But if panic reigned last holiday season, resignation is this year’s king. Merchants are keeping expectations low and running leaner with aggressive, early promotions and scaled back inventory. Eager to grab consumers’ dollars before they spend them elsewhere, some retailers are offering preview sales to the doorbuster deals that will be available on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and typically the busiest shopping day of the year.

           
The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington is obligated to pay retirement benefits to six priests who are confirmed pedophiles, church officials argued in a bankruptcy court filing seeking permission to keep making the payments.

           
After filing for Chapter 11 protection last month, the diocese agreed not to make payments to priests accused of sexual abuse without court approval. That agreement was made after objections were raised by attorneys for alleged abuse victims who now sit on a creditors committee.

           
In a filing submitted late Thursday, attorneys for the diocese now seek authorization to provide pensions, housing costs, and medical coverage to six confirmed child abusers. They cited an obligation to care for retired clergy, including priests dismissed from public ministry and facing laicization, or defrocking.

           
“Only the Vatican has the power to laicize clergy,’’ the diocese said. “Thus, while several priests have been dismissed from the public ministry and have laicization proceedings pending against them, for the time being they remain clergy whom the debtor supports, and must continue to support.’’

           
James Stang, an attorney for the creditors committee, described the filing as “outrageous.’’

           
Officials with the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, could not recall a similar motion in the six other bankruptcies involving Catholic dioceses in the United States. The group also noted that the Wilmington diocese is paying a public relations firm a minimum of $100,000 for bankruptcy-related work.

           
Defending himself against critics, Representative Ron Paul of Texas played down continuing concerns on Friday that his amendment to give Congress sweeping new oversight powers over the Federal Reserve would compromise the central bank’s political independence. He asserted that the Fed was not truly as independent as it would like the public to believe.

           
“There is already a tremendous amount of political pressure on the Fed,” Mr. Paul, a libertarian Republican, told DealBook. “The Federal Reserve Board chairmen have notoriously been sympathetic to the presidents who might be reappointing them and there has been evidence to show that.”

           
Mr. Paul also asserted that the Fed was beholden to pressures beyond the government from special interests, including Wall Street.

           
“It’s not like the banks and Goldman Sachs doesn’t have influence over the Fed,” Mr. Paul said. “Every time the Fed says it wants its independence, what they are really saying is we want to keep our secrets.”

           
The renewed attacks on Mr. Paul’s controversial amendment to provide audits of the Fed comes after the House Financial Services Committee voted Thursday night to insert the amendment into its version of the financial overhaul bill.

           
The amendment would allow the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to have access to a vast array of information on the nation’s monetary policy currently out of their reach, including information on the Fed’s emergency lending programs, information on the financial bailouts, the Fed’s dealings with foreign central banks and the Fed’s decisions to drive down interest rates by intervening in bond markets.

           
Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told DealBook that he voted against the amendment because he said he felt “it went a little bit too far.” But he noted that he could support it going forward if it did not dispel the “perception” that the Fed is independent.

           
“The problems with monetary policy is that perception plays a real role and I did worry that that could lead people inside America and also outside to be worried about the integrity of the monetary policy function,” Mr. Frank said. “If it turns out that the amendment does not cause these kind of concerns, then I would be fine with that.”

           
Meanwhile, other critics of Mr. Paul’s amendment contend that Congress is “pandering to public anger” and fear that the Fed would lose its ability to set interest rates, putting Congress in charge of this very important subset of monetary policy.

            “
Yesterday’s passage of the Paul amendment by the House Financial Services Committee is a dangerous move by this Congress to pander to the populist anger currently directed against our central bank, the Federal Reserve,” Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, said in a statement. “Congress has demonstrated time and again its inability to manage the nation’s fiscal policy, illustrated by our staggering national debt in excess of $12 trillion, so how can anyone think that its involvement in monetary policy would be good for the country?”

           
Mr. Paul shot back at Mr. Gregg. “It’s not pandering, it’s listening,” Mr. Paul said. “The people are angry because they are finding out what the Fed is doing.”

One of the more controversial things the Fed has done during the crisis was to buy up billions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-backed securities from banks and government-sponsored entities. Since the Fed is shielded from oversight, Congress has little idea what the Fed bought or exactly how much it paid for the potentially toxic securities. Mr. Paul said he feared that the government could be paying full price for the securities, which could end up being worthless.

           
Mr. Paul also said the amendment specifically barred Congress from intervening in any aspect of monetary policy and that any audits of the Federal Reserve’s decisions to raise or lower interests rates would be made available to Congress on a six-month time lag.

           
The bill will be voted on by the committee at the end of the month and it will then go to the House floor for debate and a vote. The Senate, meanwhile, is considering its own financial overhaul bill. If those bills are approved, they would then have to be reconciled by both houses of Congress before going to the president.

           
Unemployment in the District soared to a record high of 11.9 percent in October, according to government data released Friday, ranking it among California, Nevada, Michigan and other states with the highest jobless rates.

           
The District's jobless rate climbed a half a percentage point in October to reach its highest level in 34 years of record keeping. In Virginia, the unemployment rate remained steady at 6.6 percent, while in Maryland, it rose slightly, to 7.3 percent from 7.2 percent.

           
The data offered a mixed picture of the region, with Maryland and Virginia remaining below the national unemployment rate of 10.2 percent for October and the District continuing to climb above it.

           
"We see that Maryland and Virginia are benefiting from federal spending -- defense spending accounts for 20 percent of jobs in Virginia," said Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. "The District is too small to be diversified across the sectors like you'd see at the state levels."

           
Only five states had higher unemployment rates than the District, including South Carolina at 12.1 percent, California at 12.5 percent and Nevada at 13 percent. Michigan, which has been suffering from the decline of the auto industry and manufacturing, had the highest jobless rate in the nation -- 15.1 per

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