Conservatively Speaking

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in L.A. Friday urging voters to pass measures on the upcoming ballot that are directly tied to the success of the recently passed budget. At the L.A. Chamber of Commerce offices, the governor said if Props 1-A through 1-F fail, the state faces the possibility of financial collapse. Legislators tried to close the $42-billion gap in the troubled budget, but their attempts have wound up as measures on the May 19th public ballot. Most of the props relate to keeping tax revenue streams flowing well beyond their original end dates. All of the measures are trailing in the most recent polls.

A recent Chinese state-run press report provides new information indicating that China’s military plans to develop strategic lift for power projection capabilities around the world.

The April 1 report in the Chinese military newspaper stated that delegates to the recent National People’s Congress, the communist party organ that seeks to present itself as a democratic institution, recently discussed “how to push forward the construction of the strategic projection capability of our armed forces.”

Such forces are needed to display comprehensive national strength and military strength.

“We must carry out various measures to speed up the process to improve the rapid maneuver capability of our armed forces in various directions, such as on the ground, at the sea and in the air,” the report said.

Recent humanitarian and peacekeeping operations demonstrated that the Chinese military needs forces to conduct what in Chinese parlance is called “walk outside the country” and “go far away.”

Gao Shouwei, the commander of the Air Force under the Guangzhou Military Region, was quoted as saying that each time power projection capability is improved by a factor of one, combat power will be increased by two or three times.

Chinese power projection capability is being enhanced by more and larger sea and air transports as well as large number of submarines.

Such public discussion of Chinese power projection is unusual, as Beijing’s state-run media normally do not discuss such topics

Nationwide the sales of antacids has increased by 8% due to anxiety about the economy.

IT IS PORN FOR PRAYER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

The University of Maryland is trading porn for prayer as the 175-member “senate” (composed of faculty and students) voted 42 to 14 to end prayer at its upcoming graduation ceremony in order to be “sensitive” and join its peers “like UC Berkeley.” At the same time there is a campus campaign of sorts to show a hard-core pornographic film as an official part of its activities. The decision will be reviewed by its president and thence go to the university’s board for review before it becomes policy.

Coincidentally, this week’s NEWSWEEK cover bears the title, DECLINE AND FALL OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA, with the words arranged in a red cross on a black background, recalling TIME’S famous “Is God Dead?” cover of the mid-sixties. The story intones, “The end of Christian America”: The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now-and what, as a nation, we are about to become.”

According to the article, the annual 2009 American Religious Identification Survey summary got the attention of R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary because it said, “The number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent,” and names the Northeast as “the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.”

The PEW CENTER forum reports that 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian; the Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll found the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent.

In June, 2008, then Senator Obama declared in a speech in Jerusalem that the U. S. is “no longer [exclusively] a Christian nation,” but is also a nation of others, including Muslims and nonbelievers.

It was in that speech that Obama also blasted the “Christian right” for hijacking religion and using it to divide the nation: “Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” he said.

Asked last year to clarify his remarks, Obama repeated them to the Christian Broadcast Network. “I think that the right might worry a bit more about the dangers of sectarianism. Whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers,” Obama wrote in an e-mail to CBN News senior national correspondent David Brody.

“We should acknowledge this and realize that when we’re formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we’ve got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community,” wrote Obama.

It was just over 100 years ago that Justice Brewer in CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY V. UNITED STATES, 143 U. S. 457 (1892) said:

“If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life, as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs, and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters, note the following: the form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words of all wills, ‘In the name of God, amen’; the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the general cessation of all secular business, and the closing of courts, legislatures, and other similar public assemblies on that day; the churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices; the gigantic missionary associations, with general support, and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”

Comments by Rev. Bill Seimens::

The spectacle of Barack Obama’s accusing the Christian right of hijacking religion and exploiting it to divide us further amounts to an act of mega-hypocrisy, coming as it does from a man whose close friend and long-time mentor, the Rev. Wright, is a religious hatemonger of the first order. What has caused that extreme reaction in some conservative circles is the hijacking of the United States itself by the far left.

