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 7:21 am on CST on April 14, 2011.

In my past posts I could have been accused of giving just general ideas of where to cut. Now I am starting in with specifics that are taken from the article “How to cut $343 Billion from the federal budget,” by Brian Riedl, Heritage Foundation, October 28, 2010(Spending cuts in millions of dollars:  

 $6,500

 Reduce energy subsidies for commercialization and some research activities.

$600

Block grant and devolve Environmental Protection Agency grant programs.

$200

Restructure the Power Marketing Administrations to charge market-based rates.

$63

Eliminate the Science to Achieve Results Program.

Privatization. Many current government functions could be performed more efficiently by the private sector.

It has been 150 years since the beginning of the Civil War that started in April of 1861 at Ft Sumter.

Submitted by Bob Janiskee on February 11, 2009 – 10:13am

Union veteran (1862 enlistee) William Henry Jackson at the Gettysburg 75th anniversary reunion in 1938. Jackson was one of the last surviving Civil War veterans when he died in 1942 at age 99. National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection.

Gettysburg National Military Park celebrates its 114th on February 11, but it was the battle anniversaries that interested the men who actually fought in battle. In 1938, the 75th anniversary of the battle, motion picture crews filmed the aged veterans as they gathered for their final reunion on the battlefield. There’s some amazing film footage on the Internet.

In the immediate aftermath of the biggest and bloodiest battle of the Civil War — the July 1-3, 1863, Battle of Gettysburg that produced 51,000 casualties and a key Union victory – few survivors were interested in revisiting the scene of the carnage. With the passage of years, however, a good deal of interest in veterans reunions emerged.

Many veterans reunions took place at Gettysburg. At first these reunions were only for veterans who took part in the epic battle. Later, when fewer Civil War veterans remained alive, the Gettysburg reunions were for any and all Civil War veterans. The reunions held in 1878, 1913, and 1938 are especially noteworthy, being larger in scale and marking “touchstone” battle anniversaries.

15th Anniversary Reunion

The first of Gettysburg’s three larger, more heavily publicized veterans reunions was held in1878 on the 15th anniversary of the battle. It was strictly a Grand Army of the Republic affair, and it isn’t hard to appreciate why Confederate veterans weren’t on the scene. Only 15 years after the cessation of hostilities, the North and South were still divided in spirit even if not in fact. The burden of recent defeat still lay heavily on the South. Reconstruction had been a protracted humiliating experience, and some southern locales still hosted Federal occupying troops. (Here in South Carolina where I live, the last Reconstruction-era Federal troops didn’t leave until 1879.)

50th Anniversary Reunion

The largest of all the veterans reunions, a gathering that drew more than 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans, took place in 1913 on the 50th anniversary of the battle. The passage of half a century had tempered regional animosities a good deal and the surviving veterans on both sides felt a sense of kinship – the Brotherhood of Battle, as it were. There were still plenty of veterans around, too. Though getting on in years, some Civil War veterans were still in their early sixties and the youngest was said to be 61.

The reunion gave the veterans a chance to visit the battlefield hotspots of their memories, swap stories and souvenirs, and do the myriad little things that make battlefield reunions so special to the surviving veterans. There were plenty of programmed activities, of course, including speeches, reenactments, ritual expressions of friendship between Union and Confederate veterans, and ceremonies at battlefield monuments and markers.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the huge 50th anniversary reunion was the “Great Camp,” the 280-acre encampment that was set up to accommodate the hordes of veterans on hand. Each veteran was assigned a cot in a tent sleeping eight men. The thousands of tents set up for the Great Camp created nearly 48 miles of avenues and company streets. (What a sight that was!). Hot meals were provided from173 field kitchens.

75th Anniversary Reunion

The years following the 1913 reunion took a very heavy toll on the ranks of the remaining Civil War veterans. By 1938, the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, records indicated that their numbers had dwindled to somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 to 11,000. Given that the youngest of the Civil War vets were in their late 80s, it’s a wonder that nearly 2,000 attended the reunion that was held at the battlefield from June 29 to July 6, 1938. It’s thought that fewer than 70 of the attendees had actually been present at Gettysburg during the battle.

