Lucid Links (060309, Morning)

Notewothy Net-Worthies:

Best-kept secret, and most unobtainable video, in America, in a Reuters report on June 1 — “‘Chinese assets are very safe,’ (Treasury Secretary Tax Cheat Tim) Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s. His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience ….” An Associated Press report on the same day carried at CNBC written by someone who was clearly there did not mention the statement, or the student audience’s laughter. On the air yesterday morning, Glenn Beck’s reaction to this was something on the order of “you need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what’s really going on in the world today.” Center-right, sensible conservative talk radio is best seen as the mass medium where the detective work’s results can get out, which is why the Obama administration is attempting various ways to accomplish a de facto implementation of the old, misnamed Fairness Doctrine.

Reuters, of all places, may be evolving into a location where you can get fair and balanced business news. The report referenced in the previous item also told us, I believe uniquely, that “In his speech, Geithner renewed pledges that the Obama administration would cut its huge fiscal deficits and promised ‘very disciplined’ future spending ….” Conan O’Brien, who just began his Tonight Show gig this week, should be worried if Geithner keeps generating knee-slappers like that. More ominously, Reuters also told us that “Geithner offered U.S. backing for a higher-profile role for China in running global institutions including the IMF.” You would think that China is just another country with a democratically elected government, instead of the oppressive regime with the murderous Maoist legacy, the 40 million missing girls (probably more like 50 million now), and the US tech-assisted Great Internet Censorship Firewall. The apparent total lack of interest in Chinese human-rights abuses on the part of this administration is disappointing, but, sadly, not unexpected.

Another reason Reuters might be the surprise source of fair and balanced business news in the next few years is that James Pethokoukis has left U.S. News and is now blogging there. One of Mr. P’s better offerings of the past few days is his catch of Robert Reich’s speculation on CNBC that the administration’s real plan in the GM bankruptcy is, in Mr. P’s paraphrasing, “slowing down the death process so communities and workers and the economy have more time to adjust to GM’s demise.” $50 billion or more is a lot to pay for slowly euthanizing a patient. I wonder if they’ll feel that compassionate about spending money to keep dying patients alive a bit longer in the Brave New World of nationalized health care?

As LifeNews.com reported Sunday, there is no evidence that Scott Roeder, the alleged murderer of George Tiller, had any association with pro-life groups. Comment rants on web sites clearly mean nothing; if they did, a lot of lefty loons who comment here, or attempt to, would, by their mere appearance or attempt, be “associated” with me, and I with them. Further, there’s no evidence I have seen that Roeder had any intentions to harm anyone beyond Tiller; he certainly could have done so on Sunday if he had wanted to. Meanwhile, Fox is reporting that, according to a senior U.S. official, “more targets were found on the computer of a man charged in the fatal shooting at a military recruiting center in Arkansas — suggesting the accused gunman may have been part of a larger plot to attack military targets and may not have been acting alone.” If true, and there really is a group involved, Pvt. William Long’s murder is a bona fide act of domestic terrorism. So of course in the coming days, alleged murderer Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (AMM) and Long will get more national press attention than Roeder and Tiller have up until now. Prediction: Dream on. (Also see Updates below.)

The Wall Street Journal tells us that political calculations continue to subvert contract law in Obamaworld (HT Business Insider via Rose) — “Citigroup Inc. has told about five former top executives that it won’t pay them tens of millions of dollars in promised severance payouts, according to people familiar with the matter. …. (management concluded) that they wanted to avoid even the possibility of a public backlash over the money, people familiar with the situation said. On Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said that Citigroup might eventually resume the payouts once the political climate cools.” The execs are suing, but they shouldn’t have to. The “public backlash” would really be administration-orchestrated, ACORN-executed intimidation, perhaps carried out against the company, the suing execs, or both if it appears that the plaintiffs will win. This situation exemplifies how a Chicago-way, Obama-induced climate of fear has injected itself into the decision-making process. Even if the economy somehow meaningfully grows in such an atmosphere of uncertainty — a dubious prospect — never forget that by definition it will have underachieved what could have been accomplished in an atmosphere of freedom and certainty about the rules of the game.

UPDATE: This of course will not stop the leftosphere’s liars, but here’s a LifeNews.com reiteration –

Roeder has no links to any legitimate pro-life group other than a couple of postings on a public forum on a pro-life web site. Otherwise, he has never been a volunteer of, staff member of or in any way associated with either national, state or local pro-life groups.

UPDATE 2: Unlike Roeder, who had one target, Mr. AAM reportedly said that “he would have killed more soldiers had they been in the parking lot” (HT to Michelle Malkin, whose related column is also at the HT’d link).

UPDATE 3: It’s harder than you would expect, given the seriousness of the story, to find pictures of or relating to the seven men killed in Chicago in six separate incidents within a 24-hour period on Saturday and Sunday. The only picture I could find is this one of the family of one of the seven, Desmond Stansbury.

Based the block addresses of the victims, it’s virtually certain that all but one or two of the seven were African-Americans. It’s quite probable, based on the neighborhoods where the murders took place, that all were.

May they all rest in peace in a better place.

Let’s talk about political agendas and “institutional racism,” shall we? It’s hard not to conclude that the violent deaths of seven men, mostly if not all African-Americans, in just one city in a horribly short period of time, all within 3-20 miles of Dear Leader’s Hyde Park home, is less important to those in America’s establishment media than the death of one man who murdered pre-born babies for a living. I should add that this warped perspective also applies to all too many in the far-leftosphere.