When it comes to economics, there is no separation between church and state.

The same problems ”” fewer conferences and less money for travel ”” are saddling both the county convention center and church-owned conference centers.

“The downturn in the economy has made a challenging situation more difficult,” said Bob Kobielush, former president of the Christian Camp and Conference Association. “In the past three years, the number of people going to camps and conference centers has gone down.”

But at least one area church and a conference center have found a solution.

Read it all.

Rancor surrounding the proposed Park51 community center in New York City is a painful indication of how little progress America has made in healing the national wound created on Sept. 11, 2001.

Immediately following these attacks, many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims castigated the terrorists responsible. However, nearly a decade later, not only are many Americans unable or unwilling to recall this, but according to a recent Pew study, a growing number of U.S. citizens now believe ”” erroneously and prejudicially ”” that President Obama is himself a Muslim. More harmful than the ignorance behind these mistaken beliefs is that they curtail the ability of faith communities to offer much-needed guidance and healing.

Read it all.

[DAISY] KHAN: The extremists have defined the agenda for the global Muslim community, and we wanted to amplify the voices of the ordinary Muslims who are, you know, law-abiding citizens, and it was my way of, like, helping rebuild by building a center that would create a counter-momentum against extremism.

[SALLY] REGENHARD: I want to make it clear that I and my””members of my group do not have anger towards Muslims. But it’s too close, it’s too painful, it’s too soon. I’m still trying to find remains of my son.

[MICHAEL] BURKE: It amounts to an insult. It comes across as intentionally provocative.

[BOB] FAW: Proponent Khan, though, has drawn a line in the sand, arguing that being forced to move the site elsewhere amounts to “surrender.”

KHAN: I think it would be un-American to ask anybody to leave the neighborhood. We’re part of the neighborhood. I don’t think anybody should be driven out of their neighborhood. It’s about acceptance. Muslims are not being accepted as equals in this country yet.

Read or watch it all.

Mr. [Arne] Duncan joined Ms. [Michaelle] Rhee in advocating the use of student test scores as a measure of teaching ability and paying teachers for performance. Ms. [Randi ] Weingarten agreed that teacher performance should be measured, but objected to the recent publication of teacher evaluations by the Los Angeles Times, calling that particular evaluation system flawed. Mr. Duncan, in contrast, praised the publication.

Meanwhile, teacher union leaders in Los Angeles have urged a boycott of the Times and asked union members to suspend their subscriptions. So much for thoughtful discourse.

On this issue Ms. Weingarten and the teacher unions are fighting a rearguard action. A recent Gallup poll found, unsurprisingly, that 72 percent of public school parents believe teacher pay should be based on performance.

That’s a reasonable expectation, since the future of their children is at stake.

Read it all.

Two-thirds of New York City residents want a planned Muslim community center and mosque to be relocated to a less controversial site farther away from ground zero in Lower Manhattan, including many who describe themselves as supporters of the project, according to a New York Times poll.

The poll indicates that support for the 13-story complex, which organizers said would promote moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue, is tepid in its hometown.

Nearly nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks ignited a wave of anxiety about Muslims, many in the country’s biggest and arguably most cosmopolitan city still have an uneasy relationship with Islam. One-fifth of New Yorkers acknowledged animosity toward Muslims. Thirty-three percent said that compared with other American citizens, Muslims were more sympathetic to terrorists. And nearly 60 percent said people they know had negative feelings toward Muslims because of 9/11.

Read it all.

Jewish, evangelical and Catholic speakers, some with backgrounds in national security and interfaith relations, called the controversy over plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque a few blocks from ground zero in New York “contrived” and likely to help those who would recruit potential terrorists.

“The individuals and organizations who are contriving this controversy seem to will that (a war with Islam) will come into existence,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer and professor of international relations at Boston University, in a Sept. 1 teleconference organized by the group Faith in Public Life. “It is absolutely imperative that we act together to deny them this.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal the same day, New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan said he was working with Jewish and Muslim religious leaders to identify clerics and laypeople to invite to interreligious discussions to work out conflicts as they occur.

