The faith of our fathers

Were our founders men of faith

Based mostly on David Barton who wrote Original Intent

Lest I forget, a few notes about our founders whom we are led to believe were agnostics.

1. Continental Congress printed a Bible to be used in schools.
2. Benjamin Franklin recessed the Continental Congress for three days of prayer and contemplation.  When governor of Pennsylvania he drew up a plan to encourage wider church attendance.  Some historians have discredited him because for his opium use (was in so much pain that he had to be carried to meetings on a chair) and because he was considered by some of his contemporaries to be insane.  They don’t mention that it was because he was so fiercely anti slavery.  In one letter out of thousands he calls himself a deist, but only to emphasize the belief that it doesn’t matter who you think God is, worship him.  When asked about his faith Franklin said there is a god, there is an afterlife where we will have to answer for our sins.  We serve God by serving others.
3. Samuel Adams, governor of Massachusetts called the entire state to prayer and fasting 7 times.
4. Charles Carol, richest man in America used his estate to endow in perpetuity a chapel and a preacher for a remote area.
5. Benjamin Rose founded the Bible Society of America and the Sunday School Society of America.
6. Stephen Hawkins wrote treatises on Christianity
7. Robert Payne was a military chaplain
8. Washington’s adopted daughter described George Washington’s habit of Bible reading and prayer and said that to suggest that he father was not a Christian would be as silly as saying that he was not a patriot.
9. Jefferson signed his documents not just “In the year of our Lord” as most people did, but “In the year of our Lord Christ.”  He instituted church services in the Capitol.  The Marine Corp band played the service.  Ministers of every denomination took turns.  The first woman preacher and the first Black minister in the country spoke there frequently.  More than 2,000 people attended.  He also established churches in the treasury department, the war department, and at the naval yard.  Jefferson published a book called the Red Letter Book, the words of Christ in four languages which was printed every year and handed out to every new member of congress, until 1926 when progressives began taking control of the dialogue and got us to believe that the founders were all atheists.
10. James Wilson founded the first law school and said that you cannot have good civil law without divine law
11. Francis Hopkins published a book in which he set the entire book of Psalms to music
12. Benjamin Rush had a dream about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who had been in bitter dispute for years.  In his dream he saw a book published containing the many enlightening letters exchanged between Adams and Jefferson.  He felt the dream was a message of the Holy Spirit and wrote to Jefferson telling him about the dream and, because they hadn’t written any letters, encouraged them to forget their differences and begin to communicate so that the dream could be fulfilled.  Adams and Jefferson agreed that messages from the Holy Spirit must be attended to, buried the hatchet and wrote many letters which have subsequently been compiled entitled The Adams and Jefferson Letters.
13. The founders were men of faith and duty.  George Washington did not want to leave Mt Vernon to fight in the wars or serve as president.  Patrick Henry said he had 19 children and 89 grandchildren and he wanted to go home, but he served as well.  They pledged their lives and their sacred honor.   Seven of them were assonated before they could see the result of their efforts.  Seventeen of them lost everything as a result of their stand for freedom and independence.  Five were prisoners of war. 
14. Early schools required students to read two books.  The Lives of the Signers  and The Wives of the Signers.  But in 1926 two college professors (Yale, Harvard, I can’t remember which) wrote a book called The Godless Constitution in which they pictured the signers as agnostics and atheists.  No footnotes, no scholarly references.  A year later a book was published that thoroughly disputed The Godless Constitution, a scholarly book filled with footnotes and references that proved them wrong, but professors at colleges still rely on  The Godless Constitution for their information about the founders. 
15. There are 5,600 quotations in the founding papers.  The largest percentage of them, 34 per cent, came from the Bible,  the largest percentage from the book of Deuteronomy, the book of law of the Old Testaments.

       If anyone is “regurgitat(ing) old tired mantras,” it is Jules Ohrin-Greipp (Debate the facts rather than fears,” Yuma Sun, March 19) calling us birthers, deathers, fringers and depressing ignorant racists.  (Incidentally the author cites not one fact to justify the slurs. 

