Citing two senior Democratic Senate aides, Dow Jones claims reports that a deal has been achieved by a bipartisan group of Senators to cut $107B of spending from the $920B economic stimulus plan.

Leaders of the Anglican Communion are to employ professional mediators in an attempt to resolve their ongoing dispute over sexuality.

The announcement came at the close of a five-day meeting of senior bishops held in Alexandria, Egypt.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said there was “deep division” among member churches.

But he added that “the willingness to find reconciliation has been very much in evidence”.

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Anglican leaders urged their churches Thursday to maintain a 5-year-old moratorium on consecrating another openly gay bishop and developing prayers for same-sex unions, as they try to restore unity in their fractured fellowship.

An Anglican advisory panel also raised deep concerns about a North American province sought by theological conservatives to rival the Episcopal Church.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, will arrange professional mediation for all leaders involved in the North American conflict, leaders said.

“If a way forward is to be found and mutual trust to be re-established, it is imperative that further aggravation and acts which cause offense, misunderstanding or hostility cease,” the Anglican leaders said Thursday.

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While these programs support campaign promises made by Mr. Obama, they do nothing to lift the nation out of its current doldrums.

The bill’s rushed decision to spend $9 billion for rural Internet service, for example, needs to be jettisoned. So do many other projects that have nothing to do with job recovery, such as $400 million to research sexually transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, the stimulus side of the bill will not do the job that America needs it to do. Mr. Obama’s economic advisers say it will eventually create 3 to 4 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office puts its job-creation range lower, between 1.2 and 3.6 million jobs. But the nation lost nearly two million jobs in the last quarter of 2008 and is forecast to lose another four million jobs by the end of 2010 if there is no economic stimulus. That points to the need for a more effective stimulus plan for 2009 and 2010.

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President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

Reaad it all.

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11. The Windsor Continuation Group Report asks whether the Anglican Communion suffers from an “ecclesial deficit.”[6] In other words, do we have the necessary theological, structural and cultural foundations to sustain the life of the Communion? We need “to move to communion with autonomy and accountability”[7]; to develop the capacity to address divisive issues in a timely and effective way, and to learn “the responsibilities and obligations of interdependence”[8]. We affirm the recommendation of the Windsor Continuation Group that work will need to be done to develop the Instruments of Communion and the Anglican Covenant. With the Windsor Continuation Group, we encourage the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Anglican Communion Office to proceed with this work. We affirm the decision to establish the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission for Unity, Faith and Order. We recognise the need for the Primates’ Meeting to be engaged at every stage with all these developments.

12. There are continuing deep differences especially over the issues of the election of bishops in same-gender unions, Rites of Blessing for same-sex unions, and on cross-border interventions. The moratoria, requested by the Windsor Report and reaffirmed by the majority of bishops at the Lambeth Conference, were much discussed. If a way forward is to be found and mutual trust to be re-established, it is imperative that further aggravation and acts which cause offence, misunderstanding or hostility cease. While we are aware of the depth of conscientious conviction involved, the position of the Communion defined by the Lambeth 1998 Resolution 1.10 in its entirety remains, and gracious restraint on all three fronts is urgently needed to open the way for transforming conversation.

13. This conversation will include continuing the Listening Process[9], and the “Bible in the Church” Project. It is urgent that we as primates, with the rest of the Communion, directly study the scriptures and explore the subject of human sexuality together in order to help us find a common understanding.

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Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s leading candidate to become prime minister after elections next week, has said “everything that is necessary” will be done to stop Iran going nuclear. I believe him.

Never again is never again. There’s no changing that Israeli lens, however distorting it may be in a changed world. That could mean an Israeli attack on Iran within a year. If the U.S. military option is unthinkable, equally unthinkable is the United States abandoning Israel.

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As a former head of three federal agencies and a public trustee of Social Security and Medicare, I have learned that the process that one employs is critically important when transformational changes are needed. It has also led me to the conclusion that the “regular order” in Congress is broken and that achieving progress on multiple fronts within a relatively short time frame is not possible on a piecemeal basis.

