Quick Hits

A few quick news highlights from this first day of June:

• It looks like Congress and the president are starting to move faster toward an agreement on health care. Watch for more on this one-- which I view as being of paramount importance to this country-- but for now, here's a preview from Politico and another from Associated Press.
• The New York Times has a profile of Brian Deese, the [31 years] young man who is playing an important role at the Obama White House in dismantling the Humpty Dumpty of car companies, General Motors, and putting it back together again.
• In case you never thought it was possible to lose an Airbus jet... all joking aside, 228 people from an Air France passenger flight are lost and feared dead, having (apparently) lost electrical power during a storm in the "horse latitudes" off Brazil, over the Atlantic Ocean.
• NYT Op-Ed of the day: In the latest finger-pointing over the current economic recession, Paul Krugman says that "Reagan Did It."
• In the NYT's "The Way We Live Now" series, Lisa Belkin explores trends in parenting-- the latest (and for us teenagers, most annoying) being "helicopter parenting" or micromanaging kids' lives. Where is it going next? She says maybe to the older philosophy of "Let the Kid Be."