Crossing Fumo   Property owner won't sell? Fumo's response: Try to jack up taxes.   When Alan and Sheila Hunter decided to move into an old convent in South Philadelphia, they saw beauty. Then-State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo wanted the property for a charter school. He leaned hard on Hunter to sell. When the high-pressure tactics didn't work, an enraged Fumo decided to "really f- him over." His weapon: the city Board of Revision of Taxes.     Remember that 5/4 Supreme Court decision in 2005 on property seizure?  
  Justices Affirm Property Seizures
5-4 Ruling Backs Forced Sales for Private Development    

 Oral RobertsOral Roberts, who died on Tuesday aged 91, was the doyen of American televangelists, a breed that has played a vital part in guiding a third of adult Americans to a life as born-again Christians. Published: 6:26PM GMT 16 Dec 2009Comments 5 | Comment on this article                       Oral Roberts with Elvis Presley Photo: REUTERS  From the time he began his ministry in the 1940s Roberts was one of the most successful practitioners of the art of blending a hellfire vision with the growing material success of his traditionally poor and unsophisticated followers. His creed dictated that people are saved not so much by grace but by the uses to which they put their money. His favourite tele-blessing ran: "May God bless you in your bodies, in your spirits and in your finances." One of the first of a generation of Protestant preachers who came to dominate the airwaves in America, Roberts placed his miraculous powers of faith healing at the centre of his ministry. In his early days, when he addressed gatherings of the faithful in tents, he would lay his (divinely anointed) right hand on the afflicted and claimed to achieve instant cures. Petitioners who failed to respond to his ministrations were bawled out. As he moved on to the airwaves, Roberts routinely attempted to heal his followers of a wide range of diseases – from cancer to haemorrhoids – by placing his healing hand against the lens of the camera and asking the afflicted to touch their television screens. The miracle cures thus effected were often accompanied by requests for "seed faith" donations – "twenty dollars, Visa, Amex, whatever the Lord leads you to do". By the early 1980s the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association employed 2,300 people and was grossing $110 million a year in donations. At its base in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Roberts built a sort of divine Disneyworld, graced by the world's largest bronze sculpture, a 60ft pair of hands clasped in prayer, a 200ft glass and steel "prayer tower" topped by an eternal gas flame, and a 777ft artificial stream called the River of Life. There was also an Oral Roberts University, opened in 1965, where students were exhorted to dress and behave in an attractive way. Women were encouraged to wear make-up and fashionable clothes. The chronically fat risked expulsion. Besides the university, there were a television studio, a radio station, some skyscrapers and a concert hall. A monthly magazine called Abundant Life gained a circulation of 1.2 million. About 800,000 of Roberts's most loyal followers received monthly prayer letters. "Are you suffering?" ran a typical missive. "Is pain raging through your body? Is your marriage falling apart? Does it seem that nobody cares? I want to help you get the answer you need. I want to pray with you." Each day Roberts would get a thick typed list of the names and needs of those who had written in with pleas for help, and prayed for those with…

Pentagon preps for economic warfare
By EAMON JAVERS | 4/9/09 4:18 AM EDT 
The Pentagon sponsors a war game that examines how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy. Photo: AP   The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.

Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.

In the end, there was sobering news for the United States – the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the war-game.

The United States remained the world’s largest economy but significantly degraded its standing in a series of financial skirmishes with Russia, participants said. See also Parental rights: The new wedge issueFed judges are fed upU.S. could join direct talks with Iran The war game demonstrated that in post-Sept. 11 world, the Pentagon is thinking about a wide range of threats to America’s position in the world, including some that could come far from the battlefield.

And it’s hardly science fiction. China recently shook the value of the dollar in global currency markets merely by questioning whether the recession put China’s $1 trillion in U.S. government bond holdings at risk – forcing President Barack Obama to issue a hasty defense of the dollar.

“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” said Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”

Several participants said the event had been in the planning stages well before the stock market crash of September, but the real-world market calamity was on the minds of many in the room. “It loomed large over what everybody was doing,” said Bracken.

“Why would the military care about global capital flows at all?”…