Kimberly Peirce (born on September 8, 1967 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is an American film director, notable for her first and, thus far, only feature film, Boys Don't Cry (1999).

Sexuality
After reading a Village Voice article about the rape and murder of Brandon Teena, a transman in Falls City, Nebraska, she became obsessed with the story, "falling in love" with Brandon. Frustrated with sensationalistic accounts of the story, she traveled to Falls City, befriended a court reporter, and thus attained court documents. The script and short film that would eventually be elongated into the feature film, Boys Don't Cry became her thesis.
Peirce had been rumored to be involved in a number of projects, including adaptations of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Memoirs of a Geisha. Despite this, since Boys Don't Cry she has directed only an episode of The L Word, and is currently working on a film entitled Stop-loss starring Ryan Phillippe.

Films
Peirce's influences include such films as Raging Bull (whose opening scene she credits for the Boys Don't Cry opener) and Cool Hand Luke. She has expressed a love for the American anti-hero epitomized by Montgomery Clift and that the Brandon Teena character was modeled after this archetype.

Filmography
In addition to winning nearly universal critical acclaim (Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "the best American film of the year"), Peirce won debut directing awards from the National Board of Review, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the London Film Festival.

Johannes Robert Becher (b May 22, 1891 in Munich; d October 11, 1958 in Berlin) was a German politician and poet.
Johannes R. Becher was the son of judge Heinrich Becher. In 1910 tried to commit suicide with a friend. Only Becher survived. He starting from 1911 he studied medicine and philosophy in Munich and Jena. He left his studies and became an expressionist writer, his first works appearing in 1913. Because of the injury from his suicide attempt made him unfit for military service. He was also engaged in many communist organisations, joining the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1917, then went over to the Spartacist League in 1918 from which emerged the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1920 he left the KPD, disappointed with the failure of the German Revolution and embraced religion. However he again joined the KPD in 1923 and very actively worked within the party. Artically he in his expressionist peiod, from which he would later dissociate himself. He was apart of die Kugel, an artistic group based in Magdeburg. During this time he published in the magazines Verfall und Triumph, Die Aktion and Die neue Kunst.
In 1925 his anti-war novel (CHCI=CH)3As (Levisite) oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg, because of this work he was indicted for "literarischen Hochverrats" or "literary high treason". It was only in 1928 that this law was finally amended. In that same year he became a founding member of the KPD alinged Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (Federation of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers) becoming its first chairman and co-editor of its magazine Die Linkskurve. From 1932 he was publisher of the newspaper Die Rote Fahre. In the same year he began to serve as a candidate of the KPD in the Reichstag elections.
After the Reichstag fire he was placed on the Nazi black list, but he was able to escape from a large raid in the Berlin artist colony near Breitenbachplatz in Wilmersdorf to escape.
By March 15, 1933 he, with the support of the secretary of the Bundes proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller, traveled Willy Harzheim home, after staying at Brünn from there he moved over to Prague after some weeks, then to Zurich, Paris and finally in 1935 to the USSR. In Moscow he became editor-in-chief of the German emigre magazine Internationale Literatur-Deutsche Blätter and a member of the Central Committee of the KPD.
Soon he was caught in the midst of the Great Purge. In 1935 he was already accused of links with Leon Trotsky. He also took part, "informing" other writers alleged political misdemeanours. From 1936 he was forbidden to leave the USSR. 1941 he was resettled to Tashkent, where he tried several times tried to commit suidice. In 1943 he became one of the founders of the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany. During the exile he befriended the philosopher and literature theoretician George Lukács. They came to also energiticly and intensively study 18th and 19th century literatature Literarily he turned away from modernism to Socialist Realism.
After the Second World War he returned to Germany and lived in the Soviet zone of occupation. There he would hold different cultural-political positions. He took part in the establishment of the Cultural Association of the DDR, structure the Aufbau-Verlag publishing house and the literature magazine Sinn und Form. In 1946 he joined the Party Executive Committee and the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party. After the establishment of the GDR on 7 October 1949 he became a member of the Volkskammer. In 1949 he wrote the lyrics to Hanns Eisler's melody Auferstanden aus ruinen, which became the national anthem of the GDR. In the same year he took part in the establishment of the Akademie der Künste, becoming its president from 1953 to 1956, succeeding Arnold Zweig. In January 1953 he received the international Stalin Prize (later remamed the Lenin Peace Prize) in Moscow.
In Leipzig in 1955, the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher was founded and named in Becher's honor. The Institute's purpose was to train socialist writers. Institute graduates include Erich Loest, Volker Braun, Sarah Kirsch and Rainer Kirsch.
From 1954 to 1958 he was a Minister of culture of the GDR. During the Khrushchev Thaw, with which History of the Soviet Union (1953-1985) began in 1956. During the course of which, he, after sharp criticism by the party leadership, was politically demoted in 1957. For health reasons he had to give up all offices and functions in September 1958. He died on 11 October 1958 in the East Berlin government hospital of cancer. He was buried at the Dorotheenstädti cemetery in the Berlin center. The burial place belongs to the honour graves of Berlin. Becher lived in Majakowskiring 34 street, Pankow, East Berlin.

