Liberal Flight

People cast ballots with their fingers and hands. But their ultimate vote is with their feet.

There are states in this country that are magnets.  They attract. There are other states that repel. Let's look across this great country of ours and look at the real election returns, net moves in and out -- and compare those returns to ballot box voting.

Over the last decade the state that people most wanted to go to was Texas, followed in order by Florida, then North Carolina, New Mexico and Georgia.  These are states with right leaning to moderate political tilts. You need to go all the way down to Washington (number 9) and Oregon (number 11) to find states with a dramatic leftward tilt that actually attract net positive migration.

On the other hand, the top three out-migration states are New York, California and Illinois. These states were landslide supporters of Barack Obama in the last presidential election,  Their representation in Congress tilts Democratic almost 3 to 1.  Yet these are states that people do not want to stay. Abandonment is the rule in liberal America, not the exception.

The liberal out-migration slant runs through the top ten (or perhaps more properly, bottom ten) with the exception of Louisiana. Louisiana's out migration occurred in the two years after Hurricane Katrina.  It was caused by nature (despite what megalomaniacs like Al Gore tell you), not by man. If it were not for Katina, Rhode Island, despite its tiny size, would have slipped into the top ten out migrators, and there would have have been a left leaning clean sweep.

I would not advise the citizens of Oregon and Washington states to feel smug and secure. They've been blessed with some extraordinary geographical advantages and have fed off of entrepreneurial success stories that are now decades old and running their course. Liberal political programs are step-by-step, bit-by-bit, destroying economic incentive and opportunity in the Pacific northwest, as elsewhere.  It is just a matter of time.

Good luck to all.

Evolution in the 21st Century

Lockdown on Montana State University Campus

Earlier this week, Montana State University officials ordered a campus wide lock down and surged campus and city police to investigate sites on campus because two men were spied carrying a rifle (don't ask me how many it takes to screw in a light bulb).

BOZEMAN (AP) - Montana State University police are searching buildings and telling people to stay inside after receiving a report of two men carrying a rifle on campus. 

An alert sent out by the university Wednesday morning says police received a report the men were crossing 11th Avenue in Bozeman and heading toward the center of the Centennial Mall. 

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports one man is wearing a hunter's orange hoodie and the other a green or gray jacket and a baseball hat.

Aerial view of Montana State University campus.

Interesting descriptions -- they apply to maybe two out of three guys around here and one out of three gals.  The campus meanders in and around town. There is no obvious border. But shut your doors. Lock up the women and children.

Officers are searching buildings and have advised students, faculty and staff on campus to stay inside and lock their doors.

Pull in the usual suspects.

The two men were sighted at about 8:20 a.m., and an alert was sent to students and faculty at approximately 9 a.m. A campus-wide search by police turned up no suspects, and a traffic stop of a vehicle with passengers matching the descriptions of the suspects turned up no evidence.

Here are the rules.

Currently, firearms are allowed on the Montana State campus, though under the conditions that the firearms be used for hunting or sporting purposes, that guns be locked in designated storage areas—they're not allowed in residence halls—and that they never appear on campus or in academic and common areas. In 2013, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock vetoed a bill that would have allowed guns on all Montana's public college and university campuses.

The intellectuals who run the university and the geeky Democratic governor are soooooo smart. You can have a rifle, you can use it, but it must be stored, secured and cannot be seen. Then the smart people reported.

Ellig says two men matching the description were briefly detained, but they were released after their car was searched. 

Students are allowed to keep firearms in locked facilities.

Ellig says officials believe a student may have retrieved a rifle while moving out for the end of the school year.

Since we moved to Bozeman a couple years back I would guesstimate I've seen someone walking around with a rifle something like a hundred times. This is probably the safest place I have ever lived.

The most dangerous weapons in Montana are a dude barreling too fast around a corner in a Ford F-150 pickup truck or a gal running a stop sign in her Subaru. Look it up. Good luck to all.

A crushed gray Subaru sits at the scene of a fatal car accident on the intersection of East Valley Center Road and Frontage Road near Bozeman on Wednesday, April 16, 2014. Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

BOZEMAN - A Bozeman woman is dead after a two-vehicle crash at the intersection of Stucky and Cottonwood roads Monday morning.

