Mississippi State Rep. Andy Gipson (R.), the man who denounced gays by quoting from the famous biblical passage on homosexuality found in Leviticus (20:13), has refused to retract his remarks. Mr. Gipson wrote this morning on his Face Book page, “To be clear, I want the world to know that I do not, cannot, and will not apologize for the inspired truth of God's Word. It is one thing that will never 'change.'"

Good for Mr. Gipson. We are all getting tired of pusillanimous, limp-wristed Republican politicians, conservative voters, and religious leaders who speak up against the gay menace in this country, but then back down the minute there is the slightest peep of a protest from liberals.

The US economy is on the road to recovery, right? That’s what all the economists and financial analysts say. Unemployment has dropped down to 8.3%, unemployment claims are now at a level last seen in 2008 before the economy fell off a cliff, almost all the TBTF banks have just passed the recent Fed stress tests and are now allowed to use their excess capital to pay dividends and buy back their stocks, inflation is tame if you go by official government statistics (especially core inflation that the Fed loves to look at because it removes the effects of food and oil price increases), and finally all major economic indicators are flashing green lights.

Here was Rush Limbaugh at the opening of his radio show yesterday, commenting on the controversy that arose over his describing a young woman who testified before a Congressional committee a "slut" and a "prostitute".

Oh, yeah, I'm gonna deal with this. I'm gonna deal with it. I think this is hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. The left has been thrown into an outright conniption fit!... The reaction that they are having to what I said yesterday about Susan Fluke -- or Sandra Fluke, whatever her name is -- the Georgetown student who went before a congressional committee and said she's having so much sex, she's going broke buying contraceptives and wants us to buy them. I said, "Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You'd call 'em a slut, a prostitute or whatever."

The time-honored advice brokers have always given their investment clients is to “diversify, diversify, diversify!” It’s the basic law of investment – Investment 101 you might say – never put all your eggs in one basket. Which is why it is so odd to see the CEO of one of the largest investment funds in the world –BlackRock – insist that his customers ignore this basic rule and invest everything they have in equities.

CEO Laurence D. Fink says that we are living in a “New World” where it is impossible to earn a decent return on traditional bonds or other conservative investments. He’s right about that; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has made it clear he intends to keep interest rates at zero percent through at least the end of 2014. Maybe this New World is a welcome relief for borrowers, many of whom are desperate to reduce their debts, or at least the interest cost on their debts if they can refinance at lower rates.

The world is running out of money. If money is credit, and credit relies on confidence, there is not enough confidence in the financial system to supply the world with the money it needs. Since the initial credit crisis struck in 2008, credit and money have been withdrawn from the system in such staggering amounts that international trade can no longer grow. The world’s central banks are playing a rear guard action by acting as lender of last resort to banks that no longer trust each other and have stopped lending in the interbank market. As liquidity flows out from the system, the rottenness that has corrupted the foundations of global finance is now exposed for all to see.

I was nine years old at the time. We were in school one morning when our teacher was called away. This was a very unusual occurrence. We sat quietly waiting, and when teacher returned, she was crying and shaking uncontrollably. All of us were worried and confused – teacher had never acted this way before. In fact we had never seen any emotion from her at all. “What has happened, teacher?”, someone called out. Sobbing, she replied – “Children, Great Teacher has died!”

It was as if you pushed a button in the room. Instantaneously all of us burst into tears, with many of us wailing “What is going to happen to us? Who is going to take care of us? How will we live?” It never occurred to any of us that our parents or some responsible adult would take care of us. From the moment we were aware of the outer world, we understood that all that was good, beautiful and intelligent in the world came from Great Teacher.

Stock markets around the world reacted with horror this week to the news that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has ordered that the terms of a proposed EU rescue package worth €130 billion should be voted on by the Greek people in a national referendum. The Nikkei, the German DAX index, the French CAC-40, and the Dow Jones Industrial index all ended the day down 2% or more. The euro took a pummeling on the foreign exchange markets.

Global leaders involved in the Greek rescue talks expressed shock and disappointment that the Greek government would throw into jeopardy the carefully-constructed rescue plans that required approval from all 17 EU governments. The White House press secretary, speaking on behalf of the President, urged Greece to accept the bailout terms as soon as possible. It was US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who first recommended to the EU leadership that it significantly expand its bailout fund from €440 billion to as much as €2 trillion in order to calm global financial markets.

