If I Knew Then What I Know Now

I was inspired today by a small comment in a Paul Krugman blog post:

...as far as I can tell, hardly any of the new anti-Obamanites is thinking at all about what will really happen once John Boehner is speaker.

I was equally revolted by Morning Joe commentary concerning the coming doom of the mid term elections, without even mentioning the Howard Dean differentiating take from yesterday.

So I made an exercise for us to try and imagine this time next year.




[editors note: there is no way that I will ever top the seminal outing of the Morning Joe idiosynchratic parade contained in last month's video. This is not that at all, and this new one is really just trying to hard focus on one topic that Paul Krugman and I feel like the nation could use some help visualizing]

Vote For The Skunk

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010


Observations:


1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:


A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.


We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?


We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.


We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?


There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.


That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.


As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.


Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.


As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.


2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.


Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?


I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.


Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.


3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.


We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.


Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.


If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Disproportionate

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 9th, 2010


Observations:


1) The dynamic that seems to work for the Morning Joe show is when Scarborough surrounds himself with antagonists, keeps maybe one ally and takes them all on kung fu style. The show today would’ve capsized to the right if it had to pass a seaworthiness test, and screamed: bring me Katrina Vanden Heuvel at the top of its lungs.


Nice safe edits of the Sunday talk shows ensued with the favorite being the tape of the two former treasury secretaries agreeing with everything Joe Scarborough ever said, ever. Ruben and O’Neil were in rare form on GPS on Sunday. I wish the Morning Joe show would’ve spent some time talking about Paul O’Neil talking about how he got fired for his loud recognition that WMD was a fallacy or that the Bush tax cuts were catastrophic. No great mystery why that part didn’t make it to the agenda of the day.


To be fair, this show skewers John Boehner every single time. They taunt him, they mock his takes, and as of this morning refer to his appearance as ‘distracting’. It’s always a good day when that is the context of Boehner’s mention on the show, but it appears to be white noise at this point and does not counterbalance the abbreviated representation of the Ruben/O’Neil interview.


Another outright passive aggressive smackdown occurred when Joe Scarborough at the end of the Erin Burnett segment listened to Erin postulate that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will have an at best marginal effect on domestic growth. Upon hearing a take that need to be assassinated at once, Scarborough went to his ‘hypnosis’ face and deep froze the conversation straight to commercial.


But Haass, Halperin, Wallace joined Scarborough and Geist in what amounts to a televised 5-0 verdict on any issue that showed up. Halperin might have seemed like he was dissenting, but that was actually Mark wishing that Democrats would actually be even more extreme and run the ship on the rocks in the 3 months after the election, in hopes that a regime change could be had more possibly in 2012.


2) If I could have asked a question of Jeffrey Sachs, it would have been: does your abandonment of stimulus have to do solely with buyer’s remorse from the mediocrity of the Pelosi plan, or do you share Scarborough’s ban on anything called stimulus? It’s really two different takes on the issue. We have a sinful amount of envy for the recession era investments made by the Chinese, and we have no appetite to have Pelosi II.


But Scarborough ran with the Sachs accompaniment as if it was an endorsement, and that’s just not congruency. It’s OK to say there’s some coincidental parts of the two things, but what I hear when I hear Sachs riff on stimulus or health care or financial regulatory reform is a disenchantment with the diluted solutions of our government and an intent not to fund counterproductive governing bodies. That is worlds away from a small government conservative that would’ve created an equal fiscal catastrophe with misplaced austerity.


I am not surprised by Scarborough magnetizing his position to smart peoples takes that sound like they have similar elements. But there needs to be proof sent out by this claim that Scarborough’s take was something other than extreme with no provable benefit.


So should that question have gone the way I would bet everything it would, I would have followed up with another: if there was a provable architecture and an executive intent to a second stimulus, a do over with a top to bottom plan, could you endorse that? It would separate Sachs from Scarborough and prove that my remorse is solvable, but only by government that adapts to its previous failures.


They are two different takes, don’t adopt it because you won’t like it when it grows up.


