Free Bus Stops (Or What a Difference a Million Dollars Makes)

Here in Bozeman we are getting new bus shelters with ultra sleek, modern solar panels and LED billboards -- no cost to the tax payer, zero, nada. Fully enclosed on three sides (when they finish installing the panels) and roofed, the bus stops are actually designed to protect riders from frigid winter winds and driving snow. KBZK TV reports:

Waiting for the bus in Bozeman could be getting safer and more comfortable. MTN's Keele Smith shows us what will make that happen.

First bus stop under construction out Huffine Lane. See the
link above to view the video.

Carrie Fabiano knows the routine of waiting for the bus as a regular rider.  

"Well the bus was running a little late and that 10 minutes felt like a lot. I mean I started getting frostbite," she said. 

Fabiano says, "I just think it's a matter of life and death sometimes. I've seen elderly people waiting out in the freezing temperatures and you just worry." 

That is part of the reason why Chandler Communication, out of Kalispell, is building bus shelters. They will be taking care of all the construction and maintenance at no cost to taxpayers.The shelters in Bozeman are unique - they are the first to have solar panels and LED billboards. Only two of these shelters have been built so far. Six more are in the works, including two more on Huffine, three in Bozeman and one in Belgrade.  

Transportation Director with the HRDC, Lee Hazelbaker said, "This is a huge step forward. This has been in the works for years and to finally see it come to fruition is just a great feeling." 

Riders agree.

"Being able to sit down is what's going to be good for me," Fabiano said. "I think it'll help because you can't even tell where some of the bus stops are. It's just a little sign hanging up on the side of the road it's not really a bus stop." 

Another regular bus rider, Amelia Denagy said, "It's going to be a lot more comfortable to ride the bus. It's not going to be such a hassle. It's just going to be a one stop deal, you can take a break, you don't have to freeze or get wet, just much better."

Bozeman weekday bus map.

Contrast this to the bus stops inside the Washington, DC Beltway serving the fiscally spoiled and coddled, profligate citizens of Arlington Virginia who, in the federal spending bubble, have the highest median family incomes nationwide. They are served by million dollar bus stops that don't even protect people from the elements. Their bus stops are financed primarily by the federal government, meaning you the taxpayer, and our children and grandchildren, who are being forced to assume the massive federal debt bomb. The spoiled brats pay not for their own waste. There are few clearer arguments for massive down sizing of federal government.

And the Sequester Had to End? That Is Insane!

The hue and cry from Dear President and his adherents was that they couldn't manage under the budget sequester.  It was cutting to the bone and beyond.  BS!  Lies! Look at it -- 65 percent waste, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, dysfunctional, and secret, autocratic and unaccountable. Here is what one of Obama's insider, true believers has to say as he walks out the door.

The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the “remarkably dysfunctional” federal bureaucracy. David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), writes in a scathing resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider that the huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI “the very worst job I have ever had.” 

**** 

It is actually worse than it looks.

David Wright writes that working with ORI’s “remarkable scientist-investigators” was “the best job I’ve ever had.” But that was only 35% of his job; the rest of the time he spent “navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy” to run ORI. Tasks that took a couple of days as a university administrator required weeks or months, he says. He writes that ORI’s budget was micromanaged by more senior officials, and that Koh’s office had a “seriously flawed” culture, calling it “secretive, autocratic and unaccountable.” For example, he told Wanda Jones, Koh’s deputy, that he urgently needed to appoint a director for ORI’s division of education. Jones told him the position was somewhere on a secret priority list of appointments. The position has not been filled 16 months later, David Wright notes. 

OASH itself suffers from the tendency of bureaucracies to “focus … on perpetuating themselves,” David Wright writes. Officials spent “exorbitant amounts of time” in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, he writes. He asks whether OASH is the proper home for a regulatory office such as ORI, noting that Koh himself has described his office as an “intensely political environment.”

A committed, competent, intelligent and fair minded President could get rid of half of the federal bureaucracy and the only differences we would note is the government would improve.  But you all blessed us with Dear President.  God help us all.

Oh! For you low information voters out there, HHS is the department that gives us Obamacare. Sweet.

Air Travelers Should Pay for Air Travel: TSA Fee Increase is Justified

Part of the budget deal is to increase government revenues by about doubling the Passenger Security Fee that was established in 2001 to defray the cost of screening air passengers and to support the federal government's air transport security program. Screening requirements have increased, operational costs have risen and the total TSA aviation security appropriation has grown by 75 percent since the fee was instituted.  According to the GAO, in 2011 aviation fee collections covered only 28 percent of the TSA's aviation security costs.

