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 3:45 pm CST on April 19, 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:      

 $6,200

 Reform Medigap.

 $5,000

 Repeal Obamacare (larger savings in later years).

 $3,700

 Require Medicare home health co-payments.

 $673

 Eliminate the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant.

 $414

 Eliminate Health Professions grants.

 $327

 Eliminate Title X Family Planning.

 $150

 Eliminate the National Health Service Corps.

 $98

 Repeal Rural Health Outreach and Flexibility grants.

Eliminating outdated and ineffective programs. Congress often allows the federal government to run the same programs for decades, despite many studies showing their ineffectiveness.

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Inspired by the book Manhunt, by James Swanson, I decided to try and piece together the escape route that John Wilkes Booth took.

I love the movie “The Conspirator” and I wanted to look at some of the historical figures involved with the movie.

Library of Congress Photograph

After he shot Lincoln, Booth broke his left leg in his leap to the stage at Ford’s Theatre. Needing a doctor’s assistance, he and David Herold arrived at Dr. Mudd’s (about 30 miles from Washington) at approximately 4:00 A.M. on April 15, 1865. Dr. Mudd set, splinted, and bandaged the broken leg. (The National Park Service photograph to the left shows Booth’s boot which Dr. Mudd removed when he treated the leg.) Although he had met Booth on at least three prior occasions, Dr. Mudd said he did not recognize his patient. He said the two used the names “Tyson” and “Henston.” Booth and Herold stayed at the Mudd residence until the next afternoon (roughly a 12-hour stay). Dr. Mudd asked his handyman, John Best, to make a pair of rough crutches for Booth. Dr. Mudd was paid $25 for his services. Booth and Herold left in the direction of Zekiah Swamp.Within days Dr. Mudd was under arrest by the United States Government. He was charged with conspiracy and with harboring Booth and Herold during their escape. He went on trial along with Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, Mary Surratt, David Herold, Edman ‘Ned’ Spangler, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen. In court witnesses described Dr. Mudd as the most attentive of the accused. He was dressed in a black suit with a clean white shirt. Testimony against the doctor at the trial included his harsh treatment of some of his slaves. He shot one male slave (who survived). New information regarding Dr. Mudd surfaced in 1977. A previously unknown statement by conspirator George Atzerodt indicated that John Wilkes Booth had sent liquor and provisions to Dr. Mudd’s home two weeks prior to the assassination. Like the other defendants, Dr. Mudd was found guilty. His sentence: life imprisonment. He missed the death penalty by one vote.

Dr. Mudd was imprisoned at Ft. Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas about 70 miles from Key West. (The photo is from “Lincoln’s Assassins: A Complete Account of Their Capture, Trial, and Punishment” by Roy Z Chamlee, Jr.)  Dr. Mudd was allowed to stay in mail contact with his wife. Mrs. Mudd also wrote letters to President Andrew Johnson seeking her husband’s release. An attempted escape failed on September 25, 1865. In February of 1867 Dr. Mudd was assigned to the prison’s carpentry shop. In the summer of 1867, yellow fever broke out on the island. After the fort’s physician died on September 7, Dr. Mudd took a leadership role in aiding the sick. Dr. Mudd, himself, came down with the disease but recovered. Michael O’Laughlen was one of those who passed away due to the epidemic. Because of his outstanding efforts, all noncommissioned officers and soldiers on the island signed a petition to the government in support of Dr. Mudd.

In 2006 my good friend, Jim Dohren, took the photo to the right. It shows the view looking out of Dr. Mudd’s cell into the interior of Ft. Jefferson. There were no bars on the cell as there was no place to escape.

Join us as we explore the trail of John Wilkes Booth

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.

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Jan 25, 2010

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.

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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.

Spoof of President Obama’s possible commercial in 2012

My sons Hunter (pictured above) and Wilson traveled to Yosemite with our friend Sherwood Haisty Jr. from March 21 to March 27th.

In his article “Let’s talk deficits,” Arkansas Times, Feb 25, 2010, Ernest Dumas contended that paying for two wars was to blame in part for the deficit.

Heritage In Focus: Hijacking Troops for Pork

Brian Riedl is the author of the article “The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit,” (Heritage Foundation, June 21, 2010), and the next few days I will be sharing portions of his article.

