The trillions of dollars in public funds U.S. officials are putting on the line to stabilize financial markets and protect the economy from a deep recession would, in normal times, inspire fear of soaring inflation and a tumbling dollar.

But these are not normal times.

“The patient’s on the floor right now. You want to get him up off the floor; then you worry about diet and exercise,” said James Horney of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Read it all. Well, the Reuters headline says it is not a worry now but it is to a lot of us, and it should be as demonstrated in this article in this past weekend’s Barrons by Jack Willoughby. Make sure to read that also–KSH.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori on November 21 inhibited Diocese of Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker for abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church.

In the text of the inhibition, the Presiding Bishop wrote that “I hereby inhibit the said Bishop Iker and order that from and after 5:00 CST Friday, November 21, 2008, he cease from exercising the gifts of the ordained ministry of this Church; and pursuant to Canon IV.15, I order him from and after that time to cease all ‘Episcopal, ministerial, and canonical acts, except as relate to the administration of the temporal affairs of the Diocese of Fort Worth,’ until this Inhibition is terminated pursuant to Canon IV.9(2) or superseded by decision of the House of Bishops.”

Jefferts Schori acted the day after the Title IV Review Committee certified that Iker had abandoned the communion of the Episcopal Church.

Read it all.

The history of past recessions suggests that President-elect Obama has set a difficult but not impossible target for economic recovery: 2.5 million more jobs within two years.

By announcing this specific goal, alongside a stimulus plan and a team of top economic officials, Mr. Obama signaled that he is focused squarely on the challenge of job losses and an erosion of economic confidence.

He plans to ramp up spending on everything from roads and schools to solar panels and investments in energy efficiency.

The task ahead is formidable.

Read it all.

On Aug 26, attorneys for Bishop Schori submitted a 64-page indictment to the Title IV Committee. Bishop Schori believed the Anglo-Catholic leader had “so repudiated the doctrine, discipline and worship” of the church by his “persistent position that the Diocese may choose whether or not to remain a constituent part of the Episcopal Church,” that he should be found to have “abandoned the Communion of this Church.”

Bishop Schori’s lawyer, David Booth Beers added the “presiding bishop would appreciate consideration of this matter on an expedited basis, specifically, if at all feasible, before the next meeting of the House of Bishops on September 17, 2008.”

The Title IV Committee declined to deliberate at an expedited pace, and on Sept 12 Mr. Beers provided further documents in support of its contentions. A third memo to the committee was mailed on Oct 3 by Mr. Beers with clippings of an article written by Bishop Iker entitled “10 Reasons Why Now is the Time to Realign.”

In his Oct 3 letter, the presiding bishop’s attorney said that his client “has asked you consider again the evidence” against Bishop Iker. Mr. Beers noted the deposition of Bishop Duncan had now set a precedent that permitted a bishop to be deposed for bad thoughts, without recourse to having committed bad actions.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Rushing to rescue Citigroup, the government agreed to shoulder hundreds of billions of possible losses at the stricken bank and to plow a fresh $20 billion into the company.

Regulators hope the dramatic action will bolster badly shaken confidence in the once mighty banking giant as well as the nation’s financial system, a goal that so far has been elusive despite a flurry of government interventions to battle the worst global crisis since the 1930s.

The action, announced late Sunday by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., is aimed at shoring up a huge financial institution whose collapse would wreak havoc on the already fragile financial system and the U.S. economy.

Read it all.

See page 22, and read it all .

Read it all.

It can be argued that the establishment of an orthodox North American Province (even if it is initially recognized only by some of the GAFCON primates) is the best way to deal with the crisis in the Communion. (a.) The orthodox will be able to look after themselves, so “border crossing” for episcopal oversight by overseas bishops and primates can cease. (b.) Instead of being a beleaguered minority within TEC, the orthodox can be treated as equals in a dialogue intended to resolve the crisis of authority in Anglicanism. (c.) TEC will have greater incentive to respond to the calls of the rest of the Communion to return to Anglican norms, lest they lose credibility compared with the new Province. TEC’s leadership fears the realization of this last point, which is the main reason why they are working so hard to prevent establishment and recognition of a new Province….

While some may argue that the best way to preserve the unity of the Anglican Communion is to preserve the unity of the American Church (or, failing that, not to recognize any group that splits off from the American Church), I would argue the exact opposite. The best way to preserve the unity of the Anglican Communion is to allow the American church to divide (which is happening anyway, whether anyone likes it or not) and to recognize two North American provinces. Some overseas provinces will relate to one of the North American provinces more than the other. But there will not be the present level of vigorous advocacy (and border crossing) that now threatens to divide the Communion. And there will not be any reason why the other provinces of the Communion should be impaired in their relationships with each other or with Canterbury. However, if the present situation continues, and Canterbury does not recognize the new North American Province, it will eventually (and sooner rather than later) force some Global South provinces to end their relationship with Canterbury, and the Communion will be lost.

