THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Please, please, everybody have a seat.  Well, good morning, everybody.  It is good to be with so many friends united in prayer.  And I begin by giving all praise and honor to God for bringing us together here today.

I want to thank our co-chairs Mark and Jeff; to my dear friend, the guy who always has my back, Vice President Biden.  (Applause.)  All the members of Congress –- Joe deserves a hand –- all the members of Congress and my Cabinet who are here today; all the distinguished guests who’ve traveled a long way to be part of this.  I’m not going to be as funny as Eric — (laughter) — but I’m grateful that he shared his message with us.  Michelle and I feel truly blessed to be here.

This is my third year coming to this prayer breakfast as President.  As Jeff mentioned, before that, I came as senator.  I have to say, it’s easier coming as President.  (Laughter.)  I don’t have to get here quite as early.  But it’s always been an opportunity that I’ve cherished.  And it’s a chance to step back for a moment, for us to come together as brothers and sisters and seek God’s face together.  At a time when it’s easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down.  They humble us.  They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels.  We can all benefit (more…)

COMBINED NEWS SERVICES

Published: February 8, 2011 05:51PM.

China’s central bank raised interest rates for the second time in just over a month in a bid to ease high inflation and guide blistering economic growth to a sustainable level.

The People’s Bank of China announced Tuesday on its website that the benchmark 1-year deposit rate would rise by a quarter percentage point, to 3 percent, and the 1-year lending rate would increase by the same amount, to 6.06 percent. The increases are effective Wednesday.

Its previous rate hike came on Christmas Day, when the bank raised both benchmark rates by a quarter point. China’s leaders have sought to (more…)

Politicians need to stay out of athletics

By Doug Robinson

Deseret News

Published: Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011 12:49 a.m. MST

Memo to state legislators: Butt out.

Stay out of high school sports.

Find something else to meddle with.

Oh, wait, we’re supposed to tone down the rhetoric.

Butt out … pa-lease.

Remember the little drama that began last summer when the state Legislature, led by Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, wanted to turn the high school transfer rule on its head by having NO RULES WHATSOEVER? A kid could transfer anytime, anywhere. He could play three different sports for three different schools in one school year.

That was a doozie, wasn’t it? Which is why legislators went back to work on the bill and modified it. The hope was that common sense would prevail, and they’d forget the whole business when (more…)

Published on Friday, January 14, 2011

by The Economics of Happiness – the Movie The Economics of Happiness

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

See the trailer to the movie at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZL0dp-xzhw

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation (more…)

Published on Thursday, January 13, 2011 by YES! Magazine

Words Matter: How Media Can Build Civility or Destroy It

The media can, as we know, promote fear, hatred, and extremism. Can it also lead us to greater civility and more productive debate?

by Sarah van Gelder and Brooke Jarvis

“Just as media outlets have been used to create a pervasive sense of fear, they have also been used to convince people that conflict is inevitable. This leaves media consumers resigned to the notion that conflict will happen.”

Those words [1] could have been used to describe an increasingly hostile and provocative media [2] in the United States. In fact, they were written to describe the use of the media to incite Hutus to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths [3].

After Jared Loughner opened fire at a political event for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon, Arizona, attention quickly focused (more…)

Published on Thursday, January 13, 2011 by The Hill

Foreclosures Exceed 1 Million Last Year, Expected to Grow in 2011

by Vicki Needham

Foreclosures are expected to peak while prices bottom out in 2011 as the nation’s housing crisis trudges into its fifth year.

Lenders repossessed more than 1 million homes in 2010, and foreclosures could rise by 20 percent this year. (photo by Flickr user BasicGov)

Lenders repossessed more than 1 million homes in 2010, up 14 percent from the previous year and the most since 2005, according to a report released Thursday by RealtyTrac, a California-based company that tracks the foreclosure market.