The 44-year-old woman was traveling westbound on Stucky Road at around 7:30 a.m. when she failed to stop at the stop sign at the intersection of Cottonwood Road, Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Glen Barcus said. The woman, who was driving a Subaru wagon, pulled in front of a pickup truck that was heading northbound on Cottonwood Road. The driver of the pickup truck, a 29-year-old Bozeman man, swerved to avoid the Subaru but was unable to miss it and the car was T-boned, Barcus said. March 13, 2013, KBZK TV.

Real Climate Change at Work

Most of you probably never heard of Devil's Lake, North Dakota, but it has probably experienced more climate change than anywhere else in this country. Climate change is normal. Stability is not.

The town experienced incredible extreme hot and cold -- during the Great Depression.

The Daily Messenger (Canandaiguany, New York),
July 6, 1936

Records in Weather

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A dizzying succession of phenomenal weather -- most of it bad -- has made the past 12 months one of the most remarkable periods on the weather bureau's books. 

In one part or the country of another weather men have recorded the coldest Winter -- the hottest Summer -- the worst floods -- the most devastating dust storms and the most severe tornadoes and hurricanes in history. 

The Central and Eastern portions of the country recorded the extremes in low temperatures during the Winter of 1935-36. 

"At Devil's Lake, N D, bureau officials said, "there was established a Winter - a temperature record that probably has no parallel in the weather history of this country for a first-order weather station. The temperature went below freezing on November 27 and did not rise to the freezing point until March 1, a period of 96 days." 

The average temperature for January and February at Devil's Lake was 13 degrees below zero. 

It is the same region where record heat is no being recorded. Within the past week, a report of 112 degrees was received from Devil's Lake. Kennebec, S D, reported a maximum of 119 degrees.

That was in 1936, long before the recent few hundredths percent carbon dioxide increase addition to the atmosphere that supposedly will cause extreme weather, floods, droughts, pestilence, disease and famine nation and worldwide.

Devil's Lake, North Dakota is called Devil's Lake because it is on the shores of Devil's Lake, at least it is once again. Devil's lake is approximately 330 square miles -- about two thirds the size of Lake Tahoe.

During three generations (my, my parents and my grandparent's lifetimes) first the lake level dropped 40 feet. Then it rose 50 feet. Here is a graph which covers most of that time frame.

Glacier Bancorp Annual Shareholders Meeting

Last week we drove up to Kalispell to attend the annual shareholders meeting of Glacier Bancorp (GBCI). Glacier is a holding company of community banks, headquartered up the Flathead Valley, a gateway to Glacier National Park and hence the name.  It is one of our largest stock holdings, a conservatively and well managed company that unlike most all the rest of the banking industry did not accept TARP money from Uncle Sam and never suspended, did not even cut, its dividend during the financial crisis.

We previously blogged on how we came to invest in Glacier in the first place, and commented on some of its stock price meanderings earlier this year.

For some, the most interesting part of the trip likely may be the scenic photos I took on the way up.  I took a less traveled route after cutting up to Helena, from whence I drove on US 12 over the continental divide at McDonald Pass, followed the historic Old Mullan Trail down the valley before cutting north on SRs 141 and 200 before turning off through heavily wooded landscape and scenic lake vistas (many of which were still partially frozen) along SR 83. On the way home, I traversed the southern edge of Glacier NP across to Shelby and then down south through Great Falls and Helena. Here are some of the views.

Pasture and mountains (click to enlarge).

Campaign Ad: No Drones 'R Us in Montana

Campaign ad of the year!

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

The French almost never get it right.

Accenture Comes Through For Healthcare.gov!

Accenture has come through -- with respect to our predictions I mean. It's a racket.

Barack Obama taking direction from health care industry
CEO's at the White House, Washington, DC.

When the Obama administration pushed through a no-bid contract award to put Accenture on the Obamacare contract, replacing the original Healthcare.gov IT contracter, CGI, we said this is how contract selection works -- contacts and influence, no merit.

In my experience, Accenture is one of the two or three most expensive of the gang of Beltway bandits. The firm hires former federal officials who worm their way back into agencies to roam the halls and glad hand, cajole and manipulate (or worse) contract awards from their former colleagues and subordinates. I saw it first hand when I worked at Postal Service Headquarters in DC, where Accenture's inside marketing lead was a former Deputy Postmaster General, the number two man in the agency (his masked, last nameless, LinkedIn profile is here), who had at one time or another been chief operating officer, chief financial officer and head of employee and labor relations. You or I would get an armed escort out of the building if we roamed around the grounds and into and out of offices the way that guy did, but among the portals of official Washington, DC he is courted with open arms.