Read it all.

The failure of the House of Bishops to discipline our own for lesser infractions than pulling a diocese out of TEC (thereby giving incontrovertible proof of violating the oath to “conform to the doctrine, discipline and worship of The Episcopal Church) is a matter of significance, I think. Bishop Duncan in particular has done a number of things which should have called for a disciplinary response from the HoB. Indeed, he asked for it specifically, back in September 2002, when he stated to the House that he had deliberately “provoked a constitutional crisis” (his words) by interfering in a parish in another diocese. And nothing happened. That the present Presiding Bishop is acting may be closing the barn door after the horse has left. But just leaving it swinging in the breeze would be dereliction of duty.

In the final analysis, our polity exists to support a dynamic missionary expansion as its first priority, and it does this admirably. After all, TEC, despite our small size, has launched about one-quarter of the provinces of the Communion. As such, it is less well suited to resolving significant conflicts about doctrine and discipline, because sufficient agreement on these is presupposed in the structures themselves. How can you undertake to evangelize the world if you do not have enough basic trust in each other’s grasp of the Gospel and catholic order””the synthesis that is the genius of Anglican ecclesiology?

Read it all.

[It was interesting to watch] the trek to Capitol Hill by the auto company chieftains, who sought $25 billion in federal loans ”” and instead got their heads handed to them by angry congressmen. Incredibly, the C.E.O.’s came with no convincing plan of action, no promise to do better, no offers of management resignations. Even the most sympathetic Democrats, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seemed to turn against them, telling them not to come back unless they devised a plan to show Washington how they would use the money to turn the companies around. And thus the tom-toms of bankruptcy grew louder. What else is left for them to do?

Before the country decides to head down that path, though, let’s consider for a minute what that would mean and what it would entail. In his Times op-ed article this week, Mr. Romney called for “a managed bankruptcy,” making it sound as if such a move would allow G.M.”” with more or less a snap of a finger ”” to close plants, invest in new products, abolish gold-plated union benefits and make the industry more competitive.

But bankruptcy is anything but a snap. It is a long, difficult, drawn-out process with no guarantee that a bankruptcy judge will go along with everything G.M. wants to do. Several bankruptcy lawyers I spoke to all made the same point: if there is any way these goals can be accomplished outside of the bankruptcy process, then that should be tried first. As one lawyer put it to me, “Bankruptcy sucks as a way to achieve real business resolution.” As it happens, I think there is another approach that might work. But it won’t be particularly easy either.

Read it all.

In the current turmoil, accidents can pull us in vastly different directions. The unforeseeable bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, transformed a lingering financial crisis into a near-systemic meltdown. Depending on how other unpredictable events turn out in the next few weeks and months, we could end up with a deflationary depression, an inflationary boom or even one followed by the other.

In such an environment, economic forecasts are useless ”“ worse than useless, in fact, because they give us a sense of certainty where there is none.

Read it all.

This is the real “Code Red.” As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the WMD.” They were buried in our own backyard – subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them.

Yet, it is obvious that President Bush can’t mobilize the tools to defuse them – a massive stimulus program to improve infrastructure and create jobs, a broad-based homeowner initiative to limit foreclosures and stabilize housing prices, and therefore mortgage assets, more capital for bank balance sheets and, most importantly, a huge injection of optimism and confidence that we can and will pull out of this with a new economic team at the helm.

The last point is something only a new President Obama can inject. What ails us right now is as much a loss of confidence – in our financial system and our leadership – as anything else. I have no illusions that Obama’s arrival on the scene will be a magic wand, but it would help.

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving – with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

Read it all.

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.

For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption; but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.

–Galatians 6: 7-9

When the California Supreme Court begins weighing arguments over same-sex marriage ”” again ”” in December, some 18,000 such marriages could hang in the balance. Opponents of such unions also have high stakes, having spent countless hours, and nearly $40 million, to pass Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage and is under review by the court. And the justices could lose out, too; some are already being threatened with being voted out of office if they rule Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

“This is the whole ballgame,” said Jesse Choper, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “They earn their salaries in having to decide these things.”

The central issue is whether California voters ”” who have repeatedly used ballot measures to rewrite state law ”” overstepped their bounds by passing Proposition 8, which added 14 words to the California Constitution stating that only male-female marriage would be “valid or recognized.” Opponents of the measure say it amounts to a major revision of the Constitution, not an amendment, and thus would require legislative approval.

Read it all.

The number of soldiers seeking help for substance abuse has climbed 25% in the past five years, but the Army’s counseling program has remained significantly understaffed and struggling to meet the demand, according to Army records.

