[COMMENTARY] This is no time to give up on America's national treasures By Maureen Finnerty

We heard it again earlier this month when President Obama designated three major sites in the Western U.S. as national monuments: We should stop adding new national parks and other protected areas until we can pay for the ones we have now. Others have suggested hiking visitor fees so that those who use the parks and national monuments pay the freight for maintaining them.

There is no denying that many of America's national parks and historic places are in disrepair today or offering shortened visitor hours, fewer interpretive guides, and other services that should make a visit to one of our national crown jewels a special experience. This is a tragedy, but it is no reason to give up on preserving more of what makes America unique.

The reason we add a park is because something of outstanding value to our nation's heritage is in danger of damage or outright loss. That imminent destruction is, most often, human plans to pave it over or tear it up in the quest for minerals or real estate development. Precluding the possibility of new parks says that we have already protected everything that will ever be worth protecting. That's preposterous.

Of course it would be better if we addressed all unmet national park and historic site goals. We should rebuild roads, replace roofs on historic buildings and restore unglamorous, but vital, utility systems. We should also underwrite scientific evaluation and monitoring that will assure the landscapes and the plants and animals on them can survive and even thrive.

It is troubling that, as a nation, we lack the political will to foot the bill to protect and restore our shared heritage. This isn't a question of available funding. The amount of what we need to do to fix our parks is staggering when compared to anyone's household budget, but minuscule when compared to what it costs to run a mighty nation. We can afford it. However, we have been choosing, politically, not to do so.

Why not just jack up the cost of entering a national park? In fact, fees create a cost barrier that excludes the youth and lower-income people that are under-represented among our park users today. Thus, they limit who can benefit from the opportunity to experience firsthand the natural and historical heritage that makes America unique.

Via: Denver Post

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TREY GOWDY GOES OFF ON NATIONAL PARK SERVICE DIRECTOR FOR TREATING OCCUPY PROTESTERS BETTER THAN NATION’S VETERANS

During a prescheduled House hearing Wednesday morning, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) spent several minutes berating National Parks Service directorJonathan Jarvis over the closing of several Washington, D.C. monuments during the government shutdown.

Contrasting the parks service’s decision to allow in 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement a one-hundred-day-long encampment in D.C.’s McPherson Square with the turning away of visitors to the National Mall this October, Gowdy scolded Jarvis for favoring the “pot-smoking” Occupiers over the “war veterans” who “helped build” the monuments.

The South Carolinian lawmaker repeatedly pressed Jarvis to cite a regulation for why he’d erected barricades and turned away veterans from war monuments on the first day of shutdown.

The parks director explained: “On the very first day of the closure, I implemented a closure order for all 401 national parks in compliance with the Anti-Deficiency Act. And immediately, that day, also included, as a part of that order, that First Amendment activities would be permitted on the National Mall.”

But Gowdy was unconvinced. “Do you consider it First Amendment activity to walk to a monument that you helped build, or is it only just smoking pot at McPherson Square?” he asked with an accusatory tone.

“We are content-neutral on First Amendment and on the National Mall,” Jarvis responded.

“That wasn’t my question,” Gowdy shot back. “Do you consider it to be an exercise of your First Amendment rights to walk to a monument that you helped build?”

It went on from there. Watch below, via C-SPAN3:

Via: Mediaite.com

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Oh My: National Park Service Admits It Discussed Plan To Close War Memorials With Obama Officials…

In other words, we were right all along, this was orchestrated by the Obama regime to make the shutdown as painful as possible.

Via: Weasel Zippers

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The Birthplace of American Liberty Defies Obama's Tyranny

I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and my elementary and high-school education was infused with the history that was all around us, so I was very curious to know just how the shutdown of the nation's parks had affected my most favorite part of Minute Man National Park -- the Old North Bridge.

Had the Park Service wrapped the iconic Minute Man sculpture by Daniel Chester French in burlap, so the tourists couldn't see it? I took a few minutes on a perfectly gorgeous Columbus Day to find out.

