Jeremiah in the House.

Crazy House stenographer...

...or maybe it is that bad.

One final observation: I wrote this because the tone of the coverage has been universally derisive and mocking. Even if she is mentally ill, that’s an appalling way to respond to a person who may be in serious distress.

Code Pink can erupt into protest on the floor of the house and no one bats an eye. Our elected officials can lie and grandstand and backslap and lie some more and the media acts like that’s just how things are done.

But someone calls the nation to account, in the every seat of power, for its wicked behavior, and suddenly we’re in Cloud Cuckoo Land. We need to be better than that. Whether she’s sick or whether she’s speaking an essential truth, the response lacked humanity. And even if she is ill, that does not make her message meaningless.

Shutdown Theater

Harry Reid wants you to suffer:

Word came this week that the National Institutes of Health has suspended therapy-dog visits to sick children at its clinical center because of a 25% reduction in staff, even though volunteers run the program.

Seems the veterinarians who evaluate the dogs have been furloughed. So how about the frequently used dogs that have already been evaluated? No deal.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to fund NIH clinical trials for children with cancer. When asked why, if it could mean saving a single child, Reid replied: "Why would we do that?"

These are just kids, after all. Who cares if they're in pain or die because of his intransigence and lack of compassion?

It's comforting to know, however, that the House and Senate gyms are still open, that the government had enough money to buy a mechanical bull and, while the feds barricaded the open-air National Mall and threatened to fine and arrest those who walk there, they'll let an immigration amnesty rally take place on those same grounds

Remember Obama's Faux-Civility schtick.

Good times, good times....

Oops....I guess that means it's time for another "National Conversation on Race."

If you think the government is at war with you, that's because...

...it is.

Like the parks, your private information belongs to them and the government is their "private army."

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the Washington Examiner‘s Joel Gehrke shot out a little bulletin with the details.

House investigators say that IRS officials gave confidential taxpayer information to White House aides to help President Obama’s team fight lawsuits filed against the Health and Human Services contraception mandate.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., confronted the IRS’s Sarah Hall Ingram about emails she exchanged with White House aides about organizations that would qualify for an exemption from the HHS mandate.
“Well, one of the areas of interest is there’s a significant redaction that quotes the statute 6103. Do you know who is underneath that blackout?” Issa asked Ingram, who said she didn’t remember the email.

Issa’s team infers that the redacted information is confidential taxpayer information because of the legal authority the IRS invokes to justify not revealing it to the congressional committee, section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.

****

“The documents indicate that Hall Ingram and her subordinates violated the IRS’s traditional role as an impartial administrator of the tax code by using their expertise and knowledge to advise the White House on a politically controversial subject: the four-prong test for religious exemption to the contraception mandate,” according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee statement concerning the emails.

Appparently, I'm not the only one noticing how the National Park Service is identifying itself as an arm of the Democrat Party.

The government is Obama's private army:

Even this pales in comparison to the example shown by the National Parks Service during the shutdown.  There is nothing new about the Washington Monument strategy, of course, which dates back to a 1969 attempt to trim the NPS budget.  George Hartzog, then director of the NPS, closed the Washington Monument and the Grand Canyon National Park ostensibly as a cost-saving measure, but really to force the public to pressure Congress to restore NPS funding.  Congress relented two weeks later, but Hartzog resigned.

When the shutdown went into effect last week, NPS reacted not by going off the job or closing national parks alone, but by actively blocking access to areas normally accessible 24/7 without impediment. That included putting up signs and guards at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, despite the fact that (a) the memorial was built with private funds, and (b) there are no gates or barriers under normal conditions at the memorial – nor at the Lincoln Memorial, nor at the Martin Luther King Memorial, both of which were similarly shut down by the National Parks Service.

When people simply moved the barricades to access the memorials, the supposedly shut down NPS arrived on scene to wire them together .  When people gathered anyway, the US Park Police arrived on horseback to disperse them. Stephen Hayes asked an NPS spokesperson who ordered these actions, and was told that the Office of Management and Budget – a White House agency – ordered them to barricade the memorials.

It gets even worse than that.  Unknown at the time but reported this week, the National Parks Service chased down a group of senior citizens at Yellowstone National Park when the shutdown commenced on October 1st.  After informing the busload of tourists, some of whom were tourists from other countries, that the park was no longer accessible, the rangers locked them into a closed hotel for several hours with armed guards posted at the exits.  When finally allowed to get back on the bus and leave Yellowstone, rangers stopped the tourists from pausing to take pictures, chasing after them for “recreating.”

