While planning her dream wedding, Celeste Aslanyants fell in love with a picturesque manor that serves as a popular ceremony and reception site in Texas. But she soon learned the spot wouldn’t work for her fiancé’s Armenian family, who had made requests she wanted to honor. They hoped a priest would officiate, and that could only happen in a church. They wanted Armenian food and drink, but there were catering restrictions. And the guest list had quickly exceeded the location’s capacity.

The solution? Have two weddings. Ms. Aslanyants and her husband, Arsen, got married at a traditional Armenian ceremony and reception in September 2011 and then, two weeks later, they had an American wedding at the manor.

“I didn’t have to please everyone at once,” says Ms. Aslanyants, 28, who lives with her husband north of Dallas….

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Late one night 20 years ago, when I was an oil executive rather than an Anglican bishop, I had run out of steam and patience toward the end of a complex multinational acquisition. We came to yet another bit of box ticking and I suggested we skip it, because we knew the material was accurate.

“Justin,” our wise investment-bank director said quietly, “you know that’s not how we do it.”

Under pressure, everyone is prone to make bad decisions and that story remains in my mind as I sit on the U.K.’s Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, listening to people talk about banks, bankers and their failures.

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Last week, a fire on a Japan Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner parked in Boston prompted American regulators to launch a comprehensive review of the new jet program. But they maintained the plane was safe and allowed it to keep flying during their unusual if not unprecendented re-examination.

That changed Wednesday after pilots on an All Nippon Airways 787 had to make an emergency landing after another smoky battery malfunction. Before the day was over, the FAA had grounded Boeing’s technologically advanced jetliner, declaring that it won’t fly again until the onboard batteries are proven to be safe.

“Before further flight, operators of U.S.-registered Boeing 787 aircraft must demonstrate to the Federal Aviation Administration … that the batteries are safe and in compliance,” the U.S. agency said in a statement accompanying its emergency airworthiness directive.

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Our Vision

Our vision is for the gospel to be recognized as public truth again. We want to see Christians owning the gospel in all aspects of their lives, and demonstrating its positive impact at all levels of society””individuals, communities, sectors, and the entire marketplace of ideas.

Our Mission

Our mission is to take the gospel public. Through our research and our grounding in the calibre of theological education found at Regent College, we aim to provide and embody fresh, reliable, and well-informed expressions of the gospel that reveal its truth, necessity, and relevance to all spheres of public life….

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Public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was around 38 percent in 1965. It is around 74 percent now. Debt could approach a ruinous 90 percent of G.D.P. in a decade and a cataclysmic 247 percent of G.D.P. 30 years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office and JPMorgan.

By 2025, entitlement spending and debt payments are projected to suck up all federal revenue. Obligations to the elderly are already squeezing programs for the young and the needy. Those obligations will lead to gigantic living standard declines for future generations. According to the International Monetary Fund, meeting America’s long-term obligations will require an immediate and permanent 35 percent increase in all taxes and a 35 percent cut in all benefits….

[The final ‘solution didn’t] involve a single hard decision. It did little to control spending. It abandoned all of the entitlement reform ideas that have been thrown around.
Whom should we blame for this? Again, we should not blame Obama and Boehner. In their different ways, they and a number of other people in the Congress are trying to find a politically palatable way to deal with these hard issues. They got what conditions allowed.

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters. The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money. Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way.

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It’s a baby boomer’s nightmare. One moment you’re 40-ish and moving up, the next you’re 50-plus and suddenly, shockingly, moving out ”” jobless in a tough economy.

Too young to retire, too old to start over. Or at least that’s the line. Comfortable jobs with comfortable salaries are scarce, after all. Almost overnight, skills honed over a lifetime seem tired, passé. Twenty- and thirty-somethings will gladly do the work you used to do, and probably for less money. Yes, businesses are hiring again, but not nearly fast enough. Many people are so disheartened that they’ve simply stopped looking for work.

For millions of Americans over 50, this isn’t a bad dream ”” it’s grim reality….[and] though there is no single path, there are success stories that offer hope….

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A large and growing share of American workers are tapping their retirement savings accounts for non-retirement needs, raising broad questions about the effectiveness of one of the most important savings vehicles for old age.

More than one in four American workers with 401(k) and other retirement savings accounts use them to pay current expenses, new data show. The withdrawals, cash-outs and loans drain nearly a quarter of the $293 billion that workers and employers deposit into the accounts each year, undermining already shaky retirement security for millions of Americans.

