The head of a think tank on marriage and family testified at the Proposition 8 federal trial Tuesday that same-sex marriage would weaken marriage and possibly lead to fewer heterosexual marriages, more divorces and “more public consideration of polygamy.”

But under cross-examination, David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, acknowledged that he wrote in a book in 2007 that the U.S. would be “more American on the day we permit same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.”

Blankenhorn was called as an expert witness by lawyers defending Proposition 8 against a constitutional challenge by two same-sex couples. He is an author and researcher who is not associated with any university. He earned a master’s degree in history in England, where he studied the history of labor unions.

Blankenhorn testified that he later worked as a community activist in low-income neighborhoods in Massachusetts and Virginia, where he became interested in the effect of fatherless families on children.

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Obama pledged to spend money to fix the economy now while pushing for longer-term efforts to cut the deficit. He continued to strike a populist tone in calling for tougher rules on banks and for rolling back a Supreme Court decision vastly expanding the influence of corporations in electoral politics. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” he declared, “or worse, by foreign entities.”

At the same time, Obama sought to grapple with public unhappiness over the economy, a particularly strong sentiment among working-class voters, who have most felt the lash of hard times. It was clear that if Obama did nothing else, he would identify himself with the word “jobs” and shout his determination to bring them back.

It was also obvious that he realizes his administration lost two critical battles last year: to define his stimulus plan and his health-care proposal. Polls show that Republicans’ negative claims have stuck with voters, while the administration’s arguments for the merits of both plans have not.

Obama made the case for his ideas again, but he also challenged Republicans to do more than criticize.

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* Middle Class Relief. These are the type of proposals that work for politicians in normal economic times. In bad economic times, the middle class (and others) do not want symbolism and sympathy. They want economic growth and jobs.

* Economic Growth and Jobs. Tonight the president had one main task: to make a credible case that his policies will help reduce unemployment. For the most part, he failed. His proposal to cut the capital gains tax for small business investment seems positive. His other ideas — taking money from some bankers and giving it to other bankers and a temporary hiring tax credit — are a caricature of job-creation policy. For the most part, Obama defended a continuation and expansion of the stimulus package, which promises to bring prosperity on high-speed trains. Compare Obama’s speech to John Kennedy’s State of the Union in 1963, which called for permanent tax cuts that would allow America to move toward full employment. Some Democratic presidents have actually understood how the economy works.

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It should be noted that in Jos we are coming face to face in confrontation with Satan and the powers of hell, and only God can save us. There are, however, many Muslims who totally disagree with violence as a means of settling issues, and of course it is not in accordance with the gospel to use violence to settle issues either. What seems to be a recurring decimal is that over time, those who have in the past used violence to settle political issues, economic issues, social matters, intertribal disagreements, or any issue for that matter, now continue to use that same path of violence and cover it up with religion. We must pray against the powers of hell. We must also pray for our state government, our Houses of Assembly at state and federal levels and our law enforcement agents, that they may choose the path of truth and justice, and deal with crime by its proper name, so that no-one, no matter how high or low, no matter of what faith or creed, should be exempt from facing the law.

The national leadership should be lifted up to God, that they may rise beyond a concern for political success and seek to do good and right in all things for the benefit of all people. This is a most urgent prayer request, because Nigeria as a nation has a large and ever-increasing army of leaderless, lawless, unemployable, unemployed, demoralized, and near hopeless youth. This, to my prophetic mind, is the big security issue which the governments at local, state and federal levels are not taking seriously. For example, every crisis in Nigeria in the last ten years has been executed by this generation of young people. With each passing year, they perfect their skills, and when they run out of a supply of money””or when they become bored with any situation””then any opportunity for action gives them satisfaction. This army has no religion, but can choose to go under the name of religion to achieve its motives. They are uneducated, and so their values are totally different, as are their ways of handling weapons or choosing how issues are settled. Please pray for us.

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Q: The local Church [in England] has five archdioceses and 17 dioceses. Catholics number just over 5 million, or 8.9% of the population. [Could you] reflect on the present challenges for the Catholic Church in England.

