When Sen. Barack Obama faced the cameras Tuesday in Philadelphia, he was caught between his roles as politician and parishioner, forced to condemn his pastor’s words as he tried to advance his own campaign for president.

Experts on the black church say the comments of Obama’s former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, have put Obama (D-Ill.) in an awkward and uncomfortable position. At the same time, however, they have given him a chance to discuss race with white Americans, including something about the black church.

“The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning,” Obama said in his speech at the National Constitution Center.

Though his speech was dedicated more to race than religion, Obama took pains to explain the ethos of some black churches. Church is where congregants may speak openly about racial tensions that often cannot be addressed elsewhere, and where songs and sermons reflect much of what is felt and heard in black communities.

“Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor,” Obama said. “The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”

Some of Wright’s words, Obama said, reflect an anger and bitterness still felt within Wright’s battle-scarred generation. Such feelings should be addressed and understood, not wished away, Obama said, in an effort to heal and transcend racial divides.

“I think he took it as far as he can by contextualizing Jeremiah Wright’s comments on a history of American racism,” said Rev. Marvin McMickle, a Cleveland pastor and professor of homiletics at Ashland University in Ohio.

But McMickle, author of “Where Have all the Prophets Gone?”, a book endorsed by Wright, said Obama can only go so far with that message. It should be black ministers, not politicians, who explain black preaching to largely white America.

“It’s not just black people talking, and it’s not just black people listening,” said McMickle, a pledged delegate for Obama. “Black preaching has a third component . . . which is . . . addressing the gospel to the history of the black experience in ways that the white preacher could not do it, and a white congregation does not need to have it being done.”

Peter Paris, professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, worried that Obama’s condemnation of some of Wright’s words could hurt him in some black churches.

“So many black churches understand the role of prophetic speech alongside of pastoral speech, and I don’t think that Obama helped . . . communicate that strongly enough,” Paris said. “I hope that he doesn’t find black churches moving away from him in that respect.”

Paris said Wright’s comments about past slavery and modern-day segregated schools are not “distorted,” as Obama suggested.

“Jeremiah Wright is seen as a major prophetic voice in the black community, and there are many people who adore him,” said Paris, an Obama supporter and a divinity school classmate with Wright in the 1960s.

Even before Obama spoke Tuesday, some white observers who know his Chicago church said the context of Wright’s words might be lost on some Americans.

“We might like to think that racism is a thing of the past,” said the Rev. John H. Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ. “But on the gritty streets of Chicago’s South Side where Trinity has planted itself, race continues to play favorites in failing urban school systems, unresponsive health-care systems, crumbling infrastructure and meager economic development.”

Jim Wallis, a white evangelical activist, issued a letter Tuesday to faith leaders that defended the black church’s “prophetic truth-telling” role, and said some whites might be in denial about the anger felt by many black Americans.

“In 2008, to still not comprehend or seek to understand the reality of black frustration and anger, is to be in a state of white denial, which, very sadly, is where many white Americans are,” said Wallis, founder of Washington-based Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

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At what point will the Fed lower interest rates to where they are paying us to spend money? I know you liberal idiots don’t understand this, but the way you get people to spend money is by allowing us to keep more of what we earn. The only way to do that is to lower taxes. Ronald Reagan proved that in 1981 when he slashed taxes and the economy took off like a rocket. Less taxes equals more spending power. JD

The Fed’s cut of three-quarters of a percentage point is less than investors were expecting, but markets rallied nonetheless.

After weeks of surprisingly aggressive moves to arrest the credit crunch, the Federal Reserve on Mar. 18 surprised the markets in the opposite direction—cutting interest rates a bit less than anticipated. It cut the federal funds rate by three-quarters of a percentage point, to 2.25%, rather than the 1% cut that most traders had been expecting.

What’s more, two of the voters on the Federal Open Market Committee dissented, saying they thought the cut was too aggressive. That indicates Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might not be able to gather enough votes to push rates much lower if he thinks doing so is necessary to protect the economy.

But even though the Fed’s action fell short of expectations, it failed to wipe the smiles off the faces of market players. Investors have suddenly turned mildly optimistic, after weeks of panic. Stock prices dipped only briefly after the 2:15 p.m. EDT announcement before snapping back to around their daily highs. The Dow Jones industrial average surged 420 points, or 3.5%, to finish at 12,392. It was the largest one-session gain in more than five years.
Pacifying Inflation Hawks

Justifying the decision to cut rates, the Fed issued a statement saying “the outlook for economic activity has weakened further,” noting among other things “the tightening of credit conditions and the deepening of the housing contraction.” The FOMC acknowledged that “some indicators of inflation expectations have risen.” But it said the committee “expects inflation to moderate in coming quarters” as energy prices level out and the economy softens. Lowering rates threaten to drive up inflation.

The two biggest inflation hawks on the rate-setting committee, Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Richard Fisher of Dallas and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, preferred less aggressive rate cuts at the meeting. Nodding in their direction, the committee said, “it will be necessary to continue to monitor inflation developments carefully.”
Analyst Reactions

Giving the financial markets a smaller rate cut than expected ran the risk of setting off a huge sell-off on Wall Street. The Fed was “risking the wrath of the markets,” wrote economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics. Ashworth said he expects the Fed to keep cutting the funds rate all the way to 1% by summer because, in his view, the economy is going to get much worse. “Once recessions start, conditions tend to get worse, very quickly,” Ashworth wrote in an instant analysis of the Fed’s action.

