ConservativeChristianRepublican-Report - 20090515

Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable



"Daily Motivations"

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. -- George Washington



"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)

The Bow & The Arrow In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight (Prov. 3:6). Is the highest prize among the gifts of wisdom a sense of spiritual direction?

"Don't let us yield to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." (Matthew 6:13)



"The Patriot Post"

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

"[L]iberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions, even their own mistakes. Government must step in when one's liberties impinge on one's neighbor's. Government must protect constitutional rights, deal with other governments, protect citizens from aggressors, assure equal opportunity, and be compassionate in caring for those citizens who are unable to care for themselves. Our federal system of local-state-national government is designed to sort out on what level these actions should be taken. Those concerns of a national character -- such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties -- must, of course, be handled on the national level. As a general rule, however, we believe that government action should be taken first by the government that resides as close to you as possible." -- Ronald Reagan

"Why is the left so susceptible to violence and the right largely immune from it? We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, they don't -- witness their efforts to save Bill Clinton, who was manifestly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (including perjury). They believe in flaunting the law when it suits their purposes -- ergo their support for illegal immigration and an activist judiciary that's usurped legislative powers. We believe in the First Amendment, they don't. Besides the campus storm troopers practicing Marcusian repressive tolerance, Obama and his allies are determined to put conservative talk radio out of business by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine. We love America, including the principles on which it was conceived: liberty, tolerance, equality before the law and Judeo-Christian morality. For them, the Founding Fathers are dead, white males and the American saga consists of slavery, Wounded Knee, lynchings, the exploitation of immigrant labor, World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyism, and 'imperialism.' We're patriots." -- columnist Don Feder



"The Web"

Pelosi Accuses CIA of Lying; GOP Defends Agency

By Tory Newmyer
Roll Call Staff
May 14, 2009, 12:17 p.m.
Updated: 1:41 p.m.

http://www.rollcall.com:80/news/34921-1.html?ET=rollcall:e4621:80078634a:&st=email

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back hard against the controversy over what she knew, and when, about harsh Bush-era interrogation techniques by accusing the CIA of lying to her in a classified briefing on the matter in September 2002.

“At every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday.

The Speaker defended her decision not to speak out more forcefully five months later, when a top aide was briefed that interrogators had been waterboarding detainees.

“No letter or anything else was going to stop them from doing what they were going to do. My job was to change the majority in the Congress,” Pelosi said. She pointed to a letter of protest that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), then the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, sent to the CIA as the appropriate channel for top Democrats to register an objection.

Pelosi said she would be “very happy” for the CIA to release the full details of their briefings of Congressional leaders.

The agency last week released a summary of those sessions, revealing that Pelosi was told about the harsh tactics seven years ago. The Speaker on Thursday stuck to her contention that those who briefed her at the time only told lawmakers that they had the legal authority to use the procedures.

Interrogators had already used waterboarding on terrorist suspects dozens of times by then, declassified information has revealed.

“They talked about interrogations that they had done, and said, ‘We want to use enhanced techniques and we have legal opinions that say they are OK. We are not using waterboarding.’” Pelosi said of the September briefing. “That’s the only mention that they were not using it. And we now know that earlier they were. So yes, I’m saying that the CIA was misleading the Congress.”

Meanwhile, Republican leaders immediately derided Pelosi’s statements. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said her comments “continue to raise more questions than provide answers.”

“I have dealt with our intelligence professionals for the last three and a half years on an almost daily basis, and it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone in our intelligence area would ever misled a Member of Congress,” he said.

“What is this, like version 3.0 from Nancy’s perspective of what happened in that meeting?” asked Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee. Hoekstra said Pelosi’s charge against the CIA is “a very, very serious charge. I’m not a lawyer, but I would expect that Congress would treat that as a crime.”

Senate Intelligence ranking member Kit Bond (R-Mo.) said he thinks it is “outrageous” that Pelosi would call “terror fighters ... liars.”

And Bond rejected Pelosi’s claim that the only action she could have taken to stop the torture policy was to focus on electing a Democratic Congress and president. Pelosi could have brought in leadership, raised questions during a floor speech or used the appropriations process to protest certain policies, he said.

“There are a whole range of actions, and she did not take them,” Bond said.

Jackie Kucinich and Steven T. Dennis contributed to this report.



U.S. Will Pay $2.6 Million to Train Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly on the Job

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
By Edwin Mora

Flag of the People's Republic of China

(CNSNews.com) -- The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.

Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as "female sex workers"--or FSW--and their handlers as "gatekeepers."

"Previous studies in Asia and Africa and our own data from FSWs [female sex workers] in China suggest that the social norms and institutional policy within commercial sex venues as well as agents overseeing the FSWs (i.e., the 'gatekeepers', defined as persons who manage the establishments and/or sex workers) are potentially of great importance in influencing alcohol use and sexual behavior among establishment-based FSWs," says the NIH grant abstract submitted by Dr. Li.

"Therefore, in this application, we propose to develop, implement, and evaluate a venue-based alcohol use and HIV risk reduction intervention focusing on both environmental and individual factors among venue-based FSWs in China," says the abstract.

The research will take place in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.

Guangxi is ranked third in HIV rate among Chna's provinces--and is a place where the sex business is pervasive, Li said.

“The purpose of the project is to try and develop an intervention program targeting HIV risk and alcohol use,” Li told CNSNews.com. “So basically, it’s an alcohol and HIV risk reduction intervention project."

The researcher outlined three components of the intervention program in the abstract for the project:

“(1) gatekeeper training with a focus on changing or enhancing the protective social norms and policy/practice at the establishment level; (2) FSW (female sex workers) training with a focus on the acquisition of communication skills (negotiating, limit setting) and behavioral skills (e.g., condom use skills, consistent condom use); and (3) semi-annual boosters to reinforce both social norms within establishments and individual skills,” wrote Li.

The doctor said the heart of the study involves “a community-based cluster randomized controlled trial among 100 commercial sex venues in Beihai, a costal tourist city in Guangxi.”

"We anticipate that the venue-based intervention program will be culturally appropriate, feasible, effective and sustainable in alcohol use and sexual risk reduction among FSWs," says the NIH grant abstract.

Li said his study is being done in China rather than the U.S. because prostitution occurs with alcohol use in the United States like it does in China, Americans will be able to benefit from the project’s findings.

“We want to get some understanding of the fundamental role of alcohol use and HIV risk,” he said. “We use the population in China as our targeted population to look at the basic issues. I think the findings will benefit the American people, too.”

Li said minimal research has been conducted on the link between alcohol use and prostitution as it relates to HIV.

“Alcohol has been a part of the commerce of sex for many, many years. Unfortunately, both global-wise (and) in the United States, very few researchers are looking at the complex issue of the inter play between alcohol and the commerce of sex,” he told CNSNews.com.

The grant is one of several “international initiatives” sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Ralph Hingson, director of epidemiology and prevention research at NIAA, told CNSNews.com, “There are many Americans who travel to China each year and they should be made aware of the HIV problem.”

Hingson said that Americans will be able to apply the studies findings to the American situation because 1.2 million Americans are currently living with HIV.

Li’s research includes exploration, development, implementation and evaluation. Currently, the project stands at the exploration stage, which the doctor expects to last 18 months.

“The first phase is kind of an exploratory study just trying to get a good understanding of the phenomena in the population of female sex workers in China. The second phase is the program development,” the professor told CNSNews.com.

Phase two will be based on the first year of the study and on “field observations,” he added. The third phase will be the implementation and evaluation of the program.

“Prostitution is illegal in China but it exists in China," Li told CNSNews.com, “but the Chinese government and the society’s attitude towards prostitution is complicated.”

According to Li, there may be as many as 10 million female prostitutes in China with the majority raging from teenagers to those in their 20s.

“We see a lot of governmental initiatives in China, like 100 percent condom distribution promotion programs, so they deliver condoms in those (prostitution) venues," he added.

“The global literature indicates an important role of alcohol use in facilitating HIV/AIDS transmission risk in commercial sex venues where elevated alcohol use/abuse and sexual risk behaviors frequently co-occur,” Li wrote when introducing the project last November.

"We expect that the intervention will improve protective normative beliefs and institutional support regarding alcohol use and HIV protection,” he added.

The NIH proposal hypothesizes that the program will decrease "problem drinking and alcohol-related sexual risk" among prostitutes that participate.

"We hypothesize that the venue-based intervention will change and enhance the protective social norms and institutional policies at the establishment level and such enhancement, accompanied by individual skill training among FSWs, will demonstrate a sustainable effect within commercial sex establishments in decreasing problem drinking and alcohol-related sexual risk, increasing consistent and correct condom use, and reducing rates of HIV/STD infection among FSWs," says the NIH abstract.



