Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 16, the 136th day of 2014 and there are 229 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
Yes, Finally
A simple, true and very unfortunate situation and observation:
“Fifteen years ago, I reported on VA bureaucrats who took better care of administrative buildings and vacant hospitals than their own patients. Back then, an independent General Accounting Office found that the agency was spending more than $1 million a day to sustain unneeded hospital buildings. Another $35 million was squandered annually to perform upkeep on empty space, including unused lots and warehouses, while vets were forced to file malpractice suits over substandard care. … Fifteen years later, it’s the same old, same old. More empty excuses, feckless denials and deadly red tape. The names change, but the game’s the same: ‘Support the troops’ platitudes and photo-ops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
– Columnist Michelle Malkin
So, What Happened Today In 1863?
Civil War Union forces win the Battle of Champion Hill
The Union army seals the fate of Vicksburg by defeating the Confederates at the Battle of Champion Hill, Mississippi. Union General Ulysses S. Grant had successfully run the Confederate gauntlet at Vicksburg and placed the Army of Tennessee south of the stronghold, the Rebels’ last significant holding on the Mississippi River. But he did not move directly on Vicksburg because he knew Joseph Johnston was assembling a Confederate force in Jackson, Mississippi, 40 miles east of Vicksburg.
Instead, Grant advanced toward Jackson and prevented Johnston from uniting with the Vicksburg garrison, headed by John C. Pemberton. After boldly attacking and defeating the Confederates at Jackson, Grant left William T. Sherman’s corps to hold Johnston at bay. The Confederates were divided not only by Grant’s army, but also by conflicting strategy. Johnston wanted Pemberton to head into northern Mississippi to join forces with his own army. But Pemberton insisted on sticking close to Vicksburg and defending the city.
Grant sent his other two corps, commanded by James McPherson and John McClernand, to take on Pemberton. They found the Confederates on Champion Hill, about halfway between Jackson and Vicksburg. There, some 30,000 Union troops attacked 20,000 Confederates. The battle swayed back and forth, but the Federals eventually gained the upper hand. Pemberton’s men were forced to retreat, and one division was completely cut off from the rest of the army.
Although McClernand’s timidity kept the rout from being complete, the engagement was still the decisive action of the Vicksburg campaign. Pemberton fell back into Vicksburg, where Grant followed and soon bottled the Confederates. A six-week siege ensued, and Vicksburg fell on July 4.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 16 In History:
1770 – At Versailles, Louis, the French dauphin, marries Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Austrian Archduchess Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. France hoped their marriage would strengthen its alliance with Austria, its longtime enemy. In 1774, with the death of King Louis XV, Louis and Marie were crowned king and queen of France. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Marie and Louis resisted the advice of constitutional monarchists who sought to reform the monarchy in order to save it, and by 1791 opposition to the royal pair had become so fierce that the two were forced to attempt an escape to Austria. In August 1792, the royal couple was arrested by the sansculottes and imprisoned, and in September the monarchy was abolished by the National Convention. In November, evidence of Louis’ counterrevolutionary intrigues with Austria and other foreign nations was discovered, and he was put on trial for treason by the National Convention. The following January, Louis was convicted and condemned to death by a narrow majority. On January 21, he walked steadfastly to the guillotine and was executed. Nine months later, Marie Antoinette was convicted of treason by a tribunal, and on October 16 she followed her husband to the guillotine;
1771 – The Battle of Alamance, a pre-American Revolutionary War battle between local militia and a group of rebels called “The Regulators”, occurs in present-day Alamance County, North Carolina;
1777 – British-born Georgia Patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence Button Gwinnett receives a bullet wound in a duel with his political rival, Georgia city Whig Lachlan McIntosh. Three days later, Gwinnett died as a result of the gangrenous wound. McIntosh was also shot in the duel, but the wound was not fatal;
1849 – The New York City Board of Health is finally able to establish a hospital to deal with a cholera epidemic that, before it ends, kills more than 5,000 people. The rapidly growing city was ripe for an epidemic of this kind because of poor health conditions and its status as a destination for immigrants from around the world. On December 1, 1948, the ship New York arrived in New York from France. On board were the bodies of seven passengers who had died from cholera on the journey. Upon arrival, the surviving passengers were quarantined at a Staten Island customs warehouse to contain the outbreak. Within a month, 60 of these passengers had experienced cholera symptoms and 30 had died. Afraid of catching the disease and dying, healthy passengers decided to escape from quarantine. Soon, isolated outbreaks of cholera were turning up around New York. Spring brought a substantial rise in the number of cholera victims. There was no hospital to care for the afflicted and many city residents, fearful of catching the disease, did not want a new hospital for cholera victims built near them. Finally, on May 16, the city’s Board of Health started a hospital on the second floor of a building on Orange Street above a tavern. Vast numbers of people fled the city that summer as the death toll climbed above 2,500 by the end of July. The disposal of bodies became a serious problem. A mass grave was established on Randall’s Island, in the East River east of Manhattan; any person with a horse was expected to assist with the carrying of dead bodies;