That arguably constitutes kidnapping or false arrest, especially conducted under color of authority for no other reason than to score political points in the shutdown.  One of the tourists called it “Gestapo tactics,” and an NPS ranger anonymously confirmed this as a deliberate strategy by NPS.  “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” the anonymous ranger told The Washington Times. “It’s disgusting.”

It certainly is, and it’s part of a disturbing pattern emerging in the second term of Barack Obama. When law enforcement and tax enforcement become rankly political, Americans can no longer trust in their federal government, even when it’s not shut down – and that won’t stop after Obama leaves office, either. We are getting a clear lesson on the risks of larger government and regulatory overreach, and those risks go far beyond incompetence. Let’s hope this serves as a wake-up call – and let’s demand that Congress hold those accountable in the IRS and National Parks Service for their uncivil service.

When did the President found out about the denial of military death benefits?

Where was he when Behghazi was happening?

What were his college grades?

Why are rallies for illegal immigration more important than death benefits for Americans who died in the line of service to this country?

Simple questions get no answers.

Shut-down Theater.

Obama and Hagel had the authority and resources to pay these benefits.  Instead they leave Obama's golf  course and screw over grieving Americans.

The Obama administration insisted Tuesday it had no choice but to withhold death benefits to relatives of 1st Lt. Jennifer Moreno, a 25-year-old soldier born and raised in San Diego, and four other soldiers killed since the partial government shutdown began Oct. 1.

This is ridiculous and perverse. President Barack Obama has used an expansive — and some legal scholars believe extreme — interpretation of his powers to unilaterally rewrite key provisions of the No Child Left Behind law, the sweeping 2002 measure that drastically reshaped federal education policies. In similar fashion, the president has unilaterally rewritten key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, his sweeping 2010 measure that is drastically reshaping federal public health policies. His administration has also essentially rewritten federal laws governing illegal immigration and penalties for drug possession.

Just this month, the federal government has authorized the spending of billions of dollars since the partial shutdown began without explicit congressional approval. Contrary to the Obama administration’s representations, there are not hard, definitive rules governing how the executive branch must act during these budget fights. That is reflected in the amazingly arbitrary ways that the federal government has shuttered some services and agencies but not others — often with the barely hidden goal of making people suffer to build pressure on House Republicans to give in to the White House. For one of hundreds of examples, the Armed Forces Network serving U.S. military personnel abroad still shows news — but it has stopped showing NFL games, blaming the shutdown.

Scenes from an ordinary day in Soviet America...

...where you exist for the State.

//Even so, he said he took the group out for a drive in the park and he pulled over to let passengers take photos of the park’s native bison.

A ranger showed up immediately.

“She told me you need to return to your hotel and stay there,” Hodgson told the Enterprise.”This is just Gestapo tactics. We paid a lot to get in. All these people wanted to do was take some pictures.”

He said the group then was threatened with trespassing charges.

“The national parks belong to the people,” he said. “This isn’t right.”

Park spokesman Al Nash defended the actions in an interview with the Enterprise.

“We don’t have staff on duty to deal with any ordinary operational issues,” he said. When the park is closed, everything is closed, he said.

“All we could do was eat dinner in the dining room. It was like a ghost town,” Hodgson said.

One member of the group, Pat Vaillancourt, of Newburyport, Mass., told her local newspaper, the Newburyport News, that even while they were allowed to stay in the Old Faithful area, they were watched.//

What must the Park Ranger feel like?

Like a minor functionary in the Nazi party, perhaps?

Consider the case of Ralph and Joyce Spencer, 77 and 80 years of age, respectively, who were evicted from their home on Lake Mead in Nevada by an officious park ranger who told them they had 24 hours to vacate the premises. The Spencers own their home outright, but it sits on land leased from the federal government. A lease is a legal contract, and the government shutdown presents no legitimate reason for the violation of that contract. Even if it did, the place to settle such a dispute is in a court of law — not through the arbitrary exercise of federal police power. This is not a blunder: It is the malicious harassment of private citizens in their own homes by an administration intent on creating hardships and then using them for propaganda purposes. You own your home right up until the moment when that the fact becomes inconvenient to President Obama.

America - Now with Even More Hope and Change..

...now that Harry Reid is the Boss!

Obama Throws Reid Under the Bus: Hey, That Guy's In Charge of All of This, Not Me

But note how very laudatory The Hill is regarding the wily Reid. And note the article goes out of its way to protect Obama from any political fallout from Reid's aggressive, no-compromise stance -- claiming that Obama is just a spectator in all of this, and himself only wishes to compromise.

President Obama has handed over the reins of leadership on government funding and the debt limit to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Reid is now fully in charge of his party’s negotiating strategy, a significant change from past showdowns with Republicans.

