The U.S. economic recovery will remain slow deep into next year, held back by shoppers reluctant to spend and employers hesitant to hire, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists.

The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists have turned gloomier in the past three months. They foresee weaker growth and higher unemployment than they did before. As a result, the economists think the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero until at least next spring.

Yet despite their expectation of slower growth, a majority of the 42 economists surveyed believe the recovery remains on track, raising hopes that the economy can avoid falling back into a “double-dip” recession.

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Unemployment in America is a national crisis. It is also a local crisis. As individuals and families struggle to find work, make ends meet, and keep their homes amid an anemic economic recovery, they increasingly turn to local services for support. Local governments provide job training and assistance, transportation, support services for individuals and families in need, health care and education and afterschool programs that support working families. In many communities, local governments are also one of the primary employers….

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“It’s a sleazy business run by sleazy people…”

—North Charleston Councilwoman Phoebe Miller, who plans to vote for casino boats to come to North Charleston anyway

While many communities are fearfully contemplating extensive cuts, Maywood says it is the first city in the nation in the current downturn to take an ax to everyone.

The school crossing guards were let go. Parking enforcement was contracted out, City Hall workers dismissed, street maintenance workers made redundant. The public safety duties of the Police Department were handed over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

At first, people in this poor, long-troubled and heavily Hispanic city southeast of Los Angeles braced for anarchy.

Senior citizens were afraid they would be assaulted as they walked down the street. Parents worried the parks would be shut and their children would have nowhere to safely play. Landlords said their tenants had begun suggesting that without city-run services they would no longer feel obliged to pay rent.

The apocalypse never arrived.

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Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.

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We knew the price stabilization was largely due to increased buying activity on the low end from the home buyer tax credit. The issue now, front and center, is foreclosures. We’ve already seen a few reports, and I expect we’ll see more, that show new foreclosures “stabilizing,” while bank repossessions are increasing.

First of all, the stabilization is at such a high rate that it’s clearly an unsustainable stabilization for the economic recovery. New foreclosure notices need to drop, not just bump around at their near-record highs. And frankly the bank repossession number is a much bigger deal, because that is going to translate into immediate inventory on the market.

Of course they do, but in Los Angeles at least, they’re getting a big incentive to dump it fast. L.A. last week passed a new city ordinance that fines banks, servicers, whoever owns the foreclosed property, up to $100,000 for letting the property fall into disrepair. We’ve heard and seen plenty of stories about run-down, stripped homes littering the landscape, with their overgrown lawns and broken front fences standing as glaring examples of what is not recovering in the housing market.

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Making good on an earlier threat, a Central Florida atheist organization has filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Lakeland over its practice of opening City Commission meetings with prayer.

Atheists of Florida filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Tampa on Monday. It names the city and Mayor Gow Fields “in his official capacity as Chairman of the Lakeland City Commission” as defendants and seeks to “protect individual civil and Constitutional rights, including the right to be free from government intrusion into, entanglement with and endorsement of religious matters.”

Atheists of Florida and EllenBeth Wachs, director of its Lakeland chapter, are listed as the plaintiffs in the suit.

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A major political clash is brewing in New York over a planned mosque near Ground Zero, with Republicans demanding an investigation into the mosque’s funding and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg calling such a probe “un-American.”

Long Island Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, wants a probe of the $100 million project, as does GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio.

“That just is so out of character for what this nation stands for,” Bloomberg said at a Monday (July 12) press conference.

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Received this morning:

“I cant believe my 10 yr old grand daughter got a $153 ticket yd for walking her dog, great way to find out state has a law requires a person to be 18 to walk a dog without adult supervision.”

As some provisions of this year’s federal health care overhaul go into effect, Fairfax County is planning for how it will handle the changes.

Industry experts have said the cost of health insurance plans such as the one Fairfax County offers to its employees could increase by 4 percent or more in 2011, said Susan Woodruff, the county’s Human Resources director.

“That’s a cost that we, the employer, and the employees will have to find a way to share,” Woodruff said.

Given the county now budgets more than $68 million per year for its employee insurance needs, even a slight increase could add millions to the total.

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Investors are worried that the risk of default for US local governments is growing, amid signs that some regions are facing the same type of difficulty in curbing pension and budget deficits as some eurozone countries.

The yield attached to some forms of infrastructure municipal bonds has risen relative to US Treasury bonds because of fears that cash-strapped local governments will struggle to repay these loans.

Absolute borrowing costs for regional governments remain relatively low in historical terms because of the Federal Reserve’s ultra-loose monetary policy. But any swings in municipal yields will be watched closely by investors, since they suggest that the fiscal anxieties about the eurozone could now infect the US.

“The risk in the second half of the year is that investor attention switches from Europe to the US,” said Robert Parker, senior adviser at Credit Suisse Securities, who singled out parts of California, as well as towns and cities in Illinois, Michigan and New York state as among the most vulnerable.

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In a gesture borne of frustration and faith, a group of clergy from across Boston gathered in the City Council chamber yesterday to ask God for peace on the city’s streets.

