The voting results are here and some more information on the candidate, who once served in South Carolina, is there.

Where is America?

America is on line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proven innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention….

And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace — a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.

Read it all. For those of you preaching tomorrow, I think you have little choice but to address the national anxiety of which Ms. Noonan speaks head on–KSH.

For neither Dr Williams nor Dr Sentamu have a proper grasp of how modern finance works – nor the degree to which it is already examined by economists, philosophers and the Fourth Estate.

To claim, as both clerics have done, that much modern finance is fiction or fraud is wrong and, more importantly, misleading. Finance allows savers to profit from the growth of the economy. Everything from home-ownership to old age pensions relies on a successful and sophisticated financial sector. An archbishop, of all people, should know that just because you cannot see something, it does not mean that it is not there or that it does not matter.

Dr Sentamu was wrong to join the chorus of abuse for short-sellers, now the UK’s most popular pantomime villains. They are clearly not “bank robbers” or “asset strippers”. If investors believe a price is too low, they can buy and hold it. If they believe a price is too high, they can sell it short. This interplay is important. Without short sellers, prices will tend to rise too high. There are strong arguments for restraining them under febrile market conditions, but what they do is not wrong or immoral.

Read it all.

After a marathon round of negotiations that ended in the predawn hours on Saturday, Congressional leaders and Bush administration officials said they were nearing consensus on a $700 billion rescue plan for the nation’s financial system, and that a deal might be announced Sunday evening before the markets open in Asia….

On the bailout, Mr. Reid said, “We hope that sometime tomorrow evening we can announce there has been some kind of agreement in principle,” adding that it was crucial to send a reassuring message to the financial markets. “We may not have another day.”

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, who is the lead negotiator for Senate Republicans, also said there was an urgent need for action: “Failure to do this will lead to a massive fiscal meltdown in the credit markets, which will lead immediately to a meltdown on Main Street.”

Read it all.

Participants in the pulpit initiative also are wrong on their history. From the founding it has been clear that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the architects of our notions of religious liberty, intended to prohibit the state from dictating the content of religious convictions. Thus this preamble to the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which Jefferson drafted in 1777: “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness … that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money [through taxation] for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness …”

That sounds a lot like the spirit of the current tax code, which makes funds available from our collective purse for pursuit of the common good, though not political advantage.

Read it all.

Some people of faith tend to be either/or. A suicide bomber, for example, willingly forfeits this life for the hope of rewards in the next. That utterly contradicts the Christian message, for Jesus taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he described it as taking shape now, on this planet.

The world does not need either/or people of whatever persuasion””neither the believer who sees life as something merely to endure, nor the George Orwell who realizes all too late that he sawed off the limb he was resting on.

Rather, we need both/and Christians, people devoted to God’s creatures and God’s children as well as to God, and as committed to this life as to the afterlife, to this city as to the heavenly city. Otherwise, the rhetoric from Democrats in Colorado, as well as from Republicans in Minnesota, will be just that: empty rhetoric. For, as Habermas says, a democracy of free people must look elsewhere for the qualities its citizens need.

Read it all and take special note of the quote from George Orwell.

Local Episcopalians are scheduled to meet today to elect a new bishop, one more step toward mending a feud that saw their last leader retire in early 2006.

Delegates in the Diocese of Southern Virginia will choose from six candidates during voting at Powhatan High School, west of Richmond.

The winner will succeed Bishop David C. Bane Jr. and lead more than 30,000 Episcopalians in a territory stretching from the Eastern Shore to the Appalachians.

The only candidate from the diocese, which includes Hampton Roads, is the Rev. Herman “Holly” Hollerith IV, 53, a priest at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg.

Read it all.

(Press Release) FAIRFAX, Va. (September 26, 2008) ”“ Today, the Fairfax County Circuit Court signed an Order stipulating that the nine Anglican District of Virginia (ADV) congregations that filed petitions under the Virginia Division Statute (§57-9) have satisfied the voting requirements of §57-9. In that Order, The Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Diocese of Virginia also stipulated that they will not contest such findings by the Court. This Order substantially narrows the scope of the church property trial that will take place in October.

ADV also announced that the remaining two of the 11 ADV congregations sued by TEC and the Diocese have settled. Potomac Falls Church, Sterling, Va., and Christ the Redeemer Church, Centreville, Va., have each agreed to a modest monetary settlement with TEC and the Diocese which will end the litigation between them. Neither congregation filed Virginia Division Statute (§ 57-9) petitions because they did not have real property at stake, only personal property.