Read it all.

Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions””most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities””not just one””closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.

Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.

Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.

Read it all.

Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to “rolling brownouts” in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.

Philadelphia began rolling brownouts this month, joining cities from Baltimore to Sacramento that now shut some units every day. San Jose, Calif., laid off 49 firefighters last month. And Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston, has laid off firefighters and shut down half of its six firehouses, forcing the city to rely on help from neighboring departments each time a fire goes to a second alarm.

Fire chiefs and union officials alike say it is the first time they have seen such deep cuts in so many parts of the country. “I’ve never seen it so widespread,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s NY Times.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has long worked to bridge divisions, be they fissures between interfaith husbands and wives or political chasms separating the United States and the Muslim world.

The 61-year-old clergyman is now in the midst of a polarizing political, religious and cultural debate over plans for a multistory Islamic center that will feature a mosque, health club and theater about two blocks north of ground zero. He is one of the leaders of the Park51 project, but has largely been absent from the national debate over the implications of building a Muslim house of worship so close to where terrorists killed more than 2,700 people.

Though Rauf has said the center, which could cost more than $100 million, would serve as a space for interfaith dialogue, moderate Muslim practice and peaceful prayer, critics say it will create a base for radical, anti-American Islam. Some critics have also asked where the funding for the center might originate and whether it may come from sources linked to Muslim extremists.

Read it all.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As far as I am concerned, Tulane University President Scott Cowen is a national hero–someone needs to give the man a medal–KSH.

Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

Read it all.

The wake-up call comes after a series of police-involved shootings since early July that have left four men dead and a community asking hard questions.

On July 5, a rookie police officer shot and killed DeCarlos Moore in Overtown as Moore disobeyed an order and returned to his car. He had no weapon.

The most recent case involved Tarnorris Tyrell Gaye, 19, who was shot and killed last Friday by the same officer who shot and killed a man during a sting-gone-bad nine days earlier.

That day, police say, 16-year-old Joell Lee Johnson was killed during an undercover police operation involving holdups of fast-food deliverers after the teen pointed a gun at the officer.

Read it all.

It’s church versus state in a local taxation battle.

Episcopal church officials say the property tax assessment on land next to Holy Apostles Church on the Oneida Indian Reservation is unlawful because it’s designated a cemetery.

Village of Hobart assessor Mike Denor says 23 acres that have a 2010 property tax obligation of about $600 are mostly woods, and even calling it a cemetery “is kind of a stretch.”

Read it all.

Cities and states across the nation are selling and leasing everything from airports to zoos””a fire sale that could help plug budget holes now but worsen their financial woes over the long run.

California is looking to shed state office buildings. Milwaukee has proposed selling its water supply; in Chicago and New Haven, Conn., it’s parking meters. In Louisiana and Georgia, airports are up for grabs.

About 35 deals now are in the pipeline in the U.S., according to research by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Global Banking & Markets. Those assets have a market value of about $45 billion””more than ten times the $4 billion or so two years ago, estimates Dana Levenson, head of infrastructure banking at RBS. Hundreds more deals are being considered, analysts say.

Read it all.

(Make sure to view the actual cover there).

You don’t have to be prejudiced against Islam to believe, as many Americans do, that the area around Ground Zero is a sacred place. But sadly, in an election season, such sentiments have been stoked into a political issue. As the debate has grown more heated, Park51, as the proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is called, has become a litmus test for everything from private-property rights to religious tolerance. But it is plain that many of Park51’s opponents are motivated by deep-seated Islamophobia.

Read it all.

