The Hudson River tunnel stoppage is a national tragedy. Rather than rant as I’ve done repeatedly about the Krugman-Keynes versus Republican denial debate, it’s more important to ponder how Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough can have formed a blind alliance with Chris Christie and immediately came down in favor of his work stoppage order. They then went on to cite the travel musings of Chrystia Freeland in Turkey and the second Zbigeniew Brzezinski compare and contrast observation in the last few months, and went further citing Germany’s austerity program, and could not make cohesive sense if their life depended on it.
Germany can afford austerity because its public works is at a rate of completion that it isn’t perpetually 20 years behind in terms of infrastructure maintenance needs like the US is. The two recent foreign travelers are basically saying every day we do things like stop the second Hudson River tunnel the closer we come to having the infrastructure of the third world and having global business look elsewhere.
Freeland and Erin Burnett have made this as clear as they can, but choosing talking points over logic, Morning Joe has pre-aligned itself with the Republican party and cheers any new loss of momentum in governing as some great victory. Freeland and Burnett pointing out the money we would use to make public works happen is beneficial as a whole economy revival and is cheaper now on both a nominal interest basis and a real cost basis than when we had a budget surplus in 1999.
But Morning Joe’s mind is made up and that’s all there is to it. Stop building infrastructure and reverse anything else in the name of austerity. Tragic.
Conveniently the unemployment numbers boost critics either way. The unemployment figures released today were the opposite of the numbers released last month. Last month the nominal jobs lost was better than expected but because more people entered the workforce and looked for work the rate ticked up to 9.6%. The good news caused the uptick but the critics went crazy looking for ways to blame the administration for the rate.
This time the rate was expected to go up to 9.7% for the same positive reasons, but it didn’t, because again we didn’t lose as many jobs as we thought. But now the critics are camped on the fact that because there was a net job loss at all, Obama must be held accountable. It all looks like the analysis of convenience.
In a weird convergence with Yelp.com, Morning Joe just seems to scroll itself to whomever is complaining and cover that. Again you have that future commerce secretary Maria Bartiromo on the show chomping at the bit to show business is ready to revolt because Obama can’t give them the rest of the wealth they haven’t already pilfered.
Objective types continue to fail to break through with rational mathematical reasoning with the Morning Joe cast. In fairness the White House is having the same problems reasoning with people, as we talked about yesterday. But the inability of the show to connect the dots seems intentional.
Showing posts with label Maria Bartiromo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maria Bartiromo. Show all posts
Friday, October 8, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Armed With 15% Of The Facts And A Howitzer
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) How embarrassing is Tim Kaine? Audacity is defined as making that quip “I don’t pretend anyone remembers a DNC chairmen 3 minutes after they’re gone”. Ummm, I think every registered Democrat remembers the last DNC chairman, that guy who WON elections. Howard Dean.
But rather than just lament the critical velocity in reverse that the above misquidedness represents, it’s more important to point out the sheer lack of lucidity when Kaine speaks. It is all rosy if you ask Mr. Kaine. Often you hear people say this would all be a little easier if someone in government was simply speaking like adults or business men (not their publicists).
That is the opposite of the effect given off when Kaine describes how strong the Health Care Reform polls. That is just wishful thinking and amateurish projection of that wishful thinking. Health Care polls as poorly as possible because the part people need is 40 months away, and all we can think about as we wait those 40 months is the sheer capitulation that occurred defanging the needed reform. When HCR gets in place will we then find out it actually has been outflanked by defensive maneuvers by the insurers who’ve had the 40 months to get back to status quo?
The bottom line on our current DNC chairman is that he is the doctor whose bedside manner is so bad that he just lies. He tells the cancer victim that recovery is imminent so that he doesn’t have to do the tough work of telling them to write their will. Kaine is selling lottery tickets with his prediction that the Democrats will come back. All of the ‘he has to do that rationale’ is actually the strategy of the other side. This side gets its backbone by saying the truth, which is not centrist doctrine. The Kucinich's and Weiners of the world don’t go down making false promises that a nonexistent turnaround is just around the corner. They appeal to passion, and in Tim Kaine representation of the role of the DNC chairman today, could you spot that passion in any lucid form? No, it just seemed like a door to door Xerox salesman who would say anything.
While I’m throwing darts at that guy, I want to point out that there was a publicity stunt in February where it was leaked that Kaine would finally fulfill his potential as DNC Chair because Virginia inaugurated a new governor and Kaine would no longer have to split his time. His focus in the six months since has made things worse as he has been free to make more half pronouncements in a day than previously possible.
2) Now, its actually good news that Joe Scarborough can’t actually stop talking about the positive economic effects of extending tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. That opposing the extension is “mindless”. You can already see the retort on the Daily Show. Joe Scarborough would walk into this ambush like a basic training flunkee.
You can pick from about 87 3 minute rants all with the same message, jump to Mika endorsing with a “you’ve been saying that all along”, and then play 25 guests on the Morning Joe show that have lined up to say in a deep as available science that the economic foundation of Joe Scarboroughs argument is 100% fallacy.
One would say on an ROI basis with limited available funds, tax cuts to the rich are in last place, another would say it’s not 2% small business its less than that, a third small business growth we seek primarily offshoots from manufacturing growth, not singular business. At the end of 25, none of which would need to be Paul Krugman or Robert Reich mind you, it would be obvious that Joe Scarborough stands in distant opposition to genuine economic consensus, and makes you wonder about his motivation in doing so.
I fully realize that this rationale has zero effect on Joe or John Boehner’s complete rejection of letting the tax cuts expire, but I think there is also a growing consensus of people forced into a better understanding of economics by tough times asking why those leaders pursue this path? It seems dishonest with great costs to America associated to those dishonest claims.
The more middle America hears a false argument, the more a baseline realization that we're being duped sets in. We used to talk about how in polls Americans embarrassingly told pollsters they thought Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s safe to say that the awfulness of that national misunderstanding has corrected itself through repeating with great frequency just how embarrassingly wrong it was.
Similarly, Americans on the right, in the Tea Party or towards the middle right of America, will look with a degree of humiliation at where they were duped into making the comparatively poor investment of repealing a tax on the top 2% of America instead of directly investing in new jobs for their constituencies. You aren’t in that 2%. Supply side economics is the economics of waiting for crumbs, and you don’t have time to wait. Direct investments in your constituencies revive economies at a 2 to 1 rate compared to tax repeals for the rich, because the rich have the option to NOT spend the money, which they exercise at least HALF the time.
Why do John Boehner and Joe Scarborough make the trickle down case at every opportunity in defiance of any logic except the artificial one they simply concoct on the spot? It can only be one of two reasons: they are in the 2% or they are paid to protect the interest of the 2%.
3) As suspicious as I am about Maria Bartiromo, it was happy to see her on the show trying to find common ground with Arianna Huffington. But before that Willie Geist did a connect the jobs duty by asking Maria to weigh in on the small business negative impact of the tax cut for the rich debate. She of course ducked the question, instead going with the fact that if you want to talk negligible, talk about the amount of money the government gets via the top 2% returning to a 29.9% federal rate. It’s insignificant, its $36 billion dollars. Does that seem insignificant to you? Or did she just put some words together and hope nobody would check?
