WHH holds the title for shortest term President, with 32 days served until he died.

But who was the VP equivalent? Why that would be William Rufus King, of course. He lasted about 6 weeks.

Also notable about King: he was the only bachelor VP.

The nation’s only bachelor vice president, King lived with James Buchanan, the nation’s only bachelor president, for more than a decade (they were nicknamed the “Siamese Twins.”)

Huh.

“This is essential,” Obama said. “For this crisis may have started on Wall Street. But its impacts have been felt by ordinary Americans who rely on credit cards, home loans and other financial instruments.”

First Problem: Relying on credit cards

Second Problem: Washington stating that this is an OK thing to do-and expecting the credit card companies and other financial institutions to make changes, and not those that are living off of borrowed money.

I am sick of hearing about how bad credit card companies and financial institutions are-they are not non-profit organizations! I have this crazy idea, that if you don’t like what they are doing-don’t do business with them. Why blame the fine print on them-when you signed the terms seeing the size of the fine print? Why think that mortgage problems are the fault only of the financial institution, when the borrower is the one that signed without reading the document?

All we are doing is saying it is OK to blame someone else for the predicaments that we find ourselves in, because we can just blame someone else. Due to the government blaming everyone except those that accepted these terms, they are creating a society of believers that it is OK to not take responsibility for our own actions.

Source: Yahoo

I’ve actually written a few posts about Harry Truman already, so I won’t go over them again. (You can read them here and here and here if you’d like.)

But I did come across a few more interesting Truman facts the other day…

• Truman cheated to get into WWI. His eyesight was really bad. So he memorized the Army’s eye chart.
• Truman, who was President during WWII, was born in 1884.
• While he was involved with local politics in Missouri, he did not hold a major political office until he was elected as a US Senator at age 50. He was re-elected to a second term, and was then selected to be FDRs third VP.

Source: History Channel

The History Channel has been pumping this show about a grave robbing of Abe Lincoln’s grave for a few weeks now, and it was on last night.

Anyway, it explained why Lincoln took to being a ghost. He didn’t exactly rest in peace.

The show is worth a watch. I certainly won’t do the whole saga justice here. But here are the fun fact bullets:

• After Lincoln was assassinated, he had several funerals across the nation. In New York, the funeral procession went in front of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandfather’s house. Young Teddy watched the procession from the window.
• Lincoln’s coffin was placed in a tomb in a cemetery about 3 miles outside of Springfield, Illinois. Eventually the coffin was placed in a marble sarcophagus. Well, a coffin was anyway. No one bothered to measure the real coffin to see if it would fit before they built the sarcophagus. So they got a new—smaller—coffin and crammed Lincoln in it.
• During the Civil War, the first US paper currency was introduced. After paper money came counterfeiters and then the Secret Service to combat counterfeiters.
• The best counterfeiter in Chicago was caught by the Secret Service and went to jail.
• The business partners of the counterfeiter came up with a scheme to steal Lincoln’s remains, hide them, and then ransom them back to the government in exchange for a pardon for the counterfeiter.
• While they were in the bar loudly discussing their plan an undercover Secret Service agent overheard them, and pretended he was the “Body Snatching King of Chicago.” He joined their crew.
• Body Snatching was a misdemeanor crime at the time. There were no real penalties. The penalties for damaging the coffins and/or stealing and personal items on the bodies (watches, rings, etc.) were much more severe.
• The Secret Service, along with some Pinkerton detectives, planned a sting operation. Things went horribly wrong (a pistol misfired, a gun battle in the dark between all the good guys but none of the bad guys ensued) and the perpetrators escaped. The bad guys did not get the coffin out of the tomb, though. It was crammed in too tight—recall the sarcophagus.
• The bad guys went back to the original bar where they planned the heist. The Secret Service arrested them there.
• After the attempted heist, the caretaker of the tomb formed a secret society of Lincoln body protectors and moved the coffin to the basement of the tomb, where they buried it.
• The tomb, which was built on swampy marsh land, was structurally unsound, and eventually had to be rebuilt.
• Eventually, the coffin was dug up again and moved to its final resting place inside the new tomb.

There are far more details, and the back story is quite fascinating and rather funny. So you really should try to catch the show.

Source: History Channel

I couldn’t resist researching my own question on Tom’s Bob Barker Post which mentioned that Barker trained on an aircraft carrier on the Great Lakes.

How did an aircraft carrier get to the Great Lakes?

It turns out there were 2 aircraft carriers on the Great Lakes, the USS Sable (IX-81) and the USS Wolverine (IX-64). This guy has a whole blog dedicated to the topic.

They were originally coal burning paddle steamers, meaning they had big paddle wheels – think riverboats. They were retrofitted with flight decks and were used to qualify pilots to land on aircraft carriers during WWII. They were also used to train the guys who direct the planes on the deck (the Landing Signal Officers).

The ships did not have all of the features of an aircraft carrier (such as elevators or a hangar deck) but they provided a close enough experience to allow them to be used for training.