       Casting ad hominem slurs on the opposition is common on the left.  At every stump speech President Obama manages to call us Flat Earthers.  Had he been up on his history, our president would have known that outside of a few leaders in the Catholic Church, most people knew 2,000 years ago that the earth is round. Eratosthenes calculated its circumference within 50 miles of today’s estimate in about 200 B.C.   The Bible makes several references to the fact that the earth is an “orb” suspended in space.

         The president’s grasp of presidential history is lacking as well.  He compared our resistance to his energy policy to Rutherford B. Hayes’ resistance to the telephone accusing Hayes of calling it a “crazy invention.”  Rutherford B. Hays actually celebrated the invention and was the first president own a telephone. 

Conservatives are called “flat-earthers” because they refuse to recognize that solar, wind, and bio-fuels are the answer to our energy problems. We support individuals investing in a variety of energy alternatives.  Both my daughter and my niece have made their own solar panels to use on their Northern Arizona acreages.  My husband and I built a solar oven way back in the 70’s. 

          All the science, however, reveals that gas, oil, coal, and nuclear energy, (the types of energy about which the left says “Katie bar the door!!”)  are by far the most efficient, most abundant, and the most reliable. First of all, let us dispense with one of our president’s favorite canards, that the United States consumes 20 per cent of the world’s energy and has only 2 per cent of the reserves, a mere 23 billion barrels.  North America actually sits on 1.5 trillion barrels, perhaps more than the entire Middle East.   We have an abundant supply.

           And it’s efficient. Studies at Cornell University illustrate the inefficiency of ethanol.  A car getting 30 miles per gallon on gasoline would get only 20 mpg using ethanol.  It takes 2 gallons of fossil fuel to create 3 gallons of ethanol. The producers gas and oil “to produce ethanol [because they] can't afford to burn ethanol.”   

          Nuclear power is mega efficient.  A nuclear plant takes up about 2 acres of land and can produce 1000 megawatts of power per hour.  It would take 240,000 acres (375 square miles) and 9,600 turbines to produce that much power and 20,000 acres or 31.25 square miles of solar panels. Both types of energy rely on the weather, but a nuclear plant produces its 1000 megawatts 24 hours a day.

          If we could get Katie (the Department of Energy) to quit barring the door, we might very well be paying 2 bucks at the pump again.  

Volcker Rule of the Dodd-Frank bill

     I thought some of our Patriots who cannot watch Cspan would be interested in getting summaries of discussions at the capitol.  Today’s discussion was of the Volcker Rule of the Dodd-Frank bill. Representatives from various regulatory agencies, FDIC, CFTC, SEC, FTC and the Federal Reserve were asked to create the guidelines that would distinguish risky proprietary trading from healthy market-making trading which is absolutely essential to the economic well-being of the country

      The issue is so complex that that one rule required nearly 400 pages of regulations and 1,300 questions.  The regulators agreed that the only way to really distinguish between the two is to examine the intent of the investor, discern the investor’s motives.  When asked how effective it would be all of them were hesitant:  “We think we can…”  We hope…”  “Maybe we can.”  The ineffective implementation of the rule could be caustic to the economy damaging capital building, affecting liquidity, interest rates, property values, the gamut.

Members of both sides of the aisle and all the regulators agreed that there is no evidence that proprietary trading had any effect on the recent banking crisis. They are apparently trying to get a jump on the next crisis which is in and of itself a scary proposition when we realize the unintended consequences of everything government does.

       There was also a lot of agreement with regard to how costly implementation would be.  It would take banks at least 18 months to set up tracking systems that could adequately track activity.  The actual monitoring would cost from 80 billion to 400 billion to implement.  Corporations would necessarily have to sideline a trillion dollars, take a trillion dollars out of the market to make the system work.  The agencies would have to hire extra staff to take on the responsibilities and they would also have to set up a separate research center to maintain data, a significant increase to federal bureaucracy.

       The other hitch is that none of the other G-12 countries have agreed to follow the guidelines which would probably cause a loss of jobs to countries that are more business friendly.

       Aside from some of the Democrats, the only person on the panels who seemed adamant about the importance of implementation was a professor from MIT.