John Murtha Airport: A $200 Million ‘White Elephant’

Taxpayers have spent $200 million in federal funds over the past decade to support a little-used airport located in the congressional district of powerful Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha.

The John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport east of Pittsburgh serves just six commercial flights each weekday, all of them to or from Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.

When a Washington Post reporter visited the airport recently, there were just four passengers lined up to board a flight, outnumbered by seven security staffers and supervisors.

Yet the airport has a new terminal with a restaurant, a $17.8 million reinforced concrete runway capable of handling large jets, a motorized baggage carousel, and an $8 million high-tech radar system befitting an international airport — which remains unmanned.

The airport was also among the first facilities in the nation to receive funding from this year’s stimulus package — $800,000 to repave a backup runway.

And each of the six daily flights to and from the airport is subsidized, costing taxpayers about $147 per passenger last year.

Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense called the airport a “white elephant” and “an exercise in spending more money than sense.”

Even a passenger using the airport questioned the spending.

“Doesn’t it seem kind of ridiculous to have a motorized carousel for the baggage claim when 15 people get off the airplane?” Johnstown native Bill Previte told The Post.

“It obvious: There’s not enough population to justify this place.”

Of the $200 million in federal funds spent on the airport in the past 10 years, Rep. Murtha — chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense — is credited with securing at least $150 million.

In 2007, the authority that runs the airport hired MTT Aviation Services, a subsidiary of a defense contractor run by a close friend of Murtha.

“Murtha, dubbed the King of Pork by critics, consistently directs more federal money to his district than any other congressman — $192 million in the 2008 budget,” The Post disclosed.

Press reports in March alleged that in recent years Murtha obtained millions in earmarks for Penn State University’s Electro-Optical Center, which then rerouted the money to clients of PMA Group, a military-oriented lobbying firm that has close ties with Murtha.

PMA’s offices were raided by the FBI in November, and The New York Times reported that investigators were looking for evidence that PMA made illegitimate campaign contributions to Murtha.



Signs Point Toward ‘Cataclysmic’ War in Middle East

A former top American intelligence official agrees with a Messianic pastor that major and possibly calamitous events will unfold in the Middle East in the coming year.

“I think within 12 months something is going to happen, one way or another,” said retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for Intelligence from 2003 to 2007.

His concerns are echoed by best-selling novelist Joel C. Rosenberg, whose works have uncannily foreshadowed real events including 9/11.

“I don’t know how much time we have. I believe a cataclysmic war is coming in the Middle East,” he said.

Messianic pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai ministries in Puyallup, Wash., garnered attention last year with his announcement of the discovery of a rare sequence of lunar and solar eclipses, a “tetrad,” all falling on key feast days on the Jewish calendar over a two-year period.

The last time that happened, the Jews recaptured Jerusalem, Biltz said. “The time before that [was] 1949, 1950, right after they became a nation. But both times it was tied around a major war.”

Additional signs this year and next portend more of the same, according to Biltz.

“The sun and the moon were God’s signals to us,” he said. “When they fall on his divine appointments, He’s trying to tell us that we need to look to him and hear what he’s saying.”

While Biltz and other messianic believers watch the heavens, “others are watching the headlines and getting the same message,” station KMPH in Fresno, Calif., reported.

Gen. Boykin told a station reporter at a conference in San Diego that he foresees “something” happening in the coming year and added: “I’m watching the Iranian nuclear program very carefully. No one really knows how long, I don’t even think the Iranian themselves know how long it will take them to have a deliverable nuclear weapon, but they’re moving there rapidly.”

Author Rosenberg, who was an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, foresees a cataclysm in the near future, and he has been remarkably prescient in his books.

For instance, his New York Times best-seller “The Last Jihad” describes the hijacking of a jet by radical Islamic terrorists who use it to launch a kamikaze attack on an American city. That leads to a war with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein over terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

“I wrote those chapters nine months before September 11, 2001,” Rosenberg told KMPH at the conference.

His book “The Last Days” begins with a U.S. diplomatic convoy driving into Gaza on a peacekeeping mission. The convoy is attacked by terrorists. Six days before the book went on sale in October 2003, an American diplomatic convoy driving into Gaza was attacked by terrorists.

The book also foreshadowed a civil war among Palestinians similar to the hostilities that later erupted between Hamas and Fatah.



