No longer drinking the Kool-Aid
The man who once headed President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness issued a letter to his General Electric stockholders recently, accusing the president's policies of failing to create jobs and destroying the competitiveness that American companies need to succeed in the global market.
Government policies, CEO Jeffrey Immelt said, are perpetuating "slow growth, poor job creation, populism, low productivity, higher regulation, poor policy and more slow growth."
Fortunately, he said, GE is making decisions that may not be right in the partisan political world but are necessary in the competitive marketplace.
"It doesn't do any good to win awards for good governance if you are getting eaten alive by competitors," Immelt wrote. "Our sole truth of performance is in the market, winning with customers and investors."
In the end, he said, misplaced government priorities are destroying small businesses, the backbone of the U.S. economy.
It's a shame Obama is no longer listening to him.
A little history for Mr. Mook
A young Hillary Clinton spokesman may have believed he was too cute by half recently when he trotted out the right-wing conspiracy excuse for a federal judge's decision that Clinton and her top aides should be questioned under oath about her email scandal.
"We all know that the right wing sees Hillary Clinton as the Democrats' best chance to hold on to the White House and continue to build on the progress that President Obama has made," Clinton flak Robby Mook, who wasn't even a teenager when the first Clinton regime took office, told CNN's Jake Tapper. "That's why this right-wing group filed this lawsuit. Of course they're trying to subpoena people; of course they're trying to get this into the news."
Filing a lawsuit is one thing. Determining the relevance of said lawsuit is another.
The federal judge who determined Clinton and her aides should face scrutiny is U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan, who was appointed by one William Jefferson Clinton.
Told that, Mook melted and could only blurt, "It's the judge's decision to make. My point is this was promulgated by a right-wing group."
How soon can you leave?
The list of celebrities threatening to leave the country if Donald Trump is elected president is growing so long that it threatens to create a groundswell of support for the businessman.
The latest is singer (entertainer?) Miley Cyrus, who said on Instagram the Super Tuesday results made her want to vomit.
Cyrus, who posted her statement with a photo of a woman with Trump, the same woman with a slain animal and Cyrus herself with a tear rolling down her cheek, made her statement with the class that only such a celebrity could do. The post includes support for waning Democratic/Socialist candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
"Yes," she lamented. "That is a tear rolling down my cheek dripping off the end of my nose. This makes me so unbelievable scared and sad Not only for our country but for animals that I love more than anything in this world My heart is broken into 100,000 pieces That picture [of the animal] is so disturbing You are not destiny! It is not your job to decide when a living thing's life is over & you DT are not God no matter how much you think you are!!! (& if he doesn't think he is 'God' he thinks he is the [expletive] chosen one or some [expletive]! We're all just [expletive] jam between his rich [expletive] toes! Honestly [expletive] this [expletive]. I am moving if this is my president! I don't say things I don't mean!"
Mouth in gear too quickly
A kind staffer should have given U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez a heads-up on the truth before he went on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives last week to complain about the lack of diversity at far left MSNBC.
Gutierrez complained about MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry being "pulled from the airwaves without even a chance to say goodbye." (Harris-Perry actually left on her own.) He also said anchorman José Díaz-Balart has seen increasingly little airtime on the network. Then he went on to berate parent network NBC for saying it would sever ties to Donald Trump for his remarks about Latinos, only to bring him back to host "Saturday Night Live."
"[L]et's be clear," he said. "This is not about quotas, window dressing or checking the diversity file. Journalists of color bring a different texture, a different perspective on what issues matter and what should be discussed and debated on television."
Unfortunately, the network could trot out as many members of diverse racial, cultural, class and sexual identity groups as it could find, but they wouldn't help if people didn't watch.
MSNBC, after all, has spent years in the ratings cellar because of its unstinting liberal perspective.