In addition to Bob Barker, President George H.W. Bush trained on a Great Lakes carrier.

The ships were decommissioned shortly after the war.

Source: wiki (Wolverine & Sable) and the blog I linked above.

In 1974, an unemployed former tire salesman attempted to hijack an airplane and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. He was unsuccessful.

He did get on a plane, and managed to shoot a few people (including both pilots and a Police Officer) before he shot himself.

The nutjob recorded several audio tapes at various stages of his not-too-well-thought-out plot (he shot the pilots, but didn’t know how to fly), and mailed them to some people (including a reporter, and the guy who invented the Polio vaccine) before he went to the airport.

Apparently there was a movie about this in 2004, but it starred Sean Penn, so you know I didn’t see it.

Bonus Trivia: A few days before this genius executed his stellar plot, an Army Private stole a helicopter and crash landed it on the White House Lawn (after it was shot down). He was mad because the Army didn’t think he was fit to be a pilot.

Source: The History Channel

The Mexican American War took place between 1846 and 1848 between the United States and Mexico.

The Background
The conflict had its roots in the Texas War for Independence. Texas was part of Mexico, and decided they’d rather not be (good decision). They fought for independence, and ended up capturing the Mexican General in charge, Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Santa Anna signed a treaty setting the borders for Texas, and promising to recognize the independent republic. The Mexican government, however, refused to sign the treaty, saying Santa Anna signed it under duress.

Mexico always contended that Texas ended at the Nueces River, while Texas (and the US) contended that Texas ended at the Rio Grande.

The Start of War
Things really came to a head when the US annexed Texas. Mexico was opposed to the action, and the US annexed all of the land (to the Rio Grande), some of which Mexico felt was still theirs.

President James K. Polk sent an envoy to Mexico offering to purchase the disputed part of Texas, New Mexico, and California for $25 million. The Mexican government refused.

At the same time, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor and his troops into the disputed part of Texas to defend the US land there. Mexico, still claiming the land was theirs, had their own troops there.

On April 25, 1846, 2,000 Mexican troops attacked a 63 man US patrol in the disputed area, killing most of them. Polk used this plus the rebuked offer of purchasing the land as the reasoning for obtaining a declaration of war against Mexico.

The War
I won’t go into the details of the war, but it lasted about 1 1/2 years, and obviously the US won, and Mexico lost. The war ended when US troops occupied Mexico City.

The Aftermath
Representatives of the US and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexico agreed to recognize the Texas border at the Rio Grande, and ceded a large portion of land in what is now the western US. It included most of what is now California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

Mexico got $18 million plus the US assumed $3 million in Mexican debt to US citizens.

Mexico lost about 55% of its land as a result of losing this war. Or 66% if you include Texas.

The Lesson
Don’t Mess With Texas.

Source: wiki and PBS

The name ‘March of Dimes’ was coined (pun intended) by Eddie Cantor as a play on the newsreel feature, The March of Time.

Before that, The March of Dimes organization was called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and founded in 1938, during FDR’s presidency. FDR was supposedly paralyzed from Polio, though apparently some people think that was a misdiagnosis. The original idea of MoD (then NFfIP) was for everyone to give one dime to the charity.

After the Polio vaccine was discovered in 1955, the charity decided to broaden its original scope to involve the improvement of all baby related health.

The dime was first minted in 1796. FDR was added to the obverse of the coin shortly after his death in 1946, mostly in homage to FDR’s involvement with the March of Dimes. At the time, the dime was the only US coin to not have a president on it already. It had a pretty neat looking Winged Liberty Head, nicknamed Mercury, as it looked like the Roman goddess of the same name.

Then, in 1998, Blade robbed a vampire to fund his crusade. The kinda hot girl, who was a blood-doctor for some reason, accused him of doing something wrong, and he told her “This ain’t exactly the March of Dimes.” That ended that discussion!

Source: Wiki/wiki

I just read a Time Magazine profile of Rahm Emanuel. It’s quite interesting. A few fun facts:

• As a teenager, he severed his right middle finger slicing meat at Arby’s and went swimming in Lake Michigan before getting stitches. After the wound became severely infected, Emanuel had the top of his finger amputated and spent six weeks recovering.
• His brother, Ari, is a high-powered Hollywood agent and the basis for Jeremy Piven’s character in the HBO series Entourage, Ari Gold. Emmanuel himself was the basis for the character played by Bradley Whitford in The West Wing: Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman.
• Once, when a pollster made him angry, Emanuel sent him a dead fish.

I was linked to the profile from this article, which compares the Obama administration to the cast of The Godfather. It’s quite good, and worth a read. It does a good job of illustrating how The Feckless Barack Obama is only feckless when dealing with real threats. When it comes to smacking down voices of dissention, he’s all Chicago.

Never before has a President inspired so much bad art. At least I’m guessing.

See them all at http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/

But to whet your appetite, here are 3 of the worst:

Er, um. Mr. President… I don’t think your veins are supposed to look like that…

Why is the White House coming out of his teeth?

I don’t even know where to start on this one.