The Franciscan brothers stand in solidarity with the women religious, criticize the CDF's report as excessive. They make a clear stand, using more temperate language and a thoughtful and considerate posture than I tend toward.
The comments to this article are worth reading. Especially the mocking of the Jesuits, who will "barge through the door once others have taken it off its hinges."
... and not the criminals.
It has been clear for a while that a showdown was coming. The hard right turn of the Conference of Bishops, who as a result of the attacks against their memberships for covering up child rape have embraced the victimized persecuted posture of modern conservatism, while the institutional and network links between the right and the American church were deepened; the fact that shortly after the hard right turn of the Vatican an Inquisitor was sent to the U.S. to assess the role of the nuns; the fact that the nuns have continued to prioritize justice and downplay oppression, just as the global church and the Bishops were doing the opposite. All of this foretold what was to come.
But the idea that a body who has been living the life of service commanded by the Christ and the Church is to be suppressed with the full participation of the malignant opponents of criminal investigations, those who shielded of rapists from law (as opposed to accompanying them through their punishments and defending their humanity against the desire for retribution, the appropriate and infinitely difficult role of the clergy), and who put their own desire to secure their influence in the conservative movement above their duty to serve the spiritual and material necessities of their congregation, inspires a bitterness within me that cannot be holy. The nuns have been the counterweight to this malignancy; suppress them and we are left with a luciferic coven of the self-interested and well-established as the sole institutional voice of Catholicism.
Oh wait, there's always the Catholic League, faithfully dedicated to keeping lapsed Catholics lapsed and to advancing the ignominy of the Church.
When you are doing anything through a "hedge fund connection," you should be a little skeptical. When one has an inner track on something, it is tough to be too upset that your inner track wasn't the innermost.
Chris LeBarton jumped at the chance to get in on Facebook’s initial public offering. The Potomac investor and a group of friends pooled $50,000 to purchase $35 pre-offering shares through a hedge fund connection.
He said he knew it was a gamble, but he never imagined he would get cheated. After Facebook’s stock closed almost break-even its first day of trading and then fell for a few days before recovering modestly, LeBarton and his friends are looking at a paper loss of 6 percent.
“I went into this not even thinking about that possibility,” he said. “The big guys made out, and it seems the little guys got burned.”
Oh thank heavens for that. I've always disliked the millennialism of the elite centrist class. This is their wet dream equivalent of the Marxist's "heightening the contradictions," that a worsening situation--the brink, the abyss, the fiscal cliff--will cause a fracture in the fabric of regular politics, an eruption of the stupendous energy that has been locked in gridlock. Yes, I mean the achievement of a bipartisan political settlement that will finally put politics behind us, or at least will put it behind us on the one thing they insist they care about. And this time, I promise, this time the Republicans will not turn around next time they have office and say that the largest single threat to the nation is a surplus, and that this must all be given away in upward tax cuts. This time Lucy will hold the fucking football and Charlie will kick it into fiscal heaven.BY ROBERT RUBIN Congress's failure to reach a fiscal "grand bargain" last summer manifested the deep economic-policy divide separating Democrats and Republicans. Fortunately, the so-called fiscal cliff will soon create an extraordinary second opportunity for a breakthrough compromise.
Never you mind about the huge downside risks to actually living people who are already suffering and under severe economic stress. We have the risk of crowding out, of which there have been exactly zero indicators that it has arrived. Certainly if one continues to press on the accelerator, there comes a time when one goes faster than they can handle. Presumably, one starts to slow down when there are reliable indicators that they are indeed going too fast, and not just when one recognizes that one is speeding up. Crowding out is a real phenomenon. As such, it has real indicators of whether it is happening. It isn't. When investors are putting their money in government debt because of the prices it commands (currently costs them money to lend to the US government, and yet they continue to do so), and not because of the security it entails, that is the time to start worrying about crowding out.Washington's continued failure to get our fiscal house in order poses five basic risks. One, government borrowing risks crowding out private investment. Two, our unsustainable fiscal outlook undermines business confidence by creating uncertainty about future policy, economic conditions and our ability to govern, which in turn dampens investment and hiring.
But the "resulting uproar" was not over the fact that there were winners and losers, but over the fact that (1) a systemically important institution had lost a couple billion (more? less?), and that accordingly there are consequences for the financial system and for the real economy that are are considerably magnified, (2) that the loss revealed that JP Morgan did not have control over its derivatives book, which again, is a magnified problem with the company in question is a systemically important one, and (3) that they had made these losses because they had turned their CIO, responsible for hedging investments and thereby reducing risk, into a high-stakes gambling shop.But the resulting uproar, in Washington and on Wall Street, has largely obscured a simple truth of the marketplace. Yes, Morgan lost big — but, as Mitt Romney has pointed out, someone else won. And that someone or, rather, those someones, turn out to be Boaz Weinstein and a wolf pack of like-minded hedge fund managers.
To an extent, the edu-left has been arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids and now Romney's arrived with a plan that will in fact give up on that aspiration.One of the reasons I stopped reading Yglesias was not his neoliberalism, which I try generally to follow and at least keep abreast, but rather his tendency to debase the arguments of others. Left-inclined education policy thinkers tend to believe that (1) the primary determinant of education outcomes is the various non-education dimensions of the reproduction of poverty, and that (2) policies that might seem reasonable or even desirable in the abstract are in practices formulated and implemented in such a way that the public ends up distributing money upwards, to the wealthy and private interests. Which is Yglesias' point in this article.
“It’s kind of ironic you have Boyden [Gray] and me here because when we were with the executive branch, we were probably the principal proponents of executive power under President Reagan and then President George H. W. Bush,” Mr. Meese said, quickly adding that the presidential prerogatives they sought to protect, unlike Mr. Obama’s, were valid.This was at a conservative symposium on “the unprecedented expansion of executive power during the past three years.” The "adding quickly..." clause is lovely. Not only does the "unlike Mr. Obama's" get no rejoinder from the Times (such as some discussion of what makes his use different), but one can almost hear Meese losing the crowd, prompting him to affirm what everybody there already knows: that it's Obama that has inaugurated the imperial presidency, and that the same actions done by conservatives were obviously constitutional because of