“Any decision that releases any of our member congregations from the cloud of litigation is a positive step. We are pleased that the settlement has been reached. We look forward to the day when we can all get this behind us and move forward with the work we have to do,” said Jim Oakes, vice chairman of ADV.

“Yet the Diocese should have settled a year and a half ago since these two congregations both meet in elementary schools and have no real property. Not only that, but since Christ the Redeemer Church is not a former Episcopal congregation, today’s settlement is a nuisance value payment.

“We are grateful that the Diocese and TEC took heed of our repeated call to settle this litigation amicably for a modest payment from the two congregations ”“ payments which are restricted to be given to a limited number of ministries jointly approved by the congregations and the Diocese.

“We had hoped that the Diocese and TEC would have used this model as a way to work with us to drop the remaining lawsuits which we never wanted, did not initiate and consistently said that we would like to resolve amicably. Despite the promise of appeal from the Diocese, we are ready to put this litigation behind us for all of the parishes so that we can focus our time, money and effort solely on the work of the Gospel,” Oakes concluded.

The remaining items for the October trial are whether four parcels of property and one set of personal property owned by the Anglican congregations are covered by the congregations’ Division petitions. The trial will start October 14 in the Fairfax County Circuit Court.

The Episcopal Church and the Diocese abruptly broke off settlement negotiations in January 2007 and filed lawsuits against the Virginia churches, their ministers and their vestries. The decision of The Episcopal Church and the Diocese to redefine and reinterpret Scripture caused the 11 Anglican churches to sever their ties.

Between the prayers that fill the holy month of Ramadan, during the long fasts that stretch from dawn to dusk, Muslims have been meeting to discuss the disappearance of Salman Ibrahim.

The respected businessman persuaded up to 200 Pakistani and Indian immigrants to contribute their savings and mortgage their homes to finance real estate deals.

But Ibrahim vanished in August, leaving his investors with losses that could total $50 million – in some cases their life’s savings.

“The scale of impact that this stands to have on a lot of people in the South Asian and Muslim communities is potentially very drastic,” said attorney Salman Azam, who filed a petition last week to force Ibrahim’s company, Sunrise Equities Inc., into bankruptcy. “There are a lot of very, very sad stories and dire financial situations.”

But it’s the loss of trust that has really shaken people along Devon Avenue on Chicago’s North Side, home to one of North America’s largest South Asian communities.

Read it all.

Ten-time Oscar nominee Paul Newman, creator of iconic movie anti-heroes in “The Hustler,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” has died after a battle with cancer.

The 83-year-old screen legend with the piercing blue eyes died Friday at his farmhouse near Westport, Conn., said publicist Jeff Sanderson. He was surrounded by his family and close friends.

Read it all.

Wachovia Corp. has entered into preliminary talks with a handful of possible buyers — the latest in a parade of banks to look for safety in the arms of a suitor amid concerns that the weak economy is pushing them deeper into peril.

The talks came as Washington Mutual Inc.’s late-Thursday failure rattled the shares of other troubled banks. Shares in Wachovia fell 27% on Friday as investors fretted about its massive mortgage portfolio.

Investors are growing concerned that a host of banks nationwide, both large and small, could come under fresh pressure to either raise more capital or else find someone willing to buy them. The trouble stems in part from the fact that a broad range of borrowers, not just mortgage holders, are now starting to default on their debt. For instance, about 2.4% of payments on credit cards are more than 90 days overdue, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the highest level since 1991.

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

KAI RYSSDAL: Been a heck of a week, hasn’t it? The deal was on. Then it was off. The economy was collapsing, but not yet it seems. We’re going to take a couple of minutes here and try to digest all that’s happened.

Katie Benner’s with Fortune magazine. David Leonhardt’s at The New York Times…

RYSSDAL: David, do you get a sense of anger out there when you do your reporting?

LEONHARDT: I definitely do, and I was talking to a friend of mine who does more reporting out in the country, as opposed to in Washington and New York, and he said that he thinks there’s a good chance that people in Washington and, to some extent, New York, are underestimating the level of the anger there. And I think, to some extent, that is a criticism of Bernanke and Paulson, because I think they’ve done a good job of explaining the stakes here to members of Congress; I don’t think they’ve done a good job at all of explaining to the public what they’re afraid of. And so, in the end, this really does feel like a Wall Street bailout to a lot of people. Which it is, to some extent, but it does not feel like something that the Fed and the Treasury feel that is necessary in order to stem a credit crisis that very much will affect Main Street.

RYSSDAL: Katie, what stands out to you about the way this whole thing has evolved, from a week ago yesterday when Bernanke and Paulson had that first meeting up on Capitol Hill?