But yes, Arianna and Maria found middle ground. It’s as if Maria had a bit of an awakening working on her book where she was forced to analyze the role of market touts in explaining away the criminal behavior that’s taken control of Wall Street. Well, I obviously took it too far, but let’s see if over time Maria starts to look for an exit from fallacy island.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) How embarrassing is Tim Kaine? Audacity is defined as making that quip “I don’t pretend anyone remembers a DNC chairmen 3 minutes after they’re gone”. Ummm, I think every registered Democrat remembers the last DNC chairman, that guy who WON elections. Howard Dean.
But rather than just lament the critical velocity in reverse that the above misquidedness represents, it’s more important to point out the sheer lack of lucidity when Kaine speaks. It is all rosy if you ask Mr. Kaine. Often you hear people say this would all be a little easier if someone in government was simply speaking like adults or business men (not their publicists).
That is the opposite of the effect given off when Kaine describes how strong the Health Care Reform polls. That is just wishful thinking and amateurish projection of that wishful thinking. Health Care polls as poorly as possible because the part people need is 40 months away, and all we can think about as we wait those 40 months is the sheer capitulation that occurred defanging the needed reform. When HCR gets in place will we then find out it actually has been outflanked by defensive maneuvers by the insurers who’ve had the 40 months to get back to status quo?
The bottom line on our current DNC chairman is that he is the doctor whose bedside manner is so bad that he just lies. He tells the cancer victim that recovery is imminent so that he doesn’t have to do the tough work of telling them to write their will. Kaine is selling lottery tickets with his prediction that the Democrats will come back. All of the ‘he has to do that rationale’ is actually the strategy of the other side. This side gets its backbone by saying the truth, which is not centrist doctrine. The Kucinich's and Weiners of the world don’t go down making false promises that a nonexistent turnaround is just around the corner. They appeal to passion, and in Tim Kaine representation of the role of the DNC chairman today, could you spot that passion in any lucid form? No, it just seemed like a door to door Xerox salesman who would say anything.
While I’m throwing darts at that guy, I want to point out that there was a publicity stunt in February where it was leaked that Kaine would finally fulfill his potential as DNC Chair because Virginia inaugurated a new governor and Kaine would no longer have to split his time. His focus in the six months since has made things worse as he has been free to make more half pronouncements in a day than previously possible.
2) Now, its actually good news that Joe Scarborough can’t actually stop talking about the positive economic effects of extending tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. That opposing the extension is “mindless”. You can already see the retort on the Daily Show. Joe Scarborough would walk into this ambush like a basic training flunkee.
You can pick from about 87 3 minute rants all with the same message, jump to Mika endorsing with a “you’ve been saying that all along”, and then play 25 guests on the Morning Joe show that have lined up to say in a deep as available science that the economic foundation of Joe Scarboroughs argument is 100% fallacy.
One would say on an ROI basis with limited available funds, tax cuts to the rich are in last place, another would say it’s not 2% small business its less than that, a third small business growth we seek primarily offshoots from manufacturing growth, not singular business. At the end of 25, none of which would need to be Paul Krugman or Robert Reich mind you, it would be obvious that Joe Scarborough stands in distant opposition to genuine economic consensus, and makes you wonder about his motivation in doing so.
I fully realize that this rationale has zero effect on Joe or John Boehner’s complete rejection of letting the tax cuts expire, but I think there is also a growing consensus of people forced into a better understanding of economics by tough times asking why those leaders pursue this path? It seems dishonest with great costs to America associated to those dishonest claims.
The more middle America hears a false argument, the more a baseline realization that we're being duped sets in. We used to talk about how in polls Americans embarrassingly told pollsters they thought Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s safe to say that the awfulness of that national misunderstanding has corrected itself through repeating with great frequency just how embarrassingly wrong it was.
Similarly, Americans on the right, in the Tea Party or towards the middle right of America, will look with a degree of humiliation at where they were duped into making the comparatively poor investment of repealing a tax on the top 2% of America instead of directly investing in new jobs for their constituencies. You aren’t in that 2%. Supply side economics is the economics of waiting for crumbs, and you don’t have time to wait. Direct investments in your constituencies revive economies at a 2 to 1 rate compared to tax repeals for the rich, because the rich have the option to NOT spend the money, which they exercise at least HALF the time.
Why do John Boehner and Joe Scarborough make the trickle down case at every opportunity in defiance of any logic except the artificial one they simply concoct on the spot? It can only be one of two reasons: they are in the 2% or they are paid to protect the interest of the 2%.
3) As suspicious as I am about Maria Bartiromo, it was happy to see her on the show trying to find common ground with Arianna Huffington. But before that Willie Geist did a connect the jobs duty by asking Maria to weigh in on the small business negative impact of the tax cut for the rich debate. She of course ducked the question, instead going with the fact that if you want to talk negligible, talk about the amount of money the government gets via the top 2% returning to a 29.9% federal rate. It’s insignificant, its $36 billion dollars. Does that seem insignificant to you? Or did she just put some words together and hope nobody would check?
But yes, Arianna and Maria found middle ground. It’s as if Maria had a bit of an awakening working on her book where she was forced to analyze the role of market touts in explaining away the criminal behavior that’s taken control of Wall Street. Well, I obviously took it too far, but let’s see if over time Maria starts to look for an exit from fallacy island.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Dancing In The Dark
The Opposition Rebuttal to Morning Joe for June 16th, 2010
Observations:
1) Mika has become unable to define her take on issues, and has started to find a stubborn note. I know, started? I think she is trying to adapt for year 3 and have a more aggressive take. Where Joe Scarborough is comfortable being the only person at a table holding ground for a position while 4-5 others ask him to defend from every angle, Mika is not. There comes a point where it’s not believable, and the viewer wonders about whether or not she has a take or is adrift, uncomfortable, and inconsolable.
Rather than heaping on today’s debate, lets go back to the too big to fail question she was not able to even get out in the Elizabeth Warren interview a few days back. If you recall, we anticipated that was her question, but it was shoved aside for Maria Bartiromo’s 400 regulatory agencies governing AIG question. Mika at that time appeared helpless to confront what she felt was her biggest concern regarding financial regulatory reform. And this was three women talking, so her ‘women should run this’ shot from yesterday’s show is equally adrift.
But whether it’s nonsense topics like protocol for dealing with aggressive reporters, or too big to fail, or even defending the President, the viewer more and more needs a ouija board to divine “what’s the message?” and isn’t that your tagline?
Look, it’s solvable, don’t try and create your message on the fly. You know what the topic is going to be hours before the show starts. Write down, or otherwise note 3 angles of defense prior to the show so that you don’t seem like that guy who’s mad but can’t talk. Joe Scarborough may be able to do it on the fly, but you can’t, and rather than trying to adopt a skill set on the fly, don’t take chances knowing your message for an entire show is at stake.
2) Chris Matthews is crazy, shrill and I love him. He loves to blow stuff up. It’s his thing, in fact it’s his tagline. He is infuriated with the lack of accomplishment in the oval office speech. He is ringing the Jimmy Carter alarm. He even planted a seed in Joe Scarborough’s mind about it to the extent that Scarborough did a nightmare skit comparing the spill to the Iran hostage situation.