Our Constitution may or may not be more concerned with justice than sensitivity. Interestingly, there is a portion of Scripture that addresses this. In both chapters 6 and 10 of Paul’s letter, First Corinthians, he instructs his fellow Christians with this admonition: “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.” In that context, if Paul is urging Christians in a pluralistic society to be sensitive to others whose views and values may be different from theirs, he is also urging those same Christians to not be overly sensitive when their sensibilities are offended. Indeed, it is a Christian ethic that admonishes both offender and offended alike.

My life has been enriched by relationships with people different from myself, religiously or otherwise — enough, in fact, for me to conclude that the surest way to rob any of us of our humanity is to pay too much attention to how we have been labeled. The First Amendment reflects the highest and noblest vision of our great nation. And for many of us, at least, that means we are most Christian when we understand, accept and respect those who aren’t.

Read it all.

The consequences of doing nothing would be painful. But they would be far less harmful than the consequences of an unconditioned federal bailout, which would mean massive new fiscal commitments at the federal level.

Unfortunately, leaders in Illinois and elsewhere are now talking quietly about the possibility of a federal bailout. Such speculation undermines state and local efforts to reform pension systems or make other hard choices. Why agonize over unpopular budget cuts or tax increases if the feds will ride to the rescue?

Bailing out state pensions would be astronomically expensive. According to a Pew Foundation estimate this year, the total unfunded liabilities of the 50 states’ pension funds amounted to about $1 trillion in 2008. Another recent study, by Josh Rauh of Northwestern and Robert Novy-Marx of the Chicago Booth School of Business, estimated that the unfunded liability was closer to $3 trillion. Adding the liabilities of municipal pension funds makes the total even larger.

Read it all.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, said Wednesday that he would gladly help mediate between the proponents and critics of an Islamic center and mosque planned for a site two blocks from ground zero.

The archbishop said that it was his “major prayer” that a compromise could be reached, and that while he had no strong feelings about the project, he might support finding a new location for the center.

Speaking during an impromptu news conference at Covenant House, a Catholic shelter in Manhattan for homeless youth, Archbishop Dolan invoked the example of Pope John Paul II, who in 1993 ordered Catholic nuns to move from their convent at the former Auschwitz death camp after protests from Jewish leaders.

“He’s the one who said, ”˜Let’s keep the idea, and maybe move the address,’ ” the archbishop said. “It worked there; might work here.”

Read it all.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It is hard to imagine that anything has gone unsaid about the so-called Ground Zero mosque, but an important point seems to be missing.

The mosque should be built precisely because we don’t like the idea very much. We don’t need constitutional protections to be agreeable, after all.

This point surpasses even all the obvious reasons for allowing the mosque, principally that there’s no law against it.

Read it all.

Politicians beyond New York continued to stake out positions Tuesday on the controversy over plans to build an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center, but divisions emerged within each party over what has become a surprise issue in the 2010 elections.

In Pennsylvania’s closely contested Senate race, the Democratic candidate, Rep. Joe Sestak, appeared with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and endorsed the rights of project organizers to construct the Islamic center at its proposed location. Mr. Sestak’s position put him at odds with several other candidates in his own party, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who on Monday announced his opposition to the mosque’s being built near the site of the destroyed towers in Manhattan.

The issue dominated a news conference Tuesday in which Mr. Bloomberg endorsed Mr. Sestak’s Senate bid. Mr. Sestak, who had won the Democratic nomination over the opposition of Senate leaders and the White House, appeared pleased to once again highlight a difference between himself and Mr. Reid.

Read it all.

What started as a local zoning debate about an Islamic center near Ground Zero, and then morphed into a fight over religious expression, has now turned into an election-year political brawl.

Caught in the middle of the rancorous partisan fight are American Muslims, whose own voices have been drowned out by politicians on both the left and the right.

“In a fundamental sense, this is not a conversation about Muslims,”said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This is a conversation in which the Muslims are being used as the football with which to play the game of competing visions of America.”

Read it all.

