The Homeland Security Act was a direct response by the President and Congress to the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts and the mailing of anthrax spores that same year.

The Homeland Security Act was designed to meet the following goals.

1. Establish the Department of Homeland Security – The Homeland Security Act established this new cabinet department of the federal government. The department is responsible for protecting the territories of the United States from terrorist attacks, man made accidents, and natural disasters. The Secretary of Homeland Security, a position created by the Homeland Security Act, heads the department.
2. To be an agency that fulfilled a previously unaddressed role – The Department of Homeland Security, under the Homeland Security Act, is designed to prevent terrorist acts. The responsibility for prosecuting terrorists, for example, remains with the FBI.
3. To make the country better prepared for disaster – Another of the goals of the Homeland Security Act is to improve the nation’s preparedness for natural disasters and terrorism, including the government’s response to these situations.
4. To secure the borders – While not replacing traditional border patrols, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for securing the nation’s borders, waterways and ports from terrorists.
5. Securing transportation – The Department of Homeland Security also has responsibility for protecting the country’s air, land and sea transportation systems. This directive of the Homeland Security Act was responsible for the creation of Federal Air Marshal jobs on US commercial flights.
6. Protecting Information Security –The department is also responsible for protecting the sensitive information of the US government from terrorists. This applies to the security of computer systems, as well as the information that might be contained on those systems, as well as government information not housed on computer systems.

In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service and its directives. Under the Department of Homeland Security, the INS was divided into two divisions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services. In addition, the following other departments currently fall under the purvey of the Department of Homeland Security:

• Coast Guard
• US Customs and Border Protection
• Transportation Security Administration
• United States Secret Service
• Federal Emergency Management Agency

Today, the Department of Homeland Security is the government’s third largest cabinet, with more than 200,000 employees and a 2011 budget of $98.8 billion. Its scope and responsibilities have changed to reflect the country’s needs and changes in national security. As the responsibilities of the organization have matured, they have taken on greater influence. But, the chief goal of the Department of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act continues to be preventing terrorist attacks and protecting the nation from internal and external forces that desire to bring harm to the nation’s citizens.

Phyllis T. Zerkle enjoys blogging in order to help students find the information they need about online homeland security degrees.

My friend Tom has offered him a spot on his work crew building decks on new homes. It’s good money and relatively easy to learn. The only drawback is he can’t work if it’s raining and we’ll need to spot him some money to buy a pair of good workboots.

There’s a website called Work Boots USA that gives a quick overview of the different types of boots and it carries all the major brands. You can easily tell from the short description under each photo if the boot has a soft toe, hard toe or steel toe – the type of toe you need depends upon the type of work you’ll be doing and what kind of workplace hazards you have to protect your feet from.

Everything they do is about generating fees for themselves and customer service has gone out the window. I’ve had banks refuse to take my U. S. currency as a deposit to my account. I’ve had banks tell me that it is too close to their closing time (15 minutes before the doors were to close) for them to help me and to come back the next day. Now the bank where I take our company’s weekly deposit – two checks and a deposit slip – tells me that I will no longer be able to make my commercial deposit at their drive through windows. I must find a parking spot in the crowded lot and walk into the bank and stand in line with all those people who have no I.D., have accounts at other banks, and all those other time consuming banking issues, to make a deposit that takes all of 2 minutes at the drive through.

On Monday I’ll be calling their other branches to see if this is a new policy with all the locations or just the branch close to my house. If this is their policy for all locations, I’ll have to find another way to do my banking business each week.

Most of my friends that left the medspa company have accepted positions with a new franchise that is based in New York. Sadly, that means most of them have had to pack up and move from here to New York. So now I don’t have the chance for the occasional lunch or cocktails to stay in touch with most of my friends. It’s down to a few emails and occasional phone calls.

Alexa is the last of the old crew to take a job with the new company. We had lunch today at our favorite Sushi place to say goodbye. She is excited about the move and I’m thrilled for her! She’s going to stay with one of our friends already there, sleeping on the futon while she looks for place of her own. To help with that I put her in touch with one of the best real estate agents in Manhattan, Dottie Herman.

