The special Google logo for the 4th of July is not showing up for me here in the Netherlands. After using a proxy server located in the US it does. So it seems to me that Google only shows the special logo to people in the US.

I don't know why this is because other years it was vissible for people outside the US.

I think it is better this way, it shows respect for other countries

That's true. I also checked google.us but it just redirects to Google.com. I could however just see the logo when I tried translating the Google.com homepage at Babelfish world.altavista.com