What does this mean? The president and the Congress need to work together to establish a “Fiscal Future Commission” (or Task Force) that, unlike most Washington commissions, would be designed to accelerate action and get the ball across the goal line rather than punt it down the field. Ideally, this commission would be created by statute to ensure buy-in from both the Congress and the president. It should include selected congressional members and administration and non-governmental officials. It should engage the American people outside Washington’s Beltway while also leveraging digital technology and the Web. After engaging the public and key stakeholders, it would make a range of budget control, entitlement, other spending and tax reform recommendations that would be subject to an “up or down” vote in Congress, with limitations on amendments so they would not undercut the fiscal “bottom line” of the commission’s recommendations.

i was once at a conference and got a chance to hear David Walker speak. There are very few people who have a better handle on the big picture of of country’s financial future like he does. Read it all.

“Astonishing,” says [Tennessee Democrat Jim] Cooper of the new president’s avowed determination to confront the crisis. Leadership, says Cooper, who has seen precious little of it concerning entitlements, enlarges the number of “things that can be talked about.” Such as the Social Security payroll tax, which Cooper would cut for several stimulative years from 12.4 percent to 8 percent. It suppresses job creation, is raising more revenue than Social Security is dispensing and will continue to do so until 2017.

Cooper wishes more Americans were similarly eccentric and would read the 188-page 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government ”“ the only government document that calculates what deficit and debt numbers would be if the government practiced, as businesses must, accrual accounting.

Under such accounting, the deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 would have been $3 trillion rather than $454.8 billion. The report’s numbers show that the true national debt is $56 trillion, not the widely reported $10 trillion.

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“There is a deep sense across the country that those who are not responsible for this crisis are bearing a greater burden than those who were.”

—Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner yesteerday

It took [Tom] Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

—Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s new York Times

Fifty percent (50%) of U.S. voters say the final economic recovery plan that emerges from Congress is at least somewhat likely to make things worse rather than better, but 39% say such an outcome is not likely (see crosstabs).

Twenty-seven percent (27%) say the final legislation is Very Likely to make things worse, while just seven percent (7%) say it’s Not at All Likely to have that effect, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey

Support for the legislation has been slipping over the past two weeks and a plurality now oppose it.

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Wednesday’s unsigned statement ”” a rare case of the Vatican’s diplomatic arm furthering earlier remarks by the pope himself ”” not only showed an age-old institution grappling with the 24-hour news cycle. It also seemed to be a clear indication that the Vatican was facing nothing less than an internal and external political crisis.

The day before, in a rare criticism from the head of a government, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on the pope to clarify his position on the Holocaust, saying his previous remarks had not been sufficient.

Several prominent figures in the German Catholic Church joined in the criticism, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also issued a statement condemning Bishop Williamson.

But the statement from the Vatican Secretariat of State seemed to go a long way toward calming the uproar. The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, praised it, saying Wednesday that the Vatican had “clarified in an unequivocal way that every form of anti-Semitism should be condemned.”

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The primates completed their third day of business in Alexandria, Egypt, Wednesday, with work beginning on their final communiqué. The meeting is scheduled to close Thursday with an afternoon press conference led by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

So far, the primates have issued public statements on the crises in Zimbabwe and the Sudan and on global warming. Accounts of the closed-door proceedings differ, with some primates reporting a positive environment, while others have spoken of difficulties.

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It is a little over 18 minutes.

Thousands of people in the Washington area and hundreds of thousands more across the country are waiting longer than they should for unemployment benefits at a time when they need the money the most because rising joblessness is overwhelming claims offices, records show.

The problem is compounded by a simultaneous decrease in federal funding, which has reduced staffing at some local government offices. The result is that the District and many states, including Maryland and Virginia, are failing to meet federal guidelines that require timely processing of unemployment claims, appeals and benefit payments, the records show.

