In President Barack Obama’s shiny object speech at the University of Central Missouri last week, he talked some about our education system, the obstructiveness of Evil Republicans in not letting Obama have his way on education-related matters, and the politics of the matter. He also said this:
Our kids don’t care about politics.
Isn’t that a terrible indictment of the Obama Education System?
From the National Republican Congressional Committee, and on the heels of President Barack Obama’s latest Presidential Bull on the economy, comes this compilation of the…pivots…that Obama has made during his administration.
Sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “political spin.”
Following a request from the FBI, the Sanford Police Department reported Thursday that it has halted its plan to return George Zimmerman’s gun and other pieces of evidence used at his murder trial.
Never mind that Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges, and so the State of Florida has no grounds for refusing to return to him his property and no grounds for withholding from him his concealed carry permit.
Never mind that the same FBI that asked the SPD to retain Zimmerman’s property has already completed an extensive investigation into Zimmerman’s racial bias as part of a general investigation into the man prior to his arrest and trial, finding no hint of racial bias.
Zimmerman is to be denied his property, “pending…DOJ investigation.”
And so the persecution continues. Within a broader theme to facilitate the Progressives’ attack on the 2nd Amendment.
In an article about police’s increasingly routine use of automatic scanners,
which can be affixed to police cars, bridges, or building to amass millions of digital records on the location and movement of vehicles…includ[ing] such details as location and license plate numbers[,]
comes this little tidbit.
The Mesquite Police Department, in Texas, has vehicle records stretching back to 2008, though the city plans to begin deleting files older than two years.
“There’s no expectation of privacy” for a vehicle driving on a public road or parked in a public place, said Lt Bill Hedgpeth, a police spokesman. It’s just a vehicle. It’s just a license plate.”
There’s also no expectation that police—our employees—will surveill us constantly, building a permanent database (some might say, a dossier) on us while on an idle fishing expedition, for future prurient curiosity. There’s no expectation that government—our employee—will track our movements, and thereby track our meetups, and with whom, just because it feels like it.
I posted this last year; it bears repeating.
On this day 236 years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.
These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities. At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.
And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government. They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.
They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years— any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office. This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.
We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial. And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 236 years ago.
As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.