One Week In...

So...let's review where we are one week after the government "shutdown," thanks to President Petulant:

• The Park Service has been ordered to shut down numerous public memorials and monuments, including the WW2 Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. Most of these are open-air areas on the mall that people simply walk through, and are open 24 hours per day. It cost far more to send Park Service employees out with Barry-cades to close off access and stand guard than it would to simply allow people to walk through as they usually do. A Park Service employee, who asked not to be identified for obvious reasons, has been quoted as saying that the orders came directly from the White House, and told the Washington Times, "We have been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting."


• Vice President Joe Biden tweeted his thanks to a Park Service employee for trying to stand up to those scary WW2 vets who were invading the WW2 memorial - saying that he was proud of her.


• The National Park Service has also attempted to close part of the ocean. Charter Boat captains in Florida were informed that Florida Bay was "closed," and they were prohibited to take anglers into 1,100 square miles of open ocean. Fishing has also been prohibited at Biscayne National Park. Park Service rangers will be on duty to police the ban - once again spending more money on the closure than is normally spent when it is open.


• The National Park Service forced the closure of the Blue Ridge Lodge in North Carolina - a privately-run establishment that happens to be in a leased building on federal land. The 51-room inn was booked solid for October. The Park Service forced patrons to leave, and blocked the driveways leading into the establishment. His 100 employees are now idled.


• The National Park Service has been busily blocking the entrances to National Parks. At Mt. Rushmore, they not only blocked the entrance to the park, they also tried to block off access to turnouts on a public roadway to prevent people from pulling off the road to so much as take pictures of Mt. Rushmore.


• The historic 18th century Virginial Colonial Farm has been ordered to shut down despite the fact that it receives no federal funding and uses no federal resources - because it happens to be on federal land. Again, the Park Service showed up to barricade the parking lots and force people to leave. It was NOT forced to shut down during the last federal shutdown in 1995. They've already lost about $20,000 from events they've been forced to cancel, and the survival of the facility is now in jeopardy. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnmcAVupBHk&feature=share)


• 60 families have been forced to leave their privately-owned homes on Lake Mead, including an elderly couple that has owned a home on the lake since the 1970s.


• The Amber Alert Web site was taken off-line for a time - attempts to go there were redirected to a DOJ page saying that the government was closed. That has since been reversed, and the Amber Alert site is back up at last check.


• The GOP-led House has passed a number of bills that would fund specific portions of the government - the Democrat-led Senate refuses to consider any of them, insisting it's all or nothing. Dana Bash of CNN asked Senate majority leader Harry Reid about one such bill, which would have funded experimental cancer trials for children: "But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?" Reid replied, "Why would we want to do that?" and denounced the question as "irresponsible."


• Meanwhile, Camp David remains open, as does the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, because, hey, it's essential that the President be able to play golf when he wants to.


• Also, the Washington Examiner is reporting that the Park Service has OK'd tomorrow's immigration reform rally that's scheduled to take place on the "closed" National Mall.

And the hits just keep on coming - just about every day brings another example of vindictive stupidity. Mark Steyn succinctly put it this way: "The thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today's America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government's pleasure, whether it's your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades."

And those "glitches" on the healthcare.gov Web site? They may not be going away any time soon, according to http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/07/how-much-worse-will-the-obamacare-website-glitches-get/ - I loved the quote from the founder of a software firm regarding the underlying code architecture: "As a software developer, I’m embarrassed for my profession. If ever delivered such crap, I’d be personally inconsolable. This couldn’t pass an introductory computer science class." As Peter Suderman wrote in a Reason.com blog, "...if the administration knew that the problems were due to more than just traffic, and that they would not be resolved in the first week, then they weren’t telling the truth. And if the administration did not know, then that suggests they may lack the understanding or capability to easily resolve the technical flaws with the exchanges. Either way, at this point, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the administration is either intentionally misleading people, or incompetent, or both."

Harry Browne, who was the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, observed that "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'" That's never been more accurate than today.

Thinking About Boston

Several years ago, Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston. I was there, and on Friday of that week, I had about half a day free before I had to head for the airport - so I decided to walk as much of the Freedom Trail as time would allow, starting from my downtown hotel, which was only a couple of blocks off the trail. It was my first and (so far) only chance to be a tourist in Boston, but I would go back in a heartbeat if I had a chance to spend more time there.

It is difficult to describe the feeling of standing by the graves of people whose signatures you've seen on the Declaration of Independence, or walking past a building and seeing a sign telling you that the Declaration was first publicly read aloud from the window above your head, or walking past Paul Revere's home (now a museum that, unfortunately, I had no time to visit), or the Old North Church (of "One if by land, two if by sea" fame).

But what really struck me was the realization that I was 3,000 miles from home, and yet I had no fear or hesitation about walking the city streets. I didn't have to worry about what the policeman on the corner might do to me. The guy I saw wrestling a keg of beer off a delivery truck would look just as natural on the streets of Seattle if you just replaced his Red Sox cap with a Mariners cap. I was surrounded by people going about their business just as they did in my home town.

And I realized more strongly than I ever had before what an incredibly amazing country this is, and how unique it is in the entire sweep of human history, that I could be so far from home and yet have so much in common with the people all around me...because we were all Americans. There is no other country on earth where this is true, and there never has been - and that makes it very special...and I thank God that I was fortunate enough to be born here.

Thanks for listening.