1866 – Charles Elmer Hires invents root beer – (root beer – my favorite – a true hero in my book!);
1868 – The United States Senate votes against impeaching President Andrew Johnson and acquits him of committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” In February 1868, the House of Representatives charged Johnson with 11 articles of impeachment for vague “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Of the 11 counts, several went to the core of the conflict between Johnson and Congress. The House charged Johnson with illegally removing the secretary of war from office and for violating several Reconstruction Acts. The House also accused the president of hurling slanderous “inflammatory and scandalous harangues” against Congressional members. On February 24, the House passed all 11 articles of impeachment and the process moved into a Senate trial. The Senate trial lasted until May 26, 1868. By a vote of 35-19, Johnson was acquitted and finished out his term. Presidents Johnson and Clinton are the only presidents for whom the impeachment process went as far as a Senate trial. Nixon resigned before the House of Representatives could vote on impeachment;
1918 – In World War I, the Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense;
1929 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its first awards, at a dinner party for around 250 people held in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California;
1939 – The federal government began its first food stamp program in Rochester, New York;
1943 – In World War II, the British Royal Air Force sets into motion a plan to bomb key dams in order to flood the Ruhr region of Germany, while the German army pursues an anti-partisan sweep in Russia. Operation Chastise, part of a larger strategy of “area bombing” begun a year earlier was led by Guy Gibson, one of the RAF’s best bomber pilots. Leading 18 bombers at low altitude across the North Sea and Holland, Gibson lost six bombers and 56 of his crew (out of 133) who were shot down before reaching their destinations, the Mohne, Eder, and Sorpe dams. The surviving aircraft succeeded in destroying two of their three targets, causing the Ruhr river, a tributary of the Rhine, to flood the surrounding area, killing 1,268 people, including, unfortunately, 700 Russian slave laborers. Gibson would be awarded the Victoria Cross for his successful, though costly, raid;
1943 – During World War II, in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising comes to an end as Nazi soldiers gain control of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, blowing up the last remaining synagogue and beginning the mass deportation of the ghetto’s remaining dwellers to the Treblinka extermination camp. An underground resistance group was established in the ghetto–the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB)–and limited arms were acquired at great cost. Thousands were slaughtered as the Germans systematically moved down the ghetto, blowing up buildings one by one. The ZOB took to the sewers to continue the fight, but on May 8 their command bunker fell to the Germans, and their resistant leaders committed suicide. By May 16, the ghetto was firmly under Nazi control, and mass deportation of the last Warsaw Jews to Treblinka began. During the uprising, some 300 hundred German soldiers were killed to the thousands of Warsaw Jews who perished. Virtually all the former ghetto residents who survived to reach Treblinka were dead by the end of the war;
1956 – Executives from the Detroit-based automotive giant General Motors (GM) dedicate the new GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Costing around $100 million–or about half a billion in today’s dollars–to develop and staffed by around 4,000 scientists, engineers, designers and other personnel, the GM Technical Center was one of the largest industrial research centers in the world;
1960 – During the (first) Cold War, in the wake of the Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane on May 1, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev lashes out at the United States and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a Paris summit meeting between the two heads of state. Khrushchev’s outburst angered Eisenhower and doomed any chances for successful talks or negotiations at the summit. On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA spy plane and captured the pilot, Gary Francis Powers. The United States issued public denials that the aircraft was being used for espionage, claiming instead that it was merely a weather plane that had veered off course. The Soviets thereupon triumphantly produced Powers, large pieces of wreckage from the plane, and Powers’ admission that he was working for the CIA. The incident was a public relations fiasco for Eisenhower, who was forced to admit that the plane had indeed been spying on Russia. The collapse of the May 1960 summit meeting was a crushing blow to those in the Soviet Union and the United States who believed that a period of “peaceful coexistence” between the two superpowers was on the horizon. During the previous few years, both Eisenhower and Khrushchev had publicly indicated their desire for an easing of cold war tensions, but the spy plane incident put an end to such talk, at least for the time being;
