Apparently in the early days of the country, your political persuasions could be determined by which holiday you celebrated.. Independence Day or Washington's birthday:

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"In the Founders’ day, the 4th of July was a partisan holiday. It was celebrated in the 1790s and 1800s by Jeffersonian Republicans desirous of showing their devotion to Jeffersonian, rather than Hamiltonian, political philosophy. If you were a Federalist in the 1790s, you likely would celebrate Washington’s Birthday instead of the 4th of July. If you believed in the inherent power of the Executive in formulating foreign policy, in the power of Congress to charter a bank despite the absence of express constitutional authorization to do so, and in the power of the federal government to punish people who criticized the president or Congress, you would not celebrate the 4th. The 4th was the holiday of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, those great states’-rights blasts at federal lawlessness. It was the anti-Hamilton, anti-Washington, anti-nationalist holiday. -Kevin Gutzman,Associate Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University "

As we celebrate our independence, we take a hard look at today's type of political leader.

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"Republic to Empire by Charley Reese When President Teddy Roosevelt attended the funeral of a member of British royalty, he declined the offer of a gilded carriage for the funeral procession. Roosevelt told his British hosts that it would be inappropriate for the head of a republic. He would therefore walk. One of President Franklin Roosevelt's favorite things to do was to pack a lunch, drive up into the Pine Mountains, pull off the road, spread a blanket and enjoy a picnic lunch with two or three of his friends. In 1933, an assassin opened fire on Roosevelt during an appearance in an open car in Miami. The mayor of Chicago, however, was in the way and took the bullets. The Secret Service members immediately started to speed away, and Roosevelt ordered them to stop and retrieve the wounded mayor. At first they didn't, until he shouted, "Damn it, back this car up and get the mayor!" They did, and carried the wounded mayor to the hospital in the president's car. The mayor later died. President Harry Truman always took a vigorous daily walk – on the streets of Washington. When his term ended, he and his wife took a cab to the train station, where they returned to Missouri. Truman, by the way, refused all offers to serve on corporate boards of directors. "You don't want me, you want the presidency, and that's not mine to sell," he said. If you will recall the funeral procession for Princess Diana, you will remember that the royal princes walked the route to Westminster Cathedral. Imagine that – British royalty walking down a street jammed with common people. The last time President George W. Bush visited the British Isles, the Air Force had to fly over a fleet of 16 armored limousines for use of the president and his entourage. If you are young and don't like to read (I hope this hasn't become a redundancy), then you are probably unaware of the transition from a republic to an empire. One of the reasons I'm so contemptuous of modern politicians is that I don't compare them with each other; I compare them with the great men of the past. The last elected president who had genuinely great accomplishments on his résumé was Dwight Eisenhower. There is no such thing as a flawless politician. We should never expect perfection in anything involving human beings. But there very much is such a thing as character, and that's where we've gotten careless in our choice of leaders. The foundations of character are honesty, courage and fidelity. An adulterer who is unfaithful to his wife is hardly likely to be faithful to his oath of office. John F. Kennedy was an adulterer and a playboy, but he was the first president to be marketed like a bar of soap or a tube of toothpaste. It becomes more and more difficult these days to distinguish between accomplishment and image. To get even an idea of a person's character, you have to look at his whole life, not just the public image. People rarely, if ever, change their character after adolescence. Hopefully, they will grow in knowledge and perhaps wisdom, but most people remain the same people they always were as far as character is concerned. Self-indulgent cowards don't become brave stoics. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, discovered that the hellish experience didn't change anybody. Those who were bad remained bad, and those who were good remained good. I suppose the question for us today is, Have we lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad? "

7/3/2007 12:38:54 PM

I plan on celebrating with fireworks that were made in china, steaks that are from cows of unknown origin, and beer that was brewed in the US of A!

7/3/2007 12:45:40 PM

^ I've got vineson I shot with an American rifle, using American bullets, on the other side of Afton Mtn. from Thos. Jefferson's home. But yeah, the fireworks are straight Chinese.

Interesting articles though. Ironically, the Confederate Congress (a decidedly anti-Federalist group) chose Washington's birthday as the date for the founding of the CSA and it was the day, in 1862, that Jefferson Davis was sworn in.

To complete this cavalcade of random facts, today is also the 164th anniversary of Pickett's charge up Cemetary Ridge on the last day of Gettysburg.

7/3/2007 12:57:29 PM

Gettysburg, the last battle of the American Revolution

7/3/2007 3:17:14 PM

^^ Dammit. I was going to point out today being the anniversary of Picketts Charge.

Now I'm stuck pointing out that today is Independance Day in Belarus.