He has taken the initiative from Obama, who played the principal role in the 2011 debt-limit talks and New Year’s fiscal cliff deal. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill are relieved by the switch.

The majority leader has brought a more pugnacious style to the debate, bashing House conservatives as “anarchists” and mocking the “Banana Republican mindset.”

This is a welcome change for Democrats who thought Obama was too accommodating to Republicans during previous crises.

Wait, I thought compromise was a good thing? I also enjoy the Democrats' efforts (assisted by the Hill) to try to shield Obama from the political consequences of his decisions -- "Hey, Obama is just a big compromiser who wants what's best for everyone, but he's not in charge now, so don't hold any of this partisan squabbling against him."

America - Now with more Hope and Change.

If only our government were this clever and energetic when it wasn't trying to screw us

Obama shuts down Amber alert website:

//Not to sound like a broken record, but come on. The domain name has been paid for--the cost of keeping it up has to be very small, if not zero. It's probably even cheaper than blocking off an open-air memorial or barricading a road to ensure private citizens cannot go to their houses.

Although, considering we all heard Sen. Harry Reid's comments on childhood cancer patients, is it really all that shocking that the government shut down something to help missing kids?

Absurd.//

Are we a nation with a government...

...or a government with a nation?

Mark Steyn observes:

//As it turns out, the government has now closed 1,100 square miles of water in Florida Bay.

In his first inaugural, Reagan famously said that “we are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” When the government feels free to Barrycade off large chunks of the nation — from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam — it’s telling you: it’s the other way around.//

Obama is at war with America.

Obama shuts down play-off games to overseas troops.

“Make life as difficult for people as we can…”

The Major League Baseball playoffs are underway, as well as the professional and college football seasons recently kicking off, but America’s troops serving overseas won’t be viewing any of it due to the Obama ordered furloughing of “non-essential” personnel, and as we now discover a new twist, “not deemed critical” broadcasts have also been scratched, as reported by the military news service Stars and Stripes on Oct. 4, 2013.

The only American television available for troops from Afghanistan to Okinawa to Honduras as well as to all the ships at sea is in the form of the government-ran Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), which broadcasts fan favorites such as “Pentagon News” and “All Things Considered” via the also government-ran left-leaning National Public Radio (NPR).

According to AFRTS spokesman Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer John Harrington, the broadcaster’s lawyers have determined there is “no sound policy or legal basis to air sports.”

Furthermore, the legal opinion sent to the military network further advised that televised sporting events are “not deemed critical to accomplish essential aspects of the DMA (Defense Media Activity) mission in direct support of excepted military operations and activities.”

Obama is at war with the American people.

It's like he's trying to prove that the Government is the giver of all good things, even a view of Mt. Rushmore.

Blocking access to trails and programs at South Dakota’s most popular attraction was one thing, but state officials didn’t expect Congress’ budget stalemate to shut down a view of Mount Rushmore.

The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.

The cones first went up Oct. 1, said Dusty Johnson, Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s chief of staff. The state asked that they be taken down, and federal officials did so with some of them. The state was told the cones were a safety precaution to help channel cars into viewing areas rather than to bar their entrance.

“I think reasonable people can disagree about that,” Johnson said.

The cones were down again Friday as a blizzard hit the Black Hills and plows needed access to the roads, Johnson said. He said the state would be monitoring to see whether the cones are put back along viewing areas.

And:

The Buffalo News reported that a tour group of dozens of people from western New York was unable to take pictures of the monument because highway viewing areas were coned off.

“It’s all closed up,” the newspaper quoted North Collins, N.Y., resident Hilde Werneth as saying. “They won’t even let you stop and take a picture. You can only drive by.”

Jim Hagen, secretary of the South Dakota Department of Tourism, said the situation is hurting people from out-of-state and international visitors who are in South Dakota to visit the monument.

“They won’t even let you pull off on the side of the road,” Hagen said. “I just don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish.”

Who said this?

If this represents policy, it is evidence that our government is at war with us.

//“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”//

America - Now with even more Hope and Change!

Our country is in the best of hands ....when it costs more to shut down open air parks than keep them open...and "it's for the children."

In a press release, Palazzo noted: "This is an open-air memorial that the public has 24/7 access to under normal circumstances--even when Park Service personnel aren't present. It actually requires more effort and expense to shut out these veterans from their Memorial than it would to simply let them through." We can vouch for that. We recall strolling through the memorial one afternoon in February 2004, before its official opening that April. As far as we remember, it was unsupervised. So shutting down the memorial was a political stunt that wasted taxpayer money.

