Monday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!! I took a little mini-break from my usual obsessive news reading over the holiday weekend. I figured if anything huge happened, someone would post it at TC and I’d learn about it that way.

This week will be full of manufactured news from the White House, as President Obama goes on a speech and news conference bender in an attempt to fool Americans into thinking that the economy is improving. I doubt if it’s going to work.

So what’s happening out there this morning? Well, today President Obama is going “talk about jobs” (talk being the operative word) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He’ll speak to union members, their families, and others at the city’s Laborfest. The White House says the president will talk about several items – including incentives to get small businesses to hire more people.

Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis, will join him at the Milwaukee event along with national leaders of the AFL CIO. Solis says the administration has gotten the message from Americans who say the pace of job growth is not fast enough.

They sure are slow to get the message. I wonder how long it will take before they stop talking about it and actually do something about creating jobs? I’m not holding my breath, that’s for sure.

As RD discussed yesterday, Obama will push formaking the R&D business tax credit permanent.

This is not the first time Obama has called for making the credit permanent. But with the economic recovery moving more slowly than the administration had hoped – and Democratic candidates nationwide panicking as the issue threatens their majorities in the House and Senate on Nov. 2 – he is increasingly eager to show he understands the depth of the problem and is trying to act.

Republicans are trying to prove the opposite. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) accused the administration on Sunday of “flailing around” in its economic policies.

Obama will talk more about the proposal in Cleveland on Wednesday.

Today, Bloomberg reports that

President Barack Obama will propose a six-year national infrastructure plan today as part of a series of measures to boost jobs and spur the economy ahead of the congressional midterm elections in November, an administration official said.

Obama will announce the proposal to union families at a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, scheduled for 3:10 p.m. New York time.

The president will call for an initial investment of $50 billion in the first year to fund improvements to surface transportation, airports and the air traffic control system, the administration official said. The White House will work with Congress so that the plan would be fully paid for, the official said.

Supposedly this plan will immediately create a lot of jobs.

Struggling to persuade Americans that his economic policies are working, Obama will use appearances in Milwaukee and Cleveland this week to set the tone for the fall campaign.

The argument he will make on the trips and a rare White House news conference is this: Democratic policies have stopped the bleeding and produced some economic growth. Yes, more needs to be done, but Republicans would bring back ideas, he will argue, that propelled the country into the deepest recession in 70 years.

Unfortunately, Obama and his advisers still don’t seem to get it. We need action, not more talk. But we’ll be getting a lot of talk this week whether we like it or not.

The NYT reports that the housing situation is getting critical.

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid. [....]

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee — July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 — there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash. [....]

Caught in the middle is an administration that gambled on a recovery that is not happening.

“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”

Well that’s just terrific, isn’t it? Too bad we didn’t get a President who had a better idea about “what to do” to help struggling working people.

Paul Krugman has some ideas, in fact he’s just about freaking out–but don’t hold your breath waiting for President Obama to listen to him.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

And what got us out of that mess back in 1938? That’s right Conflucians, World War II happened. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t think bombing Iran will improve our economic situation.

Updating a couple of ongoing news stories:

On Saturday, BP finally managed to replace the blowout preventer on their rogue well, and the the BOP that failed back in April was seized by US authorities as evidence.

Admiral Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard commander in overall charge of the operation, declared that the preventer “will be taken into custody” and become part of the “evidence material that’s been required by the joint investigative team”.

His comments reflected another shift in the direction of a tragedy that has claimed 11 lives, cost BP chief executive Tony Hayward his job, BP and its shareholders at least $50bn (£32.3bn), diminished the credibility of President Obama, disrupted fishing and tourism, and threatened the environment around the Gulf states.

The preventer, now under close guard and inspection, has almost assumed a criminal dimension. It will form a crucial part of the evidence the US Justice Department is examining to see whether BP or Transocean, owners of the stricken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, have broken any rules that could result in a successful prosecution.

The disastrous floods in Pakistan are continuing and the NYT says they “carry the seeds of upheaval.”

After scathing criticism that they were unprepared for the disaster and inept in their initial response, government officials, ministers and even President Asif Ali Zardari are crisscrossing flood-affected areas of the country in a frantic effort to ease public anger and despair.

Pakistani officials, diplomats and aid workers warn that while civil unrest has so far been averted, the aftermath of the worst-ever flooding in Pakistan could destabilize the country in the months to come and aggravate the already deep regional, sectarian and class fissures.

Management of the disaster has added to the distrust that many Pakistanis already feel for their civilian political leaders, while the armed forces have burnished their image performing rescue and relief missions along the length of the flooded areas.

There have been angry accusations from politicians and flood victims that officials have guided relief to their own party supporters, and serious allegations that powerful landlords and politicians diverted surging floodwaters to protect their own lands at the expense of others.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

There is more talk going around about Hillary running in 2012. I don’t watch the Sunday news shows, so imagine my surprise when I read at Raw Story this morning that David Gregory asked David Plouffe to comment on the possibility and. Plouffe was noncommittal.

David Plouffe told NBC’s David Gregory that he doesn’t anticipate a Democratic challenger in 2012 but deflected questions about a possible Clinton run.

“Do you envision a primary challenge from another Democrat in 2012 against this president?” asked Gregory.

“I can’t imagine that,” replied Plouffe.

“Can you rule out based on actual information that Secretary of State Clinton would not pursue the presidency again and would not challenge President Obama?” Gregory wondered.

“You saw this week they’re working so well together. Working on Middle East peace and it’s a wonderful partnership. I think that was a really inspired choice by the president and Secretary of State Clinton is doing a remarkable job,” said Plouffe.

“Is that yes, no or maybe?” pressed Gregory.

“They’re a team and a great team for America,” Plouffe answered.

Hmmmm…very interesting.

Finally, I came across this op-ed in the NYT that relates to the discussion we’ve been having about religion at TC: Mystery and Evidence

There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: “And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?” Russell replied: “I will say: ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you didn’t give us enough evidence.’ ”

This is a very natural way for atheists to react to religious claims: to ask for evidence, and reject these claims in the absence of it….Certainly this is the way that today’s “new atheists” tend to approach religion. According to their view, religions — by this they mean basically Christianity, Judaism and Islam…are largely in the business of making claims about the universe that are a bit like scientific hypotheses. In other words, they are claims — like the claim that God created the world — that are supported by evidence, that are proved by arguments and tested against our experience of the world. And against the evidence, these hypotheses do not seem to fare well.

But is this the right way to think about religion? Here I want to suggest that it is not, and to try and locate what seem to me some significant differences between science and religion.

Go read the rest if you’re interested. I’ll just say that Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian had a big impact on me when I was in my early teens. I rushed out and read more of his books and others along the same lines. As you could probably tell from my comments on Dakinikat’s excellent post, I still very much enjoy thinking about and discussing this topic.

So what are you reading this morning? Please share your links with us and have a marvelous Labor Day Monday!!!!