Archbishop Nichols: The research, which was carried out recently, reflects a more composite community and registers a numerical increase of which we weren’t fully aware.

Something else which catches the eye at this moment is that the life of faith is much more intense in the larger cities than in the rural areas of the country, where the numbers are falling and the priests are growing old and there are serious difficulties.

I also think that this research showed that in regard to the rest of the population, Catholics are much more committed to the cause of social justice. And this is encouraging for us, because it is a concrete expression of the social teaching of the Church and because is shows that beyond the noted difficulties we also have some stories of success to tell.

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In an interview with Vatican Radio in Rome, where the archbishop is with other English prelates for their ad limina visit, Archbishop Nichols said, “The reaction to this document is, in a certain sense, measured. There was a strong reaction at first, which was inflated by the media. Now we are in a phase of evaluation, reflection and prayer.”

In order for there to be a “complete assessment of the Pope’s initiative,” the archbishop said, “one must consider the important announcement of the start of the third phase of ARCIC talks, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission. In my opinion, the two are related.”

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The call to blog took a lot of people by surprise. After all, the 82-year-old from Bavaria is better known for his conservative doctrine and revival of the Latin Mass than for his computer savvy. At first, the Rev. James Martin was startled as well. Martin is the author of The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything and blogs each day for the Catholic magazine America. Then Martin thought, surely Jesus would blog if he were on the Earth today.

“He didn’t sit around and wait for people to come to him,” Martin observes. “He went out and met people by the Sea of Galilee who were fishing. He went to tax collectors’ booths. He went into synagogues. He went all over the place. And so we need to, figuratively speaking, go out to the ends of the Earth ”” which includes the blogosphere.”

The pope has not announced his own blog. But if he does, he might be wise to listen to the experts.

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Somewhere in the halls of Sahuarita Middle School in Tucson walks a boy who already is a deadbeat debtor.

He isn’t old enough to qualify for credit. But at the house his family was evicted from recently, someone used his name and Social Security number to rack up a $950 unpaid bill with Tucson Electric Power.

The boy’s mother — a financially troubled woman with a string of criminal convictions — says she doesn’t know how the bill ended up in her son’s name.

Ugh–read it all.

Mr Zhu noted that investors are increasingly borrowing the cheap US dollar, and investing the borrowed funds in emerging markets, where interest rates are higher, and therefore generating a better return than saving in the dollars.

This phenomenon called carry trade in the US dollar is a “massive issue today,” said Mr Zhu.

“It’s bigger than the Japanese yen carry trade 12 years ago,” he said.

However, if the United States were to tighten its lax monetary policy, making borrowing more costly, funds could then flow out just as suddenly from emerging markets, back into the US market.

This could cause a collapse in emerging markets’ currencies, and spark a repeat of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

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[Leslie] Kammerdiener is among thousands of unpaid caregivers ”” parents, spouses, siblings and war buddies ”” helping veterans injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars get through each day, says Barbara Cohoon, deputy director of government relations for the non-profit National Military Family Association. She says the caregivers are a vulnerable group, often under-recognized, and in need of help to navigate the military’s medical system. Cohoon says not all caregivers receive military benefits, even though many have quit jobs, moved out of their homes and drained their savings to care for their loved ones.

“Nobody’s got a handle on numbers, but 7,500 is the number bandied about,” says Cohoon, whose organization provides counseling and helps families negotiate the health system.

The range of injuries caregivers attend to spans from gashes and fractures that will heal, to comas, amputations, burns, paralysis, nerve damage and brain injuries so severe that cognitive function lingers at the toddler level or below.

Read it all and watch the video of Bob Woodruff and his wife Lee also.

One year had taken him from a self-professed unifier to a historically divisive president; from the man selected to solve the country’s problems to the person often disparaged as their cause. He squinted against the lights and stared hard at the audience for his first State of the Union address, looking a little grayer, a little older than when he assessed the country in the same venue last February. A circus of cameras and power brokers stirred around him, yet he stood alone at a single microphone, quieting the crowd with a series of somber nods.

