The Weimar Republic is an unofficial historical designation for the German state from 1918 to 1933. The name derives from the city of Weimar; the official name of the republic remained Deutsches Reich unchanged from 1871, because of the German tradition of substates. Although translated as "German Empire", the word Reich here better translates as "realm", in that the term does not have monarchical connotations in itself; the Reich was changed from a constitutional monarchy into a republic. In English, the country was known as Germany. Germany became a de facto republic on 9 November 1918 when Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the German and Prussian thrones with no agreement made on a succession by his son Crown Prince Wilhelm, became a de jure republic in February 1919 when the position of President of Germany was created. A national assembly was convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for Germany was written and adopted on 11 August 1919. In its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism as well as contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War.
Resentment in Germany towards the Treaty of Versailles was strong on the political right where there was great anger towards those who had signed and submitted to the treaty. The Weimar Republic fulfilled most of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles although it never met its disarmament requirements and paid only a small portion of the war reparations. Under the Locarno Treaties, Germany accepted the western borders of the country by abandoning irredentist claims on France and Belgium, but continued to dispute the eastern borders and sought to persuade Austria to join Germany as one of Germany's states. From 1930 onwards, President Paul von Hindenburg used emergency powers to back Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher; the Great Depression, exacerbated by Brüning's policy of deflation, led to a surge in unemployment. In 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor with the Nazi Party being part of a coalition government; the Nazis held two out of the remaining ten cabinet seats.
Von Papen as Vice Chancellor was intended to be the "éminence grise" who would keep Hitler under control, using his close personal connection to Hindenburg. Within months, the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933 had brought about a state of emergency: it wiped out constitutional governance and civil liberties. Hitler's seizure of power was permissive of government by decree without legislative participation; these events brought the republic to an end—as democracy collapsed, the founding of a single-party state began the dictatorship of the Nazi era. The Weimar Republic is so called because the assembly that adopted its constitution met at Weimar, from 6 February 1919 to 11 August 1919, but this name only became mainstream after 1933. Between 1919 and 1933 there was no single name for the new state that gained widespread acceptance, why the old name Deutsches Reich remained though hardly anyone used it during the Weimar period. To the right of the spectrum the politically engaged rejected the new democratic model and were appalled to see the honour of the traditional word Reich associated with it.
The Catholic Centre party, favoured the term Deutscher Volksstaat while on the moderate left Chancellor Friedrich Ebert's SPD preferred Deutsche Republik. By 1925, Deutsche Republik was used by most Germans, but for the anti-democratic right the word Republik was, along with the relocation of the seat of power to Weimar, a painful reminder of a government structure, imposed by foreign statesmen, along with the expulsion of Kaiser Wilhelm in the wake of massive national humiliation; the first recorded mention of the term Republik von Weimar came during a speech delivered by Adolf Hitler at a National Socialist German Worker's Party rally in Munich on 24 February 1929—it was a few weeks that the term Weimarer Republik was first used in a newspaper article. Only during the 1930s did the term become mainstream, both within and outside Germany. According to historian Richard J. Evans: The continued use of the term'German Empire', Deutsches Reich, by the Weimar Republic... conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire.
After the introduction of the republic, the flag and coat of arms of Germany were altered to reflect the political changes. The Weimar Republic without the symbols of the former Monarchy; this left the black eagle with one head, facing to the right, with open wings but closed feathers, with a red beak and claws and white highlighting. By reason of a decision of the Reich's Government I hereby announce, that the Imperial coat of arms on a gold-yellow shield shows the one headed black eagle, the head turned to the right, the wings open but with closed feathering, beak and claws in red color. If the Reich's Eagle is shown without a frame, the same ch
The public image of former Governor and Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee is mixed. He did, receive significant support when running for president in 2008. S. House as well as three former governors and seven newspapers. Huckabee's personality has been described in positive terms as "gentle and warm", "charming", "friendly, teddy-bear", "engaging, warm and persuasive". Huckabee's personality has been described in negative terms as "petty, thin-skinned, self-righteous", "somewhat vindictive". Mixed descriptions include "best of leaders and the worst of thin-skinned pols" and "charming and aloof". In late 1996, Huckabee campaigned for ballot Amendment 1, a plan to adjust property tax rules to make school funding more equal across the state, Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment increasing the state sales tax 0.125 percent to improve the state's park system and natural resources. In 2001, his refusal to raise taxes in the face of a budget shortfall sparked criticism from lawmakers and the media.
