That is the amount of money people at Goldman Sachs lavished on President Obama for political campaigns. Will President Obama return the money?

After all, back when Abramoff scandal broke, Democrats were demanding that every dime even remotely connected to Abrahmoff activities be returned – isn’t turn about fair play?

True, that demand died down when it emerged that Democrats were major beneficiaries of Abramoff donations, but isn’t this just a great time for Democrats to live up to their own alleged standards?

This is nothing more than the most egregious and disgusting form of political payoff:

Barely 15 percent of all construction-industry workers in the United States are union members, while the remaining 85 percent are nonunion, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. So why has President Obama signed Executive Order 13502 directing federal agencies taking bids for government construction projects to accept only those from contractors who agree in advance to a project labor agreement that requires a union work force?…

…By eliminating the vast majority of potential bidders on federal construction projects, Obama guarantees two things. First, the projects will cost taxpayers more because union labor is always more expensive. And with mandated PLAs, the cost premium for union contractors will be even greater because fewer bidders always means less competition and higher prices. Second, by guaranteeing unions a bigger stream of federal contracts, Obama is making sure that Big Labor, already among the Democrats’ biggest sources of campaign cash, will have even more money to hand out for the 2010 and 2012 elections.

This is just nauseating – Obama is telling the vast majority of American construction workers that he doesn’t give a darn about them. He’s saying that the American economy and the taxpayer’s money are reserved only for groups which back the Democrat party. Essentially, Obama is impounding our government and economy in favor of his supporters, everyone else can go jump in a lake.

All Americans have a right to bid on all government contracts. The only things which should bear on whether a bid is accepted is the price offered and the ability to perform the task. All other considerations are simply un-American and should not come in to play.

This is just another example of what we fight against – this liberal notion that politics trumps everything. Obama is just locking down his union support for the 2010 and 2012 elections – what happens to the country just isn’t a factor in the decision.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Hey, its not me saying that – just reporting the news about it.

Just gets weaker all the time:

President Barack Obama’s national security advisers are considering a broad range of options to curb Iran’s nuclear program…

…In his statement, Gates said: “The memo was not intended as a ‘wake up call’ or received as such by the president’s national security team. Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision-making process.”

Mullen said Gates was leading policy deliberations within the administration that have had “great focus for years, not months.”

“This is as complex a problem as there is in our country and we have expended extraordinary amounts of time and effort to figure that out, to try to get that right,” Mullen said.

They’re acting as if they’ve got all the time in the world – they are dithering over plans and proposals which may take months to even decide on. By the time we make up our mind on what to do, Iran may already have deployed nuclear weapons.

Patience is a virtue in foreign affairs only when you are awaiting the outcome of a policy decided upon. President Bush, for instance, was very patient regarding Iraq and this was ultimately rewarded with victory. But he wasn’t patient in making up his mind – and, indeed, in such things rapid decision-making is crucial to success. Delay means that whatever policy you decide upon might not reflect reality at the time of implementation.

Choose: do we want Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, or do we wish to prevent this?

Choose: if we wish to prevent this, do we go with talking, sanctions or armed action?

Pick one, and then stick with it. Even if we pick wrong, its better than not picking, at all. Quite honestly, we’d be better off saying we’re ok with an Iranian nuke and then make defense arrangements with Iran’s neighbors than making an asinine announcement that we’re still thinking things over. The Iranian leadership isn’t thinking things over – they’ve already decided and are now patiently waiting us out, figuring that even if we ever screw ourselves up to action, it will be too late.

My views are known – blockade of Iran’s gasoline imports followed by selected air strikes on nuclear and other defense targets if blockade doesn’t bring the Iranians to the negotiating table. Maybe I’m wrong but delay in decision is worse than being wrong.

The story:

…For the past 5 1/2 months, the initial unemployment claims data have not really changed…

…The data are oscillating about a slowly increasing value, indicating that, if anything, unemployment claims are increasing. That means that for the past 5 1/2 months, every time the administration has told us that the unemployment situation is slowly recovering, and that the data show “the right trend,” they have been absolutely mistaken.

