The Jobless Go Back to School and, They Hope, Work

In this article about workers retraining, this jumped out at me.

Retraining has never been easy for workers, often stressing family finances. But in this deep recession, going back to school can be an even greater leap of faith. The velocity of recent layoffs means that many businesses are contracting rather than expanding their payrolls. That leaves many newly trained job seekers competing against more experienced workers who have also been laid off.

Still, many people are scrambling to get retrained in hopes of catching the next economic updraft. In Rockford, a city of about 150,000 people about 90 miles northwest of Chicago, 19% of residents have at least a four-year college degree, compared with the national average of 27%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Barely a quarter of the population has a Bachelor's degree?

White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code

President Obama in a meeting last week in the Oval Office, where his predecessor required a coat and tie at all times.










Hey, Israeli politicians don't even wear ties.

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

Hates the cold? I knew I liked him; that solidifies it.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

Toasty warm; I like it that way, too.

In the West Wing, Mr. Obama is a bit of a wanderer. When Mr. Bush wanted to see a member of his staff, the aide was summoned to the Oval Office. But Mr. Obama tends to roam the halls; one day last week, he turned up in the office of his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who was in the unfortunate position of having his feet up on the desk when the boss walked in.

“Wow, Gibbs,” the press secretary recalls the president saying. “Just got here and you already have your feet up.” Mr. Gibbs scrambled to stand up, surprising Mr. Obama, who is not yet accustomed to having people rise when he enters a room.

Good sense of humor.

Under Mr. Bush, punctuality was a virtue. Meetings started early — the former president once locked Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out of the Cabinet Room when Mr. Powell showed up a few minutes late — and ended on time. In the Obama White House, meetings start on time and often finish late.

Imagine the Secretary of State getting locked out of a room. Seems rather controlling, and silly.

“I’ll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something he was mad about,” said Dan Bartlett, who was counselor to Mr. Bush. “I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold.”

Silly? Seems quite anal-retentive, frankly.

If there is one thing Mr. Obama has not gotten around to changing, it is the Oval Office décor. When Mr. Bush moved in, he exercised his presidential decorating prerogatives and asked his wife, Laura, to supervise the design of a new rug. Mr. Bush loved to regale visitors with the story of the rug, whose sunburst design, he liked to say, was intended to evoke a feeling of optimism.

President of rugs; how sweet.

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye.

“He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”














Mr. Obama has exhibited a relatively informal working relationship with aides like his staff secretary, Lisa Brown.














At the Capitol on Tuesday, Mr. Obama startled lawmakers by walking up to the microphones in a Senate corridor to talk to reporters, as if he were still a senator. Twice, during formal White House ceremonies, Mr. Obama called out to aides as television cameras rolled, as he did on Monday when the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson, asked for a presidential pen.

“Hey, Lisa,” Mr. Obama called out to his staff secretary, Lisa Brown, “does she get this pen?”

Change is here, it seems

Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama’s choice of a Clinton administration veteran to head a new White House energy office and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist as energy secretary will redefine the way policy is made and applied in the U.S.

The pundits, Chris Matthews included, keep wondering about the change promised by Obama. Of course, that he got elected is the first manifestation of change. His method of assembling his Administration, and its composition, are other such manifestations.

At stake is the success of Obama’s plan to invest $150 billion in alternative energy technologies that will create jobs and cut emissions of gases linked to global warming. Chu, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, will help decide how to spend the money. Browner, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under Bill Clinton, will coordinate the efforts of at least 13 federal agencies and commissions.

Delegation of authority to strong personalities who will be charged with getting things done.

Browner is likely to focus on big-picture energy issues sweeping across all federal agencies, while Chu will be responsible for making sure the Energy Department develops the technologies needed to allow solar, wind and biomass to compete with oil and coal, said Arvizu and other analysts.

Browner might be in charge of the big picture, opines one analyst; Chu might handle the details, the nuts and bolts, as it were.

Mike Lubell, a physics professor at the City College of New York who has known Chu for 30 years, said having a scientist as an energy secretary will be vital in helping remove obstacles to achieving Obama’s goals. “Almost anything you look at in the energy arena today, the solutions are not cost competitive,” Lubell said.

Chu might be a visionary, as well.

In particular, mysteries regarding how to store energy when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining have to be unlocked, Lubell said. Battery technology has to be improved, carbon sequestration has to be developed and cellulosic ethanol has to be made more affordable. “These are big science and technology problems,” he said.

There is plenty of skepticism, too: Republicans and business interests are already decrying more bureaucracy. Time will tell. I like it.

Green Sahara

Fascinating pictures.

“Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,” he said. “I realized we were in the green Sahara.”