The first free flying glide test of the Dream Chaser test vehicle is only days away.
The test had been delayed because of the government shutdown.
Working for the Democratic Party: The major news networks blamed the shutdown on Republicans 41 times, Democrats 0 times.
In Congress the shutdown was a team effort, involving both parties. To pin the blame on one party is to reveal your partisanship.
But then, this really isn’t news. The major news networks have been unabashed Democratic Party operatives for years. This detail just provides another one of thousands of illustrations that prove it.
Leftwing tolerance: A Moveon.org petition calls for the arrest of the House Republican leadership.
At the moment the petition has over 21,000 signers. Isn’t it gratifying how tolerant the left is to the idea of dissent, when that dissent happens to disagree with them?
Working for the Democratic Party: A House hearings yesterday, the partisan tactics of the director of the National Park Service were clearly illustrated by comparing what this government official did during the Occupy Wall Street protests versus his actions during the government shutdown. Watch:
The man should be fired. But he won’t be. Obama’s outrage over such activities is pure theater. He actually likes what Jarvis did, as it wholly supports the agenda of the Democratic Party.
Obamacare might well be imploding.
In other words, the elites in Washington might have signed a corrupt budget deal, but meanwhile the cause of the shutdown, Obamacare, continues to show itself to be an abject failure, justifying the efforts of the more honest Republicans to try to stop it.
The Democrats endorsed this law again during the budget standoff. Had they be willing to even consider minor changes the shutdown could have been averted. Instead, they stood firm as a party, supporting this unworkable law, as it stands.
Cygnus will be de-orbited one day early, on October 23.
At the same time, preparations move forward for the second Cygnus flight in December, which will be the first operational flight. This quote is interesting:
Neither Orbital nor the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority got locked out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport as a result of the shutdown, meaning that preparations for the tentative December launch continued while more than 95 percent of NASA’s roughly 18,000 civil servants were on furlough.
Suggests again how unessential a good percentage of NASA’s employees really are. They might be great engineers, but they are apparently wasting their talents at NASA doing unnecessary make-work.
The Senate budget deal that the House will vote on today includes some really nice pork.
The bill includes extra funds to fix flooded roads in Colorado, a $3 million appropriation for a civil liberties oversight board and a one-time payment to the widow of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who died over the summer. It also includes a more than $2 billion increase in funding for construction on the lower Ohio River in Illinois and Kentucky. Current law authorizes $775 million in spending for related projects, and the bill increases it to $2.918 billion.
The last appears to be a kickback to Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) to get him to buy into this crap.
The bill also has this crap:
The legislation broadly re-opens the government through Jan. 15, and extends the ability of the government to borrow money through Feb. 7. It does so by allowing President Obama to waive the debt ceiling, a move that can be overridden by a resolution of disapproval by Congress that Obama could still veto. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Congress is now ceding this budgetary responsibility and power to the President, who will then rule by decree.
Update: The bill passed both houses of Congress and has now been signed by the President. Note that the only opposition came from Republicans, but even here the opposition was a minority. The Democrats strongly endorsed this bill, and for good reason. It gives them (and the Republicans who supported it) lots of pork and greater power for Obama. Americans meanwhile are screwed. The day of reckoning still looms.
WTF? Chase Bank has told its business customers that they are placing a limit on the amount that can be withdrawn from an account, while also banning all international wire transfers.
If I had a Chase account, I would close it today, immediately, before these restrictions go into place.
The director of the National Park Service now claims that the barricades around memorials in DC were put there to protect them from terrorists during the shutdown.
What kind of fools do they take us for? This is downright insulting.
Well hallelujah and amen! No budget deal: The Democrats continue to refuse to give in at all, and the Republicans have shown some spine and refused to cave.
This deadlock has been a team effort, from both sides. To say it is entirely the fault of one party or the other is to reveal your partisanship.
Nonetheless, legislation requires negotiation, and the only ones refusing to negotiate at all have been the Democrats. In the real world outside of government, such pig-headedness always results in no deal at all.