3) On Friday, the Sebastian Junger visit followed up by the David Ignatius interview was as good as it’s been on the Morning Joe show in a long while. I looked up the film and found it nearby with one paltry midday showing, but there is zero chance ill miss it. While I love the segment and the reverence, there just doesn’t seem to be any relationship being made that the movie and this book is no different than the WikiLeaks situation.


People trying to bury WikiLeaks will find that Junger’s book and movie won’t make them happy, either. So the question that should be fairly levied here is: why the reverence in one spot and the demonization of the other? I have consistently called the Julian Assange effort a courageous one. I would like to see an explanation about the two different treatments by this show.


We all like Tom Hanks, we all watched The Pacific, so how is Assange a spy and Junger a hero? They are both heroes. I elect as judge of this challenge: Dr Jeffrey Sachs. Good luck winning that one.


Ignatius made everyone’s head spin with real news that the President is trying to look in unorthodox spots like Iran to solve the problems he is facing. If nothing else, the fact that this train of though exists is very good news.


But like we all know, we may want to give that a minute or a week, lest we get bested by quick moving facts.


That's all for today, see you tomorrow.

Joe Takes Flight

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 16th, 2010


Observations


1) I don’t know why but the bottom has fallen out of the debate on Morning Joe. We have previously expressed our disdain for the PPP polling system, but there it was as today’s top news.


The BP oil spill being capped is not news. It is a reminder that the nearly impossible task of cleaning up a mega disaster is at least a finite chore if all things hold as they are now.


And Barack Obama went on vacation, wait, he has been on a form of vacation since inauguration.


Yup, those were your news items. Small wonder Wall Street looked at this pitiful display and tanked 261 points.


2) Then there was the stuff that didn’t get covered. It’s a long list and even I will leave 80% of it out, but it shows the lack of conviction from which the show currently debates.


Elizabeth Warren’s potential role as the head of the Consumer Protection Agency is being opposed by Tim Geithner. What is that? If you didn’t already know the financial wing of the administration was in the tank for Wall Street, who reward them back with abandonment, now you do. The senselessness of all of this is a real “Brazil” moment. Round and round we go, we get nothing for our own dilution, but our dilution and those who want to make us whole are ostracized. It amazes the senses.


Obama told a joke about Boehner wanting to repeal Financial Reform, then Senator Shelby actually called for it’s repeal. There were already optics police calling the Boehner joke ‘misplaced anger for a leader’, then when it happened in real life, we all just stood there, tased by the ‘Monty Python’ moment we had just been a part of.


Dick Cheney got a pump put in his heart as part of his Obamacare. People have died waiting for this procedure under the rationing of services incurred via private insurers. It’s not realistic to assume that Dick Cheney or Pablo Escobar or any other known tribal leader would likely get favorable service, but the equation still bears illumination.


I mean, it’s right there, often on your ticker, and you’re agenda spent that time talking about John Daly’s pants?


3) Joe Scarborough mumbled under his breath ‘this is going nowhere’ at 7 AM and left the set. He probably went to talk to his agent about ‘a shorter option’.


And in came Zbig.


We were pretty hard on the smartest guy in any room last time through, but only out of a ‘while you're busy shining his shoes, careful you don’t lose sight of his Starbucks passive aggressive despot side” concern. Fair enough.


But today he was back in full origami mode. He beat up that young whippersnapper Pat Buchanan then helped the wayward youth to his feet and said ‘I hope we’re still friends’.


I don’t think Buchanan is used to the woodshed. He normally can just roll out a forgotten scandal or political entity (Adlai Stevenson) and hit that ‘Buchanan octave’ and the young Turks disperse in horror.


But Mr. Brzezinski made simple math of Buchanan’s saber rattling about Libya and added in a real human touch, having been on a Korean Air flight in the past week. Buchanan was reduced to a pointless bully and seemed like he found a short circuit surrounding the word ‘morality’.


If you backed off when the Soviets did it, but you want to invade Libya, aren’t you only choosing fights where you can seem superior? I believe the quote was "If the country's immoral and weak you go after it, but if the country's immoral and strong you accommodate, now is that morality?"


