Never Again Scientific Activities. I.e., NASA!

About two years ago, I blogged here that India was wasting a whole lot of resources on an expedition to Mars when it had plenty of problems, especially the daily realities of open defecation and urban waste management.  And then a year later I celebrated India's success with the Mars expedition, and was delighted with the number of female scientists in the project.

It is not that I am a flip-flopper who is happy to ride along with success.  If it were up to me, I would any day push India towards spending money on the fundamentals like addressing defecation and the atrocious government schools.  The Mars expedition success does not change the reality on the ground.

The United States, on the other hand, has been doing everything possible to dismantle its valued, respected, and universally admired NASA, thanks to Congress crying that there is no money to fund NASA.  Seriously?  My old country and the adopted country are both messed up with their priorities in their own ways!  The richest country that the planet has ever known has no money for NASA?  We waste trillions of dollars on fighting wars for reasons that did not even exist, but no change to spare for NASA.

In the 1960s, NASA’s budget was nearly five percent of our federal budget. The U.S. space program gave us solar panels and MRI scans and inspired two generations of citizens to become fascinated by science and engineering, which is arguably the driving force behind our technological superiority among nations. Today, NASA scrapes by, still doing remarkable things with rovers and probes, on less than half of one percent of the federal budget. How can we help more Americans understand the value NASA has for our advancement?

From five percent of the budget to less than half of one percent?  Shocking.  Disgusting.

Even more shocking to when it is put like this:

NASA's flat budget won't pay for a Mars mission. At the moment NASA can't even get an astronaut to the International Space Station without buying a seat on a Russian rocket.

Seriously?  WTF!

In recent years, the agency has had to build its strategies around flat budgets. "Budget is mission-critical" is a catch phrase at headquarters. NASA retired the space shuttle program in 2011 not because the hardware was old or dysfunctional, but to free up several billion dollars a year to build new rockets and capsules that could go beyond Low Earth Orbit.

Why spend the money, you ask?  Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson:

There’s a lot to do in space.  I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.  We still can’t predict the day-to-day behavior of the Sun.  We have something called space weather now, which monitors particles that stream off from the Sun.  That’s a whole frontier, didn’t exist a few decades ago.  We knew about it but we couldn’t measure it, couldn’t do anything about it.  So I see NASA as our… the extension of our senses into space.  ‘Cause Earth is not an island, Earth is a participant in our cosmic environment.  And the more you think… I only have to look down, the more doom you are because of the environment in which we’re embedded.  You look down, all the asteroids coming behind you and you miss it. 

But, all that cannot happen when we want to cut NASA's budget further down from the less than half of one percent of the federal budget.

What a mess. The majority of Americans love NASA, and it’s incredible that NASA can do such amazing feats like send probes to Pluto and Saturn and protoplanets like Vesta and Ceres at all, let alone given the Keystone Kops feel of the Congresspeople pulling the purse strings. My only hope now is that these folks in Congress get replaced in the 2016 elections.
It’s hard to look to the stars when the people funding you have their heads jammed into pork barrels.

What a mess!

Unemployment and the moral(e) issue

As it gets closer to the time that I will have to start grading, a different kind of a reflex reaction kicks in--I seek compensation in terms of reading and blogging, perhaps to replenish the dead grey cells.

Plus, there are incredibly serious problems all around--way more than the "poor me" problems.  Isn't that right, friend? ;)

Consider, for instance, this scary, scary chart:

I am flummoxed trying to imagine a 50% unemployment.  And more!  What the what?

We are not talking about some uneducated, illiterate youth simply idling away.  It is an educated population that is jobless.  I have lucked out in life--no firsthand experience of unemployment.  Even the teetotaler me would have picked up the bottle if I had been a young man looking at a decimated job market.

All I have to do is look at the graduating students in order to get a sense of how the dim prospects of jobs begins to affect their morale.  Robert Shiller writes about this morale dimension of high unemployment rates:

The high unemployment that we have today in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere is a tragedy, not just because of the aggregate output loss that it entails, but also because of the personal and emotional cost to the unemployed of not being a part of working society.

I recall that in the movie, Up in the Air, the number one issue that the unemployed workers said they faced was this: waking up in the morning and wondering what they were going to do that day.  Being jobless, when it is not by design or choice, is one morale crusher, I would imagine.

