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On June 24, National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis asked park superintendents to work with their partners and bookstore operators to voluntarily withdraw from sale items that solely depict a Confederate flag. The National Park Service press release can be found here. "We strive to tell the complete story of America," National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said of the agency's reputation for telling difficult parts of our history. "All sales items in parks are evaluated based on educational value and their connection to the park. Any stand-alone depictions of Confederate flags have no place in park stores."...

In a few minutes, six-term Republican incumbent Steve King will debate his Democratic challenger Jim Mowrer in Storm Lake. Iowa Public Television's "Iowa Press" is hosting the debate, and C-SPAN is also televising. (SNIP) He is third in offering amendments on House floor after Jeff Flake and Sheila Jackson-Lee. You can't always pass a bill but he has highest percentage of success in getting amendments passed. Mowrer says Senator Flake [of Arizona] has asked King to stop claiming that, because it's not true. They show the King tv ad I transcribed above. Mowrer asked to comment. He says it's false....

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Roger Susanin) -- A little-known Metro Parks & Recreation regulation requires people pay $125 for a permit to take photos or shoot video at Nashville public parks.

But do you remember, during the sequester Obama was able to close down the Washington National Mall. He was able to stop veterans ceremonies. He was able to shut down the Blue Ridge Parkway. He was even able to shut down the Grand Canyon, visits to the Grand Canyon. He was able to shut down visits to Jellystone National Park. While the World War II Memorial was shut down, he allowed I think it was an anti-Israel or pro-immigration rally or some such thing to go on at that place when he was preventing World War II vets from making...

(WASHINGTON) -- It appeared Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, expected something entirely different from Facebook when he asked whether his Facebook followers were better off with Obamacare than they were four years ago, suggesting they “Comment with YES or NO!”Post by Senator Ted Cruz.Comment they did. By late Wednesday afternoon, the status update had more than 55,000 replies.   “I and a few million other people are a lot better off,” said one user. “I hope you are enjoying your Cadillac plan given to you by your wife’s employer, Goldman Sachs.” “YES, best law ever! And way overdue!” read another one....

The partial government shutdown in October was largely to blame for a 3% drop in visitors to America's national parks in 2013, according to a report released Monday by the National Park Service. The country's 401 parks, historic sites and recreation areas drew 273.6 million visitors in 2013, about 9 million fewer than the previous year, according to the report. The 16-day government shutdown, sparked by a budget dispute in Washington, was responsible for reducing the visitation numbers by about 7.9 million, the report said. The communities near the parks lost about $414 million in spending by visitors because of...

The Department of the Interior knew beforehand that two groups of aging veterans would be visiting the World War II Memorial as the partial government shutdown began on Oct. 1 but decided to barricade the site anyway, according to e-mails obtained by National Review Online. The newly released public records also show National Park Service employees busily monitoring the news for any bad publicity and making shutdown exceptions for their co-workers. On Sept. 30, staff from the offices of Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) and Representative Steven Palazzo (R., Miss.) contacted the Department of the Interior’s Office of Congressional Affairs,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says the government shutdown last fall resulted in nearly 8 million fewer visitors to national parks, costing the parks and surrounding communities an estimated $414 million in lost visitor spending. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the shutdown was a striking reminder that national parks are a powerful economic engine for local economies across the country. The report released Monday said five states, including California and Arizona, lost more than $20 million during the 16-day shutdown.

During the month of January 2014, IREHR will publish a multi-segment special report on the current status of the Tea Party movement. We will publish a track the membership of the principal organizations in the movement—a task undertaken by no organization or agency other than IREHR. We will look at geographic regions where this membership is concentrated. And we will look at some of the money that keeps this movement in the public eye. In the piece below, we follow the Tea Parties over the course of 2013. It was a year of countervailing winds and storms. A drive against...

Texas tea party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz tells ABC's Jonathan Karl on "This Week" that he has no regrets about the 16-week federal government shutdown. In fact, he blames President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders, ABC News reports in a story on its website.