I love Buchanan, and here’s hoping for a speedy recovery. For the Show.


That’s all for today, see you Monday.

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 2nd, 2010


Observations:


1) Seems distressingly odd that John Heilemann would ask the question about whether the lowering of the nominal unemployment rate would be trotted out as a positive by the White House. It’s distressing on two fronts: one is that they might actually do that despite as Savannah said it is a quirk that fell the other way 2 months ago and two, there is a simple mathematical reason why the rate fell that is a very negative piece of news. Over 600,000 people fell out of the workforce counted in the unemployment number, so the rate went down because the denominator in the equation went down. Those people went somewhere when they fell out of the workforce, they went to a category best described as hopeless.


So if you make the mistake of trotting that number out there, someone is going to damn you doubly for doing it, but it’s often difficult to resist for political types, which is why it caught the eye of Heilemann.


Tread carefully lest you be seen as trumpeting a false positive indicator for short term gain, very short term gain, with a backlash.


2) Norah O’Donnell unwittingly continued the anti Boehner campaign by adding chain smoking, poorly named a ‘love for butts’, and reinforced the boozing charge. In a public relations war, contrary to what the Wall Street Journal guy says, you want John Boehner on TV right now, because he is a trainwreck not seen since Jimmy and Tammy Fay Baker.


The late night shows had a field day with Boehner. A monster of a point was made with little fanfare by Willie Geist earlier this week, that Saturday Night Live being out of production right now is a huge break for the the Ohio congressman. Otherwise, he might get the kind of permanent roast that moves into the ‘more famous than the actual guy’ category.


I’m still stuck on ‘Breakfast Club’: “could you describe the ruckus, sir?”


3) In violation of the Morning Joe ban on any coverage of the BP oil spill, the skeleton crew took liberty today to show a 2 ½ minute clip of the oil in the gulf with some generic news sprinkled on top by Norah.


I hope they don’t get in too much trouble. I mean, it’s been decided right? This show is about politics and the most important story of the new decade can be shoved aside in the pursuit of a pure agenda. I haven’t seen such a plan Fox covered the inaugeration.


Not even the top of the hour news is certain to even mention the spill. The Boehner story got all the coverage that wasn’t the pregame on the unemployment number or the Week In Review.


I am thoroughly appalled that the Morning Joe show has completed another week in absolute ignorance of the Gulf oil disaster. I don’t know how it is happening, it’s confusing, and I wish it would correct.


That’s all for today, see you Tuesday.

New Month, Same Empty Set

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 1st, 2010


Observations:


1) It is with great joy that I witness the Morning Joe cast go for John Boehner’s head, and crack down on anyone in the Republican party who defends him as acting in deference to status quo interests.


While it may seem like theater, there is a permanent record of open criticism happening that will haunt the minority leader forever into the future. Everything from work ethic to a dearth of new ideas are all cataclysmic charges.


Now the softball interview with Paul Ryan was a step back. But I don’t want to belittle his ideas, he does in fact put moderate merit to what used to be the Republican consensus financial platform. The problem, and you know how big of a problem it is, is that even Paul Ryan doesn’t get to criticize what he knows his party is incapable of. The modern Republican party does not have the ability to initiate solvency reform in the financial sector, environmental reform at the MMS, or health care reform. Both parties are entrenched with status quo special interest, but the record now shows that only one party has any ability, even if diluted, to be a genesis point for reform or governing.


So when Paul Ryan gets to launch grenades at Obama and his agenda, and Joe Scarborough can’t put the obvious check question “would your party, if in power, be able to enact any financial reform?’ into play, that’s softball.


2) But that’s it, that’s all that was accomplished today in three hours. The sheer void where oil spill coverage should be cannot be part of the program lest the program is ready to start bleeding credibility. Today's show was a majority coverage of features and human interest stories. Not like it was a slow news day either.


Make a spill status snapshot and report on it every day. These questions have to be asked every day from now on:


Where are the oil removal ships, and can they be mapped, and competitively analyzed to understand if there is a reason for their slow assignment?


Is there burning at sea going on and what is the impact?


