Wednesday Mashup Part Two (2/17/10)

(Part One is over here.)

It’s time for more of the comedy stylings of Andrew Malcolm (here, where he tells us that President Obama is apparently doomed in his quest for a second term)…

In terms of Obama job approval/disapproval, the CNN poll of 1,023 adult Americans finds 49% yea and 50% nay.

Part of the problem, according to CNN analyst Keating Holland, comes from the perception among a 45% plurality of Americans that Obama belongs to the upper class, which only 4% of Americans identify with.

Holland calls it "the perception that Obama is not a middle-class kind of guy."

Gee, go figure. How so many Americans (Harvard) could possibly get the impression (Chicago's Hyde Park) that Obama and his wife Michelle (Harvard) are out-of-touch members ("corpseman") of the elite upper class (millionaires) is anybody's guess (Arugula).

This tells us that Obama’s predecessor enjoyed a 48 percent approval rating (one point below where Obama is now) in July 2004, just a few months before his return to office for a second term. And I wouldn’t be inclined to infer any comparisons to Number 43 (Yale) and his family (oil rich), as well as any supposedly highfalutin’ affiliations (Skull and Bones) or fancy menu items (Arugula, noted in the third course from here).

By the way, yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol (entered into force on February 16, 2005), which, as noted here, is…

…an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty intended to bring countries together to reduce global warming and to cope with the effects of temperature increases that are unavoidable after 150 years of industrialization. The provisions of the Kyoto Protocol are legally binding on the ratifying nations, and stronger than those of the UNFCCC.

And the About.com article also reminds us of the following unpleasant history…

As a U.S. presidential candidate, George W. Bush promised to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Shortly after he took office in 2001, however, President Bush withdrew U.S. support for the Kyoto Protocol and refused to submit it to Congress for ratification.

Instead, Bush proposed a plan with incentives for U.S. businesses to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas emissions 4.5 percent by 2010, which he claimed would equal taking 70 million cars off the road. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, however, the Bush plan actually would result in a 30 percent increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels instead of the 7 percent reduction the treaty requires. That’s because the Bush plan measures the reduction against current emissions instead of the 1990 benchmark used by the Kyoto Protocol.

And as Time Magazine told us in July 2001 here…

President Bush gambled that withdrawing from the negotiations — that is, removing the indispensable polluter — would force the international community back to the drawing board to seek an agreement more favorable to the U.S.'s gas-guzzling economy. But summary withdrawal from a decade-old process and failure at the same time to advance any alternative was read by the Europeans as a lack of seriousness. Indeed, there was spontaneous booing in the conference hall at Bonn when U.S. delegate Paula Dobriansky told the meeting, "The Bush administration takes the issue of climate change very seriously and we will not abdicate our responsibility." On global warming, the "indispensable nation" is looking rather more like a "rogue nation."

This tells us that as of last October, 187 countries had signed and ratified the Kyoto agreement, pledging to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, HFCs and PFCs. The goal of the Kyoto Protocol is to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

And in place of Kyoto, the Obama Administration has advanced the so-called Copenhagen Agreement, which, as noted here, provides for the following…

• All major economies must commit to reducing their emissions.
• There must be a transparent review to ensure nations are keeping their commitments to reduce emissions
• There needs to be financing to help developing nations adapt to these new standards

“It is a clear formula -- one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities,” Obama said. “And it adds up to a significant accord -- one that takes us farther than we have ever gone before as an international community.”

As noted here by Bob Herbert, although China has not signed onto the Copenhagen Agreement (here, with lack of signoff by India and China serving as a sticking point for the Bush Administration, which, as far as I’m concerned, was never serious about this issue anyway), they are moving full steam ahead, as it were, in development of a clean energy economy, which might end up satisfying or even exceeding the Kyoto standard. Meanwhile, “the world’s greatest deliberative body” continues to collectively dawdle on this matter, as they have on seemingly everything else (here).

And I don’t know exactly what it says about al Qaeda that bin Laden has attacked this country on global warming and our currency as he did here; hopefully it means that his bunch of terrorist cowards has been hampered by our efforts all of this years to the point where this is the most dramatic threat he can muster (we can only hope). However, it may also mean that he knows this country’s relative inaction on global warming is yet another arrow in his metaphorical quiver that he can use for propaganda attacks.

