Love Prevails May 29, 2012 MUD If you enter “GLDD” in the search field at right, you’ll find we have a long-held fascination with sediment and an equally long-held shareholding in Great Lakes Dredge and Dock. This write-up argues that the value of GLDD’s assets is more than double its current enterprise value (market cap plus debt). One more reason to feel comfortable holding for the long term. MITT Art: “To the extent that he has documented his claim of creating 100,000 jobs through Bain, it appears that he believes we should count even those hired by Staples yesterday — years after he left. Yet when counting jobs during the Obama administration, he believes the job losses attributable to Bush’s policies ended abruptly the day Obama was inaugurated.” It’s as if Nixon, not Kennedy, deserves the credit for the moon landing because it happened shortly after he was inaugurated. And by the way — those Staples jobs? They came largely at the expense of jobs at competitors whom Staples put out of business. Which is okay — I’m all for all for “creative destruction.” But if you’re going to count the Staples payroll as jobs Mitt Romney helped create, don’t you also have to count the perhaps even greater number of workers Staples displaced as an indication of how many jobs his efforts helped destroy? He made a ton of dough for himself and investors — nothing wrong with that — and helped to make the office-supplies industry more efficient — definitely nothing wrong with that — but what does this have to do with our urgent need to boost employment? As you know, given the chance to work his magic for four years, Governor Romney took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from an already bad 37th-out-of-50 rank in job creation down to a near-rock-bottom 47th. I’M CHRISTIAN UNLESS YOU’RE GAY First Dan Pearce blogged about his closeted 27-year-old friend “Jacob.” Then that blog post was assigned in a high school class. One of the kids’ mothers saw the assignment and forbade her 15-year-old son from participating. He did anyway (from a safe undisclosed location) and emailed her the result. Here, she tells the story — and shares her son’s essay. All of which goes to show that in the ongoing tension between Christian intolerance and Christian love, love can still sometimes prevail. MORE HOLY TERROR From Mel White’s recent Huffington Post: According to the Baltimore Sun, at a hearing on Maryland’s proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, Republican senator Nancy Jacobs said, “As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained, and started by God. That is my belief.” Raskin replied, “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” eliciting applause from some people in the room. . . .