…and Barack Obama’s vindictive streak. It’s amazing how many still don’t see what a petty, thin-skinned man he is.
24 thoughts on “The Budget Fight”
Comments are closed.
…and Barack Obama’s vindictive streak. It’s amazing how many still don’t see what a petty, thin-skinned man he is.
Comments are closed.
Over the last few days I’ve heard quite a number of government employees (and others when talking about government employees) say some of the most despicable things about their moral obligation and blind obedience to authority. It’s quite disturbing.
For example, I was discussing the park rangers threatening to man-handle WWII veterans to prevent them from accessing a previously open 24-hours a day memorial. I asked, who would follow that order? The immediate reply was “anyone who doesn’t want to lose their job”. This is a common argument, that somehow the need to put food on the table is carte blanche to ignore your moral responsibility. When I called them on this, the second most common argument came out: it’s not your place to question the law. Yeah, it is. We all have that responsibility.
Another example, I heard a government employee complaining that they don’t have permission to seek alternate employment during the shutdown. This would be simply comical, but it comes down, again, to “the risk of termination” if anyone found out they had taken another job, even temporarily. Keeping that government job, above all other considerations, including moral considerations, is the prime motivation of all civil servants.
“This is a common argument, that somehow the need to put food on the table is carte blanche to ignore your moral responsibility.”
Well, it isn’t. But, it’s also a difficult call to make if others are depending on you.
“When I called them on this, the second most common argument came out: it’s not your place to question the law. Yeah, it is.”
Ask them if they would tell that to this lady.
In the same Vein as Trent’s comment above, witness the bureaucratic threats against civil servants. It is apparently illegal for them to work during the shutdown, and they are being told that if they so much as answer an email while on furlough, they may be fired.
So civil servants, who are notoriously difficult to fire for not doing their job, are apparently very easy to fire for actually doing their job.
All the shutdown highlights for me is “Things that would be better separated from government entirely.”
It’s the difference between NIST and the EPA. Again.
Shutting NIST has minimal impact because of its structure. It doesn’t mean Kellogg can’t sell cereal because they aren’t qualified to judge weights. And even arguments over weights (You cheated me, etc.) aren’t going to involve NIST. But the EPA…
I must admit to seeing this behavior to some degree at Yellowstone National Park. As I have mentioned before, I work for a private vendor who provides services for various concessions in the park. The park is currently completely shut down without a tourist to be seen. And the budget negotiations aren’t currently going anywhere. That means we’ll probably be closing down for the season early. I’m comfortable with that. It costs a lot to run Yellowstone even with the entrance fee and it is pretty dangerous place this time of year.
What I find funny and annoying at the same time are the “no fun” instructions that as far as I can tell have been issued to everyone still in the park by the NPS (and, hence, are public domain meaning I can share with you). They start pretty reasonable. Don’t hike on the trails. I can see that, since an understaffed NPS isn’t going to be ready to find lost people out in the snow or deal with the various injuries that can occur out in the middle of nowhere.
But then there’s travel. You can only travel from one location (resort area) to another. You can’t do so for recreational purposes. I can squint and sort of see that point since they aren’t equipped right now to handle a lot of traffic (though there’s not enough people still in the park to generate a lot of traffic even if they were all on the road). The kicker though is that you can’t pull off the road for a minute to watch a sunset or a grizzly (in other words, recreational purposes) even when on valid business. It’s point A to point B only.
The final restriction of this sort makes the least sense. Because the park is officially closed, you can’t leave without first obtaining permission to get back in. But they won’t give such permission, if you’re leaving for recreational purposes. So no fun outside of the park for people inside the park. I guess the idea is to lower the work load on staffing the gates. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader how to get past that rule.
Well, this is the price of working with the government. Sometimes you get entangled in their webs.
Well, this is the price of working with the government. Sometimes you get entangled in their webs.
And this shows there absolutely must be less webs because things like this occur and it gives the people in power the ability to completely harass and screw people who have nothing to do with the budget fight. It’s one big Marxist showpiece for Obama showing “I’m in charge” to the little subjects.