About 13,500 soldiers sought drug counseling this year and 7,200 soldiers were diagnosed with an abuse or dependency issue and enrolled in counseling, Army data show. That compares with 11,170 soldiers reporting to drug counseling in 2003, when 5,727 enrolled.

Army records show 2.38% of all soldiers had positive results on routine drug urinalysis screening, a 10-year record. In 2004, when combat troops returned from Iraq in large numbers, 1.72% had positive results.

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As Congress and the incoming Obama administration prepare to revamp federal financial oversight, the collapse of the thrift industry offers a lesson in how regulation can fail. It happened over several years, a product of the regulator’s overly close identification with its banks, which it referred to as “customers,” and of the agency managers’ appetite for deregulation, new lending products and expanded homeownership sometimes at the expense of traditional oversight. Tough measures, like tighter lending standards, were not employed until after borrowers began defaulting in large numbers.

The agency championed the thrift industry’s growth during the housing boom and called programs that extended mortgages to previously unqualified borrowers as “innovations.” In 2004, the year that risky loans called option adjustable-rate mortgages took off, then-OTS director James Gilleran lauded the banks for their role in providing home loans. “Our goal is to allow thrifts to operate with a wide breadth of freedom from regulatory intrusion,” he said in a speech.

At the same time, the agency allowed the banks to project minimal losses and, as a result, reduce the share of revenue they were setting aside to cover them. By September 2006, when the housing market began declining, the capital reserves held by OTS-regulated firms had declined to their lowest level in two decades, less than a third of their historical average, according to financial records.

Scott M. Polakoff, the agency’s senior deputy director, said OTS had closely monitored allowances for loan losses and considered them sufficient, but added that the actual losses exceeded what reasonably could have been expected.

“Are banks going to fail when events occur well beyond the confines of reasonable expectation or modeling? The answer is yes,” he said in an interview.

But critics said the agency had neglected its obligation to police the thrift industry and instead became more of a consultant.

Read it all.

Check them out.

I went to our diocesan archives to look for materials from a most difficult era in our nation’s financial history, the Great Depression. Very interesting what I found there. The program fund of the diocese was at $68,000 in 1929. It decreased almost two-thirds by 1935, when the fund receipts were in the amount of $27,000. It increased incrementally to about $31,000 in 1938 and remained at that level until the end of the war years.
The two Bishops of that era, Frederick Johnson and William Scarlett, both noted the sharp decrease in programming, as a result of falling revenues. Well, that’s what will happen, in the wake of steeply falling revenues. The Diocesan Journals got progressively thinner over the course of these years, because there were fewer things to report.
But these Bishops noted the drastic shortfall almost in passing, and with no sense of self-pity. They reported at length, however, about responsibilities of the Church to respond to a whole nation in crisis. And more particularly, to their Missouri neighborhoods in crisis.
The internal financial fact of funding shortfalls was noted, and the cuts were deep and painful. Whole programs vanished.
As far as I can tell from the Journals, the work of the Church in that era focused almost entirely beyond itself, which was a matter of mission and not program. And it happened by way of personal and corporate sacrifice.

Read it all.

From 2003 to 2005, Citigroup more than tripled its issuing of CDO’s, to more than $20 billion from $6.28 billion, and Maheras, Barker and others on the CDO team helped transform Citigroup into one of the industry’s biggest players. Firms issuing the CDO’s generated fees of 0.4 percent to 2.5 percent of the amount sold — meaning Citigroup made up to $500 million in fees from the business in 2005 alone.

Even as Citigroup’s CDO stake was expanding, its top executives wanted more profits from that business. Yet they were not running a bank that was up to all the challenges it faced, including properly overseeing billions of dollars’ worth of exotic products, according to Citigroup insiders and regulators who later criticized the bank.

When Prince was put in charge in 2003, he presided over a mess of warring business units and operational holes, particularly in critical areas like risk-management and controls.

“He inherited a gobbledygook of companies that were never integrated, and it was never a priority of the company to invest,” said Meredith Whitney, a banking analyst who was one of the company’s early critics. “The businesses didn’t communicate with each other. There were dozens of technology systems and dozens of financial ledgers.”

Read it all.

A federal court has ruled that the Arizona License Plate Commission must approve an anti-abortion group’s “Choose Life” specialty license plate.

The Arizona Life Coalition applied for the specialty license plate in 2002, but the Arizona License Plate Commission, which oversees the requests, rejected its application.

Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Center for Arizona Policy filed a suit in September of 2003.

Read it all.

Federal regulators were considering a new rescue for Citigroup on Sunday, a step that could mark a third leg of the government’s broader efforts to bolster the nation’s financial industry, according to people briefed on the plan.

Under the proposal, the government would shoulder losses at Citigroup if those losses exceeded certain levels, according to these people, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified because the plan was still under discussion.

