I wonder how right wingers will spin this one to attack Obama:
The White House on Friday announced a “summit on entrepreneurship” to build economic ties with the Islamic world, part of President Barack Obama’s outreach to Muslims.
The White House said it has invited participants from more than 40 countries over five continents for the April 26-27 conference in Washington.
“The summit will highlight the role entrepreneurship can play in addressing common challenges while building partnerships that will lead to greater opportunity abroad and at home,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said…
He said that the meeting would “identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.”
Closer economic ties could go a long way to decrease tensions.
I’m sure that any outreach to the Muslims will cause a few conservative heads to explode, and result in some more knee jerk claims that Obama is secretly a Muslim terrorist born outside of the United States. How will they respond to a “summit on entrepreneurship” as proposed? This just doesn’t fit in well with their idea that Obama is a socialist. Of course Obama’s actual economic policies contradict that meme as well, but this certainly has never stopped many on the right from claiming this.
Initial reaction from conservative blogs is, as expected, negative. Deep down they prefer war over trade.
Several conservative blogs, such as here and here, are distorting Obama’s criticism of the insurance industry to suggest a hostility towards American business. Stepping in when an industry is engaging in the types of abusive activities seen by the insurance industry is not an act of opposition to American industry–it is necessary to preserve our free market system. Adam Smith would role over in his grave if he could see how capitalism is perverted by the right wing to rationalize the absence of regulation needed for a market system to operate.