If there is one good thing that is coming out of this, it is showing just how far the federal government has been allowed to reach into every aspect of what should be private life.
Does the left really think that Bush would have done anything remotely like this if there was a shutdown during his tenure? Would Bush have been absolutely insistent that an open-air monument be baracaded against veterans?
And Jim and his friends will probably pipe in here, but really, why is the NPS shutting down scenic overlooks?
http://worldnewsviews.com/2013/10/03/shut-down-theater-nps-barrycades-scenic-overlooks-as-well-as-memorials/
As the article points out, these places are not manned. It costs more to keep people out. How on earth is it “essential” to keep people out of completely open public land? What’s next? Will all highways be barricaded in the event the NTSB runs out of money?
When did this nation become about shutting down public stuff because it might be unsafe? I thought we were supposed to be a nation of free men, not cowering subjects sheltering in place waiting for the all clear from their masters. I’m no longer talking about dedicated parks like Yellowstone. I’m talking about completely open areas that never see anyone guarding it anyways. except maybe the occasional trash collector. You know what? If you want to make it about “safety”, post a sign saying that during the shutdown there are no safety personnel around, so if you pass this point it is at your own risk, and just call it a day.
Good grief. The beach at the nearby lake has this figured out. The lifeguards are only available during certain hours. Once lifeguard hours are over, they call everyone out of the lake for a few minutes to make sure everyone is safe on their watch. Then, once the lifeguards go home, everyone goes back into the lake at their own risk. If you drown, well, a free person has every right to take that risk. No money is spent keeping people out because it might be “unsafe” because no one is there to catch you.
How can this policy not be the same for the scenic overlooks?
Yes, I know, it’s not really about safety or NPS responsibility for people, because those things are easily resolved by saying, “enter at your own risk”, and calling it a day and not spending any money. It’s all about Obama and his broken ego trying to show the peasants who is boss, and also trying to showboat for the 2014 elections.
“Does the left really think that Bush would have done anything remotely like this if there was a shutdown during his tenure? Would Bush have been absolutely insistent that an open-air monument be baracaded against veterans?”
When the dems were in the minority during the Bush Administration, they didn’t fillibuster the appropriations bills to try and get their way on the war.
Um, we are talking about completely different things. One is funding a war with troops in an active war zone. The other is blocking people from visiting memorials, memorials that are not in a war zone.
And there wasn’t a complete fundamental disagreement about the entire role of government at play either. Yes, there was a disagreement over going into Iraq, but no one was disagreeing over whether the military is a government role.
Here there is a fundamental disagreement, and besides that everyone is getting screwed by this thing for only a few who benefit. I know, Democrats don’t care about anybody who makes over say $20,000 a year. Everything to the left is 1% vs 99%, except they don’t realize that within that 99% category there aren’t “like things”. Meaning, somebody who makes $99,900 is a 99%-er according to the definitions I’ve heard (less than $250,000 or less than $100,000), but that person is in a completely different place in life than someone making $10,000. So, the left lumps a whole lot of people together into this 99% category without realizing that the people within that category may not be actually able to be put into the same category when you start analyzing whether those people can individually afford insurance or not.
So, if the left believes they support the 99% but the 1% is their enemy, then I guess that means someone who makes $99,900 is a poor guy who can’t afford anything and deserving of endless government subsidies, but someone who makes $100,100 is an evil rich bastard that deserves every government confiscation of his money the left can throw at him, despite there only being a 0.2% difference between the two salaries.
The point is, the left always yells about how much they care, and then they end up screwing the vast majority of people to “help” a small amount, and even then don’t really help out that small amount anyways. The Democrats will screw everyone making between roughly $40,000 to $100,000, by raising their premiums to cover stuff they didn’t need to cover last year, in their holy crusade for “social justice”. Dana Loesch has been pointing out that the insurance on the exchanges are blocked out of something like 90% of the cancer specialist market in Missouri. Like many have said: health insurance is not health care. A government mandated credit card that most merchants don’t accept. Some social justice the left has got there.
