NPS Director: Terrorism Made Us Shut Down the Parks

The National Park Service director told Congress on Wednesday that he had to shut down the open-air memorials on the Mall during the government shutdown because of terrorism, saying that closing them was the only way to protect them "in a post-9/11 world."

Director Jonathan B. Jarvis also said his agency had received intelligence showing an increased threat of danger since the shutdown began - though he would not tell two House committees what those warnings were.

Apparently that threat included domestic terrorists such as these members of the WWII Veterans Front.

Quote of the Day

"If you attempted to reduce liberal technocracy to its Platonic essence, then transferred that essence into a carbon-based life form, you'd have Ezra Klein."

  - Troy Senik, Ricochet.com, "'Ezra Klein: Obamacare Rollout a 'Disaster,'" yesterday.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:39 PM | Comments (598)
Post contains 736 words, total size 11 kb.

I forgot to do this. My bad.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:55 PM | Comments (101)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

Political discussions may continue below down there *points down*

Dallas 3 3
Philadelphia 3 3
Washington 1 4
NY Giants 0 6

Well heh. Did I say "heh"? I meant "we all suck". Just some more than others.

Cards and Seahawks tonight if you have the NFL Network. If you don't, hey, it's the Cards and the Seahawks. You're ok.

If this goddang Windows 8 touchpad thing moves up one more application I do not care about while I'm trying to do this I'ma choke a bitch.

I'm beginning to think CGI Federal is a sub to Microsoft.

PICKEM UPDATE! From Ben K.

Bring It Fancyboy" 57
My Obscene Pick Set: 55
JetFanMike: 52
tom_06060: 50
The Smarch: 50
Circle Jerk: 50

Seen recently:

also keep talkin politics here more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:57 PM | Comments (216)
Post contains 147 words, total size 1 kb.

Hahahahaha.

We should start calling Obama's White House the Alpha-Test Administration.

No we shouldn't. That's dumb.

I got nothin'.

In other ObamaFAIL news:

A design firm, not wishing to be associated with failure, removes all references to its work on ObamaCare.

Tech experts say it needs at least a three-week shut down so that the massive problems can be fixed.

Trust the government, folks:

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY.

"The application could be fundamentally flawed," said Jeff Kim, president of CDNetworks, a content-delivery network. "They may be using 1990s technology in 2.0 world."

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer's cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn't be necessary, experts said.

...

"It is a core problem in the sense of it's fundamental to this thing actually working, but it's not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to," Engates said. "Even if they had a perfect system, it still won't work."

And:

So there's that.

Posted by: Ace at 03:15 PM | Comments (245)
Post contains 295 words, total size 3 kb.

Let me begin with something light and delicious, a little bon-bon of Hate, before moving on to something chewier.

Nailed it!

Now, let's all laugh at Matt Yglesias. But below the fold, I'm going to discuss how and why this happened, and how this sort of thing is also infecting the right -- in fact, how it's infecting everything, virally, and I think the Internet is the main reason. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (395)
Post contains 1977 words, total size 12 kb.

Old joke.

Penguin walks into a bar. Orders a highball. I know no one orders highballs anymore except for Elderly Hookers but this is an old joke so he orders a highball.

The bartender thinks, "Hey, this is Penguin, he probably doesn't know anything about how much things cost. So I'll charge him a lot for the highball."

Please stop questioning the highball part of the joke. You're ruining everything.

So the bartender says, "That'll be six dollars."

See, this is an old joke, so "six dollars" is an exorbitant price for the highball, in the timeframe we're talking about here. In inflation-adjusted dollars, in today's prices, the bartender would have asked for forty dollars. So when I say "six dollars," think forty.

And when I say "highball," think Red Bull & Vodka.

So anyway, the penguin hands over its six (forty) dollars and drinks its highball (Red Bull & Vodka).

Now this joke is getting cumbersome and that's because all you've done is ankle-bite me all through it. If I could have your support for once, instead of your unceasing criticism, I could get to the point briefly for once!

I blame you.