Now let’s step back a minute and consider how ludicrous this all is. The Greek Prime Minister proposes that the Greek people, who have borne the burden of one austerity package after another each time Greece has approached the EU for help, at long last get to have a say in these discussions. Politicians everywhere express dismay and surprise that any politician, especially one on the receiving end of the bailout talks, would even consider allowing the people to at long last have a vote in these decisions. Financial markets plummet on the news. Since when did democracy become the enemy of good governance in democratic countries?

If you are a Republican running for president, what should be your opening line of attack – the one thing the voters should remember as your biggest concern? The lousy economy? The lack of jobs? The federal deficit? The war in Afghanistan?

If you’re Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, how about leading off with the Federal Reserve and Quantitative Easing? In fact, why not go right after Ben Bernanke, and accuse him of treason, suggesting he might want to avoid large crowds milling around lampposts. Either Rick Perry is naïve and hopelessly out of his league in the big game of national politics, or he’s on to something. His gambit did work in one respect: it got him a lot of publicity, and it wasn’t entirely bad because so far he has refused to back down on his statement.

From World War I until Gulf War II – these are the bookmarks that define the American Century. All through this period the United States enjoyed economic, military, and political ascendance, and by the time Germany surrendered in 1945, the United States was the preeminent global power in so many dimensions that it truly “owned” the 20th century. In the realm of finance, American supremacy was symbolized by the AAA rating accorded its government securities, a rating the United States has enjoyed since 1917.

Now the United States has lost its AAA rating, and deservedly so. It has shown itself incapable of dealing with many serious financial and economic problems, One of its two major political parties has deliberately – yes deliberately – attempted to force a default on US Treasury securities, so that it can engineer its vision of a fiscally prudent America, one in which it is forbidden ever to raise taxes on wealthy people. This despite the fact that, other than corporations, wealthy people are the only source of incremental tax revenue for a government desperately in need of cash flow.

Was it just a week ago that President Obama was hanging tough, insisting he would never accept a debt ceiling package that excluded tax increases? In rejecting a six month extension of the debt ceiling, Obama said last week:

But there’s an even greater danger to this approach. Based on what we’ve seen these past few weeks, we know what to expect six months from now. The House of Representatives will once again refuse to prevent default unless the rest of us accept their cuts-only approach. Again, they will refuse to ask the wealthiest Americans to give up their tax cuts or deductions. Again, they will demand harsh cuts to programs like Medicare. And once again, the economy will be held captive unless they get their way.

It’s hard to say if the Tea Party has an acknowledged leader, but someone who professes to be just that has chosen a very opportune moment to trash Speaker John Boehner’s attempts to craft legislation that would allow an increase in the debt ceiling. Judson Phillips, the CEO of Tea Party Nation, is the self-acknowledged head of the Tea Party, and in an editorial this morning in The Washington Post, he attacks Boehner’s legislation for providing “almost non-existent budget cuts.”

Phillips says:

As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Here is what is fundamentally wrong and dangerous with the core assumption of the Tea Party: There are two ways to get to a debt crisis – you either spend too much money or you don’t take in enough revenue. Anyone who has done a family budget or a business budget understands there are two sides to every discussion of cash flow: cash flow in, and cash flow out. In government terms, this equates to taxes received and expenditures made.

By taking one half of this equation out of the discussion, the Tea Party is dragging the nation along on a fantasy ride in which only spending cuts are allowed as a solution to the government’s debt problem. The danger in an approach which demands enormous budget cuts - $4 trillion is the number mentioned by the Tea Party – is that you expose the economy to a depressionary shock, especially since the Tea Party wants the cuts immediately. Immediate cuts of that size would be the equivalent of removing 25% of all cash flow out of the economy, throwing tens of millions of middle class Americans into acute financial stress. For many poor people, it would be an existential crisis, in which starvation becomes a real prospect.

If political functionality were a means test for a country’s credit-worthiness, the US would have lost its AAA rating a long time ago. The country which prides itself as the “World’s Greatest Democracy” has puts its dysfunctional political system on display for months now, in a struggle to get the debt ceiling increased. The resulting spectacle has nauseated even the ever-complacent American public: both Democrats and Republicans are now given losing grades by the voters for their performance in this farce. If the country had a legitimate third party to vote for, the Democrats and Republicans would be in serious trouble. Of course, the political system is geared to prevent third parties from emerging, so the country flounders about, looking for leadership from pusillanimous Democrats or ideological Republicans who consider raising taxes a mortal sin. The voters are probably a few steps away from concluding what is meant to be hidden but by now should be obvious: American democracy doesn’t exist, and the political system in Washington is beyond repair. What is worse: there are people and organizations who like things just the way they are and will fight any attempts at reform.

