Or…thank God it’s not Monday.

We all switched from Standard Time Sunday morning to Daylight Savings time. Of the two, I much prefer Daylight Savings and if I had my druthers, I would prefer that we do not change back come Fall.

I’ve gone through the house and have changed all the clocks and the one in my Tahoe. I think the only one not changed is the clock in Mrs. Crucis’ Hupmobile. Job done…except…for me and Mrs. C.

An advantage of being retired is that you don’t need to set alarms in the morning. For forty years, more or less, I awoke at 6am, showered, dressed and went off to work.

A few years ago, I started working from home. All I needed was a broadband internet connection. My employer provided a laptop, TCP/IP phone and a VPN connection to the corporate network. When I worked from home, I told friends my daily commute to work was thirty steps down to my office from upstairs. When I worked from home, I changed my wakeup time from 6am to 7:30am. I just had to be on-line no later than 8:30am.

That was great. Since then, I’ve retired and it seems that each day, I wake up a few minutes later. With the time change last weekend, every clock and timepiece has changed…except for Mrs. Crucis and myself.

Time change is still a work-in-progress…[yawn.]

***

Obama is still sweating the spying his administration is doing through the NSA. He and the NSA hit a major speed-bump this week. The NSA lost a court battle to allow them to keep telephone metadata longer than five years.

I had read the article earlier this week. When I made a search this morning, I found no mention of the court decision from the major news outlets. Articles were there earlier in the week, where have they gone? The first article I found was from The Verge, not a major news outlet like CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, WaPo. On reflection, those alphabet organizations aren’t news outlets any longer, having long devolved into liberal propaganda organs.

Here is the report from The Verge.

Court blocks government’s request to keep NSA phone records longer than five years

By Adi Robertsonon March 7, 2014 05:11 pm

The court in charge of overseeing NSA surveillance has nixed a plan to keep American phone records in government databases for longer than five years. In an opinion published today, Judge Reggie Walton said that privacy protection laws overrode the government’s argument that it needed to retain evidence for EFF and ACLU lawsuits, denying a request that the Department of Justice made in February. Such a move “would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government,” said Walton. “The government seeks to retain these records, not for national security reasons, but because some of them may be relevant in civil litigation in which the destruction of those very same records is being requested.”

…

The groups that might need the NSA’s evidence don’t actually want it

The FISA court, which made this ruling, has previously decided that the NSA can collect phone metadata in bulk but must destroy it after five years. The Department of Justice, however, pointed to a ban on destroying evidence that was pertinent to a court case. By that estimation, since the ACLU, EFF, and others have filed suit over the phone record database, that made it illegal to purge the records. It promised, however, to make the records unsearchable by NSA agents, ostensibly resolving privacy concerns.

This argument, however, didn’t convince the court. One point of contention was that the actual parties involved have expressed mostly confusion over the plan. In February, ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer called the move a “distraction” from the real issues. “We don’t have any objection to the government deleting these records. While they’re at it, they should delete the whole database.” EFF attorney Mark Rumold, meanwhile, agreed “in principle” with the government’s request, but he expressed doubt it was acting in good faith. “It’s disheartening to see the government try to hold the privacy of all Americans hostage to score PR points,” he said.

In short, the groups that would be benefiting from having evidence retained didn’t necessarily want it, and the Department of Justice made only a perfunctory case for keeping it. “The government makes no attempt to explain why it believes the records” are relevant, said Walton. The rules for collecting data, meanwhile, are clear about the fact that it can only be kept for national security investigations. Granted, these rules have been very liberally interpreted in the past — the fact that all phone records are considered “relevant” to an investigation, for example, is highly controversial. But the court found that maintaining the database for a civil lawsuit didn’t fit the bill.

So why did it want the phone records in the first place? Walton said the request seemed to be motivated by “fear” that judges might censure it for destroying evidence, although he called that outcome “far-fetched.” As the EFF’s statement above implies, however, it’s possible it’s also an attempt to demonstrate that suing over an allegedly unconstitutional invasion of privacy will only cause more privacy violations.

A win for privacy. You may wonder why more hasn’t been made of this by the MSM? Perhaps it is due to another scheme of misdirection. Senator Diane Sweinstein, D-CA, wants an investigation of the CIA. Again, why? Because of possible CIA surveillance during the Bush years.

Yep, that’s right, whether it’s CIA spying or NSA data farming on our citizens, it’s all Bush’s fault.

Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers

By Ed O’Keefe and Adam Goldman,

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday sharply accused the CIA of violating federal law and undermining the constitutional principle of congressional oversight as she detailed publicly for the first time how the agency secretly removed documents from computers used by her panel to investigate a controversial interrogation program.Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that the situation amounted to attempted intimidation of congressional investigators, adding: “I am not taking it lightly.”She confirmed that an internal agency investigation of the action has been referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. And she said that the CIA appears to have violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as various federal laws and a presidential executive order that prevents the agency from conducting domestic searches and surveillance.

Ms Sweinstein didn’t bat an eye when the Obama administration bugged reporters and ransacked their offices. But, she can believe, despite having no proof, that Bush and his CIA bugged her and the Senate. That reminds me, the NSA still hasn’t answered the question whether they have been spying on members of Congress. Nor has Lerner testified before the House on the Obama administration using the IRS to oppress the Tea Party.

It’s just fine for Obama to spy and intimidate citizens, according to Ms Sweinstein. But let a myth appear and, “It’s all Bush’s fault!”

***

The closing topic today is one that applies to all levels of government. It applies to the city council who spend taxpayers money of frivolties like recreation centers, to County Commissioners in love with TIF, to Congressmen who vote for near Trillion dollar ag bills. Voters have a responsibility to remove legislators who waste taxpayer’s money.

RAHN: The responsibility to resist fiscally irresponsible politicians

Fiscal prudence must be carried from the kitchen table to the voting booth

By Richard Rahn, Monday, March 10, 2014

Are you more responsible than your government? If so, what can you do about it?

If your personal spending rises faster than your income each year, you eventually will go bankrupt. Responsible people understand this and thus refrain from taking on more debt than their income can support.

This basic fact is true of individuals, businesses and even governments — look at Greece and Detroit.

President Obama presented his budget proposal for 2015 last week. As the accompanying chart shows, it calls for increasing government spending from $3.6 trillion this year to $5.9 trillion in 2024.

Much of this whopping increase is to be funded through more deficit spending — and thus increasing the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio, which is already at a record high for peacetime. Many good economists also think that the president is being overly optimistic about anticipated economic growth and government revenues.

There is nothing new about governments overspending and accumulating fatal amounts of debt.

A quote attributed to Cicero warned: “The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation does not want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

The people and the political class ignored the advice. The bread and circuses continued, the political leaders became increasingly corrupt, and the formerly invincible Roman army became so weakened that it was easily toppled by “barbarians.”

In the two millennia after Cicero, empire after empire rose — and fell, often as a result of excess government spending.

The American Founding Fathers understood the pressures on governments to overspend, and did their best to design a system to make spending difficult — but the political class has increasingly been ignoring the Constitution.

In his classic book “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944, the brilliant F.A. Hayek vividly described how the utopians always end up bankrupting the society and destroying liberty.

Vito Tanzi, distinguished economist and former Italian undersecretary for economy and finance, perhaps said it best in his new book, “Dollars, Euros, and Debt”: “It is important for citizens to recognize that resources are always scarce, and the function of government should be to prevent hell on earth, rather than try to establish heaven. When the state tries to do too many things, it inevitably brings excessive complexity in its actions and becomes inefficient.”

…

Almost all major economies in the world now have government sectors that exceed that size. This fact, coupled with the three maxims cited above, if properly analyzed, leads to the conclusion that over the long run, tax increases in countries that already have big government sectors and high levels of debt only will make things worse.

Mr. Obama and many members of Congress should and probably do understand that the higher levels of spending and debt they are proposing is long-run poison to the economy.

They also understand, though, that many of their voters are more concerned about getting immediate benefits from the government than the inability to find a well-paying job.

The situation can only get better if voters start demanding their elective representatives refuse to vote for any tax or budget increase that raises government spending as a percentage of GDP.

Voters then must be prepared to vote against those politicians who deviate from those simple principles. Politicians will resist such constraints because it would force them to seriously consider spending priorities.

If voters refuse to discipline their elected officials and continue to buy the “feel-good” line, economic stagnation, inflation or worse will occur. Voters who say they are personally responsible in managing their own finances are not being responsible if they vote for politicians whose policies will ultimately destroy their and everyone else’s financial well-being.

To paraphrase Mr. Rahn’s column, voters have a responsibility to remove representatives, from local city councilmen, to county commissioners, state and federal legislators to the President of the United States, who violate the spending restrictions demanded by the citizenry.

We, the citizens and voters of this country, are failing in our duty.