Free Republic

A Period Is Questioned in the Declaration of Independence Every Fourth of July, some Americans sit down to read the Declaration of Independence, reacquainting themselves with the nation’s founding charter exactly as it was signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776. Or almost exactly? A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less. The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced...

Happy Independence Day FReeper FRiends!!!I am posting this on Thursday so we can have some silliness before the Holiday weekend.  Today is the anniversary of the day America broke up with England  To celebrate, I found a little song someone wrote on Tumblr:Cuz if you liked it then you shouldn’t have put your rules on itIf you liked it then you shouldn’t have put that tax on itDon’t be mad once you see our freedom hitIf you liked it then you shouldn’t have badly governed itWo oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh, wo oh...

The president of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan Region has told the BBC he intends to hold a referendum on independence within months. Massoud Barzani said that Iraq was already "effectively partitioned". While the Kurds would play a part in a political solution to the crisis caused by jihadist-led Sunni Arab rebellion, independence was their right, he added. Meanwhile, the first session of Iraq's new parliament has been adjourned after deputies failed to elect a new speaker. Acting Speaker Mahdi al-Hafez called off proceedings after most of the Sunni and Kurdish members of the House of Representatives did not return after a...

With a natural 3 day weekend coming for the 4th of July, Independence Day 2014, we have plenty of time for some of our favorites in movies, music and TV! What are you, my fellow FReeping Patriots, going to be enjoying? In your answers some of your fellow readers might find missing gems so offer up your favorites, famous and not.An EASY query for the scholars, what are the other non-floating Federal Holidays?

With the Delaware delegation deadlocked on the question of approving the Declaration of Independence in the Continental Congress, Caesar Rodney rode 70 miles in a thunderstorm the night of July 1, 1776 to arrive in Philadelphia as the vote for independence began the next morning. Rodney cast the deciding vote for Delaware in favor of independence, and would eventually sign the Declaration on August 2, 1776. Rodney's ride is depicted on the back of the Delaware quarter, issued in 1999.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced support for Kurdish statehood on Sunday, taking a position that appeared to clash with the U.S. preference to keep sectarian war-torn Iraq united. SNIP----- "We should ... support the Kurdish aspiration for independence," Netanyahu told Tel Aviv University's INSS think-tank, after outlining what he described as the collapse of Iraq and other Middle East regions under strife between Arab Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Kurds, Netanyahu said, "are a fighting people that has proved its political commitment, political moderation, and deserves political independence".

Via Ace and HuffPo, I’m suspicious that a story potentially this big has been confined so far to a Kurdish news outlet. If you’re looking for signs of an impending partition of Iraq, which all of entire western media is, they don’t come any bigger. Where’s the Drudge siren?A few days ago, I tweeted that with Iraq in chaos, the Kurds might as well declare independence and upend the regional table entirely, to which maybe 50 people instantly replied, “What about Turkey?” Well, what about them? The Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their...

Today is 17th June, Iceland’s national day. It is a public holiday and one of the biggest festival days of the year. There are many official and unofficial events in practically every city, town and tiny village across Iceland. A parade featuring a brass band, the scouts and police in ceremonial uniform are widespread; as are speeches by local officials and a reading by Fjallkonan – the mountain woman. The mountain woman wears an ornate version of the Icelandic national costume, with gold trimmings. Symbolically, she is the spirit of the nation. In Reykjavík, the ceremony takes place on Austurvöllur...

Leadership of the "Donetsk People's Republic" has declared independence of the region and has sough accession to Russia. "Upon the results of the referendum held on May 11, 2014 and based on the sovereignty declaration of the Donetsk People's Republic, we, people of the Donetsk People's Republic, declare that from now on the Donetsk People's Republic is a sovereign state," co-chairman of the "Donetsk People's Republic" government Denis Pushilin said at a news conference on Monday. "We ask to consider the issue of accession of the Donetsk People's Republic to Russia," Pushilin said. SNIP-- After the collapse of the Soviet...