Unemployment is a product of capitalism: People who are no longer needed are simply made redundant. On the traditional family farm, there was no unemployment.

Indeed.  But then, of course, we do not want to return to all of us working on our respective forty acres either.  So, ... ?

For morale, we need a social compact that finds a purpose for everyone, a way to show oneself to be part of society by being a worker of some sort.
And for that we need fiscal stimulus—ideally, the debt-friendly stimulus that raises taxes and expenditures equally. The increased tax burden for all who are employed is analogous to the reduced hours in work-sharing.
But, if tax increases are not politically expedient, policymakers should proceed with old-fashioned deficit spending. The important thing is to achieve any fiscal stimulus that boosts job creation and puts the unemployed back to work.

Hmmm ... that's where we will get stuck in an endless debate, won't we?

Here in the US, though the unemployment rate is in the single-digit now, unlike the horror stories in the Euro countries, but the aggregate number doesn't tell the whole story of discouraged and underemployed workers.  One thing I am convinced about: there is no way we can escape from re-writing the social contract that ties together the government, taxpayers, businesses, and consumers.  Finally, even Germany is waking up to this reality.  Let's see what they come up with.

I don't care how the contract is re-written because, like with anything else, not everybody will be happy with a new contract anyway.  But, what pisses me off is how atrociously Congress has been ignoring all these issues.  It is pathetic.

It is the Congress members who ought to be forced into unemployment, not the young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed educated youth.

(From the old country ...)

Keep calm, and pretend you give a shit about the elections!

So, yet another terrorist attack* mass killing.  Instead of a movie complex, it is a gurudwara this time.

Yet, we won't talk about guns in our society.

Because, similar to how there is a pledge that Grover Norquist extracts from Republicans, the NRA has made it essentially mandatory for Republicans, and Democrats too, to pledge support for gun rights, at the expense of anything else, including our freedom to go to a movie or a gurudwara without getting shot there!

Former president George H.W. Bush put it well recently: "Who the hell is Grover Norquist?"

But then, he isn't running for any office is he!  But, at least, he said that much.  I wonder if he will dare to say anything critical about the NRA though.

As a policy person, I understand that gun-related deaths have actually decreased in the US, especially when you factor out the drug dimension.  But, what frustrates me is how much even a meaningful discussion on guns has been completely precluded.  As a society we can talk about many, many issues but not about guns.  It is easy to dismiss an inconsequential worry-wart like who me thinks that this censorship of policy discussions is not the best for democracy.  But, when the head of one of the most prestigious policy think-tanks, RAND, expresses it, well, we better take notice:

I worry that there are some topics now where the policy options is just completely off limits, so polarizing. A few examples are gun control, another one is the question of national standards when it comes to K-12 education — there a full comprehensive look at reform ought to include a careful analysis of that, but that is one of the 'third-rail' issues very difficult to do that in a way that doesn't generate a polarized reaction. Another one is concern about the growing burden of health costs on the military and veteran systems. 

 It is nuts that we can't even engage in discussions on gun control.  Damn the NRA!

The dysfunctional Congress can conveniently duck this latest act of home-grown terrorism--it is now on a summer break!  So, what did the do-nothing-Congress do to earn this recess?

[Most] folks only take time off when they get their job done—and that definitely isn’t the case for the 112th Congress.

While Midwest farmers suffer through the worst drought in decades, the House left a bipartisan farm bill passed by the Senate sitting on the table. Certainly, there’s room for improvement in that traditionally pork-filled appropriation bill. But make the improvements and pass the damn bill—the all-or-nothing tug-of-war between the perfect and the good doesn’t help people who need it now.

Even more resonant to anyone who uses the post office (which is just about everyone) is the fact that our once-proud USPS is about to default on a $5.5-billion payment. This has been a slow-motion implosion, and the Senate got its act together to pass a bipartisan bill months ago that would help avoid default. But the House had different priorities. Instead, the chamber found time to rename 60 post-office branches and attempted to repeal the health-care law for the 33rd time.

As Gail Collins writes, given the low approval ratings for Congress, perhaps they will figure out how to get into the negative numbers too!