The Frankfurter Zeitung was a German language newspaper that appeared from 1856 to 1943. It emerged from a market letter that was published in Frankfurt. In Nazi Germany it was considered the only mass publication not completely controlled by the Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels.

History
After the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, the Frankfurter Zeitung became an important mouthpiece of the liberal bourgeois extra-parliamentary opposition. It advocated peace in Europe before 1914 and during World War I.
During the period of the Weimar Republic, the paper was treated with hostility by nationalist circles because it had pronounced itself in favour of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. At that time it no longer stood in opposition to the government and supported Gustav Stresemann's policy of reconciliation.
The Frankfurter Zeitung was one of the few democratic papers of that time. It was known in particular for its feuilleton, in which works of most of the great minds of the Weimar Republic were published.
After the 1933 seizure of power by the Nazis, several Jewish contributors had to leave the Frankfurter Zeitung, such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Because it was convenient for propaganda abroad, the paper was initially protected by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. The dictator Adolf Hitler banned the newspaper in 1943.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung somewhat considers itself as a successor organisation, as many former journalists of the Frankfurter Zeitung helped to launch it after 1946.
When Hermann Hesse wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Jewish refugees in France accused him of supporting the Nazis. He did not openly oppose this.

The International Polar Year (or IPY) was a collaborative, international effort researching the polar regions. Karl Weyprecht, an Austro-Hungarian navy officer, motivated the endeavor, but died before it first occurred in 1882-1883. Fifty years later (1932-1933) a second IPY occurred. The International Geophysical Year was inspired by the IPY and occurred 75 years after the first IPY (1957-58).
The next International Polar Year will happen in 2007–2009. It is being sponsored by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and, it is anticipated by 2007, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The chair of the International Planning Group established within the ICSU for this event is chaired by Professor Chris Rapley and Dr. Robin Bell. The Director of the IPY International Programme Office is Dr David Carlson.

