Today’s Q’s for O’s WH

ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports: 

MILLER:  Jay, MoveOn has joined with former Senator Russ Feingold, who has been calling for the GE CEO to resign from the president's job council.  In the statement they released yesterday, they said that this is slap in the face to every hardworking, tax-paying American.  Can you respond to that?

 CARNEY:  The — I have — I'm not sure — you probably know, but I've taken this question in a variety of forms, over the past few days, and, you know, I would simply make the point that the president did not create the jobs council so that he could have a lot of people who agree with him on every issue sit around a table and tell him how much they agree with him on every issue.  He wanted a diverse group of people who could bring diverse opinions to the table, to talk about measures that we could take and that business could take to increase American competitiveness and create jobs.

On the issue of taxes, corporate taxes, the president has made clear that he believes we need to reform our corporate tax system. He believes we need to — that we can lower our corporate tax rate without diminishing revenues if we — if we go after a lot of the loopholes that exist, a lot of complexity in the tax code that exists. And he's committed to doing that.  And I — and I believe that, you know, some portion of the membership of the Jobs Council is probably committed to doing that, maybe a large portion. So that's his position on this.

 MILLER:  What about the optics, the message that that sends to Americans –

CARNEY:  I think that — I — look, there's no question the people who were — who read that story in, I believe, it was the New York Times, you know, might say, what the heck, I don't get this.  And it is — the president shares that opinion in the sense that, you know, he believes that our corporate tax structure needs to be reformed to be simpler and that the purpose behind it would be  fairness and competitiveness — principally competitiveness to drive  the kind of economic growth and competitiveness we need to create jobs  and, you know, win the future economically against, you know, a pretty competitive playing field.

MILLER: One more on Libya.  Our reporters on the ground there are saying that the opposition is publicly starting to echo what a lot of them are seeing on the ground, in that we're — they're asking where are the airstrikes?  If that is the stance now, then what's going to happen when the U.S. scales back?

CARNEY:  Well, the transition has occurred, first of all. Let's make that clear.  Secondly, this operation continues, this military operation continues.  I think NATO and the Defense Department would be able to give you more specifics.  There are a variety of reasons, as I understand it as a layperson on this, about, you know, how missions are flown and when and why. But the commitment to protecting Libyan civilians is as firm today as it was last week, and the mission will continue.

-Sunlen Miller