A sad note

For those not already aware, Owen White our favorite Ochlophobist, is ending his blog on May 1st.  My understanding is that he plans to delete the blog including its archives, which I find most regrettable.  There is a wealth of great material over there.  If you want to save any of it I suggest doing so soon.

Picture of the day

I have no background on this.  Anyone care to caption the photo?

From Fr. Z's blog.

S&P lowers outloook for Japanese debt

TOKYO — Uncertainty over Japan’s fiscal situation as it rebuilds after last month’s earthquake and tsunami prompted Standard & Poor’s to change its outlook on the country’s long-term debt rating from stable to negative, the ratings agency said Wednesday.

Standard & Poor’s stressed that its sovereign credit ratings on the world’s No.2 economy remained unchanged, but said the March 11 disasters cast some doubt over the country’s economic performance and future debt load.

“Much will depend on Japan’s political leadership and its ability to forge a political consensus on how to offset fiscal measures in the future,” the agency said.

Read the rest here.

Detainees’ Lawyers Can’t Click on Leaked Documents

WASHINGTON — Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to print them out or e-mail them to friends.

Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.

On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantánamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.

Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files “in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards” — handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department’s Court Security Office.

Read the rest here.

Did Obama taint WikiLeaks suspect's right to fair trial?

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has unwittingly waded into a military legal tangle by declaring that WikiLeaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning "broke the law." Manning's supporters claim the president's statement amounts to "unlawful command influence" and has jeopardized Manning's chance for a fair trial.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits "Command Influence," in which a superior officer up the chain of command says or does something that could influence any decisions by a military judge or jury in a criminal case. As commander in chief, there's no one higher up that chain than the president.

The tangle started last week after a political fundraiser in San Francisco. Logan Price, a supporter of Manning, got close enough to the president to shake his hand and then plead Manning's case. In an exchange that was caught on a cell phone video, Price claimed that Manning, charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is a whistle-blower not a criminal. Price asked, "Why is he being prosecuted?"

Obama responded that what Manning allegedly did was "irresponsible, risked the lives of service members and did a lot of damage." But when Price persisted Obama shot back, "He broke the law."

A military legal expert says the president himself crossed a legal line with that statement.

Read the rest here.

All eyes on 'Gang of Six' as deficit deal nears

WASHINGTON — They have met in almost total secrecy for months, holed up in an office on Capitol Hill: three Republican and three Democratic senators trying to hammer out a deal to reduce America's vast deficit.

Now, with the "Gang of Six" senators widely anticipated to deliver their proposal in early May, the air of expectation in Washington is acute.

Many believe their efforts represent the only real chance — and a slim one at that — of the U.S. Congress reaching a deficit-reduction deal before next year's elections. A sense of crisis over the $1.4 trillion deficit is gripping Wall Street and Washington, and it's weighing heavily on voters.

"It's the only bipartisan plan around," one Republican political strategist told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen endorsing the proposal before it is released.

Read the rest here.

House Republicans on defensive over budget

ORLANDO, Fla. — Freshman Rep. Daniel Webster was armed with a rainbow of graphs and pie charts, ready to make the GOP's case for budget cuts before his own constituents. He was barely a minute into his prepared remarks Tuesday when the yelling started.

The first heckler shouted his doubts about the Florida congressman's promise to do what is right in Washington. From there, the hour-long meeting in Orlando was filled with a constant stream of boos and questioners in the crowd of 300 shouting over each other.

Twelve minutes into his remarks, Webster couldn't be heard over the shouting on both sides. He tried to continue but then stood quietly for a minute smiling, his hands clasped together in front.

The Republican plan to fundamentally restructure Medicare and cut social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid has at times been a raucously tough sell as its supporters head home and meet with their constituents, including Democrats organized against them. Even the architect of the plan, Rep. Paul Ryan, has been booed, though many of those attending four meetings Tuesday in his home state of Wisconsin were supportive.

The GOP plan passed by the House this month envisions cutting government deficits by a total $6.2 trillion over the next decade. One of its most contentious provisions calls for eventually transforming Medicare into a voucher-like system in which private insurance plans, not the government, pay medical bills. The plan has drawn scorn from Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who want wealthier Americans to pay higher taxes to help reduce the deficit.

Read the rest here.

Tight security planned for Royal Wedding

(CBS News) LONDON - For weeks, Sgt. Richard Brandon's prying eyes have been scanning the royal wedding route. On Friday, the route will be sealed off to the public with snipers on rooftops. But in the run-up to the prince's big day, CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports Brandon's job is to zoom in and check out anything unusual, from workers and vehicles to tourist traffic.

"What we've been able to do is look into those difficult to search areas: roofs of buildings, canyons between buildings," Brandon said. "We're like an early warning system."

A system in place from the top down and the ground up.

