Blogs For Victory

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.

No surprise, at all:

The billionaire hedge fund manager at the center of an alleged fraud hatched at Goldman Sachs, a leading investment bank…gave $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in June, qualifying him as a major Democratic donor.

He also gave $2,300 to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) reelection campaign in February of last year and $4,800 to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) last April, according to records filed at the Federal Election Commission.

The report notes that he’s given to Republicans – but that is what hedge fund managers do: they hedge their bets both in economics and politics. But he’s a major Democrat donor – and yet another bit of proof that Democrats are the party of Big Business.

We’ve got the video to the event in Las Vegas up at Noonan for Nevada. Here is my impression of the event and what it means:

The TEA Party Express endorsement of Sharron Angle for United States Senator may or may not shake up the Republican Senate primary, but it is abundantly clear that the TEA Party has shaken up American politics.

On April 15th I went down to Sunset Park in Henderson in order to observe the Tax Day TEA Party rally. When I arrived, I was disappointed – one guy parading with a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, and not much else. But as I was heading out the door, as it were, a couple flag-bedecked cars arrived with people clearly there for a TEA Party. I followed them.

Turns out, I had just gone at the wrong end of park – and hadn’t realized just how big Sunset Park is.

As I followed along behind the activists, I noted more and more converging in the same direction. I also noted the “crash the tea party” infiltrators. About four or six fit, young men shouting obscenities at little, old ladies and mothers with children. Keep it classy, liberals – but it also shows the weakness of the left. Bereft of ideas or, even, a sense of decency, all they’ve got is insults. Great credit to all the people subjected to the insults – no one reacted.

At the event, itself, was a large crowd. Keeping in mind that TEA Party activists hold down jobs, this was a big turn out for a Thursday afternoon. When I arrived, at least 250 people, growing swiftly to about 500 and then steadily increasing from there.

Read the rest at Nevada News and Views.

UPDATE: Jewish TEA Parties?

Terrible, but not at all surprising:

When the New York Times published a series of articles on top-secret counterterrorism efforts at the National Security Agency in 2006 and 2007, supporters of the Bush administration reacted with outrage. Oddly, though, the same people who expressed outrage over the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA analyst never got terribly exercised over these breaches of national security (and to be fair, the same holds true in reverse). The Bush administration complained loudly about the Times’ decision to expose these programs but never made a public show of a probe to discover the source of the leaks.

Ironically, that effort apparently succeeded in uncovering at least one leaker — and the Obama administration gets the credit for it:

A former senior executive with the National Security Agency has been indicted on 10 felony charges related to the leaking of classified information to a national newspaper in 2006 and 2007, the Justice Department announced Thursday morning.

Thomas A. Drake, 52, headed an office in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade between 2001 and 2005, and continued to work with the agency as a high-ranking contractor through 2008, U.S. officials said. The indictment alleges that Drake allegedly exchanged hundreds of e-mails with an unidentified reporter for a national newspaper and served as a source for its articles about Bush administration intelligence policies between February 2006 and November 2007, U.S. officials said.

Everyone on our side suspected this to be the case – that someone in the intelligence community was deliberately leaking info to the MSM. Only question: was this man a traitor for money, or for ideology? Meaning, was he getting paid for his stories, or was he doing it because he disliked Bush Administration policies.

If it was for money, 10 years or so in jail is sufficient – if it did it for ideology, then it must be life in prison. Why? Because employees of the government are not permitted to dissent from policy set by elected officials. They can put up with it, or they can quit – and that is all. Selective leaking of documents by a junior bureaucrat is not just a violation of trust, but also a threat to American security because the junior bureaucrat simply cannot know all the info which went in to making the decision he disagrees with.

And, yes, if any conservative in the ranks violates such a public trust to leak Obama Administration policy secrets then I’ll want him roasted on a spit, to (in a manner of speaking, of course).

As an aside, I take issue with Morrisey’s comparison of this to the Plame case – Plame wasn’t covert and her name wasn’t leaked. But, be that as it may, the assertion still stands: break trust, and pay a high price.

Record number of foreclosures in the first quarter, 2010.

But everything is all better, now. Obama and the Banksters say so.