“We will peak in foreclosures and probably bottom out in pricing, and that’s what we need to do in order to begin the recovery,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s senior vice president, said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “But it’s probably not going (more…)

Combined News Services

Published: January 10, 2011 05:18PM

Washington • Federal regulators on Monday charged the co-founder of a New York hedge fund and three other individuals with insider trading, the latest action in what the government has called the biggest insider-trading case in U.S. history.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced it filed a civil lawsuit against hedge fund Trivium Capital Management, its co-founder Robert Feinblatt and analyst Jeffrey Yokuty.The SEC also filed charges against Sunil Bhalla, a former senior executive of tech company Polycom, and Shammara Hussain, a former employee at a consulting firm that did work for Google. The agency said Bhalla and Hussain provided confidential information that enabled Fein-blatt and Yokuty to make $15 million from trading on the information.

So far, the SEC has filed civil charges against 27 people (more…)

By JEFF CARLTON

The Associated Press

Published: January 4, 2011 09:19PM

Dallas • A Texas man declared innocent Tuesday after 30 years in prison had at least two chances to make parole and be set free — if only he would admit he was a sex offender.

But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

“Whatever your truth is, you have to stick with it,” Dupree, 51, said Tuesday, minutes after a Dallas judge overturned his conviction.

Here is a man of honor. Such a shame that our justice system failed him. Race was not mentioned in the story, but he is probably black.  Thank goodness for the Innocence Project and the development of DNA evidence.

Nationally, only two others exonerated by DNA evidence spent more time in prison, according to the Innocence Project, a New York legal center that specializes in wrongful conviction cases and represented Dupree. James Bain was wrongly imprisoned for 35 years in Florida, and Lawrence McKinney spent more than 31 years in a Tennessee prison.

Dupree was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier. He was released in July on mandatory supervision, and lived under house arrest until October. About a week after his release, DNA test results came back (more…)

By Sewell Chan

The New York Times

Published: January 1, 2011 09:15PM

Washington • As the Federal Reserve debates whether to scale back, continue or expand its $600 billion effort to nurse the economic recovery, four men will have a newly prominent role in influencing the central bank’s path.

One is an economist who fears that the Fed’s easy-money policies could lead to manias like the housing bubble that burst in 2007. Another is a Texas Democrat who served in the Clinton White House, but is wary of the Fed’s aggressive efforts to combat unemployment.

The purpose of the $600 billion in treasury bonds authorized by the Fed late last year was to stimulate the economy that was still in free fall. There was one dissenting vote. It is unlikely that the new board members are going to change the balance of thinking, especially since the lone nay vote is no longer on the board.

It’s good to have new insight and it will make for a healthy discussion, but it’s unlikely to change the Fed’s current course.

Interestingly, this article was printed in the Salt Lake Tribune and the comment section attached with the story attracted zero comments. It was one of the most important stories of the day, but the illiterate American public knows zippo about economics.

However, knowing nothing about a topic usually doesn’t reduce the number of comments.

A third is a precocious economist (more…)

By JULIE WATSON

The Associated Press

Published: January 4, 2011 09:19PM

San Diego • A war memorial cross in a San Diego public park is unconstitutional because it conveys a message of government endorsement of religion, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a two-decade-old case.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the unanimous decision in the dispute over the 29-foot cross, which was dedicated in 1954 in honor of Korean War veterans.

The court said modifications could be made to make it constitutional, but it didn’t specify what those changes would be.

“In no way is this decision meant to undermine the importance of honoring our veterans,” the three judges said in their ruling. “Indeed, there are countless ways that we can and should honor them, but without the imprimatur of state-endorsed religion.”

Federal courts are reviewing several cases of crosses on public lands (more…)

(Tribune Editorial)

Updated: January 3, 2011 12:00AM

How many of the past generation’s wars would have been launched if we had known that each conflict would last for half a century or more?

Just about all of them, apparently, even though that is rarely the way the choice is presented to us.

In just about every armed conflict since World War II, and not a few before that, the decision to launch a war was predicated on the idea that it would be quick and decisive. Or, as in the case of Vietnam, the war sort of crept up on us without a formal beginning or end.

Either way, the idea of a cheap war was a lie. The costs go on and on, in the lives of those who lost loved ones, in the pain of those who returned less whole than when they left, and in the depleted treasuries of the nations that are honor-bound to care for, in Mr. Lincoln’s words, those who have borne the burden.

