The Vatican has made a ruling that I fully agree with: The Tetragrammaton, YHWH, should not be uttered as “Yahweh”.

“In recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel’s proper name,” the letter noted, referring to the four-consonant Hebrew “Tetragrammaton,” YHWH.  That name is commonly pronounced as “Yahweh,” though other versions include “Jaweh” and “Yehovah.” But such pronunciation violates long-standing Jewish tradition, the Vatican reminded bishops.

    “As an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God, (the name) was held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: `Adonai,’ which means `Lord,’” the Congregation said.

    That practice continued with Christianity, the letter explained, recalling the “church’s tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred Tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated.”

I might point out that the practice got a big impetus from the Roman Catholic translation of the Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible, but I’m willing to let that go.

The current presidential slate includes a black man and a woman. It also, let us not forget, includes someone who is disabled. John McCain’s arms are crippled, due to his injuries when we was shot down and then tortured by the North Vietnamese. (He isn’t the first disabled person to run for the office, FDR having had polio.)

Poll Shows Women Voters Shifting Support to McCain-Palin:

A new Washington Post/ABC News survey finds McCain is now ahead of Obama by 12 points among white women, 53 to 41 percent.

Last month Senator Obama held an eight point lead over McCain among white women voters in the same poll, representing a stunning, 20 point shift among that group.

The variable has to be Sarah Palin, whomsome feminists are insisting is not a woman because she is conservative. (They can say that because, in academic-speak, while a person’s “sex” is biological, a person’s “gender” is a political construction.)

The nation’s fourth biggest investment firm, Lehman Brothers, has gone under. This time a major economic player faced bankruptcy, no one bailed it out, not other banks, not foreign investors, and not the government. That is to say, this time the market is going to be allowed to work, including its important work of destroying failed businesses. What, though, will be the consequences?

Do you think all of these failures due mainly to the mortgage house of cards tumbling down means that we need to give up on free market economics in favor of a neo-Keynesian government regulation of the economy? Isn’t that where we are headed?