BENNER: The crushing speed with which things have unfolded, and it sort of feels like that moment after Enron, where people were piling in to try to create legislation, or to create rules, to stem a problem because people were angry. This is that times a thousand, and we’re not even sure what they’re doing. Nobody really understands the plan.

Read or listen to it all.

I mean, so that — if you say — just say for purposes of argument that the poison was put in by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, by putting them in subprimes, and they were not a good investment.

Well, they just spread like a virus, like a global virus, by the securitization of them and selling them as securities. And so now you’ve got all these other financial institutions who have a stake in them.

And David’s point about, what do you price them at? I mean, if there’s one place where the government ought to be able to exercise some leverage, it’s establishing what the price is. I mean, they ought to be able to go in. I mean, they ought to be able to go in low.

DAVID BROOKS: With one bidder, it’s hard to get a price. Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post had a good observation, which is you can either punish Wall Street or you can stabilize Wall Street. You can’t do both. We all want to punish Wall Street, but we just can’t do it.

And I think the argument for Republicans is, “You may hate this. A lot of people hate this. But serious people like Bernanke, who are not prone to nationalizing industries, think they’re in a panic.”

And the other thing that’s happening today, by the way, is a lot of community banks are calling up their House members. And the tide of opinion may be against this, but among the bankers and increasingly local businesspeople, they are calling up and saying, “You guys better do something.”

Read it all.

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down.

The S.E.C.’s oversight responsibilities will largely shift to the Federal Reserve, though the commission will continue to oversee the brokerage units of investment banks.

Also Friday, the S.E.C.’s inspector general released a report strongly criticizing the agency’s performance in monitoring Bear Stearns before it collapsed in March. Christopher Cox, the commission chairman, said he agreed that the oversight program was “fundamentally flawed from the beginning.”

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” he said in a statement. The program “was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate” of the program, and “weakened its effectiveness,” he added.

Read it all.

CNN’s poll of debate viewers blares a puzzling headline: “Round 1 in debate goes to Obama, poll says.”

But the poll itself actually doesn’t say that. This is blatant editorializing on the part of CNN….

Read the whole thing.

It really is worth the time.

I see over on Intrade this morning that Obama is at 55.8 and McCain 42.1.

With little more than five weeks to Election Day, they may not have persuaded many voters to change their minds or helped undecided ones make a choice.

Despite the absence of a defining moment, the debate showcased the dueling candidates’ temperaments and, particularly on foreign policy, highlighted their policy differences.

However, if voters were looking for a signal on how either would handle the economic meltdown as president, they were disappointed. Neither offered up a thoughtful prescription for addressing the worst economic meltdown in generations, or even much analysis on the proposed $700 billion government bailout.

“I wish they had. They were very cautiously evasive,” said Michael Kevane, chairman of the economics department at Santa Clara University. “They were not very forward-looking. I wanted to hear how they thought the $700 billion should be divvied up.”

Read it all.

Good to remember him on his feast day.

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so. Why aren’t we known as cultivators””people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators””people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

The simple truth is that in the mainstream of culture, cultivation and creativity are the postures that confer legitimacy for the other gestures. People who consider themselves stewards of culture, guardians of what is best in a neighborhood, an institution, or a field of cultural practice gain the respect of their peers. Even more so, those who go beyond being mere custodians to creating new cultural goods are the ones who have the world’s attention. Indeed, those who have cultivated and created are precisely the ones who have the legitimacy to condemn””whose denunciations, rare and carefully chosen, carry outsize weight. Cultivators and creators are the ones who are invited to critique and whose critiques are often the most telling and fruitful.

Read it all.

Parry Aftab, an Internet security and privacy lawyer, said the most important thing parents and adults can to is teach children good judgment and that “the most important filter is the one between their ears.”

“Teach them the people who are too good to be true are too good to be true and if an adult wants to meet them it’s not for love and affection and to marry them some day — they’ve got one thing in mind and one thing only and not all kids come home in one piece & out of a body bag,” Aftab said.

It’s a horrible topic but one that cannot be ignored. Read it all being aware that the subject is disturbing.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Do I wish he was running a different campaign? Yes.

It’s not that he has changed his political personality that bothers me. I’ve come to accept that in this media-circus environment, you simply cannot run for president as a candid, normal person.

Nor is it, primarily, the dishonest ads he is running. My friends in the Obama cheering section get huffy about them, while filtering from their consciousness all the dishonest ads Obama has run ”” the demagogic DHL ad, the insulting computer ad, the cynical Rush Limbaugh ad, the misleading Social Security ad and so on. If one candidate has sunk lower than the other at this point, I’ve lost track.