Maybe Congress will pick up the ball when it comes back to town for a couple of weeks this fall before the election. But it already has a full agenda of futile, symbolic votes plus the crucial kicking the can down the road.

Maybe it’s possible to have a negative approval rating.

The presidential candidates are not keen on making it easy to like them either.  With everything going on that needs to be addressed, what is Mitt Romney's latest gripe?

The Romney campaign released a new TV ad on Sunday in which the GOP presidential candidate calls the connection between the United States and Israel “a cherished relationship” and criticizes President Obama for not visiting the country since being elected president nearly four years ago.
The 30-second ad also criticizes Obama for “refusing to recognize” that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

It is so tempting to say "that's right, m*f*ers," as Jon Stewart might say in such a context.  We have a gazillion problems at home and around the world, and Romney wants us to ask Obama why he hasn't recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital?  WTF!

Obama's surrogate, Harry Reid, goes on an all-out offensive quoting a cannot-be-named-Bain-insider that Romney didn't pay taxes for a gazillion years.  Yes, we understand the politics behind that--keeping all the attention on Romney and his taxes during the slow news of the dog days of August.  But, come on, no other pressing matters on which the country has to engage in substantive discussions?

I understand, all the more now, how much my life would have been more pleasant if I had never been bitten by the political bug even when I was a kid.  I could then have made use of this wonderful advice from America's Finest News Source:
:

a
*Update: The FBI is apparently treating this as domestic terrorism

Terrorists can kill. Congress and President want to take away your freedom!

So, there I was taking a break from grading, which was a good idea.  The bad?  The Daily Show was also about the pathetic Congressional bipartisanship, and the Executive, on taking away away our freedom, which I had earlier blogged about. 

Hey students, your papers are such a relief compared to the insanity in the world outside :)

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Dr. Brinkley to Rep. Young: "I pay your salary"

Awesome.

Wonderful one-liners. Or, as my students might say, "burn!" 

"Rice is a university. I know you went to Yuba College and you couldn't graduate."
"You don't own me. I pay your salary."
"I work for the private sector. You work for the taxpayers."

I can't believe that an elected official would be so stupid and arrogant; but then, Rep. Young was the brain behind the bridge to nowhere! ... watch the video and check it out for yourself :) 

Supercommittee becomes Superbad!

Says Jon Stewart:

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America's Finest News Source has a winning proposition to get us over the debt crisis:

Banking on the popularity of its original location, the country hopes to make millions by partnering with franchisees around the world, to whom it would license the trademarked United States brand name as well as the nation's flag, motto, preserved landmarks, college sports programs, movie studios, and bicameral legislature.
"Now, anyone interested in starting a new nation can open an official United States," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. "America already has a brand everyone knows and responds to. Now the time has come for us to grow that asset and monetize it."
"Meanwhile, it's a great deal for our franchise partners, who not only get to fly the red, white, and blue, but also have access to our unrivaled network of foreign oil suppliers." Murray continued. "With an initial capital investment of just $20,000, interested parties can begin building their own U.S.A. immediately."

Thus it was another day here in these United States of America!

In god we trust ... no, not what you think this is about :)

America's Finest News Source lists the top ten prayers to get god's attention


Jon Stewart explains why we have no alternative but to trust god:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Feces throwing monkeys will do better in Congress? :)

So, hey pundits, what are your thoughts on the recently concluded debt ceiling debates, negotiations, and deal?

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To ruin or not to ruin? The economy, that is. Congress undecided.

The IMF and other global agents are now beginning to panic.

More on this, and other updates, from America's Finest News Source:


Ruin The Economy Or Not? Congress Still Unable To Decide

The unemployed are not merely "a statistic"

Joseph Stalin notoriously commented that the death of an individual is a tragedy but when millions died, well, it is merely a statistic.  So, he didn't care a shit about killing by the millions, and inflicting suffering on millions more. A side effect of big numbers that Stalin, unfortunately, grasped well.

Here in the US, we are understanding what big numbers can do in terms of rendering them as mere statistics.  It is insane that we don't have big time political discussions, debates, and even protests over the continuing high unemployment levels and the stalled job creation in the private sector.  9.2 percent unemployed has become a statistic. You include the discouraged workers who have simply stopped looking for work, and those who are underemployed, this shoots into north of 20 percent! 