 

As I expected, the parking lots had been chained off, the bathrooms were locked, and the park headquarters (the old Stedman Buttrick Georgian-style mansion) was closed up. Monument Street (foreground in the picture) is actually a long residential street with parking allowed along most of it, and with parking prohibited only in the immediate vicinity of the Bridge. So some tourists had parked by the side of the road and walked a few hundred feet to the Bridge.

Via: American Thinker

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Mark Steyn: Park Service Paramilitaries

By: Mark Steyn (National Review Online)

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three 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 “non-essential” 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 last 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 — although they shouldn’t be. 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.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents.

Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”

Via: NRO

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Privatize the National Park Service

No more Obama shutdowns ever again.

The behavior of the National Park Service during President Obama’s shutdown campaign has been shocking. As has been widely reported, Park Service employees have been told to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people, and have flourished in that endeavor. They have acted crudely and unprofessionally as a partisan and ideological arm of the White House and its propaganda campaign.

If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about (that would exclude American Spectator readers), then you listen only to NPR, watch only MSNBC, and read only the New York Times. Just click Google and start searching. There are frightening first-person accounts everywhere. Among the worst examples was a case innocently covered by a small Massachusetts newspaper that reported on a group of tourists traveling to Yellowstone National Park. The tourists, by no means a bunch of Tea Partiers, described the Park Service as “Gestapo”-like in its tactics.

That, of course, is an exaggeration. But the mere fact that a group of apolitical citizens would invoke such hyperbole to describe how they were treated really says something.

The Weekly Standard, a conservative source not given to hyperbole,argues in an editorial that the Park Service’s conduct “might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.” That’s no small claim for an administration plagued by scandals ranging from Benghazi to the eye-opening overreach of the IRS, the NSA, and (among others) the HHS mandate. The Standard rattled off examples of abuses during the shutdown, highlighting the most egregious of them all, the shameless scene at the World War II Memorial:

People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

Via: American Spectator

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The Park Police, Part Deux: Hot Cops

The Eagle-Tribune in New Hampshire reported on a local resident who went through something of an ordeal while visiting Yellowstone National park. I’ll let them tell it, just so you don’t think I’m making it up:

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route. . . .

Rangers systematically sent visitors out of the park, though some groups that had hotel reservations — such as Vaillancourt’s — were allowed to stay for two days. Those two days started out on a sour note, she said.

The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.

Via: Weekly Standard

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The end of civil service?

Over 140 years ago, the federal government began its reform of the bureaucracy to the civil-service system, a process which took decades to complete.  Its pinnacle of reform came in 1939 when Congress passed the Hatch Act, which barred federal employees from conducting political activity on taxpayer time and government property.  As government expanded rapidly from that point, though, the federal bureaucracy developed its own interests in policy, and this year we have reaped the results.  In my column for The Fiscal Times, I write that the IRS scandal and the National Parks Service antics during the shutdown show that the civil-service ideal is dead — especially in this administration:

In May, the Inspector General for the IRS found that the agency had targeted groups applying for tax-exempt status on the basis of their political beliefs, especially those groups that referenced the Tea Party. Those target lists continued to be used as IRS officials such as Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified to Congress that the agency conducted no such targeting.

Nor was that that the only way in which the IRS scrutinized President Obama’s opposition.  USA Today reported three weeks ago that the IRS specifically targeted groups that had “anti-Obama rhetoric” in their literature.

In one case, with an application from the Patriots of Charleston, the IRS flagged “negative Obama commentary” on their website as a reason to hold up approval for their tax-exempt application.  For the Tea Party of North Idaho, “significant inflammatory language, highly emotional language” was enough to start peppering the group with demands to release information on their donors and the companies owned by those donors.  …

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 1^st.  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.

That last incident in particular goes far beyond the already-objectionable “Washington Monument strategy” of extorting operating funds out of Congress.  It speaks to two related developments in American governance — the expansion of power in the federal government, and the arbitrary manner in which it gets applied. That may be called many things, but it’s neither “civil” nor “service.”

Via: Hot Air

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