Ping.
More interesting info from our own Freeper LS!
Lyndon B. Johnson used to enjoy humiliating his Defense Secretary Robert STRANGE McNamara by sitting stark naked on the toilet while speaking to him.
I need to know the really important things....
What kind of dogs?
President-elect Warren Harding was kidnapped in the middle of Biscayne Bay. After the election, Harding was visiting Miami. The Miami boosters took him out for an excursion on Biscayne Bay. While out on the boat, Miami Beach promoter Carl Fisher came up to the side in another boat and yelled out to Harding asking if he was interested in a relaxing game of poker with booze in sunny Miami beach. The already bored Harding perked up at hearing this and immediately hopped into Fisher’s boat which sped him away to Miami Beach, leaving the horrified Miami boosters behind on their boat.
A young Harry Truman once had a roommate in Kansas City named Eisenhower. No, not Dwight D. Eisenhower himself but one of his brothers.
Shame about Harrison. His was a brilliant speech. Excerpts follow:
The Constitution of the United States is the instrument containing this grant of power to the several departments composing the Government. On an examination of that instrument it will be found to contain declarations of power granted and of power withheld. The latter is also susceptible of division into power which the majority had the right to grant, but which they do not think proper to entrust to their agents, and that which they could not have granted, not being possessed by themselves. In other words, there are certain rights possessed by each individual American citizen which in his compact with the others he has never surrendered. Some of them, indeed, he is unable to surrender, being, in the language of our system, unalienable.
...
I proceed to state in as summary a manner as I can my opinion of the sources of the evils which have been so extensively complained of and the correctives which may be applied. Some of the former are unquestionably to be found in the defects of the Constitution; others, in my judgment, are attributable to a misconstruction of some of its provisions. Of the former is the eligibility of the same individual to a second term of the Presidency. The sagacious mind of Mr. Jefferson early saw and lamented this error, and attempts have been made, hitherto without success, to apply the amendatory power of the States to its correction. As, however, one mode of correction is in the power of every President, and consequently in mine, it would be useless, and perhaps invidious, to enumerate the evils of which, in the opinion of many of our fellow-citizens, this error of the sages who framed the Constitution may have been the source and the bitter fruits which we are still to gather from it if it continues to disfigure our system. It may be observed, however, as a general remark, that republics can commit no greater error than to adopt or continue any feature in their systems of government which may be calculated to create or increase the lover of power in the bosoms of those to whom necessity obliges them to commit the management of their affairs; and surely nothing is more likely to produce such a state of mind than the long continuance of an office of high trust.
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If parties in a republic are necessary to secure a degree of vigilance sufficient to keep the public functionaries within the bounds of law and duty, at that point their usefulness ends. Beyond that they become destructive of public virtue, the parent of a spirit antagonist to that of liberty, and eventually its inevitable conqueror. We have examples of republics where the love of country and of liberty at one time were the dominant passions of the whole mass of citizens, and yet, with the continuance of the name and forms of free government, not a vestige of these qualities remaining in the bosoms of any one of its citizens....The spirit of liberty had fled, and, avoiding the abodes of civilized man, had sought protection in the wilds of Scythia or Scandinavia; and so under the operation of the same causes and influences it will fly from our Capitol and our forums. A calamity so awful, not only to our country, but to the world, must be deprecated by every patriot and every tendency to a state of things likely to produce it immediately checked. Such a tendency has existed—does exist. Always the friend of my countrymen, never their flatterer, it becomes my duty to say to them from this high place to which their partiality has exalted me that there exists in the land a spirit hostile to their best interests—hostile to liberty itself. It is a spirit contracted in its views, selfish in its objects. It looks to the aggrandizement of a few even to the destruction of the interests of the whole. The entire remedy is with the people.
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres26.html
John Quincy Adams refused to swear the oath of office on a Bible; he swore on a law book.
The food served in the Franklin D. Roosevelt White House was so horrible that dinner guests visibly recoiled in disgust after a few bites. When the King & Queen of England visited the Roosevelt White House, they were served hot dogs.
bump
On February 20, Zangara was brought to Dade County Courthouse for arraignment and trial. By the end of the day, Zangara was given a sentence of 80 years at hard labor on four counts of attempted murder.
As Zangara left the court room, he said to the judge, "Oh judge, don’t be stingy. Give me a hundred years." The judge replied, "Maybe there will be more later."
And there was more because on March 6, Mayor Cermak died from his wound. The next day, March 7, Zangara was brought back to the court room where he was arraigned for murder. Three days after that, on March 10, Zangara was sentenced to death in the electric chair.
On March 20, exactly one month after his initial arraignment, Zangara was strapped into the electric chair. His last words were "Pusha da button. Go ahead, pusha da button."
The 33 days from the shooting in Bayfront Park to Zangara's electrocution is considered to be the swiftest legal execution in 20th century American history.
Pusha da button!
https://youtu.be/lD7b7repoRM?t=1m3s
George Washington takes the Oath of Office Inauguration from the movie John Adams.
Awesome!
Here’s what I’m thinkin. It now sounds like Pres elect Trump will be being sworn in on the same Bible that Lincoln was sworn in on. Yes, that would be the same Bible that Zero used for his swearing in. I just wonder if it has occurred to Barky that the man who swore in Lincoln (and therefore held the Bible for him) was none other than US Chief Justice Roger B Taney. Taney, of course, authored the infamous Dred Scott Decision. Surely Barky was aware of that.
4. William Henry Harrison gave the longest inauguration speech in history – that possibly killed him.
Not a huge fan of the Bushes....however...seeing 41 interact with 43 at the latter’s inauguration did have a strong sense of history, and touched, I think, most patriotic Americans.