Rallying for hate-crimes legislation on the steps of the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg on Monday, state Representative Napoleon Nelson (D-Glenside) rebuked founding father Benjamin Franklin.
The representative observed that a Franklin quote etched into a wall 40 feet from him read, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
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“In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin once observed.
Turns out, he was only half right.
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On Wednesday, hundreds stopped by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) tables on 9th Street in South Philadelphia this weekend for two things Philadelphia has generated lots of over the years: cheesesteaks and liberty.
FIRE, a Philadelphia-based institution since its founding in 1999, held the “Free Cheesesteaks for Free Speech” event as part of a larger $3.1-million pro-free-expression campaign featuring broadcast ads, billboards and digital promotions. The group, which initially focused on fighting speech restrictions on college campuses and recently broadened its mission to include other forums, hopes the effort will raise awareness of ongoing battles to honor the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.
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Benjamin Franklin was one of the most fascinating men ever to walk this earth. Born into a working-class family, he had practically no formal education, yet became one of the most wealthy, influential, loved, and respected men of all time. Europeans dubbed him “the best president America never had.” His excess energy made him an indefatigable worker, but it was his enthusiasm for life and his insatiable intellectual curiosity that most distinguished him. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he was always observing, reading, discussing, testing, questioning. In particular, he studied people, including himself.
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The final decision, after years of debate, was made on Oct. 8 to remove from the New York City Council chambers the statue of the man we all know to have been a dreaded slaveholder—to the tune of 600 over his lifetime—Thomas Jefferson.
Despite that, writing at Bari Weiss’s Substack, political science professor Samuel Goldman, with whom I concur, is less than happy.
“The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality.”
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Americans – except for those in Arizona and Hawaii – will wake up this Sunday, March 10, and realize an hour has been deleted from their day. Welcome to daylight saving time! Beginning on March 14 2:00 a.m. through November 7 2:00 a.m., clocks will ‘Spring forward’ an hour.
The short answer to why we go through this yearly ritual is so that we can enjoy more of the natural daylight in the Summertime. So the hour people will lose on Sunday is totally worth it to enjoy more daylight in the Summer!
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Americans remember Benjamin Franklin as one of our founders. That is fitting because he was not just our most famous citizen at our country’s birth, but he was also so much a central part of that birth that he has been called “The First American.”
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Before anything else, Benjamin Franklin was a printer. It’s difficult to imagine now, but printing was a strenuous trade in Franklin’s time, requiring late hours, heavy lifting of various lead types, and long shifts operating the manual presses. Franklin, however, loved to read, which suited him well in his career as a printer.
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Our nation, our republic, is unquestionably dependent upon the active and informed involvement of our citizens.
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Americans – except for those in Arizona and Hawaii – will wake up this Sunday, March 10, and realize an hour has been deleted from their day. Welcome to daylight saving time! Beginning on March 10 2:00 a.m. through Nov. 3 2:00 a.m., clocks will ‘Spring forward’ an hour. The short answer to why we go through this yearly ritual is so that we can enjoy more of the natural daylight in the Summertime. So the hour people will lose on Sunday is totally worth it to enjoy more daylight in the Summer! This is not a worldwide phenomenon. Less than 40 percent of the world participates in daylight saving time, according to timeanddate.com. Daylight saving time has been traced back to Benjamin Franklin who floated the idea around in 1784. This practice started in 1916 in Germany and Austria when they turned their clocks an hour ahead, according to timeanddate.com. America formally started daylight saving time in 1918 and continued the tradition ever since. Enjoy this video, when you wake to enjoy your 23 hour day! Remember to set your clocks an hour ahead. – – – Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of Battleground State News. Photo “Sunset”…
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The United States Constitution does, of course, contain guidelines as to how a territory may enter the Union as a full-fledged state on an equal footing with all previously-existing states. The last time that any new states were added to the United States was in the year 1959 when Alaska became the nation’s 49th state and Hawaii became the country’s 50th state. Specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 — which requires only a simple majority vote — reads: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” There has been recent chatter about admitting Puerto Rico into the Union as the nation’s 51st state. As the Constitution was not written until 1787 — and, once written, did not take effect until the following year — the procedure outlined within the still-in-force Articles of Confederation would have remained applicable to admission of news states up to…
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Ben Franklin’s face graces U.S. currency, but Texas officials may soon remove his name from one middle school over a “connection to Confederacy.” Dallas Independent School District is conducting an investigation into numerous schools in the wake of a national debate over monuments and historical figures associated with slavery. The move, which may also affect Thomas…
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This is the first of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23. Minutes after the Constitutional Convention adjourned in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Elizabeth Powel, a friend of George Washington who hosted many social events for the political class of the time, asked Benjamin Franklin if the convention had given us a republic or a monarchy. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” the venerable 81-year-old delegate, ambassador, and inventor responded. Fifty-five delegates, from all the states except Rhode Island, attended that convention, which began four months earlier in May of that year under the premise of forming a more perfect union by revising the Articles of Confederation. You see, the United States of America was not officially formed as the republic of which we are currently citizens in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain acknowledged the independence and sovereignty of its former colonies, was signed. The Continental Congress of the thirteen rebellious colonies, convening in York Town, Pennsylvania (now simply called York), adopted the…
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