Free Republic

A Gannett company newspaper. Title and link only allowed on FR:http://www.argusleader.com/article/20131004/UPDATES/310040047/Rushmore-blockage-stirs-anger-in-S-D-

The Pisgah Inn is closed compliments of the federal government. It's a private business that is located on government property. One of many businesses that are shutdown across the country. Some totally privately owned and operated. This will not stand. The order to close came from US Park Service National Director, Mr. John Jarvis. He has been contacted. As citizens of these United States, we will exercise our freedom to assemble. We are assembling at noon Saturday, 10/4. Please be at Pisgah Inn.

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

Standard & Poor's said on Tuesday the U.S. government filed a $5 billion fraud lawsuit against it in "retaliation" for its 2011 decision to strip the country of its "AAA" credit rating. In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, S&P said the lawsuit filed on February 4 attempts to punish it for exercising its First Amendment free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution, but also seeks "excessive fines" in violation of the Eighth Amendment. It said the government's "impermissibly selective, punitive and meritless" lawsuit was brought "in retaliation for defendants' exercise of their free speech...

The U.S. government is looking to recruit members for what some are calling a “Behavioral Insights Team,” a panel of experts that will study human behavior so as to “design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” according to a document describing the program...

From the time Abraham Lincoln entered the White House nearly a century and a half ago, there has been an anti-Lincoln tradition in American life. President John Tyler’s son, writing in 1932, seemed to speak for a silent minority: “I think he was a bad man,” wrote Lyon Gardiner Tyler, “a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.” Throughout his presidency Lincoln was surrounded by rivals, even among his own cabinet. Outside the White House, his many enemies included conservative Whigs, Democrats, northern copperheads and New England abolitionists. Wisconsin editor, Marcus M....

Via the Examiner, a short but noteworthy clip insofar as it exposes a potential fault line between Cruz and Rand Paul. McCain lumps them together as “wacko birds” but I’m not so sure that’s true of Cruz on national-security issues. His alliance with Paul interests me because it strikes me as a personification of the uneasy libertarian/tea-party alliance. The groups overlap heavily on spending issues, and both are deeply suspicious of Obama’s expansion of government. The master stroke of Paul’s drone filibuster was that he found a sweet spot for both, making the philosophical case for due process while humiliating...

The Associated Press scandal just keeps getting worse, and we haven't even started yet. AP CEO Gary Pruitt informed staffers Wednesday that the Department of Justice monitored, not one, not twenty, but "thousands and thousands" of phone calls made by reporters and editors. Associated Press president and chief executive Gary Pruitt told staff at a Wednesday town hall meeting that the phone records obtained by the government included "thousands and thousands" of calls in and out of the news organization, according to a staffer who attended. Pruitt said Wednesday that the Obama administration acted as "judge, jury and executioner" in...

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday urged congressional leaders to raise the debt limit and insisted that the White House is not going to negotiate over the increase because lawmakers have "no choice." "We will not negotiate over the debt limit," Lew wrote. "The creditworthiness of the United States is non-negotiable. The question of whether the country must pay obligations it has already incurred is not open to debate." Lew said that while President Obama is willing to discuss plans to reduce the nation's deficit with Congress, those talks must be kept separate from any effort to raise the nation's...

Kim Jong Un building 'mini world' with replica Big Ben and Eiffel Tower Chubby tyrant Kim Jong Un is building a “miniature world” in North Korea – with a replica of London's Big Ben at its heart. The dictator is set to open the theme park in capital Pyongyang – and has included the iconic clock tower. The new attraction, which opens this year, will also boast a copy of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. The secretive state famously doesn’t allow its citizens to leave the country – so it appears Jong Un has decided to bring the world to his people....

<p>The Democrats scoff when we remind them that the second amendment was intended by the founders for the people to defend against government tyranny.</p> <p>"What? Are we tyrannical?," They innocently exclaim.</p> <p>And the answer is yes.</p> <p>When you elect an admitted Marxist to the presidency who claims the constitution (that he is supposed to uphold) is a flawed document and pledges to "transform America" by importing European spread-the-wealth around Marxism to ensure "economic justice," that is tyranny!</p>

Chinese archaeologists said that a tomb unearthed in east Jiangsu Province might be the final resting place of an emperor known for his tyrannous reign about 1,500 years ago. The 20-square-meter tomb in Yangzhou City might belong to Yang Guang, or Emperor Yang of Sui, the second and last monarch of the short-lived Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618), according to the city's cultural heritage bureau. A gravestone excavated from the tomb confirmed the emperor's identity, while an inscription about the year of his death concurred with historical accounts, said Shu Jiaping, head of Yangzhou's institute of archaeology. "But we're still not...