This final major reunion of Civil War vets didn’t have the aura of spectacle that prevailed at the 50th anniversary reunion. You just couldn’t do a lot of physically taxing things with elderly gents (average age 94) who had “lost the pep in their step.” In fact, many were no longer ambulatory and some even arrived in Gettysburg on stretchers.

Most of what transpired at this last reunion was ceremonial in nature and arranged for the tens of thousands of spectators -– a wheelchair-prominent parade of veterans (of all wars), a military flyover, that sort of thing. The big event was the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial (on Oak Hill), a ceremony highlighted by President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech and a joint Union/Confederate undraping of the memorial and lighting of its eternal flame.

A sense of closure or finality pervaded the 1938 reunion. Everyone realized that the advanced age and frailty of the veterans would make further reunions of any decent size impractical, and that most of the old vets would soon be dead.

The academicians and media representatives on hand were primed to take advantage of the grand opportunity this final reunion presented. Historians and ethnologists gathered oral histories. Journalists conducted interviews. Photographers took scads of black and white stills. And much to the delight of generations to follow, cinematographers were on the scene to take motion pictures (some with sound).

You Can Step Back in Time

Do you want to step back to a time when Civil War veterans were still alive and sharing their stories?

If so, check out the following video and see what is probably the most interesting of all the Civil War veteran movie clips. It shows Union and Confederate veterans shaking hands over the stone wall at the Bloody Angle on Cemetery Ridge, the place that marked the crest of Pickett’s Charge and the High Tide of the Confederacy. Several Confederates spice up the occasion by rendering their version of the “rebel yell.” (This is apparently the only authentic audio recording of a Confederate veteran rendering this battle cry on a Civil War battlefield.)

Senator Hatch launches his campaign to put America’s fiscal house in order by passing the Balanced Budget amendment; a constitutional amendment that would force the congress and the president to balance the national budget each year.

Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted:

The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not to enact a balanced budget amendment (Boozman says yes; Pryor no); and on what policies would promote the kind of economic growth that would make this a little easier.

Over the next few days I want to take a closer look a Cato Policy Report from July/August 1996 called “Seven Reforms to Balance the Budget” by Stephen Moore. Stephen Moore was the Cato Institute’s director of fiscal policy studies, and afterwards, a Cato senior fellow. This article is based on testimony he delivered before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight on March 27, 1996. Moore commented:

Deficit spending is an unconscionable form of fiscal child abuse. There are hundreds of groups in Washington that pretend to speak for the interests of children. But who in Washington, among the thousands of powerful special-interest lobbyists and self-proclaimed do-gooders, speaks for the children who are going to have to pay off our irresponsible debts? The single most pro-child policy that any of us can pursue in Washington today is to reduce the crushing burden of debt our government is now preparing to place on the next generation’s backs.

I sincerely wish that we did not need a constitutional amendment to cure Washington’s addiction to red ink. Unfortunately, the destruction of our nation’s once firmly held moral rule against deficit spending–what James Buchanan called “the collapse of the constitutional consensus”–requires us to amend our Constitution and command Congress to do what it used to feel honor bound to do–balance the budget.

Tax-and-spend opponents of a balanced-budget amendment argue that a constitutional requirement is just “a gimmick.” No one really believes that. If the amendment were a gimmick, Congress would have approved it long ago. Defense contractors, corporate lobbyists, federal workers, teachers’ unions, the welfare industry, and other powerful special-interest groups ferociously attack the amendment, not because they think it won’t work, but because they shudder at the thought that it will. What frightens the predator economy in Washington is that gift-bearing politicians may have the federal credit card taken away from them.

The U.S. House of Representatives last year wisely approved a balanced-budget amendment, but it was defeated in the Senate. The matter is now out of your hands. The real issue is, What can be done in the meantime to make the budget process work better and to end deficit spending?

Last year the House passed a courageous budget, crafted by Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, that promised a balanced budget by 2002. But one thing is a virtual certainty: no matter how sincere your intentions of balancing the budget, the deficit will not be eliminated by 2002 unless new budget enforcement rules are implemented to ensure that this admirable, though minimal, goal is honored.

_________________________

Jan 25, 2010

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 10pm CST on April 13, 2011.

