Obama and religion

Don't get me wrong, I like Obama's politics and think he'll go a long way. However, I think there are plenty of Democrats who are also reasonable Christians - such as the Sojourners.

I think it would be dangerous to cater to the fundamentalist ‘Bible Thumpers,' the Falwells, etc. who are attempting to tear down the first amendment wall between religion and government. I think that would be very dangerous to the future mental health of our nation.

We shouldn't pander the Devil for votes. The old guard Republicans did and look at what happened to them! Now, they don't even have voice in their own party!

At this time we should continue to pose fiscal responsibility and economic progress to the many moderate Republicans who have been disenfranchised by their party. We should show them that they do have a choice. After all, if most of the seven Republican justices in the Supreme Court have a "liberal" bias according to the ‘Thumpers' - that should tell you something!

Remember that Bill Clinton was far from being a "liberal" - he actually was surprisingly conservative regarding the economy! So, at least we ‘Clinton' Democrats are not far in ideology from moderate old-line Republicans. Naturally, the extremes of both parties will never get together - they never have - and probably never will.....AG

Democrat Obama urges response to religious right
By Thomas Ferraro Wed Jun 28

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats must shed their reluctance to talk about faith and reach out to evangelical Christians and other churchgoing Americans, a leading new voice in the party said on Wednesday.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois said Democrats need to respond to the religious right, which has increased its clout in recent years and twice helped elect President George W. Bush.

"If we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons will continue to hold sway," Obama said, naming two outspoken right-wing Christian figures.

Conservative religious leaders have put Democrats on the defensive by pushing such divisive issues as opposition to abortion and gay rights.

In a speech to conference on poverty hosted by Sojourners, a progressive faith-based group, Obama said Democrats should be willing to explain themselves in moral terms while respecting the separation of church and state.

"I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people. "After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan," Obama said. "They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness -- in the imperfections of man."

A freshman U.S. lawmaker and the only black senator, Obama is seen as a rising political star -- one willing to give his party advice and warnings.

"Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith -- the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps -- off rhythm -- to the gospel choir," Obama said, drawing applause and laughter. There needs to be a "sense of proportion" in policing the boundaries between church and state. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," he said.

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God;' I certainly didn't."

Speak for yourself, Barack. 'Under God' was added to the Pledge back in 1954 by the Catholic Knights of Columbus and then by Congress. As a kid in school I also had to say the Lord's prayer out loud (but usually didn't) - it made me feel like an hypocrite - (children can be sensitive - at least I was - much more than I am now).

Assisted Suicide

There is no question in my mind that a person who is terminally ill or otherwise debilitated to the extent his/her 'quality of life' is severely and permanently impaired, should have the right to commit suicide with the assistance of his/her doctor.

This is yet another area where religious belief inflicts itself upon people who don't share those beliefs - a violation of the 1st Amendment. There are other cultures, Japanese, for example, which consider suicide for reason is honorable.

My present bout with rheumatoid arthritis which, without pain medications would be intolerable, makes me realize that there most certainly are situations in which suicide is the only humane treatment. In fact, veterinarians perform euthanasia routinely on pets and other animals - they "put them out of their misery." But then, animals are not governed by god(s).

However, I do agree with Governor Schwarzennegger that such laws should come from the people, not government representatives if such governments have an initiative process.

The Federal government, of course, is relatively primitive in structure and only provides lip-service to representing the people. All laws must originate in Congress or default to the Supreme Court which is charged with upholding the Constitution. ..AG

Calif. lawmakers reject assisted-suicide bill
Wed Jun 28

SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - California lawmakers narrowly rejected a bill on Tuesday that would have allowed the terminally ill to enlist doctors to help them commit suicide.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 3-2 to block the measure. Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Dunn, a Democrat from Santa Ana, California, cast the deciding vote, siding with two Republicans.

Dunn said he could not trust that future lawmakers would refrain from expanding the bill to allow persons not suffering from terminal illnesses to hasten their deaths.

