How bad is it out there? Even a cursory scan of the news paints a grim picture of an America on the brink: broken roads, crumbling bridges, dimmed streetlights, shuttered clinics and scrapped school programs. Everywhere one turns, the nation’s basic infrastructure—built in the twentieth century to connect communities and care for the sick, the young and the old—is being abandoned, as if there were not enough workers to keep it up. Yet the exact opposite is true: more than one in ten Americans are out of work, and more than half of those have been unemployed for more than six months.

Even the normally inflation-obsessed Fed, worried that the economy is headed into a deflationary spiral, bought billions in Treasury securities to keep money flowing through the financial system. But monetary policy can only do so much. The short-term solution to the crisis is obvious: get cash pumping through states and cities to create and preserve jobs. So too are the obstacles: a breathtakingly cynical GOP hellbent on opposing anything that might improve the economy—in the hopes that voters will blame Democrats in November—and an ill-timed, baseless bipartisan hysteria over deficits.

There is no clearer sign of the poisonous environment created by these factions than the battle to pass a $26 billion package to help states and local governments make Medicaid payments and avoid laying off 140,000 teachers. The only way Senate majority leader Harry Reid was able to break a Republican filibuster was with offsets, largely through—if you can believe it—$12 billion in cuts to food stamps. Reid had to table his initial proposal to cut “only” $6.7 billion in food stamps because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said the bill would still add $4.9 billion to the deficit. Only by nearly doubling the food stamp cut were Democrats able to win the votes of Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

READ MORE: http://www.thenation.com/article/154021/no-relief-sight

By Matt Patterson-The Washington Times

Poor Al Gore. As if an im- pending divorce and allegations of sexual misconduct from an Oregon masseuse weren’t bad enough (he has since been cleared of wrongdoing), the apparent collapse of “cap-and-trade” legislation in the U.S. Senate has driven the former vice president to despair.

As reported by Steve Milloy on his blog Green Hell, Mr. Gore recently admitted to supporters in a conference call, “[T]his [cap-and-trade] battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year.” Mr. Gore blamed everyone and their monkey for the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation, including his former colleagues: “The U.S. Senate has failed us,” he lamented, “the federal government has failed us.”

The fortunes of Mr. Gore’s global-warming crusade certainly are in decline: A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 34 percent of respondents “feel human activity is the main contributor” to global warming and that the percentage of those who consider global warming a “serious issue” has “trended down slightly since last November.”

Mr. Gore himself is to blame for at least some of the public backlash against global-warming orthodoxy: Using bad science to justify bad policy will inevitably rub people the wrong way. And Mr. Gore has not helped his cause by consistently expressing outrageous falsehoods (”the debate is over”) and shamelessly trying to shield his assertions from legitimate criticism by claiming “settled science.” All the while, he has enriched himself and pushed a left-wing economic agenda.

READ MORE: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/24/al-gores-global-warming-crusade-shrinks/

By KARL ROVE

In what will rank as one of the all-time presidential PR disasters, we’re now well over half way through what the White House called “the summer of recovery.” And what a recovery it’s been.

Earlier this month, first-time claims for unemployment hit a nine-month high. The unemployment rate remains at 9.5% and 18.4% of workers are out of a job, can only get part-time work, or have given up looking for a job altogether. Sales of existing homes dropped 27% from June to July, hitting the lowest point since data were first collected in 1999. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 50.4 in July, continuing a slide that started in February. And the stock market is down 11% from its peak in April.

All of this has helped shatter public confidence in the president. In early May, Mr. Obama’s approval on the economy in the YouGov/Polimetrix poll was 42%. By mid-August, it was 35%—a frightening number for Democrats less than 70 days from a midterm election. According to this week’s Reuters poll, 72% are “very” worried about jobs and 67% “very concerned” about government spending.

Mr. Obama’s credibility is crumbling, and for good reason: He and his people are saying things people don’t believe. At the start of his summer of recovery road show, the president flatly asserted that last year’s massive stimulus package had “worked.” Vice President Joe Biden, not to be outdone, promised monthly job gains of up to 500,000 and insisted that the recovery’s pace “continues to increase, not decrease” as stimulus spending was “moving into its highest gear.”

READ MORE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703632304575451502211231456.html

All have been donated to the museum, which is asking families of those killed in the 2001 attacks for photos, personal items or mementos — things to show posterity that at the start of the 21st century, there were people with achievements, passions and dreams that terrorism could not erase.

The Trade Center's slurry wall, left, held back the Hudson River on 9/11. It will be included in the 9/11 museum along with the "Last Column," seen here covered in protective materials.

But it’s not that simple. As illustrated by the national controversy over an Islamic community center and mosque proposed two blocks away, nothing about Ground Zero and 9/11 is simple.