Dottie is a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, the largest real estate company in New York. I had met Dottie years ago at a real estate function in Las Vegas and kept her business card just in case I would have the opportunity to move to New York. Alas, it is Alexa who is getting that opportunity and I’m happy to share the contact information with her.

If I could make my dream come true, I would start a new business someplace where I want to live, pack up and leave here. One of the things stopping me is getting all the financing I would need. Banks are harder to deal with every day and I’m not interested in taking on partners. For one thing I want autonomy in making the business decisions and for another I don’t want to share the profits from my own hard work with people who don’t do anything except put in the start up money.

Nowadays you do all of that yourself. Which is fine if you are handy with tools and have someplace like a covered and lit garage to work on your car. The rest of us have to resort to our own devices. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t afford to take my car to Firestone every time a little happens to my car when they are going to charge $100 for every little maintenance job. Last week I took in the car and asked for an oil change and a new air filter. The bill was $100. That’s absurd – I was expected to pay $35, tops.

I’ll have to find someplace else to take care of these routine maintenance issues for me, because I can’t afford the excessive Firestone charges.

I was distressed to find that someone robbed her store last week. Thank goodness she was not working that night and the person running the store was not hurt, but it is disconcerting to think they my friend is truly in danger of being robbed or shot at any time. The thieves took a van and rammed the front doors with the van, then hauled the ATM machine and cash register into the back of the van and drove off.

This morning they are traffic bollards across the front of the store to prevent anyone from ramming the front doors again. Bollards are the tall round posts that re installed in the pavement and spaced a few feet apart to restrict traffic.

It’s a shame we have to resort to obvious crime deterrents like bollards in front of your place of business, even in the nicer neighborhoods.

10. Chrysler Pacifica
9. Hyundai Tiburon
8. Mazda CX-7
7. Honda Pilot
6. BMW Z4
5. Nissan Versa
4. Toyota Yaris
3. Hyundai Elantra
2. Kia Spectra
1. Honda Fit

The owners of a Honda Fit are 80.46% female. How’s that for dominating a market?

Our Human Resources Manager ordered a collection of all occasion cards from gallerycollection.com and had them custom imprinted, but we also pass them them around to the rest of the staff for personal notes and signatures before presenting them with a flourish or small ceremony to the recipient. The Business Birthday Cards are a nice way to help celebrate employee and client birthdays. I also like that the envelopes are a classy, deckle-edged heavy stock, and they are made of recycled paper.

For your next out of town trip, search for green hotels on sites that only include legitimate green businesses, including Responsibletravel.com, The Rainforest Alliance, The International Ecotourism Society, and Best Green Hotels.

Before making the reservation check the hotel’s website or call to find out if it has an official environmental or sustainability policy. A good policy should go beyond washing towels every other day to save water. It should address both the hotel’s environmental and cultural conservation practices in detail. If the policy looks too generic or the hotel representative can’t answer your questions, find a different hotel that deserves your business.

She’ll be turning the extra bedroom into a home office so she can do more work from home and not have to pay for child care, plus she’ll be saving cash by not having to commute. Of course, setting up the home office will take a bit of cash, but you can’t make money if you don’t spend money.

We’ll be underwriting some of the home office equipment to help her out. Since we are on a tight budget, we are looking for ways to save as much money as we can, yet we can’t always get the cheapest products – there are some quality and reliability issues to consider as well as price.

A great source for money saving coupons is a website I found online. There are a variety of coupons to save significant money on Dell small business computers. We are also going to need some home office furniture, at the very least a computer desk and task chair.

I’m not sure which way to advise her on a printer for her new home office. I haven’t had much luck with the last ones I’ve bought. At the moment I’m using a cheap laser printer that only prints black and white, but it is a workhorse and I can use refilled toner cartridges, which saves a lot of money. I think for the sake of just getting started, she should probably have one like what I’m using, and when she starts making money she can upgrade to a color printer later.

Now, more than half of Clear Channel’s revenue comes from its billboard business, with about 800,000 signs worldwide, and that business has been growing as advertisers are redirecting their spending away from other avenues, like radio, to billboards, which are harder for consumers to bypass.

So Clear Channel has been desperately trying to sell the business for the past 18 months, which is now in jeopardy because the banks who put together the financing deal are getting gun shy and trying to bail. Can’t say I blame them – the banks have enough trouble with the mortgage foreclosures and the recession, why take on this albatross?