Unfortunately, it’s sort’ve a forgone conclusion that Chris and Joe are now ideological rivals and there is not a consensus for them to call middle ground. It was a derisive Scarborough tossing in the “how was his tie?” jab while Matthews very seriously picked apart the speech as lacking control, substance, but including what amounts to two dangerous over promises. The jury is out as to whether 90% containment by the end of June is achievable, but it will be a WMD level misrepresentation if it is not. The jury is out as to whether there is merit to the President’s assurance that he can force a solvent BP to fund a claims account stewarded by a third party. Matthews pointed to these being either evidenced contrarily by prior failures or refuted directly by BP. “BP is preparing to litigate this” is Chris Matthews’ quoted analysis.
If it seems too good to be true…
3) The voice of the other side in this case was Doris Kearns Goodwin. She correctly planted the take that Obama looked at his options, at his 3 messages he had to deliver, and at his limitations and expressed them. Those looking for more would only send the President further down the unrealistic commitment road.
She made a lot of sense, but did not reconcile with the Matthews take at all. If we are to understand all sides of an issue, likely we should see those two reality-check each other’s arguments. I think we know that this would not be a cross fire type pundit debate, but the integral between these two arguments is to me the most important part of today’s analysis.
I don’t think that can occur on Morning Joe, and I think it was evidenced by not taking the core 25 seconds of Goodwin’s take and playing if for Matthews, nor does there appear to be a cast member who can nuance the argument without “tie” jokes.
A valuable path to consensus was lost as a result, and funny enough, it was Mika’s take that Goodwin paraphrased, but she was still unable to carry water in the clutch.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Mika has become unable to define her take on issues, and has started to find a stubborn note. I know, started? I think she is trying to adapt for year 3 and have a more aggressive take. Where Joe Scarborough is comfortable being the only person at a table holding ground for a position while 4-5 others ask him to defend from every angle, Mika is not. There comes a point where it’s not believable, and the viewer wonders about whether or not she has a take or is adrift, uncomfortable, and inconsolable.
Rather than heaping on today’s debate, lets go back to the too big to fail question she was not able to even get out in the Elizabeth Warren interview a few days back. If you recall, we anticipated that was her question, but it was shoved aside for Maria Bartiromo’s 400 regulatory agencies governing AIG question. Mika at that time appeared helpless to confront what she felt was her biggest concern regarding financial regulatory reform. And this was three women talking, so her ‘women should run this’ shot from yesterday’s show is equally adrift.
But whether it’s nonsense topics like protocol for dealing with aggressive reporters, or too big to fail, or even defending the President, the viewer more and more needs a ouija board to divine “what’s the message?” and isn’t that your tagline?
Look, it’s solvable, don’t try and create your message on the fly. You know what the topic is going to be hours before the show starts. Write down, or otherwise note 3 angles of defense prior to the show so that you don’t seem like that guy who’s mad but can’t talk. Joe Scarborough may be able to do it on the fly, but you can’t, and rather than trying to adopt a skill set on the fly, don’t take chances knowing your message for an entire show is at stake.
2) Chris Matthews is crazy, shrill and I love him. He loves to blow stuff up. It’s his thing, in fact it’s his tagline. He is infuriated with the lack of accomplishment in the oval office speech. He is ringing the Jimmy Carter alarm. He even planted a seed in Joe Scarborough’s mind about it to the extent that Scarborough did a nightmare skit comparing the spill to the Iran hostage situation.
Unfortunately, it’s sort’ve a forgone conclusion that Chris and Joe are now ideological rivals and there is not a consensus for them to call middle ground. It was a derisive Scarborough tossing in the “how was his tie?” jab while Matthews very seriously picked apart the speech as lacking control, substance, but including what amounts to two dangerous over promises. The jury is out as to whether 90% containment by the end of June is achievable, but it will be a WMD level misrepresentation if it is not. The jury is out as to whether there is merit to the President’s assurance that he can force a solvent BP to fund a claims account stewarded by a third party. Matthews pointed to these being either evidenced contrarily by prior failures or refuted directly by BP. “BP is preparing to litigate this” is Chris Matthews’ quoted analysis.
If it seems too good to be true…
3) The voice of the other side in this case was Doris Kearns Goodwin. She correctly planted the take that Obama looked at his options, at his 3 messages he had to deliver, and at his limitations and expressed them. Those looking for more would only send the President further down the unrealistic commitment road.
She made a lot of sense, but did not reconcile with the Matthews take at all. If we are to understand all sides of an issue, likely we should see those two reality-check each other’s arguments. I think we know that this would not be a cross fire type pundit debate, but the integral between these two arguments is to me the most important part of today’s analysis.
I don’t think that can occur on Morning Joe, and I think it was evidenced by not taking the core 25 seconds of Goodwin’s take and playing if for Matthews, nor does there appear to be a cast member who can nuance the argument without “tie” jokes.
A valuable path to consensus was lost as a result, and funny enough, it was Mika’s take that Goodwin paraphrased, but she was still unable to carry water in the clutch.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
A Lack Of Connectivity
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 10th, 2010
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo, gets it right, but gets it wrong. Four other people are sitting at the table telling her that a sub $100k career professional is no match to regulate a $1 million dollar executive armed with a $5 million dollar lobbyist, that its not a fair fight, and she stays on her CNBC-wide take that the little guy is the guy who is to blame for the financial meltdown and the oil spill.
Yes, MMS is entirely at fault for working as a sub-agency of the oil companies, in fact it's an industry shuffling it’s own executives in and out of the regulatory facility as regulators sort’ve like the executive on loan program at the United Way.
Yes, 400 government agencies we’re meant to combine to regulate AIG.
But is this the perpetuation of the American way that when things go wrong don’t blame the shooter, blame society?
Rick Santelli’s now famous meltdown on CNBC claiming the mortgage crisis is 100 million bad American borrowers with blood on their hands got a wonderful companion piece today when Maria insisted that crises in America are the fault of bad regulators and thus business should be free to drive the economy until such a time as those bad regulators step up to do their job.
While on it’s surface, the Elizabeth Warren segment seemed like an acknowledgment that Maria was on to something, if you think Warren isn’t looking to fix how government keeps us safe from economic predation, you and Maria should scoot yourselves right on over to GoldNow.com and SurvivalGuns.com and stock up. Goldman Sachs did, because they still think they’re going to get away with it.
There is zero equity in regulation. Repeat. There is zero equity in regulation.
2) Elizabeth Warren made a case today that what financial regulation will accomplish is to help all these disparate regulators connect the dots to monitor our financial system. Erin Burnett, made the same case s short while later, that should the details be brought to light, it would be harder for a regulator to turn his head for profit as an executive on loan from the industry he is meant to control. Ok, I added the turn the head part, but Erin did say bring the details up one level.
This overview of how financial regulation should work sounds remarkably like the reforms made to our intelligence community after the attacks of September 11th. There needed to be a critical connect the dots infrastructure added to prevent separate agencies from allowing our enemies to attack us at the blind spots where we don’t connect. Now we have to protect ourselves from our own corporations exploiting gaps in existing regulatory structure.
The funny thing is, we have just hired our 4th Director of National Intelligence in the 5 years since the intelligence reforms went into effect, and the Christmas day attack demonstrated that inter-connectivity is still a dream unrealized in the intelligence community.
Now this is a hard comparison, but you can (sometimes) rebuild the damage from an attack, and regenerate lost populations from an attack, but let us never forget that if the sky ever fell financially, like it did in the great depression, we as a world population are just not equipped to for those ramifications.
