A date which will live in irony

Today is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln (and also, the 100th anniversary of the NAACP). The first Republican president ended slavery. (His Democratic opponent in 1860, Stephen Douglas, did not believe that blacks could be citizens, and defended the preservation of slavery where it already existed.) The Radical Republicans after Lincoln gave us Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause. Equal Protection was the basis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, led by a Republican chief justice, ending legal racial apartheid in America. This led eventually to the race-based Republican "Southern Strategy" to where today (2009) there are no Republican black members of Congress, whereas there are about forty Democratic black members. The first black president is a Democrat, a former Senator from the Land of Lincoln, who took his oath of office on the Bible of Lincoln. (See R[epublicans]. I[n]. P[eace].)

Also: Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. (Yesterday was the 45th birthday of Sarah Palin.)