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.

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!

California Bender

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 4th, 2010


Observations:


1) Andrew Ross Sorkin is in the room and AIG gets a pass on it’s bonus announcement. I know it was yesterdays news, but Sorkin and Huffington need to have an open debate about this every time they’re on the show. I’m confused, you have gone with the ‘greatest transfer of wealth’ thing now to the point that it’s part of the show’s mantra. That is great news for America. But today’s failure to launch is a serious writing error.


I know Jon Stewart and the book party make for very entertaining television, I know that jet lag coming this way is a bohemeth (I’ve warned you about it), but on a day where the AIG bonus gets released, the Goldman bonus creates a secondary market to sell the bonus stock earlier than promised, and the sovereign debt of 5 European countries finds previously unseen volatility, Mika had better sell 6.54 trillion books to equate the allocation of airtime. This isn’t the Today Show, and the Grove is only so big.


2) John Heilemann is the one guy explaining Obama better than Jon Stewart. His analysis can be paraphrased that ‘the administration didn’t want to marry any specific in health care reform early as to not appear to have a setback moving to the final bill’. Boy, how did that work out? Nelson is toxic, Lieberman is toxic, the caucus meeting yesterday was an absolute wake.


Joe Scarborough and I agree on 9 out of 10 fronts on health care at this point, that the stinking pile of stimulus II that came out of the Senate and falsely claimed to be health care reform needs to die, that the Obama resurrection of any of the back room deals are the real toxicity, and that all of this is getting in the way of the simple things we could do to objectively fix health care the fastest and have it move towards Swiss or Dutch models, hyperefficient private markets with strict rules of the road nationwide.


Going back to the Obama back room deals, this is incredibly troubling. I guess I’m more on the Jon Stewart side of things that I still can’t tell if he is playing us or using a stiff upper lip to hide an absolute fiasco on multiple fronts. A devout Democratic conspiracist would say that the last big part of the Bush – Cheney coup was to leave crippling multi front crises for the next administration then sit on the sidelines and point out how bad the state of things was. But I’m worried about something else. Why is it Obama and Eli Lilly, Obama and CIGNA, Obama and Goldman?


Joe Scarborough, despite jet lag, has this issue on his front burner at this point, but his subscribers are left guessing, similar to how they’re left to guess about Obama, if JS is ready to do the people’s work exploring this difficult and dangerous land.


3) Like the San Diego Chargers-owning Spanos family, part of the native flight out of Stockton, California includes yours truly. Having spent time at the very top as the ‘murder capital of the world’ in a neck in neck battle with Washington DC, and at the very bottom next to Yuba City as the worst place to live in the United States, Stockton is an extremely troubled place.


Those elements, the literacy and higher education elements that make up that quality of life equation, the really under reported lawlessness and additionally the national economic peril have combined to give Stockton a new distinction: “foreclosure capital of the US’. 60 minutes did a report verifying this. But even 60 minutes didn’t take a second to look at the 25 years of trouble that preceded the mortgage dilemma as a possible causal factor.


When Mike Barnicle asked Barbara Boxer to speak to Stockton’s citizens today, and she gave a typically incumbent answer that solved nothing and talked about how ‘she was a fighter’, you just felt the backlash brewing didn’t you. If Carly Fiorina gave a bilingual speech tomorrow underneath the incredible infrastructure that is Stockton’s inland port, the largest of it’s kind in the world, Boxer would be toast.


Barbara Boxer, you have to talk to them, or you are Coakley redux, because it seems like your fighting for your job, not for Stockton, California the vanquished.


Don’t look for pawns there, you’ll get limo-jacked.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Birdie Golf And Short Circuits

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 1st, 2010


Observations:


1) The budget sucks. There is no good angle to it. The OMB director came on the show, seemed competent, but just like Volker last week and Sommers at Davos, did not inspire confidence. Why? Birdie golf. When Orszag bases his whole premise on the fact that we are going to come within 33% of sustainability (4% deficit vs 3% deficit), and then need to do further soul searching to find that last percentage point, it seems failure is the doctrine. Birdie golf, karate, overwhelming force, these are all doctrines of success. You use your golf game to play one better than par, in karate the force of the punch doesn’t stop at the target, but 2 feet behind it, you get the point.