Is the claims fund in place and what is its financial snapshot of claims paid?


What part of the solution both at sea and in affected communities is still being directed through BP as a defacto NGO?


What is the timeline for the spill being stopped?


Will there be a criminal prosecution for the BP managers who acted recklessly causing this disaster?


Will there be any clawback of compromised activity at the MMS?


I’m sure there are others, but we just can’t watch a show presided over by a man from Pensacola, Florida turn in the result Lebron 3, BP 0.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

The Myth Of The Republican Genesis

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 22rd, 2010


Observations:


1) When a prediction goes awry, the best defense is to move quickly to the next prediction. Several predictions were unveiled on the Morning Joe show the morning after health care passed Congress, and the combining fixes were sent to the Senate to make a once and for all genesis path for health care reform a reality.

The first prediction is that John Cornyn says that the Senate will further attempt to disrupt the eventual passage, which at this point seems like hapless channeling of the tan face of defeat, Mr. Boehner. The second is that the November elections are a plank walk for Democrats. The last and maybe most significant is that Americans will see the passage as a giant loss for freedom.


No one knows if the Republicans in the Senate will have the will to continue a clear loser strategy of obstruction until the imminent defeat is had. But if they do, this is one prediction that will only profit the other side. Republicans have willingly gone the obstruction route for some time. There were times it worked, times it benefited elections, times it seemed like ‘party of no’ was a selling point. But this is a large leap of faith given the signs of a citizenry with an eroded patience, and the law of diminishing return setting in. The real cost of the obstruction is that it’s a sunk cost that just seems ridiculous when the opposite occurrence happens anyway, and seemingly the whole world could’ve predicted the end result. It seems like charades, does that help a party’s relevance?


The elections this coming November could have all looked like the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts. The Republicans could’ve pointed to a case of denial by the Obama administration where the Dems fought the futile fight inefficiently and took the voter for granted in absolute denial of the people’s will to focus on jobs. Now, the Democrats have the giant progress achievement, and it’s the Republicans who seem like the inefficient managers of the message war.


Lawrence O’Donnell has been screaming at the lack of a tax increase messages in the Republican resistance, yet all that has emanated from that resistance is ‘start over’, ‘Americans don’t want it’, and ‘Government takeover’. The days of ‘mission accomplished’ sloganism resonating with a public now forced to take a calculator to any claim from any party are over for now. You need to put math in front of them that they can self verify. Republicans and slogans is an equation about shelf life, sounds good for 90 days, seems to accomplish nothing after, and a distrust of the marketing process has ensued. Not talking about taxes is a gaffe of supernova proportions for the Republican party.


The elections will make the Republicans seem like dime store hoods facing the American public with yet another round of doublespeak hiding their true intent of dissolving the middle class for profit. Running against that health care accomplishment by the Dems is that fake hug scene in Jerry MaGuire. Good luck with that.


So, that leaves freedom. I know the freedom they’re talking about, the freedom to not acquire health insurance if you don’t want to, to pay cash for medical services so that you don’t have to pay into something you don’t use or aren’t interested in. The mandate is troubling, but you have to explain to me which side of the free enterprise system that you’re on. Because taking this argument appears to be playing both sides.


In the free market solution, you are providing a public good via a private mechanism. We learned in the car insurance business, that the uninsured driver is a byproduct of the lack of government involvement in the market, where it’s understood that an individual must be liable for his actions as a driver and automobile owner. So our registrations and police enforcements have enforced a mandate, and allowed the private insurers to work at an efficiency previously unseen.


So were you free when you could not pay for your liability to an emergency rooms mandate to treat you, or were you free when you were forced to cover yourself for that liability, and made the cost of that treatment 1/10th of the first scenario? And would you be more or less free if the undeniable fact that you will eventually need health care was simply transferred to the tax side of the equation and single payer was the law of the land. All the talk of freedom just sounds like the freedom to live in denial of your eventual need for health care.


Three predictions, three new losers, go team wrong!