The media has been doing their typical baby duck analysis: every day is a brand new day, every unemployment claims report is the first one they’ve ever seen. So we get headlines like, “job situation improving” when the number of claims drops, and “unexpected increase” when the number rises…

If you click on the link, there is a chart which clearly shows this. To put the brightest face on it, there has been no improvement, at all. A more worrisome aspect is that the trend line is, indeed, slightly upwards…which means that, overall, employment continues to decrease in the United States.

While employment is a lagging indicator, if we were in a genuine recovery we should see at least some improvement in the employment picture. All we’ve seen is some smoke and mirrors – or, at best, numbers just misunderstood.

Until we start getting men like him back to work, we’re going nowhere.

Have at it, boys and girls. Just couldn’t think of anything worth writing about for the AM.

Once upon a time wise men would ask, “what is the truth?”. Later, a man rather famously asked, “what is truth?”. These days, many assert “there is no truth”. It seems to me that we have fallen very low in the desire for truth.

A century ago G. K. Chesterton, in his What’s Wrong With the World? noted this problem – our continual desire to hide from truth. To explain it away, some times but much more often our desire to pretend it isn’t even there. One of the things Chesterton wrote about was the fact that the execution of criminals had been moved from the public square to behind prison walls.

There was, in that, none of the acknowledgment that we, the people, are doing certain things. It was all a matter for the police and none of us need sully our hands with it – but, the fact is, that even when we hide our corporate actions away from sight, we are still responsible for them. Today, we’re even worse at it – when we do gingerly decide to kill, we do it in a hospital-like room, and use a needle, rather than a noose.

Not, of course, that executions are the highest action of Man – in fact, as readers know, I’d rather see no executions, at all. But I would like us to be a lot more honest about what we’re doing – and what the effects are.

If we are to kill, then we shouldn’t be shy about it. Don’t send a man to a hospital room – ride him out in a tumbril and hang him in front of city hall. Don’t send a drone to blow an enemy to smithereens – send in troops to kill him, man to man. There would at least be honor in such killings – a clean fight, or at least an acknowledgment that we definitely want a particular person dead, and are taking our responsibility for the death.

Our dishonesty doesn’t stop at such grim things as killing – it extends right through our lives down to the smallest things. There is a conspiracy of falsehood and we all engage in it. All, that is, save a few saints and an even fewer number of hardened sinners who are at least honest about themselves.

The first task in a real reform is to start acknowledging the truth. The second task it to stop worrying about offending liars. People present to us things we know are false and yet out of fear for hurt feelings, we pretend that they didn’t lie to us.

Life can be brutal, but it doesn’t have to be inhuman. It is brutal that some of our brothers and sisters go to bed hungry. It is inhuman, however, that we don’t admit that some of them go to bed hungry because they simply didn’t bestir themselves to take the responsibility of earning their daily bread. It is brutal that some are born in to desperate circumstances. It is inhuman that we then excuse their bad behavior as if they hadn’t the wit to realize that a bad mother and poverty don’t excuse mayhem.

In all of our lies there is this ultimate result – brutality is turned in to inhumanity, and we cap off our lies by turning black in to white and claiming that our inhumanity is the most humane thing to do. We absurdly say that it is more humane to inject chemicals in to a man’s body than to very swiftly and nearly painlessly kill him by hanging him. Its more humane to allow a street person to wallow in filth than to take him up, even against his will, and force him to live in decency.

If we are to make a world suited to men and women – rather than a world of cheaply bought slaves – then we must start being truthful. When something is bad, we must say that it is so. When someone is doing wrong, we must call them wrong-doers (even, and especially, when the wrong-doer is the man in the mirror). Better a thousand sins acknowledged than one excused.

Better, that is, to hear the truth and act upon it than to hide from the truth and act upon lies.

Because the basic contention of the Islamists is that the Jews have to go:

Israel should not have to remove any settlements in a peace agreement with the Palestinians, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon has told The Jerusalem Post, adding that just as Arabs live in Israel, so, too, should Jews be able to live in a future Palestinian entity.

“If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews?” Ya’alon asked during a wide-ranging interview that will appear in the Post’s Yom Ha’atzmaut supplement on Monday.

“Why do those areas have to be Judenrein?” he asked. “Don’t Arabs live here, in the Negev and the Galilee? Why isn’t that part of our public discussion? Why doesn’t that scream to the heavens?”

