Wretched refuse

Hope you and yours had as much fun last evening as this little one, whose birth mother probably never in her life imagined that her little girl - our little girl - would be spending the fourth day of July, 2010, wide-eyed with the wonder of our American interpretation of that most Chinese of inventions, fireworks.A nice reminder, in these times of hysterical fulmination about immigration, social diversity, and fear of the heathen Chinee, that the great birthright promise of the United States has always been that, unlike many nations in many lands, being an American doesn't depend on the shape of your eyes, or the color of your skin, or the language that you speak, or the native land of your ancestors. It isn't contingent on your religion, or the way you dress, or whether you drink beer for breakfast.But that you believe, and act on the belief, that our nation is a body of laws governing the conduct between the people and their government as enumerated by the great charter of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,

or to the People.