2) I don’t understand how its not part of the news that the stand alone public option is following this bill along and has 80 sponsors. Alan Grayson has put together the antithesis of all that has gone into the health care bill just passed. Grayson’s plan is all of four pages, accomplishes its goal not of universal coverage but universal extension, and takes an existing system that has a 97% flow through and put its efficiency to work.


The reason I find it so confusing, is that it wouldn’t end private insurance, it would accomplish all of the Republicans goals of strengthening competition. Health care insurers would have to relinquish status quo monopolies and lack of free choice rules, and stateline rules just to be in this game. Most importantly, health insurers would have to come up with some private industry pressure on the cost side of things to compete. Otherwise their business goes away.


5 years after the Grayson bill would become law, the reality on the ground is that the private market would show it’s comparative superiority by providing health care at a cost of around 80% of that offered by the Medicare extension, because they would have to.


Conventional wisdom seems to be you can’t embrace this stuff until it gets enough momentum that you won’t seem like an outlier pointing to it. Morning Joe should be opposite of conventional wisdom on this issue.


3) Lawrence O’Donnell has officially made the genesis point, that Republicans would never initiate health care if they were in control of government. Lawrence included Joe Scarborough specifically. This was not a pleasant moment for Joe Scarborough. It is the simplest logic, and something we have been screaming at the television since before Morning Joe existed. In fact come November, you will be hearing this point a lot.


The Republicans have no idea how to govern anymore. Their idea of governing is to perpetually lower taxes and hope that a nation of bubble driven faux rich people are dumbed down enough to forget that should the sky fall there will be zero support structure. Further they seem like patsies to Wall Street, allowing their apparent allies to drive the economy off of a cliff on their watch. Republicans: Wall Street are not your allies, it’s a relationship of convenience between two liars.


The Democrats are far from innocent in this phenomenon. The deals agreed to in order to pass health care are embarrassing. But the incremental point is a powerful one: we are mature enough to know that while we want more in the direction of governing and providing services, we have to start here and whittle away at the mirage driven denial of our opponents.


Joe Scarborough, you would never as a governor initiate health care coverage, salvage social security, sufficiently tax a population to preserve and improve schooling, or balance any budget based on a baseline of necessity versus a baseline of revenue. You are completely limited to Reagan commercial growth for your ability to run an economy, and thus own the crises you complain about. That makes the complaints you make about the ‘bad bills’ the Democrats used for stimulus and health care part of the party of no. Stop with the mirages, and let’s see some 4 page solutions from you.


Way to go Lawrence, I guess it took a day like today.



That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

More Of The Same

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 9th, 2010


Observations:


1) If anything, we are lucky there were features today because of the lack of real news. I’m not a fan of features, but this was necessary today a) to explain away the unbelievable goings on in the Massa case and b) to be honest about the level of catatonic effect the news cycle can bring you.


Think about what the show didn’t talk about today. All that optimism stuff from yesterday: Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq…. It’s like it disappeared. Goldman Sachs, financial reform? It’s like it didn’t exist.


When those subjects are optional, it’s a statement that Morning Joe, the most powerful news show on television currently also feels powerless in the face of Washington reality.


When it is strikingly obvious that reform as Elizabeth Warren would have it is as likely as a Kucinich presidency, and the reform we are getting is double speak empowering the architects of our financial doom, we laugh catatonically.


It doesn’t matter that the laughter was in reference to locker room antics, it’s that we can only laugh at that, and cannot directly confront the less hopeful stuff except by hysterical proxy.


2) New drinking game: we’re so big we are on the television of the person we’re talking about or the place we’re referring to right now. Code name: closed circuit. It might be true, and that watershed moment when Axelrod couldn’t take it anymore last December is a chief proof of that theory, but it’s still the definition of ostentatious.


I know it’s a lot to ask, but try a little more of a glancing strategy than the “Mr. President, I’m Talkin’ To You” histrionics, and watch the effect grow. What you do when you go the closed circuit way, is you become the blogger you're taught to ignore. You become the parasitic attention grabber you’re meant to be superior to on the food chain.


