States face huge retirement fund deficits

State governments face a gap of more than $1 trillion between what they say they will provide public workers in retirement benefits and what they actually have in their coffers, according to a study released Monday.

The report, from Pew Center on the States, finds that the gap has widened considerably in recent years, as states have been slammed by investment losses stemming from the 2008 financial crisis and budget crunches caused by the recession.

As of the 2010 fiscal year, the study found that states have about $757 billion less than they need for pension obligations. The states have about $2.31 trillion set aside, the report found, but their liability is about $3.07 trillion.

Read the rest here.

Roger Clemens not guilty of perjury

WASHINGTON - Roger Clemens was acquitted Monday on all charges that he obstructed and lied to Congress in denying he used performance-enhancing drugs to extend his long career as one of the greatest and most-decorated pitchers in baseball history.

Fierce on the pitching mound in his playing days, Clemens was quietly emotional after the verdict was announced. "I'm very thankful," he said, choking up as he spoke. "It's been a hard five years," said the pitcher, who was retried after an earlier prosecution ended in a mistrial.

Read the rest here.

Germany's Merkel faces growing pressure at home, abroad

WEIMAR, Germany -- Time is running out for Angela Merkel.

The German chancellor -- Europe’s last, best hope for staving off financial and economic ruin -- is running out of options to save the euro zone’s common currency.

Sunday’s cliffhanger Greek elections may have postponed Athens’ departure from the common currency, along with the risk of a wider euro zone recession that would threaten Germany’s export-reliant economy. But Athens has yet to form a new government willing to accede to Germany’s demands for continued, painful spending cuts.

Read the rest here.

In Greece pro-Europe party wins

ATHENS — Greece’s conservative New Democracy Party prevailed in elections Sunday, giving it the chance to form a new coalition government that would try to comply with the difficult terms of the country’s bailout and secure its spot in the euro zone.

After weeks of uncertainty, the outcome of the parliamentary elections could reassure international leaders and investors, who have nervously watched developments in Greece, fearful that its exit from the euro zone would rock the global economy.

Read the rest here.

Egypt: Islamists claim election victory as military tightens grip on power

CAIRO — Egypt’s military leaders issued a constitutional decree Sunday that gave the armed forces sweeping powers and degraded the presidency to a subservient role, as the Muslim Brotherhood declared that its candidate had won the country’s presidential runoff election.

The bold assertion of power by the ruling generals followed months in which they had promised to cede authority to a new civilian government by the end of June. Instead, activists and political analysts said, the generals’ move marked the start of a military dictatorship, a sharp reversal from the promise of Egypt’s popular revolt last year.

Read the rest here.

Happy Father's Day

To all fathers,both blood and spiritual, have a great day!

Prayers Requested for Fr. Kimel and Family

Please keep Fr. Al Kimel (Western Rite Orthodox) and his family in your prayers. I have just learned via T-19 that his second son Aaron died earlier this week apparently by his own hand.

Lord have mercy!

Living in the Past Is a Full-Time Gig

MICHAEL ARENELLA is at an open-air flea market in Lambertville, N.J., his fedora-topped head leaning over a gramophone. He winds the crank, lifts the arm and places the needle on a 78. Out of the old oak box comes a voice from the past: Arthur Fields singing “In My Tippy Canoe” in 1921. Mr. Arenella stands silently, hands in his pockets, taking in every crackly note.

Other shoppers stop to figure out where the music is coming from. To their delighted surprise, they see Mr. Arenella, a 34-year-old jazz musician and bandleader from Brooklyn who looks as if he had stepped through some wormhole in the space-time continuum. He is 6-foot-1 and dressed in windowpane-checked pants, a blue paisley ascot, a red-and-white checked shirt, a herringbone vest, a blazer with a blue pocket handkerchief, cap-toe faux-crocodile ankle boots, a pinkie ring and a brown fedora. A few people wander over to check him — and the gramophone — out. But most just stare, smile and walk on, this vision of the ’20s brightening a mundane, modern New Jersey day.

