The Senate’s healthcare bill is fatally flawed, a senior Democrat atop a powerful committee said on Wednesday.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Rules Committee and co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said that the Senate’s bill is so flawed that it’s unlikely to be resolved in conference with the bill to have passed the House.

“The Senate health care bill is not worthy of the historic vote that the House took a month ago,” Slaughter wrote in an opinion piece for CNN’s website.

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In reality, this little quarter-percent tax would devastate America’s financial markets and the broader economy. First of all, the “in and out” cost of a transaction is not a quarter-percent: it is a half-percent. Again, this might not seem like much, but consider how difficult is to make even 4% on a safe investment. When one factors in an average inflation rate of 3%, the resulting profit is only 1%, and this is before the effect of state and local taxes.

The sponsors of HR4191 are either so naïve as to have no conception of the operations of modern-day financial markets — and of the competitiveness which makes a single basis point a crucial cost advantage — or, more likely, so callous as not to care. They see an opportunity to curry favor with a poorly informed electorate by trashing Wall Street while at the same time placing within their grasp trillions of dollars of future tax revenues to secure future political advantage.

Unfortunately, those that might be harmed include the patient, long-term investors who invest their funds in IRAs, 401Ks, and other retail investments. These investments are generally low-yielding mutual funds for which trading costs make a crucial difference in long-term return. Barron’s has calculated that the annual cost of a total market index, now 0.07%, would rise to 0.15% under the proposed tax. The loss of 0.08% per year, or a compounded 0.116% per decade, might not seem like much, but when it is imposed every year and compounded over the fifty-year investing lifetime of an average investor, it amounts to a great deal.

And this is the effect even in the case of the lowest-cost index funds.

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A Dictionary of the Bible (Second Edition), Edited by W. R. F. Browning, Oxford University Press, coming in late January 28, 2010.

–W. R. F. Browning has been a Canon Residentiary of Blackburn Cathedral and of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. He is now an honorary canon and an honorary priest in West Oxford.

The ongoing Christian flight from the Middle East was high on the agenda of the Vatican’s secretary for the relations with states, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, when I met with him recently in Rome.

The lengthy exodus of ancient Christian congregations from the greater Middle East’s last redoubts of religious pluralism is accelerating. Terrorism, conflict, and the rise of intolerant Islamism are to blame, Vatican officials explain. There is a real fear that the light of Christian communities that was enkindled personally by the apostles of Jesus Christ could be extinguished in this vast region that includes the Holy Land.

This trend could be reversed or at least halted, but probably not without Western help. Thus far, the rapid erosion of Middle Eastern Christianity has drawn little notice from the outside world.

Pope Benedict XVI, however, is planning a special synod of Roman Catholic bishops next October to discuss this crisis and to promote greater ecumenical unity in the Middle East. The hope for the synod, as reported by the Catholic news agency Zenit, is that “new generations must come to know the great patrimony of faith and witness in the different churches” of this region.

The greater Middle East, of course, holds profound theological significance for all Christians. Broad Christian engagement may be the best hope for the survival of these ancient Middle Eastern churches — the Copts and Chaldeans, the Maronites and Melkites, the Latin Rite Catholics, the Armenians, the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and others.

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There used to be a time when churches could rely on being filled on a weekly basis, come rain or shine.

But dwindling congregations and ageing members have forced churches to look for ways to innovate and modernise in an attempt to get the Christian message out.

And so members of Greyfriars Parish Church in Lanark have decided to exchange pews for bar stools in an attempt to spread the festive message with a Christmas Eve carol-singing session at a local pub, the Clydesdale Inn.

Their minister, the Rev Bryan Kerr, said that the church had looked at ways of getting their message out beyond the church.

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The Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic hospitals, has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life.

“If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die,” said Dr. David T. Feinberg, the hospital system’s chief executive.

Yet that ethos has made the medical center a prime target for critics in the Obama administration and elsewhere who talk about how much money the nation wastes on needless tests and futile procedures. They like to note that U.C.L.A. is perennially near the top of widely cited data, compiled by researchers at Dartmouth, ranking medical centers that spend the most on end-of-life care but seem to have no better results than hospitals spending much less.

Listening to the critics, Dr. J. Thomas Rosenthal, the chief medical officer of the U.C.L.A. Health System, says his hospital has started re-examining its high-intensity approach to medicine. But the more U.C.L.A.’s doctors study the issue, the more they recognize a difficult truth: It can be hard, sometimes impossible, to know which critically ill patients will benefit and which will not.

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[ROGER] SIMON: They changed you?