1965 – In the Vietnam War, what is described by the United States government as “an accidental explosion of a bomb on one aircraft which spread to others” at the Bien Hoa air base leaves 27 U.S. servicemen and 4 South Vietnamese dead and some 95 Americans injured. More than 40 U.S. and South Vietnamese planes, including 10 B-57s, were destroyed;
1968 – During the Vietnam War, Donald E. Ballard, Corpsman U.S. Navy, is awarded the Medal of Honor for action this date in Quang Tri Province. Ballard, from Kansas City, Missouri was a corpsman with Company M, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, 3rd Marine Division. He had just finished evacuating two Marines with heatstroke when his unit was surprised by a Viet Cong ambush. Immediately racing to the aid of a casualty, Ballard applied a field dressing and was directing four Marines in the removal of the wounded man when an enemy soldier tossed a grenade into the group. With a warning shout of, “Grenade!” Ballard vaulted over the stretcher and pulled the grenade under his body. The grenade did not go off. Nevertheless, he received the Medal of Honor for his selfless act of courage. Ballard was only the second man whose valor was rewarded despite the fact that the deadly missile did not actually explode;
1972 – In the Vietnam War, a series of air strikes over five days destroys all of North Vietnam’s pumping stations in the southern panhandle, thereby cutting North Vietnam’s main fuel line to South Vietnam. These strikes were part of Operation Linebacker, an air offensive against North Vietnam that had been ordered by President Richard Nixon in early April in response to a massive communist offensive launched on March 30;
1974 – Former U.S. Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst pleaded guilty to failing to testify fully at his Senate confirmation hearing about an investigation of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp.; he was fined $100 and given a suspended 30-day sentence;
1975 – Via the southeast ridge route, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world;
1975 – Norma Jean Armistead checks herself into Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles, California with a newborn that she claims to have given birth to at home. Some staff members were already aware that Armistead, a nurse at the hospital, had a pregnancy listed on her medical charts the previous year, but dismissed it as a mistake because they didn’t believe the 44-year-old woman was still capable of getting pregnant. Examining doctors were even more confused when it appeared that Armistead hadn’t actually given birth. The mystery was soon solved when a 28-year-old woman turned up dead in her Van Nuys apartment. The baby she was carrying, and expected to give birth to shortly, had been cut from her body. Doctors quickly pieced the evidence together and Armistead was arrested for murder. Armistead, unsuccessfully pleading insanity, was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life;
1988 – The United States Supreme Court rules trash may be searched without a warrant;
1989 – During his visit to Beijing, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, formally ending a 30-year rift between the two Communist powers;
2004 – Pope John Paul II named six new saints, including Gianna Beretta Molla, revered by abortion foes because she’d refused to end her pregnancy despite warnings it could kill her. Beretta Molla, an Italian pediatrician, died in 1962 at age 39, a week after giving birth to her fourth child;
2004 – The Bush administration announced a new initiative to speed up the approval process for new combination AIDS drugs designed to bring cheap, easy-to-use treatment to millions of people in Africa and the Caribbean;
2005 – Kuwait permits women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote;
2009 – Rachel Alexandra became the first filly to win the Preakness Stakes since 1924, holding off a late charge by Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird to capture the middle jewel of the Triple Crown by a length;
2013 – President Barack Obama named a temporary chief for the scandal-marred Internal Revenue Service and pressed Congress to approve new security money to prevent another Benghazi-style terrorist attack – (yet there’s “not a smidgen”-?-);
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 11 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states:
WAIPIO VALLEY, Big Island, Hawaii
As I close today, I
When a thought
God likes to sing too! He even likes to share his lullabies with those he loves. Not only is God our glorious Father, he is also like a mother. He gently rocks and quiets his children with his love and affectionate care.
That leads to a verse
For the Lord your God is living among you. He is a mighty savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.
– Zephaniah 3:17
That brings a prayer
Father God, I pray that when the storms of life rage against me, I will remember these words and find refuge, comfort and peace in your sheltering care. Make me aware God of your singing in my life as you make your salvation more clear to me each day. In Jesus name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