Two factors are now conspiring to weigh Americans down with horrendous costs left over from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One is the skyrocketing expenses of providing treatment for the physical and emotional wounds suffered by those who fight. Thanks to advanced battlefield care and improved armor, many soldiers survive injuries that would have been fatal in conflicts past, but that now leave our valiant countrymen with missing limbs, severe head trauma or other injuries that may leave them with life-long disabilities.

The other is the fact that, under both this administration and the previous one, under Congresses controlled by both parties, the financial cost of our wars has been kicked down the road (more…)

By John Lippman

Los Angeles Times

Published: January 7, 2011 08:52AM

There are writers whose books are stacked on my nightstand: G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Babington Macaulay — writers whom I spend half an hour with before nodding off. They are master prose stylists whose command and fluency of English are the pleasure of reading them, even if the subjects, people and times they write about are unfamiliar and distant to our contemporary minds.

Now I can add to that nightstand stack the recently published boxed set of the Library of America edition of H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices series, which comprises the six volumes published between 1919 and 1927. Reading one or two of Menken’s reviews and essays is the kind of thing that you want to take, like a restorative, before bedtime, to counter the ill writing and easy thinking that daily pass before our eyes.

The Prejudices series is a compilation of reworked reviews and essays that Mencken originally wrote for literary journals and newspapers that contain his unexpurgated opinions about American writers, culture and society. Each volume contains between 30 and 40 essays and reviews ranging over literature, art, politics, philosophy, religion and science. He was a newspaper columnist in the fullest sense: No topic or subject was out of reach (and perhaps some should have been. Mencken (more…)

By MALCOLM FOSTER

The Associated Press

Published: January 1, 2011 09:15PM

Tokyo • Japan has been overtaken by China as the world’s No. 2 economy. Its flagship company, Toyota, recalled more than 10 million vehicles in an embarrassing safety crisis. Its fourth prime minister resigned in three years, and the government remains unable to jolt an economy entering its third decade of stagnation.

For once-confident Japan, 2010 may well mark a symbolic milestone in its slide from economic giant to what experts see as its likely destiny: a second-tier power with some standout companies but limited global influence.

As Japanese drink up at year-end parties known as “bonen-kai,” or “forget-the-year gatherings,” this is one many will be happy to forget.

Problem is, there’s little to look forward to. With a rapidly aging population, bulging national debt, political gridlock and a risk-averse culture slow to embrace change, Japan’s prospects aren’t promising. And a tense, high-seas spat with China has intensified fears of its neighbor as a military as well as economic threat.

A few optimists hope Japan can harness its strength in technology (more…)

Medicaid review stirs up backlash

By Kirsten Stewart

The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: January 1, 2011 12:18AM

A legislative probe that found evidence of waste and abuse in Medicaid may sharpen the resolve of lawmakers who have vowed to take a scalpel to the low-income health program’s budget.

But the chief problem uncovered by auditors — clinics overcharging for their services — isn’t limited to Utah. “Upcoding” is one of the most common types of health care fraud, but the amount of money that can be recovered from any single provider is small, says an attorney who helps states pursue fraud claims in court.

And it’s difficult to prove, which is why states tend to focus more on investigating fraud with potential for bigger payback, said Tim McCormack, a lawyer at Phillips & Cohen in San Francisco.

There needs to be full time government auditors watching this program like a hawk all year long. An occasional audit will not (more…)

By LARRY NEUMEISTER

The Associated Press

Published: November 26, 2010 04:24PM

New York • An insider trading case last year that federal authorities said was the biggest ever is providing a recipe for another case that may be even bigger.

The current case is largely an extension of work that led to the arrest of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in October 2009. The Galleon investigation marked the first time federal authorities used wiretaps in an insider trading probe.

Wiretaps led to the first arrest in the latest case. Don Ching Trang Chu, a consulting firm executive, was arrested earlier this week for allegedly providing private information about a company’s corporate earnings to a hedge fund.

The FBI also searched the offices of three hedge funds and subpoenaed some of Wall Street’s most influential firms, including Denver-based Janus Capital Group (more…)

By ADAM LIPTAK and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal in the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation’s history, one claiming that Wal-Mart Stores had discriminated against hundreds of thousands of women in pay and promotion. The lawsuit seeks back pay that could amount to billions of dollars.