In my past posts I could have been accused of giving just general ideas of where to cut. Now I am starting in with specifics that are taken from the article “How to cut $343 Billion from the federal budget,” by Brian Riedl, Heritage Foundation, October 28, 2010(Spending cuts in millions of dollars:

$8,000

$2,000

Trim Head Start by $2 billion and convert it into vouchers.

$2,000

Scale back the Education Department bureaucracy.

$1,500

Eliminate dozens of small and duplicative education grants.

$298

Eliminate state grants for Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities.

Consolidating duplicative programs. Past Congresses have repeatedly piled duplicative programs on top of preexisting programs, increasing administrative costs and creating a bureaucratic maze that confuses people seeking assistance.

_________________________________________

It has been 150 years since the beginning of the Civil War that started in April of 1861 at Ft Sumter.

At 97, last known Civil War widow is living link to history
Associated Press ^ | 4/12/03 | PHILLIP RAWLS

Posted on Tuesday, February 03, 2004 9:46:40 PM by Jaysun

ENTERPRISE, Ala. – America’s last known Civil War widow never had a hoop skirt or a mansion like Tara.

Alberta Martin was a sharecropper’s daughter with a young baby and no job when, in 1927, she married a man 60 years her senior. Yes, former Confederate soldier William Jasper Martin was old, but his $50-a.m.onth pension as a Civil War veteran ensured there would be food on the table and – many years later – fame.

“Miz Alberta,” as everyone calls her, is 97 now and in a wheelchair. But Civil War re-enactors and history buffs take her to Sons of Confederate Veterans events from Gettysburg to St. Louis. They see that she has regular visitors at a nursing home in Enterprise and make sure that, after a lifetime in poverty, she can be comfortable in her final days as a living link to history.

Her role became even more significant when Gertrude Janeway, the last widow of a Union veteran, died in January in Tennessee at age 93.

Martin’s eldest son appreciates the late-in-life recognition and comfort that has come to his mother.

“She lived a rough, rough life back in the ’20s and ’30s. They sharecropped and had a miserable life,” said Harold Farrow, 78, of North Little Rock, Ark.

His mother was a seventh-grade dropout working in an Alabama textile mill when she met a cab driver named Howard Farrow. They stood before a preacher to get married, but never got a marriage license to make it official.

It didn’t matter. Howard Farrow liked his whiskey, she recalled, and he died in a traffic accident six months after Harold was born.

Alone and living with her father, she began to notice “the old man” who walked by her house on his way to play dominoes with friends. William Jasper Martin was nearly 82 and she was barely 21. Their courting consisted of a few conversations.

“He asked my daddy if he could let him have me. My daddy told him that he didn’t care if I didn’t,” she recalled.

On Dec. 10, 1927, Alberta and W.J. Martin were married in a ceremony at the courthouse in Andalusia in south Alabama. She wore “just a plain blue cotton dress.”

Theirs was never a typical or an easy marriage.

Their wedding night was spent in her half-brother’s crowded house with lots of other family. “When we went to bed, we had the baby in between us and he went to crying,” she said.

Two days later, they rented their first house, starting with a stove and a table as the only furnishings.

Even in those days, people wanted to know why a young woman would marry such an old man?

Martin, who had a sense of humor when she had nothing else, usually gave a comical answer: “It’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.”

But for a woman as poor as Martin, the real answer was simpler: “He had $50 a month.”

“Sometimes I would look out over the fields and wonder what it was like to be married to a younger man,” she recalled.

For her husband, the marriage brought late-in-life joy. On Oct. 10, 1928, their son, Willie, was born, and the old man loved to go to town and carry the boy on his shoulders, proudly displaying his offspring.

They had been married nearly five years when the Civil War veteran died in 1932.

Two months later, his widow married his grandson by a previous marriage.

The marriage of Alberta and Charlie Martin caused the gossip to fly. They got kicked out of their church. People gave them funny looks.

Alberta Martin made no excuses.

“I was lonesome,” she said.

They were eventually welcomed back by the church, and their marriage worked, with the couple marking their 50th anniversary before Charlie died in 1983.

Afterward, Martin lived with her son Willie, making do off her third husband’s pension as a World War II veteran.