And finally back to the original point, even if Democrats did that, the point is, I believe Bush would have not closed down open-air memorials and completely public unmaintained scenic overlooks. I mean, this is really starting to go into dangerous territory where Obama thinks he can just shut down non-dedicated public areas in response to no money coming in. Like I said, does this mean the highways will be shut down if the NTSB runs out of money? Does the left even care that the government thinks it has that authority, that if the government has no money they can lock up everyone into only their private property? What is the left going to do with the homeless if the government has the authority to shut down all non-private property areas because there is no government money? Herd them into concentration camps?
How can this policy not be the same for the scenic overlooks?
The priority shouldn’t be to optimize the experience of a government shutdown, the priority should be to not have government shutdowns.
Will repeat up her:
And so if a budget is not passed, then the logical conclusion of what Obama is doing is that Obama can lock everyone in their homes.
should be “up here”
The walkways around Old Faithful have always been open when the park itself is open, and usually open even when the park is closed between seasons. The only closures I’ve known of are when there’s a grizzly feeding on a carcass nearby, and when the President is visiting. (Thank you both Bushes for not doing the first year in office photo-op visit there.) You will also never see a law enforcement ranger on patrol out there, and rarely will you see a naturalist. If there’s a problem or an emergency, they need to be summoned by people like me.
A friend of mine volunteers to help run the Old Faithful webcam. He told me that it got shut down, even though it was funded and is maintained by private money, and all the operators do it from their homes or offices (including one guy in England.) But because the bits get routed through NPS servers, they deliberately shut it all down.
So the closures are there solely to make people as miserable as possible. And as Karl points out, since the general public can’t get there, this is primarily making employees of both the NPS and the concessioners suffer.
NPS thuggery and contempt for the public is nothing new from my perspective. I’ve dealt with them for decades, and never trust anything they say, and assume the worst. For example– The parking lots along the road north of Old Faithful were deliberately made smaller back when the roads were rebuilt in the 1990s. As predicted, this has caused more traffic problems (at one trail head, auto accidents went from rare, say once per week to several per day sometimes last year. This year they put up huge, unslightly barriers to try to manage the parking mess they created). When these future problems were pointed out when reviewing the Development Plans, the NPS responses were that it was being done, “to protect wetlands” and to “encourage people to get out of their cars.”
I also find disturbing the willingness of government employees to follow nonsensical orders, such as barricading monuments and blocking the parking lots of private businesses that are connected to federal land. Even though they complain about it, they’re doing it anyway. This does not bode well for when things really get bad.
Another thing I’ve noticed is the websites nasa.gov and history.nasa.gov are unavailable. Both simply have a blank page redirecting people to usa.gov. I’m not an IT guy, but I don’t see how it would cost anything to leave the sites as is and put a banner on the home page saying that they are not being updated because of the shutdown. That would not affect the thousands of pages about historical missions or Hubble photos. But no, all of that content is unavailable. I wonder who gave that order. Did it come directly from the White House? I have a hard time believing that Charles Bolden did it on his own authority.
Also, yesterday I got my paycheck and saw that taxes were withheld as usual. Someone forgot to inform the IRS about the shutdown.
but I don’t see how it would cost anything to leave the sites as is
A website with a simple redirect does cost marginally less than one with lots of great Hubble photos; it gets fewer visitors, uses less bandwidth, etc.
To reiterate: the goal of a government shutdown isn’t to save money, it’s to get the shutdown over with.
And so if a budget is not passed, then the logical conclusion of what Obama is doing is that Obama can lock everyone in their homes.
To reiterate: the goal of a government shutdown isn’t to save money, it’s to get the shutdown over with.
True for those who consider that government is too small and doesn’t spend enough. That’s a mighty small segment of the population. For everyone else it’s a demonstration that most of government really isn’t that necessary. Life goes on normally. And the longer it does, the more people will come to the realization that government is actually too big and spends too much.
And before you spout your usual 2-billion figure about what the last one cost, remember that figure is only arrived at by including the back pay that federal workers got AFTER it was over. Funny; exclude what was saved by not paying them, and add it in when they got it afterwards. Only LIV’s and sycophants can swallow that without laughing.
the goal of a government shutdown isn’t to save money, it’s to get the shutdown over with.