On Friday, 5,000 police officers will be on duty - most of them unarmed.

"Policing an event like this is particularly difficult because the balance has to be struck between security and allowing the public to enjoy the event, which is what everybody - and especially the royal family - want the public to be able to do," said Peter Clarke, CBS royal wedding security correspondent.

But the terrorists are plotting. Police say the biggest threats of an attack come from radical Irish Republicans or al Qaeda. And there are the anarchists, who have vowed to make trouble and have been practicing. Last December, they surrounded Prince Charles and Camilla's car in Central London, shouting, "Off with their heads!"

There's also a huge police effort dedicated to tracking unstable people, from lovesick stalkers to political zealots. Really anyone who would find the idea of disrupting the royal wedding irresistible - especially with 2 billion people watching worldwide.

Read the rest here.

Ford posts best first-quarter profit in 13 years

DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co reported its best first-quarter profit since 1998 as higher prices for redesigned vehicles including its small Fiesta offset pressure from spiking commodity and oil prices.

Ford's better-than-expected profit, and strongest first-quarter since the peak of the SUV boom, reassured investors after a disappointing fourth quarter.

It also showed the success the No. 2 U.S. automaker has had in getting consumers to pay more for improved quality and technology in vehicles like the Focus compact.

Ford also said on Tuesday that it expected to ride out the disruption in parts supplies from Japan with a minimal effect on its production in Asia, setting the automaker up to take market share from Japanese rivals.

Read the rest here.

Public pensions, once off limits, face the axe

When an arbitrator ruled this month that Detroit could reduce the pensions being earned by its police sergeants and lieutenants, it put the struggling city at the forefront of a growing national debate over whether the pensions of current public workers can or should be reduced.

Conventional wisdom and the laws and constitutions of many states have long held that the pensions being earned by current government workers are untouchable. But as the fiscal crisis has lingered, officials in strapped states from California to Illinois have begun to take a second look, to see whether there might be loopholes allowing them to cut the pension benefits of current employees. Now the move in Detroit — made possible, lawyers said, because Michigan’s constitutional protections are weaker — could spur other places to try to follow suit.

“These things do tend to be herd-oriented,” said Sylvester J. Schieber, an economist and consultant who studies pensions.

The mayors of some hard-hit cities have said that the high costs of pensions have forced them to lay off workers: Oakland, Calif., laid off one-tenth of its police force last year after failing to win concessions on pension costs.

Elsewhere there is pension envy: some private sector workers, who have learned the hard way that their companies can freeze or reduce their pensions, resent that the pensions of public workers enjoy stronger legal protections. But government workers, many of whom were recruited with the promise of good benefits and pensions, say that it would be unfair — and in many cases, very likely illegal — to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Read the rest here.

Ron Paul takes step toward presidential run

Texas Congressman Ron Paul plans to announce on Tuesday in Iowa that he is forming a presidential exploratory committee.

Drew Ivers, Paul's 2008 Iowa caucus campaign manager, said the Republican congressman will announce his plans Tuesday afternoon at Des Moines hotel.

Paul also will name an Iowa campaign team at the event, Ivers said.

Paul, 75, finished fifth in the 2008 caucuses and has visited Iowa seven times since. He headlined an event in Sioux Center two weeks ago for a social conservative group, and he spoke at a rally for Christian home-school advocates at the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines last month.

Paul is a favorite among libertarians and enjoys strong backing by many tea party supporters.

Read the rest here.

Hooray! Gas for 10 cents a gallon

Great news!

Gas is close to the cheapest it has ever been.  Historically, the price of gas between 1920-1970 was generally between 25-35 cents a gallon.  There were of course fluctuations.  The price rose sharply during and immediately after World War II and it fell as low as 17 cents a gallon during the Great Depression.  But the serious and prolonged rise in gas prices which most of us have perceived, and come to accept as normal, did not begin until the early 1970's when two things occurred.  First the Arabs briefly embargoed oil sales which would have driven up the price of gas in any circumstance, albeit temporarily.  The second was that the United States (quickly followed by everyone else) abandoned real money for paper.  Since then gas has been going up in nominal dollars with no end in sight.

But in real money... gas is actually cheaper now then even during the darkest days of the Depression.  How's that?

Silver topped $47 oz. today and briefly flirted with $50.00 oz.  Which means that a gallon of gas is actually about 10 cents a gallon right now, if you can find a dime minted before 1965.  That's because 1964 was the last year the US Government used real silver in its coinage.

I'd start checking the old change jar.

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark; What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks

This can’t end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.

I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this -- truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.” In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

Read the rest here.

The Bipartisan March to Fiscal Madness

IT is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent. Likewise, entitlement reform requires means-testing the giant Social Security and Medicare programs, not merely squeezing the far smaller safety net in areas like Medicaid and food stamps.

