First: If you work for a weekly newspaper that prints on Tuesday, or has Labor Day events in its circulation area, then you are working today. In fact, you work on every Monday “holiday,” including the ones that other people have as vacation. So the labor unions can take their we-brought-you-the-weekend self-congratulatory crap and stick it someplace really dark.

(And today should be Capital Day, not Labor Day, anyway.)

People who will be working today include police, including Milwaukee police, because Barack Obama is coming to Milwaukee in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. (Though apparently they won’t be in the same place in public, which is strange.) Which brings up irony number two: Neither Obama nor Burke have ever employed union labor. Trek Bicycle is nonunion, and Obama has never had a real job in his entire life.

Obama and Burke are campaigning against Gov. Scott Walker, as if Obama has nothing better to do given the numerous crises about which he is doing nothing. (More on that momentarily.) No one at Goonfest — I mean, Labor Day in Milwaukee — will also acknowledge the blame Wisconsin unions have for the state’s less-than-desired economic performance. For a solid year viewers, including business owners, of TV news watched various union types screaming about their sacred rights to free health care and pensions to which they don’t have to contribute during the Act 10 debate and Recallarama. And if you were a business owner outside Wisconsin and watched that, the logical conclusion you’d reach is that Wisconsin workers are concerned only about their benefits and not about actually performing their jobs. So why would you come to Wisconsin if that’s your first impression of the Wisconsin workforce? Hell no, you won’t go.

The Pittsburgh Post–Gazette reports about workers:

Rutgers researchers found more than a third of workers report their finances have been permanently injured by the recession, with 16 percent of Americans, or 38 million people, reporting they were financially devastated and expect that damage to be permanent.

“The typical American worker lives a precarious and doleful existence — unhappy, poorly paid and fearful about losing his or her job, according to the opinions of fellow Americans who responded to this survey,” the team at Rutgers found.

Seventy percent of respondents described typical American workers as not secure in their jobs and 68 percent said workers were highly stressed. …

Carl Van Horn, one of the authors of the Rutgers study, said the two independently produced reports reinforce each other. “One is the economic reality as portrayed by wages and the other is how people feel,” he said.

While most Americans are satisfied with their own jobs, they are also afraid of what is coming down the pike.

“They’re really afraid they are going to be the next person with a pink slip,” he said.

The reality is “there were lots of problems before the Great Recession and the Great Recession made everything worse,“ Mr. Van Horn said. “The recovery has been slow and uneven, and it has not brought about anything close to prosperity so it did not allay any of the fears people had.”

Well, we already knew the stimulus was a giant steaming pile of failure, the perfect symbol, if you think about it, of the Obama administration, for which a majority of voters voted twice. So has been every economic policy that has followed (allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, for instance), not to mention the ones they’d like to foist on us (i.e. increase unemployment by paying employees more than they’re worth, through increasing the minimum wage). How many times do people have to be told that government does not create jobs?

Either Obama or one of his paid idiots, or one of the union goons that get six-figure salaries, will claim that American companies are making record profits. Their economic illiteracy is demonstrated by such claims, given that, as readers of this blog know, publicly traded companies, about which that claim is made (since publicly traded companies have to report their finances), represent all of 0.1 percent of American businesses. Ask a business owner you know if he or she is making record profits. The answer will be no.

The unionistas won’t tell you this, but part of the problem with the American economy may well be the American worker. Following Mike Rowe, host of cable TV’s “Dirty Jobs,” on Facebook may make you think, from comments to his thoughts, that too many Americans are not interested in hard work anymore, and are certainly not interested in hard work that by their definition is unpleasant or beneath them. (That is probably the natural consequence of taking the bad vocational advice of doing what you (think you) love, instead of doing what you’re good at.) The American workplace has too many clock-watchers and not enough people who work hard and well because we should work hard and well irrespective of how we’re paid or otherwise rewarded. (The craptacular level of service at most fast-food restaurants today should make you choke on your French fries at the thought that those people deserve a pay raise.)

It should be apparent anyway that the only way to make money isn’t to work for someone else, it’s to go into business. That doesn’t mean you will make money going into business, but you will not make money working for someone else. That also means, of course, giving up nights, weekends (like this weekend) and holidays (like today), along with the security, such as it is, of getting paid on a regular basis.

Obama will probably mention climate change sometime today, to change the subject from his failures that are too numerous to count, both domestically and in foreign policy. U.S. Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyoming) lists seven different things that are more important:

• Iraq is a greater challenge than climate change. While the president now likes to pretend that he didn’t force a total withdrawal of U.S. troops, Americans remember his 2008 campaign promise to do exactly that. When the U.S. leaves a vacuum, others will fill it. The barbaric Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, is trying to build a base of operations in Iraq and Syria from which to attack the U.S. and its allies. The recent beheading of American journalist James Foley showed how serious ISIS is about “drowning” our nation in blood, as the group said in the video of the murder posted on YouTube.

• Afghanistan. The administration says it still intends to pull out the remaining 30,000 troops by the end of 2016. If it does, the country will quickly become a terrorist haven once again. As with Iraq, the timetable seems to be mostly about the political calendar. The Obama administration seems to have lost the will to win. The terrorists have not.

• Russia. President Obama was so intent on “resetting” U.S. relations with the Kremlin that he telegraphed a lack of resolve. President Vladimir Putin has only become more aggressive. That’s led to Russian troops in Ukraine and Russian-supplied weapons shooting a passenger plane out of the sky.

• An Iranian nuclear weapon. America’s enemies have shown they are content to stall for time, while President Obama gets distracted. That’s what’s happening as the president continues to negotiate indefinitely on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. An Obama administration desperate to strike a deal is likely to strike a bad one. It could leave in place an enrichment program that would be a pathway to a nuclear-armed Iran.

• Syria. It has been more than three years since President Obama said the time had come for President Bashar Assad to step aside. The administration drew a “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, then did nothing when Assad crossed that line last summer. ISIS already has strongholds in Syria, while the Free Syrian Army desperately needs more U.S. assistance.

• North Korea. The North Koreans continue to test nuclear weapons. They have held multiple tests of missile technology designed to reach the continental U.S. President Obama has done nothing at all about this.

The White House has said its foreign policy rule is “don’t do stupid stuff,” but putting climate change ahead of global threats fails that simple test. The United Nations will hold yet another conference on climate change next month, while the world burns.

The greatest threat to Americans “right now” is not climate change. The greatest threat is people with the intent and capacity to do us harm—and the president’s failure to lead the fight against them. [Secretary of State John] Kerry’s fixation on climate change is one reason America’s friends no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us. The world is growing more dangerous as a result.