When it happened last time, the vacuum the financial crisis created led us to World War and Cold War. Interestingly enough, the world population at that time had about 300% more self sufficiency than they do now, they were able to grow and raise their food and weren’t bound by an oil based transportation grid.
We are far more susceptible to a catastrophic interruption to society currently, should our global economy become disabled significantly.
Do you feel like anyone is explaining the stakes of the game to you? Those in charge of governing are as afraid of pitchforks as the Wall Street community, and they all have a vested interest in the gravy train as it is.
3) Did anyone else noticed that the 12 people deemed most responsible for the oil spill by Time Magazine did not include Sarah Palin and “drill, baby, drill” as a national mantra. They glossed over that omission by making the American driver the number 7 culprit. Further, somehow they got Sarah Palin to participate in an issue of Time devoted to the perils of oil consumption and aggressive extraction?
Were her publicist and strategist on vacation when that happened? That is the only way that could’ve transpired as witnessed.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo, gets it right, but gets it wrong. Four other people are sitting at the table telling her that a sub $100k career professional is no match to regulate a $1 million dollar executive armed with a $5 million dollar lobbyist, that its not a fair fight, and she stays on her CNBC-wide take that the little guy is the guy who is to blame for the financial meltdown and the oil spill.
Yes, MMS is entirely at fault for working as a sub-agency of the oil companies, in fact it's an industry shuffling it’s own executives in and out of the regulatory facility as regulators sort’ve like the executive on loan program at the United Way.
Yes, 400 government agencies we’re meant to combine to regulate AIG.
But is this the perpetuation of the American way that when things go wrong don’t blame the shooter, blame society?
Rick Santelli’s now famous meltdown on CNBC claiming the mortgage crisis is 100 million bad American borrowers with blood on their hands got a wonderful companion piece today when Maria insisted that crises in America are the fault of bad regulators and thus business should be free to drive the economy until such a time as those bad regulators step up to do their job.
While on it’s surface, the Elizabeth Warren segment seemed like an acknowledgment that Maria was on to something, if you think Warren isn’t looking to fix how government keeps us safe from economic predation, you and Maria should scoot yourselves right on over to GoldNow.com and SurvivalGuns.com and stock up. Goldman Sachs did, because they still think they’re going to get away with it.
There is zero equity in regulation. Repeat. There is zero equity in regulation.
2) Elizabeth Warren made a case today that what financial regulation will accomplish is to help all these disparate regulators connect the dots to monitor our financial system. Erin Burnett, made the same case s short while later, that should the details be brought to light, it would be harder for a regulator to turn his head for profit as an executive on loan from the industry he is meant to control. Ok, I added the turn the head part, but Erin did say bring the details up one level.
This overview of how financial regulation should work sounds remarkably like the reforms made to our intelligence community after the attacks of September 11th. There needed to be a critical connect the dots infrastructure added to prevent separate agencies from allowing our enemies to attack us at the blind spots where we don’t connect. Now we have to protect ourselves from our own corporations exploiting gaps in existing regulatory structure.
The funny thing is, we have just hired our 4th Director of National Intelligence in the 5 years since the intelligence reforms went into effect, and the Christmas day attack demonstrated that inter-connectivity is still a dream unrealized in the intelligence community.
Now this is a hard comparison, but you can (sometimes) rebuild the damage from an attack, and regenerate lost populations from an attack, but let us never forget that if the sky ever fell financially, like it did in the great depression, we as a world population are just not equipped to for those ramifications.
When it happened last time, the vacuum the financial crisis created led us to World War and Cold War. Interestingly enough, the world population at that time had about 300% more self sufficiency than they do now, they were able to grow and raise their food and weren’t bound by an oil based transportation grid.
We are far more susceptible to a catastrophic interruption to society currently, should our global economy become disabled significantly.
Do you feel like anyone is explaining the stakes of the game to you? Those in charge of governing are as afraid of pitchforks as the Wall Street community, and they all have a vested interest in the gravy train as it is.
3) Did anyone else noticed that the 12 people deemed most responsible for the oil spill by Time Magazine did not include Sarah Palin and “drill, baby, drill” as a national mantra. They glossed over that omission by making the American driver the number 7 culprit. Further, somehow they got Sarah Palin to participate in an issue of Time devoted to the perils of oil consumption and aggressive extraction?
Were her publicist and strategist on vacation when that happened? That is the only way that could’ve transpired as witnessed.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
You've Been Karzai'd!
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for April 6th, 2010
Observations:
1. So in a science experiment I decided to let a couple weeks pass and then view the shows in a combined time-lapse 1/10 sequence animation. The combined shows ran for the same three or so hours. The results were hilarious. Even at that time shifted kilter, the words ‘I’m going to have to stop you there, because you’re wrong about every single thing” we’re as clear as when they were shouted at Tina Brown in real time.
Even in time lapse the only real noticeable differences were there was some sort’ve kerfuffle in Florida where public education was defined as a public good necessitating strong government action, and then Joe Scarborough disappeared for either 90 minutes or a week and a half, so he didn’t have to extend the same logic to health care.
It was like a dream sequence, with a lot of inordinately important people in the Florida thing, then Willie Geist ran the network for like 6 months until I woke up.
2) Cut to today and give me a break. That Afghanistan conversation, apparently grounded because conservatives and progressives alike agree, was still mired in more one-dimensional mud than a viewer should be asked to tolerate. Yea, you can say you’re on Biden’s team when it’s convenient, you can say Karzai was another example of a failure about to happen that could be seen from space, but when you try and put it together you just cement your role as falling for whatever the opposition is selling on a news cycle basis.
Has Morning Joe ever gone into the blinders policy of the opium crop in Afghanistan? It was as if when the words ‘drug problem’ were uttered a single time and then the subject was evacuated like an Irwin Allen movie in an attempt to keep the conversation simple, where an Ozzie and Harriet consensus could be achieved without a nap or a headache. I have a long history claiming the vacuum of critical thought that permeates the Afghanistan discussion on Morning Joe is a disservice, to put it kindly. And that analysis stayed true today. Look, when one thing like the Karzai situation goes predictably south, maybe try and follow your own advice and stay calm and move along rather than pull out a Chicken Little routine out of convenience.
In Afghanistan today, the Americans are letting the Afghans have a safe haven in their opium trade, they are taking the lowlands by a surge of military force because it will be more plausible they could retain control there, and they have adopted a Biden strategy in the mountains, where the New York Times just wrote about a climate of no safe haven on either side of the border. This is a complex strategy that deserves to be shown in the context of equally complex strategies in Iran and Pakistan and then, and only then, can your algebraic arguments find any solvency test. Otherwise, you’re just speaking in political code, in an attempt to sway the argument more on a popularity basis than a basis of any real wisdom.
I’m not saying you’re resultant consensus is right or wrong, or that you’re misreading the 10% of the facts you’re acknowledging, it just sounds like Mr. Ed talking with his hoof when there is so much more out there and you know it.
3) Rudy Giuliani in real time or Maria Bartiromo in time lapse, it’s all the same. These people are eroding their credibility with every appearance. In my dream the White House listened to Maria riff on the stimulus for about 45 minutes then intervened. In real time Rudy Giuliani had a perfect opportunity to get somewhere today when Arianna Huffington just lost her mind and cheapened every solid argument she had made in the last 5 years with grade school insults that would get her arrested in Massachusetts. But instead of making any critical establishment of a way forward, his mind was again exposed for the binary mechanism of catastrophe it has become: shoot Karzai, Rubio because of old sandbox scraps with Crist, and I saved New York and the World so I think I know the menace of a social democracy coming when I see it.
