In 1873, San Francisco introduced the cable car system. This mode of transportation was invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie. He was inspired to build this system as a result of a bad accident. A street carriage slid backwards, killing the horses pulling it. He was shocked and decided to do something about it by designing a different form of transportation that would prevent something like that from happening again.
<span> Hitler marched his troops into the Rhine, the Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslovakia, and Austria over the protests of Britain, France, and the US. On Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thereby starting WW2 in Europe. The Poles fought valiantly against Hitler's forces; when they took refuge behind the Vistula River, and it seemed they could hold on until the arrival of the British and French, Stalin entered the war and invaded Poland from the east. About 2 weeks later it was all over for the Poles. </span>
<span>Stalin also invaded Finland on the flimsy pretext of protecting his northern frontier. The Finns, although outnumbered and outgunned, held off the Soviets for several months. </span>
<span>Japan annexed Korea in 1910. The militarists of Japan also invaded Manchuria (China) in 1933, trying to create what they called the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." In their delirious minds, they thought that Asia would thrive if all of it was under their rule. The rest of Asia disagreed. Japanese brutality in Manchuria caused the US to enact a trade embargo against Japan. The Japanese used the embargo as an excuse for the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, thereby precipitating America's entry into WW2. </span>
One of the many, many problems Jeb Bush faces in his quest for the Oval Office is his break from Republican orthodoxy on president Ronald Reagan's legacy. In 2012, Bush told a group of reporters that, in today's GOP, Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did"— namely, working with Democrats to pass legislation. He added that Reagan would struggle to secure the GOP nomination today.
Bush was lambasted by fellow conservatives for his comments, but he had a point: If you judge him by the uncompromising small government standards of today's GOP, Reagan was a disaster. Here are a few charts that show why.
Under Reagan, the national debt almost tripled, from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988:
Reagan ended his 1988 farewell speech<span> with the memorable line, "man is not free unless government is limited." The line is still a rallying cry for the right wing, but the speech came at the end of a long period of government expansion. Under Reagan, the federal workforce increased by about 324,000 to almost 5.3 million people. (The new hires weren't just soldiers to fight the communists, either: uniformed military personnel only accounted for 26 percent of the increase.) In 2012, the federal government employed almost a million fewer people than it did in the last year of Reagan's presidency.</span>