The bill mirrored an Oregon law allowing doctors to prescribe a lethal prescription to terminally ill patients.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested earlier this year he would not sign such a bill because the issue of physician-assisted suicide is of such importance it should be left to voters.

The 1st Amendment...

Sorry Attorney General Gonzales, but the 1st Amendment is the law of the land whether you like it or not. It is just at times like these where the freedom of the press is most vital. Times when it is quite possible that an administration or ideology might decide to take over the country - and without a free press, it would be pretty easy wouldn't it?

It is just too bad if the press makes it uncomfortable for your bosses - or even if some "top secret" information leaks to the press - seems that everyone does it nowdays. You guys can't have it both ways!

No one is going to catch bin Laden through financial records anyway. Some stalwart Republicans are so obtuse, it seems - how in hell did they ever get elected?

Lawmaker wants feds to probe N.Y. Times
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration on Sunday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.

Rep. Peter King cited The New York Times in particular for publishing a story last week that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.

King, R-N.Y., said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the nation's chief law enforcer "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times — the reporters, the editors and the publisher." "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told The Associated Press.

King's action was not endorsed by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. "On the basis of the newspaper article, I think it's premature to call for a prosecution of the New York Times, just like I think it's premature to say that the administration is entirely correct," Specter told "Fox News Sunday."

Stories about the money-monitoring program also appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. King said he thought investigators should examine those publications, but that the greater focus should be on The New York Times because the paper in December also disclosed a secret domestic wiretapping program. He charged that the paper was "more concerned about a LEFT-WING ELITIST AGENDA* than it is about the security of the American people." *Sounds awfully political to me...

When the paper chose to publish the story, it quoted the executive editor, Bill Keller, as saying editors had listened closely to the government's arguments for withholding the information, but "remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

In a letter posted on its Internet site Sunday that the Times said was sent to people who wrote to Keller, the editor said the administration argued "in a half-hearted way" that disclosure of the program "would lead terrorists to change tactics."

But Keller wrote that the Treasury Department has "trumpeted ... that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash."

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the paper acted responsibly, both in last week's report and in reporting last year about the wiretapping program.

"It's pretty clear to me that in this story and in the story last December that the New York Times did not act recklessly. They try to do whatever they can to take into account whatever security concerns the government has and they try to behave responsibly," Dalglish said. "I think in years to come that this is a story American citizens are going to be glad they had, however this plays out."

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Treasury officials obtained access to a vast database called Swift — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The Belgium-based database handles financial message traffic from thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

Democrats and civil libertarians are questioning whether the program violated privacy rights. The service, which routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States, but it does not execute those transfers.

The service generally does not detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.

Gonzales said last month that he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security. He also said the government would not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly. [no, just all the time]

In recent months, journalists have been called into court to testify as part of investigations into leaks, including the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's name.

He said the First Amendment right of a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security.

All I can say is that this is the beginning of "1984" 22 years too late - we've been warned!

Was it treason?.....

Did anybody watch PBS "Frontline" last night? It rehashed the behavior of Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld after 9/11 and their efforts to twist facts to promote an attack on Iraq. The interview-based documentary was very explicit and detailed.
http://tinyurl.com/5oebg

Treason:
# a crime that undermines the offender's government
# disloyalty by virtue of subversive behavior
# treachery: an act of deliberate betrayal

Investing your money

Since the virtual demise of corporate pension plans and the requirement for workers to actively invest in their own retirement, it is really important for people to become self-educated in the mechanics of investing. The following article shows what a serious problem it is - and it will only become more serious in the future.

The article is critical of ETF's (Exchange Traded Funds) which I consider to be wonderful vehicles for personal investing in that they provide liquidity and diversification. However, misuse of them, although not as dangerous as ‘futures' can result in severe losses.

The idea that one can invest money in anything other than a bank or money market and simply leave it there untended and expect it to grow and grow spells financial disaster (even bond funds are volatile). If an investor doesn't want to tend his financial garden daily, or at least weekly, he should hire a financial gardener who will do it for him.

