Happy Independence. Folks.

Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.

contra view:http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/10/1st-october-not-nigerian-independence/

Happy 4Th, American Independence.

happy 4th of july, #americanindependence, UNLESS you are #british, in which case, i'm sticking my tongue at ya, because if it was up to you, i'll be singing "all hail the queen", instead of watching our flag flying PROUDLY "o'er the ramparts"!

if you are #french, we thank you IMMENSELY. if it wasn't for you, there would be NO 4th, and we'd forever be watching the #britishqueen grinning from ear to ear and waiving at her subjects -- us!

the thought makes me SHUDDER!!

Happy Birthday, Nigeria.

Happy Independence Day To Us In America.

happy #americanindependence, everyone. we have reason to celebrate and thank God for those who fought and gave all measure of devotion and patriotism, so that we may be free from the tyranny of king george and his ilk.

happy independence day america.

Happy 4Th Of July Independence Day To All The REAL Patriots Out There!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO NIGERIA. WE ARE BIAFRA!

OUR FOUNDING FATHERS: WHO WERE THEY AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? WATCH VIDEO.

ON THIS INDEPENDENCE DAY, WE SALUTE OUR FOUNDING FATHERS FOR THEIR SACRIFICES.

Declaration of Independence

Here is the complete text of the Declaration of Independence. The original spelling and capitalization have been retained.

Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

The Pennsylvania Packet, July 8, 1776

DECLARATION SIGNERS

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/04/2247908/declaration-of-independence.html#storylink=cpy

Happy Independence Day To Nigeria.

Declaration Of Independence.

Declaration of Independence

(Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776)

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Happy Independence Day.

Back Again To Independence Day From One Of My Favorite Writers, Peggy Noonan.

A Cold Man's Warm Words
Jefferson's tender lament didn't make it into the Declaration.
By PEGGY NOONAN

The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.

It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.

The tensions over slavery had been wrenching, terrible, and were resolved by brute calculation: to damn or outlaw it now would break fragile consensus, halt all momentum, and stop the creation of the United States. References to the slave trade were omitted, but the founders were not stupid men, and surely they knew their young nation would have its date with destiny; surely they heard in their silence the guns of Fort Sumter.

Still, in the end, the Congress would not produce only an act of the most enormous human and political significance, the creation of America, it would provide history with one of the few instances in which a work of true literary genius was produced, in essence, by committee. (The writing of the King James Bible is another.)

The beginning of the Declaration had a calm stateliness that signaled, subtly, that something huge is happening:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separate."

This gave a tone of moral modesty to an act, revolution, that is not a modest one. And it was an interesting modesty, expressing respect for the opinion of the world while assuming the whole world was watching. In time it would be. But that phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" is still a marker, a reminder: We began with respect. America always gets in trouble when we forget that.

The second paragraph will, literally, live forever in the history of man. It still catches the throat:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

What followed was a list of grievances that made the case for separation from the mother country, and this part was fiery. Jefferson was a cold man who wrote with great feeling. He trained his eyes on the depredations of King George III: "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compete the work of death, desolation and tyranny . . ."

Members of the Congress read and reread, and the cutting commenced. Sometimes they cooled Jefferson down. He wrote that the king "suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states." They made it simpler: "He has obstructed the Administration of Justice."

"For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely." I quote from the historian David McCullough's "John Adams," as I did last year at this time, because everything's there.

Jefferson looked on in silence. Mr. McCullough notes that there is no record that he uttered a word in protest or in defense of what he'd written. Benjamin Franklin, sitting nearby, comforted him: Edits often reduce things to their essence, don't fret. It was similar to the wisdom Scott Fitzgerald shared with the promising young novelist Thomas Wolfe 150 years later: Writers bleed over every cut, but at the end they don't miss what was removed, don't worry.

"Of more than eighty changes in Jefferson's draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it," writes Mr. McCullough. But one cut near the end was substantial, and its removal wounded Jefferson, who was right to be wounded, for some of those words should have stayed.

Jefferson had, in his bill of particulars against the king, taken a moment to incriminate the English people themselves—"our British brethren"—for allowing their king and Parliament to send over to America not only "soldiers of our own blood" but "foreign Mercenaries to invade and destroy us." This, he said, was at the heart of the tragedy of separation. "These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever" our old friends and brothers. "We must endeavor to forget our former love for them."

