According to a recent Harris Poll (great fun! http//news.harrisinteractive.com/), Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday Monday was largely ignored, was the best president in history, with 32% of the votes cast by 2756, 18 years and older respondents.
Oddly, sadly, Ronald Reagan, the drugstore cowboy, was named both the second best in history and the best president since WW II, according to those polled.
Apparently the Iran-Contra affair, where weapons were sold to Iran through Israel to secure money to fund Sandinistas and other anticommunist forces in Nicaragua, has been conveniently forgotten. A selling point to secure Ronnie's approval was that Iran would then pressure Hezbollah to release some fifty Americans taken as hostages in Lebanon.
This program was hugely screwed when, after a botched delivery of Hawk missiles and a failed meeting, a wing of Hezbollah took down Arrow Air Flight 1285 after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing all 254 aboard, including 248 American soldiers returning from 6 months in the Sinai.
Reagan's response: deny and destroy. Deny any knowledge, destroy all pertinent documents.
To help you understand the conservative mind, consider: Oliver North, a staff-grade Marine Light Colonel, did time in prison for submitting suggestions no one should have even acknowledged, let alone approved. North has since become a conservative media darling, with best selling books and radio and television shows, the latter currently on FOX (surprise!).
In April 1983, 63 Americans were killed in a truck bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.
And, on October 23, 1983, 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines, were killed in the bombing of the marine barracks near the airport in Beirut.
President Hawk Reagan's response? all marines were pulled from Lebanon three months later.
This was the largest single casualty count for the USMC since Iwo Jima. All must be proud of that withdrawal.
The highest-stressed job in the US is an air traffic controller. Bleeding ulcers plague every one in his 20's, and ATC's are prone to all manner of addiction and total breakdown, including premature death.
On August 3, 1981, ATC's went on strike, ostensibly for benefits but primarily to get updates for their 20-year-old equipment, which reloaded once a minute and displayed airliners full of hundreds of people as fuzzy green blips every 12 seconds - as in they moved every five blips, terrorizingly slow when you have sixty hanging in the air awaiting your instructions.
So what does a ridiculously successful B movie actor do?
Why, fire 11,345 of them, and ban them from civil service for life, or however much of it this job has allocated them.
Washington, DC, recognized the depravity of this heinous action by renaming Dulles Airport "Reagan International". Any ATC who goes to work there is a fucking scab, every time he/she clocks in.

For the record, 1% of the respondents voted H.W. and W as the best presidents since The Big One.
WTF?
Name one thing either accomplished? (and if you say The Patriot Act, I will craptrap your porch.)
HW screwed around and killed about 24 million Iraqis, even though he encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait. Soon after, he reneged on a promise to protect the Kurds, and Chemical Ali unleashed barrages of chemical weapons on them, killing 300,000 and terminally diseasing countless others.
And W, who stood at "ground zero" (a term I despise, as it cheapens its definition, the locus of the impact of a nuclear weapon) and swore to rebuild the New York Police and Fire Departments. How about you, just for grins, Google how many NYC Police Stations & Fire Barns have closed since that 9/14/01 day of typical Bush family bullshit.
Harris is a distinguished and reliable pollster, successful such that they can make these data available free of charge.
The question thus becomes "How fucking stupid are we?"
The results of that poll aren't in, but are sure to approximate "dumber than goatshit".

Despite the continued refrigerator temperatures (don't you wish you had stacked all that stuff in your yard and turned the damn thing off about three months ago?) I've seen a few warmbloods out and about. There was a cute little raccoon who stared at me from behind a small forked tree thirty feet away while I layered up a few days ago. My dogs didn't sense him, and he watched for the five minutes it took me to leave.

Last evening my collie pup found an opossum along the rail/trail. It was typically nasty, pink snout and a mouth full of teeth, a rat tail on the other end, and a dirty humped lump in between. My Sun was understandably disgusted, stopping and barking twenty feet shy.

The wild things are as tired of this cold and snow as we are, and anxious to get about with life's business.