Still three-quarters of a percentage point is no small cut, especially since it comes on the heels of other big cuts. The federal funds rate—the rate that big banks pay to borrow funds from each other overnight to meet reserve requirements—is now fully 3 percentage points below the 5.25% rate of last summer. In a statement, Swiss Re (SWCEF) Senior Economist Arun Raha called the Fed move “yet another forceful move in its attempts to alleviate the liquidity crunch and to shore up a rapidly weakening economy.”

Coy is BusinessWeek’s Economics editor.
Reader Discussion

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All I can say is WHAT DR.LAURA SAYS! I am by no means a Lauratron. In fact I think she treats her listeners like dirt and sometimes gives the wrong advice. But when it comes to the issue of a cheating man, she hits the nail right on the head every time.

Women call in to her radio show crying that they have found out that their man is cheating. With a bit of prodding Dr. Laura will inevitably get the caller to admit that she rarely if ever had sex with her husband and never cooked a warm meal for him and basically made him look elsewhere for his sexual needs.

I have news for you women out there. You do that shit to your man and you will loose your man. Women tend to believe that in a marriage they hold the right to play the game by their rules. They routinely use sex as a weapon against their men. They make lame excuses for not making sure that their man is satisfied sexually.

Dr. Laura is speaking the truth and all the women of America are appalled by it. You know why? Because they know its the truth and most women have a huge problem when it comes to a few simple things in life. Admitting when they are wrong and apologizing for their actions. They want zero accountability for what they say or do. And when the husband finally tell the wife to fuck off and runs off with someone else the woman plays the victim.

I was married to such a woman. I speak from experience. She did all of the above and more. Did I cheat? No!!! I got a divorce. But I don’t blame any man that cheats when he is married to a woman that neglects his needs and desires. Now go take on the day. JD

Dr. Laura Schlessinger has never been one to shrink from controversy, and she leaped headlong into one on Monday when she said that if a husband cheats, his wife may share some of the blame.

“When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings, sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs,” the popular psychologist and radio personality said.

More commonly known as just “Dr. Laura,” Schlessinger made the remarks while participating in one of several panel discussions on TODAY dealing with the breaking news that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been connected to a high-priced prostitution ring.

The comment touched off a storm of protest, both from other members of the panels and from viewers, who flooded the show’s online mailboxes with mostly conflicting views.

Schlessinger later emphasized that she was not excusing Spitzer’s behavior. Nor, she said, was she saying that his wife, Silda Spitzer, was in some way to blame for his indiscretion.

“I do not know anything about their personal lives,” she said.

But, she persisted, frequently when there is infidelity in marriage, both spouses share the blame.

“You’re saying the women should feel guilty that they somehow drove the man to cheat?” asked TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira.

“The cheating was his decision to repair what’s damaged and to feed himself where he’s starving,” Schlessinger replied. “But, yes, I hold women responsible for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”

Others who participated in the panels disagreed strongly.

“I refuse to believe that this adultery is the wife’s fault,” said anthropologist Helen Fisher, who had discussed the evolutionary reasons for infidelity.

Dina Matos, who had stood by the side of her former husband, then-New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey, when he announced in 2004 that he had conducted a homosexual affair with one of his advisers, also took strong exception.

“This is absurd,” she said. “It’s just like blaming a rape victim. And we see this all too often. It’s just insanity.”

Another relationship expert, psychologist Jeff Gardere, said that trying to decide who’s at fault is beside the point. “It’s not about the blame game,” he said. “It’s about looking at what’s going on in this marriage that may have been ripe for this to happen. But the person who cheats is doing it for a very selfish reason. It’s a very selfish act.”

In a final appearance with TODAY’s Ann Curry and Hoda Kotb, Schlessinger stuck to her guns.

“The point is, what he’s done is wrong. The point is, what she’s done is wrong,” she said. “I have kept marriages together after affairs because I have reminded women that you have the power to turn this around. He had his children with you. He has his future life plans with you, his dreams, his whole mind, body and soul was wrapped up in the promise of you. If you now turn that back on, all that stuff you turned off because ‘I’m busy’ or ‘I’m irritated’ or ‘I’m annoyed’ or ‘I’m self-centered’ — if you turn that around, you have that man back.”

She said that there are reasons why men look outside the marriage for sex and companionship.

“I would challenge the wife to find out what kind of wife she’s being,” she said. “Is she being supportive and approving and loving? Is she being sexually intimate and affectionate? Is she making him feel like he’s her man? If she’s not doing that, then she’s contributing to his wrong choice.”

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Once again the Associated Press completely and carefully omits the party affiliation of Governor Spitzer. If Spitzer were a republican it would be mentioned in the first two or three lines of the first paragraph. Let that be a lesson to all you rubes from the northeast that surround yourselves with liberal indiots and try to convince each other that Fox News is the root of all evil.