GAO analysis of TSA air security appropriations and air security fees.

Here is the way it will work,

The proposed deal, expected to pass in the next several days, would more than double the $5 security fee on most round-trip tickets, to $11.20 per ticket. The higher fee begins on July 1. 

The old fee was $2.50 each way for a nonstop flight, capped at $5 each way if a traveler has a connection. The new fee would be $5.60 each way whether or not there's a connection. 

The CEO of Delta Air Lines said travelers will be the ones who pay it. 

"Airfares are going up for consumers. So that tax increase will not be absorbed by Delta," Richard Anderson said at a Delta Air Lines Inc. presentation for investors in New York on Wednesday.

So be it. We look in vain for other fee increases or spending cuts to align program revenues and costs. Going through the federal budget program by program, activity by activity and line by line, there would be a $100 to $200 billion per year in deficit reduction -- easy.

Sequester as in Scare-Quester -- Montana Style

It's everywhere. The mainstream media is working against the factual grain, trying to scare up support for more spending and ending the sequester. The scare tactics have spread out west.

Early last week, a Bozeman Daily Chronicle page 1 story raised the specter of fiery destruction at the hands of the sequester. The headline reads "Wildfire suppression efforts suffer under budget cuts." Local fires in what is collectively referred to as the Miner Paradise Complex fire were listed in a sidebar -- North Eightmile fire (containment at time of publication, none), Horsetail fire (containment, none), Emigrant fire (containment 5 percent), Sheep fire (containment, none), and also three fires in Yellowstone. All are lightening caused.

Emigrant fire smoke plume.

Wildfires are inevitable and naturally occurring phenomena. Burns maintain balance and ensure diversity in the ecosystem. Elk herds, for example, graze in summer at elevation in areas where shade trees and brush have burned away and grasses flourish. Bears and buffalo like the more open habitat as well. Certain conifers have (serotinous) cones which require the intense heat of fire to open and release seeds for the next generation of growth. When wildfires are suppressed, this causes dead trees and dried wood and other organic debris to accumulate to the point where the build ups fuel intense conflagrations that completely denude the landscape, leading to soil erosion and dangerous mudslides. The resulting fires are so intense and uncontrollable that large numbers of structures may not survive. 

Sequester No Problem When It Comes To Syria

When the sequester went into affect Barack Obama announced curtailment of naval deployments to the Persian Gulf, fronting Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and an announced policy of annihilating Israel, and site of the Straight of Hormuz, where 35 percent of seaborne oil and 20 percent of worldwide crude passes through. Yet Obama and friends are surrounding Syria, which other than a buffer has essentially no geopolitical strategic value, has no net oil exports and is a direct threat to no one outside its borders, with a broad array of military assets.  

Boy that sequester, it's a helluva problem, isn't it?

Government Employees Report to Work After All

Earlier this month we blogged about the phony and exaggerated sequester furlough claims that came out of the Defense Department and the Obama administration, vis a vis non-uniformed DoD civilian personnel.

Official notice of phony sequester claim.

Furlough days were dropped from the original 22, down to 11 and ultimately to six. But the story telling wasn't limited to Defense. Phony furlough claims were made government wide, where the ultimate impacts were less, much less, than at the Pentagon. Many departments managed their budgets to dodge furloughing altogether.

The earliest examples came from departments that told Congress they would have to furlough employees, but ended up backtracking. The Education and Justice departments fall into this category. The Agriculture, Transportation, and Homeland Security departments all received authority to transfer funds between agency accounts, and were therefore able to cancel planned furloughs. The Commerce Department promised furloughs at its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only to cancel them in May.

Other departments reduced the number of enforced days off.

Several agencies have relied on “internal reviews” of their financial conditions, during which they discovered cost-cutting measures had made their situations less dire than originally anticipated. This, in turn, allowed them to cut required furlough days.

The Treasury Department, for example, originally said it would furlough all 90,000 of its Internal Revenue Service employees five days, but has since cut the number of days to three. The Housing and Urban Development Department also recently canceled two furlough days. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency cut furloughsby three days. The Interior Department warned of 12-14 furlough days for the U.S. Park Police, but ultimately ended the furloughs after employees took less than half of the expected total.

The loyal to the end administration leaders at Labor Department and HHS are equivocating, claiming they still don't know if employees will be furloughed, even though as a practical matter it is too late in the fiscal year to implement widespread reductions.  Of course, truly independent federal agencies like the Postal Service (the largest non-defense federal employer) and the Federal Reserve were never affected by the sequestration at all.

