Leftwing civility: Say you are conservative at a dinner party and get booed and called a racist.
Note that the conservative who experienced this rudeness, Joel Pollak, is married to a black woman.
Despite a threat of arrest by the Obama administration, veterans from Ohio plan to visit the World War II memorial on Wednesday.
I suspect that the park service employee who said the vets risked arrest if they crossed the barricades regrets that statement. I also almost hope that the Obama administration does try to arrest someone, as such action will quite starkly illustrate how fascist the administration is behaving.
And then there’s this story: ‘Gestapo’ tactics meet senior citizens at Yellowstone.
Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard. The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.
Read the whole story. It should make you ashamed.
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.
Finding out what’s in it: “I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today.”
That’s what a knee-jerk Obamacare supporter said when he discovered how much the cost of his health insurance was going up after Obamacare takes effect. Here’s another good quote from another knee-jerk Obamacare supporter:
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.” Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.
“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” [emphasis mine]
Who did he think was going to pay for it? The tooth fairy?
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.
Working for the left and the Democratic Party: The National Park Service is permitting a leftwing rally for illegal immigrants to take place on the National Mall, supposedly closed because of the government shutdown.
Much like the favoritism exhibited by the IRS, the park service is now clearly favoring leftwing protest. Want to gather at the World War II monument to celebrate the courage of Americans to free the world from Nazism and fascism? No! Want to gather on the National Mall to celebrate illegal immigrants? Yes!
Harry Reid drags his feet on alleviating the financial anxiety of hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers, and he’s refused to bring to the floor seven continuing resolutions, all passed by the House, all passed by wide and fairly bipartisan majorities (all or almost all of the Republicans, and another 20 or so House Democrats):
- Authorizing military chaplains to do their duties during the shutdown;
- Continuing appropriations for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children for fiscal year 2014 (food stamps).
- Continuing appropriations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
- Continuing appropriations for veterans benefits.
- Continuing appropriations for the National Institutes of Health.
- Continuing appropriations for National Park Service operations, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- Continuing appropriations of local funds of the District of Columbia.
Not a single one of those resolutions says anything about Obamacare. We know why Harry Reid isn’t bringing them to the floor. If he did, they would pass. Senate Democrats wouldn’t be able to vote “no” on any of those priorities without providing fodder for attack ads next fall (maybe the District of Columbia). And if they pass, the pain of the shutdown is mitigated in part.
Harry Reid doesn’t want to minimize the pain of the shutdown. He wants to maximize it.
Posted from wet and rainy Maryland. And in case you didn’t know it, it is generally wet in the east, even when it isn’t raining. I had lived in the east for most of my life, and now cannot wait to get back to Arizona where I don’t feel sticky all the time from humidity.
Does this make you feel safer? A nine-year-old boy was able to board a plane in Minnesota and fly to Nevada with no ticket or boarding pass.
The big question in this case is how did this boy get through at least three layers of security at the airport? There are three levels of security he would need to have passed through. The first checkpoint is the screening by the TSA, including metal detectors. Then he would have had to get by the Delta Airlines gate agents before boarding the plane. The last level of security would be the flight crew themselves who should have questioned why the boy had no boarding pass before the plane took off.
This only provides further proof that the entire TSA is a complete waste of money.
A bus tour of veterans today pushed barricades clear so that the Iwo Jima Memorial was once again open to the public.
More events like this have to happen, and they have to be done by everyone, not just the veterans.
“Government shuts down, nation descends into riots, looting and cannibalism.”
“The government shut down! We can do anything we like,” shouted Sam Hasbley of Grassley, Iowa, while tearing the tag off a mattress despite an explicit warning label forbidding such a dangerous course of action. “Tear yours off. The government is shut down. It can’t stop you.”
Eyewitnesses spoke of further horrors. On a quiet street in suburban Massachusetts, a man brought out a set of highly illegal lawn darts. In Maryland, there were allegations that an entire family had begun digging ditches to collect rainwater runoff. With the fall of the government, citizen activists took it upon themselves to chronicle the culture of lawlessness. Men played Gibson guitars made of wood imported from India, but not finished by Indian workers. Women bought cold medicine without a photo ID. Children went hours without hearing lectures about the environment.
Heh. Read it all. You will be horrified.
The Maddron Bald trailhead on October 3, 2013, during
the government shutdown.
Today we did our last hike in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As I described yesterday, we decided to go to a place where we could park on private land and easily hike to a trail in the park. That way, we would reduce the level of power any fascist-minded ranger from the National Park Service might have over us should they confront us for being in our park.
As it turns out, there was no evidence at all of a shutdown at the trailhead we choose. We went to the Maddron Bald trailhead, just off state route 321. The parking area here is small, capable of holding no more than 5 or 6 cars. When we arrived there were three cars there, so we had no problem finding room, as you can see from the image to the left.
There were also no signs indicating the park was closed. Nor were there any barricades or cones. As far as we could tell, it was a normal day in the national park, which to me proved that the restrictions the park service is imposing on New Found Gap Road (as well as elsewhere across the nation) has absolutely nothing to do with their lack of funds. This particular trailhead is not as well known or visited, and is off the beaten track. Moreover, it would be hard to monitor. Thus, the park service chose to make believe it wasn’t there. Smart tourists could come here and enjoy the park, as intended, despite the shutdown.
If the shutdown really required the closure of the park, the park service would have sent a ranger here as well. They did not, proving that their obnoxious efforts are really aimed at causing problems for as many Americans as possible, not securing the park as they dishonestly might tell us.
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Shutdown fascism: The Obama administration has demanded that hundreds of private venues close, merely because they are on federal land, and even if they use no federal funds to operate. Key quote:
“I can only assume their intention is to artificially increase the cost of the shutdown as some sort of political ploy,” Meyer said in his letter. “The point of the shutdown is to close non-essential operations that require Federal money and manpower to stay open. So why is the White House closing private operations that require no government money to keep open and actually pay a percentage of their gate revenues back to the Treasury? We are a tenant of the U.S. Forest Service, and a tenant does not have to close his business just because his landlord goes on a vacation.”
A spokeswoman for the National Park Service told MyFoxDC that it is still federal land, and the rule is that if there’s no Congressional appropriation, no visitors are allowed. [emphasis mine]
That last so-called rule is absolute hogwash. It doesn’t exist. All the lack of an appropriation means is that the federal government should hang a “closed” sign on the door of the buildings and lockable facilities and go home. Public lands are exactly that, public. They have no right to keep the public off them, since it is the public that actually owns them. The park service is merely a maintenance crew. Their attempt to close these parks is like the janitor at the Empire State Building standing at the door and telling its owner he or she cannot enter.
