WhatFinger

It belongs to the people, not to the government. And yes, the former outranks the latter.

Sweet video: Regular citizens enter national parks and dare Obama’s goons to catch them

By Dan Calabrese ——--October 9, 2013

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In choosing to stage histrionics over the so-called "shutdown," the Obama Administration hoped to prove to everyone how vital and wonderful the government really is. Why, you won't have your parks! You won't have your veterans' memorials! We'll even close the ocean!
But what they've really done is demonstrate what happens when the government intertwines itself with things that may belong to the public, but really don't need government oversight. We all heard the stories last week of the government erecting barricades at the World War II Memorial, even though it is normally not staffed and thus would not need to be affected by the shutdown. Closing off the memorial cost more money than doing nothing. It was strictly a stunt by the White House to upset people so they could blame Republicans. The same is true with national parks. Not everything that is public needs to be governmentalized, such that basic access to it is denied when government funds are cut off. And in a delicious act of civil disobedience, some citizens are defying Obama's goons and entering national parks in spite of the barricades - then daring the authorities to come after them. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
With the US government shutdown well into its second week, growing numbers of Americans are gleefully engaging in what they call "civil disobedience” by tossing aside cones or jumping over government shutdown-inspired barricades around national monuments, malls, andpark entrances. Whether their acts are punishable by law or a legitimate citizen protest against the federal government is an emerging questionas the shutdown entered Day 8. Hundreds of national park and forest service sites from Washington State to Washington, D.C., have been barricaded or closed amid a government shutdown over the implementation of Obamacare. The political sniping has focused on who is to blame for the budget impasse: Republicans for pushing the issue to a budgetary brink, or President Obama and Democrats for failing, at least, to entertain Republican ideas. Yet the barricaded federal lands issue has particularly focused on whether it's really necessary to close off public lands that aren't regularly patrolled, that are leased to private entities, or are simply open-air monuments without pay gates. For some areas, millions of dollars in tourism revenue is at stake. "We've gone from 'this land is your land, this land is my land,' to the government saying this land is its land," writes University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds in an e-mail.
Professor Reynolds's point is exactly the one I'm making. The land belongs to the people, not the government, and the government has no right to forbid people from accessing it - especially not to make some sort of political point about a budget dispute, which is all Obama is doing here. Check out this video in which a runner who uses the parks every day - normally with no interaction whatsoever with park patrols - is suddenly being told he can't run on land that is owned by the public.

The media may not recognize how disingenuous these stunts by the administration are, but it appears much of the public does. And if Obama is really bound and determined to keep fining and arresting people who merely enter public lands, I wonder how long the media will give him cover for that.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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