Read the rest here.

Reminds me in some ways of friend of the blog The Young Fogey, though I believe his preference is for the 50's and 60's. But seriously, who can blame him? If you had access to a time machine, would you not at least be tempted to ditch this rather miserable and coarse age we live in? Of course one needs to be careful about looking at the past through rose colored glasses. I love the 20's. But they had their problems. Racism was rampant. Prohibition (which we tend to overly romanticize) was in effect. There was no social safety net, so if you were down on your luck you had to depend on family or charity, or you starved. And of course the 20's were followed by the 30's.

Still, if anyone has a time machine I can borrow drop me a line. I will take Calvin Coolidge over Barack Obama and a Pierce Arrow over a Ford F150 any day. Just gotta remember to sell that RCA stock no later than September of '29.

Gruesome photos put spotlight on China's one-child policy

Feng Jianmei  says she was manhandled by seven people, some of them local family planning officials, some of whom she didn’t know.

Feng, 22 years old and seven months pregnant, was dragged out of her relative’s home, carried and shoved into a van that headed straight to a hospital on June 2, she told NBC News in phone interview.

She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.

Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people.

Read the rest here.

Barter takes hold in depression wracked Greek economy

VOLOS, Greece -- Residents of this town in northeastern Greece are resorting to an age-old solution to deal with a desperate new problem –- using barter instead of cash for essentials.

"I want to use euro but it's very expensive and I believe trade is better," said 30-year-old Artemis Zafiriou, who works at an agency helping immigrant workers but hasn’t been paid in months.

The port town of Volos is like countless other communities in Greece, where millions are strapped for cash amid crushing European Union-imposed austerity measures. A steady flow of people come and go at the unemployment office, but most find no work.

So Zafiriou and her partner Kostas Christou, 40, have joined a small but growing network of people who trade goods and services without cash.

Read the rest here.  

Germans on edge as Greeks prepare to vote

BERLIN - For  travel agent Holger Schneider, Europe’s financial crisis is finally hitting home.

Germans famously love to travel. But the deepening crisis on the continent -- and calls for greater German financial help from Greece and Spain -- has prompted many would-be vacationers to stay home and keep a tighter grip on their money.

“People give their money to the bank to save,” said Schneider. “But the banks give it to these weak countries and maybe the people will never get it back.”

So far, the recession that is sweeping across the rest of the continent has not arrived in Germany. That may help explain why opinion polls here show that Germans still oppose bailouts of Greece and Spain by roughly two to one.

Read the rest here.

Obama Administration Won't Deport Most Young Illegal Immigrants

The Obama administration announced on Friday that it would no longer seek the deportation of most young illegal immigrants, and would instead allow them to apply for work permits, a significant policy shift with potentially major electoral implications.

The Department of Homeland Security said that, effective immediately, the government would no longer seek the deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and would allow them to apply for work permits if they meet certain criteria.

“Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Read the rest here.

200 SSPXers sign petition calling Benedict XVI a heretic and protesting a return to Rome

...We also must confess ourselves confused, to say the least, regarding your recent statements about Benedict XVI. It has been said that nobody in the SSPX has a right to refuse if the Pope insists on a canonical accommodation. You yourself have spoken of him in terms of his being our leader in the fight for Tradition:

“But we are not alone in working to defend the Faith … It’s the Pope himself who does it; that’s his job. And if we are called to help the Holy Father, then so be it.” (CNS, May 2012)

May we remind you that this is the very same man (as Cardinal Ratzinger) whom Archbishop Lefebvre felt he could not trust in 1988? That this is the same man who has professed heresies that he has never retracted, as Bishop Tissier de Mallerais has pointed out on several occasions? That in the mind of this same Benedict XVI, the idea ‘defending the Faith’ appears to include speculating about the non-existence of Limbo, about the possible moral probity of contraception when used by the depraved, and that he appears to believe that conversion, baptism or the confession of Christ are not necessary for Jews to be saved?