The House Oversight Committee wants to find out why the Park Service behaved so bizarrely. ... Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former prosecutor, almost drove National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis into incoherence with his relentless questioning. Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them...

Yesterday we briefly interrupted our battle with the Tea Party Anarchists to  present the Medal of Honor to retired Army Captain William Swenson. The long overdue medal was awarded to former Captain Swenson for repeatedly risking his life in Afghanistan's Battle of Ganjgal to rescue his fallen comrades. It only appears that Lady M is floating in space For the occasion, Lady M selected one of her recycled frocks, this one a little Rachael Roy number from way back in 2009; as you can see it still fits as well as it did 4 years ago! Even though we’ve, uh,...

<p>Klein — who wrote a provocative biography about Obama last year entitled “The Amateur” — said White House insiders refer to Jarrett as “The Night Stalker” because she is the only presidential aide who frequently spends time in the family quarters and dines with the Obamas.</p>

PAYSON, AZ - Republican Rep. Brenda Barton of Payson compared President Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler on her Facebook page Monday in a post urging county sheriffs to revoke authority from the National Parks Service “thugs” who are enforcing the federal shutdown on national parks lands. “Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?” she wrote. Fuhrer is a German term for leader that is...

----"Plan B" and fiscal cliff vote, redux. Having hammered out a deal to shoot back to the Senate tonight -- with most Republicans reportedly on board -- House GOP leadership has been forced to delay or cancel those votes after support among conservatives collapsed in the early evening hours. The rules committee meeting, which would have formally drawn up the bill and advanced it to the full house, has been postponed indefinitely. The reason is simple. They don't have the votes: What happened? The counter-offer's broad outline, which I've been following all day, seemed to be on track. Then the...

Father Ray Leonard, who serves as the Catholic chaplain at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, filed suit Monday against the Department of Defense, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the Department of the Navy, and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. DOD is prohibiting Father Leonard and the other Catholic priests from administering the sacraments and providing other services to their congregations even though two weeks ago Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, a law that instructed DOD to maintain on the job and keep paying contract employees who were supporting the troops. DOD took this action because Hagel determined--after consulting...

The sacred ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania where 9/11 Flight 93 crashed twelve years ago after being hijacked by Islamic terrorists has been closed by the National Park Service due to the 'government shutdown.' The Flight 93 memorial was closed. pic.twitter.com/27G6l39Hiq — Dave Stroup (@DaveStroup) October 13, 2013 Govt shutdown closes Flight 93 National Memorial, would-be visitors turned away.#flight93 pic.twitter.com/an9qFsaIFn — Mary Pickels (@MaryPickels) October 1, 2013 The petty and ghoulish Spite House strikes again: Barrycades blocking WWII vets from their memorial, denying death benefits to military families and now this. The Flight 93 National Memorial is an open field for...

Does anyone know which contractor supplied the black fences around the monuments? I would like to contact whichever company that supplied the barricades at the monuments and ask it to come and pick them up. A boycott and bad publicity is what they deserve for this.

Sarah Palin Obama’s Debt Default is on His Shoulders While We Shoulder His Impeachable Offenses Apparently the president thinks he can furlough reality when talking about the debt limit. To suggest that raising the debt limit doesn’t incur more debt is laughably absurd. The very reason why you raise the debt limit is so that you can incur more debt. Otherwise what’s the point? It’s also shameful to see him scaremongering the markets with his talk of default. There is no way we can default if we follow the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4, requires that we service our...

As I mentioned yesterday, the medical device tax that went into effect last January is just one of the many insidious job-killing measures contained within ObamaCare, but it is an especially terrible one. The 2.3 percent excise tax is meant to raise a handsome $30 billion to pay for ObamaCare over the next decade, except that, added bonus: It’s going to stifle innovation and competition in an industry that provides all manner of life-saving medical devices, from MRIs to pacemakers to blood tubes. And this hasn’t just been a Republican refrain, by the way. Thursday night, the Senate voted overwhelmingly...