The historical fact is that the nation was in “the greatest generation” when it was far more Christian than it is today, when we are plagued by crime, violence, vice and corruption. I submit that it is very difficult to pass this off as mere coincidence. There is a set of values that any sober evaluation of our history will show made us great, and if we think we can eliminate prayer from our commencement ceremonies and replace it with hard-core porn, and then send out graduates who will mend the ills of our country, we are the most deluded generation in history.

Oh, and by the way, wasn’t it the University of Maryland whose medical students a few generations back solved the problem of a lack of cadavers to practice on by paying grave robbers to supply them?

This country was founded on the principle that it would be a nation ruled by Christian values, as stated by Judge Brewer, and that it would welcome those of other faiths to join us, become Americans, and worship as they pleased. The thought that those others should then demand that we drop everything to the lowest common denominator is an abomination. It is as if some people believe they have found a cure for all forms of cancer. Others move in and feel the others are deluded, and refuse to take the cure. Subsequently, they demand that those others stop claiming that they have such a cure.

In fact, there are historical precedents for such foolishness. In the Middle Ages Christian forces captured a Muslim doctor and put him to work treating their troops. A soldier was brought in with a leg wound, and the Christian doctor announced that the leg had to be amputated. The Muslim doctor protested, saying that his people healed such wounds on a regular basis. The Christian doctor retorted that the Muslims were barbarians and were wrong about this, and ordered a man with an axe to chop off the soldier’s leg. His first chop missed, at which point the soldier fainted. The second blow spattered the room with bone, blood and flesh. The third blow took off the leg, but the soldier was dead.

As long as our only absolute value is the conviction that there are no absolute values, we are going to continue riding the bobsled of emptiness and meaninglessness down into national oblivion. If we go the way the University of Maryland is threatening to go, so ends a great nation-not with a bang but with a whimper.

April 15^th is the day Americans have to file and pay their income taxes. April 13^th is the tax freedom day by when Americans have worked long wnough to pay their taxes. April 25^th is the day when Obama will have spent every nickel paid by Americans in taxes for 2008, and the rest of the year’s will be finances by borrowed money mostly from China.

Did you hear about the latest Rasmussen Poll? In their recent telephone survey they asked American adults “Which is a better system - Capitalism, Socialism or Not Sure”? Barely half (53%) said Capitalism was better while 20% said Socialism and 27% wasn’t sure. Wow.

Digging into the demographics is even more revealing. So who favors Socialism? Mainly the young. Only 13% of people over 40 picked Socialism over Capitalism while that doubles to 26% of the thirty something crowd and jumps to one-third (33%) of the youngest adults picking Socialism as the better system. Wow again. It is one thing to be idealistic when you are young but this is carrying it too far.

Except the Rasmussen report that accompanied this finding poses the hypothesis that perhaps the young aren’t as much socialistic as they are dumb. OK so they didn’t quite put it that way but that was the general gist of it. You see their survey never defined either Capitalism or Socialism, it simply asked which system was better. So maybe the 20 year olds just didn’t understand the meaning of those words so that they couldn’t make an informed decision. Hmmm. Sounds like what we saw during the Presidential election, doesn’t it?

This ignorance was supported by earlier surveys which showed that 70% of Americans supported a “free-market economy” while only 15% prefer a “government-managed economy” and another survey showed that just 14% believe the government would do a better job of running the auto companies. Granted, these surveys polled different people but if 70% want a free-market economy and yet only 53% want Capitalism then what else can you infer other than many people are poorly educated and not too bright.

Think I am being too hash? That maybe the older generation has always denigrated the younger generations? Think again. In the history of this country, never before have one-third of the younger generation turned their backs on what makes America great - the rights of the individual and instead are embracing a political system that promotes the government over the individual. And if they truly aren’t Socialists and basically didn’t understand the terminology then they are uneducated fools. So take your pick - in thirty years America will be run by either Socialists or ignorant twits. Feel better now?

Saccharin, the sweetener in those pink packets, was discovered by accident because chemist Constantin Fahlberg didn’t wash his hands after a day at the office.

Prepare to get icked.

