Eideard

Zavala is the dude with the big hat

From humble beginnings in southwest Mexico, Gabino Zavala entered the priesthood and embarked on a remarkable journey that landed him squarely in the corner offices of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese. An auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, he oversaw the church’s vast San Gabriel region, a diverse community considered vital to the future of the church. Then, from his pulpit, he became a forceful champion for social and economic justice.

…He is the father, church officials said, of two children, and has resigned his post.

Zavala’s fatherhood, a violation of canon laws of celibacy for priests, was the first controversy to rock the local church during the tenure of Archbishop Jose Gomez… Gomez responded with a blunt letter to his flock on Wednesday announcing the resignation…”He is the father of two minor teenage children, who live with their mother in another state,” the letter said. “Let us pray for all those impacted by this situation and for each other.”

That always helps, right?

The Vatican did not immediately name Zavala’s successor. Gomez declined to be interviewed, and the church declined to disclose further details. Asked whether Zavala was involved in the children’s lives, and why the information suddenly surfaced after so many years, archdiocese spokesman Tod M. Tamberg said: “Those are questions for Bishop Zavala to answer.”

Zavala, who is no longer in ministry but remains a priest and bishop, could not be reached for comment. The voice mail on his cellphone was full and no one answered the door of his home in the Hacienda Heights foothills…

Zavala’s resignation is likely to spark renewed debate over the ecclesiastical laws of celibacy. The earliest popes — St. Peter himself, under some interpretations — were married man and fathers. Later, in the fourth century, church officials concluded that men who were not celibate “shall be deprived of the honor of the clerical life…”

“It’s self-evident — celibacy does not work,” said Father Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Younger priests influenced by conservative Vatican administrators in recent years “think celibacy is the crown jewel of the priesthood,” he said. “That’s nonsense.”

Anyone expecting reason, rational debate, policy changes happening in the Catholic Church as a result of this event, the problems it points out – shouldn’t hold their breath while waiting. The Church hasn’t made it past the 19th Century, yet.

Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

Rising sea levels will increase the vulnerability of coastal areas, and the increase in “extreme weather events” will wipe billions off national economies and destroy lives, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body of the world’s leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations.

Scientists have warned of these effects for years, but yesterday’s report – the “special report on extreme weather” compiled over two years by 220 scientists – is the first comprehensive examination of scientific knowledge on the subject, in an attempt to produce a definitive judgment. The report contained stark warnings for developing countries in particular, which are likely to be worst afflicted in part because of their geography, but also because they are less well prepared for extreme weather in their infrastructure and have less economic resilience than developed nations. But the developed world will not be unscathed – heavier bursts of rainfall, heatwaves and droughts are all likely to take their toll.

Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the report, said the message was clear – extreme weather events were more likely. “Some important extremes have changed and will change more in the future. There is clear and solid evidence [of this]. We also know much more about the causes of disaster losses.”

He urged governments to take note – many of the economic and human impacts of disasters can be avoided if prompt action is taken: “We are losing way too many lives and economic assets in disasters.”

There is a range of caveats in the report – of course – since scientists by definition don’t care to offer anything more than conservative estimates of results from their studies. Something the average politician or know-nothing, what passes for a 21st Century conservative has little or no comprehension of. Scientists traditionally posit results on honest evaluation and conservative conclusions.

Living in a country where we can’t even convince Congressional conservatives to dedicate effort or funds to repair and maintain our crumbling infrastructure – Americans have nothing but disasters to look forward to. Penny-wise and pound-foolish beancounters combined with the admixture of nutballs and paranoids that constitute America’s right-wing will do everything in their power to deny and defeat any planning for weather extremes.

We sit down to talk, the smile goes away!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Islamabad — An unusually powerful American delegation arrived here on Thursday to deliver the starkest warning yet to Pakistan, according to a senior American official: that the United States would act unilaterally if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven to kill Americans…

“This is a time for clarity,” Mrs. Clinton declared in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she met President Hamid Karzai before leaving for Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. “No one should be in any way mistaken about allowing this to continue without paying a very big price.”

