Barack Obama is so full of bad policy ideas these days, some of them seem to be slipping under the radar. But this piece by Zach Carter at the Huffington Post has an important piece that zeroes in on one especially bizarre bit of the President’s posturing around the debt ceiling deal: his claim that one of the best ways to create jobs is for Congress to “send me a bill that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to patent a new product or idea, because we can’t give innovators in other countries a big leg up when it comes to opening new businesses and creating new jobs”.

Anyone who’s been reading my recent posts about intellectual property law can probably guess what I think about this: the last thing we need right now is to make it easier to get patents. As NPR’s Planet Money makes clear in a great follow-up to their This American Life piece on patent trolls, the flood of vague and useless patents is already gumming up the legal system with litigation and probably costing jobs. In fact, Intellectual Ventures, the villian of the TAL piece, turns up in the HuffPo piece as one of the companies lobbying against anything that weakens patent protections.

But as with most things in our political system, the patent “reform” legislation has turned into a gigantic contest of corporate lobbyists, with the rest of us left watching from the sidelines. The whole article is worth a read, but here are a few highlights.