Although most 9/11 families seem inclined to give the museum photos or artifacts or recorded memories of their loved ones, some are boycotting the appeal because of misgivings about the museum now being built in the Trade Center’s foundation pit.

They complain that the underground museum will be unsafe in case of attack; that it will devote too much attention to the al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked two airliners and crashed them into the Trade Center’s towers; and that victims’ unidentified remains, which are to be kept behind a “memorial wall,” will become a macabre, if invisible, tourist attraction.

Museum officials such as President Joe Daniels respond that the underground site helps tell the story of 9/11 by showing visitors the Trade Center’s footings and the 70-foot-high foundation wall that remained standing after the towers collapsed; that the terrorists’ role must be explained, in part to debunk bogus conspiracy theories; and that Ground Zero is a more fitting repository for the victims’ remains than the medical examiner’s office.

The museum dispute has been obscured by the one over the Islamic center, described by proponents, including its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, as a rebuke to radical Islam. Opponents — including prominent Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, and many 9/11 victims’ family members — call the planned mosque an insensitive intrusion on sacred ground.

President Obama last week said Muslims have a right to build a mosque near the site because of the nation’s freedom of religion but said he wouldn’t comment on the wisdom of doing so.

Gingrich accused Obama of “pandering to radical Islam. … Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.”

Together, the controversies show how much raw emotion still attends Ground Zero. “Lots of these (9/11) families have such issues, they can’t move on,” says Eileen Fagan, whose sister Patricia died at the Trade Center. “They can’t agree on anything.”

Erika Doss, a Notre Dame historian and author of Memorial Mania, a book on public memorials, says such sites are always emotionally fraught. Yet she’s surprised by the intensity of feeling about the mosque and the museum: “It’s a different country than nine years ago, but it’s amazing how people are hanging on to this. There are people who are still really, really angry.”

Given the complexities and controversies at Ground Zero, says Edward Linenthal, another expert on public memorials, it’s virtually impossible to build anything there without conflict: “Solomon couldn’t do it.”

The storm over the Islamic center may die down before the one over the museum, which will open two months before the 2012 presidential election. By then, museum officials will have to decide whether to display artifacts such as a terrorist’s travel visa or include printed quotes from hijackers’ “martyr videos.”

Alice Greenwald, the museum director, says only 2% of the space will be devoted to the terrorists. Daniels says the terrorists’ photos — roughly 4-by-6 inches — may be displayed on tables rather than a wall “so they’ll be less in your face.”

Some wonder whether the museum can fulfill its dual mission to honor the dead and educate the public.

“Will it be a museum or a shrine?” asks David Simpson, a professor at the University of California-Davis who wrote 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. “Sometimes you have to wait 20 or 30 years to tell a story. It’s not a great time for an open discussion of 9/11.”

Honor and educate

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum expects to be the city’s top visitor destination, attracting 5 million to 7 million people a year. (The current leader, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had about 4.5 million visitors last year; in its first 11 months, the museum’s “preview site” in a nearby storefront drew 1 million.)

The project will cost at least $610 million to build and $50 million a year to operate. The building cost will be covered largely by donations, including $15 million each from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and fellow philanthropist David Rockefeller. It’s unclear whether public funds will subsidize operations, or whether admission will be charged.

The memorial, on a plaza shaded by 400 trees, will consist of two massive pools with 30-foot waterfalls set in the footprints of the twin towers. Plaques around the pools will bear the names of 2,982 people who died in New York, at the Pentagon, on United Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania and in the 1993 Trade Center bombing.

The project sits next to the Freedom Tower, or One World Trade Center, now under construction. The tower is scheduled to open in 2013 and, at a symbolic height of 1,776 feet, be the nation’s tallest building.

The memorial opens a year from now, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, and the museum a year after that. Its visitors will enter through a pavilion on the plaza and descend 70 feet to bedrock, where one exhibit will tell the story of 9/11, another the stories of the victims.

The museum’s collection includes the “Ground Zero Cross,” a steel cross beam found in the rubble; the “Last Column,” a 36-foot-high steel member covered with handwritten messages, which was taken from the site in 2002 at the end of the cleanup; and the “Survivors’ Stairs,” down which many escaped the Trade Center Plaza on 9/11.

Yet some of the museum’s most affecting items may be the most personal – a favorite baseball hat, an old license plate from back home, a WTC souvenir, a “missing” poster. Most families have yet to contribute anything. Some procrastinate because they dread having to decide what best sums up the life of their spouse, sibling or child.

And there’s this: “What am I able to part with?” asks Bonnie McEneaney, who lost her husband, Eamon, once an All-American lacrosse player at Cornell. She’s thinking about giving one of his sticks.

Here’s how four relatives of 9/11 victims respond to the museum’s appeal:

The $2 love story

When Rob Gschaar proposed to Myrta Alvarado in 1987, he showed her two $2 bills — one for her, one for him. Their first marriages had ended in divorce, and he said the bills meant they were two of a kind, each with a second chance at happiness. “If we ever get lost,” he told her, “I will find you with that bill.”