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In the House, the majority Republican party says it won’t raise the debt limit without spending cuts of equivalent amounts. Mr. Obama has said he won’t negotiate over the matter, saying it is the responsibility of Congress to enable the government to pay bills it has incurred.

The government spends 40% more than it takes in and borrows money to cover the difference. Without an increase in the debt ceiling, the Treasury won’t be able to borrow the additional money needed to pay all its bills.

Failure to make payment on even some of its obligations could wreak havoc in the economy and financial markets and possibly trigger another financial crisis and recession, analysts have warned.

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The Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next decade Social Security’s annual cash deficit will rise by nearly $100 billion, reaching $155 billion a year. The cost of servicing the extra public debt tied to cashing in $1 trillion worth of Social Security’s intragovernmental IOUs over the 10 years would add $40 billion to the deficit in 2022 alone, an IBD analysis finds.

Overall, Social Security would account for nearly $200 billion in annual deficits or nearly 20% of the $1 trillion-plus deficit that would occur under current policies, including fiscal-cliff tax hikes.

Then, over the following decade, the retirement program’s impact on deficits would really balloon.

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On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg will sit in judgment on a series of cases that have far-reaching implications for religious freedom in this country. Two of the cases involve devout women who were banned from wearing the most important symbol of the Christian faith ”“ the cross.
Shirley Chaplin, an experienced nurse, had worn her confirmation cross on a small chain around her neck, without incident, throughout nearly 30 years of frontline nursing. Then, one day, she was told to remove it.

In the case of British Airways check-in clerk Nadia Eweida, a national campaign was mounted when BA banned her from wearing her cross. But the airline refused to compensate her for months of being suspended without pay and subsequent tribunals have disputed her claims of discrimination.

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Lawrence Carpenter knew he always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but he was in the wrong business ”“ the business of selling drugs.

After his second stint in prison, it became clear to him: “I made mistakes in my life, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in poverty because of those mistakes. I also knew that I had a criminal record, and looking at things realistically, it was going to be pretty difficult finding a job anywhere. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse. I knew that in order for me to realize the goals I had financially, my only option was to start my own business and create my own market….”

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Vicki Grantham of the Cremation Society of Illinois slid open a gray metal door. “This is where everything starts,” she said.

Visitors peered into a huge room chilled to 35 degrees and fitted with stacks of long metal shelves on each side.

Homewood, Ill., Mayor Richard Hofeld backed away a few steps. He supports cremation and intends at some point to be a consumer. Still, he found the sight of the cooler where bodies are kept slightly discomfiting. “We know it’s going to happen, but we don’t want to think about it.”

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America has too many malls.

I’ve recently blogged that many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are being threatened with “economic destruction” by their advantaged online competition. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, anchorwoman Nicole Lapin asked about the implications of this dynamic on retail real estate. I said I hadn’t studied it, but I thought the ramifications would be very big and very negative (I believe the phrase “apocalyptic” was used).

I’ve since had the opportunity to spend some time looking at this issue, and I believe we’re seeing clear signs that the e-commerce revolution is seriously impacting commercial real estate. Online retailers are relentlessly gaining share in many retail categories, and offline players are fighting for progressively smaller pieces of the retail pie. A number of physical retailers have already succumbed to online competition including Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA, Tower Records and Blockbuster…..

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Mr. Donahue joined the company in 1972 as a part-time law clerk, a year after graduating from Princeton University with a history degree. He went full time in 1974 after earning a law degree at the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Donahue was named president and chief operating officer in 1993 and president and CEO in 1998.

He is one of 13 children of John and Rhodora Donahue, who have made their Catholic faith the center of their family, which includes 84 grandchildren and 69 great-grandchildren. John Donahue, 88, who co-founded Federated in 1955 with two Central Catholic classmates, is the company’s chairman.

Catholicism’s influence is evident in the work Donahue family members do.

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“Dozens of companies have been delisted from our exchanges due to economy irregularities and outright fraud,” said Dan David, vice president of GeoInvesting, LLC, a firm that monitored the Asian investment craze. “They raised hundreds of millions, some companies, that is outright money that was taken from investors that they’ll never see again.”

[Mary] Schapiro said the SEC opened 40 cases against Chinese firms during her tenure, targeting financial schemes she described as “brazen” and “extraordinary.” Schapiro, who stepped down in December, said that when she asked Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan for help during a trip to Beijing in July her requests were rebuffed.

“We haven’t yet achieved a level of cooperation that makes it possible for us to get access to Chinese companies the way we need,” Shapiro said. “We will fight hard to try to secure recovery for U.S. investors. But it’s harder when we don’t have the cooperation of the foreign government.”