It had been, Obama told the audience, “one of the most difficult years in our history” — and it had been one of his most difficult years, too.

The president had plenty of reasons to be frustrated Wednesday night, and he channeled all of them during his 71 minutes at the podium. The poker player so often lauded for his evenness was instead pleading and persistent, frank and angry. His words as much as his body language suggested a shift, that this was the time not only to address the populist aggravation but to make it his own. He pressed his forefinger against his thumb and made jabs at the air to accentuate his points. He told the crowd that he “hated” the bank bailout, that he wanted the government to match the public’s “decency,” that he was tired of “the numbing weight of our politics.”

“How long should we wait?” he asked. “How long should America put its future on hold?”

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Politicians, including Obama, had been highlighting the dilapidated Dillon County school for more than a year by the time of Obama’s February 2009 speech. He and several other presidential candidates visited the school during the run-up to the 2008 election. And Obama first brought national media attention to the students’ plight in August 2007, when he winced as a high-pitched train whistle interrupted lessons during his visit.

All but $4 million of the federal money the county is receiving is a loan, which the area will pay back using revenue from a 1-cent sales tax levied in 2007, Rogers said. Some of the money will be used to refurbish existing facilities and build a new early childhood development center. But about $25 million will go toward building a new J.V. Martin Junior High School.

The school is in a rural swath along Interstate 95 in the state’s northeastern corner known as the Corridor of Shame, after a 2005 documentary about conditions in schools there. The school itself is a hodgepodge of buildings; the original part, a former church, dates to 1896, and the latest section was added in 1955. The auditorium, built in 1917, was condemned in 2008 by the state fire marshal.

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Rebuffing the concerns of church leaders over the fate of shuttered church buildings, the city’s Landmarks Commission is recommending that six more Catholic churches be designated as historical city landmarks.

The designation, which would give the buildings some protection against demolition or structural changes, is opposed by the Diocese of Cleveland, which is in the midst of closing some 50 parishes.

The City Council would need to adopt legislation to implement the Commission’s recommendations, and in a letter sent to the commission and council members, the diocese called the proposals “extremely offensive.”

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The Anglican Church of Canada may close up to 14 churches in British Columbia because of declining attendance.

Bishop James Cowan of the Anglican Diocese of B.C. says its community numbers are dwindling because churchgoers are aging and no new members are taking their place.

“We are a church saying a crisis could come if we don’t act. It is painful.”

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Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High; and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

–Psalm 50:14-15

Almighty God, who hast enriched thy Church with the singular learning and holiness of thy servant Thomas Aquinas: Enlighten us more and more, we pray thee, by the disciplined thinking and teaching of Christian scholars, and deepen our devotion by the example of saintly lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

A Senior cleric in a northern diocese of England has taken Government minister Harriet Harman to task for her attack on the “traditional family”.

The broadside at the Minister for Women and Equality, who voiced the attack last year, is delivered by the Rector of St John the Baptist church, Chester, the Rev David Chesters.

In the January issue of Phoenix, his parish magazine, the married 64-year-old rector says: “As I write this…Harriet Harman is having a go at the ‘traditional family.’ ”

But it is “this type of family that has moulded a people and a faith over hundreds of years,” protests Fr Chesters who, ordained in 2004, has been at St John’s – Chester’s original cathedral – since 2006.

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Every few weeks I see a new study showing a link between exercise and improved cognitive performance.

The most recent from an article in the New York Times showing how strength training improves the cognitive performance of older women.

A quick sampling of the studies like this, this and this are adding to the growing body of evidence that exercise has benefits beyond the heart and waist line.

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Abroad, America’s greatest source of strength has always been our ideals. The same is true at home. We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal, that no matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law you should be protected by it; that if you adhere to our common values you should be treated no different than anyone else.

We must continually renew this promise. My Administration has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil rights violations and employment discrimination. We finally strengthened our laws to protect against crimes driven by hate. This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. We are going to crack down on violations of equal pay laws ”“ so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work. And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system ”“ to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.

