The “Occupy DC” protest group is planning to disrupt the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference using a range of potentially illegal tactics that could even include violence against participants, Scribe has learned. The planned disruptions at CPAC come only days after U.S. Park Police raided Occupiers’ tent cities at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., confiscating a number of tents, and prohibiting Occupiers from camping out there any longer. During a Thursday meeting at McPherson Square, until Saturday the epicenter of the protests, Occupiers brainstormed tactics for shutting …
The noon deadline for Occupy DC protesters to clear out their camping gear came and went today. By mid-afternoon, National Park Service police had declined to move in and enforce the law. Far from clearing McPherson Square, the hub of the protest’s Washington activity, occupiers draped a large blue tarp over the statue of General James McPherson, which sits at the center of the park. For months, the Park Service had insisted that occupiers’ overnight presence at the park – which appeared to be a violation of statutes prohibiting camping …
Testifying on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, the National Park Service made clear its legal position for declining to enforce laws against camping on federal land with respect to the Occupy DC protest group. But the Supreme Court has already weighed in on a near-identical case and found that enforcing laws against camping does not violate First Amendment rights, as the NPS claims. “The core of [Occupy DC’s] First Amendment activity is that they occupy the site,” explained NPS director Jonathan Jarvis. In other words, “occupying,” or camping on the land …
The tents still occupy two parks in Washington, D.C., but there are fewer people living in them as protesters with the Occupy movement flee for warmer quarters. The desertion of the Occupy D.C. is fueling class divisions within the movement among “those who can’t go home again and those who chose not to,” according to the Washington Post. Homeless people flocked to the parks this fall and are now apparently among the few remaining. One of them is Blair Rush, a 41-year-old homeless woman interviewed by the Post. She told …
Last week repairs on the Vietnam Memorial commenced to replace the worn, yellow grass with fresh sod, improve the irrigation system and restore the bronze fixtures around the memorial – including the flagpole, a statue of three soldiers and the base of the directories to help visitors find names on the wall. Particularly worth noting is how it’s being funded: not by the taxpayer but by a private memorial fund. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund took over the duties from the National Park Service “because of scarce funding from the …
Representative Rob Bishop’s (R-UT) is concerned about how the Department of the Interior is – or perhaps more appropriately isn’t – working with the Department of Homeland Security to secure our borders, and he let Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar know it at a hearing of the Committee on Natural Resources. As evidence of the issue’s gravity, Bishop points to a 2004 Interior Department report that had never been released to the public. According to the report the vast majority of the Organ National Pipe Monument in Arizona has …
