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| July 16, 2010 |
| WSJ's News Pages Slice & Dice Obama |
| By Kevin McCauley |
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The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has never seen a proposal/policy from President Obama that it has liked.
The news pages of Rupert Murdoch's crown jewel are increasingly joining the fun. "Just the facts" apparently been tossed out the window.
 The president is slapped today on A-2 for spurring "a new national industrial policy," while A-3 takes a poke at the administration's plan to privatize NASA rocket launches. Talk about having it both ways.
Obama's ground-breaking at a battery plant in Michigan that was half-funded by $151M in federal stimulus money, according to the Journal, "reignited a debate not heard since the 1990s: What role should government play in fostering private ventures that might founder without taxpayer support."
That debate certainly belongs in the editorial section.
The Journal quotes a staffer from the ardent anti-Obama Libertarian Cato Institute, saying he's befuddled that White House economists "really believe they are doing anything more than throwing around cash to projects that sound good." A rebuttal from a progressive group, such as the Economic Policy Institute, is nowhere to be found.
Michigan Republican governor-wannabe Pete Hoekstra tells the WSJ he's bewildered that the Obama administration is using "stimulus leverage to prod local yacht makers to go into wind turbine manufacturing." Talk about letting them eat cake. Is that the kind of industrial policy the WSJ can support: U.S. aid for yachtmakers? Note to Pete: the boating set is not forced to accept U.S. stimulus money.
On the next page, Obama is faulted for proposing the use of private rockets to blast astronauts into space, a move that will enable NASA to focus on deep space exploration and R&D for heavy-lift rockets. The Journal has supported every privatization bid in the past, but when it comes to Obama, it’s no dice.
"That White House proposal has prompted broad bipartisan opposition, with critics saying it would undermine U.S. leadership in space and threaten U.S. jobs," according to the WSJ. The paper doesn't name any of those critics. It does quote supporters of Obama's NASA plan, such as Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, NASA;s No. 2 official, Lori Garver, and Commercial Spaceflight Federation executive director John Gedmark.
C'mon, the Journal crying about a potential job loss by NASA employees? Those are nothing but crocodile tears. |
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