Labor Day weekend is supposed to be a sleepy time removed from the normal grind of days. It’s to be a time of camaraderie with family and friends and escape from the workaday routine. It denotes the symbolic end of another summer idyll and the return of less frivolous pursuits, foreshadowing the imminent return of less frivolous weather as well. This is what Labor Day weekend is supposed to be.

Instead this Labor Day Weekend was all too full of politics as usual. It started, as most things do in the era of Hopenchange, in the White House.

The sordid details follow the jump…

I tried very hard but to no avail to avoid news of the resignation of one of the president’s many satraps czars, this one called Van Jones the Magnificent or something. The appointment of Van the Magnificent as Lord of all Green Jobs (about which, more later) initially looked like a super-smart end run around the Senatorial confirmation process. And with a compliant media more interested in glorifying than vetting the Obama administration, why should it have been otherwise?

Apparently the answer to that is a two parter. Part one is that Van Jones has made kooky enough statements in the past to make Glenn Beck appear a sober-minded investigative journalist by comparison. No mean feat, that.

Part two is that Obama is rapidly losing the patience and the trust of the general public. How he managed to fritter it away at such speed and without anything more substantive to show for it than some magic beans a bushel of (allegedly) economy-stimulatin’ pork is a topic for another day. But for today the lesson is that Obama ran, at least in part, on making government transparent and post-partisan. Increasingly the public wants to see evidence of those things in his appointments. As soon as public scrutiny fell on Van Jones, the game was already lost for an administration which prefers to throw inconvenient Truthers under the bus rather than explain them.

But that was merely one administration story that buzzed its way, yellow jacket-like, into the Labor Day weekend conversational picnic. The main Obama administration story setting tongues awag this weekend was his decision to address the nation’s schoolchildren.

The hubbub over this one definitely caught me by surprise. It’s not that I find the idea of a presidential address to the children a wonderful idea. It’s that most of my objections to it stem from my own school memories about such events. Far from being scandalized by the potential for the injection of partisan invective into the minds of our nation’s innocent youths, I was overcome by the impetus to yawn over how mind-numbingly boring the very idea sounded.

Think about it… How do public officials of any sort address student bodies when asked? They dumb things down and bland them up to such an extent they serve virtually no purpose at all. Ever attend a mandatory all-school event welcoming the assistant undersecretary to the third district alderman? You probably did at some point in your past schooling and the fact that you can barely recall it should tell you something. School students have the attention span of caffeinated ferrets at the best of times. That attention span worsens a bit when you try to address them all at once. I can only presuppose it worsens still more when you try to address all of them across time zones, grade levels, and mandatory dress codes at the same time.

And this event is both grander in scale and lamer in delivery than any assistant undersecretary to the third district alderman could dare to dream. It’s being delivered over the internet – like a YouTube video. A mandatory YouTube video. Oh yeah, that’s going to be a revolutionary event in the education of our young people. Almost as big as the video of the fat kid doing Jedi moves, or Tay Zonday layin’ down a new track. And just about as impactful to the kids’ future education.

Anyway, by the time you read this the lame-o address to the schools will be over (bingo! – ed.) and the only wonder will be how our scintillatingly brilliant Hope-monger-in-chief could bungle this piece of PR fluff so badly he once again stepped all over his health care insurance whatever reform message.

Anyway, now that the school children have been sufficiently droned at en masse, it’s time for the president to get back to one of the most pressing matters of our time… naming a replacement Green Jobs czar!!!

My choice would be someone with exactly the right mind for the job – which is to say none. May I once again present the Star Tribune’s “Footprint blogger”…. Kim Carlson…

It’s Labor Day on Monday and that got me thinking about the illusive promise of green jobs. Everyone seems to want one, but no one seems to be able to find one. Having written, “Green Your Work”, I get calls weekly, asking if I know of any available green jobs. Recently, a national television producer who wanted to do a story showing people doing green jobs contacted me; I wasn’t sure where to send them.

Sounds like just the person for the job. By the time she’s up to speed on what she’s trying to accomplish we’ll be well into the next administration and far away from any unexpected scandals. And maybe next Labor Day can be a bit quieter.