The worst thing any investor can do is ‘buy and hold'. That used to be the way of investing when good companies shared their profits through dividends with shareholders. Most profitable companies don't do that anymore and most dividend returns, if any, are pathetic! Instead they plow their profits back into the company to make it larger and more valuable. Thus for an investor to realize profits, he has to sell his investment at the right time. To do that, he has to pay attention!

If one graphs the price history of a company, one will note that the stock prices may rise over a period of time to the point the company becomes over-valued from investor exuberance. Savvy traders realize this and quickly sell at a profit causing the stock price to plummet leaving the guy who is not paying attention with a loss. So the novice eventually sells at a loss, the price bottoms out, and another group of investors see opportunities in the undervalued company and buy in. The whole cycle starts over again - like ocean waves!

Investors ignore warnings in volatile markets
By Svea Herbst-Bayliss Sat Jun 17

BOSTON (Reuters) - When a 76-year-old pensioner recently told Jill Schlesinger he wanted to put 10 percent of his $100,000 portfolio into gold, the financial adviser knew the latest investment craze would likely end badly, and soon.

"With each passing quarter, people became more greedy and more complacent," said Schlesinger, chief investment officer at money-management firm StrategicPoint Investment Advisors in Providence, Rhode Island. "And people lose sight of what a diversified portfolio is and what risk is."

Suddenly, investors who had never traveled beyond the East Coast of the United States were plowing money into India and Brazil and metals mined in faraway places.

Many are now suffering double-digit losses, but they won't get much sympathy from regulators because they were warned and because losses aren't yet heavy enough, according to financial advisers.

"There have not been enough people who have been damaged to get the regulators to notice this one," said Richard Smith, president of Capital Advisory Group in Richmond, Virginia.

Less than six years after the worst bear market in many investors' memories, people were eagerly dabbling in some of the world's riskiest markets in a craze fueled by hopes of recouping money lost when the technology bubble burst.

Money-management firms' steady offering of new products also fed the frenzy.

Exchange traded funds like StreetTracks Gold Trust, iShares Comex Gold Trust and iShares Silver Trust let investors get into precious metals markets. Crude futures were available, and Deutsche Bank had a ETF to track its diversified commodities index. And more specialized ETFs were on the way.

But many of those bets ended badly. Investors who purchased the recently launched Barclays Global Investors unit's silver ETF lost roughly 26 percent if they got in at the beginning. If they bought later, they lost even more.

ETFs, which have been available for less than 20 years, are similar to mutual funds but are traded in exchanges and allow investors to participate directly in markets.

"With new products like ETFs it is easy to speculate, but investors have no one to blame but themselves for any losses on a run-up they thought looked like a sure thing," said Capital Advisory Group's Smith. "The fund firms are only producing the vehicles, they are not showing anyone how to use them."

But there were plenty of warning signs along the way, making potential lawsuits over the losses highly unlikely, according to financial advisers and analysts.

Barclays said clearly that its silver ETF wasn't for the faint-hearted, according to financial advisers. And mutual funds that offered other ways to get into recently successful markets also cautioned investors in other ways.

Vanguard told its clients that the energy market was overheated, and Oppenheimer Funds recently raised the investment minimum for its Developing Markets fund to $50,000 to keep out investors who can't afford a potentially heavy loss.

"This was clearly a message to investors that the emerging markets were overheated and that there was a lot of hot money in the asset class," said Dan Lefkovitz, analyst at research firm Morningstar Inc. in Chicago.

Still, despite the warnings, investors made a critical mistake with commodities in the last months.

"Wall Street decided that commodities could be bought and held forever," and that prompted investors to plow in some $200 billion over the last three to six months, said Leonard Kaplan, president of commodities brokerage firm Prospector Asset Management in Evanston, Illinois.

"That was incredibly ignorant and it will happen over and over again because the public is infinitely stupid about these things," Kaplan said.