Mr. [MITCH] ALBOM: Oh, no doubt. I mean to be honest with you, 10 years ago I highly doubt I’d be having a conversation like this with you about faith. I was very cynical about it. But what I saw being around these two men was faith practiced on a daily basis, you know, not for show, not for headlines. I saw Pastor Covington driving around Detroit in an old car putting food on the hood of his car and driving around like one, two miles an hour so it wouldn’t fall off, breads and cheese. And the poor people of the Detroit area, you know, would see him. People were squatting in apartments and come running out, and he would literary just feed them, just feed the hungry. I don’t know anything more Christian than that. And he didn’t ask for anything, you didn’t have to join his church, there was no quid pro quo. He just felt that he was doing good, and this is what he needed to do.

And you see enough of this happen on a daily basis, over and over, hundreds of examples of these two men, and to be honest, you lose your cynicism. I don’t know how you can maintain cynicism in the light of that. It’s beautiful work.

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Geithner said some of the signs that confidence is returning in the fourth quarter include consumers spending more, businesses investing again, stronger exports and a more stable housing market.

“These things all help ”” they all make a big difference,” Geithner said. “But we were in a very deep hole, and it’s going to take a long time to repair the damage done to confidence.”

Geithner said it’s important that the administration continue to work with Congress to pass financial reform legislation that can “prevent the next crisis” and build a “more stable financial system.”

“But right now, the real risk we face is that banks are not lending enough and not going to provide the capital businesses need to grow for the economy to strengthen going forward,” he said.

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Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said the White House and the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives have been pressuring him not to speak out on the “compromise” abortion language in the Senate version of the health care bill.

“They think I shouldn’t be expressing my views on this bill until they get a chance to try to sell me the language,” Stupak told CNSNews.com in an interview on Tuesday. “Well, I don’t need anyone to sell me the language. I can read it. I’ve seen it. I’ve worked with it. I know what it says. I don’t need to have a conference with the White House. I have the legislation in front of me here.”

The Michigan Democrat succeeded last month in getting 64 House Democrats to join him in attaching his pro-life amendment to the House version of the health-care bill. The “Stupak amendment,” as the provision is known, would prohibit the federal government from allocating taxpayer money to pay for any part of any health insurance plan that covers abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger.

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Americans will feel the pain before the gain from the health care overhaul Democrats are close to pushing through Congress.

Proposed taxes and fees on upper-income earners, insurers, even tanning parlors, take effect quickly. So would Medicare cuts.

Benefits, such as subsidies for lower middle-income households, consumer protections for all and eliminating the prescription coverage gap for seniors, come gradually.

“There’s going to be an expectations gap, no question about that,” said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “People are going to see their premiums and out-of-pocket costs go up before the tangible benefits kick in.”

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There’s a reason the South is known as the Bible belt: A survey shows that Southerners — and Mississippians in particular — are most active in their religious practices and beliefs.

Residents of Mississippi ranked first among Americans in all four measures of a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, with 82 percent saying religion is very important in their lives. Five other states had at least seven in 10 people stating that religion holds that kind of importance for them: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and South Carolina.

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Fire stations across the country have decorated like this for years, and it has not pushed the United States down the slippery slope toward a religious state. If anything, Gallup polls show that the number of people who consider religion important in their lives has dropped nearly 10 percent in the last decade.

It’s not like there was a shrine to Christianity in the tax collectors’ office or city hall; there was no implied “thou shall worship,” no banner proclaiming “Charleston: Proud Sponsor of Religion.”

This is a fire hall, a place where firefighters essentially live. Since they have to stay there around the clock, waiting to save our houses, it’s only fair that they get to add a few touches of home. If they want a manger, what’s the harm?

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[U.S. House Majority Whip Jim] Clyburn said the high-profile deal that Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson reached to have the federal government pay 100 percent for Medicaid expansion in his state will help land South Carolina a better deal during the conference negotiations.

Nelson was given the perk in return for agreeing to vote for the bill. Nelson’s vote all but assures the bill’s final passage later this week.

Other states would receive reimbursements worth 91 percent. Clyburn said he will be a party to the conference negotiations and he will push for states to receive a 95 percent return for the life of the bill, but he cannot guarantee he will get it.

“Rather than carping on this, I think it opens the door for other states to demonstrate need for similar treatment when you get to the conference,” Clyburn said.

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Facing a budget deficit of more than $20 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to call for deep reductions in already suffering local mass transit programs, renew his push to expand oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast and appeal to Washington for billions of dollars in federal help, according to state officials and lobbyists familiar with the plan.

If Washington does not provide roughly $8 billion in new aid for the state, the governor threatens to severely cut back — if not eliminate — CalWORKS, the state’s main welfare program; the In-Home Health Care Services program for the disabled and elderly poor, and two tax breaks for large corporations recently approved by the Legislature, the officials said.

