Chile: Mine rescue nearing end with one left to bring up

A great miracle of God.

Mine rescue in progress in Chile

Pick a TV channel. It's probably on. Prayers for everyone involved.

N.Y. Faces $200 Billion Shortfall in Retiree Health Costs

The cities, counties and authorities of New York have promised more than $200 billion worth of health benefits to their retirees while setting aside almost nothing, putting the public work force on a collision course with the taxpayers who are expected to foot the bill.

The total cost appears in a report to be issued on Wednesday by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a research organization that studies fiscal policy.

It does not suggest that New York must somehow come up with $200 billion right away.

But the report casts serious doubt over whether medical benefits for New York’s retirees will be sustainable, given the sputtering economy and today’s climate of hostility toward new taxes and taxpayer bailouts.

The daunting size of the health care obligation raises the possibility that localities will be forced at some point to choose between paying their retirees’ medical costs and paying the investors who hold their bonds. Government officials aim to satisfy both groups, and have even made painful cuts in local services when necessary to keep up with both sets of payments.

Only a few places have tried to rein in their costs, by billing retirees for a portion of the premiums, for example. Retirees have responded with lawsuits, but ratings agencies and municipal bond buyers have shrugged off these warning signs.

“So far, the market doesn’t care,” said Edmund J. McMahon, the director of the Empire Center. “The market seems to assume, on the basis of nothing, that at some point all of these places are simply going to stop paying retiree health benefits.”

Read the rest here.

Federal judge issues injunction against military gay ban

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday immediately stopping enforcement of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, suspending the 17-year-old ban on openly gay U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' landmark ruling also ordered the government to suspend and discontinue all pending discharge proceedings and investigations under the policy.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys have 60 days to appeal. Pentagon and Department of Justice officials said they are reviewing the case and had no immediate comment.

Read the rest here.

This is breaking news. As such the above text which is from the wire service AP is likely to change on the linked site.

Rescue may be near for trapped miners

COPIAPO, Chile — Fresh air and freedom were just hours away on Tuesday for 33 miners trapped a half-mile underground for 69 days, men whose endurance and unity have captivated the world. No one in the history of mining has been trapped so long and survived.

"This story started as a tragedy and we hope that in a few hours, it'll end in a miracle," Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said to reporters gathered at the mine site.

Read the rest here.

From the mailbag: Guest Posts?

Never really thought about it, though until today was never really asked. After considering the idea, I am open to the possibility of an occasional guest post with a few caveats.

• Any proposed guest post should be submitted to me by email and should be on a topic likely to appear on this blog. (That's a rather wide field but there are limits).
  
• It should be in conformity with the guidelines for comments I have linked in the sidebar.
• It needs to be signed in some way. A pen name or Blogger ID is OK. "Anonymous" is not. But your real name should be in the email you send to me.
• Contrary points of view are OK if you are responding to something previously posted that's a bit too long for the com box.
• Please don't be offended if you submit something and I say "no." If I decline to post something on the blog I will let you know why.
  

With the above in mind please understand I am not encouraging everyone to start sending in guest posts. This is my blog and I plan to keep it that way. Guest posts would be an exception not the rule. Having said that, there are some people I have corresponded with or who are regular commentators who would get serious consideration if they had something they thought was worth posting.

In ICXC
John

Memory Eternal

140 years ago today Robert E. Lee died.

H/T Wilson Unplugged

Memory Eternal

Ten years ago today the USS Cole was bombed.

Quote of the day...

The Postal Service’s ability to lose mail is, of course, legendary. Here is an example of how bad it has become: last week the American Postal Workers Union had to postpone their national election of officers because so many of the ballots were lost in the mail.

Source.

H/T T:19

September FED minutes suggest more money printing

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve officials believed in September the struggling recovery might soon need more help, and they discussed several ways to provide support, including the possible adoption of a price-level target.

Policy-makers had a "sense that (more) accommodation may be appropriate before long," the central bank said on Tuesday.

In minutes of the its last policy-setting session held September 21, the Fed said officials discussed several approaches to aiding the economy but focused on buying additional longer-term Treasury securities and ways to nudge the public into expecting higher levels of inflation in the future.

On Wall Street, stocks trimmed their losses, with both the Dow Jones industrial average (DJI:^DJI - News) and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (^SPX - News) briefly turning higher after the FOMC's minutes came out.