Safety of Pipelines

A recent letter inspired me to do some research regarding the safety of pipelines. The first barrel of oil traveled through the Alaska pipeline in 1977 The only significant spill occurred as a result of an environmentalist’s blowing a 1-inch old in the line at Steele Creek in February 1978 at a loss of approximately 16,000 barrels.  The pipeline was shut down again in January 2011 when a leak was discovered the basement of the booster pump at Pump Station 1 where repairmen recovered 10 gallons of spilled oil. There may well have been other accidents, but apparently none that made the news.

The Exon Valdez which spilled 750,000 barrels into Prince William Sound's Alaska. Every year around 225 large trucks carrying approximately 8,500 gallons of oil and gas are involved in fatal traffic accidents.  That totals as many as ½ million gallons a year. I couldn’t find any specific information about accidents involving trains carrying oil and gas, but it is probably also significant.

The viscosity of the oil pumped through Keystoe Pipeline does require that dangerous chemicals have to be added to make it pumpable, but all considered the EPA’s own worst case scenario suggests that 1200 barrels may be spilled over the course of the 50 year expected life of the pipeline (See http://watercenter.unl.edu/downloads/2011-Worst-case-Keystone-spills-report.pdf)

We may not like the idea of pipelines, but it’s pretty obvious that environmentally it’s one of the safest to move it from point to point.

Liberals violating first amendment rights in the separation of church and state

         Those on the left are accusing the Catholic church of violating first amendment rights by refusing to comply with the health care mandate that requires them to provide coverage for birth control and the morning after pill in the health insurance policy the church organization provides. 

         I wonder if people on the other side of the issue can see that it is they who are imposing their religious views on the Catholic Church.  They are the ones who are violating first amendment rights.  The choice people have been forcing my Catholic cousin to financially support Planned Parenthood which aborts thousands of babies every year.  Kathleen’s heart breaks when she thinks of those babies.

       Now you may think she’s silly, that it’s not a baby; it’s just tissue, but can you see that you are forcing her to violate her moral conscience, her religious liberty by forcing her to support something she so adamantly opposes?

        No one is proposing that we outlaw either contraception or the morning after pill.  All we’re saying is that people who are morally opposed to the idea should not be expected to pay for something they abhor.

The Social Security Scam

       You’ve probably seen the email forward that suggests we are getting ripped off by our government.  Surprise!  The second time I got it I did the calculation and decided, “Pretty close.”  I forwarded it to my genius son who verified it.

       Assuming we averaged only $30,000 a year, had we bought an IRA that paid only 4 percent with the money our employers contributed to the Social Security trust fund over the 40 years we worked we’d have an $800,000 nest egg which would pay us $26,000 a year for 30 years, assuming we’d live to 95. 

The email ends, “The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madhoff ever had.”  My son says it’s worse than a Ponzi scheme, because “with a real Ponzi scheme you have a choice.  With Social Security you have a gun in your face forcing you to participate.  A Ponzi schemer, thief that he is, does not have the unlimited power of the government over his victims.”

Colorado River Tea Party Dinner Debate

       The Colorado River Tea Party group had a debate watch dinner party last night.  It was great, about 100 people, and in spite of the fact that once again the debate is moderated by a liberal jerk who is intent on asking questions that make the candidates look like empty headed idiots, they did quite well, turned most of the questions into real issues.      
        I have been waiting for someone to take Santorum down a notch or two because of his serious big government creds. It happened last night, his backing of Specter against Toomy,  the Tea Party candidate. Santorum also supported the bridge to nowhere, all the bailouts, Planned Parenthood, no child left behind, and he voted 5 times to raise the debt ceiling with no caveat to cut spending.
        And his excuses were quite lame. Specter was a power broker who could influence judicial votes, no child was in support of Bush and the party, planned parenthood because it was part of a big spending bill that needed to pass. All of them credible reasons, but reasons that dug deep holes for him last night. His conservative creds are all based on social issues and we need someone who is serious about fiscal issues. 
         The other three all did well, although I wish they wouldn't let those liberal moderators trap them into focusing on non issues rather than talking about real problems. Gingrich was great on clarifying issues: "You're asking the wrong question." "The issue isn't that simple..." When the moderator posed a question that he said was complex, Gingrich said, "That's not complex. The answer is simple." He and Ron Paul were having some fun. Ron Paul was blunt as usual.  Of Santorum he said, “Well, he’s a fake.”  Romney was serious and on target.