Glancing strategy can be fun. Here’s a thing you could do in a glancing environment that’s equally confrontational and equally educational. Role playing. Ok, Sam Stein, you be the President, Chuck Todd, you be Rahm, Mika, Axelrod, Joe, McConnell, Pat, Boehner, even Willie, Gibbs, and you’ve got yourself a fun introspective analysis without the self serving holiness.


Take on a few subjects, hey, why not start with financial reform? You missed it today.


3) Is it a surprise to anyone that Liz Cheney played herself out? Or that Rahm is at death’s door? We are all so led on this stuff that we are weakest when we think we’ve got it figured out. That’s the nature of a strategy that corrects. Go get in the game, and even if it is not going that well, remember you still get to correct and it’s the post correction strategy that you close with.


Your opponent can only react, or guess.


We are at that spot right now, as the Obama people are absolutely redefining what works and what doesn’t, while the Republicans, as evidenced in John Boehner’s statement today, are really boxed into a more of the same strategy.


I don’t know what the administration or the Pelosi/Reid legislature are going to do to close, but all the prognostication in the last 30 days and going forward seems to me to be grasping at straws, and that includes McConnell, Boehner and Steele.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

It’s Time To Play Some Dodgeball

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 20th, 2010


Observations:


1) Here's how bipartisan progress should work: the majority and minority leaders and the committee chairmen of the various health care related committees get together in a binding selection framework.


Harry Reid gets to go first and says “no pre existing conditions” , Mitch McConnell gets to go second and says “tort reform” , Nancy Pelosi goes third and says “end to antitrust exemption”, John Boehner goes last and says “rescind state line limitations”


The two sides go back and huddle up for a day. And come back and see if there is a phase two selection. The selection is sudden death and there are five available attempts to get the first set of 4 selections complete or the process is scuttled for the congressional session. So if anyone says something and the following chooser says I can’t agree to that, the selection process is scuttled, and goes back to what we have now.


If any party says public option, the process is likely killed, if either party says unfunded mandate, the process is likely killed, but if the bipartisan horse trading results in progress for the free market system, we all win. Obviously, John Boehner could say with his last vote, “John Boehner for termless king” but that likely wouldn’t get 60 votes. Nor would abortion restriction, nor would medicare for all.


But what would happen is if the 4 things we need the most in the existing system were progressed in a bipartisan manner, it would avoid omnibus pig troughs and limit amendments and earmarks. That’s the rules in horse trading, an amendment is a fifth selection, and that wasn’t the bipartisan deal.


2) There is no doubt that the Brown victory is a victory for the American people. The American people gave Obama a fair chance to make his case, and his case was as popular as Ishtar. Health care has proven to be a feckless giveaway on par with the stimulus, which consensus says was misguided beyond all doubt.


Goldman Sachs, big pharma, the insurance industry, and the ethanol lobby all have a closer relationship with this administration than any citizen who voted for this President, thus making the lion’s share of his election mandate appear to be an absolute fraud to an angry electorate.


Blaming centrism for dilution and corporate giveaway is making matters worse. You are beholden to Lieberman and Nelson because you did not talk to the whole Republican party, just a couple of tokens. This was your own doing.


This math could’ve been overcome several ways, but they all had a common necessity: leadership. When we’re selecting managers for industry, we look to see if they manage by crisis or are out in front of potential trouble spots allowing at least some of them to be reduced to managed events rather than blowups. It’s been blowup after blowup after blowup on this executive’s watch, and he has just been made accountable.


3) As an optimist, I’m ready for year two to be Obama the tornado. What Bill Clinton found out early on, is that you sign the checks yourself. Clinton micromanaged and immersed like no President before him. He was obviously fluent in everything from Bosnia, to the oppositions contract with America.


You have every opportunity to be the ball in year two, and it starts with the horse trade above as an admission that you have not achieved your bipartisan goals and will need to reinvigorate that process to finish this health care agenda once and for all. A horse trade version of health care can be through the legislature in weeks. Make those leaders make that deal in your office, make them show up every Monday at 8 am until its done. That’s what being an executive is all about, they all work for you, including the opposition.