Yesterday more veterans visited the memorial. PJMedia reports they were met by an "SEIU rent-a-mob" (that's the Service Employees International Union). "About 20 protesters arrived on the scene chanting 'Boehner, get us back to work' and claiming"--falsely, it seems--"they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown." One of the protesters told PJMedia's Patrick Poole he was being paid $15 an hour.

As for the kids with cancer, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday on the consequences of cuts to the National Institutes of Health: "Director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center for clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said."

The Washington Post's left-liberal Wonkblog picked up the story: "As long as the government is shut down, the National Institutes of Health will turn away roughly 200 patients each week from its clinical research center, including children with cancer."

Healio.com reports that the House today passed a bill to restore NIH funding--but Obama has already issued a veto threat. Yesterday, as the Washington Free Beacon notes, CNN's Dana Bash asked Reid about it at a press conference:

Bash: You all talked about children with cancer unable to go to clinical trials. The House is presumably going to pass a bill that funds at least the NIH. Given what you've said, will you at least pass that? And if not, aren't you playing the same political games that Republicans are?

Reid: Listen, Sen. Durbin explained that very well, and he did it here, did it on the floor earlier, as did Sen. Schumer. What right did they have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded? It's obvious what's going on here. You talk about reckless and irresponsible. Wow. What this is all about is ObamaCare. They are obsessed. I don't know what other word I can use. They're obsessed with this ObamaCare. It's working now and it will continue to work and people will love it more than they do now by far. So they have no right to pick and choose.

Bash: But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?
Reid: Why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 people at Nellis Air Force base that are sitting home. They have a few problems of their own. This is--to have someone of your intelligence to suggest such a thing maybe means you're irresponsible and reckless--

Bash: I'm just asking a question.

Even diehard partisans in the press are on the defensive. "Come On, No. Harry Reid Doesn't Hate Kids With Cancer," reads a headline on The Atlantic's website. When you feel compelled to answer a question like that, it's a sign you aren't winning the argument.

America held hostage...

...by President Obama.

Our government is out of control.

First, it was the World War II veterans who had to break down barriers to see the open air, un-attended memorial erected in their honor.  A memorial which is on public land but is supported – including the National Park Service fee – with private funds. This week there was more security surrounding this memorial — just to keep elderly veterans out — than there was at our embassy in Benghazi the night it was attacked.

And for what? To inflict as much pain as possible through this government shutdown. It’s called Washington Monument Syndrome, and it’s pure political theater.

But now there’s a story just coming to light that takes things even further. According the Archdiocese for Military Services, GS and contract priests (who are paid by the federal government as independent contractors in places where there aren’t enough active-duty priests to meet the needs of Catholics in military service) are being forbidden from celebrating Mass, even on a volunteer basis.//

"We are like prisoners of war who have to pay for our prison."

Obama is at war with the American people.

Obama orders privately-run, privately-funded parks to close.

We are the hostages he's taken.

Great Moments in Leadership.

Harry Reid asks why he would want to save one sick child.

The Obama Administration is at war with the American people.

Government shut-down fascism:

It is obvious that the Park Service intends to block access to these trailheads, even though it literally costs them nothing to leave them open and by closing them they actually increase the possibility of serious problems for drivers on the road and hikers still in the park. In fact, it is costing them money they don’t have trying to block access.

To block access is thus a deliberate, senseless, and mean-spirited act that demonstrates quite clearly the political goals of the Obama administration during this shutdown. The administration has decided it will use its power to do as much harm as possible to the American people as it can, with the hope that this harm will cause the public to rise up and throw the Republicans out for refusing to pass the budget that Obama wanted and demanded. By limiting access to the park, the administration will also cause harm to the thriving businesses just outside the park that depend on the tourism trade.

Further proof of this vicious and fascist political strategy by the Obama administration could also be seen in Washington, DC., where the park service put up barricades to try to block access to the World War II memorial, despite the fact that it is an open-air monument that is unmanned by any park service staff. Before the shutdown the memorial cost the park service nothing. After the shutdown it is costing them a lot to try to keep people out. When a large group of veterans, many in wheelchairs, arrived today to visit the memorial, however, they decided to tell the park service what they thought of this policy, and tore the barricades down.

More Americans have to follow the lead of these veterans. The time has come for some courageous defiance by everyone. For example, we plan to go hiking one more time while we are here, on Thursday. If the shutdown is still in place, I intend to remove those cones and park my car and go hiking. Since a park ranger has already told me they will not be providing any service in the park, what will they do? They won’t be there to stop us.

The Occupy Movement took over public property for months.

Why don't the rest of us have the same rights?