Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is April 15, the 105th day of 2014 and there are 260 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 !!!
I’ll take this slot today to wish everyone a Happy ‘TAX’ Day!!!
It’s that special day each year when you are compelled to relinquish your earned income for redistribution. This year, working Americans are required, on average, to send the IRS every cent earned in the first 111 days of 2014 — and that’s three more days than last year. In fact, Obama has now proposed more than 440 tax increases, plus another 20 hidden in the so-called “Affordable Care Act.
If anyone remembers: Unjust taxation was the catalyst for the first American Revolution, and once again, the central government is seizing taxes for purposes not authorized by our Constitution.
So please don’t forget: U.S. DEBT CLOCK
So, What Happened Today In 1865?
President Abraham Lincoln dies from his assassin’s bullet from the evening before
At 7:22 a.m., Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, dies from a bullet wound inflicted the night before by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer. The president’s death came only six days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Lincoln had just served the most difficult presidency in history, successfully leading the country through civil war. His job was exhausting and overwhelming at times. He had to manage a tremendous military effort, deal with diverse opinions in his own Republican party, counter his Democratic critics, maintain morale on the northern home front, and keep foreign countries such as France and Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. He did all of this, and changed American history when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, converting the war goal from reunion of the nation to a crusade to end slavery.
Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth jumped to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. An hour after dawn the next morning, Abraham Lincoln died, becoming the first president to be assassinated. His body was taken to the White House, where it lay until April 18, at which point it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station and boarded on a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, his home before becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the train’s railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.
Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On April 15 In History:
1784 – The first balloon is flown in Ireland;
1813 – U.S. troops under James Wilkinson siege the Spanish-held city of Mobile in future state of Alabama;
1850 – The city of San Francisco is incorporated;
1871 – ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok becomes the marshal of Abilene, Kansas;
1912 – The RMS Titanic, billed as unsinkable, sinks into the icy waters of the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage, killing 1,517 people. The United Kingdom’s White Star Line built the Titanic to be the most luxurious cruise ship in the world. It was nearly 900 feet long and more than 100 feet high. The Titanic could reach speeds of 30 knots and was thought to be the world’s fastest ship. With its individualized watertight compartments, it was seen as virtually unsinkable. The iceberg that struck the ship was spotted at 11:40 p.m. Although a dead-on collision was avoided, the Titanic‘s starboard side violently scraped the iceberg, ripping open six compartments. The ship’s design could withstand only four compartments flooding. In 1985, after many attempts over many years, divers were finally able to locate the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the North Atlantic;
1918 – In World War I, with the Germans, in the throes of a major spring offensive on the Western Front, hammering their positions in Flanders, France, British forces evacuate Passchendaele Ridge, won by the Allies at such a terrible cost just five months earlier;
1920 – A paymaster and a security guard are killed during a mid-afternoon armed robbery of a shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Out of this rather unremarkable crime grew one of the most famous trials in American history and a landmark case in forensic crime detection;
1923 – Insulin becomes generally available for people suffering with diabetics;
1944 – During World War II, in the pacific region, the U.S. plans Operation Wedlock, an invasion of the Kurile Islands of northern Japan. American and Canadian troops, aided by the Ninth Fleet and American bombers ordered to bomb the islands every day, prepare to occupy the islands long disputed between Japan and Russia. The plan was a fiction. There was no invasion—or a Ninth Fleet. It was all a ruse to divert Japanese attention away from the Marianas Islands, the Allies’ true target. Operation Forager, the real thing, was launched on June 15, 1944, with a landing on Saipan, one of the three Marianas Islands. It was a U.S. success, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Japanese—both from combat and ritual suicide—including that of the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito;
1944 – In World War II, in Europe, the Soviet Red Army occupies Tarnopol, one of the principal cities of Eastern Galicia, across the former Polish border. Tarnopol, traditionally a part of Poland, then part of the Soviet Union, had become German-occupied territory in the great German offensive eastward in June 1941;
1945 – During World War II, British and Canadian troops liberate the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen;
1955 – Ray Kroc starts the McDonald’s chain of fast food restaurants;
1959 – As a part of the (first) Cold War, four months after leading a successful revolution in Cuba, Fedel Castro visits the United States. The visit was marked by tensions between Castro and the American government. The trip got off to an inauspicious start when it became clear that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had no intention of meeting with Castro. Instead, Eisenhower went to the golf course to avoid any chance meeting with Castro. Relations between the United States and Castro deteriorated rapidly following the April visit. In less than a year, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to begin arming and training a group of Cuban exiles to attack Cuba (the disastrous attack, known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, was eventually carried out during the Kennedy administration). The heated Cold War animosity between America and Cuba would last for over 40 years;
1964 – The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel connecting Virginia’s Eastern Shore with Virginia Beach was opened to traffic;
1967 – During the Vietnam War, massive parades to protest Vietnam policy are held in New York and San Francisco. In New York, police estimated that 100,000 to 125,000 people listened to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Prior to the march, nearly 200 draft cards were burned by youths in Central Park. In San Francisco, black nationalists led a march, but most of the 20,000 marchers were white;
1970 – In the Vietnam War, as part of the third phase of U.S. troop withdrawals announced by President Nixon, the 1st Infantry Division departs Vietnam. It was deployed to the area north of Saigon in October 1965, one of the first Army infantry divisions to arrive in Vietnam. The division consisted of seven battalions of light infantry and two battalions of mechanized infantry. Other combat elements included an armored reconnaissance unit and four battalions of artillery. It returned to Fort Riley, Kansas, upon its departure from South Vietnam. The 1st Infantry Division was awarded the Vietnamese Civil Action Medal and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm. Among other individual awards, its soldiers won 11 Medals of Honor, 67 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 905 Silver Stars for bravery. The division suffered 20,770 soldiers killed or wounded in action, slightly more than the 20,659 casualties the division suffered inWorld War II;
1974 – Members of the Symbionese Liberation Army held up a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco; a member of the group was SLA kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, who by this time was going by the name “Tania”. Hearst later said she’d been forced to participate;
1989 – 96 people died in a crush of soccer fans at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England;
1989 – Students in Beijing, China launched a series of pro-democracy protests; the demonstrations culminated in a government crackdown at Tiananmen Square;
1998 – Pol Pot, the architect of Cambodia’s killing fields, dies of apparently natural causes while serving a life sentence imposed against him by his own Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society;
2004 – In an audiotape, a man identifying himself as Osama bin Laden offered a “truce” to European countries that did not attack Muslims, saying it would begin when their soldiers left Islamic nations; key European nations, including Iraq war opponents Germany and France, vigorously rejected the overture;
2009 – Whipped up by conservative commentators and bloggers, tens of thousands of protesters staged “tea parties” around the country to tap into the collective angst stirred up by a bad economy, government spending and bailouts;
2013 – Two bombs go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 other people in attendance. Four days later, after an intense manhunt that shut down the Boston area, police captured one of the bombing suspects, 19-year-old Dzhohkar Tsarnaev; his older brother and fellow suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died following a shootout with law enforcement earlier that same day;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
This is why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him. If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
– Romans 13:6-7
Holy God, I thank you that I am free in you and belong to no one and no power. Yet because I want your name to be respected, I will obey the laws of this land according to your will. At the same time, O Lord, I fervently pray that you will heal our land and bring our hearts back to you. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