I checked 13 different articles from some of the nations leading news outlets on Google News about the Spitzer affair, and only 6 mentioned the fact that Spitzer is a democrat. Of those six, only one metioned it in the first three paragraphs. The rest mention it at the end of the article. They do this because they know most people don’t read the entire article. Most read the first three paragraphs.
JD

By SAMANTHA GROSS and DEVLIN BARRETT –

NEW YORK (AP) — Eliot Spitzer knew how to catch bad guys by following the money.

As attorney general, he once broke up a call-girl ring and locked up 18 people on corruption, money-laundering and prostitution charges. He ruthlessly investigated the pay packages of Wall Street executives and was so familiar with shady financial maneuvers that he rose to become the top racketeering prosecutor in Manhattan.

But in the end, it appears that Spitzer may have been done in by the same behavior he built a career out of prosecuting.

In fact, it seems he was tripped up by some of the very financial accounting methods he used so successfully against multibillion-dollar Wall Street firms.

For one thing, the governor initially drew the attention of federal investigators because of cash payments to an account operated by a call-girl ring, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of because of the sensitivity of the case.

Banks are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports to the government whenever they observe something they fear may be a crime.

In court papers, Client 9 — identified by another law enforcement official as Spitzer — hurried to get more than $4,000 in cash to pay a call girl at a Washington hotel.

That kind of activity, repeated over time, is just the kind of thing that would set off alarm bells with a bank’s compliance officer, who is trained to be on the lookout for what is called structuring or “smurfing” — a pattern of transactions aimed at hiding the nature or purpose of certain money.

Spitzer of all people should have known that, said Miami-based lawyer Gregory Baldwin, credited with coining the term “smurfing” in the 1980s as a federal prosecutor.

“I think he’s done enough cases where he’s charged money laundering that he would know exactly what kind of information you get from the banks. It’s such a perfect example of what goes around, comes around,” he said.

By the time the scandal broke this week, Spitzer’s financial transactions had been monitored, his phone calls had been caught on tape, and his actions had been scrutinized by federal prosecutors. It could have been straight out of the Spitzer prosecution playbook.

Whether Spitzer thought he was smarter than the feds because of his own professional experience is, for now at least, a matter for psychologists to speculate on.

As New York attorney general, Spitzer was also familiar with how to bust up a prostitution ring.

Spitzer proudly announced on April 8, 2004, that authorities had arrested 18 people on promoting prostitution and related charges — including money laundering and falsifying business records — in an investigation of escort services in New York.

“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Spitzer said at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable.”

In the 2004 probe, investigators used wiretaps and other surveillance to build their case, said Vincent Romano, who defended the man accused of running the ring. Prosecutors also charged some of the defendants with enterprise corruption — a charge carrying heavier penalties than simple prostitution. No charges were brought against the ring’s customers, just those accused of working for or running the service.

“It was a big splash. They had the perp walk. He caused a lot of embarrassment to a lot of people in the case to his benefit. What he put their families through at the time, he’s probably experiencing now: the level of embarrassment and ridicule,” Romano said.

“He’s got this overzealous, mean-spirited prosecution, but behind closed doors in another state, he’s doing the identical thing that he’s accusing others of doing,” he added. “And the other irony of it is that you’ve made a career off of a wiretap, and your demise is by the same prosecutorial tool.”

The investigation that could spell Spitzer’s ruin found that Client 9 was apparently a repeat customer with the Emperors Club VIP, a lucrative prostitution service where some call girls pulled in $5,500 an hour. The governor has not been charged, and prosecutors would not comment on the case.

A person familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press that the probe began with a referral from banks to an Internal Revenue Service office on Long Island about suspicious transactions involving accounts ultimately traced to Spitzer. The IRS studied the records and then referred the case to federal prosecutors in October. It was then assigned to the public corruption unit of the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan.

The precise details of what set off alarm bells for federal authorities are still unclear.

But authorities believe Spitzer may have spent tens of thousands of dollars, apparently transferring only personal funds — not campaign contributions or state taxpayer dollars — between accounts to pay for the prostitute service, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A half-million or so times every year, banks alert the federal government that a suspicious transaction has occurred. Although the public sometimes thinks it requires a transfer of $10,000 or more to attract attention, banks can label transactions suspicious even if they involve far less money, said Walter Pagano, a former IRS agent who has testified in court on white-collar crime.

Spitzer might have tried to keep his transfers below the $10,000 threshold, underestimating the scrutiny that banks give to lesser amounts.

Spitzer prosecuted cases in New York for two decades before becoming governor. From 1986 to 1992, he was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. While there, he rose to become chief of the labor racketeering unit.

While attorney general, he also went up against two men he accused of using their tour company to promote “sex tourism” in the Philippines and Thailand — first suing them in civil court and then bringing criminal charges.

One defense attorney on the case said it was politically motivated.

“He prosecuted a couple of little guys who were easy targets when he was running for governor,” Daniel Hochheiser said. “The whole situation is marked by irony, hypocrisy and self-righteousness.”

Associated Press Writer Devlin Barrett contributed to this report from Washington and AP Writer Larry Neumeister contributed from New York.

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