The omnibus federal employee union acknowledges that Obama's furloughing claims were political gamesmanship at their inception, never based in reality to begin.

The American Federation of Government Employees attributes the furlough reductions and cancellations partly to the success of its negotiations.

“We showed the agencies there were numerous alternatives to dealing with sequestration,” said Jacqueline Simon, public policy director at AFGE. “It was across the board and our union responded in every one of these situations.”

Federal employees protesting exaggerated
and non-existent furloughs.

Simon added the bloated estimates were a “political calculation,” with federal employees dangled as sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to Congress the potential fallout from sequestration.

Translation -- Obama and his minions have lied to promote unnecessary spending and additional debt. They were called on their false claims when the sequestration went into effect in February. It's time they stopped bluffing the American people altogether.

Phony Furloughing for the Sequester

Like virtually every claim made with respect to the parade of the Sequester's horribles, civilian employee furlough days at the Pentagon and DOD installations nationwide were grossly exaggerated. The number of non-uniformed personnel furlough days for the fiscal year (ending September 30) started out at 22, dropped to 11 and now actually will be more like 6, according to the AP. 

One of the most absurd claims about the DOD belt tightening came early on from the Governor of Hawaii, carping about the sequestering impact on his locals.

The plain fact is, that will undermine our capacity for readiness at Pearl Harbor. And if that doesn't symbolize for the nation that, far from overstating anything, it is zeroing in on a graphic example of what happens when we fail to meet our responsibilities congressionally. You don't want to undermine that capacity to be able to respond.

We called it then and there a "phony alarm."  

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a Japanese sneak attack.  Maxine Watters said the sequester would "cost 175 million jobs." Education Secretary Arnie Duncan said 40,000 jobs would be lost in education alone.  The White House said 13,000 people would be going down one way or another in Montana.  Obama said first responders wouldn't be able to respond, teachers would lose their jobs, hundreds of thousands of people would not receive medical care, the US would lose its ability to respond to threats and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs.  The national parks wouldn't reopen in the spring because the roads would not be plowed.  Lies, all lies, from the left to justify outrageous spending and passing along humongous debt to our children. 

Debbie Wasserman Schulz complained that lunch prices for hill staffers would go up a couple of bucks as food subsidies were withdrawn.   She was right about that....awwwwww!

Enough said.

Sequester Tightens, Uh, Real Estate Market in DC

Club Fed continues to spew riches. This comment on WAPO's blog says it so.

All that wealth and opulence – bought and paid for by the rest of the country, so our rulers can live in a style and fashion that the rest of us can only imagine. Is this a great country or what?

Sequester is a no-quester when it comes to housing and real estate in the federal government based economy in the Washington, DC area. Feds throughout continue to grow the financial divide with middle America as the real estate they occupy appreciates by leaps and bounds and federal largess makes housing affordable for contractors and employees.

Demand is soaring, but supply is not keeping up. The region’s supply of homes is the tightest it’s been since well before the financial crisis, according to recent data.
The result? It takes only nine days for most homes to be snapped up by hungry Washington home buyers. The region’s entire inventory of homes for sale could be consumed in as little as two months.

This tight inventory is pushing up home prices, setting up bidding wars and pricing new home buyers out of a market that is still enjoying historically low mortgage rates.
Homes in the $300,000 to $600,000 price range are selling the most quickly — usually in a week, according to June data — making the market particularly hard to navigate for first-time home buyers who want to live close to the District. Just a year ago, those homes sat around for at least three weeks.

Even homes at the higher end of the spectrum — from $600,000 to just shy of the $1 million mark — are on the market for eight days. On the other side of the scale, homes priced lower than $300,000 are available for just over two weeks.

Washington’s strong labor market and relative immunity from the housing crisis meant that demand never really dried up here, analysts say. But supply hasn’t kept pace.

Here are the numbers.  It pays to be in Club Fed.

For all home types in the Washington area:

MEDIAN SALE PRICE

In thousands

$400,000

$400

300

200

100

0

2012

2013

J

J

A

S

O

N

D

J

F

M

A

M

J

ACTIVE LISTINGS

In thousands

10,374

10

8

6

4

2

0

8,281

2012

2013

J

J

A

S

O

N

D

J

F

M

A

M

J

MEDIAN DAYS ON THE MARKET
For all home types

June 2013

June 2012

Washington metro area

9

19

Alexandria

12

22

Arlington County

7

13

Fairfax County

7

14

Loudoun County

9

22

Montgomery County

11

25

Prince George‘s County

17

37

Prince William County

12

20

Washington, D.C.