In a WSJ op-ed, Princeton's Alan Blinder calls this "a national jobs emergency.:"

sitting by passively is no longer acceptable. In fact, it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment of the American work force. Isn't that unconstitutional?

The unemployed are not mere statistics.  These are real people with real, and huge, challenges.  Catherine Rempell at Economix presents a letter from one such real person:

Dear Ms. Rampell,
I read with interest your recent column, ‘The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible’ (July 9).
I am unemployed. I am not a statistic. I am not one of fourteen-plus million. I am me. I have a life. When authors use such big numbers, it’s easy for us unemployed to feel invisible.
I am a community relations professional with 20 years of combined experience in nonprofit, health care and higher education. I’ve had a lot of successes and am respected by colleagues and others with whom I’ve worked and/or collaborated. I’ve had several interviews and been one of two or three finalists. So why hasn’t anyone offered me a job yet?
I spend my day writing and rewriting my resume, customizing cover letters, calling friends and contacts, networking, taking classes, and editing my LinkedIn profile. Job hunting is more than a full-time job. I spend seven days a week several hours a day on my computer, far more time than the average person in a 9 to 5 job. But I have no union to protect me and I don’t earn a paycheck like people with real jobs.
I’ve heard that the longer one is unemployed, the harder it is to secure a new job. “Your skills get soft.” “You lose touch with your connections.” At least that’s what ‘they’ say.
I try to remain philosophical. You know, ‘the right job will come along at the right time.’ I keep my interview suits clean and pressed. I make regular visits to my hairdresser and get the occasional manicure. I am fortunate insofar as I am surrounded by people who care about me and continue to support me throughout this journey.
I remember back to a project that my daughter did. She was in sixth grade and had to ‘spend’ one million dollars. Boy was that hard! With that project I learned that one million is a really big number, too big to truly comprehend. Fourteen-plus million is even bigger.
I don’t want to be one of fourteen-plus million anymore. I want to be thought of by columnists and law makers as me. And I believe that there are fourteen-plus million more just like me. Because of that, we – you – need to think about unemployment one person at a time. Me, Mike, Bruce, Pam, Audrey, Arlene, Bob, and the others. And then I need a job and so do they.
Thank you.
–Tina Friedman

Fourteen million Tinas, and counting :(

Cheap food/high calories. Healthy food is expensive. Obese we are!

A big tip of the hat to Economix for the link to the following chart:

It is simply way easier in the US to consume a whole lot of calories by spending very little money.  A McDouble for a dollar is beyond ridiculous.  It doesn't even make sense that a burger would be this inexpensive. 

More from Leonhardt:

One dollar’s worth of Coke has 447 calories, while $1 of iceberg lettuce has just 16.5. To look at it another way, you would have to spend about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce.
These gaps have become larger over time, as this chart makes clear:

Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsChange in price of items since 1978, relative to overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The price of carbonated drinks, for example, has fallen 34 percent relative to all other prices.

I rarely saw obese people in Quito and its surrounding areas.  BTW, fruits there were tremendously tasty and inexpensive; I think I bought two guavas and two bananas for about 35 or  40 cents.  These were the guavas with the red pulp inside.  Aaah!  One can't get obese by eating a whole bunch of bananas, guavas, papayas, ... maybe we ought to send--at taxpayer expense--the highly obese to Quito, have them walk those ups and downs of the city, and have them subsist on nothing but local fruits, steamed corn, and locro.

Getting rid of agricultural subsidies here in the US makes sense even from a health perspective.  These subsidies are killing us. Literally sometimes.

But, of course, that is not what Congress did.  Instead, the House voted to retain farm subsidies!  As Alex Tabarrok notes, the news headline "House keeps farm subsidies, cuts food aid" makes one think it is from the Onion!

King Obama makes King Bush feel proud of his war legacy: "change?" ha!