In response to the criticism he created the "Tax Me More Fund", a voluntary fund for people who felt that the government needed to raise more taxes. State Sen. Minority Leader John Brown called the "Tax Me More Fund" a campaign tactic. However, the Club for Growth argues Huckabee increased state spending 65.3 percent and supported five tax increases. In response, Huckabee said he doubled the standard deduction and the child care tax credit, eliminated the marriage penalty and the capital gains tax on the sale of a home, reduced the capital gains tax for both businesses and individuals. Ernest Dumas of the Arkansas Times, a consistent Huckabee critic, responded most of the tax cuts were small deductions and exemptions initiated by the state legislature, that the broad-based tax cut was proposed by his predecessor and Huckabee was "the biggest taxer and spender in Arkansas history." Former Arkansas State Representative Randy Minton has said. The group has pointed out that Huckabee publicly opposed the repeal of a sales tax on groceries and medicine in 2002, signed a bill raising taxes on gasoline in 1999, signed a $5.25 bed-tax on private nursing home patients in 2001.
In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the five best governors in the U. S. writing "Huckabee has approached his state's troubles with energy and innovation". The Club for Growth accuses Huckabee of being a liberal in disguise, saying Huckabee increased state spending 65.3 percent and supported five tax increases. The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration states during Huckabee's tenure, taxes were cut ninety times for a decrease of $378 million, while taxes were raised twenty-one times for an increase of $883 million. Arkansas Health Care Association President Jim Cooper stated the private nursing home tax was necessary in order to avert future huge tax increases as a result of years of mismanagement; the newspaper of Dallas Morning News endorsed Huckabee in 2008 and praised his fiscal policies as governor saying "Mr. Huckabee established a respectable record of fiscal responsibility in Arkansas. Rather than run up deficits, he backed raising taxes to pay for needed infrastructure, health care and education.
That's called prudence, it was once a Republican virtue."The libertarian think tank of the Cato Institute gave Huckabee an "F" for his spending/tax policies as governor in 2006 and a D for his career as governor. The conservative non-profit group Club for Growth spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during 2008 presidential race attacking Huckabee's economic policies. Huckabee supports the FairTax. Ann Coulter was quoted on saying "The problem with the fair tax is that it's so conservative it would never be implemented..." Rudy Giuliani criticized the fair tax saying "This would not be a good time — I don't know if there would be a good time to do this — to advocate ending the home mortgage deduction. The home mortgage deduction is considered by many critical to the ability of people to buy a home and keep their home." The Christian Science Monitor called Huckabee a "conservative with a social gospel." Bill O'Reilly's first question to Huckabee in an interview was "Is Mike Huckabee ‘Too Religious’ to be elected president?"
In a 1998 gubernatorial exit poll, Huckabee earned 48 percent of the African-American vote, a feat accomplished by Republican candidates since the 1930s. On January 21, 2008, Mike Huckabee received the endorsement of 50 African-American leaders in Atlanta, Georgia; the endorsers cited Huckabee's record on life, minorities, the economy, the prison system, immigration as Arkansas governor. Due to his beliefs on amnesty in conjunction to illegal immigration, Hispanics support him. Huckabee has expressed on numerous occasions a low opinion of the LGBT community, he has compared homosexual relationships between consenting adults to illegal drug abuse, criticized same-sex marriage, as well as supported laws that ban same-sex couples from adopting. Kathy Webb, a gay Arkansas state senator, has said the "former governor doesn't seem to have a lot of tolerance and goodwill toward gay people."Huckabee has been criticized for being photographed with Brian Camenker the head of MassResistance, a social conservative activist group, classified as a "Hate Group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization known for its tolerance education programs and legal victories against white supremacists.