It’s likely to get worse. Figures released yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Washington area unemployment has hit its highest level since August 1993. The jobless rate climbed to 4.7 percent in December from 3 percent a year earlier and 4.4 percent in November. That’s well below the national average of 7.2 percent but still a burden for claims offices.

Carrie Kenworthy of Manassas has experienced the problem. She was laid off from her $80,000-a-year job as a mortgage loan officer in 2007. Then she tried to file for an extension in unemployment benefits in July. The Virginia Employment Commission denied her claim three times. Her appeals took more than two months because of a state backlog in cases.

Read it all and make sure to take the time to look at the two photographs also.

The first explicit testimony about the end of St. Paul comes to us from the middle of the 90s of the first century, and therefore, something more than 30 years after his death took place. It comes precisely from the letter that the Church of Rome, with its bishop, Clement I, wrote to the Church of Corinth.

In that epistolary text, the invitation is made to have the example of the apostles before our eyes, and immediately after the mention of Peter’s martyrdom, it reads thus: “Owing to envy and discord, Paul was obligated to show us how to obtain the prize of patience. Arrested seven times, exiled, stoned, he was the herald of Christ in the East and in the West, and for his faith, obtained a pure glory. After having preached justice in the whole world, and after having arrived to the corners of the West, he accepted martyrdom before the governors; thus he parted from this world and arrived to the holy place, thereby converted into the greatest model of patience” (1 Clement 5,2)….

In any case, the figure of St. Paul is magnified beyond his earthly life and his death; he has left in fact an extraordinary spiritual heritage. He as well, as a true disciple of Jesus, became a sign of contradiction. While among the so-called ebionites — a Judeo-Christian current — he was considered as an apostate of the Mosaic Law, already in the book of Acts of the Apostles, there appears a great veneration for the Apostle Paul.

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At 82, retired engineer Leonard Thompson is out to show he still has a few good years left.

Years? What’s this bunk about mere years, sonny?

More like decades. Why the heck not?

Thompson, after all, exercises body and mind daily, even developing his own workout program for seniors that emphasizes stretching, deep breathing, light aerobics and modified sit-ups and push-ups. And, six months ago, he recovered from invasive bladder and prostate cancer surgery quicker than some patients half his age.

”He is a fairly remarkable individual,” says Thompson’s urologist, Dr. Ralph deVere White, director of the University of California Davis Cancer Center.

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However, ideology is not the only reason that senators — from both parties — are balking at the president’s plan. As it emerged from the House, it suffered from a confusion of objectives. Mr. Obama praised the package yesterday as “not merely a prescription for short-term spending” but a “strategy for long-term economic growth in areas like renewable energy and health care and education.” This is precisely the problem. As credible experts, including some Democrats, have pointed out, much of this “long-term” spending either won’t stimulate the economy now, is of questionable merit, or both. Even potentially meritorious items, such as $2.1 billion for Head Start, or billions more to computerize medical records, do not belong in legislation whose reason for being is to give U.S. economic growth a “jolt,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it. All other policy priorities should pass through the normal budget process, which involves hearings, debate and — crucially — competition with other programs.

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By now, it’s clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression. Millions of jobs that Americans relied on just a year ago are gone; millions more of the nest eggs families worked so hard to build have vanished. People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring.

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives — action that’s swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

That’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.

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Human sexuality was the first order of business at the 2009 Primates’ Meeting at the Helnan Palestine Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt. The primates devoted their first business session to discussions over the effects the disputes over sexual ethics had had on the life and mission of the church.

Following prayers and Bible study, the Primates began work at 11:00 with five presentations from the Primates of Canada, the United States, Uganda, South Africa and Burma. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had asked each to address the question “What impact has the current situation had on your Province’s mission priorities?”