I hope Congress has some serious cojones to challenge the imperial presidencies we have been subject to since 2000

More here on this from the NY Times:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations. ...
The administration has also emphasized that there are no troops on the ground, that Libyan forces are unable to fire at them meaningfully 

I was sure that my go-to commentator on such constitutional issues, Glenn Greenwald, would have gone ballistic about this, and hypothesized that he would draw the Bush parallels with evidence; he didn't disappoint me:

That George Bush would knowingly order an eavesdropping program to continue which his own top lawyers were telling him was illegal was, of course, a major controversy, at least in many progressive circles.  Now we have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping in a way that his own top lawyers are telling him is illegal, but waging war in that manner

Greenwald takes this one step more:

what is undeniable is that Obama could have easily obtained Congressional approval for this war -- just as Bush could have for his warrantless eavesdropping program -- but consciously chose not to, even to the point of acting contrary to his own lawyers' conclusions about what is illegal. 
Other than the same hubris -- and a desire to establish his power to act without constraints -- it's very hard to see what motivated this behavior.  Whatever the motives are, it's clear that he's waging an illegal war, as his own Attorney General, OLC Chief and DoD General Counsel have told him.

Why do we keep electing warmongering candidates to the presidency in the first place?  Why do we think that any talk about peace and limiting our military interventions is somehow only being wimpy?  Awful!

I suppose Professor Obama dismissed all the legal advice and went with his own interpretation of the text.  But, wait, what is that old saying about an attorney being his own lawyer?  Oh yeah, has a fool for a client!

The March Madness of Libya War: the barbarism of buffoons

Calling it a "Coalition of the Confused," Spiked's Brendan O'Neill is sharp in his critique:

The almost overnight formation of a Western ‘coalition’ against Libya does not spring from lingering colonialist instincts in Washington, London or Paris. Rather it speaks to a new and extremely dangerous reality. It reveals the incoherence and self-doubt at the heart of the West, to the extent that Western governments will go to quite extraordinary lengths to give the impression that their attack is not a Western initiative. It shows that foreign offices across the West are now staffed by people with little or no grasp of geopolitical reality. It has exposed the inability of the Western powers to drum up serious support or international consensus even for a relatively small-scale military operation: the Arab League, so keenly held up by Cameron as a moral fig leaf for the attack, expressed its concerns after just one night of bombings, while much of the Western media is warning about the possibility of ‘mission creep’ and getting bogged down, once again, in the unpredictable terrains of Africa.
Most of all, it speaks to the now almost complete rupture between Western political interests and Western political behaviour.

O'Neill is one of the many commentators pointing fingers at Samantha Power, who was/is a key Obama foreign policy adviser.  She, along with Hillary Clinton and the UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, have become the female and liberal versions of the warmongering Neo-Cons.  "liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids" as Stephen Walt notes.


Power's role in this is not difficult to imagine--she has powerfully argued about the West's inaction in various systematic killings by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes and exposed the hollowness of the slogan "never again."  But, if she were actively involved in this decision to go to war against Gaddafi, well, she was applying the correct lessons in a wrong context. 

So, why do these buffoons keep leading us into wars, presidency after presidency?

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama are all presidents that seem incapable of conducting a serious yet desperately needed discussion about foreign policy and America's place in a post-Cold War world. Until something like that happens, the result will be a fully ad hoc set of actions that make little sense and accomplish even less in the long-term. These guys are politicians first and foremost and they know that however non-interventionist the American people may be at any given moment, all will be forgiven if you can even vaguely claim success in kicking some Third World dictatorship's ass.

But then, we might ask ourselves, whatever happened to the checks and balances of the American system?  How come the President has so much power to take us into wars?  What about the House of Representatives?  What about the Senate?

Well, the framers of the Constitution did their best.  But, we have been goofing around a lot lately.

Matt Yglesias says that the wars are not examples of presidential power grabs as much as they are about Congress abdicating its responsibilities, and it does so because:

The main reason congress tends, in practice, not to use this authority is that congress rarely wants to. Congressional Democrats didn’t block the “surge” in Iraq, congressional Republicans didn’t block the air war in Kosovo, etc. And for congress, it’s quite convenient to be able to duck these issues. Handling Libya this way means that those members of congress who want to go on cable and complain about the president’s conduct are free to do so, but those who don’t want to talk about Libya can say nothing or stay vague. Nobody’s forced to take a vote that may look bad in retrospect, and nobody in congress needs to take responsibility for the success or failure of the mission. If things work out well in Libya, John McCain will say he presciently urged the White House to act. If things work out poorly in Libya, McCain will say he consistently criticized the White House’s fecklessness. Nobody needs to face a binary “I endorse what Obama’s doing / I oppose what Obama’s doing” choice.
Which is all just to say that presidents will go back to accepting congressional authorization for the use of force as a binding constraint when congress starts actually wanting that authority.