To help shift inflation expectations, policy-makers debated providing more detailed information about what rates of inflation they would prefer, or the possibility of making clear they would tolerate a higher level of inflation on a temporary basis, a policy approach known as price-level targeting.

They also discussed the possibility of targeting a path for GDP growth.

Read the rest here.

Happy Birthday: Ramsay MacDonald

[Ramsay] MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

-Winston Churchill

Russian Orthodox Church launches YouTube channel

Here.

A Roman Catholic Old Kalendarist on Sede Vecantism, Pius XII and neo-Trads

Is there anyone more full of shit than a Sedevacantist? See this site for a good laugh. According to them Pius XII was the last ''true'' Pope and they celebrate the Tridentine Rite, and that if you do not adopt the sedevacantist position (like so many in the SSPX, with whom I desire no communion - ever) you don't really care much for Tradition. The dead give away of their manifest heresy is this line (no doubt inspired by Mediator Dei): ''What we believe, so we pray.'' Their priests even swear Pius X's Oath against Modernity!

Boob. As far as ''true'' Popes go Pius XII was the absolute worst in the history of the Papacy (even worse than John XII, who funded his far too numerous mistresses at the Lateran by the sale of episcopal consecrations). A thousand anathemas upon that awful, heretical, man. And now the ''Tridentine Rite''...To my knowledge the so-called ''Tridentine Rite'' has not been celebrated since 1604 when Clement VIII introduced his new reformed Missal (and I think that the ''ethos'' of the Tridentine Rite died a death when Gregory XIII imposed the Gregorian Kalendar on the Universal Church in 1582). No doubt these ignorant extremists celebrate the '62 Rite merrily, woefully ignorant (or wilfully so) of the fact that the '62 Rite is as far removed from any holistic and authentic hermeneutic of Tradition as is the rest of their deplorable position. But it was before the Council so it's all ok; it's Vatican II which is the enemy of Tradition, not Pius XII! If the See of Peter is vacant then the Church of Christ is builded upon sand. But then some have even gone so far as to elect their own popes. Idiots.

Read the rest here.

See the original for links.
I posted n this subject a few years back.

New York: GOP candidate for governor attacks gays

Carl Paladino greeting supporters after his remarks

Republican candidate for governor Carl P. Paladino told a gathering in Williamsburg Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality is acceptable, and criticized his opponent, Democrat Andrew M. Cuomo, for marching in a gay pride parade earlier this year.

Addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders, in Williamsburg, Mr. Paladino described his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“That’s not how God created us,” he said, reading from a prepared address. "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t."

And then, to applause from the group at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year -the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did and that’s not the example we should be showing our children,”

Read the rest here.

Democrats: Heading for a once in a generation electoral shellacking

Over the weekend I wrote a piece on how some liberal elites, not least at The New York Times, remain in denial over the scale of the disaster the Left is facing at the polls in November. Well, I hope they’re taking a close look today at the latest Gallup poll, which is enough to make any White House adviser weep.

Gallup’s new survey of more than 3,000 adults, including over 2,700 registered voters (1,800 of whom are highly likely to vote), shows Republicans with “a double-digit advantage” under two separate scenarios – lower and higher turnout. Under the higher turnout scenario, the GOP lead is 13 percentage points, while under the lower turnout scenario it is even higher, at 18 points:...

...How substantial could GOP gains be based on the Gallup numbers? According to Michael Barone, arguably America’s most influential election analyst, those gains could be the biggest since 1946, 1928 or even 1894, let alone 1994.

Read the rest here.

40 State Attorneys General plan coordinated investigation into bank and mortgage fraud

WASHINGTON — The attorneys general of up to 40 states plan to announce soon a joint investigation into banks' use of flawed foreclosure paperwork.

A person briefed on the investigation said Saturday night that an announcement could come as early as Tuesday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was not yet public.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller will lead the investigation. Miller already has been leading multistate reviews of questionable foreclosure documents.

A joint investigation by 40 states would further escalate pressure on banks to widen their suspensions of foreclosures. On Friday, Bank of America became the first bank to halt foreclosures in all 50 states.

Read the rest here.

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.

An FBI spokesman wouldn’t acknowledge that the device belonged to the agency or that agents appeared at Afifi’s house.

