Noel C. Cilker

After the first debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Facebook friend of mine posted a meme about Trump having never paid taxes which would have supported infrastructure, the military, roads, health care, etc. I'm no fan of Trump, but I was curious to see if that was true. So I went to Politifact.com to check it out. It was false . It turns out, for the years we do  have Trump's tax returns (which is its own, unending issue), he did  pay taxes. So, hoping to clear up the misinformation, I wrote a comment back to my friend that, while I didn't support Trump, it was important to judge someone on actual facts. I also included the link to the Politifact article. My friend deleted my comment, then he wrote, "I don't intend to be fair or even-handed when it comes to [Trump], even if I get it partially wrong sometimes." "But there are so many other true things to get him on!" I pleaded. He didn't respond...

True, the focus over the past few days has been on Donald Trump Jr. and his shady meeting with a Russian lawyer , but I prefer to look at a happier moment from the past week. Independence Day! The holiday is a time to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and all the fun times (hot dogs! beer! parades! fireworks! NPR tweets! ) that resulted because of it. Sort of. The adoption of the DOI remains in most people's brains - if they think about it at all - as an inevitable, patriotic event. However, for the men in the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 who approved the DOI, and the men on August 2, 1776 who signed it, theirs was a dangerous act that amounted to treason. They may look calm, but the men who approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 were well aware of the gravity of their actions. So did anything actually happen to those signers after they put pen to paper? One popular essay , written by a man named Gary Hildrith, ...