As for what work the successor contract required, we noted that Accenture was being hired to confront and resolve back end/back office web site difficulties. Large parts of the platform had never been built.

Healthcare.gov does not track payments or allow the government
to calculate its subsidy payments accurately.

The back (financial) end of the website is not built, so the government not only doesn't know how many people have actually purchased insurance, it also cannot determine how much of your taxpayer subsidy money to forward to health insurance companies. Change management (like if you have a baby to add to a policy), opt out and cancellation processes are also not implemented. As the website stands now, you can sign up but cannot get out. I can't wait until we hear the stories about poor penniless survivors forced to continue to pay for a deceased loved one's health insurance. It's gonna happen.

The government said it was bringing in Accenture on a non-competitive basis because it wanted to be sure the work got done the right way, right now. Looking at Accenture's business model and track record, nuts to that we said.

Supposedly the new contractor will timely rectify website failures. But if you really think there will be something materially different or significantly improved now that Accenture will be managing the website code writing exercise, you may want to think again.

So to our surprise shock and dismay, here is the headline months later.

Price Tag for Healthcare.gov Repairs Jumps to $121 Million; 'Back End' Still a Mess

It can be embarrassing -- to be so right.

After shelling out $677 million to build the federal health care website, the government will spend an additional $121 million in 2014 to repair it—$30 million more than previously estimated—the Washington Times reported last night. This comes just as the Obama administration is starting the hunt for next year’s diverse group of contractors.

CGI Federal, the original lead contractor awarded $93.7 million, was replaced by Accenture this past January. Accenture received an initial payment of $45 million—an amount that was supposed to double by year’s end, according to the Washington Post. But yesterday, Accenture Federal Services announced their final agreement of $121 million for work through January 10, 2015.

Accenture is outstanding at doing one thing and one thing only -- collecting outrageous sums of money.

All that work that had to get done -- well, it did not.

This year, Accenture is tasked with repairs and additions such as “enhancing the back-end capabilities to improve user payments,” according to the Washington Times. The Hill reported in January that the “back end” had to be operational by mid-March, or “disaster” would ensue and the whole law could be “jeopardized.” In fact, that was the main reason Accenture was brought on board so hastily without a full bidding process, The Hill noted. 

But last Friday, Politico stated that the back end might not be completed by the summer, detailing what it called an “overlooked chapter” of Obamacare: 

Obama administration officials originally intended to have the major back-end components of HealthCare.gov working by the website’s launch in October….

The deadline for completing those pieces gave way to January and then to mid-March. Senior officials said early last month that they hoped to have the entire system ready by the summer. Now, even summer appears to be a question mark.

The government is clueless on what is going on with Obamacare financially. It is wasting money left and right. Pay no attention. Carry on. Good luck to all.

Obama Uses His Pen -- To Eliminate Jobs

Barack Obama wags his pen -- the dude is in charge!

When Congress wouldn't salute smartly and go along, Barack Obama used his pen to establish a new federal minimum wage for work on government and government sponsored or regulated contracts. He ratcheted minimum pay from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. That is a 39 percent increase, which anyone who has even passing knowledge of basic economics or business finance knows, will make many operations that are dependent on low wage, unskilled labor unprofitable, put them out of business and inhibit new business growth altogether.

Sure enough, when Dear President's penmanship wrought and wrote down into military bases, their eateries, one after another, began to close down. In late March it was reported:

Six restaurants located on military installations, including three McDonald’s outlets and two name-brand eateries, have closed recently or are planning to shortly, with new minimum wage requirements for workers on federal contracts believed to have played a role in the decisions.

Last week McDonald’s restaurants closed at Naval Weapons Station Charleston, S.C., and at Naval Support Activity, Bethesda, Md.; a third McDonald’s will close next week at Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton, Wash. A fourth restaurant, I Love Country, has notified Navy Exchange Service Command that it will close next week at Naval Station Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, reported Army Times.

Two other contractors, a sandwich eatery and a pizza parlor, have asked to terminate their Army and Air Force Exchange Service contracts to operate at two other installations.

These decisions most likely are related to Labor Department rules governing fast food workers on federal contracts, along with a recently signed executive order increasing the minimum wage for employees working on new federal contracts beginning Jan. 1, a source told the publication.

United States soldiers patronizing a McDonald's in Kuwait.