Right now it looks like 17% of the government will remain shut for quite awhile. And with the debt ceiling kicking in, the federal government will find its hands tied even more. The American people are about to find out that life will go on quite successfully without their big daddy to boss them around.
Finding out what’s in it: A company that employes a large number of temporary workers is now going to have to drop health insurance for all of its employees, because of Obamacare.
Aside from its full-time staff, the company also manages about 400 temporary workers, and is hoping to add another 200 in the next year. Those employees can buy into a separate health insurance program North Georgia Staffing signed up with. Under new ObamaCare rules, many of those “temps” will count toward the Underkoffler’s full-time staff. Larry Underkoffler calculates their full-time employee count will instantly surge from 18 to around 200. They will go from boutique operation to “major employer” overnight.
And that means, under the health care law, they’d have to provide insurance coverage to all, or pay a $2,000-per-worker fine. In the Underkofflers’ case, the fine might be the more affordable option. “We would have to provide the same program for all the employees — including the temps — to everyone employed by us. And we just couldn’t do that,” Larry Underkoffler told Fox News. They argue that providing insurance to all the employees would bankrupt the company. Instead, they’ll eat the cost of the fine, and dump the employees they can’t cover into Georgia’s federally run health insurance exchange.
“It looks like we will have to just pay the penalties,” Debbie Underkoffler told Fox News. Those penalties could add up to $400,000 in just the first year. That comes right off their bottom line. Still, it’s a fraction of what providing health care could cost them. That tab could top $2 million per year. What’s more, because ObamaCare does not allow separate plans for the full-time employees and the temporary workers they manage, their full-timers will lose their current benefits.
The cost of the fines themselves is so high that I expect that they will soon begin destroying business left and right. Get prepared for the arrival of a large underground black market, working illegally under the radar to avoid the unbearable financial burdens of Obamacare.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Aetna insurance moans the complete failure of the Obamacare website to function.
Asked if he would have delayed the launch of the exchange given its earlier problems, Bertolini said, “I would have, if I’d been in their seat.”
But don’t worry, the Democrats have your back! Having Obamacare the law of the land now is so important to them that they are willing to shut down the government, for as long as necessary.
Shutdown fascism: A Catholic priest at a military base has been prohibited from even volunteering to run Mass and was told that if he violated that order he would be arrested.
Even more amazing, “Protestant services continue to take place. Only Catholic services have been shutdown.”
A lawsuit has been filed.
Occupy America! Thousands of Americans have stormed the World War II memorial today, as well as other barricaded monuments in DC.
More here. The first link above says that there was some “pushing and shoving” between protesters and the police at one location. This is not confirmed however. This story says the protesting vets were carrying the barricades to the White House.
Update: It appears the veterans are bringing barricades from all over and are using them to “barricade the White House.”
“Obama lied, my health care died.”
Remember the presidential talking point? If you like your current health plan, Barack Obama and his allies repeated over and over again, you would get to keep it. There would be no change. Things would go on as before even if Obamacare became the law of the land. The letter that came Thursday put the truth to the president’s lie. I would not be allowed to keep my current plan because it did not conform to the dictates of the new law and it was going away. And there was nothing I could do about it save enroll in a new plan because, as the letter also said, “you will be required to select a new ACA-compliant plan in order to continue your coverage.”
There are no two ways about it: Barack Obama stood up in front of the Congress of the United States and lied the nation into a new health care insurance system. Given that, it is now clear what the origins of the current contretemps between the executive and the legislative branches clearly are.
By insisting the Congress give him a continuing resolution to sign that includes funding for Obamacare, and by willing to engage in a phony shutdown of the federal government to make his point, President Obama is trying to undo nearly 10 centuries of the democratic process – going all the way back to the Magna Carta – to regain the power of the purse for the executive. Though the current crisis may, to some, seem silly or petty, it has as its basis a critically important point. The U.S. House of Representatives is the representative of the people of the United States, the same people in whom the U.S. Constitution invests national sovereignty. And they have determined that Obamacare should not be funded.