7/3/2007 3:58:06 PM

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"The Case for Independence by Anthony Gregory On July 4th libertarians celebrate the rejection of empire. Politicians more likely see it as the US government’s birthday. If they’re right, we should think it a tragic commemoration indeed. No, I see the Fourth as an independence celebration to which our government has no rightful claim. Seventeen seventy-six was, after all, five years before they ratified the Articles of Confederation and a full eleven years before the Constitution was completed. As our national mythos goes, it was on this day that America declared its separation from the British state. This is a day to remember liberation, disunion, the idea that a house divided might be more civil, peaceful and secure than one kept together by force. In light of this heritage and Jefferson’s wonderful declaration, I believe we should consider the possible benefits were the American people to reclaim the spirit of 1776 and apply its principles to the present day. I believe we should contemplate the possibility that what Americans and foreigners need is independence from the empire. The American colonists had been particularly irked by the British government’s hypocrisy regarding the liberal tradition. The British prided themselves on having a liberal and enlightened political culture, complete with checks and balances, due process and the like. But they did not grant such privileges and immunities to their colonial subjects. They preached freedom and toleration but practiced international despotism. Edmund Burke, one of the most consistent proponents of liberty in Britain, decried this colonial hypocrisy as an enormous scandal. Today, the US empire is everything the British empire was: It claims the banner of constitutional justice at home, it feigns interest in freedom abroad, it poses as the embodiment of liberty itself. But it treats those in its clutches, especially those in its remote grasp, as dispensable means to an imperial end. It slaughters civilians with no regard for the number. It enforces martial law in its exploits abroad. It is the champion and vindicator, not of foreign liberty, but of theocracies and socialist states everywhere. In the course of its reign, it has laid waste to millions of lives. George W. Bush is a far greater tyrant than King George ever was. He claims the right to seize anyone in all the world – his designated battlefield in the war on terror – and deprive him of liberty or life without anything approaching due process, without a right to an attorney, without habeas corpus. Under recent presidents and especially today’s, the US has become just what John Quincy Adams warned it might: The Dictatress of the World. The world’s people deserve their independence. Perhaps it would be fitting to start with the British. Liberate them from the Bush foreign policy that only a minority of them approve. Wartime coalitions without representation are tyranny! They should be the first satellite freed, as a poetic gesture of honest friendship. The Brits didn’t release America without a fight, but perhaps they can be let go in peace. Of course, Iraq and Afghanistan must be freed immediately. Is it not an embarrassment for Americans to celebrate the day with fireworks and barbecues yet think nothing of the perversity of it all, given what is happening in the Muslim world? US interference with Middle Eastern independence has been nothing but a repudiation of July-4th principles, at least since 1953 when the CIA overthrew Iranian democracy and installed a torturing inflationist monster. The US support, betrayals and overthrows of Arab and Muslim regimes have typically been incoherent, contradictory, and nakedly unjust. Such intervention has not protected but has rather endangered American lives and freedoms. The entangling alliance between the United States and Israel, which compromises the safety of both populations, must also end. Then there are the other imperial holdings. There’s Old Europe, which should stop being bullied every time they don’t want to go to war for America. Just because Americans were dragged into World War II doesn’t mean the French should be dragged into the next installment, with presumed allegiance to Old Glory until the end of time. Bring GI Joe home from Germany, where he has absurdly been stationed for six decades, presumably in wait for Hitler’s resurrection, or the threats presented by the Soviet Union, always an economic invalid and now nearly two-decades defunct. Then there’s New Europe, which should be freed from undue US government influence. Stop bribing their leaders and see how loyal their people really are to the Bush-Cheney enterprise. It is high time the US stop playing elections to its advantage. In Japan and Korea, American troops have long been the cause of much agitation and no visible good. Bring them home. Mao has long been dead, so it’s time the US government stopped pretending it’s all that’s keeping imaginary dominoes from falling all over Asia. Free trade with Asians would be good as well. Much of the original US imperial interest in Asia was commercial in nature, although now America’s protectionists fear Asia becoming capitalist and rich. It’s clear, however, that trade benefits both sides to the transaction, and empire only gets in the way. Latin Americans’ self-determination declines whenever the US reinterprets the arrogant Monroe doctrine to award itself the keys to the capital city of yet another Spanish-speaking nation. Policy in the region has been brazenly colonial at least since the US imposed the Platt Amendment on the Cubans and stole Guantanamo Bay. The US should stop pretending it has always owned the Western Hemisphere, stop poisoning crops, stop staging coups and stop strong-arming Mexico and other countries into maintaining a draconian drug war. US meddling in Africa also tends toward disaster, as Somalia and Sudan have shown. Extend to the African peoples total free trade and friendship, which is the best America can do to help them join the developing world. We should resist the internationalist temptation to redeploy into the continent with humanitarian bombs and altruistic bellicosity, as if in anticipation of a Joseph Conrad novel with a happy ending. Australia, Canada (and every other country) should also get their independence, at last, from the US. No more global regulatory arm-twisting, manipulative foreign aid, threats or empty promises. As for the American people, we should consider independence, too. For starters, half our income is taxed away and we have the biggest prison population on the planet. American government is much worse for American liberty than the British empire was, to an almost obscene degree. Open up Common Sense and notice the radical insights about being governed from afar. There is simply no sense or justice in the same central state ruling everybody from Hawaii to Virginia, from Arizona to Vermont. The American Republic was a half-decent experiment, as far as such political experiments go, but it didn’t guarantee liberty even when the American population was 2% the size it is today. American freedom and international peace will always be a mirage so long as the beast in Washington, DC, lords it over everyone on earth. There have always been Americans who saw no limits to the US government’s power, but let us once and for all tell these Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that we are sick of their crazed expansions and invasions and want some peace and freedom for a change. Americans make particularly terrible imperialists. We are a people who prefer privacy and liberty in our own lives. We are a people with independence and rebellion in our national heritage. Ours is thus an even more hypocritical empire than that of the British. It’s long past time Americans stopped trampling across the globe as conquerors. As long as we pursue such conquests, we ourselves will remain conquered, shackled by our own chains. Edmund Burke’s rebuke of his nation’s imperial policy and his defense of American independence apply today as never before. Our government, the biggest in human history, is the greatest threat to our freedom, drain on our wealth, and fomenter of international conflict. We cannot keep empire if we want liberty. We cannot be free if we seek to boss all of mankind around. To have the freedom that Jefferson described, we must let go of our foreign satellites and allow our compatriots and international brothers and sisters the freedom we want for ourselves. Is such independence possible? Absolutely. Empires crumble. In 1775, few thought the Americans would soon be their own nation. The British empire suffered from pretensions to eternal life. The US empire may in some ways be unique, but it is no more permanent than any other. In stark contrast, the principles of human nature declared to the world from a small Philadelphia gathering 231years ago were true then, years before the US empire was born, and will remain true long after the US empire collapses. -Anthony Gregory, writer and musician who lives in Berkeley, California "