“There’s no place to go any longer,” Mrs. Clinton added, referring to Pakistan’s leaders, whom the administration has accused of equivocating by supporting the Afghan insurgency…

Before the meeting, which took place at the residence of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, a senior administration official said that the delegation would make it clear that if the Pakistanis did not act against insurgents like the Haqqani network, then the United States would have to.

The Haqqani network uses Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base and has become the most potent part of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Before stepping down last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, General Dempsey’s predecessor, called the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service…

Pakistan’s response remains to be seen…

RTFA. I understand they are between a rock and a hard place. It is – to a certain extent – a problem of their own making. The habit of funneling virtually all foreign aid through Pakistan’s military who dole it out to their bandit buddies as freely as they do to political hacks – ain’t any way to build and maintain democratic and progressive leadership of a nation still climbing out of the Stone Age they agreed to with the departure of the Brits at the end of colonial days.

If they don’t try, if they fail to take a stand for the advancement of the whole of Pakistan’s population while rejecting the sectarian bandits from fear of confrontation – US largesse and tribute must be cut off. Simple enough. Easy enough. Lose the Cold War mentality.

Saying it’s time to stop letting convicted killers “get off that easy,” a Florida state lawmaker wants to use firing squads or the electric chair for those on death row.

Rep. Brad Drake filed a bill this week that would end the use of lethal injection in Florida executions. Instead, those with a death sentence would choose between electrocution or a firing squad.

Drake, a Republican, said the idea came to him after having a conversation with a constituent at a Waffle House over the legal battles associated with the Sept. 28 execution of Manuel Valle.

Valle’s lawyers tried to stop the execution by arguing that a new lethal drug cocktail would cause him pain and therefore constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Courts, however, rejected that argument and let the execution go forward.

..The GOP-controlled Florida Legislature will consider the bill during the 2012 session that starts in January.

He said government is spending too much time listening to advocacy groups and instead should put in place a death sentence that forces convicted murderers to contemplate their fates…

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said Drake’s legislation would just cause embarrassment for Florida if it were adopted. “Just when you thought that public policy in Florida couldn’t get worse, along comes a state rep who develops proposed legislation from what he overhears at the Waffle House.”

Simon said, “Given all that former members of the Florida Supreme Court and the American Bar Association have said about Florida’s broken death penalty system, including the nation’s highest number of exonerations, this would be embarrassing – if our legislature were capable of embarrassment.”

Like most of the fools who pass for Republicans nowadays, Drake is another fossil whose brain is trapped somewhere mid-way through the 19th Century.

He could bring in IG Farben to build mass gas chambers. They probably still have the plans.

“I will rise into the air and you will see God embrace me…”

When Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called for a day of prayer and fasting in Houston, world-famous televangelist John Hagee answered enthusiastically…

When Perry officially launches his presidential campaign this weekend, he will not be the only Republican candidate to carry the banner of Christian piety…Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty discovered his inner Honest Abe at the Faith and Freedom Conference in June. Heedless of the risks to his campaign, Honest Tim read from the Bible and thundered to the mostly evangelical audience, “We need to be a nation that turns toward God, not away from God!”

Another presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, refers to God so frequently in the context of her political ambitions that you would think He was her running mate. At the Faith and Freedom Conference, she treated the audience to a prayer of her own design: “Lord, we know there are things we have done in our nation that have not been pleasing in your sight,” she sorrowfully intoned, “Lord, we ask your forgiveness for that…”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich may not be able to boast about Christian values in his personal life, but he has vowed to defend his grandchildren from the imminent threat of “a secular atheist country” or, somewhat inconsistently, political domination by radical Islamists. Gingrich has also promised to resist the fearsome “homosexual agenda” on the grounds that he supports “pro-classical Christianity,” a hitherto-undiscovered Christian sect that may be imaginary.