So I thought it would be good to buy another one just like for the home office and we can give the old PC to our grandson. He has just started school and he loves to play with letters and numbers, he can read a couple hundred “sight words” and he like to play with numbers, too. I’ve shown him how to get online to play a couple of good children’s sites games, like Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer. He can even play a couple simple card games. We are so proud of him!

So I’ve searched everywhere for this Slimline PC and can’t find it for sale anywhere!

Based on the old fashioned kids games of Capture the Flag, paintball is fast and fun exercise that takes people out of their normal comfort zone and puts them on a field of two teams shooting each other with guns that shoot harmless pellets of paint.

People who love this game often join teams and compete in tournaments against other local teams and for the very serious, teams from all over the world compete for cash prizes.

First timers can rent all the equipment they need from their local field. Serious players buy their guns and ammo, often from online sources to save money or get brands not available locally. My favorite site for paintball gear is pntball.com. You can shop for complete starter kits, with everything you need for a fun day of paintball games, or you can build your own collection of gear by choosing from all the major brands:

• Tippmann
• Spyder
• Smart Parts
• Dye
• Empire
• Draxxus

Find your local paintball field and make plans to spend a fun day with co-workers, friends or even a group of strangers who also happen to show up on the same day. It’s great exercise, it gets you out of the house, and you  might find yourself involved in a  fun new competitive sport!

The Bay Area is a magnet for biotechnology as well as the southern neighbor of San Jose being Silicon Valley with the world headquarters of Yahoo, Google, EBay and dozens of others. The only big boy missing from this gathering is Microsoft, based in Seattle.

What’s missing from all this development are good restaurants. Most eateries are little local holes in the wall that you have to just put down your money and take your chances. In the six months I lived there, the best place I ate dinner was a national chain, Romanos Macaroni Grill. The food was top notch and the service was excellent. Now I search out Romanos in other cities when I have a craving for good Italian food.

So although I have a carpet cleaning machine and use it about once a month, I feel like calling the professionals with their heavy duty chemicals and equipment will do a more thorough job if I hire them once a year for a spring cleaning.

What is annoying is the push by the person who shows up to do the cleaning to upsell you on a lot more services and cost. The carpet cleaner told me that I need extra spot treatments and extra conditioners and extra enzyme treatments and tried to run my bill up from the $20 coupon rate to $300. That’s obscene. I told him I wanted the coupon rate and nothing more and he played it out, telling me he had to get special permission from the home office to not do the extra treatments, because he was concerned that I would not be satisfied with the $20 process. He came back and said the home office had authorized him to give me a big discount if I wanted to go ahead and get all the extras for just $200. But I held firm and said I wanted the $20 and to quit wasting my time and get busy.

He finally did the job and it turned out OK, but I’m still very annoyed at the high pressure sales tactics and the huge difference in price that they tried to get from me. We spent more arguing about the cost than it took him to just do the job. He was so disagreeable that I felt he might deliberately sabotage the cleaning or steal something from my house, so I had to stand there at the hallway and watch his every move. It was a totally unpleasant morning although now I do have a clean carpet.

The paper money is not an issue, but working with coins has us both frustrated. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make this make sense to a 5 year old, please send me your comments.

The first American made modern toothbrush.

Although the Chinese are credited with having invented the toothbrush, they used natural boar’s bristles and a bamboo handle.

Dr. West invented the manufacturing process to put nylon bristles onto a plastic handle and marketed it to the Americans.

True story.

There is a great service called Dial 7 that provides cars with an experienced and courteous driver to take you into the city. They provide 24 hour service for car service, limousine service and airport transportation, including LaGuardia Airport, JFK Airport and Newark Airport.

There is a website that provides IT training, called Global Knowledge, that offers a variety of delivery methods. You can learn their coursework in a traditional classroom setting, or take online courses, or arrange for an instructor to come to your workplace.

They have certification course in the popular platforms, including Cisco, Microsoft and Red Hat Linux.

Course subjects include exam prep for PMP training networking, security, business processes and project management.

The website makes it easy to plan your curriculum by browsing a huge catalogue of courses. My favorite part of the site is the section of additional resources, including podcasts, web seminars and white papers.