If I was mad last August when Obama was having that Mighty Ducks ‘give the bad guys a huge lead’ moment, I just can’t imagine being the guy behind the guy, behind the guy, behind the guy who was behind Michael Steele who was just fired. Those guys are likely pitch-forking each other in a scene out of Lord Of The Flies at this point, pointing to the screen as a former presidential candidate is going on national television with the sole purpose of showing the wide divide within the Republican party. Could that be farther from a message? Rove and Orwell are pissed.
You’ve heard of eating your young, now you’ve seen it.
That’s all for today, see you soon!
Observations:
1. So in a science experiment I decided to let a couple weeks pass and then view the shows in a combined time-lapse 1/10 sequence animation. The combined shows ran for the same three or so hours. The results were hilarious. Even at that time shifted kilter, the words ‘I’m going to have to stop you there, because you’re wrong about every single thing” we’re as clear as when they were shouted at Tina Brown in real time.
Even in time lapse the only real noticeable differences were there was some sort’ve kerfuffle in Florida where public education was defined as a public good necessitating strong government action, and then Joe Scarborough disappeared for either 90 minutes or a week and a half, so he didn’t have to extend the same logic to health care.
It was like a dream sequence, with a lot of inordinately important people in the Florida thing, then Willie Geist ran the network for like 6 months until I woke up.
2) Cut to today and give me a break. That Afghanistan conversation, apparently grounded because conservatives and progressives alike agree, was still mired in more one-dimensional mud than a viewer should be asked to tolerate. Yea, you can say you’re on Biden’s team when it’s convenient, you can say Karzai was another example of a failure about to happen that could be seen from space, but when you try and put it together you just cement your role as falling for whatever the opposition is selling on a news cycle basis.
Has Morning Joe ever gone into the blinders policy of the opium crop in Afghanistan? It was as if when the words ‘drug problem’ were uttered a single time and then the subject was evacuated like an Irwin Allen movie in an attempt to keep the conversation simple, where an Ozzie and Harriet consensus could be achieved without a nap or a headache. I have a long history claiming the vacuum of critical thought that permeates the Afghanistan discussion on Morning Joe is a disservice, to put it kindly. And that analysis stayed true today. Look, when one thing like the Karzai situation goes predictably south, maybe try and follow your own advice and stay calm and move along rather than pull out a Chicken Little routine out of convenience.
In Afghanistan today, the Americans are letting the Afghans have a safe haven in their opium trade, they are taking the lowlands by a surge of military force because it will be more plausible they could retain control there, and they have adopted a Biden strategy in the mountains, where the New York Times just wrote about a climate of no safe haven on either side of the border. This is a complex strategy that deserves to be shown in the context of equally complex strategies in Iran and Pakistan and then, and only then, can your algebraic arguments find any solvency test. Otherwise, you’re just speaking in political code, in an attempt to sway the argument more on a popularity basis than a basis of any real wisdom.
I’m not saying you’re resultant consensus is right or wrong, or that you’re misreading the 10% of the facts you’re acknowledging, it just sounds like Mr. Ed talking with his hoof when there is so much more out there and you know it.
3) Rudy Giuliani in real time or Maria Bartiromo in time lapse, it’s all the same. These people are eroding their credibility with every appearance. In my dream the White House listened to Maria riff on the stimulus for about 45 minutes then intervened. In real time Rudy Giuliani had a perfect opportunity to get somewhere today when Arianna Huffington just lost her mind and cheapened every solid argument she had made in the last 5 years with grade school insults that would get her arrested in Massachusetts. But instead of making any critical establishment of a way forward, his mind was again exposed for the binary mechanism of catastrophe it has become: shoot Karzai, Rubio because of old sandbox scraps with Crist, and I saved New York and the World so I think I know the menace of a social democracy coming when I see it.
If I was mad last August when Obama was having that Mighty Ducks ‘give the bad guys a huge lead’ moment, I just can’t imagine being the guy behind the guy, behind the guy, behind the guy who was behind Michael Steele who was just fired. Those guys are likely pitch-forking each other in a scene out of Lord Of The Flies at this point, pointing to the screen as a former presidential candidate is going on national television with the sole purpose of showing the wide divide within the Republican party. Could that be farther from a message? Rove and Orwell are pissed.
You’ve heard of eating your young, now you’ve seen it.
That’s all for today, see you soon!
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Gelb Standard
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 18th, 2010
Observations:
1) Your subscribers indicate that they are suspicious about the agenda of Maria Bartiromo. It just seems that she is an undisclosed lobbyist. I’m bored with picking apart her take on things, suffice it to say you are hearing Mitt Romney accurately channeled in this appearance.
My prediction is that one of these non disclosure checks is going to reveal that Maria Bartiromo is on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or the national association of corporate raiding hedge fund managers (I made that up). No one believes that anything she says is actually an opinion but instead a sales job.
The disturbing thing is besides the ubiquitous appearances on Morning Joe, she has that Wall Street Journal show, and her CNBC platform. It just appears we have given the megaphone to the voice of corporate greed and no distortion is too fuzzy to serve the bottom line of those individuals who are most benefiting from the transfer of wealth created by the current mix of status quo politics and government funded banking guarantees to proprietary investment.
Maybe its good to have Maria on Morning Joe, the same way Rachel and Keith have an intern monitor Glenn and Bill. We should let her come on the show and rant pro Wall Street-isms, it’s a gold mine of self serving hypocrisy, and you can’t get Harold anymore, who at least cloaked his allegiance expertly.
2) I am so happy to hear that the Howard Dean appearance yesterday had the same effect on Joe Scarborough that it did on me. There are guests and there are guests. Funny, I didn’t hear any reflections on the Kaine appearance, but Dean made sound bites that hit you.
I was less happy that that reflection wasn’t connected to the now 11 Senators pushing for a tough reconciliation health mandate. I think these elements are distinctly connected. It seems that simultaneous to the ramp up to the health care summit on February 25th, there are two legislative versions of events being attempted. In addition to the public option reconciliation dagger, there is the resuscitation of the existing bill with the necessary changes. But in standard Washington D.C. ice cube demonstrata, that resuscitation effort can’t seem to find closure and current estimates indicate that again the legislature will fail to deliver a signable action by the summit, leaving the Republicans with leverage that could’ve been avoided or turned.
This is Democratic cannibalism. It is the weakness Dr. Dean spoke of incarnate. And funny enough at the center of the failure is the void where the President or Tom Daschle, or Howard Dean should be.
I say that staffing shortcoming analysis fully briefed on the apparent conflict of interest charges levied at both Daschle (United Health) and Dean (Pharma). I await comment from them or a second source to decide whether they are of limited effectiveness because of it, but it couldn’t be any worse than the horrible deals Rahm Emmanuel made with both organizations directly on behalf of the White House.
3) That leads me to Les Gelb. No I don’t want Zbigeniew Brzezinski empowered to replace Jim Jones. But I do subscribe to a multi front catastrophic failure of strategic planning complete with pictures of Jones, Axelrod, Gibbs, Summers, and Emmanuel.