Brian Riedl is The Heritage Foundation’s lead budget analyst and has built a solid reputation for interpreting, explaining and reforming the often arcane realm of federal budget policy.

Indeed, much of the current backlash against runaway federal spending can be attributed to Riedl’s work. As far back as 2002 and 2003, his writings exposed the beginnings of a federal spending spree that was pushing real federal spending to more than $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II.

Myth #2: Future deficits are “the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.”

Fact: These policies play a relatively minor role in the growth of future deficits. 

During his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama asserted: 

At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.[7]

In other words, according to President Obama, the massive budget deficits are President Bush’s fault, but the data do not support this assertion. President Bush implemented the three policies mentioned by President Obama in the early 2000s. Yet by 2007—the last year before the recession— the budget deficit had stabilized at $161 billion. Since the combined annual cost of these three Bush-era policies is now relatively stable, they cannot have suddenly caused a trillion-dollar leap in budget deficits beginning in 2009.[8]

President Obama made this claim by comparing the costs of the three policies against a “current-policy budget baseline”—a snapshot of what the budget would look like for the next decade if today’s tax and spending policies are maintained. The President’s claim assumes that the cost of these policies (more than $4 trillion) comprises more than half of the projected $8 trillion baseline deficit over 10 years.

The first problem is the President’s current-policy baseline deficit of “$8 trillion over the next decade.” He likely began with the 10-year, $9 trillion deficit in the White House’s budget baseline released in 2009 and then subtracted his own stimulus law that had already been incorporated.[9]

Yet this $8 trillion baseline vastly understated the 10-year budget deficit. It assumed trillions more in tax revenues than the CBO baseline assumed under the same policies. It also assumed that spending growth on regular discretionary programs, which has doubled over the past decade, would slow to approximately 2 percent annually for most of the decade. This smaller baseline deficit makes the cost of the wars, tax cuts, and Medicare drug entitlement appear larger in proportion to the deficit.

A more realistic and up-to-date measure would begin with budget data from the more neutral CBO. According to CBO data, maintaining today’s tax and spending policies, assuming a gradual troop drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan, will produce $13 trillion in deficits over the next decade.[10]

In contrast, the 10-year cost of extending the tax cuts ($3.2 trillion), the Medicare drug entitlement ($1 trillion), and Iraq and Afghanistan spending (approximately $500 billion, assuming a gradual troop drawdown) adds up to $4.7 trillion, a little more than one-third of the $13 trillion in baseline deficits.[11] (See Chart 2.) This contradicts the President’s claim that most of the deficits result from those three policies.

My sons Hunter and Wilson traveled to Yosemite with our friend Sherwood Haisty Jr. from March 21 to March 27th.

Rex Nelson wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 2, 2011 a great article called “Arkansas Bucket List.” The readers of his blog http://www.rexnelsonsouthernfried.com came up with a list of things you must do at least once in your life to be considered a well-rounded Arkansan. Nelson asked others to add their suggestions at his website. I am going through the list slowly.

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1. Pick pecans from a Delta pecan orchard on a November afternoon.

2. Have your photo taken on the Arkansas-Texas line in downtown Texarkana. (I have been to the Texarkana post office where the state line splits the post office in two. We used to sell brooms to Buhrman Pharr Hardware in Texarkana, Arkansas until they closed in 2002. Below is a picture of their building.)According to the Texarkana Gazette dated September 21, 1955, W. J. Buhrman of Connecticut came to Texarkana in 1880 with ten cents in his pocket, an unbounded confidence, healthy determination and the will to do.  In the 1880’s, Texarkana was a small village.  There was a limited number of buildings in the vicinity of the railroad station and dirt roads.  Beyond the railroad station, was vast wilderness and small farms.  Most of the farmers were poor except for the large planters along the Red River.  Apparently, during the late 19th century in Texarkana, sawmills and lumber yards were the main businesses.  With his vision and determination, W.J. Buhrman sold the idea of starting a hardware  business to J. L. Chatfield. 

Buhrman-Pharr Hardware Company Historic District

Elevation drawing of the Buhrman-Pharr Hardware Company retail building

BUHRMAN-PHARR HARDWARE COMPANY HISTORIC DISTRICT, TEXARKANA, MILLER COUNTY

SUMMARY