Rupert Murdoch has always prided himself on his ability to make or break prime ministers, presidents, and princes, but in the end it was a lowly 13-year-old schoolgirl who has reached out from the grave to bring him down. Milly Dowler, a murdered British teenager, has extracted revenge against Rupert Murdoch for his many crimes, something the wealthy and the powerful have never been able to do.

Rupert Murdoch has been about wealth and power from his earliest days as a newspaper proprietor in Australia, but it is power that he lusts after. The power to shape and move public opinion is intoxicating for ambitious men like Murdoch, and when he first got into the business, merely owning a megaphone like the editorial page of a large national newspaper was enough to provide him the tools to guide the general public into a particular voting direction. Those days are long gone. Murdoch may own respectable newspapers like The Times of London, or The Wall Street Journal, but their editorial pages carry a fraction of the influence they had a quarter century ago. The reading audience – or more particularly the voting public – have long since moved on to television, and more recently cable television and the internet. To maintain his influence over the public, and to continue to intimidate, bribe, and possibly blackmail politicians, Rupert Murdoch has had to step up his game in a very nefarious way.

It’s Father’s Day. Do you know where your children are? Most American fathers do, but a growing number have little to do with their children. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, nearly a quarter of all white fathers live apart from their children, due to divorce, abandonment, or other reasons. Among African-American fathers, the number is 44%, influenced by the fact that at any one time one in nine African-American males is in prison (the large majority of them on drug charges). The tendency of fathers to live apart from their children is more pronounced among families earning less than $30,000 a year, and it is no surprise therefore that as middle class wages have fallen over the past twenty years, the number of fatherless children has risen.

The Republican presidential candidates are assembling this week in New Hampshire for another debate, to be broadcast on CNN. Now I know what you’re thinking: “You mean there was a first debate? How did I miss that?” It’s understandable if the first debate completely passed you by, and you failed to notice that it was won by Herman Cain. You probably couldn’t tell Herman Cain from Tim Pawlenty if both of them sent you pictures of themselves naked, so I’ll give you a clue: Herman Cain is the black guy. He’s not an African-American; he won’t use that term. He describes himself as an ABC candidate – American, Black, and Conservative, in that order.

Why Roger Ailes lets him get away with confusing the voters about which television network he represents is beyond understanding. Herman Cain is one of several candidates in the race who represents the sovereign state of FOX News, and one of the first things you need to know about Republican presidential campaigns is which candidates represent Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. There are all the candidates who represent FOX News, and then there’s everybody else. That’s a start to handicapping the candidates, which is relatively easy because all the candidates who aren’t on the FOX News payroll have a serious handicap in the first place. The second thing you need to do is think like a Republican, which of course is asking too much of our readers because they haven’t been lobotomized yet, so I’m here to help (I grew up in a family of Goldwater supporters so I was already lobotomized at a very young age). Here, then, is everything you need to know about our next President of the United States, assuming Barack Obama doesn’t fire Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke before it is too late.

The non-state actor. That’s what he was called in the 1990s, before he became universally known as a mass murderer. Academics used it as a euphemistic term for an individual who took on state power, before they came up with the phrase ‘asymmetric warfare.” Osama Bin Laden was, if not the inventor of asymmetric warfare, the master of the technique, the man who single-handedly took on the world’s hyperpower.

How much more asymmetric could you get by spending $200,000 to bring down the globe’s colossus? In one terrifying morning Osama Bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 Americans, some of them tortured to death - forced to choose between being burnt alive or jumping to their death from 96 stories. In the process, he sent the United States on a path of self-destruction, as the nation lost its way between two schizophrenic and conflicting impulses: living in perpetual fear of terrorists, or strutting about the world stage with military bravado, killing hundreds of thousands of invisible, innocent men, women, and children because they were Muslims.

The S&P bond rating service put the AAA rating of the United States on warning today that the country faces a downgrade if it does not change direction in its fiscal policies. In technical terms this doesn’t mean anything immediately; S&P said the risk to the rating is a year or two away if deficit spending continues on its current trajectory. This is more like an auctioneer saying “fair warning” before letting the merchandise go for a dirt cheap price. The bond market didn’t pay too much attention to this development; people who are in the markets everyday already know that traders think it is only a matter of time before the US, UK, and other top-rated country credits lose their pristine halo for fiscal rectitude that is implied by a AAA rating.

