Madonna released from hospital after horseback riding accident

LONG ISLAND, NY -- Singer-actor-publicity hound Madonna has been released from a Southampton Hospital with "minor injuries and bruises" following being thrown off a horse earlier on Saturday, Vice President Joey Biden disclosed Sunday Morning at an undisclosed golf course in the Hamptons.

The accident occurred when the horse Madonna was riding was startled by paparazzi who jumped out of the bushes screaming, "Look this way like a virgin!"

Her only apparent injuries were a shifting of recent Botox injections in her lips and left eye.

Madonna will be having further tests and continues to remain under observation by doctors. Should camera crews show up, she has pledged to also have X-rays taken.

It wasn't the equestrian star's first horse-related injury. Earlier this year in Malawi, she fell from a zebra and nearly broke her ass. Madonna also broke several bones in a 2005 fall on her English country estate on her 67th birthday, including three cracked ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken hand and a severely wounded pride.

Madonna has vowed to confine her publicity stunts the for rest of this year to adopting African children who already have parents.

She is recovering at the New York estate of her friend and fellow bulimic Gwenyth Paltrow.

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Believe it or don't

Presidential trivia: At 4 feet 6 inches, James Madison was our smallest president. He did have the third-largest head of any president, however, behind James Garfield and Ronald Reagan. (Teddy Roosevelt had the largest teeth.)

Madison disliked having himself painted with others, and always tried to claim he was seated when the above painting with gun collector Alex Hamilton and Supreme Court Justice and practical joker John "JJ" Jay was done.

He wasn't.

John Jay went on to be another unrecognized Founding Father. Alexander Hamilton went on to become shot in the gut by Vice President Aaron Burr. James Madison merely went on.

Believe it or don't.

The Founding Fathers: Prelude to the constitution

There is one more post I would like to slip in before we go to war, if we do, about what actually went on during the framing of our present constitution (as well as the very concept of Federalism), and that is a post about the "Founding Fathers." (The picture above is not the founding fathers per se, but the men who wrote the Federalist Papers.)

I want to talk about the Founding Fathers for a bit because I think it is important that we try and crawl inside their heads and attempt to determine where they were coming from, because only if we can follow their thought processes can we ever hope to have an intelligent conversation about what they created.

First, who were they?

It is easy to generalize, and most Americans do, that anyone who was part of the drafting and debate of our constitution, anyone who was a delegate to the convention, should, at least loosely, be considered a "Founding Father." Not surprisingly, I disagree with this broad definition.

I believe that a lot of those people who have generously been included in the term "Founding Fathers" were merely along for the ride, swept along with the tide, and present simply by virtue of their standing as a representative or Favorite Son of this or that state, and who were among those persuaded at the convention rather than being one of the persuaders.

To me, the Founding Fathers were a small group of men who were in the fight from the beginning; prominent men whose names were known and hated by by the British Government. Most importantly, they were the few men without whom we wouldn't even have a country today—or they were the ones who set the chain of events in motion, the ones who convinced the necessary people that there should be independence, should be a revolution with Great Britain; who fought one way or the other in that revolution, convinced foreign powers to support our cause and loan us money, raised armies and planned military strategy and engaged the British Armies, and, in the end, came up with the plans for a government so far-sighted  that it still exists today.

The historian Joseph J. Ellis, in his book "Founding Brothers", postulated that there were seven Founding Fathers. I say there were only six. Six that meet the criteria listed above, and without whom the United States of America simply would not exist today—certainly not in its present form.

Ellis lists his seven:

Benjamin Franklin

George Washington

John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

Alexander Hamilton

Aaron Burr

I omit Aaron Burr.

Not all of these men were intimately engaged in the framing of our constitution, to be sure. But they got us to the place where we were an actual country in need of a constitution. Others not on the list contributed greatly to the concepts that are actually contained in the constitution, but I would not call them Founding Fathers within the strict criteria I laid out above. Not everyone who attended the convention and debated and contributed and voted and signed the paper were necessarily deserving of the term Founding Fathers.

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As stated in previous posts, these men and their millions of sisters and brothers did not yet consider themselves Americans. They were New Yorkers. They were New Hampshiremen. They were Georgians.

And they were Virginians.

I think many present-day Americans don't quite understand the importance of Virginia in our history. Virginia, the first colony. The largest population. The wealthiest. The colony where most of the movers and shakers lived. The colony of gentility and even aristocracy.

The land of slaves.

When it came to framing and wording of the new constitution, Virginia was a force to be reckoned with. No Union would be viable without Virginia in it, and everyone knew it. What Virginia wanted in the constitution, well... you get the picture.

Four of the first five presidents were Virginians. Later, when we fought a Civil War, the capital of the confederacy ended up in Virginia and the Supreme commander of the Confederacy was a Virginian - and this was over 80 years after the constitution!

If you would understand some of the odd things that got put into our constitution, some of the tremendous compromises that went into hammering out that constitution, then look to Virginia and the rest of the South. Look to the Republicans** Thomas Jefferson and his protoge James Madison and their crew. Look to the institution of slavery.

I think we should also discuss the debates about federalism and thoughts about what the nature of the constitution should be, by Madison and Hamilton and others. Next, perhaps?

But first, I think, a few posts on other matters are in order before I lose all my other readers.