Yom HaAtzmaut 2014 begins at sundown, Monday, May 5th, and ends at sundown on Tuesday, May 6th

Lawmakers in Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway region of Transdniestr on Wednesday passed a resolution calling on Moscow and the United Nations to recognise its independence. Transdniestr, a strip of land bordering Ukraine, broke away from Romanian-speaking Moldova following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Some analysts suspect Russia is eyeing the territory, which consists mostly of Russian speakers, in the wake of last month's annexation of Crimea. The resolution adopted unanimously by Transdniestr's self-appointed parliament on Wednesday called on the international community to recognise the region as a "sovereign independent state". "According to the universally recognised norms of international...

The idea to separate Siberia and annex the territory to the United States of America has been engrossing the minds of Siberian separatists for a long time already. Surprisingly, or maybe not, they find the support from across the ocean. Many, if not all Siberians, may think at times that the Siberian regions with their natural riches live poorly just because they have to give away a big part of their incomes to other territories of the Russian Federation. "The referendum will be held with the help of the US administration. The US has successful experience in obtaining independence. After...

With Scotland moving ever closer, Crimea having chosen their own path, and Venice overwhelmingly voting for secession from Italy, the Spanish government has put its foot down on the Catalonia's planned independence referendum. As Time reports, In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to be unconstitutional. Of course, just as in Crimea, this is being ignored by the Catalan government - a region seen as the powerhouse of the Italian economy - who exclaimed "this will have no effect on the process." Via Time, ... In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to...

In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to be unconstitutional, but secessionists in the Spanish autonomous region (called a “community” in Spain) have vowed to proceed regardless. Although stifled under the yoke of the Franco dictatorship, Catalonia has long felt cultural and linguistic disctinction from the rest of Spain. In recent years, it developed into a powerhouse of the nation’s economy. However, amid the country’s financial crisis, Madrid has been urging national unity.

Venetians have voted overwhelmingly for their own sovereign state in a ‘referendum’ on independence from Italy. Inspired by Scotland’s separatist ambitions, 89 per cent of the residents of the lagoon city and its surrounding area, opted to break away from Italy in an unofficial ballot. The proposed ‘Repubblica Veneta’ would include the five million inhabitants of the Veneto region and could later expand to include parts of Lombardy, Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The floating city has only been part of Italy for 150 years. The 1000 year–old democratic Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, was quashed by Napoleon and was subsumed into...

Voters in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea who vote in the March 16 referendum have two choices – join Russia immediately or declare independence and then join Russia. So the choices are “yes, now” or “yes, later.”

Film star Sean Connery is urging fellow Scots to vote for independence when a referendum is held in September. The longtime independence advocate says in The Sun on Sunday newspaper that the opportunity to separate from the rest of Britain is too good an opportunity to miss. He says independence would galvanize the film and creative industries, creating new jobs in Scotland. Connery no longer lives there and said the decision should be made by the people who choose to live and work in Scotland. He said a vote for independence would bring renewed focus on Scottish culture, heritage and...

I think we have lost Scotland. I felt it the other day, a disturbing sensation like that moment when the tow-rope parts, the strain too great for its rotten, decayed fibres to bear. The sulky, puzzled feebleness of the London politicians’ arguments sounds desperate and defeated. Alex Salmond has already won the September referendum. [....] But this does not stop me seeing what has happened. And I am amazed that so few have noticed the real problem. The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish....

This year voters in Scotland will decide whether to remain within the United Kingdom. Scottish sovereignty rides on two things: any eventual negotiations between London and Edinburgh and the gradually evolving position of the Scottish National Party, the primary backer of the independence bid. And if it happens, the resulting military reform is going to be a mess. If the vote is yay, the most optimistic date for negotiations is March 2016, but it isn’t out of the question that sticking points could push this back. Defense could be one of those points. In its white paper on a newly...

It was lying in a drawer in the attic, a 12-page document that was not just forgotten but misfiled. Somehow it had made its way into a folder with colonial-era doctor’s bills that someone in the 1970s decreed was worthless and should be thrown away. Luckily, no one did. For when Emilie Gruchow opened the folder last summer and separated it from the doctor’s bills, she recognized it as a one-of-a-kind document. Ms. Gruchow, an archivist at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, was an intern at the museum in Upper Manhattan when she made her discovery. The mansion served as George Washington’s...