Slow news day at AP - Unions Not Happy

You know it's a slow news day when the AP has a headline pointing out that unions are not happy with President Obama anymore.  The real news flash is the one for the unions - waking up to the reality that Obama's a best friend of...Obama.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the early days of the Obama administration, organized labor had grand visions of pushing through a sweeping agenda that would help boost sagging membership and help revive union strength.

Now labor faces this reality: Public employee unions are in a drawn-out fight for their very survival in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states where GOP lawmakers have curbed collective bargaining rights.

Also, many union leaders are grousing that the president they worked so hard to elect has not focused enough on job creation and other bold plans to get their members back to work.

"Obama campaigned big, but he's governing small," said Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.

Too bad, so sad.  Not for the unions, for AP.  That just shows how little is going on at this moment.

BLS - do you need the 'L'?

The Unemployment Rate remained unchanged in August at 9.1%.  I've been critical of the numbers reporting in the past, given that the retroactive adjustments always seemed to work to the convenience of the Obama administration.  The number after being widely reported would be later adjusted upwards with little or no fanfare.  Or, the other adjustment would often seem like it was retroactively bumping up the previous month to make the current month's bad news seem less worrisome by comparison.  In other words, the numbers might be pure, but only if you look back far enough.  Sure, maybe it's unintentional, but the adjustments never seem to be of equal distribution between good news and bad news for President Obama.  Color me suspicious. Take out the L from BLS, and you have my view at a minimum, on the way the numbers get reported.

Sarah Palin Announces...

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Arg. Via ABC Sarah Palin Talks About Her ‘Plan’ but Does Not Announce in Iowa;

Again?

ABC News’ Sheila Marikar reports: Sarah Palin’s Iowa speech sounded a lot like a stump speech. She made frequent references to “my plan” — “My plan is a bona-fide pro-working man’s plan and it deals in reality … My plan is about empowerment...

I'm guessing an announcement is indeed coming, but it's starting to take too long. 

Saturday Learning Series: Debate - A good argument

Two weeks ago I posted a Saturday Learning Series post about different types of false arguments. I promised last week I would get back to it but that there was a Yale lecture series on capitalism I really wanted to start posting on as well. It looks like we'll be alternating topics for a while.

Getting back to the philosophical side of debate, rather than looking at poorly formed or misleading argument styles, Kevin deLaplante of The Critical Thinking Academy doesn't just look at what to look for in a bad argument or debate style, he also talks about how to construct a good argument.  From negative to positive.

Obama Jobs Plan - What If Scenario #2

Yesterday I went through the exercise of what would happen if the president in his upcoming jobs speech went big on conservative principles. Not likely but theoretically possible as a scenario, it pales compared to some of the other possibilities. In the next scenario, let's look at what would happen with a "go small approach". In other words, if the president's big plan that he worked on at Martha's Vineyard turned out to be entirely underwhelming, what would happen?  Hang on, there's a twist.

Obama Jobs Plan - What If Scenario #1

Waxing poetic on jobs?

Now that President Obama is done playing footsie with Congress and the address to the joint session of Congress is a go on Thursday, not Wednesday, before the NFL season opener not during, we can turn our attention to the super awesome wonderfulness that will be his august address.  After all, an address to a joint session is usually a big deal, so this jobs address must be a doozie of a plan.  It must be spectacular to merit such a rare non-State of the Union joint session.

So what's the plan?  I can think of four different scenarios that could materialize and each has a different set of implications for the country and for how the GOP should react.