A long look at "The Long Road Ahead"

It's a long read, but quite eye-opening...makes me wonder what kind of metamorphosis I'll be able to pull off this time...

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The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

by Don Peck

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America - The Atlantic (March 2010):

"The Long Road Ahead"

Since last spring, when fears of economic apocalypse began to ebb, we’ve been treated to an alphabet soup of predictions about the recovery. Various economists have suggested that it might look like a V (a strong and rapid rebound), a U (slower), a W (reflecting the possibility of a double-dip recession), or, most alarming, an L (no recovery in demand or jobs for years: a lost decade). This summer, with all the good letters already taken, the former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on his blog that the recovery might actually be shaped like an X (the imagery is elusive, but Reich’s argument was that there can be no recovery until we find an entirely new model of economic growth)."

No one knows what shape the recovery will take. The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008. If economic growth continues to pick up, substantial job growth will eventually follow. But there are many reasons to doubt the durability of the economic turnaround, and the speed with which jobs will return.

Read the rest here:
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America - The Atlantic (March 2010):

Krugman - America Is Not Yet Lost

There's a definite decline in patriotism by those who shout for it the loudest. Putting party or personal goals before country is petty and wrong and is causing gridlock. In the orient, one has loyalty and service first to country, then family, and lastly self - not the other way around that seems to be increasingly the norm here in the west...
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Krugman:
Op-Ed Columnist - America Is Not Yet Lost - NYTimes.com:

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.
...

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

...

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

...

Op-Ed Columnist - America Is Not Yet Lost - NYTimes.com

Austin Lounge Lizards - Satirical folk music with five part harmony and hot pickin'

One of my all time favorite bands...
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Larry McMurtry once noted, “Being a writer and a Texan is an amusing fate, one that gets funnier as one’s sense of humor darkens. In times like these, it borders on the macabre.”

McMurtry wrote those words in the late Sixties, but he could have been speaking for the Austin Lounge Lizards four decades later. Since the group’s founding in 1980, a shifting ensemble of Lizards has enjoyed what the military folks call a “target-rich environment.” Fools, pompous fatheads, hypocrites and self-important blowhards have never been in short supply in the Lone Star State and, armed with sprightly bluegrass melodies and a rapier-sharp lyrical sting, the band has enjoyed a virtual shooting gallery of satirical opportunities.

And in an era in which the latest Ponzi scheme, the Balloon Boy, Glenn Beck and various villains from Detroit to Wall Street to Washington, D.C., all compete for space in the 24-hour news cycle, the national pickings are better than ever.

The Lizards’ latest single, the Lindsay Eck-penned “Too Big To Fail” (available as an iTunes download), speaks in black-humored fashion of the cynical excesses of the new Gilded Age:

Austin Lounge Lizards - Satirical folk music with five part harmony and hot pickin'

Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

This is the graph I've been wanting to see for a while now...

I wish they'd put more information out in graphs like this.
Kind of an update of the Perot Charts.

Graphics helps my brain process the mind-numbing numbers, and interactive graphics like this are very cool.

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Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com