**Not in the least related to the political party of the same name that exists today. Some historians call them "Democratic-Republicans" for some reason. They called themselves simply "Republicans", in their writings - believers in the definition of "Republic" rather than in the concept of Federalism. The original "State's-Righters" if you will.

Chugging right along. Part 3

As we begin to deal with more and more detailed events, I will no longer rely on my memory to tell this story, as I mostly have up until now. I revert to my more-loved role of interpreter.

After the American Revolution, a new country called the United States of America was formed by a union of the 13 separate former colonies. Hereafter, these colonies would begin calling themselves "states."

As mentioned in the earlier posts, this union was not really an easy or natural thing, since the colonies had always been (and would continue to be) separate entities, each with its own government, and each with differing values and goals.

The revolution, however, as well as the previous common experience of the French and Indian War, had brought them closer together and, now that they were free of British rule, there was a need for some sort of central government to be established to handle the interactions between the several former colonies who suddenly found their fate and survival very much tied together - at least in terms of self defense from outside powers. They still weren't too keen on banding together for other purposes, save, perhaps, the regulation of commerce between the several new "states."

The Continental Congress was a legislature, consisting of representatives from the various colonies, which was, in effect, the central government of the colonies during the time they were in rebellion against Great Britain. They met in Philadelphia. The British would not have minded a bit hanging the members of this legislative body of the rebels. They even sailed a fleet up the Delaware to clear out the irritating nest, but the rebel legislators simply moved out of Philadelphia for a while. Frankly, they knew the lay of the land much better than the British, and were able to simply fade into the population. But the government in rebellion is a story for another day.

As early as 1776, following the declaring of independence from Great Britain, the Second Continental Congress, with the conviction, I assume, that the colonies would prevail against the mother country and gain their independence, had appointed a committee to draft up a plan for future confederation. The final draft was approved by the Second Continental Congress in 1777. However, these Articles were not ratified by the states until March of 1781. In the meantime, there was a war going on.

So, with a lot of input and debate from each colony's representation, the official document was drawn up, and eventually ratified, which outlined what powers they would delegate to the new central government. Not very much, as it turned out.

The word "confederation" simply refers to the fact that certain parties, or groups, have banded together for some common purpose. The current entity called the European Union, for example, is a "confederation" of several countries which have agreed to act in concert for a common (in this example, economic) purpose. Similarly, when the 13 former American colonies agreed to band together for economic purposes and for a common defense, the result of that agreement was called a confederation.

The ratification in 1781 resulted in the formalization of this agreement to form a confederation, and the document that stated the rules for the confederation, and told what powers the states agreed to give to the new government, was called "The Ariticles of Confederation." In effect, these Articles were the basis our first constitution, though that constitution was a separate document.

The Articles stated that our name would be "The United States of America". Our first president was Samuel Huntington of Connecticut. It should be noted that, under the Articles, the "president" (although called "The President of the United States") was not the Chief Executive authority as the office is today under our present constitution, but was the presiding officer of the congress, chair of the cabinet, and performer of various administrative functions.

This first attempt at a federal government failed pretty miserably and was later replaced by our second federal government which still exists today, empowered by a new constitution ratified by the states in 1787.

But let's stop for a moment and talk about what the Articles of Confederation were all about and why that government failed. It is important that we understand this period of our country's beginnings, because from the mistakes in the original Articles came many of the enduring strengths of our current constitution.

If one were to make one general statement to explain why our first federal government failed, it would probably be that the individual states still saw themselves as too individual and independent, and therefore were not willing to delegate enough power to the new central government for it to do its job. At least that is this blogger's opinion. Almost everything the new government did had to be approved by the several states. Without sufficient authority, nothing ever got done and the government failed.

In our next post, we will concentrate on the failings of the Ariticles of Confederation, and the subsequent struggle to produce a stronger, more viable, constitution. The struggle was pretty fierce, as the individual states fought to protect their own sovereignty and agendas.

This struggle, and the eventual compromises that produced our present constitution make for lively debate and interesting conversation so I hope you will stay tuned for tomorrow's post.

May the force be with you.

Croatoan

Although never proven, the current belief is that the "lost" settlers of the second Roanoke settlement were not killed by the Roanoke Indians, (who the governor of the first Roanoke settlement had really pissed off) but instead were taken under the protection of the friendly Croatoan Tribe who lived on an island to the south, in the Outer Banks. This is the most likely explanation, since that tribe (the Croatoans) had always been friendly to the English settlers, and, indeed, the governor of that (second) settlement had asked the Croatoans to take in the settlers if anything ever happened to threaten their survival. This was before the governor returned to England for supplies and was not able to return. Before he left, he had asked the settlers to leave a sign of some sort if they were forced to move to another location. It would therefore be logical to assume that is what happened to them in the intervening three years: the Croatoans took them in and absorbed them into their tribe.

This is further borne out by the fact that, 50 years later, members of the Croatoan Tribe had European features and spoke English. Ironically, this evidence of mixed blood is why the U.S. Government today does not recognize the Lumbee (successors to the original Croatoans) as an official Indian Tribe with the benefits that accompany such recognition. Is that unfair, or what? Thank you for taking them in and interbreeding with them! The State of North Carolina does recognize them as a tribe. (The Croatoans lived on an island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina just south of Roanoke, which is in Virginia. Today that island is called Hatteras.)