Motivation
The First International Polar Year was proposed by Georg Neumayer and inspired by an Austro-Hungarian naval officer, Karl Weyprecht. They argued for a coordinated scientific approach, with observers making coordinated geophysical measurements at several locations during the same year. This would permit more views of the same phenomena, allowing more valuable interpretation of the available data, with only slightly more total money.
Seven years were required to organize the collaboration. There were 12 expeditions to the Arctic and three to the Antarctic. Twelve nations participated: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
Tragically, 17 of the 24 Americans involved in the Arctic expedition starved to death during the first IPY of 1882-83. A supply ship was missed, leading to the disaster where several bodies were consumed by the survivors.
The aforementioned countries operated 14 meteorological stations around the North Pole. Observations included meteorology, geomagnetism, auroral phenomena, ocean currents, tides, structure and motion of ice and atmospheric electricity. More than 40 meteorological observatories around the world expanded their programs of observations for this period. Data and images from the First International Polar Year have very recently been made available for browsing and download on the Web. These records of the First International Polar Year offer a rare glimpse of the circumpolar Arctic environment as it existed in the past and hold the potential to improve our understanding of historical climate variability and environmental change in the Arctic.
Shortly after World War I, mysterious, often defective behaviour in telegraph, radio and electric power and telephone lines began to persuade engineers and scientists that the electrical geophysics of the Earth needed more study. The airplane, motorized sea and land transport and new instruments made the proposals more interesting.
In 1927 a proposal came before an International Meteorological Committee. In 1928 the committee submitted a detailed report to an international conference of directors of meteorological services at Copenhagen. Part of one of the resolutions follows:
... magnetic, auroral and meteorological observations at a network of stations in the Arctic and Antarctic would materially advance present knowledge and understanding (of these phenomena) not only within polar regions but in general ... This increased knowledge will be of practical application to problems connected with terrestrial magnetism, marine and aerial navigation, wireless telegraphy and weather forecasting.
The conference suggested observing in 1932–1933, the fiftieth anniversary of the First International Polar Year.
The Second Polar Year (1932–33) program studied how much observations in the polar regions could improve weather forecasts and help transport by air and sea. Forty-four nations participated, and a vast amount of data was collected. A world data center was created under the organization that eventually came to be called the International Meteorological Organization.
By most accounts, the privations of these two early operations were extreme, with the men spending less than 10 percent of their time on science, and the rest of the time devoted to survival.
In the 1950s new instrumentation, including especially rocketry and seismography, inspired U.S. scientist Lloyd Berkner to propose a third Polar Year. The International Council of Scientific Unions, a parent body, broadened the proposals from polar studies to geophysical research, renaming the effort the International Geophysical Year (which see). More than 70 existing national scientific organizations then formed IGY committees, and participated in the cooperative effort. The IGY took place from July 1957 to December 1958.
While the IGY had taken place when the sun was at maximum output, this was followed by an examination of the sun and related geophysical phenomena at the low point in the solar cycle, the International Year of the Quiet Sun (IQSY). This lasted from July 1963 to December 1964.

History
The Royal Canadian Mint's $20 silver coin, launched on July 18, 2007 has evoked one of the darkest moments in the history of polar exploration and rankled Canada's main Inuit organization.

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As one of the defining events of the 20th century, and one of the most stark examples of human brutality in modern history, the Holocaust has had a profound impact on art and literature over the past 60 years.

Literature
German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," but he later retracted this statement. There are some substantial works dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the work of survivor Paul Celan, which uses invented syntax and vocabulary in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Celan considered the German language tainted by the Nazis, although it is interesting to note his friendship with Nazi sympathizer and philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Visual Arts
The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including Schindler's List, Voyage of the Damned, The Pianist, The Sorrow and the Pity, Night and Fog, Shoah, Sophie's Choice, and Life Is Beautiful. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida.