Joe Biden says the president of the United States is preparing to take "executive actions" to deal with guns. BuzzFeed reports: Vice President Biden told White House allies in the gun control fight Thursday that President Obama will be announcing new executive actions on gun violence in the days after the Senate voted down a gun violence bill. On a conference call with "stakeholders," Biden told gun control advocates that the fight is not over and that eventual action on gun control will come. Press were not invited to the conference call; a participant provided BuzzFeed with access. "Look I...

The executive order will direct the commission to produce a report for Obama within six months of its first public meeting, principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said. The panel will be tasked with considering "a variety of ways to shorten lines and promote the efficient conduct of elections" and its findings will be "intended to serve as a best practices guide for state and local election officials to improve voters' experience at the polls under their existing election laws."

In Stalin's Russia, genetics and cybernetics were treated as the cat's paw of imperialism and officially branded as "whores." But it was another branch of Soviet science, history, that was a far more deserving candidate to bear that not exactly honorific moniker. Russian historians loyally served the regime, meeting its propaganda needs in full compliance with a thesis propounded by the titular head of the Soviet school of history, Mikhail Pokrovsky: "History is the present telescoped into the past." Some American liberals have been faithfully following Pokrovsky's precept, reinventing the past in keeping with the progressive view of the world....

A 22-carat dictator: Robert Mugabe has gold coins minted to celebrate his 89th birthday in poverty-stricken Zimbabwe • Four-tier cake made in his honour at Zimbabwe's state house party • Opposition accuses his party supporters of killing 12-year-old boy Zimbabwe is one of the poorest country's on Earth, but clearly despot Robert Mugabe doesn't seem to care on his 89th birthday. The president celebrated it by immortalising himself in freshly minted gold coins and held a lavish party with a giant cake. Guests, including his wife, first lady Grace, tucked into the four-tier treat made in his honour at the...

...Did he exert features of moral grandeur and heroism necessary to steer the country through its deepest political crisis? Or was he an aspiring tyrant, especially in his use of executive power? A recent example of how not to think about Lincoln’s leadership comes from the historian and television commentator Doris Goodwin. Goodwin wrote a book called “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” showing how Lincoln drew his cabinet from his personal and political competitors. In a subsequent discussion of Lincoln’s leadership titled “The 10 Qualities That Made Lincoln Great... If all of these sound a little...

In January 1863, Abraham Lincoln made a remarkable confession. He was, he told a senator, more worried about “the fire in the rear” than he was about the Confederates to his front... Disgusted Republicans termed them “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake... By January 1863, their assaults on Lincoln, combined with the poor performance of the armies, were taking a toll on civilian morale. Midwesterners spoke openly about seceding and establishing another new country or aligning with the Confederate States of America. Lincoln’s critics were harsh, uncompromising and relentless. They said Lincoln was a tyrant, bent on amassing power and ruining...

Group with enormous influence on White House issues specific plans A progressive group with enormous influence on White House policy has issued specific recommendations to the Obama administration on how to push sweeping gun control, including suggestions for executive orders. The Center for American Progress released an 11-page proposal, reviewed by WND, calling for a full ban on the sale of assault weapons and magazines with a capacity for more than 10 bullets. CAP suggests legislation to require licensing and transfer restrictions on new and existing assault rifles. The CAP paper, delivered to the White House last week, recommends that...

Top Two Reasons to Own a Gun: Thank God and Sam Colt … My right to own a gun, to stroke it, to use it, and to pass it on to my children is not a matter of pragmatism, so I’m not going to argue statistics or polls, even though they’d be in my favor. And this list is in no particular order because, after the top two reasons, it really doesn’t matter how you order the rest. It’s like the top musical acts of the twentieth century; there’s Elvis and the Beatles and where you rank The Stones, The...