Orszag needed to say he won’t rest until the budget is at surplus. No one on the show even attempted to define why 3% of GDP as a budget deficit was sustainable. It sounds like if they had they would have said that, it was because we could afford the minimum payment.


The one foundation-building point made in the entire discussion was the aside that market conditions after World War II let the United States economy churn it’s way out of it’s postwar economic hole, and those conditions are not going to recur for the US economy at any point on the current time horizon. Kudos to Joe Scarborough for putting the WWII context into the conversation, but it’s not a pretty picture when your Budget Director can’t point to the surface of the water, only to a more modest drowning.


Further to this same point, what an awful appearance by Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling. The math contained in his chief point had the sole purpose to mislead grandmothers in Texas, and he needs to be called out. This atrocious month versus year deficit spending analysis uses another era’s budget surplus to claim Republican budget superiority. It also is undermined by using nominal dollar figures versus constant dollar figures. The picture is bad, but if you use 3rd grade algebra poorly on national TV twice in a week, we get to change your name to Jim, just to protect you from embarrassing yourself.


2) No one was defending the KSM trial today when Joe Scarborough temporarily lost his inner compass and went off the deep end. Look, when you repeat your point without furthering your point, that’s just agitation on display, think when that Senator on “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” slips into French on camera.


Lost in the shout downs was the ultimate point. Do we get any return on our investment if we use a public court? Is that return only some added credibility on the streets of Luxembourg? Or is that gone because of the taint put upon any public proceedings by the leading statements of the administration over the weekend?

If effectively managing your conversation, it should have gone one more step. The return on investment on any of this is whether on the margin we are creating or disenchanting the next round of potential terrorists. Take KSM’s face off the screen and stop showing it. Put the face of the suicide bomber that’s being recruited next week and have that supplant all others in this discussion. That is the calculus.


Your job as always is to aid and abet the multi-front conversation that is so complex that the leader of the free world and his administration are struggling with it. We need less Giuliani, less Robert Gibbs bizarre false bravado, less bellicose histrionics, and more sober analysis where it counts.


3) Mike Barnicle hit a ball out of the park today. At 8:15 EST, Mike connected the dots and is the first person to go on record saying that the Obama / Republican discussion Friday was great, but the similarly formatted Obama / Democrat discussion is the missing link to last year's failures and it should also be televised. The whole reason I got into this was that most days this critical connection goes unmade, that the format has to fight the tendency to repeat rather than evolve. I had already written, in my head, the scorched earth piece about you guys missing the boat again, then Barnicle went yard.


There had been little advances, like suggestions that the meetings be regular, but no one had made the ultimate connection. History will show the waste of 60 votes as a rare opportunity in 2009 was done with Democratic obstructionists like Stupak, Lieberman and Nelson able to hide in their office and deny their role in the damage done to the Obama administration. No part of the Legislature should be allowed to distort or obstruct in privacy or without an explanation to the President of the United States for their actions. The formula is so right and so timely, it might be the one part of the way forward that lights an optimistic path.


Of course, Joe Scarborough did the subscriber a great service by saying what no other Republican would say out loud: “having the Friday meeting was a {rare} mistake" in the Republican lockstep obstruction game. A mistake on par with Russia missing it's veto vote on the Korean War. Mike Pence must have an interesting list of voice mails today. If Chris Matthews calls your idea heroic, what does Roger Ailes say?


Speaking of Roger Ailes, the face off that Morning Joe repeated was only part of the story with Arianna Huffington and Ailes on ABC over the weekend. Huffington had him avoiding the subject of Fox dropping it’s coverage of the Friday Obama / Republican meeting early because it showed the Republicans in a bad light. Ailes directly avoided the question and slipped out the back door to avoid the green room part of the show. Ailes without words, agrees with Joe Scarborough that Mike Pence gave away part of the store with this invitation.


Because the store is power not progress.


That’s all today, see you tomorrow