The problem is the gulf between a AAA rating and any other rating is unbreachable. It’s almost like virginity; once you lose it you don’t get it back. This is especially so for the United States, which is the linchpin of the global financial system, and which has enjoyed nearly a century of preeminence in the markets, to the point where US Treasuries are the base (the “risk free rate”) from which all other bonds are priced. In fact, the US has long benefited from two critical attributes that are important to the management (and some might say exploitation) of global finance: the Treasury bond is the center of the international bond market from which all other bonds are referenced; and the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world. Both of these are now in danger of being lost.

Did you receive your email from Barack Obama yet? If you are a Democrat, or on his campaign mailing list, the president has promised you are going to be the first to know when he formally launches his reelection campaign. It could be any moment now; apparently the White House is waiting for a slow news day when Libya and Fukushima and Congressional budget negotiations aren’t dominating the media agenda. Once the news is out, you are expected as a loyal Obama supporter to start sending in campaign donations and begin attending campaign organization meetings.

The problem is, if you are a liberal, the chances are pretty high that you haven’t forgotten that the White House thinks of you as ”fucking retarded”. That’s at least how Rahm Emanuel described liberals when he used to work in the White House; he was a bit less patronizing during the recent Chicago mayoral election when he needed their votes. Still, everybody knows he holds the left wing of the Democratic Party in contempt, and he will probably never forgive them for not aggressively supporting all those beloved Blue Dog Democrats who got wiped out in last November’s mid-term election. Rahm Emanuel maintains the quintessential Democratic Party insider attitude regarding liberals – they are doormats to be walked upon day in and day out, except around election day, when they are expected to rise up, stand upon some real doormats, and convince people to get out and vote for whomever the party has put up for election.

It used to be if a corporation wanted to practice the dark art of extortion, it would do so well outside of the public eye. Not these days; company CEOs are out in the open and proud of it when they want to extract yet more money out of the taxpayers.

Take the case of Caterpillar CEO Douglas Oberhelman. He wrote a letter to Illinois state governor Pat Quinn, complaining about the state’s recent increase in the corporate tax rate from 4.8% to 7.0%. He said at least four other states have approached the company offering generous allowances if Caterpillar would move its headquarters out of Peoria, Illinois. Neighboring states of Indiana and Iowa have admitted to lobbying Caterpillar, as has the far-away state of Texas. The company said it wasn’t threatening Gov. Quinn over the tax increase, but it had “to do what’s right for Caterpillar.” That’s corporate-speak for “we’re threatening to leave the state if you don’t rescind this tax increase.”

In the early morning of March 19, 2003 – eight years to the day this week – the US dropped four bunker buster bombs on a farm site west of Baghdad. The US had ground intelligence that Saddam Hussein was visiting his two sons at the farm. Three of the four bombs missed their target entirely, and the fourth killed one civilian and wounded nine women and children. US intelligence was flawed: Saddam Hussein hadn’t been at the farm since 1995, and neither had any of his family. So began a military adventure in the Middle East that rid the world of one dictator at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths, a civil war in Iraq, enormous strain on the US military and its finances, and enhancement of Iran’s position in the Middle East.

Eight years later the US has commenced another adventure in the Middle East, this time with a cruise missile bombardment of key military targets in Libya, as part of a No-Fly Zone being enforced by the US, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada. Mohammar Qaddafi is even more isolated than Saddam Hussein was in early 2003. None of the permanent members of the UN Security Council vetoed the No-Fly Zone proposal, and those that might have, such as Russia and China, chose to abstain and let the proposal go through. It is also telling that Silvio Berlusconi, having nurtured close personal ties with Qaddafi in order to establish critical oil and gas rights, was willing to throw all that aside to join in the aerial bombardment of Libya.

We can see that something momentous is happening not simply in Libya but throughout the Middle East, but it is very hard to say what it means. The situation is highly fluid, and there are an extraordinary number of cross-currents at play here: the politics of oil; the public demand for self-determination in opposition to dictatorship, tyranny, and monarchy; the Sunni-Shi’ite religious split; the disgust with economic inequality and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite; protests against corruption, nepotism, and cronyism; a resurgence in Islamic fervor; concerns over the high cost of food and energy coupled with the lack of jobs; and a desire for Western living standards without succumbing to Western materialism or immorality. And where in all this is al-Qaeda and the terrorism movement? Why hasn’t Osama bin Laden spoken out at such an important moment? What happened to the assumption that everything in the Middle East revolves around the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Revolutions, Earthquakes, Political manipulation, Nuclear disaster. Feeling helpless?