Film
The Holocaust has been particularly important theme in cinema in the Central and East European countries, particularly the cinemas of Poland , both the Czech and Slovak halves of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. These nations were either host to concentration camps and/or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and as a result the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews has haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lended themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's Miklós Jancsó, have no personal connection to Judaism or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, Poland, 1947) and Alfréd Radok's hallucinogenic The Long Journey (Daleká cesta, Czechoslovakia, 1948). As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s (although films about the Second World War generally continued to be produced). Among the first films to reintroduce the topic, were Jiří Weiss's Sweet Light in a Dark Room (Romeo, Juliet a tma, Czechoslovakia, 1959) and Andrzej Wajda's Samson (Poland, 1961).
In the 1960s, a number of Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama Shop on the Main Street (Obchod na korze, Czechoslovakia, 1965) by Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos won a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film the following year.
While some of these films, such as Shop on the Main Street used a convention film-making style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatise the terror of the period. This included non-linear narratives and narrative ambiguity, as for example in Andrzej Munk's The Passenger (Pasażerka, Poland, 1963) and Jan Němec's Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, Czechlovakia, 1964); expressionist lighting and staging, as in Zbynych Brynych's The Fifth Horseman is Fear (...a paty jezdec je Strach, Czechoslovakia, 1964); and grotesquely black humour, as in Juraj Herz's The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, Czechoslovakia, 1968).
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by Arnošt Lustig were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's Diamonds of the Night.
Although some works, such as Munk's The Passenger, had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas that the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanising effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films were interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, as for example in The Passenger and András Kovács's Cold Days (Hideg Napok, Hungary, 1966), or through passive inaction, as in The Fifth Horseman is Fear.
The 1970s and 1980s, were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's The Revolt of Job (Jób lázadása, Hungary, 1983), Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau (Poland, 1988) and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me (Zastihla mě noc, Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.
Directors such as István Szabó (Hungary) and Agnieszka Holland (Poland) were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his Oscar-winning Mephisto (Germany/Hungary/Austria, 1981) and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, Germany, 1984). Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jacob The Liar (Jakob, der Lügner, 1975) in German and directed by German director Frank Beyer but starring the acclaimed Czech actor Vlastimil Brodský. The film was remade in an English-language version in 1999.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to a number of more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak (Poland, 1990), Szabó's Sunshine (Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999) and Jan Hřebejk's Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat, Czech Republic, 2001). Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
Generally speaking, these recent films have been far less stylised and subjectivised than their 1960s counterparts. For example, Polish director Roman Polanski's The Pianist (France/Germany/UK/Poland, 2002) was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, somewhat surprising to some critics given the over-wrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.

Central European Film
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13.
In 1984, Canadian rock band Rush recorded the song "Red Sector A" on the album Grace Under Pressure. The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee's memories of his mother's stories about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was held prisoner.
In Pink Floyd's album The Wall, one of the record's tracks is titled "Waiting for the Worms". This song is set in the middle of the time the main character, Pink, has become a neo-nazi, and the head of a fascist group. The song seems to be set in a march down a main street in Brixton, England, with Pink singing/saying the lyrics through a megaphone. One of the lyrics from the song is, "Waiting! For the final solution to strengthen the strain!"
A song from Arcade Fire's 2007 album Neon Bible titled "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" is rumoured to be about the Holocaust as well, with such lyrics as "Left my name with the border guards/a name that I don't need" , "We'll make it if we run!/Run from the memory" and "been eating in the ghetto on a $100 plate". The music in the song itself seems very Eastern European inspired with string instruments and a military chorus in the background.

Theatre

Nazi exploitation
Trauma and the arts

Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of Karl Marx. However, communism had a rich history of theory and practice for hundreds of years before Marx's attempt to think communism in the context of industrialization. Communism as a political goal is generally a conjectured form of future social organization, although Marxists have described early forms of human social organization as "primitive communism". Self-identified communists hold a variety of views, including Marxism Leninism, Trotskyism, council communism, Luxemburgism, anarchist communism, Christian communism, and various currents of left communism, which are generally the more widespread varieties. However, various offshoots of the Soviet (what critics call the "Stalinist", and supporters call Marxist-Leninist) and Maoist interpretations of Marxism comprise a particular branch of communism that has the distinction of having been the primary driving force for communism in world politics during most of the 20th century. The competing branch of Trotskyism has not had such a distinction.
Karl Marx held that society could not be transformed from the capitalist mode of production to the advanced communist mode of production all at once, but required a transitional period which Marx described as the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the first stage of communism. The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society would actually look like. However, the term "Communism", especially when it is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties that claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the late 19th century, Marxist theories motivated socialist parties across Europe, although their policies later developed along the lines of "reforming" capitalism, rather than overthrowing it. One exception was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. One branch of this party, commonly known as the Bolsheviks and headed by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in taking control of the country after the toppling of the Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1918, this party changed its name to the Communist Party, thus establishing the contemporary distinction between communism and other trends of socialism.
After the success of the October Revolution in Russia, many socialist parties in other countries became communist parties, signaling varying degrees of allegiance to the new Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After World War II, communists consolidated power in Eastern Europe, and in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China, which would later follow its own ideological path of communist development. Among the other countries in the Third World that adopted a pro-communist government at some point were Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Mozambique. By the early 1980s almost one-third of the world's population lived in Communist states.
Since the early 1970s, the term Eurocommunism was used to refer to the policies of reformist communist parties in western Europe, break with the tradition of uncritical and unconditional support of the Soviet Union. Such parties were politically active and electorally significant in Italy (PCI), France (PCF), and Spain (PCE).
There is a history of anti-communism in the United States, which manifested itself in the Sedition Act of 1918, the subsequent Palmer Raids, and the later period of McCarthyism.
With the decline of the communist governments in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s and the breakup of the Soviet Union on December 9, 1991, communism's influence has decreased dramatically in Europe. However, around a quarter of the world's population still lives in communist states, mostly in the People's Republic of China. There are also communist movements in Latin America and South Asia that have significant popular support.