“The violence in the neighborhood in which we serve is intolerable,’’ said the Rev. Cathy H. George of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Upham’s Corner. “And it wouldn’t be put up with anywhere else that I’ve ever been in the state.’’

The City Council opens each of its weekly meetings with a prayer, but yesterday, in a show of concern about a wave of violence in which five people under 16 have been shot this spring, Council President Michael P. Ross and Councilor at Large Ayanna Pressley asked a number of clergy to come and pray.

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Spending cuts by state and local governments from New York to California may act as a drag on the economy into 2011, only the second time in more than a half century that such reductions have restricted growth for three consecutive years.

States face a cumulative budget gap of $127.4 billion as 46 prepare for the start of their fiscal year on July 1, according to a report this month by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. They will have to fill that hole largely on their own, as aid from the federal government under programs including President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package starts to wind down.

State and local cutbacks may trim growth by about a quarter percentage point in 2010 and 2011 after shaving it by 0.02 point in 2010, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. He also sees the governments lopping payrolls by 200,000 during the next year after reducing them by 190,000 in the 12 months through May.

“The budget cutting that is dead ahead will be a significant impediment to economic growth later this year into 2011,” he said in an interview.

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Public school teacher pensions are a ticking time bomb. They’re short by $933 billion in assets needed to cover promises to retirees, or more than $18,600 per public school pupil.

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President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

The letter comes as rising concern about the national debt is undermining congressional support for additional spending to bolster the economy. Many economists say more spending could help bring down persistently high unemployment, but with Republicans making an issue of the record deficits run up during the recession, many Democratic lawmakers are eager to turn off the stimulus tap.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

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Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas survived a tough challenge from her party’s left wing on Tuesday to capture the Democratic nomination in a runoff primary election, resisting the anti-incumbent wave that has defined the midterm election year.

Mrs. Lincoln withstood a multi-million-dollar campaign against her from organized labor, environmental groups and liberal advocacy organizations from outside Arkansas as she prevailed over Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. She faces a difficult contest in the fall, but her victory challenges the suggestion that voters are poised to oust all officeholders.

“We proved that this senator’s vote is not for sale and neither is yours,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “We took on the outside groups seeking to manipulate our votes.”

In California, Republican primary voters chose female business executives to run for Senate and for governor after both crushed their opponents.

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The Broward school district on Monday delivered pink slips to 1,305 teachers, secretaries and maintenance workers as the school district struggles to close a $130 million budget shortfall.

Two days before the school year ends, the district notified 568 teachers and 737 noninstructional employees that they will not have jobs when classes resume in the fall.

“This is the worst possible scenario coming true,” School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb said.

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This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.

Ms. Barham just left. And she’s not coming back.

In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends’ pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog.

Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.

In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. “I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn’t predict, in a way that couldn’t be controlled by the police,” she says. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Not a short article but a very important one–read it all.

Following a colloquy on the effect of intermarriage, an increasing phenomenon, on the question of who is Jewish, [Jonathan] Kligler cited “commitment” as an important facet of “community.” In Judaism, he said, an individual is expected to have a relationship with each element of the “great triad” of God, Torah, and Israel (with the latter referring to the people rather than the country). Meanwhile, the Jewish Congregation recently demonstrated its identity as a community by gathering at the home of a member whose father had died.

The first purpose of a religious community, said Maclary, who has served as pastor of Christ’s Lutheran Church since 1998, is to “keep the faith” – to seek an interaction with God and an understanding of the divine. In an apparent allusion to the so-called Religious Right, the Lutheran minister expressed concern over the recent prominence of an intolerant segment of the Christian community. “The word Christian has been taken hostage, derailed by a group of people with a political agenda,” she said. “My denomination and others have been drowned out by a minority and are struggling to reclaim our identity.”

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Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 ”” and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount ”” black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites ”” many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

A long but important article–take the time to read it all.

“There comes a time when you have to say, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’ ” said Jaweed Ansari, a Brentwood physician and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Williamson County.

Every year, hundreds of new houses of worship are proposed around the United States. A growing number face resistance from neighbors and government officials who see places of worship as a nuisance because they don’t pay taxes, often ask for special exceptions to zoning rules and cause traffic congestion. But religious liberty advocates say these objections can trample the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

Ansari admits the mosque plan wasn’t perfect. Most of the 14 acres is on a flood plain, a problem exacerbated by Middle Tennessee’s recent storms. Only about 4 acres was needed for the mosque, so organizers didn’t see that as a problem. They also felt the site, which borders a park and has neighbors only on one side, would be fairly unobtrusive.

“We realized going into this that nobody wants anything in their backyard, regardless of whether it is a church or a Walmart or whatever,” he said.

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On June 21 – in the lead up to the federal election ”“ the leaders of Australia’s two major political parties have agreed to speak live to Christians across the nation. We want you to be part of this landmark event.

”˜Make it Count 2010’ will see Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott address Christians and answer questions from Christian leaders in a live webcast to churches throughout Australia from Canberra’s Old Parliament House.