If the government should have to take on the bigger losses, it would receive a stake in Citigroup. The banking giant has been brought to its knees by gaping losses on mortgage-related investments.

Read it all.

City officials have ordered 22 New York churches to stop providing beds to homeless people.

With temperatures well below freezing early Saturday, the churches must obey a city rule requiring faith-based shelters to be open at least five days a week — or not at all.

Read it all.

A native of Galloway, N.J., [Myron] Rolle arrived at Florida State from the Hun School in Princeton as the country’s No. 1 football recruit. He has had an all-American-caliber junior season, but Rolle’s list of off-field accomplishments is as lengthy as it is daunting.

He graduated from Florida State in two and a half years with a degree in pre-med and a grade point average of 3.75. He is so studious that the Seminoles’ defensive coordinator, Mickey Andrews, publicly criticized him for studying too much last year, saying it affected Rolle’s preparation for football. Rolle said the criticism was a “little unfair.”

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” Rolle said of Andrews. “I don’t think he’s ever sat through an organic chemistry lecture and seen just how difficult it is. He’s been through a couple ballgames, but that’s a different arena right there.”

Outside of class, Rolle was awarded a $4,000 grant for cancer research over the summer, and also started a program to help educate Seminole Indian children in Okeechobee, Fla., about the importance of health and physical fitness. He belongs to a fraternity, helps tutor his teammates, has studied in London and has written for The New York Times.

As he has been deluged by interview requests this week ”” including three reporters traveling with him on the plane to College Park ”” Rolle said he welcomed carrying the brand of the university.

“I have no problem holding the weight of that on my shoulders,” he said. “I think it’s more of a privilege and an honor than a burden.”

Read it all–what a remarkable young man. Later in the week, you guessed it, he won the Rhodes scholarship. His story was used in this morning’s sermon by yours truly–KSH.

So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times!

–Ephesians 5:15, 16 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message, quoted in this morning’s sermon

No, really, how bad could it be? How seriously should we take the state’s latest budget crisis if a clutch of lawmakers, including the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, is spending the emergency session in India?….

But far from India, Georgia and wherever else elected officials are spending the waning days of the special session, back in Sacramento, in the governor’s Department of Finance, at the Legislative Analyst’s Office, among those who watch unemployment figures and cash flow, there is a palpable anxiety. In some offices, it borders on panic. Past meltdowns have been disguised by a healthy economy. This time it is different.

Read it all.

Thanksgiving came early this year for residents of Johns and Wadmalaw islands.

Nineteen churches pulled together Saturday to host “Feeding the Multitude,” which included a free Thanksgiving meal, entertainment and Christian fellowship.

Although Sunday mornings have been called one of the most segregated times in America, black, white and Hispanic volunteers contributed food, time and talent to serve their neighbors Saturday afternoon.

The event was held at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Johns Island, and organizers hope it will become an annual event.

Hooray for Saint John’s! Read it all.

“I treasure the splendid diversity and tolerance of the Episcopal Church and how marvelously our liturgical life knits us together,” said Prescott, an attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Fort Worth. “And I love the way we manage to combine our rich catholic heritage with an understanding that God’s revelation to us continues.”

The group, made up of worshippers formerly from St. Francis of Assisi, Willow Park; All Saints, Weatherford and Holy Apostles Church, chose the McCall Elementary School because “it is located in one of the fastest-growing areas of Texas and we do intend to reach out to the community,” said Prescott.

The Rev. John Keene, a retired priest who led the congregation’s worship, invited the congregation truly to engage all of the Bible. “When you regard the Bible, don’t ignore your queasiness or uncertainty if you run across something that puzzles you or bothers you. God has given you a mind and I ask you to use it. It’s when you start to get fundamentalist about it, that you have a problem.”

The quote from Father Keene says so much about TEC right now–define yourself negatively, say what you are not (without, of course, ever really defining the buzzword used). Read the whole thing.

South Carolina looked like a pretty good choice to computer network engineer Chad Birnbaum. Armed with a degree from Michigan State University and solid industry credentials, he landed a job in the area that paid $60,000 and offered full benefits.

At 25, life was good.

Then, as the financial meltdown began to wind its way through the local economy, Birnbaum was laid off by Welded Tube Berkeley.

“Things are getting ugly. I’m in a world of hurt,” he said this week after filling out forms for jobless benefits at the Employment Security Commission office on Lockwood Boulevard.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

It was short and sweet, and void of drama, like most thought it would be. After two hours and just two ballots, the Rev. J. Scott Mayer was named Bishop Elect of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwest Texas late Saturday morning.

The election was held inside the sanctuary of St. Paul’s-on-the-Plains Episcopal Church and simulcast on a large projection screen inside the church’s parish hall.

Mayer was the only of the four nominees with local roots, and the only nominee in attendance due to his membership in the diocese as current rector of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Abilene.

Read it all.