Main article: History of communism

The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president is at the head of the executive branch of the federal government, whose role is to enforce national law as given in the Constitution and written by Congress. Article Two of the Constitution establishes the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and enumerates powers specifically granted to the president, including the power to sign into law or veto bills passed by both houses of Congress, to create a Cabinet of advisors, to grant pardons or reprieves, and, with the "advice and consent" of the Senate, to make treaties and appoint federal officers, ambassadors, and federal judges, including Justices of the Supreme Court. As with officials in the other branches of the United States government, the Constitution restrains the President with a set of checks and balances designed to prevent any individual or group from taking absolute power.
The United States was the first country to create the office of president as head of state of a modern republic. Since the adoption of the Constitution, forty-three presidents have been elected or succeeded into the presidency, the first being George Washington. The current president is George W. Bush, inaugurated on January 20, 2001 to a first term and on January 20, 2005 to a second. His term expires at noon on January 20, 2009, after which he will be replaced by the winner of the 2008 presidential election. From the middle of the twentieth century, the United States' status as a superpower has led the American president to become one of the world's most well-known and influential public figures. U.S. presidential elections are regarded by many as events of international as well as national significance and are closely followed in many places around the world.

Origin
Article Two of the Constitution sets the qualifications required to become president. Presidents must be natural-born citizens of the United States, at least thirty-five years old, and must have been resident in the United States for at least fourteen years. Citizens at the time of adoption of the Constitution were also eligible to become president, provided they met the age and residency requirements as well; the Constitution was adopted over 200 years ago, so this rule does not apply to any person living today. While not an official requirement, the vast majority of presidents had prior experience as vice presidents, members of Congress, governors, or generals; in addition, thirty-one of forty-two presidents served in the military, all but one of them, James Buchanan, as an officer. During the electoral process, experience or lack thereof is often given as a point in a presidential candidate's campaign.
Candidates usually must receive the backing of a major political party. This is not strictly required in order to be considered a serious candidate, however; third-party candidate Ross Perot received nearly 19% of the vote in the 1992 election.

Qualifications

Main article: United States presidential election Election
Article Two of the Constitution originally established the method of presidential election. It also used an electoral college, but there was a major difference in the voting system. Each elector cast two votes, with the intention that one would be used for a presidential and the other for a vice presidential candidate. The candidate with the highest number of votes would become the president, while the second-place candidate becoming the vice president.
However, the 1796 and 1800 elections highlighted flaws in the electoral system in use at the time. In particular, the tie in the electoral vote that resulted from the lack of separation between presidential and vice presidential votes in the latter election was an issue. The Democratic-Republican Party's candidates, who won the election, were tied with each other, and as a result, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives in the outgoing Federalist Party-controlled 6th Congress. Federalist representatives attempted to elect Aaron Burr, the Democratic-Republican candidate for vice president, over Thomas Jefferson, the presidential candidate. Jefferson eventually won after Alexander Hamilton managed to swing one state delegation's vote to him. As a result, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution in 1803, and it was ratified in 1804. This amendment created the electoral system used today.

