Press of Atlantic City

Actually, the Declaration wasn't the first such declaration

Published: Jul 04, 2008

MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N.C. - The impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III's wife Charlotte might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.

What occurred that day in Philadelphia might have been a Declaration of Independence, but the first such was enacted here on May 20, 1775. Presbyterians, meaning most Mecklenburgers, were incensed by Anglican meddling from London, such as the Vestry and Marriage Acts of 1769, which imposed fines on Presbyterian ministers who conducted marriage ceremonies. Marriage as a political issue is not just a recent phenomenon.

On May 19, 1775, the day before the Mecklenburg convention met to act on such grievances, a rider arrived with news from Massachusetts about the April bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. The next day, Mecklenburg's convention declared:

"We the citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the mother country. ... We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people ... to the maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor." More

Jul 04, 2008

• A justice like Anthony Kennedy simply confounds the partisans

The Supreme Court's decisions in recent weeks have casual observers scratching their heads trying to figure out the ideological bent of this bench.

Jul 04, 2008

• Blacks in the U.S. shouldn't have to prove their patriotism

Today, on the Fourth of July, we as Americans will celebrate the 232nd anniversary of our country's independence. On Nov. 4, we will elect our 44th president.

Jul 03, 2008

• Live from D.C. - it's the Bush White House

Satire, at its best, is an artful blend of subtlety and wit. But often it plunges into heavy-handed ways. Then it becomes insufferably witless.

Jul 03, 2008

• Optimism waning in this summer of our discontent

The symbol of the summer of 2008 may well be the FOR SALE sign swinging wildly in a thunderstorm outside a suburban house, or outside two houses, or nearly every house on the cul-de-sac or the street. Or maybe it will be the gas-price signs, the numbers ticking up as rapidly as the symbols on the slots in Vegas as motorists fill their tanks and shake their heads. Or the sodden remains of a den in Iowa, or the smoking husk of a California hill house.

Jul 03, 2008

• Oceans drowning in a sea of trash

On the first of June, two men set sail from the port of Long Beach, Calif., bound for Hawaii, on a raft made of junk. Their cabin is the cockpit of a Cessna 310, white with a blue racing stripe, salvaged from the desert. It floats on a system of handmade pontoons - 15,000 plastic bottles held together with recycled nets - propelled by currents and wind. If it sounds dangerous and makeshift, that's the point. The pilots of Junk, as the vessel is called, want to get your attention.

Jul 02, 2008

• Bush just phoning it in now

George W. Bush has roughly 200 days remaining in office.

Jul 02, 2008

• Scalia - and his gun ruling - belong in another century

I often wonder if Antonin Scalia might not be more comfortable in another century, past not future, one not touched by the miseries and dangers of urbanization. I certainly think we would be if he were.

Jul 02, 2008

• Developing renewable energy isn't Big Oil's responsibility

Rather than do something productive to increase fuel supplies, Congress wastes time hunting bogeymen and fabricating distractions. Lately they have excoriated Big Oil for the cardinal sin of "under-investing" in alternative energy.

Jul 01, 2008

• Give Bush some credit on N. Korea

George W. Bush is hugely unpopular, and we all know what to do when a man is down, don't we? Why kick him, and kick him hard, maybe even come up with an idea like one in San Francisco to name a sewage plant after the president, and make sure never, ever to acknowledge his accomplishments, such as the one in North Korea.

Jul 01, 2008

• Obama must reach out to Muslims

It is not difficult to understand why Barack Obama has a fear of scarves.

Jul 01, 2008

• Lobbyists kill; casualties rising

Thousands of Americans die from the unprecedented dominance of U.S. lobbyists. Their modus operandi isn't the roadside bomb or the sniper's bullet, but their victims are just as dead as our fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jun 30, 2008

• Two sensible rulings from Supreme Court

Two of Thursday's Supreme Court rulings - both decided 5-4, and with the same alignment of justices - concerned the Constitution's first two amendments. One ruling benefits Barack Obama by not reviving the dormant debate about gun control. The other embarrasses John McCain by underscoring discordance between his deeds and his promises.

Jun 30, 2008

• Scrutiny of horseracing is overdue

Thoroughbred racing may be the sport of kings, but it is also often the sport of mountebanks, charlatans and fixers always seeking an edge in the high-stakes search for a sure thing and a big payoff. It is a never-ending struggle between those who truly love the sport and their animals and those who merely want to exploit the weaknesses of the system for huge personal gain.

Jun 30, 2008

• Lack of health insurance is but a symptom - the high cost of medical care is the disease

During the recent U.S. presidential primary campaign, the candidates talked frequently about proposals to reduce the 47 million people in this country without health insurance by measures such as expanding eligibility for Medicaid and requiring that individuals buy coverage or pay a fine. What they failed to do is recognize that lack of coverage is merely a symptom of a larger problem: the high cost of medical care, which makes insurance unaffordable for many.

Jun 30, 2008

• Big donors still rule - better public financing needed

Not long ago, Barack Obama criticized special-interest lobbies that "use their money and influence to stop us from reforming health care or investing in renewable energy for yet another four years." He has said that his army of small donors constitutes "a parallel public financing system," one in which ordinary voters "will have as much access and influence over the course of our campaign" as that "traditionally reserved for the wealthy and the powerful."

Jun 29, 2008

• Media lapdogs silent as Obama flip-flops shamelessly

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."

Jun 29, 2008

• Put U.S. resources into solar R&D, not carbon caps

The bitter arguments in the Senate this month over the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which would have required major emitters to pay for the right to discharge greenhouse gases, proved that climate change caused by humans has come to the fore of U.S. policy debates. But political rhetoric is unlikely to put us on a path toward solving the problem of climate change in the best possible way.

Jun 29, 2008

• Bush's abstinence-only policy leading to teen baby boom?

So all we know for sure is that something happened in Gloucester, Mass.

Jun 27, 2008

• Federal bureaucracy is broken

We've seen the federal government at its worst over the past six months. Consider the controversies over contaminated tomatoes and meat, tainted toys, toxic trailers, counterfeit Heparin, aircraft groundings, veterans' care, missing warheads and unrelenting contract fraud. For every NASA success on the surface of Mars, there seems to be a failure back on Earth.

Jun 27, 2008

• Obama's funding flip more troubling than McCain's flips

In politics, we're having a Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr kind of year. It was Karr, a French writer, who coined the phrase plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, which means, as Barack Obama has shown, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jun 27, 2008

• Let's lose the entrenched, partisan views on energy

Listening to the back and forth about oil drilling and energy prices, you have to wonder whether there's anyone in Washington who understands what leadership is about.

Jun 26, 2008

• In a bad economy, taxing Internet sales makes sense

Can our state and local governments afford to subsidize businesses that conduct their sales only on the Internet, rather than through physical retail stores? And if we could, is there a good reason to do so?

Jun 26, 2008

• Smart immigration policy: Send your Ph.D.s yearning to be free

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Fifty years ago, Jack Kilby, who grew up in Great Bend, Kan., took the electrical engineering knowledge he acquired as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin to Dallas, to Texas Instruments, where he helped invent the modern world as we routinely experience and manipulate it. Working with improvised equipment, he created the first electronic circuit in which all the components fit on a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip.

Jun 26, 2008

• Credit reform will hurt the people it seeks to help

The subprime mortgage fiasco is sending tremors through Wall Street and has brought the U.S. economy near (if not into) recession. For African Americans and Latinos - the primary victims of the debacle - the mortgage meltdown may widen the considerable gap in wealth that already exists between whites and people of color. Even worse, some proposals to fix the problem of limited access to credit may end up doing more harm than good.

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