But it can’t stop there, you are going to need to clean house in Treasury. Austan Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to move reform forward unencumbered by the industry interests. Your staff are directly executing the industry’s agenda, visible to voters who are choosing to vote against you until this changes.


Lastly, this Mohammed trial is a domestic loser beyond all scope. Now that it’s not Dick Cheney shooting holes in your patriotism, its Democratic voters saying they had no idea you we’re this far off of the grid when it comes to using our courts to protect the rights of admitted terrorists, your choice is clear. Let’s rush on domestic needs and slow down on Guantanamo and banning Tribunals until we can catch our breath on this. It appears you have grossly overcomplicated the already complicated.


We are at a historic crossroads. One more wrong move and this country will look a lot like what’s going on in Russia right now with our own Putin named Romney. I don’t think we have much longer to fight that off. And if that happens to us, how many other great societies go with us?


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Scarborough Tries The Old Ball O’String Trick

The Morning Joe Rebuttal For November 25th, 2009


Observations:


1) Now look, any day that John Boehner looks bad is a good day for the truth. This person is the minority leader of the House of Representatives. They are currently in charge of obstruction of progress for the American people and have spent the last 2 years and 11 months trying to harm America, sell doublespeak as fact, and reinforce the movement of the distribution of wealth in our country forever northward.



But that’s not what Joe Scarborough intended when golf-gate was the main story today. It is that technique of using what amounts to a benign occurrence with very bad optics to appear to be closer to the middle, only to use that regained false credibility to attack a far more substantive matter: health care, jobs, Afghanistan, take your pick.


It’s what your older brother did to you in the back of the car on family trips to steal your ice cream sandwich, look {Morning Joe Viewer} there’s the worlds biggest ball of string, then BAM!, when your head’s turned your ice cream was gone!


Don’t let them get away with it. The best defense is to blithely play along, let the damage to Boehner be maximized, and then refute the first attempt by JS to use that momentum for any “see, I’m on your side” munitions. That’s called the engineered backfire technique and I know you’re up to it.


2) Speaking of doublespeak, I have an antidote for you, and his name is Dr. Howard Dean. If you had to trust any one person with your future, you have chosen Barack Obama, but if you ever wavered, ever wondered why so many Goldman guys are in power, why guys who are going to vote no anyway got to shelve anti-trust provisions for health care, why the American people are still in last place in the domestic food chain, who should you pick next? John Boehner and let commerce govern you for another eternity, or Howard Dean, the one guy on the planet left who didn’t have to be a billionaire already to tell you the truth and really govern.


Dr. Dean is like that guy on Fast Times At Ridgemont High who is “just flown in for games”. The reason he doesn’t have a gig right now, after managing the resurrection of the Democratic party culminating in the first sweeping majority in 35 years, is that he is the party’s designated hitter and free to attack whatever trouble spot exists while the party’s in power.


Dr. Dean has a position on health care and it’s the one that will serve as kryptonite to the right if needed. He will be the person who will be the face of reconciliation if that’s what it takes to put a bill through the Senate either pre- or post-conference containing real teeth. He is Harry Reid’s best friend in the world right now, and if you had a hellfire missile like him with a clumsy crusading army of obstructionist approaching, you would like your chances.


3) Independent voters the world over have a single motivating force: they know that both parties are forced to mislead them due to the structural engineering of their platform. If you don’t have 8 of 10 items right on your Republican checklist, guess what, you’re now an independent. If you didn’t want to reverse the annexation of the Panama Canal, ditto. This prevalence of managed messages and agenda talking points bundle stuff you need from either side and forces you to embrace or exile. Exile is where the overwhelming majority of Americans are today, and it’s a new kind of paradise in formation.


The Democrats know this and they are comforted going forward by showing the infighting that’s going on as healthy, hoping that independent voters will come back once they look at the Republican party and see the checklist. The checklist is absolute suicide, and lets hope it’s here to stay. John Boehner reading that checklist and looking like the principal in Breakfast Club, trying to represent the future? I must be dreaming.


John Hughes was a generational treasure.

Have a great Thanksgiving, see you Monday.