La News

A presidential proclamation marking Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

Available in full after the jump.

Interesting point from First Read: "We've wondered what Obama's election would do to other senators. For years, senators were told they'd never get to the White House, and the stats proved it. Now, with governors in general less popular now than before, having a well-rounded issue experience that a senator gets may mean more to voters than so-called executive experience."

IT'S ON!...
Dems are attacking Republican Representatives in radio ads for not spending enough taxpayer money!
Really!

Barack Obama will quadruple the deficit this year.

Democrats believe they have a winning formula for 2010.
They are airing ads attacking Republican Representatives for not voting on the massive Democratic spending bills this year.
Roll Call reported:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running radio advertisements for the next week targeting six House Republicans, according to details obtained by Roll Call. The committee blasted these GOP Members for voting against Democrats?" Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which passed earlier this year.

Radio advertisements, automated calls and e-mails will target Reps. Don Young (Alaska), Brian Bilbray (Calif.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), Peter King (N.Y.) and Charlie Dent (Pa.).

?SDid you know Congressman King voted against the economic recovery plan?? says an announcer in the spot running in King?"s district. ?SHe opposed an $800 tax cut and opposed creating or saving 215,000 New York jobs. Tell King to put New York first.?

In addition to the radio advertisement, which is scheduled to air during drive time, automatic phone calls will run in each of the Republicans?" districts. The automated calls refer to specific projects in the districts that could be funded by the stimulus, such as widening a road in McCotter?"s district.

Obviously, the democrats didn't get the message from the California voters 10 days ago.

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

John Nance, the former FAA administrator, and now an aviation consultant to ABC News, says that there's a 50-50 chance that the missing Air France jet went down in an explosion. The story was just on ABC. They tended to downplay Nance's comments, but I have to admit, i was wondering about the possibility of terrorism as well. Obviously, it's too soon - and it's suspicious that no terrorist group is claiming credit, since they're usually not very shy about such things.