She told people she was a Civil War widow and she ought to be getting the Civil War widow’s pension that Alabama still had on its law books from 1895. Her daughter-in-law even wrote then-Gov. George Wallace to explain her situation.

But when you’re a poor widow with little education, it’s hard to get anybody’s attention in the state capital.

In 1996, Enterprise dentist Ken Chancey and other members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans took up her cause. They got state officials to approve her for a pension.

They even bought the first air conditioner for a woman who had lived her entire life in the sweltering summers of south Alabama.

These days, they bring her sacks of her favorite snack – Cheetos – and relish her recounting of the stories that W.J. Martin told her about the Civil War, about how food was in such short supply near the end of the war that he would grab whatever he could find in roadside gardens while on the march.

“He’d get a handful of peas or a watermelon or whatever he could and eat it,” she said.

At 96, Martin’s hearing is going and some days so is her memory.

But when her memory won’t work like she wants, she can still find her sense of humor and a smile: “I’m old enough to forget, ain’t I?”

One thing that’s not left to Martin’s fading memory is her funeral. It’s already planned in great detail.

It will be a Confederate heritage ceremony, complete with Civil War re-enactors and a Confederate brass ensemble. A mule-drawn wagon will carry her casket to a cemetery near Elba where her last husband is buried, and a Confederate battle flag will cover her casket.

While others debate the appropriateness of the Confederate battle flag, Martin talks proudly of her burial plans.

“It’s my flag,” she says.

Max Brantley thought the “Fayetteville Finger” was a joke when he first heard about it, but he later embraced it and was disappointed when the Democrats could not get it passed. Likewise other liberals John Brummett and Pat Lynch were surprised that that it did not make it.

The http://bluearkansasblog.com/ was the latest to rant and rave ab0ut the Fayetteville Finger getting put to rest:

So here we have it.  Democrats, despite controlling majorities in both the house and the senate, caved to Republicans on the Fayetteville Finger.  All they had to do was vote as a block, let the Republicans scream, and pass the damn map that would have allowed us to compete in three of the four districts.  Now we’re stuck with this map for ten years that may not even come close to doing that.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that the first gained some southern delta counties rather than moving west, but I wish we could have helped Democrats in the second and fourth as well.  Can we still compete in the 4th with this map, post Ross?  God I hope so.  Do we have a shot at taking down Griffin still?  I think so, but it will be tricky.  I’m a never say never, charge hell with a bucket of water kind of guy…but I have to say, this leaves a foul taste in my mouth….

From here, well, we do our best of what we got.  Things look pretty good in the 1st and so-so in the second.  I don’t care about Ross but I was hoping that after he steps down in 2014 we could nominate and elect a good Democrat from that district.  I’d like to be more enthused and ready to rally the troops, but it’s hard to do that when folks in the Democratic Party are working so hard to undermine Democrats.

_________________________________

It has been 150 years since the beginning of the Civil War that started in April of 1861 at Ft Sumter.

Wives and children followed their husbands

Wives and children sometimes followed their husbands to war, particularly in the early period of the conflict. “(The soldiers) were in the camp, and the women were right there and the kids were right there. They called them camp followers,” Kelly Knauer, editor of ‘TIME Civil War: An Illustrated History.’ This image, from 1861, may be a family portrait; the soldier was a member of the 31st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, attached to the Army of the Potomac in Washington. View more photos in the new book TIME The Civil War: An Illustrated History.

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  9:55 pm CST on April 12th.

In my past posts I could have been accused of giving just general ideas of where to cut. Now I am starting in with specifics that are taken from the article “How to cut $343 Billion from the federal budget,” by Brian Riedl, Heritage Foundation, October 28, 2010(Spending cuts in millions of dollars:

$6,000

Eliminate the Community Development Block Grant program.

$598

Eliminate the Rural Utilities Service.

$523

Eliminate the Economic Development Administration.

$480

Eliminate NeighborWorks America (formerly the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation).

$200

Consolidate the Rural Housing and Development Programs and convert them into block grants.

$73

Eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission.

$48

Eliminate the Denali Commission.

$31

Eliminate the Minority Development Business Agency.

$8

Eliminate the Delta Regional Authority.