Read the rest here

This is exhibit A for why it is imperative that the SSPX regularize itself with the Roman Church without further delay. The people who signed this are schismatics. And it is the nature of schism that the longer it lasts the harder it is to end. I really and firmly believe that this is the last chance for the SSPX. They either go back now or they might as well just declare themselves their own little true church like our various old calendarist schismatics. As it stands it's very likely that the three bishops will bolt. And I expect them to take a good chunk of the clergy and hard core lay people with them.

In Greece, the money flowed freely, until it didn’t

ATHENS — The torrent of money that flooded into Greece when it joined the euro zone paid for roads, boosted wages and helped Constantine Choutlas build a major construction company. But all that cash did not build a competitive economy.

When the rest of the world discovered that and the money drained away, so did Choutlas’s business.

Read the rest here.

Obama's big speech; even libs are calling him a liar

I had high hopes for President Obama’s speech on the economy. But instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.

The falsehood is that he has been serious about cutting government spending. The fallacy is that this election will be some sort of referendum that will break the logjam in Washington.

Read the rest here.

Birth Control and the Church

Abbot Tryphon on birth control with an editorial comment from ByzantineTexas.

I for one think this is an excellent short commentary. Catholics who typically have an all or nothing approach and a rather restricted understanding of economia view any concession as a sell out. But while I disagree with that, it is indisputable that the Church here in N. America has become far too permissive on the subject of ABC. Use of BC is an exception to a rule granted for good reasons. It is not a "choice" within marriage. And any form of abortificient birth control is always morally inadmissible. Far too many priests don't raise the issue before a wedding, but the teaching of the Church is clear. If you don't want kids, then you can't marry. Not every sexual act has to be open to procreation. But every marriage does.

Hans Küng is at it again and flirting with sedevecantism

What on earth is Hans Küng up to now? He has mounted yet another assault on the Pope (every time he does this, he simply confirms one’s view that the Pope is right about whatever it is) over his willingness to heal the breach with the SSPX. But his tactics this time are very strange indeed. He says that since the SSPX bishops were invalidly ordained (not illicitly, invalidly) to accept them back into the mainstream of the Church would make him a schismatic pope, and that since, according to Catholic teaching a schismatic pope loses his office, he is very close to deposing himself. He is, in other words, arguing exactly like an extreme reactionary schismatic: it’s a kind of liberal sedevacantist argument.

Read the rest here.

One of those days

Ever have one of those days where nothing goes quite right? A man threatens to commit suicide. The police, always helpful, fire 33 rounds at him. Of the 33 shots discharged, only four or five hit. No more donuts for you. And as of last word, the poor man is still alive.

Read the story here.

Joe Scarborough: Why I voted for Ron Paul

I operate on instinct. So I should not have been surprised by my own gut reaction to the absentee ballot that lay before me on the kitchen table.

I scanned the list for Republican primary candidates and let instinct take over.

Mitt Romney? Not on your life. A big government Republican who will say anything to get elected.

Rick Santorum? No way. A pro-life statist who helped George W. Bush double the national debt.

Newt Gingrich? Ideologically unmoored. A champion of liberty one day, a central planner the next.

Ron Paul? Yep. I quickly checked his name and moved on to a far more complex task: fixing my daughter a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Read the rest here.

Southern Baptists set to elect 1st black president

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Four months ago, two African-American pastors stood in a hallway of the Southern Baptist Convention's Nashville headquarters looking at a row of white faces.

The portraits of the 56 convention presidents since the denomination's 1845 founding are in large picture frames holding several portraits each. The final frame holds empty slots.

"They got a space for Fred, right there," one of the men said. "Got a space picked out for him."

"Fred" is the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., the man poised to become the first African American president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination when convention delegates vote next week in New Orleans.

Read the rest here.

From an historical point of view this is breathtaking. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded partly in defense of slavery and was for many decades firmly on the record in favor of race segregation. It is still an overwhelmingly white Protestant denomination. Moments like this, even with all the crap going on in the world, that make me think there is hope.

It may be a little premature but many years to Rev. Luter!