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On top of the possible employment losses, what messages are we sending when the government penalizes marriage at any level? One message is clear. The decision by Congress to impose a marriage penalty only discourages couples from getting married and subsidizes cohabiting households. The Marriage and Religion Research Institute studies the social science data and research on the impacts of marriage and religious practice on the lives of children and the future of the nation. Statistics show that homes headed by married couples are less likely to need government assistance. Analyzing the data, they have found that children in homes headed by married couples are more likely to be higher-achieving students and better citizens, and are less likely to become dependent on the failing government subsidy system.

Add in the higher taxes (an average of $2,425 per employee) from the 2 percent tax increase in everyone’s paychecks to pay for Social Security and the myriad tax increases all families will pay thanks to the malady known as Obamacare, and it is likely that families will end this year with their own personal fiscal cliffs. If Congress is serious about tax reform, easing the burdens on all families should be at the center of any transformation.

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My household has more than its share of student and credit card debt. I didn’t expect my salary to be frozen for half a decade, and I assumed the spending was a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Bad assumption. Two months ago, I got a notice from my student loan company telling me that my monthly payment was about to double. It took a minute, but I thought back to the day I agreed to those repayment terms. By the time my payment obligations spike, I remember thinking, I’ll be so flush that it won’t even be an issue….

There have been many far more serious victims of the Great Recession and the anemic recovery than me, of course ”” people who have lost their jobs, their homes, breadwinners who have lost a defining sense of self. Although I have never felt more than a step or two away, I still have a home and I still have a job.

But too often there has not been a distinction made between the victims and people, like me ”” among the majority of Americans who are not unemployed or underemployed, but didn’t act as prudently as they should have ”” who made poor decisions.

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Even if you’re not going to the Consumer Electronics Show, running Tuesday through Friday in Las Vegas, you can still test drive one of the world’s newest gadgets this week.

With the right kind of smartphone you can find what’s hot at certain hotels and even find out when a big jackpot last hit on a particular slot machine.

The new product, called TecTile, will be unveiled Tuesday (today) at various Caesars Entertainment resorts on and near the Strip. The manufacturer, Samsung Mobile, is installing 4,500 programmable stickers throughout the various properties as a way to make information easier to access.

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Check it out (Hat tip: KK).

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

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There are two major reasons for Medicare’s rising costs. The first is the program’s design, often tweaked but left fundamentally intact since its creation in 1965, which basically pays doctors and hospitals fixed fees for whatever they do. At a time of rapid (and often beneficial) medical innovation, the dominant incentive has been to provide more, and more expensive, care. Hence the House Ways and Means Committee’s 1965 estimate that Medicare hospital insurance would cost $9 billion by 1990 fell short by $58 billion. The second reason costs keep going up, of course, is the rising number of elderly eligible for Medicare, which is inevitable; the 50 million beneficiaries today will be 78”‰million in 2030.

The ultimate solution is structural: to limit growth in expenditures per beneficiary. Easier said than done. Liberals would empower the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB) to stop payment for treatments it deems not cost-effective. The idea hasn’t gotten very far, partly because Republicans denounce it as “rationing.” Conservatives favor “premium support,” which would subsidize seniors to shop among competing insurance plans, but Democrats, the president included, have tarred that idea as a skimpy “voucher.”

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For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Social Security ran a deficit in 2010: It spent $49 billion dollars more in benefits than it received in revenues, and drew from its trust funds to cover the shortfall. Those funds ”” a $2.7 trillion buffer built in anticipation of retiring baby boomers ”” will be exhausted by 2033, the government currently projects.

Those facts are widely known. What’s not is that the Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out ”” to the tune of $800 billion by 2031, more than the current annual defense budget ”” and that the trust funds will run out, if nothing is done, two years earlier than the government has predicted.

We reached these conclusions, and presented them in an article in the journal Demography, after finding that the government’s methods for forecasting Americans’ longevity were outdated and omitted crucial health and demographic factors. Historic declines in smoking and improvements in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease are adding years of life that the government hasn’t accounted for. …

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Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt may travel to North Korea over opposition from the U.S. State Department, becoming the highest-profile businessman to visit the isolated nation since Kim Jong Un succeeded his father as leader just over a year ago.

Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said today that he and Schmidt are planning a “private humanitarian visit” and that Schmidt is going as a citizen interested in foreign affairs. “This is not a Google trip,” Richardson said.