In the end, it is our ideals, our values, that built America ”“ values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every corner of the globe; values that drive our citizens still. Every day, Americans meet their responsibilities to their families and their employers. Time and again, they lend a hand to their neighbors and give back to their country. They take pride in their labor, and are generous in spirit. These aren’t Republican values or Democratic values they’re living by; business values or labor values. They are American values.

Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions ”“ our corporations, our media, and yes, our government ”“ still reflect these same values.

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As President Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address and the future of health care reform hangs in the balance, nationally prominent religious leaders, including eight members of the White House Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, are encouraging him to exercise the full influence of his office to urge Congress to pass comprehensive health reform legislation.

Despite the last week’s political twists and turns on Capitol Hill, the reality for families suffering needlessly due to lack of access to affordable health care has not changed — and the faith community’s commitment to making quality health care affordable for all remains steadfast.

Read it all and check the list of signatories.

Three Year Spending Freeze

Will Say: “The budget oversight of the last ten years, followed by the Great Recession, followed by federal government’s swift and successful efforts to end the recession, have put America’s finances in a terrible hole. Our current deficit is necessary. But it is also gaping and unsustainable. There are many things we need to do to fix our national balance sheet, but the first step is to tie a belt around federal spending. That’s why I’m proposing a three-year freeze on all discretionary spending not directly related to our national security. It is not sufficient to solve our deficit crisis. But it is a necessary and important start. ”

Won’t Say: Obama knows that everybody is worried about the deficit — moderates, Republicans, bondholders. We can’t do anything non-gimmicky and substantive because Republicans won’t raise taxes and Democrats won’t cut services. So here’s something gimmicky and mostly without substance. We’re freezing less than 25% of the budget, which should save $15 billion in a year where the deficit is expected to pass $1.3 trillion.

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Apple Inc. said it will sell the newly unveiled tablet-style iPad starting at $499, a price tag far below the $1,000 that some analysts were expecting.

The iPad, which is larger in size but similar in design to Apple’s popular iPhone, was billed by CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday as “so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smart phone.”

The highly anticipated gadget has a 9.7-inch touch screen, is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds and comes with 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes of flash memory storage. The basic iPad models will cost $499, $599 and $699, depending on the storage size.

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You have noted the critical influence of social behavior clusters on sexual development. You also mentioned that, early on in your medical training, you knew there were certain things that would disqualify you from becoming a doctor, including poor grades, a criminal record or a failed marriage.

Yes, that’s right. Fundamentally, I expected that, if I did marry, I was supposed to make it a go.

Now, wouldn’t some argue that those were societal expectations which were imposed upon you and your generation?

Yes, and they were good ones ”” and biblically based, and part and parcel of my commitment to really what amounts to loving relationships. You see, what has happened with the permissive movement is that it has picked up the Freudian confusion of desire and love, making them the same. And with the implication, for example, that I must desire my mother. I don’t desire my mother. I love my mother. Now the fact is that in my marriage, of course, I desired this woman and I felt love for her. Now, 50 years into marriage with her, I still desire her, but now I love her. She’s irreplaceable. There is this thing that has come and it’s different. This person exists for me as irreplaceable. So, there is this confusion of desire and love. [Homosexuality] is erroneous desire.

Much of what you have said seems to underscore the pivotal role that the ecclesial and parish family plays as a behavioral cluster. What more influential environment might there be than the Church?

This is the point….

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On Tuesday (Jan. 26), a parliamentary commission delivered a long-awaited report recommending that women be barred from wearing the full veil in public institutions and on public transportation.

The bipartisan panel also recommended that foreigners who wear the full veil be denied French citizenship and residency. But in an indication of the issue’s sensitivity, the panel did not call for banning the garment from private buildings or public spaces such as streets.

“Scandalous practices are being hidden behind the full veil that go against our history,” said French Communist deputy Andre Gerin, the commission’s head, in broadcasted remarks. “… To say no to the full veil, we have decided to wage a political battle.”

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