The IEA on the Financial Crash

When will the majority Democrats on Capital Hill demand an independent investigation on Sen. Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, as two who may be directly responsible for these financial failures? - oyh

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/05/12/the-iea-on-the-financial-crash/#more-6624

The Institute for Economic Affairs, the prestigious British think-tank, has released a comprehensive, two hundred page long, study of the causes of the financial crash. Its conclusion is that “Government failure had a leading role in creating the conditions that led to the crash.”

As the IEA sums it up, “It may be overstating the point to argue that the crash was caused by government failure but it certainly appears that there is nothing that governments and regulators have done that made the crash less likely or made its consequences less dire.” According to the IEA, central banks created a monetary bubble that fed an asset price boom and distorted the pricing of risk, while, in the U.S., government policy “encouraged high-risk lending through support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” The problem was not that regulators lacked the power to act: it was that they did not act, and to the extent they did, they incentivized opaque and risky behavior.

It is therefore not sensible to believe that giving more power to regulators is the answer. Yet while the banks that failed have lost most or all of their value, the regulators who failed are being given more responsibilities. In that light, Samuel Gregg’s contribution to the IEA’s study is particularly striking. He concludes by noting that “In the end, no amount of regulation – heavy or light – can substitute for the type of character formation that is supposed to occur in families, schools, churches and synagogues.”

Relying on regulation ignores the fact that participants in the market, like everyone else, ultimately need to practice prudence. That, of course, is an insight as old as Adam Smith – the Smith of the ‘invisible hand,’ who first made his name as a moral philosopher. Reacting to the crash by relying on governments to guide that ‘invisible hand,’ is, ultimately, to reject not only Smith’s insights into the free market but his belief in the moral value of civil society.



"The e-mail Bag"

Children in Church

A little boy was in a relative's wedding.
As he was coming down the aisle, he would take two steps, stop, and turn to the crowd. While facing the crowd, he would put his hands up like claws and roar.

So it went, step, step, ROAR, step, step, ROAR, all the way down the aisle. As you can imagine, the crowd was near tears from laughing so hard by the time he reached the pulpit. When asked what he was doing, the child sniffed and said, "I was being the Ring Bear."


One Sunday in a Midwest City, a young child was "acting up" during the morning worship hour. The parents did their best to maintain some sense of order in the pew
but were losing the battle. Finally, the father picked the little fellow up and walked sternly up the aisle on his way out...

Just before reaching the safety of the foyer, the little one called loudly to the congregation, "Pray for me! Pray for me!"


One particular four-year old prayed, "And forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets."


A little boy was overheard praying: "Lord, if you can't make me a better boy, don't worry about it. I'm having a real good time like I am."

A Sunday School teacher asked her little children, as they were on the way to church service, "And why is it necessary to be quiet in church?"

One bright little girl replied, "Because people are sleeping."


A little boy opened the big and old family Bible with fascination, looking at the old pages as he turned them. Then something fell out of the Bible. He picked it up and looked at it closely. It was an old leaf from a tree that has been pressed in between the pages. "Mama, look what I found," the boy called out.

"What have you got there, dear?" his mother asked. With astonishment in the young boy's voice he answered, "It's Adam 's suit".


The preacher was wired for sound with a lapel mike, and as he preached, he moved briskly about the platform, jerking the mike cord as he went. Then he moved to one side, getting wound up in the cord and nearly tripping before jerking it again.

After several circles and jerks, a little girl in the third pew leaned toward her mother and whispered, "If he gets loose, will he hurt us?"


Six-year old Angie , and her four-year old brother, Joel , were sitting together in church. Joel giggled, sang and talked out loud. Finally, his big sister had had enough.. "You're not supposed to talk out loud in church." "Why? Who's going to stop me?" Joel asked.

Angie pointed to the back of the church and said, "See those two men standing by the door? They're hushers.."


My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, "Grandma, do you know how you and God are alike?" I mentally polished my halo, while I asked, "No, how are we alike?"

"You're both old," he replied. A ten-year old, under the tutelage of her grandmother, was becoming quite knowledgeable about the Bible.

Then, one day, she floored her grandmother by asking, "Which Virgin was the mother of Jesus ? The virgin Mary or the King James Virgin?"


A Sunday school class was studying the Ten Commandments. They were ready to discuss the last one. The teacher asked if anyone could tell her what it was.

Susie raised her hand, stood tall, and quoted, "Thou shall not take the covers off the neighbor's wife."