7/4/2007 10:06:00 AM

GIT ER DUN

7/4/2007 11:08:24 AM

Hooray, shitty articles written by some bat shit crazy anarchists.

7/4/2007 12:29:49 PM

^^^ articles like that make me remember why i used to consider myself a libertarian.

that is a very well-written piece of agitprop. i find it hard to disagree with anything in there, other than i would strike the word "socialist" and replace it with "totalitarian"

7/4/2007 1:40:05 PM

7/4/2007 1:40:56 PM

Quote :

"other than i would strike the word "socialist" and replace it with "totalitarian" "

I'd agree. Totalitarians are socialists on Crack

7/4/2007 7:50:53 PM

no they arent

socialist and totalitarian are completely opposite of each other on the political spectrum

7/4/2007 9:52:55 PM

^ no they aren't ... and ... ^^ no they aren't

socialist and totalitarian are independent of and unrelated to each other.

its like peanut butter and bananas. they might work out well, together on a sandwich, but so do bananas and mayonnaise. or peanut butter and marshmallow whip.

i mean, you can have a lot of different types of damn sandwiches, you know.

7/5/2007 2:56:20 AM

fuck the political bullshit, when can we expect the banks to be open 365 days a year. 24 hour society, my ass. yay a day off, and if you want to burn 2 vacation days you can turn it into a week.

its all trickery. ooh i can have a 5 day vacation instead of a 4 day if i waste 2 days because of this 1 day. its like selling lottery tickets to poor people. ill be there tomorrow, bright and early, and taking my vacation on a whole week or 2 when i dont have to be surrounded by silly shits at any place with water. plus youre getting paid for nothing these next 2 days just to show up. every other jackass with a job better than mcdonalds is already returning emails with "be back on the 9th!!1 happy 4th!!1" -

usa #1, this is jackleg and im bitter cause i should be asleep

7/5/2007 4:16:54 AM

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"every other jackass with a job better than mcdonalds is already returning emails with "be back on the 9th!!1 happy 4th!!1" -"

As well as those working in weather because clouds and sunshine don't take holidays.

7/5/2007 4:50:50 AM

Quote :

"As well as those working in weather "

well that's too bad for you. the oceans don't get a day off, but i took one anyhow

7/6/2007 12:35:24 AM