Note again that Obama and the Democrats have shut the government down in order to make sure Obamacare goes into effect.
Privatize the National Park Service.
This recommendation will anger NPS employees. Well, for that, they can thank White House schemers for overplaying their heavy hand and unwittingly shedding ominous light on the abusive possibilities of this agency. That’s not a sentiment that the president and allies intended to foster when they began agitating and orchestrating their shutdown campaign. Rather than convincing us of the alleged evils of congressional Republicans, they’ve unveiled the roguish tendencies of some federal employees who blindly follow orders. Let’s respond by taking power away from those employees, so this cannot happen again. Easily maneuvered into providing propaganda for a president or party, these NPS workers have proven themselves unworthy of the mission entrusted to them. They are the embodiment of the dangers of unaccountable, big government.
To this I say amen! I spend a lot of time visiting the national parks, and more often than not have been consistently disgusted with the National Park Service and its possessive and dictatorial attitude. In the past two decades the park service has changed. Once it considered its job that of a mere custodian, administering these parks for the benefit of the American public, the parks’ real owner. Today the park service instead sees the parks as their private little playground, and the public as annoying trespassers whose access should be limited as much as possible.
It is time to fire these thugs and give the job to someone else.
Note also the ease in which state governments are taking over operations of the major parks out west. For less money too. This illustrates how bloated and unnecessary most of the park service actually is. It can be replaced.
From a college student: “Obamacare has raped my future.”
This budget fight exists because Republicans are trying to delay or repeal Obamacare while Democrats are doing everything to keep the law in place. If the Republicans had any brains they would focus on this point, as I do, all the time. Obamacare is a disaster, everyone sees it, and by showing how the Democrats are willing to even shut down the government to endorse it can only work to the Republicans’ political advantage.
The budget negotiations continue: Obama apparently has rejected the Republican capitulation offer from yesterday.
The Republican plan, which I think sucks, was simply not humiliating enough. Meanwhile, there appears to be some pushback from conservative Republicans. I am not hopeful, however. The cowards at the head of the Republican party always back down.
The Republican leadership folds on the government shutdown. Key quote:
In exchange for meeting, at least momentarily, all of Obama’s demands, the House GOP is seeking a “framework” for future negotiations.
They get a repeal of an Obamacare tax on medical equipment, but lose everything else, plus give up some of the sequester cuts that have actually produced the first real reduction in the size of government in decades.
And the Republican leadership wonders why they keep losing elections? With incompetent friends like this, who needs enemies.
Finding out what’s in it: One man’s Obamacare nightmare.
In sum: Obama lied. His health plan died. He can’t keep his doctors. He couldn’t sign up in 10 minutes for health care. He’s being steered toward a government plan he doesn’t qualify for or want. And he can’t get his personal information back from the online Obamawreck black hole.
And then there’s this: A disabled mother finds she is forced to chose between food or Obamacare premiums.
But don’t worry: The Democrats think Obamacare is so great that they have forced a government shutdown to make sure it goes into effect immediately!
Posted as we circle Little Rock, Arkansas.
Utah has forced an agreement with the federal government to reopen its national parks.
The article says that Utah negotiated this agreement, but the only way I can imagine Utah got the Obama administration to agree to this was to tell them that Utah was going to open the parks one way or the other, and that the Obama administration would look really bad if it resisted local authorities as they protected citizens who wished to visit these parks.
Update: More information here. It appears the Obama administration is backing down across the board. They have not only announced that they will let the parks open if the states pay for their operation, they have removed the barricades at Mount Rushmore, as well as in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Click on the link. Lots of hilariously captioned pictures of evil tourists defying their righteous government which is so sincerely trying to protect its property from those disgusting “little people.”
Posted as we pass Knoxville, Tennessee.
“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”
This seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me.
Posted driving past Radford, Virginia.
Government marches on! The Obamacare website — that doesn’t work and probably never will — was originally supposed to cost $93.7 million and ended up costing more than six times more, $634 million.
