THE party is over. The crowds have gone. The empty tubs of Ben and Jerry’s “Yes, Pecan†ice cream have been binned. Shops are selling “And He Shall Be Called Barack Obama†T-shirts at a generous discount.
But before the new president has got comfortable in the Oval Office, he has been buffeted by bad economic news. American firms announced at least 65,000 job cuts on January 26th alone. Unemployment, which was 4.9% only a year ago, stood at 7.2% in December and is sure to rise. The only bright news was that house sales rose 6.5% between November and December, as buyers snapped up bargains.
Mr Obama spent much of his first week trying to push his gargantuan stimulus package through Congress. The package includes some $275 billion in tax cuts and handouts and $300 billion in short-term spending, such as aid to cash-strapped states for providing health care, unemployment benefits and so forth. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan number-cruncher, reckons about two-thirds of the package could be pumped into the economy within 19 months. That should help soften the recession.
The rest of the package, however, consists of longer-term investments in infrastructure….
[TIM] O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes  like armed robbery  can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.
Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So what we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.
O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.
Judge PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him. So we give him a life sentence.
O’BRIEN: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.
(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?
Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children….
An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning ‘This site may harm your computer’.
It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites – and some of its own pages – as containing malicious software or ‘malware’.
The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google’s email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders.
The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered some kind of major failure that could have had serious implications for internet commerce.
In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.
So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.
Like any other troubled marriage, this one needs counseling. And pronto, because even a trial separation at a moment as precarious as this could get really ugly.
So we have come to this 4.2-million-square-foot behemoth  the mother of all malls, a pioneer in the field of destination retailing, and a sprawling, visceral economic indicator  for some talk therapy with shoppers, retailers and management. We let people vent, grumble and sift through their feelings. They catalog their anxieties, describe their fears and express the surprising varieties of guilt that only dysfunctional relationships can produce.
An official report into the “serious and lasting” effects of the economic downturn also warns that clergy may have to make “significant” increases to their pensions as stock market turmoil reduces the value of their retirement funds.
Officials are now carrying out urgent reviews of all aspects of Church finances and future budgets, which will be discussed in detail at the July meeting of its governing body, the General Synod.
In total, the Church spends just over £1bn a year in salaries and pensions for clergy as well as the upkeep of its historic buildings.
Two different takes on Limbaugh’s comments over the past several weeks — which are essentially no different from his comments during Clinton’s reign either.
This is a pretty fair article, offering up two analyses as to the helpfulness of what he’s doing. I personally think that it’s positive — he’s pretty much now the only voice speaking up for conservative policies and ideas, unlike the party that was supposed to do that. And he’s not ashamed to treat the new President as no different from how he treated other liberal presidents. When you have a leadership vacuum, eventually someone steps up, and Limbaugh has. I also don’t think he’s “misread the national mood” one bit — at least, the “national mood” of conservatives which is basically all that he can affect.
For all the talk of new politics and a new start with a new administration, the media person who has emerged as the chief voice of opposition during the first week of Barack Obama’s presidencyâ€â€Rush Limbaughâ€â€has been doing this for 20 years.
The talk-radio titan said, days before Obama was sworn in, that he hoped Obama failed because he didn’t believe in the incoming president’s policies.
It’s kept him in the headlines ever since, to the point where MSNBC on Thursday asked: “Is Rush running the GOP?” The day before, every Republican House member voted against Obama’s economic stimulus plan, a bill Limbaugh has ridiculed as the “porkulus” plan.
“Obama was trying to marginalize me,” Limbaugh said. “His hope was that the House and Senate Republicans would join him in denouncing me. Didn’t work.”
Over the years of my adult life and ministry I have witness[ed] Catholics and Evangelicals adopting more rigid and isolated positions in the face of Liberal triumphalism and in the process become more and more distressed by the abandonment of many in all sections of what we used to term Anglican Comprehension of a commitment to mutual tolerance and symbiosis. It is as if Anglicans have divided into two camps, the one planted in dogmatic conclusions about a past “golden age†of Anglicanism as solely authentic and the other intent on burying for good the traditions, spirituality and theological conclusions of Anglicanism in its “past†multifaceted ethos.