Campaign
Voters in each of the states elect a president on Election Day, set by law as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, once every four years; elections for other offices at all levels of government also occur on this date. Each state holds a number of electoral votes which correspond to electors in the Electoral College. Tickets of presidential and vice presidential candidates are shown on the ballot; each vote for the tickets actually corresponds to a vote for a slate of electors chosen by the candidates' political party. In most states, the ticket that wins the most votes in a state wins all of that state's electoral votes, and thus has their slate of electors chosen to vote in the Electoral College. Maine and Nebraska do not use this method, opting instead to give two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one electoral vote to the winner of each Congressional district. Neither state has split electoral votes between candidates as a result of this system in modern elections. In any case, the winning set of electors meets at their state's capital on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, a few weeks after the election, to vote, and sends a vote count to Congress.
The vote count is opened by the sitting vice president, acting in his capacity as President of the Senate, and read aloud to a joint session of the incoming Congress, which was elected at the same time as the president. Members of Congress can object to any state's vote count, provided that the objection is supported by at least one member of each house of Congress. A successful objection will be followed by debate; however, objections to the electoral vote count are rarely raised.
In the event that no candidate receives a majority of the electoral vote, the House of Representatives chooses the president from among the top three contenders. However, the House does not vote normally; instead, each state delegation is given only one vote, marginalizing the importance of more populous states. The vice president is chosen through normal voting in the Senate, where each state delegation is already of equal size.

Electoral College
When the Constitution was written, the framers disagreed on the selection of the president: some favored national popular vote, while others wanted Congress to choose the president. The Electoral College was created as a compromise between the two proposals. It gave rural areas and smaller states a slightly larger role in determining the outcome of the election, and it continues to do so today; for example, the largest state by population, California, only has about one electoral vote for every 660,000 residents, while the smallest, Wyoming, has an electoral vote for about every 170,000.
Today, most of the electoral process is a formality in the public eye, as the choice of electors determines the result of the election, with a few exceptions. However, the Twelfth Amendment was written in a time when voters at large had little knowledge of candidates outside their state. As a result, the amendment accommodated this; the electors that voters had chosen were supposed to learn about the other candidates, and make an informed decision that represented the wishes of their constituents. Modern communication has rendered this unnecessary, and as a result, voters now choose between electors that are already pledged to a presidential candidate.

Rationale
Presidents' terms of office begin at noon on January 20 of the year following the election. This date is known as Inauguration Day in the United States, and it marks the beginning of the president's four-year term, alongside the vice president. Before assuming office, the president-elect is constitutionally required to take the following oath:
George Washington, the first president, set an unofficial term limit of two terms, which was generally followed by subsequent presidents as precedent. After the twelve-year presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected four times, but died shortly after beginning his fourth term, the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, barring presidents from being elected more than twice, or once if they served more than half of another president's term. Prior to Roosevelt, several presidents had campaigned for a third term, but none were elected. Harry S. Truman, who was president at the time of the amendment's ratification and thus not subject to its terms, also briefly sought a third term before withdrawing from the 1952 race.
Since the amendment's ratification, three presidents have served two full terms: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Richard Nixon was elected to a second term, but resigned before completing it; George W. Bush will become the fourth upon completion of his current term on January 20, 2009. Lyndon B. Johnson was the only president under the amendment to be eligible to serve more than two terms in total, having only served for 14 months following John F. Kennedy's assassination. However, he chose not to run in the 1968 election.

