I have some fine, genuine 24-karat gold-plated HDMI cables you may be interested in.

... they'd spend the money on lobbying instead.

I never read TFA, so I'm already halfway there!

Yes: you shouldn't assume that a degree is irrelevant to competence because this survey makes no effort separate the competent from the incompetent.

Or the parent is just pleased with people that are able to vaguely meet vague goals, rather than employees who ask for clarification with pesky questions like "Why?"

You don't need a college degree to read a phone script.

Just because there's a lot of 'em doesn't mean they're all good.

I even got you some numbers to satisfy my own curiosity:

According to the National Park Service's FY13 Greenbook, the National Mall and adjoining shrines and memorials (which include the National World War II Memorial) are treated as a single item and cost the National Park Service $32,282,000 to maintain in 2012, or over $88,200 each day.

These costs do not include Park Police, which are listed as a separate $79,763,000 expenditure in the DC area alone in '12.

Groundskeeping, maintenance and security are not free. The federal government is charged with maintaining (i.e. not abandoning) the sites, and the cheapest and easiest way to maintain anything is to close off public access.

It'd be an olive branch, a consolation prize to the Chief Justice to give the appearance of SCOTUS influence where there need not be. After all, the Chief Justice doesn't have that kind of say over bread-and-butter district, bankruptcy and circuit judges.

Emphasis mine:

In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction only where Congress allows it. If Congress excepted the FISA court from Supreme Court jurisdiction, that's the end of it.

Because the standard used for "essential" is "Would stopping this put life and limb into immediate jeopardy?" As you'll note from the constant complaints about science funding or the lack thereof, spending on scientific research and development is the epitome of a long term investment, which generally means that turning it off won't cause any immediate hospitalizations.

And everyone wants to see their own special interest declared "essential." The Tea Party wanted the exception to be certain war monuments, for example. Why is a space telescope more essential than, say, Head Start? This is how politics works.

It comes from being born into circumstances in which you can actually afford an education. In our society, these circumstances are highly correlated with being white and male.

Born on third, think they hit a triple, etc.

1.) Ultimately, "Tea Party" of the self-declared is little more than a bunch of true Scotsmen moving goalposts around. Once you get beyond "Tea Party" office-holders (i.e. the folks who actually get elected on what they declare to be "Tea Party values," and who are uniformly right-wing reactionaries), you're left with a myriad of small groups not much more than a dozen strong, who together can't even agree on what day it is. Which brings me to my next point...

2.) Knowledge of hard sciences is (at best) independent of knowledge of social sciences, or economics, or any number of other factors that arguably make one more fit to govern. Their inability to organize, to the point where they are being led around by the nose by the likes of Sarah Palin, should highlight this. So an average "Tea Party member" acknowledges anthropogenic climate change. Ask them what should, or even can be done about it. Ask them what is politically feasible to accomplish on a national or international level.

The author notes that he doesn't know any self-declared Tea Party members personally. The general inclination here is to view him as an "ivory tower academic." But there's a converse: the law professor doesn't know any Tea Party members because the Tea Party doesn't actually value the study of law.

"Can" and "must" are two different words.

Hell, the document went in force in 1789 and the Navy wasn't effectively established until 1794.

Ah, but the parent said "budget for the Department of Defense." Veterans' Affairs is "somebody else's problem."