Well. Talk of love was a little much for the delegates. Love was not on their mind. The entire section was removed.

And so were the words that came next. But they should not have been, for they are the tenderest words.

Poignantly, with a plaintive sound, Jefferson addresses and gives voice to the human pain of parting: "We might have been a free and great people together."

What loss there is in those words, what humanity, and what realism, too.

"To write is to think, and to write well is to think well," David McCullough once said in conversation. Jefferson was thinking of the abrupt end of old ties, of self-defining ties, and, I suspect, that the pain of this had to be acknowledged. It is one thing to declare the case for freedom, and to make a fiery denunciation of abusive, autocratic and high-handed governance. But it is another thing, and an equally important one, to acknowledge the human implications of the break. These were our friends, our old relations; we were leaving them, ending the particular facts of our long relationship forever. We would feel it. Seventeen seventy-six was the beginning of a dream. But it was the end of one too. "We might have been a free and great people together."

It hurt Thomas Jefferson to see these words removed from his great document. And we know something about how he viewed his life, his own essence and meaning, from the words he directed that would, a half-century after 1776, be cut onto his tombstone. The first word after his name is "Author."

America and Britain did become great and free peoples together, and apart, bound by a special relationship our political leaders don't often speak of and should never let fade. You can't have enough old friends. There was the strange war of 1812, declared by America and waged here by England, which reinvaded, and burned our White House and Capitol. That was rude of them. But they got their heads handed to them in New Orleans and left, never to return as an army.

Even 1812 gave us something beautiful and tender. There was a bombardment at Fort McHenry. A young lawyer and writer was watching, Francis Scott Key. He knew his country was imperiled. He watched the long night in hopes the fort had not fallen. And he saw it—the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

And so to all writers (would-be, occasional and professional) and all editors too, down through our history: Happy 234th Independence Day. And to our British cousins: Nice growing old with you.

Back To Frank Rich's "Fourth Of July, 1776, 1964, 2010". I Love It!

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010
By FRANK RICH

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago.

With the holiday weekend approaching, Johnson summoned the television networks for the signing ceremony on Thursday evening, July 2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, first proposed more than a year earlier by John F. Kennedy, banished the Jim Crow laws that denied black Americans access to voting booths, public schools and public accommodations. Johnson told the nation we could “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country” with the help of a newly formed “Community Relations Service” and its “advisory committee of distinguished Americans.” Talk about an age of innocence!

Still, there were some heartening reports of America’s first full day under the new law. A front-page photo in The Times on July 4 showed 13-year-old Gene Young of Kansas City being shorn by a white barber at the Muehlebach Hotel shop “formerly closed to Negroes.” But that Norman Rockwell-like tableau was paired with the image of a white businessman, Lester Maddox, and a teenage accomplice respectively wielding a pistol and an ax handle as they turned away blacks from Maddox’s restaurant in Atlanta. The summer of 1964, which had begun with the lynching of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., would soon erupt in a bloody wave of terrorism, marked by dozens of bombings of black churches, homes and businesses.

A presidential campaign was in the wings. The soon-to-be Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, had committed heresy by casting one of the Party of Lincoln’s few Senate votes against the Civil Rights Act. But not even Goldwater had been as implacably opposed as a Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd. Of all the filibusters trying to block the bill, largely from Southern and border state racists then welcomed by the Democratic Party, Byrd’s was the longest (some 14 hours) and perhaps the most appalling. As the historian Taylor Branch recounted, Byrd even let loose with ornate “segregationist interpretations of Luke and Paul.”

This was typical of Byrd. He had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1940s. As he moved toward a political career after World War II, he wrote to a notorious bigot, the Democratic Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, to rage at President Truman’s efforts to integrate the military: “I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

That letter was not unearthed until the late 1980s, but by then Byrd had long since renounced and apologized repeatedly for his ugly past, with words as well as deeds, including his avid support for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983. Byrd referred to his K.K.K. association in interviews as an immutable stain. He always noted with rue, not complaint, that it would haunt his obituaries. He wasn’t wrong. But when those obituaries finally appeared last week, after his death at 92, Byrd’s résumé in racism was dwarfed not just by his efforts to atone for it but by his legislative achievements on many fronts during his epic Senate career.