At least our defense community has its “eye on the ball” on this issue, as noted here (as opposed to a certain Arizona senator who was in favor of a “successor to Kyoto” before he was against it, as noted here).

And finally, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote the following yesterday (here)…

Long-term unemployment is one of the most devastating experiences a person can endure, equal, according to some measures, to the death of a spouse. Men who are unemployed for a significant amount of time are more likely to drink more, abuse their children more and suffer debilitating blows to their identity. Unemployed men are not exactly the most eligible mates. So in areas of high unemployment, marriage rates can crumble — while childbearing rates out of wedlock do not.

Young people who enter the work force in a recession, meanwhile, are psychologically altered. They are less likely to get professional-level jobs throughout life. They are less likely to switch jobs later in their career, even in pursuit of greater opportunity. But there’s also reason not to be too despairing. The country endured stagflation and recession between 1977 and 1983, and rebounded smartly in the 1980s and ’90s.

Wow, color me shocked. Sounds like BoBo has been reading Bob Herbert.

Continuing…

That’s because people are not passive pawns of economic forces. Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

Uh oh, I think we’re in trouble…

This recession has exposed America’s social weak spots. For decades, men have adapted poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy. Now they are paying the price. For decades, the working-class social fabric has been fraying. Now the working class is in danger of descending into underclass-style dysfunction. For decades, young people have been living in a loose, under-institutionalized world. Now they are moving back home in droves.

OK, now we’re in familiar territory with Brooks. So…the reason our economy stinks is that “men have adapted poorly” and young people are moving back home…???

As noted here, though, this is a variation on the same tired, disproven BoBo theme; the following excerpt illustrates this point…

DAVID BROOKS (New York Times columnist): Maybe. You know, I guess the one thing I'd say is, one of things (Obama and the Democrats) cannot do is go back to the New Deal. One of the things they're talking about is building roads, building bridges. Well, sometimes it takes 80 months to get an infrastructure project actually going. The amount of money spent in the first couple of years in infrastructure -- miniscule. So, the one thing I'd say to them: Think about the new economy. This is a human capital economy. Think about relationships and not roads. And so, if I were designing employment plans –

STEPHANOPOULOS: And what does that mean exactly?

BROOKS: Right, if I were designing employment plans, the things I would think about is do some road building, build some schools -- that's fine -- but think about national service. Think about how you're going to build relationships. Think about how you're going to build federal money to create communities that actually employ a lot of people in a service sector sort of economy. To me, they're -- the way they're talking now, they're doing a lot of reading about [Roosevelt adviser] Harry Hopkins. I would spend a lot more time thinking about, "How am I going to build relationships using service, building communities?"

ROBERT KUTTNER (co-founder, The American Prospect): I really think -- respectfully, I disagree. It's a kind of a straw man. I mean, I think you have to do all of the above. I think the hit to the economy is so serious. Contrary to the usual belief, you can get infrastructure programs going pretty quickly, and by giving relief to state and local government, you get help on the way instantaneously. Right now, state and local governments are laying off people. They're deferring projects. They're cutting health and education. If the government cuts a check to state and local governments to the tune of $100, $150 billion dollars, not one of those layoffs have to occur.

And I suppose it’s also the fault of men adapting poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy that, for the first time ever, women surpass men on U.S. payrolls, noted here (one explanation offered by Economics Professor Casey Mulligan, the person who found this out, is that women tend to work more in winter months because many men working in construction cannot do so because much of this type of work is seasonal employment).

Oh, and did you know that The Sainted Ronnie R was responsible for an 8-point drop in unemployment according to Brooks? Me neither, mainly because that’s not true, as noted here.

And Brooks concludes by saying that “Somehow there must be a way to use the country’s idle talent to address freshly exposed needs.”

I would tend to agree with that. And one of those “freshly exposed needs” should be a new New York Times Op-Ed columnist.

Update 2/19/10: I was having a horrific time with Blogger while working on this post, and I forgot these two links: here, our media applauds the "recovery" while unemployment supposedly falls, and this tells us of "disposable workers."