The Labor Department rules, issued last fall, require federal contractors operating under the Service Contract Act to pay fast food workers a higher minimum wage, as well as additional health and other benefits. It is not yet clear what the impact of President Obama’s executive order will be for contracts on military installations. It will increase the minimum wage for all federal contract workers from $7.25 to $10.10.

These closings “are the tip of the iceberg,” the source told Army Times. “I don’t think anybody has realized what the far-reaching effects of this will be.”

The shutdowns and job losses prompted a response and rebuke from the Navy:

More closures may come unless relief is granted. Navy and Marine Corps exchange officials estimate that up to 390 fast food concession operations would close on installations across the U.S. and its territories, which would result in the loss of jobs for nearly 5,750 employees, according to an April 8 letter to Labor Department officials signed by Russell Beland, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for military manpower and personnel, asking for exemption from the wage regulations.

These contracts are negotiated for different bases at different times, so the effects will be seen incrementally. The Navy and Marine Corps exchange systems already have suspended 74 contracts for “new concepts,” according to the Navy letter.

Many family members and veterans are employed by the fast food restaurants.

Officials of the two exchange services estimate a combined loss of about $27 million a year in profits associated with food service sales alone. The companies that build and operate the restaurants on base make payments to the exchange systems.

This was a lose, lose, lose deal as is so normal when the federal government intervenes in business decisions and interferes with markets. I pray someday that we have a president again who worked real jobs, for real businesses, in the real world, for an actual living.

For now, at least, the Department of Labor has found a well of disappearing ink.

No need to bid adieu to that Big Mac. The U.S. Department of Labor is temporarily exempting fast food restaurants on Navy and Marine Corps installations from new minimum wage rules that led to the closure of McDonald's restaurants on several bases.

Time will tell if this is the last chapter or Obama will author more writs to show employees the door.

Top April Posts

At long last April is gone, and so, after the last few days, is the snow cover below 7,000 feet. Yesterday was delectable. May is opening with more of the same. I began work on a new garden plot (with a raised bed) a few weeks back, taking a few shortcuts to allow early planting. I am hoping for the best. Cold April weather kept my attentions indoors much of the month, which was great for posting productivity on Along the Gradyent, but not such a positive influence on my golf game. Here are the top ten April posts. 

Diagram depicting the anatomy of the Club Rendezvous tragedy.

1. My boyhood hometown of Morton Grove Illinois was a mecca for roadhouses and speakeasies during the 1920s and 1930s.  One of these establishments was the Club Rendezvous, located in a converted bungalow on the southeast corner of Austin and Dempster, where the Hi Lo and Jewel Tea grocery stores, and the Sun Drug pharmacy, operated during my youth. In the wee hours of the morning on March 25, 1935 a flash fire erupted in the club. Inwardly opening, spring locked doors trapped patrons inside, including Northwestern University students, killing seven and seriously burning a dozen more.  Morton Grove Before the Baby Boom: Club Rendezvous Goes Up In Smoke chronicles what happened that night and outlines the shady history of the club proprietors -- Al and Rose Cowdrey.

2. If you like the movie CaddyShack you will love King Day Post, which tells the story, from this then fourteen year old's perspective, of us caddies going on strike, following the model of a civil rights demonstration. The post is fun and, like the movie -- long after its initial release -- has become a perennial favorite. We are happy to entertain. Read and enjoy.

Obama's sprawling new NSA data center.

3. In the NSA scandals, all Barack Obama has done is follow in Bush's footstep, right? In NSA Overreaches are Bush's Fault? we point out the contrary evidence is right in front of everyone's eyes. 

4. In the The Masters (Repost) we reminisce about  caddying for the first of the honorary starters at The Masters, and apologize for not believing the elderly gentleman when he related to us how he won the Open Championship.

George S. Foster, candidate for Congress in 1904.

5. My great uncle George S. Foster led an incredible life. As a teenager he lived in a sod shanty where a snake slithered from the roof down into his cup of tea. By the time he was an elderly man he was a gentleman farmer who lived comfortably on the shores of Lake Michigan. Along the way he was a successful lawyer, a Chicago Democratic politician, and a zealous advocate for unpopular clients. Read all about in On the Road to Bathgate Act 4g: George S. Foster, Chicago Politician, Lawyer, Banker and More.

6. Morton Grove: Before the Baby Boom is the first installment of the Morton Grove Prohibition era roadhouse series that we are rolling out.  We began with the figurative end, which is the burning of The Dells. Our next post in this series will come out this month. It will document the history of The Dells from soup to nuts, or perhaps should I say from robbery, to arson, to kidnapping and to murder. These guys played for keeps.