No, what disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.

McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.

Read it all.

President Bush and Congressional leaders tried to assure Americans on Friday morning that lawmakers and the administration would be able to come together and reach an agreement on a proposal to rescue the country’s financial system.

“We are going to get a package passed,” Mr. Bush said, a day after an earlier agreement dissolved amid a flurry of political rancor. “We will rise to the occasion. Republicans and Democrats will come together and pass a substantial rescue plan.”

A short time later, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, made similar assurances. “We’re going to get this done and stay in session as long as it takes to get it done,” Mr. Reid said.

Read it all.

As congressional leaders struggled to craft a bailout plan for the nation’s troubled financial system Thursday, angry protesters mobbed Wall Street, telephones rang off the hook in House and Senate offices and a group of prominent economists sent off e-mail blasts critiquing the proposal.

Numerous opinion polls taken this week came to wildly varying conclusions about the level of support among Americans for the Bush administration’s $700-billion plan. But the increasingly loud roar coming from all corners of the nation shows that the idea of a bailout has touched a particularly sensitive nerve among the public.

A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said her five offices had doubled staffing to deal with the constantly ringing phones. Through late Thursday, Feinstein’s offices had received a total of 39,180 e-mails, calls and letters on the bailout, with the overwhelming majority of constituents against it. The spokesman said the volume was as great as during the immigration debate and at key points during the war in Iraq.

Read it all.

Setting the stage for a collision of religion and politics, Christian ministers from California and 21 other states will use their pulpits Sunday to deliver political sermons or endorse presidential candidates — defying a federal ban on campaigning by nonprofit groups.

The pastors’ advocacy could violate the Internal Revenue Service’s rules against political speech with the purpose of triggering IRS investigations.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canter­bury this week preached at an inter­national mass in Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, as part of the 150th-anniversary celebrations of St Bernadette’s visions of the Virgin Mary.

Dr Williams was taking part in a pilgrimage of bishops, clergy, and laity from the Church of England, including the Suffragan Bishop in Europe, the Rt Revd David Hamid, which was organised by the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and the Society of Mary.

Read it all.

Banks throughout the United States carried on with the business of making loans yesterday even as federal officials warned again that their industry is on the verge of collapse, suggesting that the overheated language on Capitol Hill may not reflect the reality on many Main Streets.

The industry is resilient despite the struggles of some members. Washington Mutual, a troubled Seattle savings and loan that was among the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, yesterday was seized by the government and sold to J.P. Morgan Chase.

At the same time, many smaller banks said they were actually benefiting from the problems on Wall Street. Deposits are flowing in as customers flee riskier investments, and well-qualified borrowers are lining up for loans.

Read it all.

Matthew Taylor wasn’t sure what life held for him after leaving Fort Dorchester High School. But he knew what he had to do months later when airliners struck the World Trade Center towers.

The next day, Taylor and his father drove to a U.S. Army recruiting station on Rivers Avenue. Taylor knew that if he was going to seek justice for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he’d need a frontline fighting position. He enlisted in the Infantry.

“It was patriotism. He felt for all the people who had been killed,” his father, Don Taylor, said Wednesday. “He had an extreme sense of duty.”

With the twin towers still smoldering, Matthew looked to his father and said, “We need to go and deal with that.”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier.

I am worried for our country — not so much because of the tumult in the financial markets but because of the federal government’s response and its implications.

It seems that each new crisis is met with a new answer from the government. After Hurricane Katrina, the federal government assumed roles traditionally handled by state and local governments. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government federalized 25,000 workers through the Transportation Security Administration. The example of security-focused countries such as Israel, which elects to have that function handled by the private sector, did not matter. Now, our federal government is likely to commit three-quarters of a trillion dollars — more than last year’s Pentagon budget — to a bailout based on what happened in the credit markets last week.

An ever-expanding scope of federal commitment and power is not what made this country great. Expanded power in one place comes at a cost in other places. American cornerstones such as individual initiative and an entrepreneurial spirit — born in free and open societies with private property rights and the rule of law — have never fit particularly well within the context of an ever-growing federal government.

Read it all.

Congressman Paul Kanjorski was on CNBC earlier and said that his mail and calls on the Paulson plan are running 50-50: 50% no and 50% hell no.

“I’m a dirt farmer,” said Senator Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat who still lives on his family homestead. “Why do we have one week to determine that $700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?”

—From Tim Egan in the NY Times