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In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken hours after the Senate passed and President Obama signed the deal, 46% disapprove of the agreement; 39% approve. Only one in five see it as a step forward in addressing the federal debt…

“Most people assume that whatever came out of this horrible process was pretty crappy,” says Joseph White, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who studies budget policy…

In the survey, 41% say the deal will make the economy worse; 17% say it will make it better. A third predict it won’t have much effect.

Who bears the most responsibility for this crap deal?

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll…A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977…

More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt-ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.

Republicans in Congress shoulder more of the blame for the difficulties in reaching a debt-ceiling agreement than President Obama and the Democrats, the poll found…All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations.

The public was more evenly divided about how Mr. Obama handled the debt ceiling negotiations: 47 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved…and by a ratio of more than two to one, Americans said that creating jobs should be a higher priority than spending cuts.

Sixty-three percent of those polled said that they supported raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year, as Mr. Obama has sought to do — including majorities of Democrats (80 percent), independents (61 percent) and Republicans (52 percent).

A oouple of informative polls. Especially if you feel surrounded by idiots from the Kool Aid Party who rant day-and-night about constitutional imperatives. Crap they all decide inside their dementia.

The last thing they’re about to do is look around and listen to what the rest of the country thinks. They’ve already decided what you are required to think and believe.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, announced Tuesday a bill to repeal the federal law that defines marriage as a “legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and that allows states to reject legal same sex marriages from other states.

The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, passed both the House and the Senate in 1996.

Feinstein said she is one of only 14 senators who voted against the legislation at the time. “I thought even then, this is unconstitutional and wrong. Well, today it’s unconstitutional, I believe, and wrong,” she said in a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

She said her bill would “strike the Defense of Marriage Act from law and would free the government to allow for the same type of benefits they allow for married couples to also be applied to same-sex couples…”

“Believe it or not, there are over 1,000 federal laws and protections that are afforded to married couples but are not afforded to legally married same-sex couples in any of the states that have approved same-sex marriage,” she said.

Kathleen Cumiskey and Robin Garber were among three same-sex couples who joined Feinstein at the news conference. They said they traveled from New York’s Staten Island with a stack of papers they take with them nearly everywhere.

The couple was married in Toronto, Canada, in 2006 and their home state of New York legally recognized their marriage in 2008. But when they travel across state lines, they said, they have to bring with them paperwork in case of an emergency.

“We traveled from New York City last night and had to bring with us our box of documents,” Garber said holding up a marbled-cover box. “Wherever we go we need to be able to prove the legal documentation of our relationship. We need to be able to prove that we are legally responsible for each other, that we have the legal right to make decisions for each other.”

She added, “We find it really incredible that we can travel halfway around the world — we can go to Spain, we can go to Ireland, we can go to South Africa — and have our marriage recognized and respected, but when we travel 15 miles from our own front door that is not the case and we need our box of documents.”

Overdue. Like so much civil rights law in the land – it’s time to dump the hatred and fear and support equal opportunities for all citizens.

Should be a cutting edge showdown between the Right side of the issue from homophobes all the way to the simply intellectually lazy opposing change – versus official Democrats including the president who has said he will endorse the “Respect for Marriage” Act, progressives and conservatives with a commitment to the Bill of Rights.

The people at Miracle-Gro are going to start marketing to marijuana farmers, reasoning that they need fertilizer, too.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.

“I want to target the pot market,” Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. “There’s no good reason we haven’t.”

Sales at Scotts rose 5% last year to $2.9 billion. But the Marysville, Ohio, company relies on sales at three key retailers—Home Depot Inc., Lowe’s Cos. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.—for nearly two-thirds of its revenue. With consumers still cautious about spending, the retailers aren’t building new stores as quickly as they used to, making growth for suppliers like Scotts harder to come by. Against that backdrop, Mr. Hagedorn has pushed his regional sales presidents to look for smaller pockets of growth, such as the marijuana market, that together could produce a noticeable bump in sales.

NPR is reporting:

The medical marijuana market will reach $1.7 billion in sales this year, the story says. Scotts-Miracle Gro’s annual sales are $2.9 billion.

