Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is March 23, the 82nd day of 2014 and there are 283 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 !!!
Today, I would like to send my appreciation to all puppies, young and old, on this, our ‘National Puppy Day’!!! Everyone should spend an extra moment to give an extra hug and kiss for your four legged loved ones who provide us with such ‘unconditional’ love, regardless of our own behavior! (All three of ours say an extra treat wouldn’t hurt either!)
So, What Happened Today In 1862?
Rebel forces suffer defeat at the first battle of Kernstown
During the American Civil War, at the First Battle of Kernstown, Virginia, Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson suffers a rare defeat when his attack on Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley fails.
Jackson was trying to prevent Union General Nathaniel Banks from sending troops from the Shenandoah to General George McClellan’s army near Washington, D.C. McClellan was preparing to send his massive army by water to the James Peninsula southeast of Richmond, Virginia, for a summer campaign against the Confederate capital. When Turner Ashby, Jackson’s cavalry commander, detected that Yankee troops were moving out of the valley, Jackson decided to attack and keep the Union forces divided.
Ashby attacked at Kernstown on March 22. He reported to Jackson that only four Union regiments were present–perhaps 3,000 men. In fact, Union commander James Shields actually had 9,000 men at Kernstown but kept most of them hidden during the skirmishing on March 22. The rest of Jackson’s force arrived the next day, giving the Confederates about 4,000 men. The 23rd was a Sunday, and the religious Jackson tried not to fight on the Sabbath. The Yankees could see his deployment, though, so Jackson chose to attack that afternoon. He struck the Union left flank, but the Federals moved troops into place to stop the Rebel advance. At a critical juncture, Richard Garnett withdrew his Confederate brigade due to a shortage of ammunition, and this exposed another brigade to a Union attack. The Northern troops poured in, sending Jackson’s entire force in retreat.
Jackson’s troop losses included some 80 killed, 375 wounded, and 260 missing or captured, while the Union lost 118 dead, 450 wounded, and 22 missing. Despite the defeat, the battle had positive results for the Confederates. Unnerved by the attack, President Abraham Lincoln ordered McClellan to leave an entire corps to defend Washington, thus drawing troops from McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign. The battle was the opening of Jackson’s famous campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. Over the following three months, Jackson’s men marched hundreds of miles, won several major battles, and kept three separate Union forces occupied in the Shenandoah.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On March 23 In History:
1775 – Leading up to the American Revolution, during a speech before the second Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry responds to the increasingly oppressive British rule over the American colonies by declaring, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Following the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Patrick Henry was appointed governor of Virginia by the Continental Congress;
1806 – In the Old West, after passing a wet and tedious winter near the Pacific Coast, Lewis and Clark happily leave behind Fort Clatsop and head east for home. The Corps of Discovery arrived at the Pacific the previous November, having made a difficult crossing over the rugged Rocky Mountains. Their winter stay on the south side of the Columbia River-dubbed Fort Clatsop in honor of the local Indians-had been plagued by rainy weather, thieving Indians, and a scarcity of fresh meat. No one in the Corps of Discovery regretted leaving Fort Clatsop behind;
1839 – The initials “O.K.” are first published in The Boston Morning Post. Meant as an abbreviation for “oll correct,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time, OK steadily made its way into the everyday speech of Americans. During the late 1830s, it was a favorite practice among younger, educated circles to misspell words intentionally, then abbreviate them and use them as slang when talking to one another. Just as teenagers today have their own slang based on distortions of common words;
1857 – Elisha Otis installs the first modern passenger elevator in a public building, at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway in New York City;
1858 – Eleazer A. Gardner of Philadelphia patents the cable street car, which runs on overhead cables;
1901 – A group of U.S. Army soldiers led by Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston capture Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899;
1913 – A horrible month for weather-related disasters in the United States culminates with a devastating tornado ripping through Nebraska, near Omaha. It was the worst of five twisters that struck that day in Nebraska and Iowa, killing 115 people in total;
1918 – In World War I, at 7:20 in the morning on March 23, 1918, an explosion in the Place de la Republique in Paris announces the first attack of a new German gun. The Pariskanone, or Paris gun, as it came to be known, was manufactured by Krupps; it was 210mm, with a 118-foot-long barrel, which could fire a shell the impressive distance of some 130,000 feet, or 25 miles, into the air. Three of them fired on Paris that day from a gun site at CrÉpy-en-Laonnaise, 74 miles away;
1919 – Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran and publisher of Socialist newspapers, breaks with the Italian Socialists and establishes the nationalist Fasci di Combattimento, named after the Italian peasant revolutionaries, or “Fighting Bands,” from the 19th century. Commonly known as the Fascist Party, Mussolini’s new right-wing organization advocated Italian nationalism, had black shirts for uniforms, and launched a program of terrorism and intimidation against its leftist opponents;
1933 – The German Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act, which effectively granted Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers;
1942 – During World War II, 2,500 Jews of Lublin massacred or deported;
1942 – During World War II, the first Japanese-Americans evacuated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrived at the internment camp in Manzanar, California;
1944 – During World War II, German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit. Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German troops had occupied wider swaths of the peninsula to prevent the Allies from using Italy as a base of operations against German strongholds elsewhere, such as the Balkans. An Allied occupation of Italy would also put into their hands Italian airbases, further threatening German air power. Despite such setbacks, the partisans proved extremely effective in aiding the Allies; by the summer of 1944, resistance fighters had immobilized eight of the 26 German divisions in northern Italy. By war’s end, Italian guerrillas controlled Venice, Milan, and Genoa, but at considerable cost. All told, the Resistance lost some 50,000 fighters-but won its republic;