Schwarzenegger also will propose extending a cut in the state payroll that is scheduled to expire this summer. That cut has translated into 200,000 state workers being furloughed three days a month, the equivalent of a 14% pay cut. Lawmakers would have the option of extending the furloughs, imposing layoffs or some combination of the two.

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This is long, but well worth the time to plough through. Take a look and see what you think.

Each Anglican province is autonomous, limiting the power of Williams and other Anglican leaders to police the communion. In fact, earlier this month, Episcopalians in Los Angeles openly defied Williams by electing an open lesbian, the Rev. Mary Glasspool, as an assistant bishop.

Since then, Williams and an international panel of Anglican leaders have asked the Episcopal Church to “exercise restraint” by not confirming Glasspool’s election. In addition, the Anglican Communion’s Standing Committee on Friday asked Episcopalians to exercise “gracious restraint” with respect to “actions that endanger the unity of the Anglican Communion.”

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who generally supports gay rights in the church, sits on the 15-member Standing Committee, but it is not known whether she supports the statement. A spokeswoman for Jefferts Schori said on Tuesday that “as agreed upon by the Standing Committee, the details of the conversations of the meeting are considered private.”

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As the Anglican Communion has developed in recent years there has not been a parallel development of a framework to address together a response to problems which arise in relationships between the member Churches. The Covenant puts forward such a framework, faithful to Anglican ecclesiology, within which a response to tensions can be discerned and articulated. At present, as no such mechanism exists, it has led to serious threats to the unity and integrity of the Communion.

The draft gives considerable prominence to the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion which can make recommendations concerning the relational consequences resulting from actions by individual member Churches. It can make requests to Churches to defer certain actions, for instance. However, it will still be up to each member Church to decide how to be guided by any specific recommendations which may come from the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion, thereby respecting the treasured autonomy of the Provinces.

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…there apparently is a new ACC constitution (now referred to as Articles of Association) that changes the membership procedures for the ACC. This new constitution (which has not been made public) also applies in some way to the adoption of the Covenant by other churches.
11. On the second question, “who can invite,” the Covenant is explicit in saying that this may be done by the “Instruments.” On its face, this means that any of the Instruments, e.g., the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Primates’ Meeting, could issue such an invitation, which would then invoke the procedures indicated: approval by the Standing Committee and consents from the Primates.

12. None of this is meant to suggest that such an invitation is necessarily imminent, but the procedures are far more flexible and responsive to developing circumstances than many have been led to believe.

13. With these principles in mind, we urge all churches and dioceses interested in committing to the life of mutual accountability and interdependence required by the Covenant to adopt and affirm the Covenant as soon as practicable and communicate their decisions to the Communion and its churches. We note that paragraph 4.1.6 provides that “This Covenant becomes active for a Church when that Church adopts the Covenant through the procedures of its own Constitution and Canons.” Thus, the Covenant will become active as soon as member churches begin to adopt it, and the Global South churches have indicated their intention to begin doing so as early as April 2010. By committing to the Covenant, a church or diocese will immediately begin to share in the Communion life represented by the Covenant even as the formalities of the Communion Instruments necessarily will take longer to implement.

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…true encouragement comes from honesty before God and self and the strength of purpose to serve in the face of disappointment or uncertainty. Or so it should. I know a young person who sneered at the faith of an Episcopalian ”“ a more conservative person ”“ who chose to leave TEC for another set of ecclesial structures. “You would do such a thing”, this young person said to him: “yours is the generation, after all, who invented no-fault divorce”. In fact, in this case, the complaint was less directed at a purported hypocrite, than at what he perceived to be the witness of an impotent God, unable to garner the sacrificial steadiness of His adherents. But either way, faith is scandalized by those who do not have the strength, nor certainly seek the strength, to stand in the face of upheaval.

I will come back to this at the close of my remarks: honesty need be neither angry, miserable, nor defeatist. It should be the seed for hope, because it is the first and necessary turn to God who alone saves.

What is the difficult thing to speak, honestly? It is this: the Episcopal Church, as it has been known through the past two centuries, is no more, in any substantive sense. TEC is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago ”“ yes, even then, a church with a good deal of vital diversity and disagreement; but a seeming sense of restraint over pressing these in ways that overwhelmed witness and mission. And as a result, even then, it was church that was growing in outreach and faith. That church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone. And TEC will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts.

This is something we must face. To be sure, I am not speaking here of this or that diocese or bishop or congregation or clergy person within TEC: there are many through whose service the Gospel shines bright and the witness of the Kingdom flourishes. I am speaking of an institution as a whole ”“ not even in terms of its legal corporation, but in terms of its character and Christian substance given flesh in the Spirit’s mission.

