We made some copies of the Declaration, put a notice in the local paper, and were fully prepared to read it ourselves on the steps of Borough Hall if nobody showed up.
In one inspiring chapter, a Massachusetts house slave, Mum Bett, learned the language of freedom from those she served: at her master's table were some drafters of the Declaration of Independence, and she wondered why the rights they articulated did not extend to her.
"Even if some of these declarations in the media are stretching it a bit.
"So… the Judicial Redress Act doesn't… have the force that… the court may believe that it has based on some of the expert declarations".
According to Murillo Karam, the identification of Mora, the declarations of some of the detained suspects, and (according to press reports) other information that he did not specify was enough evidence to be able to say that, in the Cocula dump, "at least one was killed".
The overall impression, which I reported to the Council on Dec. 19 and which remains after some weeks of examination of the Declaration (Iraq's declaration of weapon programs on Dec. 7), is that it is rich in volume but poor in new information about weapons issues and practically devoid of new evidence on such issues.
Whitman intended his "Leaves" to be a statement of America's national purpose, a "new national text" (in the phrase of his latest biographer, David S. Reynolds), in some ways a counterpart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or, from his own time, the speeches of Lincoln — except that, unlike those statements, Whitman's took the form of an extravagant work of the imagination.
Some of the phrases of the declaration have steadily exerted profound influence in the United States, especially the proclamation that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Some include only the signers of the Declaration, others the signers, as well as others who gave input.
