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 …
Indiana lawmakers are bracing for another high-profile fight over a right-to-work bill when the legislative session opens Wednesday. Last year Democrats fled the state in protest, preventing the legislature from conducting business for five weeks. The right-to-work bill would end forced unionization for private-sector workers in Indiana. Its supporters say the bill would increase jobs and choices in the Midwestern state with a 9 percent unemployment rate. Unions complain it threatens their existence. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) is speaking out in favor of the bill, even recording a 60-second …
Scribe reported last week on the extensive damage to small businesses wrought by the “Occupy” protests being staged around the country. In lower Manhattan, business owners are fighting back. Having been forced to endure nearly half a million dollars in lost revenue, they are planning to stage a counter-protest. At 5 pm, they will gather on the steps of City Hall to speak out against the “Occupy Wall Street” tent city, which has remained in Zuccotti Park for nearly two months. A recent survey by the New York Post showed …
What happens when the going gets tough for unions? They protest, even if they don’t have a legitimate reason to do it (other than an inability to compete and their plummeting membership rolls). Take the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters (MRCC), for example. As The Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports, the union has been protesting Ritsema Associates, a Michigan construction company since last summer – even though its members don’t work there. Why? The union claims that the company pays “substandard wages and fringe benefits,” but they don’t offer …
Much has been made over the attendance at the march and rally in DC on September 12. Reports varied, with many on the left clinging to an unofficial DC Fire Department estimate of 60,000 to 70,000. Some reports from overseas went as far as to say two million. However, one completely objective source of information is the number of people who rode Metro, Washington, DC’s mass transit subway system. Washington Metro measures and releases its ridership numbers and these numbers have been used in the past to judge the size …
Here is a picture of the crowd in Olympia, Washington courtesy of Trent England. Not small.
Today in more than 500 locations in all 50 states, American taxpayers will hold ‘Tea Party’ rallies to protest exploding government spending and the inevitable higher taxes that will be needed to pay for it. We wish we could direct you to one website that had a comprehensive list of all the events and a clear mission statement for the movement, but none exists. The defenders of big government desperately want to dismiss today’s rallies as a top down corporate funded campaign, but they can’t even get their conspiracy theories …
Tomorrow, thousands of Americans across the country will organize on Tax Day to protest the tax, borrow, spend and bailout policies of Washington. Whether large or small, these demonstrations will all have one message in common: Enough! Over the past three months, Americans have seen an already out-of-control government spend their borrowed dollars as if a trillion dollars is a drop in the bucket. After the bailouts that put the White House at the head of a number of major corporations; after a stimulus bill that the Congressional Budget Office …
