October 20, 2013

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It will be a long time before Americans forget what the park service did during the shutdown. You’ll enjoy John Fund’s account of the grilling the head of the service received before a house committee.

Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing about the closures of national parks and monuments during the government shutdown, proved one thing: Under President Obama, The traditional “Washington Monument Strategy” of closing popular services first has become the “Washington Bully Strategy.”

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 better than the nation’s military veterans. “Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?” he demanded.

Jarvis responded that, while he was required by the Anti-Deficiency Act to close all parks and memorials, any veterans who wanted to enter the war memorials could have done so if they had “declared” they were there to exercise their First Amendment rights. 

“Who were they to declare it to? A barricade?” Gowdy sniffed. …

… The Park Service closed the City Tavern in Philadelphia, a meeting place for those who signed the Declaration of Independence, even though the tavern, at IndependenceNationalHistoricalPark, opens directly onto two major city streets. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute joked to Representative Issa’s committee,  “had King George III’s ministers in the colonies had the authority and the foresight to close [the tavern] down, they might have prevented the American Revolution.”

Ebell also noted the number of barricades and printed signs needed to close 401 parks and monuments on the shutdown’s first day required foresight and planning. The speed of the closures and the procurement of barricades has also convinced former secretary Norton that a lot of thought had gone into how to conduct the Park Service’s blitzkrieg. “I imagine that the decision was made at the highest levels of Park Service leadership, in co-operation with the White House,” she told NRO. …

 

Certified leftist Peter Beinart says the media has the results of the shutdown fight all wrong.

… Most of the press is missing this because most of the press is covering the current standoff more as politics than policy. If your basic question is “which party is winning?” then it’s easy to see the Republicans as losing, since they’re the ones suffering in the polls. But the partisan balance of power and the ideological balance of power are two completely different things. The Nixon years were terrible for the Democratic Party but quite good for progressive domestic policy. The Clinton years were, in important ways, the reverse. The promise of the Obama presidency was not merely that he’d bring Democrats back to power. It was that he’d usher in the first era of truly progressive public policy in decades. But the survival of Obamacare notwithstanding, Obama’s impending “victory” in the current standoff moves us further away from, not closer to, that goal.

It’s not just that Obama looks likely to accept the sequester cuts as the basis for future budget negotiations. It’s that while he’s been trying to reopen the government and prevent a debt default, his chances of passing any significant progressive legislation have receded. Despite overwhelming public support, gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama’s second term agenda, looks unlikely. And the other items Obama trumpeted in this year’s state of the union address—climate change legislation, infrastructure investment, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost to the minimum wage—have been largely forgotten.

Democrats keep holding out hope that losing yet more public support will break the ideological “fever” that grips the Republican Party and help GOP moderates regain power. The problem, as the last few weeks have shown, is that the GOP keeps defining moderation down. For instance, the Washington GOP’s plummeting approval ratings may well boost the presidential prospects of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, just as the Gingrich Congress paved the way for the comparatively moderate George W. Bush. Like Bush, Christie is described as moderate because he has Democratic allies in his home state and because his rhetoric is not as harsh on cultural issues. But in the White House, Bush’s economic policies were hardly moderate. To the contrary, from taxes to social security to regulation, he governed well to the right of Ronald Reagan. Christie likely would as well. As governor, after all, he’s vetoed a hike in the minimum wage, cut the earned income tax credit, vetoed a millionaires’ tax three times and adopted basically the same attitude towards public sector unions as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.

Yet for the next three years, the press will likely describe Christie as “moderate” for the same reason it now describes a “clean” CR as Republican surrender: Because the GOP keeps moving the ideological goalposts and the press keeps playing along.

 

Michael Graham agrees with Beinart.

… Ask yourself: A year from now, when the stupidity of the shutdown fight is long gone, who would you rather be: Team “Obamacare Sucks And We’ve Got Too Much Debt”?

Or Team “I Voted to Shut Down the Government Rather Than Change Obamacare or Spend Less Money”?

I know what you’re thinking, Democrats. “They’re Republicans. They’ll find a way to screw this up.”

And two months ago, you’d be right. But Tea Party politicians are still, in the end, politicians.

And to quote U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former prosecutor and current Tea Party fave: “I didn’t lose many cases in court, and I haven’t won many cases here in Congress. It’s time to re-evaluate my tactics.”

 

NY Times reports on changes to basic assumptions about early humans that grew out of discoveries in Georgia in 2005.

After eight years spent studying a 1.8-million-year-old skull uncovered in the Republic of Georgia, scientists have made a discovery that may rewrite the evolutionary history of our human genus Homo.

It would be a simpler story with fewer ancestral species. Early, diverse fossils — those currently recognized as coming from distinct species like Homo habilis, Homo erectus and others — may actually represent variation among members of a single, evolving lineage.

In other words, just as people look different from one another today, so did early hominids look different from one another, and the dissimilarity of the bones they left behind may have fooled scientists into thinking they came from different species.

This was the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists led by David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist at the GeorgianNationalMuseum in Tbilisi, as reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The key to this revelation was a cranium excavated in 2005 and known simply as Skull 5, which scientists described as “the world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull” of such antiquity. Unlike other Homo fossils, it had a number of primitive features: a long, apelike face, large teeth and a tiny braincase, about one-third the size of that of a modern human being. This confirmed that, contrary to some conjecture, early hominids did not need big brains to make their way out of Africa.

The discovery of Skull 5 alongside the remains of four other hominids at Dmanisi, a site in Georgia rich in material of the earliest hominid travels into Eurasia, gave the scientists an opportunity to compare and contrast the physical traits of ancestors that apparently lived at the same location and around the same time. …

 

Metal Floss posts on why baseball players chew sunflower seeds.