This had elicited a “very interesting discussion” the primates’ spokesman Archbishop Philip Aspinall of Australia told reporters, noting there had been a “huge diversity” of responses. However, primates questioned by ReligiousIntelligence.com reported that there appeared to be little shifting of views as the discussions were predominantly restatements of opinion, rather than a conversation. While there had been “much talk” there seemed to have been “little listening,” one primate observed.

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How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Another reason is that every idea has been tried and has failed. For the Palestinians, Pan-Arabism, Communism, Islamism have all come and gone, with none having delivered statehood or prosperity. As a result, more and more Palestinians have fallen back on family, clan, town and tribal loyalties. In Israel, Peace Now’s two-state solution was blown up with the crash of the Oslo peace accords, the rising Palestinian birthrate made any plans to annex the West Bank a mortal threat to Israel’s Jewish character, and the rockets that followed Israel’s withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza made a mockery of those who said unilateral pullouts were the solution.

All of this has led to a resurgence of religiosity. According to Haaretz, the following questions were posed by a well-known rabbi in one of the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli Army’s Office of Chief Rabbi before the latest Gaza fighting: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land.”

Who in the world would want to try to repair this? I’d rather herd cats….

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When the Rev. Kevin McBride opens his office door on a snowy Sunday morning, he’s ready to preach a good word for tough times. He walks straight into an anxious crowd of cookie-eating people who could really use some deeper sustenance.

There’s Jeff Bean, who was laid off 11 days ago from his manufacturing job and now sells identity-theft prevention tools on commission. There’s Ken Archibald, an unemployed contractor. And there’s Kim Sparks, a chicken farmer in a purple sweat suit and white T-shirt that proclaims: “My Savior Is Tougher Than Nails.”

She’s losing money on every egg sale because of the high cost of feed. “I worry a lot,” says Carolyn Matthews, a freelance editor whose retirement portfolio has been “pretty much decimated” in recent months. “But Scripture is full of adversity. And in every story, there’s a triumph of this sustaining Spirit.”

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The Rt Rev Suheil Dawani, the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem that includes Gaza, after two hours of waiting was denied entry into the Gaza Strip at the Israeli EREZ security Crossing Point this morning along with Lutheran Bishop Mounib Younan.

A spokesman for the Anglican diocese said that both Bishops were on a pastoral visit to include the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, an institution of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, and to members of their communities as part of a five-member delegation of the Jerusalem Heads of Church. The decision for the pastoral visit was apparently made two weeks ago and negotiations for the permits were begun with the Israeli authorities for that purpose. They had been informed that their request to enter Gaza had been granted.

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A presentation by the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG) to the primates’ meeting was scheduled for two hours on Tuesday morning, but spilled over into the afternoon.

In December, the WCG met at the Diocese of West Texas’s conference center and prepared a final draft of its report to the primates. The report was given to the primates Tuesday, but placed under a media embargo until the close of the conference. The news blackout extended to the day’s press conference, where the primates’ spokesman, the Most Rev. Philip Aspinall of Australia, would say only that the archbishops discussed the report over two sessions.

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Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson must “unequivocally and publicly” change his views before he can be admitted to office in the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said Wednesday.

Marking a major U-turn for under-pressure Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican statement also said that Williamson’s remarks were “not known” to the German pontiff “at the moment of lifting the excommunication” of the Englishman and three other renegade bishops last month.

Williamson is on record as denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to eliminate millions of Jews during World War II, saying only 200,000-300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps.

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I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code. First, there were those auto executives who didn’t realize that it is no longer socially acceptable to use private jets for lobbying trips to Washington. Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch office suite.

Then there are the Wall Street executives who were suddenly attacked from the White House for giving out the same sort of bonuses they’ve been giving out for years. Now there is Tom Daschle, who is being criticized for making $5 million off his Senate prestige.

I’m afraid there are rich people all around the country who are about to suffer similar social self-immolation because they don’t understand that the rules of privileged society have undergone a radical transformation.

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The prepubescent children of days gone by have given way to a cooler kid ”” the tween ”” who aspires to teenhood but is not quite there yet.