Ya’alon said that if Israel and the Palestinians were truly headed down the path of peace and coexistence, “Jews living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and citizenship” should be possible.

Now, if I were a Jew, I wouldn’t want to live under Moslem rule. Heck, as a Christian I don’t want to – Islamists have this habit of brutality towards Christians as well as a penchant for desecrating Christian holy places. You know, treating us in a manner we’d never dream of treating them – and yet, oddly, they whine endlessly about perceived slights to Islam at the hands of Christians. Strange, huh?

Anyways…

Until the Moslems say to the Jews, “we want you to stay”, there can be no real peace. Until, that is, Islam comes to grip with the fact that non-Moslems have as much right to live and participate fully in society as Moslems, then there can be no real peace. Not between Islam and Israel – not between Islam and anything.

Terribly sorry for my Moslem brothers and sisters, but just because you say your founder talked to God doesn’t mean we have to agree. We Christians, to put it bluntly, consider Mohammed to just be this guy who picked up a bit of the Arian heresy, adapted it to his personal rule and proclivities, and had at it. We respect those aspects of Islam which are morally excellent (calls to regular prayer, strong family life, almsgiving, etc), but trying to tell us, say, that our mere existence is a pollution in your holy city is not conducive to peace and cooperation.

Doesn’t help, either, when Christians are murdered for alleged “insults” to Islam, nor does it help that Moslems who convert to Christianity are then threatened with death. There are lots of things, on all sides, which can promote peace but most of what must be done needs to be done by Moslems – who have been routinely in the wrong.

This is why calls for a renewed peace process in the Israeli/Moslem conflict fall on deaf ears with me – what is the point? Until they change their ways, the best which can be hoped for is an armed truce. And given the nature of things, Israel must be more heavily armed and always able to strike much harder blows than the Moslem world can.

Its a hard thing, but there’s not much we can do about it. The ball is in Islam’s court – lets see what they do with it, then we can move from there.

You can write about whatever you want, as long as there’s no religion in it:

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Pulaski County Special School District on behalf of a student and her mother, who were both prohibited from participating in Sherwood Elementary School’s literature distribution program because their fliers were “church-related.”

School officials are standing by the decision even after they received an ADF letter stating that the district’s policy is unconstitutional.

The ADF filed the lawsuit, A.W. v. Pulaski County Special School District, with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division.

“Christian students shouldn’t be discriminated against for their beliefs,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David Cortman. “When fliers for many community programs or events are permitted in the district’s policy except for activities that are ‘church-related,’ that’s a textbook violation of free speech protected by the First Amendment. As the U.S. Supreme Court has stated, ‘Students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.’”

Religion is not unconstitutional – but that is essentially how some view it. Any expression of any sort of religious belief in the public square is held by some to be prohibited by the Constitution.

Of course, the reality is that the Constitution merely prohibits government from enforcing a creed as well as prohibiting government from banning a creed. If you aren’t coerced by government to worship and the government doesn’t coerce you in to not worshiping, then the entirety of the US Constitution on this matter is observed. There is nothing else for government to do or prevent.

And so, if its pass-out-fliers time at school and people are allowed to pass out literature on whatever strikes their fancy, then there is nothing wrong with passing out religious literature.

Fundamentally, as our people in 1787 were for the most part deeply religious, there can be nothing in our government which acts against the public expression of religious belief. They simply would not have banned themselves from doing things they (a) did all the time and (b) considered to be a good thing for society, as a whole. If you want to ban such things a prayer in school – even organized prayer – then your true recourse is to Constitutional amendment.

Of course, the people fighting religion don’t do that – because they know they’d lose, and lose rather badly. So, they use courts and bureaucrats to do an end-run around both Constitution and people. A large part of our fight is this battle to restore religious liberty in the United States – and it will also be the hardest and most difficult part.

California unemployment rises to 12.6%.

Can you feel the hope? Taste the change?

One thing rather curious – in the March report on jobs, the State which had the largest gain was Maryland which, of course, has DC in it. The State which lost the most jobs? Easy – the State where a lot of our factories used to be: Michigan.

Who is benefiting from Obamunism? Bureaucrats.

UPDATE: 9 more banks fail.

UPDATE II: Some cities in economic free fall.