When told Brian was from MassResistance, Gov. Huckabee said, "I know. I get your emails."Andr
A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus Vitis. Grapes can be eaten fresh as table grapes or they can be used for making wine, grape juice, grape seed extract, raisins and grape seed oil. Grapes are a non-climacteric type of fruit occurring in clusters; the cultivation of the domesticated grape began 6,000–8,000 years ago in the Near East. Yeast, one of the earliest domesticated microorganisms, occurs on the skins of grapes, leading to the discovery of alcoholic drinks such as wine; the earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of wine-making in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in Georgia. The oldest known winery was found in Armenia, dating to around 4000 BC. By the 9th century AD the city of Shiraz was known to produce some of the finest wines in the Middle East, thus it has been proposed that Syrah red wine is named after Shiraz, a city in Persia where the grape was used to make Shirazi wine. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics record the cultivation of purple grapes, history attests to the ancient Greeks and Romans growing purple grapes both for eating and wine production.
The growing of grapes would spread to other regions in Europe, as well as North Africa, in North America. In North America, native grapes belonging to various species of the genus Vitis proliferate in the wild across the continent, were a part of the diet of many Native Americans, but were considered by early European colonists to be unsuitable for wine. In the 19th century, Ephraim Bull of Concord, cultivated seeds from wild Vitis labrusca vines to create the Concord grape which would become an important agricultural crop in the United States. Grapes are a type of fruit that grow in clusters of 15 to 300, can be crimson, dark blue, green and pink. "White" grapes are green in color, are evolutionarily derived from the purple grape. Mutations in two regulatory genes of white grapes turn off production of anthocyanins, which are responsible for the color of purple grapes. Anthocyanins and other pigment chemicals of the larger family of polyphenols in purple grapes are responsible for the varying shades of purple in red wines.
Grapes are an ellipsoid shape resembling a prolate spheroid. Raw grapes are 81% water, 18% carbohydrates, 1% protein, have negligible fat. A 100 gram reference amount of raw grapes supplies 69 calories and a moderate amount of vitamin K, with no other micronutrients in significant content. Most grapes come from cultivars of Vitis vinifera, the European grapevine native to the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Minor amounts of fruit and wine come from American and Asian species such as: Vitis amurensis, the most important Asian species Vitis labrusca, the North American table and grape juice grapevines, sometimes used for wine, are native to the Eastern United States and Canada. Vitis mustangensis, found in Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma Vitis riparia, a wild vine of North America, is sometimes used for winemaking and for jam, it is native to the entire Eastern U. S. and north to Quebec. Vitis rotundifolia used for jams and wine, are native to the Southeastern United States from Delaware to the Gulf of Mexico.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 75,866 square kilometers of the world are dedicated to grapes. 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, 2% as dried fruit. A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be reconstituted for fruits canned "with no added sugar" and "100% natural"; the area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year. There are no reliable statistics, it is believed that the most planted variety is Sultana known as Thompson Seedless, with at least 3,600 km2 dedicated to it. The second most common variety is Airén. Other popular varieties include Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet Franc, Grenache, Tempranillo and Chardonnay. Commercially cultivated grapes can be classified as either table or wine grapes, based on their intended method of consumption: eaten raw or used to make wine. While all of them belong to the same species, Vitis vinifera and wine grapes have significant differences, brought about through selective breeding.
Table grape cultivars tend to have large, seedless fruit with thin skin. Wine grapes are smaller seeded, have thick skins. Wine grapes tend to be sweet: they are harvested at the time when their juice is 24% sugar by weight. By comparison, commercially produced "100% grape juice", made from table grapes, is around 15% sugar by weight. Seedless cultivars now make up the overwhelming majority of table grape plantings; because grapevines are vegetatively propagated by cuttings, the lack of seeds does not present a problem for reproduction. It is an issue for breeders, who must either use a seeded variety as the female parent or rescue embryos early in development using tissue culture techniques. There are several sources of the seedlessness trait, all commercial cultivators get it from one of three sources: Thompson Seedless, Russian Seedless, Black Monukka, all being cultivars of Vitis vinifera. There are more than a dozen varieties of seedless grapes. Several, such as Einset Seedless, Benjamin Gunnels's Prime seedless grapes and Venus, have been spe