So, after the Penguin pays the exorbitant bill and drinks his drink the bartender says, "You know, we don't get many Penguins in here."

And the Penguin says, "Well, at these prices, I can see why!"

See, that undermines the original premise of the joke that Penguins don't know how much things should cost. Furthermore, it suggests that the reason Penguins don't show up at the bar is not due to the obvious fact that Penguins don't talk and don't drink alcohol, but rather that Penguins don't show up because they're price-conscious.

So it's funny.

Here's what's not funny:

You paid for this. And now you're paying bonuses and overtime to fix it at crunch time. And you'll also be paying off SpryMedia for copyright violations.

A third of a billion dollars. For a website that doesn't even work.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (317)
Post contains 382 words, total size 3 kb.

Now this story is not a huge one. I tried to think of a way to not mislead people in the headline and sort of try to say "This is more of a joke than a major issue." "Larf" was all I could come up with.

A company permits the free use of its software, I think for data tables, so long as the user retains the copyright notification that the software belongs to the company.

Well, of course, The Gang Who Couldn't Code Straight did not include that copyright notification.

Obviously this will be quickly resolved, as Obama can't take yet another embarrassment.

And obviously he will use our money to make his problem go away in a speedy manner. I imagine he will use some of our money to pay off the company so that it never speaks of this again, that is, he will pay them off to secure a No Disparagement Clause or NDA. Which is contrary to the public interest, and also contrary to the fiscal interest.

But it's in Obama's own personal political interests, and that's all that matters, right?

Oh, apparently the crack Obama team left the internal comments in the code, which allowed this company to quickly determine it was in fact its code. Of course, they did delete the part of about requiring their copyright notice to be displayed.

That part they remembered to delete.

BTW, I added a good update to the Tea Party Science post, below, which probably no one has seen, as it was added very late.

Update:

Nixonian.

Good God. It never ends. And the public will not know, because the media will not tell them.

Oh, yes, Politico notes this. And yes, we've seen, for example, a New York Times reporter call Obama's WH the "most paranoid, thin-skinned, control-freak Administration I've ever covered."

But there are a lot of dots here that could be usefully connected by a few very straight lines. This is what the media claims it does best -- put things into context. A very easy (and accurate) narrative could be written here about the Administration's paranoia and secrecy not only harming the American interest but its own interest as well.

Instead, they will let these dots float away, each alone, each isolated, unconnected to any broader, more useful picture.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (235)
Post contains 431 words, total size 3 kb.

Sharron Angle's, I believe. Hey, whatever. I laughed. more...

Posted by: JohnE. at 12:23 PM | Comments (167)
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

This... is a crippling progressive mindset that blinds CNN to its own bias.

Also, check out the new MSNBC site, where they have both kinds of news -- "Republicans Losing" and "Democrats Winning."

And nary a word about the ObamaCare rollout.

Thanks to @slublog for both.

Posted by: Ace at 04:17 PM | Comments (220)
Post contains 66 words, total size 1 kb.

Only by a little bit, but still.

There's probably an ideological reason for this: Many members of the public, especially the Liberal Arts Left, simply think of science as either an ersatz religion which gives meaning to their lives and issues them fatwas and dogmas about the proper role of Man in the World, or as just another Community Organizing institution devoted to politics and advancing the leftist agenda.

I happen to have enough respect for science that I recognize it as neither religion nor Democrat lobbying group. I imagine this respect is widely shared... but not by the left.

More: From Politico's coverage of the article:

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

I'm glad he admitted his cognitive bias, but is he actually aware of his deep cognitive bias?

Will he now do a study to document the cognitive biases of the left, their tendency to demean as nearly subhuman all those who disagree with them?

I doubt it. This is, for any behavioral scientist, obviously an interesting line of inquiry, and certainly one that has very little inquiry into it.

But having found that he himself has been Cocooned by a steady diet of bias-confirming self-selected sources which engage in a nonstop demonization of The Other, he will simply move on to his next hypothesis about the degenerated brains of Tea Partiers and attempt to confirm his own biases.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (358)
Post contains 370 words, total size 2 kb.