Sunday, November 9, 2008

Lame Duck Soup - Random Trivia Answers

  • A1) London Stock Exchange. The term originally referred to a broker who did not pay his debts and has been documented as far back as a 1761 letter from Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann.
  • A2) 20th Amendment. Before 1935 for congressmen and 1937 for presidents and vice presidents, terms ended on March 4. This was pushed back to January 20 by the amendment ratified on January 23, 1933.
  • A3) February 6. The 20th Amendment was ratified two weeks earlier but was not officially in effect until this date in 1933.
  • A4) John Adams. In 1801, John Jay had declined the nomination, so Secretary of State John Marshall got the job, taking over from Oliver Ellsworth.
  • A5) Bill Clinton. Perhaps even more infamously, he pardoned Marc Rich, who had filed a blank 1040 despite owing $50 million in taxes and whose ex-wife donated to the presidential library.
  • A6) Jimmy Carter. The following day, Ronald Reagan was able to celebrate the release of the 52 hostages in Iran.
  • A7) William Taft. The Bureau of Labor was created by Congress in 1888, was briefly a lower level Department of Labor, then became part of the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903.
  • A8) Dwight Eisenhower. The 34th U.S. President let his successor, John F. Kennedy, suffer the fallout from the fiasco.
  • A9) Bill Clinton. Because his successor was George W. Bush, the possibly apocryphal story says that all the W's were eviscerated.
  • A10) John Tyler. Texas became the 27th state half a year later, on December 29, 1845.
  • A11) Gerald Ford. Iva Toguri D'Aquino had been found guilty of treason on fairly weak and even manufactured evidence.
  • A12) James Polk. His successor Zachary Taylor then got to actually fill it out.

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