THE CHURCH OF SAINT MARY THE VIRGIN (EPISCOPAL)
CHRISTMAS EVE
Choral Music & Carols 10:30 PM
O Magnum mysterium – Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557–1612)
Salve regina – Poulenc (1899–1963)
Sing lullaby – Howells (1892–1983)
Procession & Solemn Mass 11:00 PM
Sermon by the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Missa ‘Laetatus sum’ – Victoria (1548–1611)
O Magnum mysterium – Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557–1612)
Bethlehem Down – Warlock (1894–1930)
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If you're a Facebook user who's switched over to Facebook's new Timeline view for your profile, you can use the image shown here as your Timeline "cover", the large banner-like image at the top of your Timeline.
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It reads:
If the Republicans don’t extend the payroll tax cut by January 1st, taxes for a typical American family will go up by $40 each paycheck. Write what $40 per check means to you. Visit WhiteHouse.gov. Or Tweet it: #40dollars.
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Calls from the usually opposing US Chamber of Commerce and the ALF-CIO to invest in America's transportation infrastructor date back to January.
From recent remarks by President Obama:
At the end of September, if Congress doesn’t act, funding for our roads and bridges will expire. This would put a stop to highway construction, bridge repair, mass transit systems and other important projects.... And it would affect thousands of construction workers....
.....Right away, over 4,000 workers would be furloughed without pay. If it’s delayed for just 10 days, we will lose nearly $1 billion in highway funding that we can never get back. And if we wait even longer, almost 1 million workers could be in danger of losing their jobs over the next year.
....In Virginia, 19,000 jobs are at risk. In Minnesota, more than 12,000. And in Florida, over 35,000 people could be out of work if Congress doesn’t act.
That makes no sense – and it’s completely avoidable....
via www.webwire.com
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Michael Gerson and Mark Shields converse with Jim Lehrer about the debt ceiling politics unfolding in Washington.
Shield's summary of the Republican position, one
'Well, if you put a penny of revenue, a penny of revenue, if you even suggest that a registered nurse in an emergency room and a New York firefighter shouldn't pay taxes twice the rate of a hedge fund manager, we leave. We're not going to be a party to that.' That's -- that's basically where they were.
......
This whole experience, Jim, of this deficit and debt ceiling has so diminished everybody involved in it. I saw embarrassment, total professional and personal embarrassment, on the part of members of Congress this week that they were a part of this. And that diminishes confidence and trust and optimism about the government's ability to do anything. That's one of the casualties of this.
Think Progress notes:
Institute for Policy Studies’ (IPS) Sam Pizzigati... cites an IPS paper from last spring to make the argument that if corporations and households making more than $1 million paid the same rates as they did in 1961, our debt would virtually disappear in a decade:
Some numbers — from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring — can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been. If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year. In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.
As ThinkProgress has previously reported, the richest Americans are paying their lowest taxesin a generation. Additionally, Center for American Progress experts Michael Linden, Seth Hanlon, and Jordan Eizenga have shown that the United States is actually very low-tax compared to other developed countries.
There's some evidence that the coalition government's austerity measures in the UK aren't helping the economy there: UK GDP grew by a mere 0.2% over the last nine months. Some may argue that's because the full effects of the austerity measures haven't kicked in yet. Others may point out that President Obama's stimulus package has done little better for the US. Still others may then point out that the stimulus package was about 22% tax cuts, actually, not direct stimulus. Some might complain that the tax cuts weren't sufficiently aimed at corporations or too strongly geared towards the President's commitment to fulfill his campaign pledge to cut taxes for the middle class. Others might note that almost none of the stimulus was directed towards a massive new works (jobs) program. Yet others might then point out that it's hard to imagine what those jobs would be. Is it realistic to have out of work Americans doing the hammer, nails, and shovel sort of work the WPA used in the 1940s, since today's severe infrastructure needs--everything from roads and bridges to internet access and energy supply and distribution improvement--are comparatively technical? Some might then argue that the WPA didn't help the economy; that employment and the economy improved because the US switched toward war-related production. Others then note that war-related production is government-sponsored job creation: the government is the buyer, paying with taxpayer or borrowed money, and offering incentives to businesses to switch over to war-related production.
Yet others would say all of this is less important than the wealth disparity problem in America.
But others, like Michael Gerson (above), might note that dysfunctionality in Washington makes action on wealth gaps, including the racial one, or pretty much anything else, unlikely.
The discussions and back-and-forth can go on and on.
Mr. Shields got the first word in this post, so Mr. Gerson can have the last:
In normal times, a worsening social problem like the wealth gap [between whites and blacks] might unite creative liberals and compassionate conservatives in an unlikely policy alliance. Meetings would take place at the New America Foundation. Bipartisan legislation would be introduced. It is a Washington I can remember — but now seems impossibly distant.
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Everybody knows that President Obama tried to stimulate the economy with a huge increase in government spending, and that it didn’t work. But what everyone knows is wrong.
Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.
So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: some of us warned from the beginning that tax cuts would be ineffective and that the proposed spending was woefully inadequate. And so it proved.
It’s also worth noting that in another area where government could make a big difference — help for troubled homeowners — almost nothing has been done. The Obama administration’s program of mortgage relief has gone nowhere: of $46 billion allotted to help families stay in their homes, less than $2 billion has actually been spent.
via www.nytimes.com
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He was also among the smartest in the half-million force, scoring a perfect score on his aptitude test, a feat the Army says is rare.
Andrew was so well-liked his comrades named a combat outpost for the soldier with the infectious smile. COP Wilfahrt sits 6 kilometers from Kandahar. To his buddies, it is not named for a gay soldier, but for one who fought with valor.