Gee, this is almost as good as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is probably going to end up cost nine times more than originally budgeted.
And obviously, this disaster must be the fault of either George Bush or the tea party!
Former NASA shuttle head outlines a pessimistic future for NASA expensive Space Launch System.
Continuing to develop programs in the same old ways, from my observations, will certainly lead to cancellation as government budgets are stretched thin.”
Shutdown fascism: The Obama administration is shutting down small private campgrounds in Forest Service lands, but allowing big ski lodges to continue to operate.
The forest service is also allowing certain state parks in federal land to remain in open, which I think is the result of Scott Walker’s refusal to shut his state parks in Wisconsin. The big ski lodges have the ability to fight back, as do the states. And like all bullies, the Obama administration is going after the small and the weak, and running in fear from the strong and defiant.
We must all be defiant. Obama and the Democrats will then fold like a cheap card table.
Occupy America! Citizens storm National Park Service barricades throughout the land.
The public appears to be increasingly defiant about the National Park Service’s closure of parks.
Meanwhile, from a commenter here describing the situation at Great Smoky National Park since we left that area on Friday:
I was at the Smokies this weekend (Saturday and Sunday). The parking lot a Newfound Gap was completely open. The road to Clingman’s Dome was open. I did not travel down the North Carolina side of the park. Major trailheads were blocked at the Chimneys and Alum Cave Bluff. Chimneys picnic area closed. All other trailheads along 441 were open and there were plenty of people parked and enjoying the park. Little River Road was closed. We parked a couple of quiet walkways and took some short walks. Never saw an ranger anywhere.
If you are planning a trip to the Smokies then I would say to go for it. You may not be able to access some of the more popular areas of the park but there are plenty of areas that are accessible. I am planning a horseback riding trip (my own horses) in a couple of weeks and I am not going to let the dictatorial government in Washington ruin my plans.
The Chimney Top trail has been closed anyway during the week because of trail work, and the Alum Cave Bluff parking area is located at a spot where road work is presently going on and therefore might have been closed anyway as well.
And then there’s this: Yorktown restaurant owner defies the federal government, “occupying” his restaurant.
The horror! The government shutdown is forcing House lawmakers to reuse their towels in the House gym.
The important question is why this gym is even open, or even exists. I can think of a lot better uses of taxpayer dollars, especially considering how much money these elected officials make.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided that the shutdown prevents them from paying the death benefits to the families of military soldiers killed in action.
Compare and contrast.
The world that works vs the world that doesn’t.
In Washington, penalties for failure are few: Has anyone been fired over the Obamacare launch debacle? Problems are always the fault of circumstances, or the Evil Opposition, or are simply swept under the rug. Of course, that means there’s not much learning from mistakes, and “more of the same, only we’ll try harder!” is a common response. As in The Hunger Games, life is always posh in Capital City; suffering is for the poor schlubs out in the provinces.
In the world that works, on the other hand, mistakes are painful: They cost people jobs, they cost investors money, they result in bad publicity that’s harder to explain away. Thus, people learn from them. Unsurprisingly, the world that works is where the money that Washington spends ultimately comes from.
The problem is that the bigger Washington gets, the less room is left for the world that works. As more and more of American life is taken over by the world of politics — in which wealth is not generated, but taken from one’s opponents and distributed to one’s supporters — a smaller share is left for the world that works.
Obama fascism: 22 privately run campsites in New Hampshire are being told to close by the Forest Service, even though they get no money from the federal government.
According to the Union Leader, while the campsites are situated on federally owned land, they are entirely run by a private company, which has a contract to operate the sites and which pays the federal government a cut of the fees it collects. That means the closure will not only prevent thousands of campers from using the facilities, it will actually cost the federal government money it would have collected if it had simply done nothing.
These campsites were always allowed to operate during previous shutdowns. I should add that they have a legal contract with the government, which it appears the government is now breaking without real cause. If I were them I would be suing the Obama administration for loss of income and a violation of contract.
