Category Archives: Obama
President’s Council on Crony Capitalism
Chinese President Hu arrived in the U.S. shortly after the unveiling of a Chinese Stealth Aircraft suspiciously like our own. He left with a joint venture agreement with GE for hi tech jet engines.
Yesterday, President Obama announced the appointment of G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt (who axed 18,000 jobs) to chair the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. According to IBD, “GE has received $60 million in federal funds to build a technology center and $55 million to build a hybrid locomotive battery plant.” This is in addition to “a $139 billion bailout in the form of FDIC backing of GE Capital debt”.
Emptywheel at Firedog Lake says, Immelt’s “actions make him the poster child for everything wrong with the U.S. economy right now”.
Here’s a link to Immelt’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Mad Men
President Obama acknowledged, at last night’s memorial pep rally, that accused Arizona murderer Jared Loughner wasn’t motivated by uncivil discourse . It was madness. It turns out that authorities were aware of Laughner’s problems in 2007. He was kicked out of college and told not to return without a psychiatric evaluation.
David Ignatius writes that the country is full of unmedicated mentally ill.
E. Fuller Torry says, in the WSJ, “These tragedies are the inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health policies.” He estimates there are 21,000 untreated schizophrenics in Arizona alone, 10% of whom become violent.
Hard to see how more civil discourse will solve the problem.
Fighting Words
Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has used the Tucson tragedy as a platform to attack his political enemies. Paul Krugman did the same even before Dupnik’s yellow crime scene tape was up. Los Angeles Times columnist, Andrew Malcolm, takes a dim view of Dupnik’s police work. Victor Davis Hanson wonders, in National Review, why people like Dupnik and Krugman focus on Sara Palin’s crosshairs on a map but not the president’s search for an ass to kick. And finally, here’s the Krugman view expressed in a more thoughtful way by Jacob Weisberg in Slate.
If some deranged person strangles an elephant, I’m in trouble.
This item from today’s NYT is by Yale history professor Joanne Freeman on congressional violence – by congressmen!- back in the good old days. I met Joanne at a conference in Boise last October. She spent 10 years digging up stuff for a book about duels, fist fights, and other interesting behavior in Congress.