9

17

SOURCE: RealEstate Business Intelligence. GRAPHIC: By Tobey - The Washington Post. Published July 24, 2013.

Barack Obama Stands With Defense Contractors

During my days in Washington, DC we called them the Beltway Bandits. Apparently that information hasn't filtered down to today's generation of political leaders, for they are a band of brothers with the defense industry. The common goal, led by none other than Barack Obama, is to reverse the effects of sequestration and rebuild annual deficits to a trillion dollars. The headline reads, "Defense Industry Hatches Plot to Kill the Sequester." The industry and the check writer in chief are pursuing common goals, sharing tactics and suffering similar fates.

In assessing the difficulty of reversing the sequestration cuts, defense analysts say that much of the industry’s trouble is self-inflicted — because the apocalyptic predictions their leaders made about the sequester have not come to pass.

You don't say.  We highlighted the charade as it was launched earlier this year, covering Obama's seminal rant and describing the tactics, best known as the Washington Monument game. As per normal, the military has its own terminology, they call it the "gold watch" gambit.

But perhaps the biggest example of the Washington Monument maneuver is coming from the Defense Department, where it goes by another name. Over many decades of defense budget battles, the Pentagon has often used a tactic known as a "gold watch." It means to answer a budget cut proposal by selecting for elimination a program so important and valued -- a gold watch -- that Pentagon chiefs know political leaders will restore funding rather than go through with the cut.

"Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf," Obama said at a White House appearance on Tuesday, in case anyone missed the news.So now, with sequestration approaching, thePentagon has announced that the possibility of budget cuts has forced the Navy to delay deployment of the carrier USS Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf. With tensions with Iran as high as they've ever been, that would leave the U.S. with just one carrier, instead of the preferred two, in that deeply troubled region.

Some military analysts were immediately suspicious. "A total gold watch," said one retired general officer who asked not to be named. Military commentator and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters called the Navy's move "ostentatious," comparing it to "Donald Trump claiming he can't afford a cab."

You have no credibility. Keep it up boys. You are all for one and one for all -- Obama calls it a community and the Beltway Bandits call it readiness. No matter which word is used it's about throwing money at politically favored groups, something our country and our children who are picking up the bills can ill afford.

Big Government Sequester Armageddon Wrong Again

Who is the real extremist?

So recall that Obama got into his Chicken Little routine on February 10 backed up by firefighters who would no longer be able to douse blazes, police who would no longer be patrolling the streets and EMT's who would abandon dying accident victims along the side of the roads  Obama told us the sequester will cost the economy "hundreds of thousands of jobs." Pure silliness and fabrication spewed forth. It turns out the sequester has barely impacted its ground zero economy, Washington, DC.

“The surprise is that the [DC region] economy is as good as it is,” said Stephen S. Fuller, the economist who directs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. “We’ve done better than I expected.”

In January, Fuller predicted that the sequester, if enacted, would be an “end-of-the-world kind of hit” to the regional economy. He wrote an analysis of the cuts in March concluding they would kill more than 325,000 jobs in Virginia, the District and Maryland combined.
That estimate included both direct and indirect effects — that is, layoffs not just among federal workers and contractors, but also the workers, such as waiters or car salespeople, whose jobs depend on spending from federal paychecks.

So far, the direct job effects have been relatively small. The metro area shed 1,000 federal jobs in April, accelerating a belt-tightening trend; in the 11 months before that, the area lost nearly 4,000 federal jobs. Meanwhile, professional business services — the job category that includes government contracting — has grown at roughly the same rate this year as in 2012 and 2011. No major contractor has issued a government-required notification that it is planning a mass layoff.

The sequester is a no-quester in terms of its economic impact. It always was. You can't trust this president or his lapdog experts, not at all.

Furloughed to the Fairways

If it is good enough for the President, it's good enough for Club Fed.

Back in Arlington, Virginia we took frequent advantage of Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority (NVRPA) offerings.  My "home" course was one of theirs -- Algonkian Golf.  I also played NVRPA links at Pohick Bay and Brambleton.  One of the last times I played at Brambleton (just beyond Dulles International Airport) as I lined up my tee shot on the 15th hole there appeared just over the treeline the Space Shuttle Discovery hauled by a Boeing 747 and close escorted by a NASA T-38 jet.  It was awesome.  We spent many a family swim day at NVRPA's Ocean Dunes Water Park at Upton Hill Regional Park and Great Waves Water Park at Cameron Run Regional Park. 
   