 The year was 1879 and Fahlberg was trying to come up with new and interesting uses for coal tar. After a productive day at the office, he went home and something strange happened.

 He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she hadn’t. They tasted normal to her. Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands - which he hadn’t washed.

 The next day he went back to the lab and started tasting his work until he found the sweet spot. Nobody paid much attention until sugar shortages during World War I sent bakers and others scrambling for alternatives.

Saccharin is an artificial sweetener. The basic substance, benzoic sulfinide, has effectively no food energy and is much sweeter than sucrose, but has an unpleasant bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. In countries where saccharin is allowed as a food additive, it is used to sweeten products such as drinks, candies, medicines, and toothpaste.

Obama’s scorecard from his Euro-Turkish trip does not tally much of anything concrete - absolutely nothing moved  on any of big policy issues - zilch, nada. Media awarded Obama a “Gentleman’s C” avoiding a failing grade.

Obamania followed him while leaders bobbed, weaved and ducked his “demands.”

France and Germany vetoed Obama’s giant $1 trillion global stimulus plan green lighting only funds for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - a small success, at best

At the NATO summit his pleas for additional combat troops in Afghanistan were rejected in favor of little more than a few more crossing guards with the proviso they’d stay out of harm’s way and even that paltry concession of 5,000 troops would be pulled home after Afghanistan’s August election.

Most notably Obama’s call for a nuclear-weapons-free world - was hailed as laudable if unrealistic and met with awkward silence from key nuclear powers, while Russia announced aggressive plans to upgrade its nuclear arsenal effectively rendering any new START treaty virtually meaningless.

“In my 10 years of doing this, never have I seen the difference between atmospherics and reality to be so great,” John Hulsman, a Berlin-based trans-Atlantic expert who is president and co-founder of foreign policy consulting firm John C. Hulsman Enterprises. “Of course it’s better to have a president who is liked, who listens to America’s allies with an open mind and who does not demonize America’s enemies, but we really saw in this European trip the limits of good vibrations - because despite of all those, absolutely nothing moved on the big policies.”

The president managed to reset the alliance with several European powers, which could at a later point in time lead to more concrete commitments in Afghanistan-but if that sours that will disappear like a puff of smoke.

Obama did apparently convince Turkey not to veto Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO’s next secretary-general. But Turkey exacted a key concession to lobby for its membership in the EuroUnion that irked Europe and accusation Obama was meddling where he had no right, license or honest purpose.

Analysts generally award Obama a “gentleman’s “C” not unlike my own in high school Latin because I played football and Miss Knapp knew I had to have it to stay on the team so mainstream media tried to save the savior.

Then Russia and China pranced and danced about North Korea’s missile test before issuing a toothless note that must have left Kim rolling in the aisle making Obama and the U. S. foreign policy look flaccid. Now there is the spectacle of two U. S. warships held at bay by Somalia based “pirates” who attacked a U. S. flagged ship for the first time in centuries and did so on the high seas with impunity.

It is ironic the first U. S. rescue ship to arrive was the USS Bainbridge named for Commodore William Bainbridge (1774 -1833). In 1800, Bainbridge was sent to carry the tribute which the United States still paid to the dey of Algiers to secure exemption from capture for its merchant ships in the Mediterranean. Upon arrival in the 24-gun USS George Washington, he anchored in the harbor of Algiers-directly under the guns of the fort. The dey demanded that he ferry the Algerian ambassador and retinue to Constantinople or be blown to bits on the spot. With great disgust, Bainbridge raised the Algerian flag on his masthead and submitted to the embarrassment of serving as the dey’s messenger boy

Finally the U. S. figured out paying tribute didn’t work and used force inspiring the reference in the Marine Corp hymn “to the shores of Tripoli” and eventually, if temporarily, subduing the Barbary pirates Bainbridge did not do sparklingly well and ran his ship aground and was captured and imprisoned. He was released serving with distinction in the War of 1812 that diverted US and English attention, encouraged the pirates igniting the Second Barbary Wars against the Libyan based Muslim pirates.

Now what’s that phrase about being destined to repeat history?