As Curt says, it’s only a goal for those who think the government should be powerful enough to oppress the citizenry until they pay up. For those not in government, such a goal is called racketeering.
I’m not so worried about the websites. One valid point is that leaving a website up without maintenance is a security nightmare, as no one is watching the server logs.
Good. We can have an adult conversation about these matters in Rand’s fine salon, that is, until certain persons return to express their snark and indignation.
Speaking of snark and indignation, Brian Williams ran a segment of a Republican Congressman getting into a “national park-rage” incident with a Park Ranger. Williams explained to NBC viewers (this was on the regular NBC Nightly News, not gosh forbid, MSNBC) that “what we are seeing is an example of hypocrisy.”
I guess. If you are willing to suspend belief that Health Care Reform is controversial, ignore that it was passed on a parliamentary maneuver once Scott Brown was elected to the Senate on a platform of opposing Health Care Reform (from Massachussetts of all places), that House Republicans were attempting to repeal, and if that failed, to delay Health Care Reform, yes, on a party-line vote on keeping the Federal Government funded, and that they are doing that because it isn’t just their personal Quixotic quest, but that they are looking over their shoulders and constituents and possible primary election challenges, and that the House Republicans have passed measures to keep the parks open and give life-saving treatment to the kids while the government reaches some compromise on a major issue that the public is not of one mind on because even the Republicans aren’t stoopid and they see which way the wind blows politically, but the Senate Democrats are following the President’s hard line, with the Senate Majority leader saying something completely stoopid about him not wanting to fund medicine for the sick kids when some Federal workers have to stay home.
Yes, if you are willing to suspend belief, or suspend any semblence of balanced coverage on a public controversy, what the Republican Congressman was doing was hypocrisy.
I guess I am belatedly coming to the view that this is all “street theatre.” The park-rage incident with a Ranger was for the folks back home, and the Ranger (along with Brian Williams) was too obtuse to know that.
The Honor Flights and the storming of the Memorial is all street theatre — these incidents were attended by Republican House members.
The forced closure of open-air Mall sites is all street theatre as is the President’s “thin skinned response.” Like the chit chat on Wheel of Fortune where Pat embarrassed himself introducing a male contestant as having a “woman willing to marry you”, the fiance turning out to be a man, and Pat quipping, “I had a 50-50 chance of getting that right”, my wife remarks that this idle banter is scripted and read off a Teleprompter, the producers of “Wheel” deciding to go mainstream with same-gender marriage.
This is all out of the Alinsky playbook, every last bit of it.
I guess I am a little surprised regarding applying this tactic to the WW-II veterans. It is one thing doing this to Chicago slum landlords living in Winnetka, threatening a “sit-in” of the men’s rooms at O’Hare if certain demands were not met, but veterans?
I got to thinking Mr. Obama is “doing Alinsky by the numbers” by doing this to WW-II vets, you know, the guys who fought Hitler and Tojo. But when you have the Wrath of Brian Williams against the WW-II vets, not to mention our own Chris and Jim, I guess I am behind the times to know what is sacred and what is not.
I once asked a British-immigrant STEM discipline professor about the treatment of Dowding (of Battle-of-Britain fame), and he responded, “Who?” The fellow probably thinks Peter Townshend the musician rather than Peter Townshend, one of the “few owed so much by so many” who was not permitted to marry the Queen’s sister.
By the way, the musician (Who?) is Townshend whereas the war hero is Townsend.
I can see this backfiring against the Park Service. I’d like to see some Congressional hearings into who ordered these actions. Americans love our national parks (some say we’re loving them to death) but the Park Service, not so much.
If I told you, “This is all the work of rogue Park Service employees of the Yosemite Ranger Station and has nothing to do with the White House”, would people here “get” the joke, or do I need to go back and work on my “timing”?
I think it’s already backfiring against the Democrats. Americans are starting to take pride in simply ignoring what the government tells them to do, and they’re not being punished for it. The government put up barricades, and the people just take them down or ignore them.
That’s the kind of attitude change that brought down the Soviet Union.
LOL