Now here comes NRVPA forward with a lessened links levy for victims of the sequester.  

Furloughed to Fairways

Thousands of area federal employees will be furloughed on certain days between April and September this year as a result of the Federal Sequester.  In response, the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority (NVRPA) is offering a special deal for those furloughed federal employees who enjoy the outdoors and a good round of golf. 

Starting on the first day of May, federal employees will be able to play any one of the three courses owned by NVRPA for just $25.  This deal, which is about 30% off the regular greens fee, will be honored Monday through Thursday after 10 A.M.  Federal employees must bring a civilian federal employee ID to the course to take advantage of the deal, which is targeted at furloughed employees. 

“We greatly appreciate the federal employees who are so important to our region, and we want to show our solidarity with those public servants who enjoy the sport of golf," remarked Brian Knapp, Chairman of the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.  "It is very unfortunate that these federal employees are being impacted in this fashion.  In a small way, we wish to thank them for their contributions to our local communities and our nation, and welcome them to visit our three beautiful golf courses.” 

The Park Authority has three golf courses conveniently located throughout Northern Virginia, including Algonkian Golf Course in Sterling, Brambleton Golf Course in Ashburn, and Pohick Bay Golf Course in Lorton. Contact information for each course appears at the end of this release. 

“NVRPA is giving a real morale boost to furloughed workers.  To me, it’s more than just the golf discount-through Furlough to Fairways, NVRPA is showing that the Northern Virginia community supports us,” said Ted McCleskey, civilian employee with the Department of Defense. 

The Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Authority, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Management and Budget and many other departments will be sending workers home on a regular basis (often weekly) as a result of the Sequester.  

"Co-workers may want to use this unique opportunity to play golf together during the week at prices that are not normally available," commented Paul Gilbert, Executive Director of NVRPA.

NRVPA is doing Debbie Wasserman Schulz proud by stepping forward to support the unfortunate victims of the sequester. The sequester won't fester in D.C..  Congratulations to NVRPA!

Politidumb of the Week

Sequester is the gift that keeps on giving. 

This week's Politidumb honor is awarded to no less than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Barack Obama's chief lieutenant in the United States Senate.  Ignoring, for example, expenditures on the stream of million dollar bus stops that could be stopped, Reid fear mongered Tuesday this week that the sequester could "cost this country - and humankind - a cure for AIDS or Parkinson's disease or cancer." 

Sadly, this is not a stand-up comic routine.  Reid's continuing incredulous crusade builds on House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer's (D - Mary.) claim last week that the Boston bombings were result of the sequester.  Last month Reid himself had linked unimplemented sequester cuts to the unfortunate accidental death of 7 marines during a training exercise in Nevada.

In early March House Democrat Maxine Watters (D - Mich.) claimed the sequester would cost the US economy 170 million jobs, which is about half again as many jobs as there are in the entire United States economy.   In February, Obama Education Secretary Arnie Duncan falsely claimed the sequester was costing 40,000 teaching jobs, when not a dime had been cut or a single pink slip issued. Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie (D - Haw.) sounded an early phony sequester alarm, "the plain fact is, that will undermine our capacity for readiness at Pearl Harbor." The reign of sequester horrors started on February 19 when Barack Obama warned your house will burn down, your home will be burglarized, your children will be abandoned, the economy will fall apart and you will be unemployed if the federal government is forced to go ahead with 2 point something percent in spending cuts.

Thank you Harry Reid for keeping the tradition alive!

The FAA Sequester

Love this view!

The Hangover Doesn't Feel Any Better

I ranted on Facebook last night.  This,

Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers and kept the air traffic control system humming and on course. At the direction of the White House, the partisan hacks in the Obama administration use modest budget restraint as an excuse to snarl the air traffic control system and create blockages. Barack Obama loves his politics and has nothing but disdain for ordinary citizens who get in the way of his exercise of political prerogative.

And this,

This Boston thing is getting curiouser and curiouser, smart strapping young man a resident alien on welfare, while on welfare flies back and forth to Russia staying months (where did that money come from?), leaving behind wife and infant daughter, develops somehow along the way expertise in building a range of effective explosives. I don't know where this all leads, but there is a lot to this story and we damn well better be told all about it. No Benghazi stonewalling on this or there will be hell to pay.

