Word: abrahamics
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...first U.S. President to be assassinated was Abraham Lincoln -- or was it Zachary Taylor? Last week the coroner in Louisville exhumed the body of the 12th President, who died on July 9, 1850, five days after consuming a large amount of iced cherries and milk at a sweltering Independence Day celebration at the Washington Monument. Back then, Taylor's sudden death was attributed to gastroenteritis. But Clara Rising, a Florida writer who is researching a book about Taylor, believes he may have been murdered...
DURING THE CIVIL WAR, Abraham Lincoln called political cartoonist Thomas Nast "our best recruiting sergeant." According to Lincoln, Nast's cartoons "have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism, and have always seemed to come just when those articles were getting scarce." But when pundits examine the Fourth Estate's impact upon American politics, they routinely ignore the importance of the cartoon...
...imposter, presuming to take over. Or so it always seems. The vice presidency almost by definition enforces an expectation of the second rate: the man is inherently a loser (he was not the President, after all) or at best a Sancho Panza. In the case of Andrew Johnson following Abraham Lincoln, the fear of mediocrity was fulfilled. When Franklin Roosevelt died, a god of the era gave place, it seemed, to democracy's least common denominator, a barking, weightless little haberdasher from Independence...
...know how much it costs. The government sets prices arbitrarily, so they bear no relation to the actual market value of the planes, tanks and missiles produced. The weapons programs were measured by input: so much steel, titanium and manpower. "The Defense Ministry simply ordered up weapons," says Abraham Becker, a senior Soviet specialist at the Rand Corp., "and the Ministry of Finance paid the bill. Finance didn't know whether the weapons were needed, and Defense didn't know whether they were worth the cost...
Opponents also contend that the activist strategy can spark enormous anxiety in children and their parents. One boy was so depressed at his high cholesterol reading that he refused to join friends at picnics and beach parties. Says Dr. Abraham Bergman of the University of Washington, who has studied the psychological toll on youngsters of benign heart murmurs and sickle-cell trait: "Children pay a price for being labeled." There is concern too that overzealous parents will put their offspring on overly stringent diets that can deprive them of essential calories and nutrients and stunt their growth...