The moose should have told you
There’s an old saying, I think by Thomas Sowell, that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert in five years you’d have a shortage of sand. Not sure you’d find better proof of it than during this shutdown. If you put the government in charge of a free Twitter account, in five years you’ll find that it won’t run during a shutdown.
Now, yes, I know that the First Lady probably normally has hired someone to tweet for her. But if you’re going into a shutdown, you don’t have to pay that person to announce that they are not going to tweet. The First Lady still exists, whether we pay her proxy tweeter or not.
And the whole closing select national monuments by the White House is crazy. Areas of Washington, DC that are normally wide open without any restrictions or even employees half the time, are being closed down. The White House has chosen to hire people to put up barricades to block areas that normally not only did not have restricted access but didn’t even have guards or other security for the simple reason they don’t need it. They’re concrete and grass.
The White House did the same thing during the sequester—shut down little things that tourists enjoyed (such as White House tours) while continuing the expensive stuff (such as sending his dog in a private plane). The sequester, remember, is still going on. It was supposed to be the end of America; America is still here and now the President is taking credit for the reduced spending that the sequester mandated.
- October 15, 2013: Nice park you have there; shame if anything happened to it.
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I keep hearing the Democrats and the media talking about how the Republican attempt at funding a continuing resolution is “extortion”. Give what we’ve been seeing in DC, that’s an interesting choice of words. Extortion isn’t the House following its constitutional requirements to originate funding—especially when everyone knows that if the White House or Senate Democrats were to merely open up negotiations the House would compromise, as it always does.
Hell, does anyone really believe that if the White House gave them the opportunity to just pretend that they’d compromise, that the House Republicans wouldn’t fold like a three dollar chair?
Of course they would. If Democrats were to make even a token effort toward compromise, they’d get everything they want. The first round in what should have been the start of negotiations is not extortion.
Even after the Democrats refused to negotiate at all, Republicans began to look for areas of common ground where both sides could agree that funding was essential—veterans care, cancer research, Head Start, the WIC Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the FDA, and FEMA, even the District of Columbia. Senator Reid hasn’t even scheduled a vote on them. Yet, this is what every family in the US does when funds get tight or there’s disagreement on how to spend income—identify the most important expenditures and try for a consensus on spending within them. That’s not extortion, it’s common sense.
Extortion is spending extra money and extra manpower during a shutdown to block off an open-air stone memorial at the National Mall—when it normally is fully open and often unstaffed during the regular course of the day. Extortion is shutting down a football game that operates without government funding.
Extortion is trapping seniors in a building and not letting them leave—and then forcing them into a bus, all so that they can’t see natural beauty that will be there regardless of the federal government. Extortion is forcing people at gunpoint to leave their homes and businesses—again, at extra expense, and while leaving businesses frequented by administration officials and donors open. It’s blocking off public parking spaces that might provide a view of national monuments.
Extortion is the President saying that even though the US has enough revenue to meet its obligations, its going to default anyway, and “Wall Street should be concerned”.
- Barry-cades confirmed: Park Service says Obama admin ordered closure of World War II Memorial | Twitchy at Twitchy
- At the WWII Memorial, Carol Johnson w/the Park Service says they were told to close the site by White House's Office of Management & Budget.
- Compare and Contrast: Ace
- The "barricade" at the WWI memorial is just a single six-foot length of fence, barricading nothing at all, and a sign:
- Lincoln Memorial Shut | WWII Memorial | Obama | Democrats: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection
- Obama has barricaded the Lincoln Memorial even though it was not barricaded during the 1995 shutdown. Will Barry-cades become the symbol of the 2013 "shutdown"?
- Need proof that math is hard for Obama admin? Look to FLOTUS’ Twitter account | Twitchy at Twitchy
- Twitter is free. RT @FLOTUS: Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund govt, updates to this account will be limited. #Shutdown— Cuffé (@CuffyMeh) October 01, 2013
- Obama Adminstration Specifically Denied Exception to Permit Veterans to Attend WWII Memorial: Ace
- Before we go any further, let us note once again how contrived it is to shut down entryways to a wide open space out in the middle of a park.
- Sorry folks parks closed
- Walley World closed.
More Barack Obama
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- Former President Barack Obama promises to tear down the barriers of hate, and end the divisions that plague shelters. “We will restore the Sanctuary’s image as the last, best hope for acceptance for all those touched by domestic violence.”
- Trump vs. the Media: authenticity and humility
- A meme running around comparing what President Trump wrote in the Holocaust memorial guestbook to what Senator Obama wrote shows a surprising humility in President Trump.
- The Last Defense against Donald Trump?
- When you’ve dismantled every other defense, what’s left except the whining? The fact is, Democrats can easily defend against Trump over-using the power of the presidency. They don’t want to, because they want that power intact when they get someone in.
- Election lessons: be careful what you wish for
- Republicans should learn from the Democrats’ mistake of the primary season: be careful what you wish for, you might just get… half of it. They wanted Donald Trump as Hillary Clinton’s opponent.
- Lessons for new Presidents: Entangling long-term alliances
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More government schools
- On education, the left is mired in the fifties
- Why don’t schools have locked doors? Because when it comes to education, especially K-12, the left, as in so many things, is mired in the distant industrialized assembly-line past.
- Why is it so difficult to hold schools accountable?
- Simulating accountability in education has the same problems as simulating accountability in health care or any other monopoly. Tests and grades and paperwork are never as effective as choice.
- Anything less than school choice is unfair
- Forcing people to pay for one government school regardless of where they want their kids to go is so unfair that even far-left Democrats think it’s wrong.
- Democrats endorse public school elections, teacher recalls?
- Should legislators and teachers be evaluated for job performance in the same way? A group called Winning Democrats suggests that public school teachers should be elected positions rather than tenured, and that teachers should be subject to recall by the communities they serve.
- What is a captive audience, anyway?
- G.K. Chesterton writes, in Eugenics and Other Evils, that whenever someone starts asking “what is x anyway?” you know they’re trying to pull some wool over your eyes and make it the default. So, really, what is a captive audience, anyway?
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