Claim the date! This can become the biggest positive and graced event of '11! Newsworthy to the max as being something beautiful and good amidst the horror and confusion of so much recent news.

On 15th May between the hours of 1400 and 1500 join 250000 people around the world for an hour of walking and talking. Wherever you are, invite a friend for a walk and share what touches your lives.
At the end of the walk, decide one concrete action you can take to make a difference to at least one other person.

The extraordinary brutality employed by the Qaddafi regime against its own people has few modern precedents. Dictators tend to reserve their use of state terror for political or sectarian enemies. Saddam Hussein attacked those segments of Iraqi society not content to submit to a government reserved exclusively for Sunni Arabs, and Saddam’s Ba’athist neighbor Hafez al-Assad killed up to 20,000 members of the Syrian arm of the Moslem Brotherhood when they threatened his rule.

Perhaps the only equivalent instances occurred in Cambodia under the psychotic dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge, and in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. In both cases, the oppression was identified more with the ruling party than with a dictator; China’s government was in fact leaderless following the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, which precipitated the Tiananmen protests. Libya, on the other hand, has been under the unforgiving dictatorship of Muhammar Qaddafi and his family since 1969. The decision to attack anti-government demonstrators with snipers targeting children, soldiers lobbing artillery shells into crowds, mercenaries wielding swords, and planes strafing civilians, is associated entirely with Qaddafi. He has deliberately chosen to enrage and embitter the entire population of Libya in defense of his dictatorship. How does he expect to win this war against his own people, now determined to resist him with both civil disobedience and guerilla insurrection, and how does he expect to rule if he wins, knowing that in order to survive he must henceforth permanently exercise state terror against the people he “loves”?

Reports have begun to appear in the American business press of a possible settlement among banks and their regulators over the mortgage mess in the U.S. The various players in this settlement are leaking stories to business reporters in order to place on the public square their negotiating positions, which can often serve to define the terms of the discussions taking place in private. For those of our readers who are not Americans, we need to apologize in advance for the convoluted, and you might even say ugly, manner in which policy is made in Washington when so many different players are involved. We’ll try to keep the description of what is going on basic and understandable, but don’t be surprised if you feel like you’ve wandered into an abattoir where sausage is being made. First, let’s go down the list player by player, and see what they want out of a possible settlement.

Driving in from the airport to the center of Tripoli, as you pass Pepsi-Cola Road and approach the old city, you see one billboard after another featuring Mohammar Qaddafi. He has different guises, depending on whether he wishes to be Col. Qaddafi in military uniform, or tribal Qaddafi in flowing robes, or religious Qaddafi in the turban and cloak of an imam. Overlooking the central square is Qaddafi the modernizer of Libya, sporting brownish-yellow sunglasses that might have been stylish in 1969 when Qaddafi first came to power in a military coup, but today give him the appearance of trying too hard to be young.

Does Ben Bernanke even know what he is doing? I've certainly wondered about that point, and it is increasingly a topic of conversation among stock market analysts who have come to understand that all the major US stock market indexes are pushing relentlessly upward because of the Bernanke put.

There hasn't been a significant correction in the stock market since early September, when the S&P 500 left the 1040 range to its present very lofty height of 1330. This rally has set a number of records, including days when the stock market moves less than 1%, and number of stocks above their 200 day moving average. While some analysts credit this advance to improving economic conditions, most observers point to the Fed's deliberate policy to keep the stock market "higher than it would otherwise be", fueling it with hundreds of billions of dollars from the quantitative easing program.

The other evidence in favor of the Bernanke put argument is that volume has fallen off dramatically at each daily advance. This past week volume has been at its low for the year, 40% off even the median volume for the market. This is never the sign of a healthy market, especially one that advances with no corrections in sight. It says investors don't trust the advance, but are unwilling to sell or even take their profits because the direction is so clear for the short term.

The Fed, in other words, owns the stock market for the first time ever. The Fed has assumed responsibility for its move up, promises to protect investors should the market hint at going down, and will take the blame if the Fed is unable to prevent a sell off. Whether the Fed agrees to this is not relevant - this is market perception held by millions of investors. The Fed may not really be to blame when the market finally corrects (and not if, by the way), but the Fed is to blame for this perception continuing.