I think more important than cleaning house are teachable moments. If you do as Gelb says, it’s no longer an Obama administration. It could be said that the first 45 days and last 2 years of Goerge W Bush’s tenure were actually GHW Bush administrations by proxy. No, it’s more important to salvage the talents of Axelrod and Emmanuel, to harness the Economic regime, pathing Austen Goolsbee for eventual ascension, and to enable Jones.
Emmanuel should consider doing what Mike Dunleavy did last month, fire himself, but retain partial ownership of the continuing project. He should go get the best chief of staff possible (DEAN, DASCHLE) and stay on in an advisory role so that its boot to the throat time, but still Obama’s ship.
I think, as I always have, that Summers is the obvious plank walker. You can actually thank Summers for being there when you needed a guy to keep Goldman Sachs from engineering a depression, for they are at that scale at this point, but point to a future where we need to get rid of the government lending to investment banks and too big to fail. I don’t know that we could dress up Elizabeth Warren to look like Maria Bartiromo, I don’t know that Volcker is any more a solution than Brzezinski. I know Goolsbee would be more of the same tough sledding until his time has come in an earned fashion.
If there is one thing consensus (minus Maria) could find, it’s that having the government seem like a department of Goldman Sachs had better go the way of the dodo bird in the next 90 days or get ready for Romney 2012 with his new economic advisor: Lloyd Blankfein.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
{ed.- don’t miss the point on the Warren / Bartiromo thing, dress up means to not scare Wall Street into a catastrophic tantrum, not any superficial definition}
Observations:
1) Your subscribers indicate that they are suspicious about the agenda of Maria Bartiromo. It just seems that she is an undisclosed lobbyist. I’m bored with picking apart her take on things, suffice it to say you are hearing Mitt Romney accurately channeled in this appearance.
My prediction is that one of these non disclosure checks is going to reveal that Maria Bartiromo is on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or the national association of corporate raiding hedge fund managers (I made that up). No one believes that anything she says is actually an opinion but instead a sales job.
The disturbing thing is besides the ubiquitous appearances on Morning Joe, she has that Wall Street Journal show, and her CNBC platform. It just appears we have given the megaphone to the voice of corporate greed and no distortion is too fuzzy to serve the bottom line of those individuals who are most benefiting from the transfer of wealth created by the current mix of status quo politics and government funded banking guarantees to proprietary investment.
Maybe its good to have Maria on Morning Joe, the same way Rachel and Keith have an intern monitor Glenn and Bill. We should let her come on the show and rant pro Wall Street-isms, it’s a gold mine of self serving hypocrisy, and you can’t get Harold anymore, who at least cloaked his allegiance expertly.
2) I am so happy to hear that the Howard Dean appearance yesterday had the same effect on Joe Scarborough that it did on me. There are guests and there are guests. Funny, I didn’t hear any reflections on the Kaine appearance, but Dean made sound bites that hit you.
I was less happy that that reflection wasn’t connected to the now 11 Senators pushing for a tough reconciliation health mandate. I think these elements are distinctly connected. It seems that simultaneous to the ramp up to the health care summit on February 25th, there are two legislative versions of events being attempted. In addition to the public option reconciliation dagger, there is the resuscitation of the existing bill with the necessary changes. But in standard Washington D.C. ice cube demonstrata, that resuscitation effort can’t seem to find closure and current estimates indicate that again the legislature will fail to deliver a signable action by the summit, leaving the Republicans with leverage that could’ve been avoided or turned.
This is Democratic cannibalism. It is the weakness Dr. Dean spoke of incarnate. And funny enough at the center of the failure is the void where the President or Tom Daschle, or Howard Dean should be.
I say that staffing shortcoming analysis fully briefed on the apparent conflict of interest charges levied at both Daschle (United Health) and Dean (Pharma). I await comment from them or a second source to decide whether they are of limited effectiveness because of it, but it couldn’t be any worse than the horrible deals Rahm Emmanuel made with both organizations directly on behalf of the White House.
3) That leads me to Les Gelb. No I don’t want Zbigeniew Brzezinski empowered to replace Jim Jones. But I do subscribe to a multi front catastrophic failure of strategic planning complete with pictures of Jones, Axelrod, Gibbs, Summers, and Emmanuel.
I think more important than cleaning house are teachable moments. If you do as Gelb says, it’s no longer an Obama administration. It could be said that the first 45 days and last 2 years of Goerge W Bush’s tenure were actually GHW Bush administrations by proxy. No, it’s more important to salvage the talents of Axelrod and Emmanuel, to harness the Economic regime, pathing Austen Goolsbee for eventual ascension, and to enable Jones.
Emmanuel should consider doing what Mike Dunleavy did last month, fire himself, but retain partial ownership of the continuing project. He should go get the best chief of staff possible (DEAN, DASCHLE) and stay on in an advisory role so that its boot to the throat time, but still Obama’s ship.
I think, as I always have, that Summers is the obvious plank walker. You can actually thank Summers for being there when you needed a guy to keep Goldman Sachs from engineering a depression, for they are at that scale at this point, but point to a future where we need to get rid of the government lending to investment banks and too big to fail. I don’t know that we could dress up Elizabeth Warren to look like Maria Bartiromo, I don’t know that Volcker is any more a solution than Brzezinski. I know Goolsbee would be more of the same tough sledding until his time has come in an earned fashion.
If there is one thing consensus (minus Maria) could find, it’s that having the government seem like a department of Goldman Sachs had better go the way of the dodo bird in the next 90 days or get ready for Romney 2012 with his new economic advisor: Lloyd Blankfein.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
{ed.- don’t miss the point on the Warren / Bartiromo thing, dress up means to not scare Wall Street into a catastrophic tantrum, not any superficial definition}
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Surrounded By Populists
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 11th, 2010
Observations:
1) OK, so now I’m not so obsessed with Maria Bartiromo, because she was on the show for practically the whole morning and is like having the financial equivalent of an Al Qaeda double agent on. In one exchange, prior to Elizabeth Warren being on, Maria basically acted like your mean boss at Pizza Hut and said ‘Obama better stop being so leftist’ or face the consequences of Wall Street not supporting his presidency. That is so important, this is a person who has an early entry on the show and feels like there are no adversaries philosophically around her, so she can basically admit shoplifting American wealth from the middle class is OK, because we (Wall Street) said it was ok, now get back to work.
The only thing missing from this was how when Joe Scarborough tackled the backwards logic of Maria’s sentiment, he did not send the debate towards Joe Conason, who you know must’ve been seething. That was an unfortunate edit. But look, if you’re going to try and gain intelligence from double agent Maria, and she already has alluded to the Wall Street sentiment, that they know what they’re doing so stay out of the way, maybe this was strategy, for she must be willing to eclipse that data with some further even more significant watershed.
And watershed we got, because after Elizabeth Warren, cloaked in a ‘bank fees will cost jobs and be passed on to the consumer’ false ideology, which Conason heckled, was the real nugget: “proprietary trading didn’t cause the financial meltdown, sub prime mortgages did”. America, digest Wall Street’s internal thought process upon light of day, as they attempt to explain away their role in your disaster. That viewpoint is revolutionary for a number of reasons.
