The starting sentence from the article, Key Dem Senator: Obama ‘snookered’ by GOP into talking deficit over jobs, is

Urging the administration to enact new measures to lower the unemployment rate, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said President Barack Obama got “snookered” by Republicans into prioritizing deficits over jobs.

Remember, just because I would use the word patsy for some of President Obama’s actions, I did not feed this choice of words to Senator Harkin.

Perhaps with Austan Goolsbee leaving as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the pernicious influence of the University of Chicago economics department will finally fade from prominence.  Then President Obama will finally be free to listen to people who really understand recession economics and how to recover from a recession.

If the President appoints a new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers that is from the same Chicago school of thought, then all is probably lost.

It is so unfortunate for our erstwhile progressive President to have chosen to start his professional career in Chicago and even join the faculty of the University of Chicago.  Had he chosen some other city, perhaps he would have avoided being tainted by the Milton Friedman cult of shock doctrine economics.