Each tucked a bill away. Nothing more was said about them, not even when the couple married in 1989.

Fourteen years later, Rob was working for Aon Insurance in the south tower. After the north tower was hit, Myrta called him. He tried to reassure her he’d be OK; then he started to cry. “My God, I see them jumping,” he told her. “I can see the bodies coming down.” He said he loved her and he’d call back. It was the last she heard from him.

Several years later, she was called to the New York Police Department property room. Her husband’s wallet had been found in the rubble. It was caked with a fine silt and smelled of smoke.

She opened it and pulled out the bills — first a five, then a one and finally, folded up, a two. The two. She couldn’t speak. The police just looked at her. She reached into her pocketbook, found her wallet and pulled out her matching $2 bill. Then the officers couldn’t speak, either.

That’s when Myrta finally accepted that Rob had not wandered off with amnesia. She could move on, because he was not coming back. “I knew he would never part with that bill.”

She says she gave both bills to the museum because that’s what Rob, a history buff, would have wanted. “It’s the way I can give him something, to put him in the middle of history,” she says. “The world needs to know there are some stories with a happy ending.”

The pocketbook

The sisters Fagan shared the daily commute from central New Jersey, where they lived with their 93-year-old father, to their jobs in Lower Manhattan.

Pat’s other companion was her black canvas pocketbook, where she kept everything to get through the day — wallet, bus tickets, glasses, favorite Lancome lipstick (Passion Pink), a bulging folder with their father’s medical records. And two sets of rosary beads: a brown wooden set for the bus and an aqua crystal set known as St. Anthony beads, named for the patron of travelers and seekers of lost items.

On 9/11, Pat was working at Aon Insurance in the south tower. Eileen was across the street at the Bank of New York. As she fled her building, she saw the north tower collapse and realized the south tower was already gone.

In January 2003, she got a letter from the police listing valuables recovered at Ground Zero, including $162 cash and credit cards. “I thought, ‘Holy God, they must have the pocketbook.’ ”

It was battered and grimy, but its contents were intact, including both sets of rosary beads. “It was such a moment of faith for me,” she says. “I felt the Blessed Mother had been with Pat.” And St. Anthony with herself.

Donating the pocketbook “seemed like the perfect tribute” to her sister, Eileen says. “We don’t have that much family. People aren’t going to remember her except for this pocketbook. It’s the story of her life. She was like a lot of people that day, going to work, just doing her job.”

The last call

The last time Lisa Friedman spoke to her husband, Andy, was exactly 9:16 a.m. on Sept. 11. She has the cellphone bills to prove it.

Andy, as carefree as their twin boys, didn’t like to carry around a cellphone. But after he got a job at Carr Futures in the north tower late that summer, Lisa bought him a sexy little black and silver Audiovox. “I thought there’d be more of a chance he’d use it,” she says. When he went to work on 9/11, he forgot the phone at home on Long Island.

Later that morning, when he called Lisa, he used a co-worker’s cell. His voice was calm. “We’re going to be fine. We have plenty of air,” he said. Lisa could hear coughing in the background. “All I could say was, ‘I love you,’ ” she says. “I didn’t even say goodbye.”

Months later, Lisa contacted the colleague’s mother and got a copy of his cellphone bill. Amid repeated calls to 911, there was Andy’s outgoing call at 9:15. Her own bill shows the incoming call a minute later. Lisa says she offered the cellphone bills and Andy’s own little-used phone to the museum because they’re “little things that tell a story about that day. Just a guy calling his wife on the phone.”

The dissenter

Diane Horning will neither visit nor contribute to the museum, which she describes as too much, too soon.

“It lacks the perspective of history,” she says. “The museum should have been done years from now, with just a simple memorial for now. We never asked for something this big.”

She worries that to attract visitors the museum will sensationalize 9/11 — go for what she calls “the wow factor” — and focus less on the victims than “the men who killed my son.” Matt Horning, a database administrator for Marsh & McLennan, died in the north tower.

His mother complains that while the hijackers’ faces and histories will be on permanent display “in a room of their own,” visitors who want to learn about their victims will have to call up files at a computer station. Museum officials say, “We must tell the true story,” she says. “My son is the true story.”

She also says that while 9/11 families always expected that unidentified human remains would return to Ground Zero, they never thought they’d be “part of a museum experience.” She’d like to see the remains interred in a “tomb of the unknowns” until advances in DNA science allow their identification.

That said, she wishes the museum well and expects most of the 9/11 families to accept and even embrace it: “They feel this is better than nothing. People desperately want a place to honor the victims and connect with their feelings. People so desperately want something there.”

Contributing: Martha T. Moore