The securitization of sub prime mortgages in a hedge environment that included default swap insurance products is a direct product of proprietary trading. Proprietary trading is a trade a company does for itself and not for its client. Goldman sold securitized sub prime mortgages on behalf of clients, and then collected default swaps against them proprietarily. It wasn’t the first time they did this. It was oil for a while, it was dot com for a while, it was sub prime mortgages balanced by default swaps for a while. All bubbles, all ended badly, seemingly as if the proprietary trading was pushing those markets off a cliff on purpose, right Maria?
Maria makes two mistakes with one unhealthy view from the inside, because not only was proprietary trading a hierarchical financial pattern overseeing the sub prime crisis, today, funded by the government, the proprietary trading that is occurring is doing one thing very, very badly, it is not serving the US economy. To put it simply if your proprietary equation today was to find the cheapest manufacturer of an item in order to create wealth in a New York based trade, you would trade a US job to China instantly. To put it in a macro sense, the money being given to Goldman Sachs by the US Treasury is specifically monetizing the continuing destabilization of the US job economy. The tax payer is funding his own job loss and the profit from the trade is retained by Lloyd Blankfein.
And for 120 minutes, Maria Bartiromo was the face of that transaction. Willingly.
2) Elizabeth Warren has made a youtube moment for our time and it occurred today on Morning Joe. She called out the highest level of leadership: both the Wall Street crowd, and undoubtedly, Barack Obama himself. Her words said loudly, you’re either really dumb, or you’re committing a crime against the American people.
Praise to Joe Scarborough for trotting out the ‘transfer of wealth’ line in goading Maria, above, to spill the secrets of the castle. But it was not needed in the Warren segment, as she has become the populist and consumerist juggernaut for finance that Howard Dean is to health care.
“He doesn’t ask me for advice” quipped Warren about the President as she mused about the administration appearing for sale in trading ever weakening financial reform, that is more a securing of the status quo than reform, for campaign money. At this point, it’s obvious the only way to trust Tim Geithner, is if he works for Elizabeth Warren and she signs off on his work, Summers, same, Volker, same. President Obama, it’s right there for the taking.
“It’s not competition when you can legally contract competition away from a transaction”
“This is banks versus people”
You don’t need to add any observation to that.
3) All in all, Morning Joe continues on a hot streak of a previously unseen level. I wish they didn’t waste appearances by Conason and Haas, but that’s live television. They self edited altruism from the conversation with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, they have been relentless on getting Elizabeth Warren on and exposing the dangerous high level math going on in the financial world, versus the algebraic placation attempts by Maria Bartiromo, and not by making judgment but making the foundations of the two arguments stand to be judged themselves.
I feel like I felt yesterday. If it’s true that the White House has this show on in the morning, they have to be a bit on the despondent side. We all make mistakes, and when Bush made mistakes, he could just switch the channel to Fox. But Obama doesn’t have a base bathed in doublespeak and Orwellian message. When he tries to use that kind of messaging, his base actually revolts. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”. Your base does not hear higher order logic there, they hear capitulation.
This is going somewhere important. This president is neither conservative, nor liberal, centrist or extreme. He is looking for opportunity, but unfortunately each of his mandates feel more like a business deal than governing.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) OK, so now I’m not so obsessed with Maria Bartiromo, because she was on the show for practically the whole morning and is like having the financial equivalent of an Al Qaeda double agent on. In one exchange, prior to Elizabeth Warren being on, Maria basically acted like your mean boss at Pizza Hut and said ‘Obama better stop being so leftist’ or face the consequences of Wall Street not supporting his presidency. That is so important, this is a person who has an early entry on the show and feels like there are no adversaries philosophically around her, so she can basically admit shoplifting American wealth from the middle class is OK, because we (Wall Street) said it was ok, now get back to work.
The only thing missing from this was how when Joe Scarborough tackled the backwards logic of Maria’s sentiment, he did not send the debate towards Joe Conason, who you know must’ve been seething. That was an unfortunate edit. But look, if you’re going to try and gain intelligence from double agent Maria, and she already has alluded to the Wall Street sentiment, that they know what they’re doing so stay out of the way, maybe this was strategy, for she must be willing to eclipse that data with some further even more significant watershed.
And watershed we got, because after Elizabeth Warren, cloaked in a ‘bank fees will cost jobs and be passed on to the consumer’ false ideology, which Conason heckled, was the real nugget: “proprietary trading didn’t cause the financial meltdown, sub prime mortgages did”. America, digest Wall Street’s internal thought process upon light of day, as they attempt to explain away their role in your disaster. That viewpoint is revolutionary for a number of reasons.
The securitization of sub prime mortgages in a hedge environment that included default swap insurance products is a direct product of proprietary trading. Proprietary trading is a trade a company does for itself and not for its client. Goldman sold securitized sub prime mortgages on behalf of clients, and then collected default swaps against them proprietarily. It wasn’t the first time they did this. It was oil for a while, it was dot com for a while, it was sub prime mortgages balanced by default swaps for a while. All bubbles, all ended badly, seemingly as if the proprietary trading was pushing those markets off a cliff on purpose, right Maria?
Maria makes two mistakes with one unhealthy view from the inside, because not only was proprietary trading a hierarchical financial pattern overseeing the sub prime crisis, today, funded by the government, the proprietary trading that is occurring is doing one thing very, very badly, it is not serving the US economy. To put it simply if your proprietary equation today was to find the cheapest manufacturer of an item in order to create wealth in a New York based trade, you would trade a US job to China instantly. To put it in a macro sense, the money being given to Goldman Sachs by the US Treasury is specifically monetizing the continuing destabilization of the US job economy. The tax payer is funding his own job loss and the profit from the trade is retained by Lloyd Blankfein.
And for 120 minutes, Maria Bartiromo was the face of that transaction. Willingly.
2) Elizabeth Warren has made a youtube moment for our time and it occurred today on Morning Joe. She called out the highest level of leadership: both the Wall Street crowd, and undoubtedly, Barack Obama himself. Her words said loudly, you’re either really dumb, or you’re committing a crime against the American people.
Praise to Joe Scarborough for trotting out the ‘transfer of wealth’ line in goading Maria, above, to spill the secrets of the castle. But it was not needed in the Warren segment, as she has become the populist and consumerist juggernaut for finance that Howard Dean is to health care.
“He doesn’t ask me for advice” quipped Warren about the President as she mused about the administration appearing for sale in trading ever weakening financial reform, that is more a securing of the status quo than reform, for campaign money. At this point, it’s obvious the only way to trust Tim Geithner, is if he works for Elizabeth Warren and she signs off on his work, Summers, same, Volker, same. President Obama, it’s right there for the taking.
“It’s not competition when you can legally contract competition away from a transaction”
“This is banks versus people”
You don’t need to add any observation to that.
3) All in all, Morning Joe continues on a hot streak of a previously unseen level. I wish they didn’t waste appearances by Conason and Haas, but that’s live television. They self edited altruism from the conversation with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, they have been relentless on getting Elizabeth Warren on and exposing the dangerous high level math going on in the financial world, versus the algebraic placation attempts by Maria Bartiromo, and not by making judgment but making the foundations of the two arguments stand to be judged themselves.
I feel like I felt yesterday. If it’s true that the White House has this show on in the morning, they have to be a bit on the despondent side. We all make mistakes, and when Bush made mistakes, he could just switch the channel to Fox. But Obama doesn’t have a base bathed in doublespeak and Orwellian message. When he tries to use that kind of messaging, his base actually revolts. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”. Your base does not hear higher order logic there, they hear capitulation.