Byrd’s evolution often parallels that of a country that has now elected its first African-American president. But the story of America and race is hardly resolved, and progress is not inexorable. Even in the new century, we still take steps back and forward in bewildering alternation. New Yorkers could only be embarrassed to learn last week, courtesy of The Times, that in a city where the non-Hispanic white population is 35 percent, 70 percent of the senior officials hired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg are white — a record worse than that of all three American cities of comparable population, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. The title that an independent panel gave to its newly issued report on the altercation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a Cambridge, Mass., police officer — “Missed Opportunities, Shared Responsibilities” — might apply here too.

Yet paradoxically the news in New York was preceded by happier tidings from South Carolina, where the flag of the Confederacy still flies at the state Capitol. Republican primary voters there gave victories both to an African-American candidate for Congress, Tim Scott, and an Indian-American gubernatorial hopeful, Nikki Haley. Liberals have argued that these breakthroughs come with a caveat: Scott and Haley are often ideologically to the right of even their conservative competitors. True enough, but that doesn’t alter the reality that some very conservative white voters in the land of Strom Thurmond did not let any lingering racial animus override their other convictions. They voted for Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants, despite the urging of a local G.O.P. official that they reject a “raghead.”

Scott’s victory had an added irony because he defeated Thurmond’s son. But we shouldn’t read too much into these results from low-turnout primaries — just as we shouldn’t draw too much solace from the pleasing morality tale of Byrd’s atonement. Even as Washington paid homage to Byrd’s triumph over his origins last week, the Capitol played host to what the Supreme Court’s only black justice, Clarence Thomas, might call a “high-tech lynching.” The victim was, of all people, Thurgood Marshall — the nation’s first black solicitor general and first black Supreme Court Justice, nominated to both jobs by L.B.J.

The pretext was Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings in the Senate. Marshall had been a mentor to Kagan, for whom she clerked in 1988. He is also a hero of our history, a brave and brilliant lawyer whose advocacy in many civil rights cases, and most especially Brown v. Board of Education, helped open the doors for landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Even before last week’s ceremonial hazing of Kagan, the G.O.P.’s only national black political figure, Michael Steele, attacked her for writing approvingly of a speech Marshall had given calling the original text of the Constitution “defective” — a restrained adjective, actually, for a document that countenanced slavery. On the first day of the Kagan hearings, Marshall received many more mentions (35) than even that other Republican archenemy, President Obama, in the accounting of Talking Points Memo. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said they weren’t sure they could have voted to confirm Marshall to the court. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a state that suffered years of economic boycotts because of its opposition to the King holiday, faulted Marshall’s jurisprudence for advancing “the agenda of certain classes of litigants” (wonder who?) and for being out of the “mainstream.”

These senators were in the tradition of Thurmond, not Byrd — indeed, they are Thurmond’s direct heirs. Like Byrd, Thurmond had been an ardent Democratic foe of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unlike Byrd, he left his party in disgust that year and endorsed Goldwater, jump-starting the migration of the Democrats’ racist cadre and their political toxins to the G.O.P. and setting the stage for the Republican “Southern strategy.” That strategy isn’t dead. Witness just recently the Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of a Confederate History Month that omitted any mention of slavery, and the Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul’s revival of Goldwater’s “constitutional” objections to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Thurmond, who died at 100 in 2003, never recanted his racist past. He chose instead to pretend it never happened. He told interviewers that his “reputation as a segregationist” was “just misunderstood” and that he helped “the people of both races” throughout his lifetime. This from a man who, when running as a Dixiecrat for president in 1948, exclaimed that “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation.” Only after Thurmond’s death did we learn that his record also included fathering a daughter with a teenage black maid in the 1920s — and then shunting her into the shadows.

The senators trashing Marshall last week almost uncannily recycled Thurmond’s behavior from July 1967, when, as a freshly minted Republican senator on the same committee, he pelted Marshall for an hour with windy, truculent and arcane questions during Marshall’s own Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Indeed, some of the coded invective — such as Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions’s decrying Marshall as “a well-known activist” — was coined by Thurmond and his peers then. Thurmond not only voted against Marshall but declared him too deficient in constitutional knowledge to qualify for the court.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” wrote our current Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, in a smug majority opinion nibbling away at Brown v. Board of Education in 2007. His conservative self-righteousness, a product of his time, is as delusional as L.B.J.’s liberal faith in the efficacy of a federal “Community Relations Service” was in 1964. On this Fourth, as on the 233 that preceded it, America is still very much a work in progress.

Jim Chatham: "This July 4, A Larger Concept Of The Patriotic Call." I AGREE.