... But the trend is toward all postwar presidents asserting broad “commander in chief” powers and Obama’s no exception.

Well, we get the government we deserve!

The State of the Union, in a cartoon :)

The President will address Congress and the country on January 25th.  Senator Mark Udall has pitched the idea of a bipartisan seating arrangement.
Cartoonists, take it away :)

Congressional Comedy: the reading of the Constitution

What a farce that was!  Political theatre--an expensive production that was a dud!!!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee :(

The lame (duck) Congress

I was laughing all the way through this one :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lame Duck Congress - Jake Tapper
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Campaign for 2012 elections begin

Cartoon of the day: will reappear in two years!

So, is the US at war in Pakistan, too?

The Wall Street Journal (via the Hindustan Times) reports that:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using aerial drones and weaponry being diverted by the US military from Afghanistan to step up its anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan.
"The shift in strategic focus reflects the US view that, with Pakistan's military unable or unwilling to do the job, more U.S. force against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan is now needed to turn around the struggling Afghan war effort across the border"

 So, what is the Pakistan government's response?

Responding to a point of order raised by Lt Gen (r) Abdul Qadir Baloch, the PM said, “If they (NATO) don’t apologise and remove our apprehensions, we may consider other options as well.”

He said cooperation in the war on terrorism did not mean compromising on national integrity and sovereignty. He said Pakistan is a responsible and nuclear state, adding that being political people, “we have lodged a civilised protest” with NATO headquarters over the force’s violation of the country’s air space”.

I have no idea what he means by "options" ...

The prime minister, who did not elaborate “other options”, appeared miffed by the outburst of Mr Baloch who, speaking at the top of his voice, said if Pakistan continued to tolerate strikes by drones and now manned helicopters, “a time will come when they will come overland” and, referring to Pakistan’s military strength, added: “We will have to beat them back.” 

other than, say, choking off the NATO supply lines and making them easy targets?

Looks like we have put the Pakistan government in one hell of a legitimacy-questioning awkward position, which has already been in a weak state ... no wonder Musharraf is smelling opportunities :)  Here in Washington?

Meanwhile, in response to reports of political upheaval in Pakistan, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the United States considers Pakistan a "key ally" and believes that "the government of Pakistan is committed to democracy and to the preservation of civilian leadership."

So, here in the US, any tough questions being raised in the Congress about the way this war is escalating?  Yeah, right!  All bloody war mongers out there, who are now too busy with their re-election scams campaigns :(

Barack Obama v. Jimmy Carter: Crisis of Confidence

With economic stagnation of sorts, and with the threat of deflation, we have the potential for a new kind of stagflation, as opposed to the stagflation during the Carter years.

The more I kept thinking about this, the more I started wondering whether there might be any more parallels ...

Congress:
Carter, too, had significant Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House:

Both chambers had a Democratic majority. It was the last time either party held a filibuster-proof (60 member) majority in the Senate, until the 111th United States Congress in 2009 (in which both chambers once again held a Democratic majority)

Petroleum:
The BP oozathaon presents a petroleum challenge to Obama, though different from the petroleum issues Carter had to deal with.

The "Gulf"
In Carter's time, it was only the Persian Gulf issues.  Now, we have the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf as issues.

And how did Carter summarize the situation then?  The following is an excerpt from his "Crisis of Confidence" speech that he gave on July 15, 1979.  Seriously, don't you think it is applicable, quite verbatim, even today?:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. 

 Consumer confidence is way down now.  Approval ratings for every branch of government are not anywhere near favorable.  Corporate leaders seem to be only a step or two away being from falling victims to lynch mobs ...
Carter went on to say:

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

 I guess the difference is that we no longer bother to even say "disrespect" ... instead, we simply say "dis" :)
 More Carter:

The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.
Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

Hmmmm .....

Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources -- America's people, America's values, and America's confidence.

Good luck, President Carter, er, Obama