"Mom, everyone knows [I'm gay]. Nobody cares," he told his mother in their final conversation, a phone call from Afghanistan on Thanksgiving.
.....
Andrew never denied his sexuality. But like so many, he struggled with what it means to be gay in America. Yet it was only one part of him. He was so much more. In the note on his laptop, he never used the words gay or homosexual to define himself. His younger sister, Martha, says it's the least interesting thing about him.
via www.cnn.com
A smart, wise younger sister. She gets it.
Also from the news profile:
Jeff's greatest regret is not hugging his son when he first told him he was gay. "This is how it is for an old fool of a man. This moment is the burden I carry."
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Republican Rep. John Kriesel, who lost his legs while serving in Iraq, sent Andrew's photo around the floor during debate in the Minnesota House. A few years ago, he said, he would have defined marriage as solely between heterosexuals. But his military service changed that.
"This amendment doesn't represent what I went to fight for," he told lawmakers."I cannot look at this family and look at this picture and say, 'You know what, Corporal, you were good enough to fight for your country and give your life, but you were not good enough to marry the person you love.' I can't do that."
Andrew didn't have a significant other. If he had, the partner wouldn't have been allowed to escort his body home from Dover Air Force Base, nor would he have received Andrew's $100,000 death benefit.
.....
"We will never forget him and are honored to have served with such an outstanding person," platoon leader 1st Lt. Brandon LaMar said in a letter informing the family of the naming of the outpost.
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One of the most respected business publications in the world, The Economist, first argued for gay marriage as far back as 1996. They reiterated their argument in 2004.
From 1996:
the state's involvement in marriage is both inevitable and indispensable. Although many kinds of human pairings are possible, state-sanctioned marriage is, tautologically, the only one which binds couples together in the eyes of the law. By doing so it confers upon partners unique rights to make life-or-death medical decisions, rights to inheritance, rights to share pensions and medical benefits; just as important, it confers upon each the legal responsibilities of guardianship and care of the other....
Just so, say traditionalists: and those rules should exclude homosexuals. Gay marriage, goes the argument, is...frivolous because it blesses unions in which society has no particular interest; dangerous because anything which trivialises marriage undermines this most basic of institutions. Traditionalists are right about the importance of marriage. But they are wrong to see gay marriage as trivial or frivolous.
It is true that the single most important reason society cares about marriage is for the sake of children. But society's stake in stable, long-term partnerships hardly ends there. Marriage remains an economic bulwark....
Homosexuals need emotional and economic stability no less than heterosexuals—and society surely benefits when they have it. “Then let them 'unchoose' homosexuality and marry someone of the opposite sex,” was the old answer. Today that reply is untenable. Homosexuals do not choose their condition; indeed, they often try desperately hard, sometimes to the point of suicide, to avoid it. However, they are less and less willing either to hide or to lead lives of celibacy. For society, the real choice is between homosexual marriage and homosexual alienation. No social interest is served by choosing the latter.
To this principle of social policy, add a principle of government. Barring a compelling reason, governments should not discriminate between classes of citizens.
From 2004:
Why should one set of loving, consenting adults be denied a right that other such adults have and which, if exercised, will do no damage to anyone else? Not just because they have always lacked that right in the past, for sure: until the late 1960s, in some American states it was illegal for black adults to marry white ones, but precious few would defend that ban now on grounds that it was “traditional”. Another argument is rooted in semantics: marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and so cannot be extended to same-sex couples. They may live together and love one another, but cannot, on this argument, be “married”. But that is to dodge the real question—why not?—and to obscure the real nature of marriage, which is a binding commitment, at once legal, social and personal, between two people to take on special obligations to one another. If homosexuals want to make such marital commitments to one another, and to society, then why should they be prevented from doing so while other adults, equivalent in all other ways, are allowed to do so?
(Image: Mike Groll, AP Photo)
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[P]resident and founder [of Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, and Terrain,] Richard Hayne donated $13,150 to the political campaigns of Rick “gay sex leads to man-on-dog love-making” Santorum.
Remember this from 2006? Didn't think so. Remember this from 2008, when Urban Outfitters pulled a pro-gay rights t-shirt from its line? Didn't think so.
If all—or even half—of pro-gay rights [Urban Outfitters] customers committed to quit the brand for one quarter (3 months) they would draw substantial press and cut deeply into the store’s revenue for 2011. Make it 75% of pro-gay shoppers for two quarters and the company would start bleeding all over their floral jumpsuits and rubbery braided belts.
Image: Richard Hayne, net worth: $1,800,000,000.00. Want to help him out? Sure you do. His company operates Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie and Terrain.
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Herta Müller:
[E]verything each one of us does we do differently, because we have no other option. You can test that with writers because their job is to write things down – and this is something you can see for yourself and discuss. In the case of other people, things and ideas do not get expressed on the outside so we can't see them. That's the difference. I have met so many sensitive people in all walks of life, doing all sorts of jobs, and I have never thought that I am capable of seeing something which these people who do not write cannot.
.....
I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. I do not understand. That is why I write, because I do not understand.... Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think "I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave." I haven't a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don't even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania [during the Ceausescu regime], if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn't get my head round it. I couldn't even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn't think. I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching.... We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn't understand a thing. That's why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.
via www.eurozine.com
A very interesting interview with Herta Müller the novelist and Nobel laureate. She has publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime; she defends her stance that, as adeptly summarized by Eurozine, "the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance."
Hat-tip with a flourish to 3quarksdaily.
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