The question is not whether there was discrimination but rather whether the claims by the individual employees may be combined as a class action. The court’s decision on that issue will almost certainly affect all sorts of class-action suits, including ones asserting antitrust, securities and product liability.

This case will be interesting to observe. We have two women on the Supreme Court and seven men. Most of the men pray to the same God the Walton’s pray to—the anti-government God of Lais sez Faire.

If nothing else, many pending class actions will slow or stop while litigants and courts await the decision in the case. Arguments in the case are likely to be heard this spring, with a decision expected by the end (more…)

By LESLEY MITCHELL

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: December 9, 2010 09:38PM

Utah has offered online retailer Overstock.com an incentive worth as much as $1.1 million to expand its software-engineering department in Provo. That means 150 new workers would be added over the next 10 years.

The company immediately accepted the incentive offer, approved Thursday by the Governor’s Office of Economic Development board.

This $1.1M welfare gift to Overstock.com is a thing of beauty. All parties involved hate big government and especially government handouts. Welfare for the poor—absolutely not! Welfare for Corporate America—-well, that isn’t welfare.

The money is payable over 10 years as a tax credit and is contingent upon the addition of as many as 150 full-time workers earning an average of more than $51,000 annually.

As part of the expansion, Overstock.com said it will open (more…)

More research is needed, but the report suggests air pollution could be a factor.

December 16, 2010|By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times

Children born to mothers who live close to freeways have twice the risk of autism, researchers reported Thursday. The study, its authors say, adds to evidence suggesting that certain environmental exposures could play a role in causing the disorder in some children.

“This study isn’t saying exposure to air pollution or exposure to traffic causes autism,” said Heather Volk, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “But it could be one of the factors that are contributing to its increase.”

Reported cases of autism cases increased by 57% between 2002 and 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although professionals still debate whether rates have actually risen or a greater proportion of autistic children is being diagnosed. An estimated 1 in 110 children is diagnosed with autism today. There is no cure, although research has shown that various therapies can mitigate some symptoms, especially if begun early in life.

In the current study, published online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers looked at 304 children with autism (more…)

Facing an outcry, city officials bar planned bus ads against ‘Israeli war crimes’ and retaliatory responses decrying ‘Palestinian war crimes.’

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

December 25, 2010

Forget billboard battles over the existence of God — holiday advertising proposed for next week on Seattle buses zeroed in on the mother of all arguments, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Reacting to an international outcry, King County executive Dow Constantine cancelled both the original proposed bus billboards and a retaliatory response. “Israeli War Crimes — Your Tax Dollars at Work,” was set against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings and dazed civilians in the Gaza Strip. The proposed response decried “Palestinian war crimes” and featured an Israeli bus in flames.

This is an inevitable problem when permitting advertising on government property as a source of revenue. It is not appropriate for the government to be in the role of censoring advertisements, and it may even be inappropriate to be selling advertising space in the first place. These are difficult questions, but once Seattle opened the buses for advertising it also opened itself up to controversy.

The question boils down to the legal issue of free speech: are the ads like yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre?

“The escalation of this issue from one of 12 local bus placards to a widespread and often vitriolic international debate (more…)

By Doug Robinson

Deseret News

Published: Friday, Dec. 24, 2010 5:45 p.m. MST

The NFL should consider contraction.

Not fewer teams; fewer pounds.

Let’s face it, the NFL needs to go on a diet. Send the players to Jenny Craig, sign them up for fat camp or Jillian Michaels, eliminate seconds at the training table, get serious about drug penalties — do whatever it takes.

Look, this sounds like a wacko idea, and it will never be seriously considered by the league because it makes way too much sense, but the NFL should adopt weight limits for players. Put them on a scale before each game, like boxers and wrestlers. With the much-publicized health problems of overweight NFL players, combined with the recent outbreak of explosive collisions and injuries, why not?

Doug Robinson has a great idea here. Now that it is openly on the table it could well happen. Support for this idea could pick up steam very fast. Limiting offensive and defensive linemen to 275 pounds would open the game up. Instead of 10 players standing and hugging one another in a mass at the center of the field (more…)