Senator Pryor asks for Spending Cut Suggestions! Here are a few!(Part 17)(The Conspirator, Part 12, Mary Surratt part C)
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Here are a few more I just emailed to him myself at 8:38 am CST on Thursday April 21, 2011.
Open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to leasing.
(The savings are leasing revenues, which are classified as negative spending in the federal budget.)
$200
Suspend federal land purchases.
Almost all of the proposed cuts in federal spending will provoke strong objections from constituencies that benefit from having Members of Congress give them taxpayer money taken from someone else. Yet the difficulties caused by each of these cuts should be measured against the status quo option of doubling the national debt over the next decade, risking an economic crisis, and drowning future generations in taxes.
Governing involves difficult choices, and Congress simply cannot continue to court long-term disaster for all merely to avoid short-term difficulties for some.
Clip of the new movie of Robert Redford.
Starring: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, Toby Kebbel
President Andrew Johnson maintained that he never was shown the plea for mercy. Judge Advocate Joseph Holt said he had been in Johnson’s presence when the president read the plea. Johnson was quoted as saying that Mary Surratt “kept the nest that hatched the egg.” Anna Surratt tried in vain to meet with the president. Thus, along with Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt, Mary Surratt was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She wore a black dress and black veil. Her last words on the scaffold were “Don’t let me fall.”
Even Captain Christian Rath, the hangman, did not expect Mrs. Surratt to be executed. In his personal account of the hanging he stated, “The night before the execution I took the rope to my room and there made the nooses. I preserved the piece of rope intended for Mrs. Surratt for the last. By the time I got at this I was tired, and I admit that I rather slighted the job. Instead of putting seven turns to the knot – as a regulation hangman’s knot has seven turns – I put only five in this one. I really did not think Mrs. Surratt would be swung from the end of it, but she was, and it was demonstrated to my satisfaction, at least, that a five-turn knot will perform as successful a job as a seven-turn knot.”
Four years later Anna Surratt made a successful plea to the government for her mother’s remains. Today, Mary Surratt is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The address of the cemetery is 1300 Bladensburg Road, NE. Her headstone reads simply “MRS. SURRATT.” (The photograph is from Mary Surratt: An American Tragedy by Elizabeth Steger Trindal.) Anna Surratt and Isaac Surratt were buried on each side of their mother. John Surratt was buried in Baltimore. Strangely, John Lloyd, whose testimony was so damaging to Mary, was buried less than 100 yards south of her in the same cemetery. His simple tombstone is marked John M. Lloyd.Elizabeth “Bessie” Jenkins, Mary Surratt’s mother, passed away in June 1878 at age 84. She was buried at St. Ignatius Church on Brinkley Road in Oxon Hill, Maryland. She never made a public comment about her daughter’s execution.Historical opinion is divided on the subject of Mary Surratt’s guilt or innocence. In 1977 a “Lost Confession” of George Atzerodt surfaced. Regarding Mary Surratt, Atzerodt stated, “Booth told me that Mrs. Surratt went to Surrattsville to get out the guns (Two Carbines) which had been taken to that place by Herold. This was Friday.” On the face of it, this statement by Atzerodt would certainly seem to point towards Mary Surratt’s complicity with John Wilkes Booth. (For the full text of Atzerodt’s lost confession, CLICK HERE.) Although no one knows for certain, it seems at least possible that Mary knew about the plot to kidnap the president, but may not have known about the plan to assassinate him. Several good arguments for Mary’s innocence are made by Elizabeth Steger Trindal in her article entitled The Two Men Who Held The Noosein the July 2003 edition of the Surratt Courier.
The Daily Hatch 