This is going somewhere important. This president is neither conservative, nor liberal, centrist or extreme. He is looking for opportunity, but unfortunately each of his mandates feel more like a business deal than governing.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
If Republicans Think This Is Their Time, Let Them Delude
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 21st, 2010
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo needs the truth-o-meter. Loretta Sanchez had it bad enough with the classic ‘never empower the question’ histrionics of Rudy Giuliani, but when future Wall Street super lobbyist Bartiromo claims any sort of divining rod in what’s right and rational in the banking system at this level, she is exposed as an arbiter of conflict of interest. Just Google Maria Bartiromo and try and find hard hitting journalism about the role of Moody’s in the financial meltdown, and all you’ll find is pro business fluff pieces. That’s what an apologist does, that’s what a lobbyist does. Loretta Sanchez had it exactly right, fine, talk about Countrywide, but give equal time the sub prime mortgage securitization process and the role a compromised Moody’s played in that. You were there, Maria, you were part of the hoax.
Now, as for Rudy, I don’t need game film to call you out for all of the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ level anecdotal nonsense, it just isn’t necessary. You do enough yourself. If anyone doesn’t characterize Giuliani getting off of a plane in Massachusetts as wanton opportunism, if they can’t directly see that part in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ where the fat incumbent Governor Pappy O'Daniel dances a jig to George Cluny’s sudden hero, then they simply don’t understand the shallow place hermit crab Giuliani has chosen to dwell this week.
2) Mike and Willie did something very right today when they didn’t become the 104th on-air opportunity for Indiana Republican Mike Pence, who went everywhere else to try and claim a victory lap for the Republican party based on the Massachusetts election. This guy is looking for the airtime just to float his coming senatorial campaign. But the fact that he has decided to break national based on a dubious read of momentum is astounding.
We had a super shift in the standing of the independent voter in Massachusetts. There was no pro Republican message anywhere in the Brown campaign. Pence is so far off in his interpretation of the Brown message, that he probably should be counseled by the RNC prior to causing a huge schism in any real opportunity possessed by them in the next 12 months. An incumbent is an incumbent. Financial records will already show they’re in the bag for special interests and voters have reacted to a modern media phenomenon where virtual inventory of your vast bank of conflicts of interest is part of their voting decision.
The jig is up for the Dodds and the Sessions of the world equally. Pence running around with an elephant flag is Gary Larson level misinterpretation on display.
The show, instead of having Pence, or anyone else with any party delusion for that matter, on to try and spin rightward, chose a very moderate Nicole Wallace, and a very scholarly Melissa Harris-Lacewell to have an adult discussion of the facts on the ground subsequent to the Massachusetts (and New Jersey) elections. That is an astounding victory for the show where your competitors were letting Republicans shoot episodes of ‘The Far Side’.
3) I thought it was interesting today that Mike Barnicle talked about his checkered past with banks, foreclosures, repossession and credit. This comes a couple of days after this column blasted Mike and Harold Ford Jr. for being part of the machine while claiming to be agents of honest appraisal. I want to know more, because I find this self-characterization of today troubling.
On one hand, it could be that all the personal experience led a rational broke person to marry well so that he could carry on with his low paying populist vocation comfortably. On the other hand, he might’ve run game film on himself and felt the need to place some populist credibility on his public record. Either way, Countrywide came up again today. They are hurting people. Bank of America owns them. Mortgage restructurings account for less than five percent of all defaults. The banks are not allowing any of the government mortgage relief mandates to move forward. They are slow walking the mandates trying to force a 100 cents on the dollar subsidization of mortgage restructuring by the government similar to the deal Goldman got for it’s AIG repayment. That is Bank of America hurting main street for profit, trying to dynamically force an enriching bailout one American family tragedy at a time. Who pays your mortgage again?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo needs the truth-o-meter. Loretta Sanchez had it bad enough with the classic ‘never empower the question’ histrionics of Rudy Giuliani, but when future Wall Street super lobbyist Bartiromo claims any sort of divining rod in what’s right and rational in the banking system at this level, she is exposed as an arbiter of conflict of interest. Just Google Maria Bartiromo and try and find hard hitting journalism about the role of Moody’s in the financial meltdown, and all you’ll find is pro business fluff pieces. That’s what an apologist does, that’s what a lobbyist does. Loretta Sanchez had it exactly right, fine, talk about Countrywide, but give equal time the sub prime mortgage securitization process and the role a compromised Moody’s played in that. You were there, Maria, you were part of the hoax.
Now, as for Rudy, I don’t need game film to call you out for all of the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ level anecdotal nonsense, it just isn’t necessary. You do enough yourself. If anyone doesn’t characterize Giuliani getting off of a plane in Massachusetts as wanton opportunism, if they can’t directly see that part in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ where the fat incumbent Governor Pappy O'Daniel dances a jig to George Cluny’s sudden hero, then they simply don’t understand the shallow place hermit crab Giuliani has chosen to dwell this week.
2) Mike and Willie did something very right today when they didn’t become the 104th on-air opportunity for Indiana Republican Mike Pence, who went everywhere else to try and claim a victory lap for the Republican party based on the Massachusetts election. This guy is looking for the airtime just to float his coming senatorial campaign. But the fact that he has decided to break national based on a dubious read of momentum is astounding.
We had a super shift in the standing of the independent voter in Massachusetts. There was no pro Republican message anywhere in the Brown campaign. Pence is so far off in his interpretation of the Brown message, that he probably should be counseled by the RNC prior to causing a huge schism in any real opportunity possessed by them in the next 12 months. An incumbent is an incumbent. Financial records will already show they’re in the bag for special interests and voters have reacted to a modern media phenomenon where virtual inventory of your vast bank of conflicts of interest is part of their voting decision.
The jig is up for the Dodds and the Sessions of the world equally. Pence running around with an elephant flag is Gary Larson level misinterpretation on display.
The show, instead of having Pence, or anyone else with any party delusion for that matter, on to try and spin rightward, chose a very moderate Nicole Wallace, and a very scholarly Melissa Harris-Lacewell to have an adult discussion of the facts on the ground subsequent to the Massachusetts (and New Jersey) elections. That is an astounding victory for the show where your competitors were letting Republicans shoot episodes of ‘The Far Side’.
3) I thought it was interesting today that Mike Barnicle talked about his checkered past with banks, foreclosures, repossession and credit. This comes a couple of days after this column blasted Mike and Harold Ford Jr. for being part of the machine while claiming to be agents of honest appraisal. I want to know more, because I find this self-characterization of today troubling.
On one hand, it could be that all the personal experience led a rational broke person to marry well so that he could carry on with his low paying populist vocation comfortably. On the other hand, he might’ve run game film on himself and felt the need to place some populist credibility on his public record. Either way, Countrywide came up again today. They are hurting people. Bank of America owns them. Mortgage restructurings account for less than five percent of all defaults. The banks are not allowing any of the government mortgage relief mandates to move forward. They are slow walking the mandates trying to force a 100 cents on the dollar subsidization of mortgage restructuring by the government similar to the deal Goldman got for it’s AIG repayment. That is Bank of America hurting main street for profit, trying to dynamically force an enriching bailout one American family tragedy at a time. Who pays your mortgage again?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