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…what has to be explained is not the west’s looming relative decline but its temporary pre-eminence. Of a world population approaching 7bn, the US and western Europe together account for a mere 770m. Their gross domestic product per head ”“ a very approximate guide to living standards ”“ is three times the world average. Such discrepancies can hardly be expected to last in an increasingly globalised planet. In 1500, just after Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery, China and India were both estimated to have had a total GDP considerably higher than western Europe’s and GDP per head only slightly lower. Earlier still, in about 1000, living standards were fairly uniform ”“ and low ”“ throughout the world but the estimates show China slightly in the lead.

The reversal towards an earlier norm has already started. Emerging and developing countries now account, for the first time in the modern era, for about half of total world output. Historians have offered endless explanations for the west’s temporary surge: religions that put more emphasis on the individual and his activities in this life; an intellectual climate more favourable to scientific thought; property rights that safeguarded acquisitions of wealth; less autocratic forms of government. The list is endless and doubtless all these elements played a part. In the late 18th century the government of England’s George III sent a trade mission to China, only to be rebuffed by the Chinese emperor who declared that his country had everything it required and did not need western trinkets.

But such attitudes could hardly be expected to last, faced with the evidence of an increasing western lead. What the west initiated the others would follow; and eventually began to initiate on their own.

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While many in Washington are breathing a sigh of relief and some are trying to spin the outcome as a win for the president, those who characterize this bill as a genuine victory for anyone at all have clearly lost perspective. The deal brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does make good on President Obama’s promise to bring a little more equity to the tax code by raising rates on wealthier Americans, and it temporarily averts the most draconian “sequestration” cuts. But the list of what it does not do, and what it does wrong, is long.

By midday Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office had concluded that the Biden-McConnell package would add nearly $4 trillion to federal deficits over the next 10 years. This was largely because it actually extends and makes permanent more than 80% of the Bush tax cuts. So much for the idea that this whole struggle was supposed to help America get its financial house in order.

Just as bad, or perhaps worse in terms of the day-to-day lives of average people, the bill only postpones the forced cuts of sequestration by two months, to precisely the moment the country will be engaged in another ruinous debate about lifting our national debt ceiling to ensure the country can pay its bills. It thus creates a new, even more dangerous fiscal cliff….

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Update: George Will has also written on this I see–Perils Of The Entitlement State And Our Decadent Democracy.

Congress’ hectic resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis is the latest in a long series of decisions by lawmakers and the White House to do less than promised ”” and to ask Americans for little sacrifice ”” in confronting the nation’s burgeoning debt.

The deal will generate $600 billion in new revenue over 10 years, less than half the amount President Barack Obama first called for. It will raise income tax rates only on the very rich, despite Obama’s campaign for broader increases.

It puts off the toughest decisions about spending cuts for military and domestic programs, including Medicare and Social Security. And it does nothing to mitigate the looming partisan showdown on the debt ceiling, which must rise soon to avoid default on U.S. loans.

In short, the deal reached between Obama and congressional Republicans continues to let Americans enjoy relatively high levels of government service at low levels of taxation. The only way that’s possible, of course, is through heavy borrowing, which future generations will inherit.

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The goal of your local church’s marketing effort is to increase the number of inbound leads and to drive conversions…. This is no different than the goal of commercial marketing, except we’re dealing in spiritual rather than tangible goods. Understanding how to increase inbound leads (people who express an interest in your church) and drive conversions (people who actually join your church) is not hard, but it does take leadership, planning, creativity and sustained effort. In other words, it takes a little work.

Most churches are already engaged in some forms of marketing. Any of the basic functions of parish life are marketing processes, including outreach, hospitality, ushering, preaching, maintaining the parish’s website and Facebook page, tweeting, and promoting the Sunday worship schedule. The challenge is to move from efforts focused on maintenance to efforts focused on growth.

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The budget deal passed by the U.S. Senate [and House]… would raise taxes on 77.1 percent of U.S. households, mostly because of the expiration of a payroll tax cut, according to preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635, the policy center said. A 2 percent payroll tax cut, enacted during the economic slowdown, is being allowed to expire as of [December 31]

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Congress approved a plan to end Washington’s long drama over the “fiscal cliff” late Tuesday after House Republicans surrendered to President Obama’s demand to let taxes rise on the nation’s richest households.

The House voted 257 to 167 to send the measure to Obama for his signature; the vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation.

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Update: Here are the new numbers for 2013 in Congress–Democrats control of the Senate by 55 to 45 (change of 2) and Republicans control of the House of Representatives by 234-201 (change of 8)