Links and Minifeatures 07 04 Happy Independence Day!

Happy Birthday to the greatest nation on earth! Some July 4th miscellany



The text that started it all



What signing cost the delegates



Disabled Iraq vets still trying to win one for the U.S.A.



(video) painting Liberty in three minutes



Road to independence was perilous, long



Freedom isn't Free



Calvin Coolidge upon the Declaration of Independence

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Clinton criticizes Libby prison commute

"This (the Libby decision) was clearly an effort to protect the White House. ... There isn't any doubt now, what we know is that Libby was carrying out the implicit or explicit wishes of the vice president, or maybe the president as well, in the further effort to stifle dissent."

Had that been the case, the president could have issued a pardon before it even went to trial.



Not that Ms. Quid-Pro-Pardon has any room whatsoever to criticize anyone else's use of the pardon. Mr. Bill issued 140 last minute pardons, and it seems likely to me that his wife participated in the political payback for several of them. (here's a list, that includes persons such as Mr. Symington, corrupt former governor of Arizona)



President Bush really has become Emmanuel Goldstein, hasn't he?



(Run it through a search engine if you've never read 1984)



The President commuted Libby's sentence so that he wouldn't go to jail for an investigation where no crime was committed beyond getting confused in testimony to the investigator.



Politically stupid, but the right thing to do for Mr. Libby. How many people would be ecstatically happy to be put in prison for two and a half years for getting confused in your testimony during an investigation where they knew no crime had been committed before they started talking to you?



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Chinese villagers eat dinosaur bones



Kind of makes you wonder if that's not what has been happening to a lot of fossils for a very long time.



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Red Mosque students surrender slowly



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Pulsing Giant Star Dissected

Red giants are older versions of the sun that, once they have burned off most of their hydrogen fuel, begin to burn helium. This creates intense "flashes" of radiation that puff the star up to more than 100 times its original size as it pushes stellar gas and dust out into space. S Orionis sheds about the mass of Earth each year.

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There isn't much the crooked Yemeni regime won't stoop to, as Armies of Liberation notes in Abdulkarim Al-Khaiwani Arrested on Fabricated Terror Charges