Last Friday, at the start of Ramadan, President Obama presided over the White House’s annual iftar dinner and made some rather bland remarks about religious freedom. The context, of course, was the controversy over the proposed mosque in Lower Manhattan, which is not, as Obama insisted, about freedom of religion but about religious tolerance. And then, having once again gotten high praise for so very little, he went to bed a panicked man and reached, trembling, some hours later, for a political morning-after pill to take back some of what he had said. Whew, for a moment there he was pregnant with principle.

No more. “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Obama said in revising and extending and eviscerating his remarks of the previous night. He had merely been commenting on freedom of religion. Turns out he’s for it.

The president muddled his message. Does he not grasp that questioning the “wisdom” of the mosque’s placement is predicated on thinking that 9/11 was a Muslim crime? Does he not understand that the issue here is religious prejudice, not zoning? The answer, of course, is that he does. But unlike Henry Clay, he would rather be president than right.

Read it all.

President Obama said on Saturday that in defending the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near Ground Zero he “was not commenting” on “the wisdom” of that particular project, but rather trying to uphold the broader principle that government should treat “everyone equal, regardless” of religion.

Read it all.

The controversy over a planned Islamic mosque and cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center has stirred a lot of impassioned voices in opposition to the facility, which some see as an affront to those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

But one organization that is not opposed to the new structure — at least not in principle — is the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles.

The Wiesenthal Center is the organization behind the Museum of Tolerance, which has locations in L.A. and a new branch in New York. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview that his organization is not going to oppose the Cordoba House, which is the name of the planned Islamic cultural facility.

“The families of the victims, they should have the dominant say in this,” said Hier.

Read it all.

The Charleston County School Board decided Monday night to scale back its request to voters and ask them to approve a six-year, one-penny sales tax increase to pay for construction projects.

Board members had planned to put an eight-year sales tax increase on voters’ ballots in November, but a lack of business community support and revised revenue figures led them to reduce it by two years. The six-year tax would generate an estimated $75 million per year for a total of $450 million.

The money would go toward building 14 new schools, renovating four schools, acquiring land in three developments, conducting seismic evaluations of six buildings, creating design plans for one school and improving existing schools’ athletic facilities.

Read it all.

New Jersey’s most impoverished city will close all three branches of its public library at year’s end unless a rescue can be pulled off.

Camden’s library board says the libraries won’t be able to afford to stay open past Dec. 31 because of budget cuts from the city government. The city had its subsidy from the state cut.

The library board president says the library system, which opened in 1904, is preparing to donate, sell or destroy its collections, including 187,000 books.

Read it all

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further ”” it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

Read it all.

Rather than issue a plain-vanilla bond with a fixed interest rate, Denver followed its bankers’ suggestions and issued so-called pension certificates with a derivative attached; the debt carried a lower rate but it could also fluctuate if economic conditions changed.

The Denver schools essentially made the same choice some homeowners make: opting for a variable-rate mortgage that offered lower monthly payments, with the risk that they could rise, instead of a conventional, fixed-rate mortgage that offered larger, but unchanging, monthly payments.

The Denver school board unanimously approved the JPMorgan deal and it closed in April 2008, just weeks after a major investment bank, Bear Stearns, failed. In short order, the transaction went awry because of stress in the credit markets, problems with the bond insurer and plummeting interest rates.

Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.

Read it all.

The County School Board will ask voters this fall to support an eight-year, one-penny sales tax increase that would generate at least $500 million for construction projects.

The money would cover at least 16 new school buildings, two whole school renovations and comprehensive athletic complexes for three areas of the county. The big question now is whether voters will vote in favor of the tax.

If they don’t, county residents instead would see their property taxes increase to pay for the rebuilding of five schools with seismic problems — Buist Academy, Charleston Progressive Academy, James Simons Elementary, Memminger Elementary and Sullivan’s Island Elementary — but none of the district’s other building needs would be addressed. The eight-year tax includes those projects as well as a number of others, and property taxes would not be raised.

Read it all.