Unfortunately, in proposing tax increases only for the very rich, President Obama has denied the first of these fiscal truths, while Representative Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has contradicted the second by putting the entire burden of entitlement reform on the poor. The resulting squabble is not only deepening the fiscal stalemate, but also bringing us dangerously close to class war.

This lamentable prospect is deeply grounded in the policy-driven transformation of the economy during recent decades that has shifted income and wealth to the top of the economic ladder. While not the stated objective of policy, this reverse Robin Hood outcome cannot be gainsaid: the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of households has risen to 35 percent from 21 percent since 1979, while their share of income has more than doubled to around 20 percent.

The culprit here was the combination of ultralow rates of interest at the Federal Reserve and ultralow rates of taxation on capital gains. The former destroyed the nation’s capital markets, fueling huge growth in household and business debt, serial asset bubbles and endless leveraged speculation in equities, commodities, currencies and other assets.

At the same time, the nearly untaxed windfall gains accrued to pure financial speculators, not the backyard inventors envisioned by the Republican-inspired capital-gains tax revolution of 1978. And they happened in an environment of essentially zero inflation, the opposite of the double-digit inflation that justified a lower tax rate on capital gains back then — but which is now simply an obsolete tax subsidy to the rich.

In attacking the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers, the president is only incidentally addressing the deficit. The larger purpose is to assure the vast bulk of Americans left behind that they will be spared higher taxes — even though entitlements make a tax increase unavoidable. Mr. Obama is thus playing the class-war card more aggressively than any Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt — surpassing Harry S. Truman or John F. Kennedy when they attacked big business or Lyndon B. Johnson or Jimmy Carter when they posed as champions of the little guy.

On the other side, Representative Ryan fails to recognize that we are not in an era of old-time enterprise capitalism in which the gospel of low tax rates and incentives to create wealth might have had relevance. A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.

Ingratiating himself with the neo-cons, Mr. Ryan has put the $700 billion defense and security budget off limits; and caving to pusillanimous Republican politicians, he also exempts $17 trillion of Social Security and Medicare spending over the next decade. What is left, then, is $7 trillion in baseline spending for Medicaid and the social safety net — to which Mr. Ryan applies a meat cleaver, reducing outlays by $1.5 trillion, or 20 percent.

Trapped between the religion of low taxes and the reality of huge deficits, the Ryan plan appears to be an attack on the poor in order to coddle the rich. To the Democrats’ invitation to class war, the Republicans have seemingly sent an R.S.V.P.

Washington’s feckless drift into class war is based on the illusion that we have endless time to put our fiscal house in order. This has instilled a terrible budgetary habit whereby politicians continuously duck concrete but politically painful near-term savings in favor of gimmicks like freezes, caps and block grants that push purely paper cuts into the distant, foggy future. Mr. Ryan’s plan gets to a balanced budget in the fiscal afterlife (i.e., the 2030s); the White House’s tactic of accumulating small-fry deficit cuts over the enormous span of 12 years amounts to the same dodge.

Such fiscal jabberwocky ignores the fact that we have experienced a recession every five years or so for the last six decades; that the budget is now exposed to even more frequent and amplified cyclical turbulence amid the aftershocks of the financial crisis; and that the United States does not have a divine right to issue any amount of interim debt that suits the ideological convenience of the two parties.

Nevertheless, the Democrats are immobilized because Keynesians insist on kicking the budgetary can down the road until cyclical “demand” has in their estimation fully recovered, while Republicans sit on their hands because supply-siders insist on letting the deficit fester until tax cuts work their alleged revenue magic.

Read the rest here.

Bright Week

 

There is no fasting until the Wednesday following Bright Week. This includes Bright Wednesday and Friday. While monastics will continue to abstain from meat, penitential disciplines of any kind during Bright Week are discouraged as we are feasting with the Bridegroom. In the Western tradition fasting during this period was actually forbidden.

During Bright Week the Holy Doors in the church are kept open, including throughout the Divine Liturgy.

Finally, for forty days following Pascha there is no kneeling or prostrations either at home or in church.

60 Minutes on Mt. Athos

Blogger hates my blog and routinely screws up any embedded videos.   You can just go here to watch both segments at the CBS website.

Pascha/Easter Liturgy In Christ The Savior Cathedral

CHRIST IS RISEN!

 Wishing the joy of the Feast to all.

Christ is risen!  Indeed He is risen!

Holy Week Recess

We have now reached the mid-point for Great and Holy Week and as I prepare to celebrate the Great Feast (and the 5th anniversary of my reception into the Church) it is time to sign off.  Barring something urgent there will be no posting between now and Bright Monday.  I wish each of you a blessed Holy Week and the joy of the Resurrection.

The 15th Antiphon for Great & Holy Friday Matins

Archbishop Job of blessed memory chants the 15th antiphon for Great Friday Matins.