Saturday Open Thread [3.2.13]

Welcome to the weekend! DD is over on Facebook predicting snow for next week. He’s been predicting snow ALL WINTER, and we’ve had bupkis. That guy!

Did you catch the NJ story yesterday, reporting on how NCCo is firing one of its pension managers?

The portfolio managed by Friess Associates, the Greenville-based pension manager that has invested some of the county’s pension funds for nearly 32 years, has lost an average of 7.5 percent from 2008 to 2012, county Chief Administrative Officer David Grimaldi said, which Friess acknowledges.

Does the name Friess ring any bells? Foster Friess almost singlehandedly kept Rick Santorum alive through much of the 2012 GOP primary. He was the same guy who advised women to use an aspirin held between your legs as a contraceptive. Friess Associates was his investment firm, until he sold the controlling interest elsewhere. I think his family still has a stake in this firm, but I’m not so sure on that. But given their fund performance, you wonder how they were kept on for so long.

The State Department goes on record with No Major Objections to the Keystone XL Pipeline. That is the finding of the draft EIS and opens a 45 day period for public comment. But this:

The lengthy report says Canadian tar sands are likely to be developed, regardless of whether the U.S. approves Keystone XL, which would carry oil from western Canada to refineries in Texas. The pipeline would also travel through Montana, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

The report acknowledges that development of tar sands in Alberta would create greenhouse gases but makes clear that other methods to transport the oil — including rail, trucks and barges — also pose a risk to the environment.

I think is the signal that this thing will get built.

Roger Ebert used his column yesterday to contemplate How He Is A Roman Catholic after watching Pope Emeritus Benedict leave the Vatican yesterday. I loved this and identify with it almost completely, even though we are a generation or two apart.

It was from these nuns, especially Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne, that I learned my core moral and political principles. I assumed they were Roman Catholic dogma. Many of them involved a Social Contract between God and man, which represented classical liberalism based on empathy and economic fairness. We heard much of Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum”–“On Capital and Labor.” When I hear self-appointed Catholic “spokesmen” like William Donohue of the Catholic League, I wonder if he has come across it in his reading.

Through a mental process that has by now become almost instinctive, those nuns guided me into supporting Universal Health Care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders. It continues to surprise me that many who consider themselves religious seem to tilt away from me.

If you are a Catholic — practicing or no, this is worth every minute to read.

And then there’s this, Benedicto XVI Closing Party at El Vaticano Club:

What interests you today?