Posted on 10/17/2013 11:08:29 AM PDT by Idaho_Cowboy
If a government shuts down in the forest, and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown, as noted last week, is mostly baloney: 83 percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “nonessential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.
But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the past two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall – that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding, therefore, to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.
Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction... Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Terrific post, well said. I hadn’t seen it before. To arms. I thot that was the very worst of the worst that President Pouty Pants did during the shutdown. I hope the blowbacks leaves him and his Royal Thugs in ashes. Cannot be soon enough.
Thank you for posting. The NPS acted in a thoroughly lawless manner and I hope the message gets out.
Steyn ping.
Bttt.
I hope lawsuits are forthcoming.
Mark Steyn ping.
Freepmail me, if you want on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.
Thanks for the ping Slings and Arrows.
It was, but the different venues that carry Mark's brilliance use their own titles. i.e. National Review: Park Service Paramilitaries [King Obama's Deer].
It helps if all things Steyn carry the keyword marksteyn. This is a case where the title search can't detect earlier posts.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.The NPS has disgraced itself. The National Park Service???
I certainly hope there will be Congressional hearings about this, and about the FCC imprimatur on News which is propaganda. And of course, NPR.
But of course the real culprit is the AP, which is the mechanism by which reporting is made homogenous:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)Journalists are “people of the same trade,” after all - and a wire service is a mechanism by which they “meet together” - and have done, continually, since the Civil War era. Before the AP, newspapers were notorious for not agreeing about much of anything. Now they are - leave aside a stray editorial page, which is a ghetto in the news business - utterly homogenous in the political implications of what they emphasize and what they don’t mention.
This is must see video of Trey Gowdy relentlessly grilling National Park head honcho.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3080114/posts
Direct link to the Blaze
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/16/trey-gowdy-goes-off-on-national-park-service-director-for-treating-occupy-protesters-better-than-nations-veterans-heres-his-case/
We should by now be well past the "lawsuits" phase and into the "tar and feathers" phase. Our Founding Fathers would have been...
Learned from a radio show today that the 3’x4’ professionally printed signs restricting entry to every NPS ‘owned’ site, were in place 8 hours after the shutdown.
How did this happen? How did they get printed and distributed so speedily? No bid contrats again? Essential expenditures just in case the Congress did not ‘keep the govt open”? Or planned nastiness by the Obamanation and his storm troopers.
Yeh but we have been subjected to many years of conditioning. We are kinda pansified.
Mark Steyn is incomparable, as always...thanks for the ping, JLS!
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