National Park Week

National Park Week is April 21-29, 2012. All 397 of the national parks are offering free admission, all week long! The National Park Service website offers more information including visit planning, an event calendar, etc. See also the National Park Week site. If you can't come in April, try June 9? That's the next day entrance fees will be waived, this time to celebrate Get Outdoors Day.

GSA Corruption

After several days of hearings, Senators of both parties today urged the General Services Administration, which oversees government spending to the tune of billions of dollars in contracts and grants, to clean up its act and weed out the corruption which has existed in the agency over the past several decades. An Obama appointee has unearthed the latest in a series of corrupt practices in GSA. Violations occur in spending, travel, and allocations. For details on the ongoing problems, see a press release by the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Committee at http://republicans.transportation.house.gov/News/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1604

For a press release from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform about how a top Obama official worried about how facts of this scandal would be portrayed in the media, see: http://oversight.house.gov/release/

1940 Census Released

On April 2, the National Archives and Records Administration made individual records from the 1940 Census available to the public for the first time. Explore the site to see how America has changed since the 1940s.

See also the Census Bureau site: http://www.census.gov/1940census/index.html