The Dells is torched on October 7, 1934. The boys stopped to pose.

7. To Invest In A Bank talks about my investment in Glacier Bancorp, headquartered up the Flathead valley in Kalispell.  As promised, I attended Glacier's shareholder meeting earlier this week. I took copious notes -- about a lot of tall, serious looking guys in dark suits, white shirts and boring ties. When the gardening and golf schedule permits I'll write a post with insights gleaned from that first hand look and share a look at my new GBCI hat.

8. First it was Fannie Mae.  Then it was the Obamacare website contractor.  It was a neighborly mix. The in house lobbyists for both lived across the street -- from me, literally. Check our story out in It's That Fella Across The Street.

9. With the golf season in full swing again, training for the uninitiated is freshly in order. Readers of this blog who are new to the game are learning how to survive a season of professional golf coverage in The Golf Channel: Spouse's Guide To Sanity (Special Guest Post).

Paul Bunyan in Bathgate, not Brainerd.

10. Bathgate had snow -- Fargo and Brainerd didn't. On the Road to Bathgate: Fargo the Movie, is an ever popular pop culture story that found new legs this month with the debut of Fargo, the series, on FX. "You should have seen it right after they put it up," said Reinhold Henschel, who owns Reiny's Bar, one of a handful of businesses in the town of 75 people about 10 miles south of the Canadian border. "It was foggy, and people couldn't see it until they got right up to it. Then, it says, 'Brainerd,' and they thought, 'What the hell?"

Thought for Today

The last time I attended a professional basketball game, the Celtics were playing the Bullets in the Capital Center, and Larry Byrd, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish were patrolling the court. I don't care about the NBA, I don't care about the Los Angeles Clippers and I don't care about Donald Sterling, if that is the owner guy's name.  I wish they all would just curl up into a ball and go away. I don't need their moralizing drama show to learn how to not classify, group and treat people according to race. It is what comes naturally. Move on -- the old coot will be dead long before he will change.

Back to Winter Swim Today

Saturday Pictures on Sunday, Part 2

Saturday Pictures

April 27, 2014

(click to enlarge)

Teacher at school gave our oldest a black and white film camera over the weekend and told her to go out and expose a roll. She got some views in town with her mom yesterday and recruited me to take her out for something scenic late this afternoon. I took along my digital. We popped over to Trail Creek Road, up the slope, over the divide, and down towards Paradise Valley. "Dad," she said, "I can see why they call it Paradise." Homework assignment, check.

Saturday Pictures on Sunday, Part 1

Saturday Pictures

April 27, 2014

(click to enlarge)

Local farmers and their suppliers are working hard to cultivate and plant their fields.  I took these pictures of work on the wheat field behind our home. The elk herd viral video was headed towards the mountains in the background. 

A supply truck motors down Bozeman Trail Road.

Crop Production Services runs a surface dusting operation.

The duster continues.

 Stopping for resupply.

An old barn and outbuildings across the street.

Working right through until the sun goes down.

Plowing snow in Yellowstone National Park: A big, beautiful job | KBZK.com | Z7 | Bozeman, Montana

Plowing snow in Yellowstone National Park: A big, beautiful job | KBZK.com | Z7 | Bozeman, Montana

Post by Grady Foster.

Federal Land Grab

BLM police tase Cliven Bundy supporters armed with cell phone cameras.

The story of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy down in Nevada has become well known. It's about the struggle of a rancher and his cattle claiming prescriptive rights earned through generations of toil, investing in countless improvements to the land and continuing a hundred years of use, against the unrestrained power of the United States Government, and one of the eleven police forces armed and operated within its Department of Interior.

Now down in Texas, a yet larger land grab is being planned by Barack Obama, his yuppie Department of Interior head, Sally Jewel, and Harry Reid's henchman, Neil Kornze, installed as Interior's Bureau of Land Management chief.

Does the federal government plan to take control of 90,000 acres of Texas land along the Red River?

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is the latest state official asking that question in relation to a looming U.S. Bureau of Land Management decision about what to do with a swath of federal and American Indian land in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas — including the acreage in Texas along a 116-mile stretch of the Red River.

The Red River of the South forms much of the border
between Texas and Oklahoma.