Term of office
See also: Impeachment in the United States and United States presidential line of succession
Vacancies in the office of President may arise due to death, resignation, or removal from office. Articles One and Two of the Constitution allow the House of Representatives to impeach high federal officials, including the president, for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors", and give the Senate the power to remove impeached officials from office, given a two-thirds vote to convict. Two presidents have thus far been impeached by the House, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither was subsequently convicted by the Senate; however, Johnson was acquitted by just one vote.
Per the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet may remove the president from office once they transmit a statement declaring the president to be incapable to hold office to the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate. If this occurs, then the vice president will assume the powers and duties of President as Acting President; however, the president can declare that no such inability exists, and resume executing the Presidency. If the vice president and Cabinet contest this claim, it is up to Congress, which must meet within two days if not already in session, to decide the merit of the claim.
By Act of Congress, presidents may also resign if their resignation is delivered in writing to the Secretary of State. The only president to resign was Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974; he was facing imminent impeachment and likely subsequent conviction in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Just before his resignation, the House Judiciary Committee had reported favorably on articles of impeachment against him.
The Constitution states that the vice president is to be the president's successor in the case of a vacancy. If both the president and vice president are killed or unable to serve for any reason, the next officer in the presidential line of succession, currently the Speaker of the House, becomes president. The list extends to the President pro tempore of the Senate after the Speaker, followed by every member of the Cabinet in a set order.

Removal from office

Main article: Powers of the President of the United States Duties and powers
The president is entitled to use the White House as his living and working quarters, and its entire staff and facilities, including medical care, kitchen, housekeeping and security staff. While traveling, the president is able to conduct the functions of the office from one of two custom-built Boeing 747 aircraft, known as Air Force One. For ground travel, the president uses an armored presidential limousine, currently a heavily modified Cadillac DTS which uses the call sign "Cadillac One."

Privileges of office
The First U.S. Congress voted to pay George Washington a salary of $25,000 a year, about $531,000 in 2005 terms. Washington, already a wealthy man, refused to accept his salary. Theodore Roosevelt spent his entire $50,000 salary on entertaining guests at the White House. The FPA, as amended, also provides former presidents with travel funds and mailing privileges.

Salary
The United States Secret Service is charged with protecting the sitting president and his family. Until 1997, all former presidents and their families were protected by the Secret Service until the president's death. The last president to have lifetime Secret Service protection is Bill Clinton; George W. Bush and all subsequent presidents will be protected by the Secret Service for a maximum of ten years after leaving office. However, debates in Congress have been raised concerning this decision. Following the increase in terrorism and threats to the president in general since 1997, lifetime protection is being reconsidered.

Secret Service

Main article: Presidential library Presidential libraries
Many presidents have had significant careers after leaving office. Some prominent examples include William Howard Taft's tenure as Chief Justice of the United States and Herbert Hoover's work on government reorganization after World War II. More recently, Jimmy Carter has become a global human rights campaigner and a best-selling writer. Other former presidents have served in elected office after leaving the White House; Andrew Johnson was elected to the Senate after his term was over, and John Quincy Adams served in the House of Representatives. Grover Cleveland, whose bid for reelection failed in 1888, was elected president again four years later in 1892. John Tyler served in the provisional Confederate States Congress during the Civil War, and was elected to the official Confederate Congress but died before it convened.

After the presidency

List of Presidents of the United States
Curse of Tippecanoe
Executive privilege
Fiction regarding United States presidential succession
Historical rankings of United States Presidents
President of the Continental Congress
Presidential $1 Coin Program
United States presidential election, 2008
Category:Lists relating to the United States presidency
Category:United States presidential history See also

Official

A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825 - Presidential Election Returns including town and county breakdowns
The American Presidency Project. UC Santa Barbara. Retrieved on 2005-10-07. - A collection of over 67,000 Presidential documents
Presidential Documents from the National Archives. Retrieved on 2007-03-21. - A collection of letters, portraits, photos, and other documents from the National Archives
Life Portraits of the American Presidents. C-SPAN. Retrieved on 2005-10-07. - A companion website for the C-SPAN television series: American Presidents: Life Portraits