This July 4, a larger concept of the patriotic call
By Jim Chatham

The Oxford American Dictionary defines "patriot" as "a person who is devoted to and ready to support or defend his or her country."

We usually associate patriotism with military service. We honor those who protect our country in conflict, focusing on "supporting the troops."

But if we Americans are "devoted to and ready to support" our country, we need a larger concept of the patriotic call. Doing what is best for the nation has other meanings also. Here are a few.

A patriot today will vote. Our presidents are normally elected with less than 50 percent of the eligible population voting. A recent state primary brought out 11 percent. Democracy is a delicate construct, most easily undermined by indifference. If we love our country, we will educate ourselves about political issues, local candidates and national candidates, and then we will vote. It is the most fundamental of civic duties.

A patriot today will refuse to participate in the wave of anger sweeping this nation, stoked by professional anger provocateurs seeking power and wealth. Anger appears likely to play a significant role in this coming November's election. I shudder to think of the government our anger will elect. It will not be a government of knowledge and wisdom in leading our nation forward through difficult times. If we love our country, we will not let anger do our voting.

A patriot today will support necessary taxation. Realize what our taxes buy. They buy our parents' Medicare and our children's teachers. They buy the streets we drive on, the lights that show us the way, the fire departments that answer our alarms, the police that protect us, the army that defends us, the arts that enrich us, the scientific research that prepares our future. Yes, there is waste, graft and corruption, but the contention that taxes are evil is a lie. We are short-sighted and self-centered if we believe it. If we love our country, we will support fair and necessary taxes, and we will elect candidates who have the courage to vote for them.

A patriot today will join the effort to scale back on our nation's voracious appetite for oil. Cars, SUVs, gasoline, heating oil, plastics, synthetics -- together they create an oil addiction that is seriously weakening our country. Not only are we using up the earth's finite oil supply and fouling the world's environment, but we are also making some very unsavory people fabulously rich. Patriotism cries out to us to find a better way. The guiding word is SACRIFICE: how much will you and I sacrifice on our auto travel, our air travel, our convenience, our demand, our consumption to make America stronger? Will we support the development of alternative energy sources? Our President recently beckoned us to this challenge; are we paying attention? If we love our country, we will start now withdrawing ourselves from our addiction to oil.

A patriot today will affirm that those of us with more need to share with those of us with less. Wealth disparity in this country has reached enormous proportions. One percent of our people possess 43 percent of our wealth; 80 percent of our people possess 7 percent of our wealth (http//sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html). In the past 30 years, Congress has passed much legislation designed to make this disparity worse, to enrich further the rich and to impoverish the poor. We have deluded ourselves with the notion that those "with means" deserve favorable treatment because they possess superior insight, intelligence and morality in leading the rest. Ludicrous! Our country is made of all of us. We cannot be strong unless the strength is shared. If we love our country, those who have more will see it as their obligation to share with those who have less.

If we want to be strong patriots in the year 2010, this is how to do it.

James O. Chatham, of Asheville, N.C., is a leader in Elders United for a Just Society, www.EldersUnited.com. He is pastor emeritus of Highland Presbyterian Church in Louisville.

David Broder: "Henry Clay's America".

Henry Clay's America
By David Broder

WASHINGTON -- Just as this year, Independence Day in 1852 fell on a Sunday. But in New York City the traditional celebration was upstaged by another event. The casket bearing the remains of Henry Clay had arrived aboard the steamboat Trenton .

As historians David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler write in their splendid biography, Henry Clay: The Essential American , published earlier this year, "New York closed down and turned out on Broadway to see the makeshift parade that bore Clay to City Hall. He lay there in state for the rest of the day and all of the next, July 4, a Sunday."

From there, he was borne by ship up the Hudson to Albany and then by funeral train to Buffalo and beyond.

Clay was not a New Yorker, but the Congress in which he had served decided, with his family, his renown was such that, after tributes had been paid over his bier in the Capitol (just as we heard last week for Robert Byrd), the nation should join the commemoration.

So he was transported north to Baltimore, Philadelphia and through the New York stops to Cleveland and Cincinnati before reaching his final destination, Lexington, Ky.

Who was this man, the slim 75-year-old whose funeral in the Senate chamber had been attended by the president and so many other worthies that it resembled a State of the Union address? He was a unique figure in American history, the founder of the Whig Party, the youngest speaker of the House at the time, one of the giants of the Senate in its golden age, a five-time candidate for the White House, and the author of some of the most significant legislation in the first century of our national development.