Politidumb of the Week

The competition for this week's Politidumb award was pitched.   Leaders of the national progressive Democratic movement jostled and elbowed one other to make political hay from the Boston Marathon massacre.  They callously and  brazenly tied pet political agendas to the terrorist attack on innocents, before there was a hint of who the suspects might actually be, barely waiting for victims to gulp their last breath or to have their dangling limbs amputated and sewn off. 

Fastest out of the gate, was former White House advisor, Obama pal and confidant, Chicago based political consultant and NBC "Senior Political Analyst" David Axelrod, who jumped straight away to an unsupportable conclusion -- a tax protest.   He said that is what the President was thinking.  Axelrod's statement is most instructive for what it reveals about the progressive and presumptive presidential mindset -- taxpayers are the enemy.  Most of us are taxpayers David -- it's nice to learn of President Obama's regard.

Sadly a president thinking that the folks responsible for the mischief and mayhem are responsible taxpayers fits the uncorked mindset of the current Oval Office occupant incredibly well. 

Then comes Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip who seems to care not a whit anymore about objective reality.   In reference to the sequester Hoyer said the Boston bombings are “proof that those automatic spending changes negatively impacted the intelligence community.”   What Hoyer didn't say is that he is unhinged because the sequester is hitting hardest high-income residents of the DC suburbs, including his Maryland constituents.  Fine job Steny, working to parlay the continuation of your constituents' gravy train off loss of  life and dismemberment of innocents.

Then Barney Frank opened his pie hole, claiming that the sequester hamstrung the government's ability to anticipate and respond to the Boston bombing. Frank called it a “teaching moment.” 

“And yes, I do want maybe for this to have some people be less enthusiastic about reducing our ability to respond to a crisis like this. You’re asking me am I trying to make an argument to affect how people make decisions about public policy? Absolutely, I think this is an important teaching moment about what we need if we’re going to live the way we want to live.”

When Hoyer and Frank went for the political kill, skimming Steny and bizarre Barney did not know that a fully funded FBI had interviewed and investigated the ring leading Tsarnaev and moved on.  Operating prior to the sequester and without constraint the FBI concluded Tamerlan Tsarnaev did not pose an actionable threat.  So much for the despicable money grab.

Still, the winner is the man who has made a career out of channeling the President of the United States. Congratulations David Axelrod for your Pogo moment. We have met the enemy and it is us.



  

Damn the Sequester, Full Snowplows Ahead -- Yellowstone or Bust

WYDOT Plowing Moving North from Jackson through South Entrance

To counter Barack Obama's Washington Monument game opening delays, Wyoming Department of Transportation rotary plows are clearing the South Entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

Snow Plowing Progress Map, Effective 4/12

Major progress is being made by Wyoming crews from Cody and the East Entrance as well.  In leading the effort from the Wyoming entrances, Governor Matt Mead said,  “This is an example of what this country needs right now – people working together,”  He continued, “The federal government made cuts that would have shutout visitors for two weeks. I decided Wyoming will not bail them out, but we do want to find solutions. Our towns of Cody and Jackson rallied to raise money and the beneficiaries are all of the visitors who want access to America’s first national park who will now have it.”

Effective Tuesday, Wyomning Crews met a major milestone,

The Wyoming Department of Transportation crews spent 11 days plowing westward from the East Entrance. They met Yellowstone crews plowing eastward about 15 miles inside the park gate, according to department spokesman Cody Beers.

Meanwhile, roads from Yellowstone's West Entrance in West Yellowstone, Montana and Mammoth Hot Springs to Old Faithful will open as originally scheduled (i.e., not on Obama's in your face sequester delayed schedule) this Friday, April 19.  Roads will open starting at 8 a.m. on Friday morning. Kudos to the Town of West Yellowstone which overcame Obama's gamesmanship, with plowing efforts, and by sending a grader and operator into Yellowstone during the last week of March to assist with the removal of snow and ice on park roads near the West Entrance.

A Happy Median

The most affected victims of the sequester continue to rollick along on the real estate bandwagon.

March median sales price by jurisdiction

	2013	2012	YoY
DC metro	$372,500	$345,000	8%
Falls Church	$631,000	$458,300	37.7%
Arlington	$515,000	$509,450	1.1%
Alexandria	$487,500	$391,950	24.4%
District	$460,000	$405,000	13.6%
Fairfax County	$430,000	$398,500	7.9%
Fairfax City	$392,500	$443,750	-11.5%
Montgomery County	$375,000	$345,000	8.7%
Pr. George’s County	$176,500	$158,000	11.7%

Source: RealEstate Business Intelligence

Row Houses, Washington DC Style