“I can’t really tell you much about it, because it’s still an ongoing investigation,” said spokesman Pete Lee, who works in the agency’s San Francisco headquarters.

Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle.

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Read the rest here.

Contemplating the once unthinkable... Am I the only one wondering how long before it's time to start thinking about where to immigrate to?

Three rare books about the Russian Orthodox Church in China have been found

Three rare books about the Russian Orthodox Church in China found by Nina Achmatova The three tomes, which are waiting for a translator, are about the birth and development of three churches in Beijing, Tianjin and Harbin. The Chinese government does not recognise the Russian Orthodox Church. Its 13,000 members meet occasionally for religious functions, and usually inside the Russian Embassy and consulates. Moscow (AsiaNews) – The Russian Orthodox Church in China is trying to rediscover its origins. Some believers have been able to borrow some old books on Orthodox Christianity in the Middle Kingdom that date back to the first half of 20th century. They describe the foundation and development of three churches in Beijing, Tianjin and Harbin. Scanned one page at a time, the rare copies are available on the internet. Originally published in Russian, they are waiting for a translation. All three tomes are rare specimen with facts, figures and pictures of some of the earliest churches of the Orthodox Mission to China. The first book, by a nameless author, is dedicated to the Church of the “Protective Mantle of the Mother of God”, built in Tianjin in 1931. Archimandrite Viktor was the first priest put in charge of the church, which included an Orthodox cemetery, a library, an Orthodox ecclesiastic confraternity, the first high school ran by religious in the country, a Russian hospital and the Mercy House of the Blessed Serafim Sarkovsky. Many Chinese but also foreigners from places like Great Britain, France and Italy received physical and spiritual assistance from the last two structures.

Read the rest here.

GOP House of Representatives candidate spends free time dressed as Nazi SS officer

Rich Iott, the House Republican nominee in Ohio’s 9th district, belongs to a group that reenacts World War II battles as a Nazi SS division.

Iott confirmed to The Atlantic that he has been a member of the group, called Wiking, for years but that his participation stems from his interest in history.

"In fact, there's a disclaimer on the [Wiking] website,” he told The Atlantic, which first reported his membership. “And you'll find that on almost any reenactment website. It's purely historical interest in World War II."

Iott is seen in photos dressed up in a Nazi military uniform. The group says its name come from the 5th Panzer Division Wiking, which was an armored tank division that included foreigners and mainly fought against Russians on the Eastern Front. A recruiting video on the Wiking site, shows members of the group marching, shooting rifles and performing drills as if they’re German soldiers.

Read the rest here.

Unbelievable. And before anyone steps up to defend "historical" reenactment as a hobby; we are not talking about a guy who belongs to a WW II group that, when in need of some bad guys makes its members draw lots to see who has to be the enemy. We are not even talking about guys wearing Confederate uniforms at Civil War reenactments. This is a group that is dedicated to a specific unit/division of the Nazi SS. The same unit to which Joseph Mengele belonged. Irrespective of the relatively sane disclaimer on the group's web site, who in their right mind would nominate a man for Congress who dresses in an SS uniform for a hobby? I mean seriously. All the other side has to do is run a silent TV spot showing a photo of this guy for 30 seconds in his deaths head and swastika get up and the election is over. They don't even need to say a word.

I was pretty sure no one was going to top the Christine O'Donnell fiasco. Boy was I wrong. Fortunately for the GOP (unlike in Delaware) I am pretty sure this was not a seat that was considered to be "in play."

Democrats plant phony Tea Party candidate in NJ

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) — A New Jersey Republican congressional candidate criticized his Democratic opponent Friday amid mounting evidence that Democratic officials planted a tea party candidate in the race to siphon off conservative votes.

"My opponent, John Adler, represents everything that is wrong with politics in our country today," Republican Jon Runyan said. "I would ask for an apology. But frankly, an apology from someone like Congressman Adler would be so meaningless that it's not worth seeking."

He spoke at a news conference as Adler, a first-term Democratic lawmaker, and his campaign remained mum about a report in the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill in which Democratic operatives speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed what Republicans have believed for months: That tea-party candidate Peter DeStefano was put on the ballot by Democrats.

The operatives said a county Democratic employee is running at least the Web elements of DeStefano's campaign.

Read the rest here.

At the very least this is a despicable and dishonorable form of deception. At most it might be election fraud.