And now I find myself on the edge, on what a friend of mine describes as a conveyer belt leading out of the church I have loved all my life, first in England and now in America. Even during my long years as an extra-mural Anglican bishop, as I sought to serve those who left TEC, I worked hard to keep at the fore the breadth and depth of an Anglicanism which embraced the truths taught and lived by men and women of many forms of what we once termed Churchmanship which made up the whole cloth of our tradition.
I have mentioned before the irony of my entering TEC because it was the American expression of worldwide Anglicanism in communion with the See of Canterbury and now finding myself in a church which may purposely sever its links with that Communion as it affirms independence over mutual interdependence and may become the largest of those groups which have abandoned Anglicanism for sectarianism: a liberal trendy modern Deist group wrapped in the garbs of sacramentalism or a respectable form of Theosophy.
Until I started looking into this, I did not realize that procrastination was such a fertile field of study for so many people and that there were so many types of procrastinators procrastinating in so many ways.
Nor did I realize how much money it can cost us.
How? By not putting away money for retirement, delaying attending to medical needs until they become much more serious, going on last-minute holiday shopping jaunts that run up credit cards because we don’t have time to hunt for bargains and, as many of us have discovered, waiting too long to sell stock.
The average American tax procrastinator, for example, paid an extra $400 because of mistakes made by rushing, resulting in $473 million in overpayments in 2002, said Piers Steel, an associate professor of human resources and organizational dynamics at the University of Calgary. He is writing a book on the subject, “The Procrastination Equation,†(Collins) to be published next year.
The litigation in San Joaquin has entered a new phase with the filing of a cross-complaint against the Episcopal Church (USA) by the parties it initially sued last April. The cross-complaint, brought by Bishop Schofield and two diocesan investment entities which he heads (the Episcopal Foundation and the Diocesan Investment Trust), seeks an award against ECUSA for the amount of attorneys’ fees those defendants are being called upon to expend in defending the suit instigated by Bishop Jerry A. Lamb and a group calling itself the “Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin”, and joined in by ECUSA.
The cross-complaint states two claims for relief. The first asserts that ECUSA in effect put Bishop Lamb and his followers up to bringing the lawsuit that was filed in Fresno County Superior Court on April 24, 2008, by making false representations to them that they could be plaintiffs because they were now a genuine diocese of the Episcopal Church who had met in a legitimate “special convention” the previous month and elected a bishop. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, convened the special convention herself, and proposed the Rt. Rev. Jerry A. Lamb, the resigned (retired) bishop of the Diocese of Northern California, to be its “provisional bishop”. After it concurred, the convention proceeded to adopt resolutions authorizing him to claim ownership of the corporation sole that holds title to diocesan real property, and to file the present lawsuit against Bishop Schofield and the investment entities, which manage the funds belonging to the diocese.
St. John the Evangelist Church is a large Catholic parish one block away from the former Good Shepherd buildings. Msgr. Meagher, the priest at St. John’s, graciously offered to host Good Shepherd’s Thursday night soup kitchen,the Shepherd’s Bowl, temporarily while we are transitioning from one location to another. Last week, having already vacated the buildings, we hung signs on the former Good Shepherd property directing Shepherd’s Bowl people to St. John’s where they would find a good warm meal and free loaves of bread.
This Tuesday our attorney handed the keys to our former building over to the Diocese of Central New York. I considered taking the signs down, but thought better of it. Surely, I thought, the Diocese of Central New York would not want to make it difficult for poor, hungry people to find a soup kitchen.
Silly me.
There were only about 10 people at the Shepherd’s Bowl last night. We could not understand why there was such a steep drop-off until we passed our old building. The walks had been shoveled, the locks changed and all the signs had been taken down.
It has been very cold here in Binghamton this year…colder than it has been in at least six winters. It’s difficult to imagine hardened criminal thug gangsters tearing down soup kitchen signs, its beyond my capacity to understand why a purportedly Christian organization would do so.
The mission slogan of the Diocese of Central New York is “To be the passionate presence of Christ for one another and the world we are called to serve.” Somehow I just can’t imagine Jesus doing that.