gotten real filthy. One of the things floor mats are supposed to do is keep your car floor real clean. I never realized about how valuable that feature of floor mats was until I did not have them anymore. Now that I have my new floor mats my car will stay a lot cleaner. Best of all when my car gets filthy, all I have to do is take out my floor mats and just shake them out on the ground.

It’s not Oprah Winfrey’s fault that former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin hasn’t been a guest on her talk show yet! Chicago talk show host Oprah Winfrey declared, “I said I would be happy to talk to Sarah Palin when the election was over… I went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin and instead she talked to Greta [Van Susteren]. She talked to Matt [Lauer]. She talked to Larry [King]. But she didn’t talk to me. But maybe she’ll talk to me now that she has a [multi-million dollar] book deal in the works.

When asked if Oprah will have Barack Obama on the show, she responded, “There’s always an open invitation for the president-elect and first ladyMichelle.”

“Extra’s” AJ Calloway caught up with Winfrey at last night’s Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s 50th anniversary celebration where she served as honorary chair. Winfrey joked, “In my wildest, wildest, crazy, crazy dreams, I am a dancer…When I’ve like had too many tequila shots and I go to sleep, I dream of being a dancer.”

AND – Winfrey told Calloway the one thing that she had to rescue when the Santa Barbara wildfires threatened her home was a book of letters from Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and all the young ladies who attended her Legends Ball. Winfrey exclaimed, “So when the fires were coming and the flames were a blowin’, I said, ‘Get my letters!’”

Perry County a small central Alabama county whose mainly African American residents gave president Elect Barack Obama more than 70 percent of the vote on Election Day has created an annual holiday in honor of the president-elect.

The Perry County Commission voted 4 to 1 to observe the second Monday in November as “The Barack Obama Day.” County offices will close and its roughly 40 workers will get a paid holiday.

The sponsoring commissioner, Albert Turner Jr., said the holiday is meant to highlight the Democratic president-elect’s victory as a way to give people faith that difficult goals can be achieved.

The majority of the county’s 12,000 residents are black.

The county commission’s three black members and one of its two white members voted for the resolution.

Commissioner Brett Harrison said Wednesday he voted against the resolution because of the holiday costs to the county, which has a $2.2 million annual payroll and is one of the poorest in the state. He said closing the courthouse would also idle some state employees.

“I’m a Democrat, but just in these financial times, it’s not using the county’s money wisely,” Harrison told The Associated Press by phone Wednesday. “The recognition is certainly well-founded.”

Turner said copies of the resolution, adopted at a Nov. 25 meeting, have been mailed to Obama and his transition team.

An Associated Press exit poll found black voters in Alabama almost universally supported Obama while more than eight in 10 whites backed Republican John McCain. McCain carried the state with 60 percent of the vote.

Well it looks like now that Barack Obama won the election, big government is here to stay. And with big government who knows maybe even Barack Obama will bring along big brother. Barack Obama has spoken often of wanting to use more technology in government, and in my opinion some of it is good and some of it can be used for pure evil. One of the first things Barack Obama may do is implement fleet tracking on the thousands of vehicles owned by the government. Fleet tracking would allow each agency to monitor the use of their vehicles at any time. For us taxpayers monitoring of federal vehicles may not be such a bad thing – since it will stem obvious abuses. Just knowing that their vehicle is being watched will stop many people from driving their cars to places they should not be using work vehicles for.
On the other hand, the government using fleet gps tracking even in a well meaning way gives the government more ability to control and step into the lives of every day citizens. If an Obama administration can get away with using big brother tactics on their own agencies why would they not use similar concepts to watch over other people (hmm Joe the plumber)? Why would governments expend money on policing people when they could use technology which automatically told them the speed of the car? We can forget about offshoring, jobs will taken by technology which is cheaper. Gps tracking could even be extended to people. It could come in under a helpful scenario like preventing kidnapping then it would be extended to seeing who kids hang out with and where. Or they could put it on people under house arrest BUT this would deny them their fifth amendment rights not to self incriminate. Typical house arrest monitors just report if a person left their house not where they went.

The Joe the Plumber fiasco showed what happens when the government uses the information in its hands in a negative way. Imagine Joe the Plumber’s employer had a fleet tracking in his truck, don’t you think the media would have had more fodder to discuss. “Joe the Plumber goes to Safeway”. “Joe the Plumber leaves the house at 10” Putting a gps into someone’s life instantly makes so much more information available to be abused. For an employer or taxpayer this is a great thing but for an every day employee, this is a doomsday scenario. As an employer, I would jump on fleet tracking since this a fantastic way to save money but I would hate to have an employer look over my shoulder.

The thaw in the resentful relationship between the most powerful woman in the Democratic Party and her younger male rival began at the Democrati party’s convention in August, when New York Senatory Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave such a passionate speech supporting then Illinois Senator Barack Obama that his top aides leapt out of their chairs backstage to give her a standing ovation as she swept past.

Obama, who was in the first steps of what would become a strategic courtship, called afterward to thank her. By then, close aides to Clinton said, she had come to respect the campaign Obama had run against her. At the least, she knew he understood like no one else the brutal strains of their epic primary battle.

By this past Thursday, when Obama reassured Clinton that she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff as secretary of state, the wooing was complete.

“She feels like she’s been treated very well in the way she’s been asked,” said a close associate of Clinton, who like others interviewed asked for anonymity because the nomination will not be formally announced until after Thanksgiving.

Few are predicting that this new relationship born of mutual respect and self-interest will grow into a tight bond between the new president and the woman who will be the public face of his foreign policy around the world, though some say it is not impossible. They argue that a close friendship between those in those powerful roles is useful but not essential, and is not a predictor of the success of the nation’s chief diplomat.