Clay was born in Virginia in 1777, less than a year after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Trained in penmanship, he became the private secretary to George Wythe, who was a signer of the Declaration and the mentor of Thomas Jefferson. At 20, armed with a law degree, Clay joined an older brother in Lexington, Ky.

From then on, he rose rapidly in public office. Sent to the U.S. Senate by fellow members of the Kentucky General Assembly, then elected to the House, he became speaker at 34, with the support of other young men in the group known as "War Hawks" because of their hostility to Britain.

The following decades are etched in history. Clay found his nemesis in Andrew Jackson and began an unprecedented series of losing presidential campaigns by challenging him. He earned a permanent place in Senate history along with his great contemporaries, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster.

He became famous as a conciliator and, despite increasing infirmities, helped negotiate the Compromise of 1850, a last, futile attempt to head off the Civil War.

Along the way, he led the short-lived effort to make the Whigs (named for their British cousins) the opposition party. It lasted just long enough to inspire Abraham Lincoln.

And besides all that, Clay invented the American System, policies favoring the support of domestic industry and the improvement of what we would now call infrastructure -- roads and rail and all other forms of transport and communication.

Between Washington's time and Lincoln's, it is probable that no American was more influential than Clay -- and certainly no one who did not occupy the White House.

On Independence Day now, he is rarely mentioned as part of the pantheon that shaped this nation. But shape it he did. And, as the Heidlers remind us, toward the end of Clay's life, when the famous soprano Jenny Lind visited Washington and Clay came to hear her, he was pleased to reciprocate by honoring her request to come listen to him argue a case before the Supreme Court. Two star turns.

David S. Broder is a columnist with The Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

"Franklin's Wisdom".

Franklin's wisdom

Happy 234th birthday, America. This is your day to reconnect with your roots, with your forefathers' gathering to declare the fledgling country's independence from the "injuries and usurpations" of a bullying Britain, with your unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Many have noted, over the years, that the Declaration of Independence doesn't promise Americans happiness, only the right to pursue it. That pursuit is something to contemplate these days, when partisanship seems so sharp, when anger seems so widespread, when patience seems so worn.

Red, white and blue? Red, white and blues is more like it.

The document whose signing Americans celebrate today bears many signatures, and some of the people who signed it then remain stand-outs in the country's history. One in particular defies time and still offers many lessons and warnings -- in handy sound-bite form -- for the American sons and daughters his brain and his imagination continue to spawn.

That's Benjamin Franklin, of course, who only completed second grade but has been called the first "scientific American," his experiments in electricity sealing his fame long before his patriot days did the same for his status as national hero. He also was an inventor, a newspaperman, an author, a diplomat, the first postmaster general and, speaking of pursuits of happiness, a real bon vivant who had quite a way with the ladies -- but that's another story.

Franklin is summoned today because so much of what he wrote and repeated in his Poor Richard's Almanack from 1733-58 can serve as a user's manual for getting along in modern America. If the wise words don't exactly promise happiness, they do serve as a reminder that current challenges have been faced and dealt with before.

Today's questions, Benjamin Franklin's answers:

The haves and have-nots?

"The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one."

Want to put everything about yourself on Facebook?

"Do not do that which you would not have known."
(2 of 2)

The need for health care reform?

"God heals, and the Doctor takes the fees."

The importance of balance between work and home?

"Drive thy Business, let not that drive thee."

The importance of hard work?

"He that waits upon a Fortune, is never sure of a Dinner."

How persistence pays off?

"Little Strokes, fell great Oaks."

The dangers of hypocrisy?

"Don't throw stones at your neighbours, if your own windows are glass."

The importance of humility in leadership?

"He that cannot obey, cannot command."

Living in the moment?

"One Today is worth two Tomorrows."

The need to think before you speak?

"Man's tongue is soft, and bone doth lack; Yet a stroke therewith may break a man's back."

And Nike sure owes him:

"No gains without pains."

The wisdom in those words is timeless. But two other expressions of Benjamin Franklin's seem especially resonant in this American age of sharp partisanship, hot anger and worn patience.

He said, "A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges."

And right before he affixed his name to the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin wrote about the need for the "united" aspect of the future states of America: "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Happy Fourth Of July -- Independence Day.

Happy Independence Day To Nigeria.