Tweens are in-between ”” generally the 8-to-12 set. The U.S. Census estimates that in 2009, tweens are about 20 million strong and projected to hit almost 23 million by 2020.

Among them now are Malia Obama, at 10 already a tween, and sister Sasha, who turns 8 this year. With the Obama daughters in the White House, the nation’s attention will focus even more on this emerging group ”” and the new “first tweens” will likely be high-profile representatives of their generation.

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This is from the comments below but I am highlighting it in case others missed it:

I remain at a loss as to why this is being proposed NOW, and being made public NOW, just as the Primates meet. I am grateful for the openness and desire for discussion around the concrete proposals (unlike some dioceses with which I am familiar). And in the spirit of such discussion, I included the following in a letter I sent yesterday to two of the Toronto bishops.

It is hard to escape the fact that the process you have now set in motion — one that involves public proposals, discussions, synodical actions, and all dealing with a way of ordering a particular “pastoral response” that involves episcopal oversight and particular permissions, following directives that involve the nature of prayers ”“ cannot avoid being seen as one of ecclesial “authorization” of liturgical matters surrounding same-sex unions. The following words of the Archbishop of Canterbury were given at the end of the recent Lambeth Conference:

One of the problems around this is that people in different parts of the world clearly define ‘public’ and ‘rites’ and ‘blessing’ in rather different ways. I’d refer I think to what I said in the address this afternoon. As soon as there is a liturgical form it gives the impression: this has the Church’s stamp on it. As soon as that happens I think you’ve moved to another level of apparent commitment, and that I think is nowhere near where the Anglican Communion generally is. In the meeting of Primates at Gramado in Brazil some years ago, the phrase ‘A variety of pastoral response’ was used as an attempt to recognise that there were places where private prayers were said and, although there’s a lot of unease about that, there wasn’t quite the same strength of feeling about that as about public liturgies. But again ‘pastoral response’ has been interpreted very differently and there are those in the USA who would say: ‘Well, pastoral response means rites of blessing’, and I’m not very happy about that. (Final Press Conference, August 3, 2008)

I would underline two things in this response by Archbishop Williams. First, the key character of putting the “Church’s stamp” on same-sex unions somehow, simply by there being a publically permitted or authorized form of prayer (“liturgical form” ”“ which is a deliberately vague phrase), is crucial. Second, the fact that “pastoral response” was always understood among the Primates at least ”“ and even here with a great deal of trepidation ”“ as involving no more than “private prayers”. Although you and your colleagues may feel that you are proposing something that would fall within this realm of only informal acknowledgments of private prayer, the very process you are following will make this very difficult to sustain in the judgments of many others around the Communion. The fact is that, among other things, your proposal includes the following:

Ӣ Episcopal permission be given to a limited number of parishes, based on Episcopal discernment, to offer prayers and blessing (but not the nuptial blessing) to same-sex couples in stable, long-term, committed relationships, as an extension of the current pastoral norms.
Ӣ Episcopal guidelines on the nature of the prayers/blessing will be established. A particular rite will not be authorized.
Ӣ Episcopal permission for blessings will be required.
Ӣ Evaluation of this pastoral response will be undertaken after one year.
Ӣ No parish or clergy will be required to participate.
”¢ A Bishop’s Commission will be formed to create the guidelines, monitor activity and review.

All of this represents formal, episcopal, diocesan, public, liturgical prayers of blessing. And while it is true that the Archbishop’s remarks above do not carry any kind of formal authority in determining how the Church of Canada and her bishops will define “pastoral response”, I think it fair to say that his rather moderate definitions will be shared by, and even defined more strictly by, many others among our Communion partners. I believe, in short, that it will be very difficult indeed to make the case and persuade others of the fact that the Diocese of Toronto is not moving forward with a contravention of the informal moratorium articulated at Lambeth (and before), not to mention moving in a way that simply does not defer to the general concerns of many Anglicans around the world.