1956 – Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic, although it is still within the British Commonwealth;
1961 – In the Vietnam War, one of the first American casualties in Southeast Asia, an intelligence-gathering plane en route from Laos to Saigon is shot down over the Plain of Jars in central Laos. The mission was flown in an attempt to determine the extent of the Soviet support being provided to the communist Pathet Lao guerrillas in Laos. The guerrillas had been waging a war against the Royal Lao government since 1959. In a television news conference, President John F. Kennedy warned of communist expansion in Laos and said that a cease-fire must precede the start of negotiations to establish a neutral and independent nation;
1970 – During the Vietnam War, from Peking, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia issues a public call for arms to be used against the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh and requests the establishment of the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK) to unite all opposition factions against Lon Nol. North Vietnam, the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and the communist Pathet Lao immediately pledged their support to the new organization;
1973 – Before sentencing a group of Watergate break-in defendants, Chief U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica read aloud a letter to him from James W. McCord Jr. which said there had been “political pressure” to “plead guilty and remain silent”;
1979 – Federal Judge Barrington Parker presides over the sentencing of Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross Diaz for the murder of Orlando Letelier. Novo and Ross Diaz were initally sentenced to consecutive terms of life imprisonment. The murder to which Judge Parker referred had occurred on September 21, 1976, when a car bomb exploded while victims, Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador, and his friends Michael and Ronni Moffitt were driving on Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row. Letelier was the intended target because of his political work against Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet;
1981 – U.S. Supreme Court upholds a law making statutory rape a crime for men but not women;
1981 – The United States Supreme Court rules states could require, with some exceptions, parental notification when teen-age girls sought abortions;
1983 – During the (first) Cold War, in an address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan proposes that the United States embark on a program to develop antimissile technology that would make the country nearly impervious to attack by nuclear missiles. Reagan’s speech marked the beginning of what came to be known as the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);
1983 – Barney Clark dies 112 days after becoming the world’s first recipient of a permanent artificial heart. The 61-year-old dentist spent the last four months of his life in a hospital bed at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, attached to a 350-pound console that pumped air in and out of the aluminum-and-plastic implant through a system of hoses;
1987 – U.S. offers military protection to Kuwaiti ships in the Persian Gulf;
2004 – A report by Medicare trustees said that without changes, the federal health care program would go broke by 2019, seven years earlier than expected, (so where do we get the thought that it would be a good idea to put the entire US health care system under the government’s control?);
2004 – A federal commission concluded that Clinton and Bush administration officials had engaged in lengthy, ultimately fruitless diplomatic efforts instead of military action to try to get Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks; top Bush officials countered that the terror attacks would have occurred even if the United States had killed the al-Qaida leader;
2010 – In Washington, D.C, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tells a lobby group that ‘Jerusalem is not a settlement’ and Israel has a ‘right’ to build there;
2010 – President Barack Obama signed a $938 billion health care overhaul, declaring “a new season in America” – (and it surely is, unfortunately – a loosing season!!!);
2011 – Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who appeared in more than 50 films, won two Academy Awards and was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, dies of complications from congestive heart failure at a Los Angeles hospital at age 79;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
Now, Off To The Fun Stuff!!!
Today’s ‘Try Not To Smile’ Picture:
Today’s Funny Animal Video:
Dog’s reaction to a magic trick, the disappearing treat – https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VEQXeLjY9ak
Today’s Thought For The Day:
“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
– Michel de Montaigne, French essayist (1533-1592)
Today’s ‘I Fixed It For You Honey’ Picture:
Today’s ‘Daily Motivator’:
Visualization can be a powerful tool, yet merely pretending that something is true does not make it so. Visualize the way you desire for life to be, and accept that you must work to make it so.
Today’s Patriotic Quote:
“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
– Patrick Henry, 1775
Today’s ‘Least We Forget’ Video:
I’m Already There – https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_p2EW3yBqSk
Today’s ‘Every picture tells a story’:
A dog named ‘Leao’ sits for a second consecutive day at the grave of her owner, who died in the disastrous landslides near Rio de Janiero on January 15, 2011
Today’s Word For The Day:
Bifurcate; bifurcation (bi·fur·cate) v Divide into two branches or forks: “The river bifurcates at the base of the mountain.”
Today’s Quote For The Day:
The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.
– Vince Lombardi
Today’s ‘Adorable’ Picture:
Today’s Trivia:
An adult’s skin weighs approximately six pounds.
Today’s ‘Clever Words For Clever People’:
SUDAFED: Brought litigation against a government official!
Today’s Inspirational Thought:
Today’s Inspirational Music Video:
Glory Road – https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL46E650823E4CDBC3&v=JOfIfEjec_s&feature=player_detailpage
Today’s Verse & Prayer:
Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive he crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
– James 1:12
Thank you Father for giving me the assurance that when all is said and done, I will share in your life and your victory forever. Help me this day to live confidently, knowing that I have your life. In the name of Jesus I pray. Amen
Today’s ‘AWE of GOD’ Picture:
Until Tomorrow – America, Bless GOD!!!
