This is from my hometown paper. Not exactly a bastion of conservative thought (although they do better than many) so I was pleasantly surprised to see this op-ed this morning.

Reading Eagle:

Don Spatz: A day to cherish rights that are left

It's July Fourth, America's Independence Day, and it's time to take stock in just what a wonderful country we have, and the rights we Americans enjoy.

I'm so thankful for the right to life, liberty oh, wait, I'm 63 and by the time I'm 70 and may need a procedure to keep that life, the death panels in Obamacare (now Obamatax) will have ruled whether I live or die.

How about liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Oh, yes, so long as the pursuit doesn't involve making a lot of money and I'm considered a greedy 1 percenter.

OK, well, I've got the right to free speech oh, wait, unless it's speech that offends anyone for any reason at all and I'm charged with a hate crime.

By golly, at least I've got the right to the free exercise of my religion uh, unless that involves bringing my belief in a personal God into everyday decisions, since I'm supposed to leave him out of everything.

And if my beliefs mean I'm pro-life, then heaven help me - as if heaven would be allowed to.

OK, OK, but I can still count on a constitutional ban against unreasonable searches and seizures unless I'm walking in New York City where last year the cops seized and searched - the cops call it stopped and frisked - 685,724 people, with no warrants nor probable cause other than that those folks just didn't look right.

All right, let's at least celebrate my right not to have the government take my property without just compensation oops, that's unless I own some land with what I call a puddle and the government calls a wetlands, and it forbids me from using it for anything else, thereby "taking" my land for a government purpose but not compensating me.

Is it asking too much to be thankful for the right to bear arms? I guess it is if I'm in Chicago, whose gun ban was ruled unconstitutional but the city replaced it with bureaucratic red tape that's just as effective.

Whatever happened to the real Americans? To those who said "Give me liberty or give me death" and would have none of this government monkeying with citizens' rights?

Are they gone forever? Are we the frogs in the pot who don't realize what we've lost, and are about to lose?

As we celebrate this Independence Day, remember what independence is.

It's more than separation from the mother country.

It's separation from tyranny.