On Tuesday, Abbott sent a letter to Neil Kornze, BLM director, seeking information about the agency’s plans for the land, some of which North Texans have long considered theirs, using it for cattle grazing and growing crops. 

“Private landowners in Texas have owned, maintained, and cultivated this land for generations. Despite the long-settled expectations of these hard-working Texans along the Red River, the BLM appears to be threatening their private property rights by claiming ownership over this territory,” wrote Abbott, the Republican candidate for governor. “Yet, the BLM has failed to disclose either its full intentions or the legal justification for its proposed actions. Decisions of this magnitude must not be made inside a bureaucratic black box.”

Governor Rick Perry and the attorney general in Texas are fighting back.

On Tuesday, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is running to replace Perry, raised the issue in a letter to the BLM director. He also told Breitbart.com he’s ready to “go to the Red River and raise a ‘Come and Take It’ flag to tell the feds to stay out of Texas.” 

Abbott reiterated his comments Wednesday night on "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren." 

"At a minimum, (the federal government is) overreaching, trying to grab land that belongs to Texans, or worse, they are violating due process rights by just claiming that this land suddenly belongs to the federal government, swiping it away from our Texans," said Abbott, who threatened court action. "This is just the latest symptom of what seems to be a federal government run amok that is messing in states’ rights and now messing in private property rights."

Perry told Fox News he stands with Abbott on this issue. 

“It’s not a dare, it’s a promise that we’re going to stand up for private property rights in the state of Texas,” Perry said, calling the federal government “out of control.”

The consolidation of power and riding roughshod over the rights of hard-working, dedicated private citizens comes as no surprise. Obama's Department of Interior police expropriated rights and shut down property not their own during the government shutdown. We reported last October:

I've been advising tourists to go down to Mount Vernon during the Federal Government shutdown. Mount Vernon is open and welcoming. It's privately owned and privately funded. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association is clear, stating that " Mount Vernon does not accept grants from federal, state or local governments, and no tax dollars are expended to support its purposes."

Barrycade at Mt. Vernon parking lot.

Well that's not enough to establish independence for the petulant, grubby, power mongering presidency of Barack Obama. The National Park Service (NPS) sent its jack booted rangers, U. S. Park Police, and burly maintenance workers down to Mount Vernon to shut down all the foundation owned parking -- Barrycades is what the barricades have come to be known. Barrycades appeared as if from nowhere to block off publicly accessible areas that are unstaffed and have never been shut down for any reason (including many previous government shutdowns). Obama's move is not only ridiculous.  It's lawless.

Mount Vernon is owned and operated as a public trust by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.

The Mount Vernon Ladies are a cooperative crowd. Their parking is open and available to all, including those looking for a place to anchor a hike or begin bike ride along at the southern terminus of NPS's Mount Vernon trail. Cooperativeness just makes them an easy target in the world of Obama. 

Confronted by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association the National Park Service has backed down, removing the saw horses and police tape from the entrances to all but a distant satellite lot that fills only during the heavy summer tourist season.  

The barricading of the parking lots at Mount Vernon comes at the same time the National Park Service has blocked off many other public monuments, memorials, and parks. They’ve even blocked off small parking lots that are otherwise unmanned. In fact, every parking lot along the George Washington Memorial Parkway has been barricaded.

Three space Barrycade on public road.

That includes a parking spur with a mere 3 spots located on the parkway between Mount Vernon and Old Town Alexandria.

At the moment there is no word on when the government shutdown will end, when the National Park Service will remove their barricades, or why the barricades were really necessary in the first place. Hopefully those answers will all become apparent soon.

Petulant twits carrying out Obama's will -- NPS, you are totally losing my respect dudes.

The creepy presidency continues.

Thugs are running the show. Good luck to all.

It's a Beautiful Morning!

Click to enlarge. Enjoy!

Climate Change at Work

Al Gore, Barack Obama, NASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, all agree, global warming is driving climate change, which manifests itself in extreme weather. So let's see what's been going down the last few springs.

In 2012 tornado activity was uncommonly low.

In 2013 tornado activity was even lower yet.

And so far in 2014, tornadoes are down even more.

Thanks for the warnings and your prescience guys! Global warming isn't science, it's a religion, as practiced by a proselytizing, bombastic, brainwashing sect.

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!

The girls got out theIr egg decorating aprons last night!

Out back, the ground beneath the last remnant snow drift is being resurrected -- that slice of earth hasn't seen sun since the week before Thanksgiving.

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!