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I want to stress, please, that people in the comments interact with what Ephraim is arguing for and actually saying. Comments not doing so will be dispacted into the ether. Many thanks–KSH.

The State of the Union typically takes place on the third Tuesday of January, which would be Jan. 19.

But it’s unclear whether negotiators will be able to smooth out significant disagreements in such a short time.

Congress traditionally does not reconvene until the week of the president’s address but leaders may bring their colleagues back to work early to get a jumpstart on remaining legislative work before election-year politics begins to intervene….

[Max] Baucus said differences over how to pay for new federal health insurance subsidies and limits on abortion coverage are two of the biggest obstacles.

The House legislation would pay for a large portion of its benefits by imposing a tax surcharge on individuals who earn more than $500,000 and families earning over $1 million.

The Senate bill would instead tax high-cost insurance plans and raise the Medicare payroll tax on individuals earning over $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000.

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Check it out (the “total column”).

Note: The household debt service ratio (DSR) is an estimate of the ratio of debt payments to disposable personal income. Debt payments consist of the estimated required payments on outstanding mortgage and consumer debt.

The financial obligations ratio (FOR) adds automobile lease payments, rental payments on tenant-occupied property, homeowners’ insurance, and property tax payments to the debt service ratio.

The good news is it is moving in the right direction–KSH.

A friendly reminder of where to find the information about it here.

Lord Jesus, you were born in a stable in Bethlehem and came to us as a healer and reconciler. Send forth your healing touch to families, communities and na-tions. Where there is estrangement, build bridges; where there is hostility, sow love; where there is con-flict, bring peace; where there is inequity, establish justice; where there is revenge, bring forgiveness; where there are historical wounds, pour out your heal-ing balm; where there are unruly wills, establish your gentle sovereign rule; where there is spiritual hunger, pour out your peace that passes understanding. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Son of God, Son of Abraham, Son of Man, now and forever. Amen.

This Christmas, a new priest will be leading the mass at Christ Church in Hamilton. The Rev. Patrick Gray started his new job as Priest-in-Charge at Christ Church in Hamilton on Oct. 1. The former rector of Christ Church, Jurgen Liias, was called to the rector position at the Christ the Redeemer Anglican Church in Danvers.

Gray comes to Christ Church from seven years as associate rector of the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston. Gray conveys the qualities of youth and energy, drawing people in with his smile and comfortable friendliness. His office, still in a state of transition, has the rare addition of a dove named Lovey-Dovey.

“She was in training to be a carrier pigeon,” explained Gray, “but she got lost and we adopted her.”

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As a priest led prayers for a few dozen worshipers inside St. Joseph Chaldean Church here on Sunday, Iraqi police officers stood guard outside. They blocked the street to traffic and frisked those who entered for explosive belts.

At churches in Baghdad this week, Christians are being asked for identification to determine if they have names that security force members recognize as Christian. Some churches around the northern city of Mosul are digging in, surrounding their buildings with giant earthen berms to prevent car bombers from getting too close.

For Christians in Iraq, this will be a year of canceled holiday celebrations and of Christmas Masses spent under the protective watch of police officers and soldiers because of a spate of threats by extremist groups to bomb churches on Christmas Day.

“I’m very sad that we are not able to have our rituals for Christmas this year and not have a sermon, but we do not want any Christians to be harmed,” said Edward Poles, a Christian priest at Sa’a Church in Mosul, which was bombed last week, though no one was killed.

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Listen to it all–a superb example of how to read a story.

On the first day of her introductory religion class at Merrimack College just north of Boston, professor Rebecca Sachs Norris put her students to work at having some fun.

She assigned teams of three or four students to play some of the many religious board games that fill her office shelves. Weeks later, they had to present their classmates with what they gleaned from each game.

As one team discussed BuddhaWheel, a game that teaches about Buddhism, Norris, chair of Merrimack’s religious and theological studies department, asked, “Can you win this game?

“One of them said, `Well, yes, but it takes a very, very long time! You just keep getting born over and over and over again.’

“I said, `Exactly, that’s it!’, and they learned it in a way that is very different.”

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“If you can’t find the Word in the text, it’s your fault, not the text’s. Go back and read it again.”

–Markus Barth (1915-1994), as quoted by John M. Buchanan in Christian Century, the December 29, 2009 edition, page 3

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

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It’s another Sunday morning at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Southern California. But some congregants are holding more than just the printed page, thanks to their iPhones. That’s because they have access to the entire Bible on the device.

Technology is producing a new form of religious interaction. There are over two dozen Bible apps for smart phones. And beyond Scripture, people are using gadgets for devotional purposes.

Dave and Jackie Brown had been reciting the rosary in their daughter Isabella’s hospital room. But her cancer treatment made her sensitive to light.

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