So on the face of it, marijuana growers can’t add much to the company’s revenues. Of course, there’s clearly a very large non-medical-marijuana industry in this country that the company could also sell into.

Overdue. Get the fracking politicians out of the simplest of homegrown relaxation therapies. Tax it. Regulate it – as little as possible. Let’s get on with the real world, please.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal by gang rape victim Mukhtar Mai against the acquittal of five men she accused of attacking her…

Mai, now 40, was gang raped in June 2002 on the orders of a village council in Meerwala town of Punjab province as punishment after her younger brother was wrongly accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.

The boy was 12-years-old at the time.

A local anti-terrorism court (ATC) had sentenced the six accused men to death, but the Lahore High Court acquitted five of the men in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.

A four-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday “dismissed” all appeals and ordered the release of those arrested, according to a copy of the court order received by AFP. It however upheld the life sentence for Khaliq…

Mai, whose case garnered much attention in the West as an example of oppression suffered by Pakistan’s women, expressed her disappointment over the Supreme Court verdict while human rights groups also voiced discontent…

Mai, who now helps protect women facing threats at the hands of influential men, said she would not file any appeal against Thursday’s judgement…

“This is a setback for Mukhtar Mai,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement urging the government to “ensure her safety.”

Pakistan’s government refuses to ensure honesty. Why should you expect safety?

Almost a thousand women were raped in Pakistan during 2010 while more than 2,000 were abducted and almost 1,500 murdered, according to the Aurat Foundation, an organisation working for the protection of women in the country.

A further 500 were the victims of “honour killings”, a custom under which relatives and other fellow tribesmen kill a woman if they believe she had an affair.

There are many nations devoting every opportunity afforded to bring the lives of their families, their neighbors, their nation to a healthier, better life. I’d be hard pressed to qualify Pakistan as one of those progressive nations.

A $61.5 billion spending-cut bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday would slow economic growth significantly this year, according to an analysis by the global investment firm Goldman Sachs.

“Under the House passed spending bill, the drag on GDP growth from federal fiscal policy would increase by 1.5% to 2% in Q2 and Q3 compared with current law,” according to Alec Phillips, who signed the analysis…

“This nonpartisan study proves that the House Republicans’ proposal is a recipe for a double-dip recession,” said Senator Charles Schumer, a member of the Senate’s Democratic leadership.

Republicans in Congress, especially conservative Tea Party activists who were elected in November, have touted their fiscal 2011 spending-cut bill and upcoming attempts to impose more U.S. budget cuts as the key to improving the economy and creating jobs.

Which illustrates how out-of-touch with modern economics these clowns can be.

Democrats have countered that while there is a need to cut government spending and budget deficits over the long-term, policy-makers must tread softly in the short-term so the fragile economic recovery underway is not cut short…

With Democrats and Republicans facing a March 4 deadline to reach some sort of deal on funding the federal government, there are worries that a failure would lead to a temporary shutdown of many government offices and programs if there is no deal.

The Goldman Sachs analysis points out that a government shutdown “poses less risk” than proposed spending cuts “as long as it is brief…”

In its fiscal 2012 budget proposal released last week, the the Obama administration forecasted 2011 economic growth of 2.7 percent year over year, while Blue Chip economists estimate 3.1 percent.

Background disclaimer: I’ve been asked a few times to either include market analysis in this blog or offer a separate investing blog. I’ve paid little attention to investing other than studies in economics over my life. But, I got pissed-off enough at the shoddy management of what little I had set aside in mutual funds to begin studies and investing on my own in the downhill side of this Great Recession.

I think they’ve hit the nail smack on the head in this look at Republican reactionaries and their KoolAid Party class warfare allies. Reliance on 19th Century ideology versus essentials proven in practice from the days of Keynes up through Leontiev’s macroeconomic studies illustrates the irrelevance of what American conservatism has become. Or, rather, the irrelevance of those who claim to speak for conservatism – when their economic practices are closer to Mussolini’s corporatism than anything else.