The event follows on from a similar one held prior to the 2007 federal election in which John Howard and Kevin Rudd addressed 100,000 Christians meeting at 846 churches across Australia. This year we are hoping to triple those numbers.

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Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who left the Republican Party a year ago in hopes of salvaging a 30-year career, was rejected on Tuesday by Democratic primary voters, with Representative Joe Sestak winning the party’s nomination on an anti-incumbent wave that is defining the midterm elections.

In Kentucky, Rand Paul, the most visible symbol of the Tea Party movement, easily won the Republican Senate primary and delivered a significant blow to the Republican establishment. His 24-point victory over Trey Grayson, who was supported by the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, underscored the anti-Washington sentiment echoing across the country.

The outcomes of both contests, along with a Democratic primary in Arkansas that pushed Senator Blanche Lincoln into a runoff election in June, illustrated anew the serious threats both parties face from candidates who are able to portray themselves as outsiders and eager to shake up the system.

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As [John] Podhoretz rightly notes, if you grew up in a big city in the ’70s, then life is better for you now in about every respect. Today, most liberals and conservatives have more sophisticated views on how to build and preserve civic order than people did then, and there is more of it.

The Upper West Side is still integrated. And despite all expectations, it’s actually more religious now. For example, there are now 4,000 children attending yeshivas, Jewish schools and Jewish nursery schools in the neighborhood.

The children of the ’70s grew up with both unprecedented freedom and disorder, and have learned, in mostly good ways, from both.

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Dorchester District 2’s well-regarded schools are in danger in the wake of severe budget cuts, school leaders and residents told County Council at a public hearing Monday night.

Allyson Duke, district chief financial officer, made a presentation to council’s Finance Committee on the 2010-2011 schools budget. She said the district faces a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall next year.

Her presentation was followed by a public hearing, which drew a standing-room-only crowd. At the hearing, district leaders and residents voiced their concerns about the impact of budget cuts on the schools.

Superintendent Joe Pye said, “the biggest issue is class size.” There will be more children, on average, in classrooms next year, which will impact students, he said.

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Herein lies the challenge: Small businesses, half of the private sector (and the most important part as far as jobs are concerned), have been heavily impacted by this credit crisis. Small businesses created 64% of new jobs over the past 15 years, but they have cut five million jobs since the onset of this credit crisis. Large businesses, by comparison, have shed three million jobs in the past two years.

Small businesses continue to struggle to gain access to credit and cannot hire in this environment. Thus, the full weight of job creation falls upon large businesses. It would take large businesses rehiring 100% of the three million workers laid off over the past two years to make a substantial change in jobless numbers. Given the productivity gains enjoyed recently, it is improbable that anything near this will occur.

Unless real focus is afforded to re-engaging small businesses in this country, we will have a tragic and dangerous unemployment level for an extended period of time. Small businesses fund themselves exactly the way consumers do, with credit cards and home equity lines. Over the past two years, more than $1.5 trillion in credit-card lines have been cut, and those cuts are increasing by the day….

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A T-shirt vendor saw something suspicious in New York’s Times Square Saturday evening — smoke coming from an unoccupied SUV on 45th Street near 7th Avenue — so he alerted police.

The tip led to what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called an “amateurish”-looking car bomb and what Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told ABC News’ “This Week” today might have been part of a “one-off” attack.

The 6:30 p.m. scare prompted police to evacuate thousands of people from the heart of the Big Apple during one of its busiest times — a warm Saturday night when it was packed with theatergoers and tourists.

“We are very lucky,” Bloomberg said. “Thanks to alert New Yorkers and professional police officers, we avoided what could [have been] a very deadly event.”

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Also, an AP video report which I appreciated may be found here.

“The bashing of Wall Street is something that should worry everybody,” [Michael] Bloomberg declared last week.

The Republican-turned-independent mayor’s positions have made him a lone wolf among left-leaning officials in the city. Local lawmakers and others rallied at City Hall on Tuesday in support of financial reform, some holding signs that read “Goldman Suchs.”

Bloomberg plans to attend Obama’s speech at The Cooper Union college Thursday but demurred when asked whether he was concerned about what the president would say.

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School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.

The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue ”” state money and local property taxes ”” have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education has been mostly used up this year.

As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts are planning to close schools, cut programs, enlarge class sizes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.

“We are doing things and considering options I never thought I’d have to consider,” said Peter C. Gorman, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, who expects to cut 600 of the district’s 9,400 teachers this year, after laying off 120 last year. “This may be our new economic reality.”

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The ritual of washing feet has a deep-seated tie to Holy Week, a symbol of the humility Jesus showed in performing the act for his disciples the day before his death.

Craig Taffaro, president of St. Bernard Parish, La., took that custom into the workplace Thursday (April 1), going around the government complex throughout the day to wash the feet of willing employees.

“As the chief executive officer of St. Bernard Parish Government, I thought it was an appropriate gesture to show that I am as humbled as any other sinner in the world, so much so that I would offer to wash the feet of the employees,” Taffaro said.

Taffaro did not publicize his actions. A reporter was alerted to the matter by several phone calls from people who had heard from government employees whose feet were washed.

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