The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 30th, 2010
Observations:
1) If anyone sees anything other than great news out of the Glenn Beck debacle over the weekend, I may not be able to help you. The right is agitated and they want change now. But the fact is despite a spoiled brat mentality that covers the entire right of center spectrum, there is no leader. I know the feeling, because I lived it for 6+ years from the other side. John Kerry? Nothing elicits helplessness more fiercely than having the ‘for it before I was against it’ guy running your squad.
Glenn is out there because of the opportunity brought on by the absence of anyone approximating leadership in the Republican Party. Even if there were an heir apparent, his advisers would have him in an ice cave in Saskatchewan avoiding the recent implosion of the right into its two base parts. Recently is misleading, because the right has been best described as a poster child for identity crisis for the better part of a decade. Let gays in or persecute? Brown skinned Republicans or refuge for those of European descent? Like or dislike Eric Rudolph? All of these seemingly absurd questions show the peril of wanting to be on the right side of humanity without offending the extreme base of the party.
Enter master of doublespeak Glenn Beck. I know nothing of this man, proudly. When I try to watch the guys show, anything else seems more entertaining or informative. I basically get the feeling he is just guessing as he goes along with a piece of chalk in his hand. But look, there’s nothing hiding the fact that Rupert and Roger don’t want him actually making sense or his show even watchable. The more of a catacomb of self serving code that the show is, the more of a convenient device it is to be all things to all of the people mentioned above. There were brown skinned people at the rally and people who didn’t like having brown skinned people, well, at the rally. They were too confused by a lack of any real agenda to question why they were in the same circumstance without a partition.
My favorite fact overviewing the rally was the instruction sent out beforehand to avoid signage. It might as well have said: 'make Joe Scarborough guess your stand on the 2nd amendment, don’t make it obvious that you’re a 99.9% over my dead body crowd'. It was very hard to abide by that instruction. The Toby Keith garb was an overwhelming trend.
I can’t wait. Next, Glenn will say “let’s all meet just over the Potomac in Manassas and settle this thing once and for all”. The population is just weak enough right now because of everything that Glenn Beck is not talking about, to believe that might be the answer.
Lead to your untimely demise by a puppet being strung along by an Australian guy, you really need a leader to emerge prior.
2) Joe Scarborough has declared war on Paul Krugman. Krugman is the whipping post for Scarborough’s scathing dismissal of all things John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, Scarborough gets away with this despite having offered nearly zero solutions of his own. These are difficult times and what this war on Krugman and Keynes embodies is a disastrous demonizing process when we need solutions and everything should be on the table.
Keynes does not equal stimulus in his theoretical entirety. In fact the thing I find the most interesting about Keynes has to do with regulatory policy. Keynes was for significant segmentation of the financial services and would have been absolutely horrified at the black box that currently best describes the lawlessness that the entire industry operates under. Keynes also has another key ingredient: that the private financial sector has an obligation towards progressing a national goal of full employment.
Now as you digest those two things, ponder that they are higher order elements of Keynesian theory than stimulus to replace spending in a time of crisis. So if you want to wage a war on Krugman and Keynes, you owe your subscribers more than the sound bite sensibility you have exhibited in your vitriolic dismissal of these two great economists.
If you think Krugman called you stupid or insane, you know he has zero inhibition about coming on your show to shine a light on the circumstance or context of that. I agree with the Joe Scarborough assertion that once you base your argument in one dimensional insults like this, the argument is essentially over because you’ve stated that the other side is void of credibility. The bottom line is if the answer really does lie inclusive of some of the things these two historically credible people endorse, they need you to help explain it to the lost souls described in section #1 above.
Those guys around you with economic bonifides: Sorkin, Sachs, etc; I don’t think they would endorse a cold shoulder where a significant part of the collective answer might lie. Ask them.
3) You guys have really lost the plot as it pertains to Erin Burnett. The top 3 things got weighted down by a bunch of Cramer-esque props, and now she is back to fighting to get any intelligent discussion going. Mr. Licht, you had something, you had a path to getting Erin to be an asset, and then it kept getting tinkered with. Can’t you get enough control of the show to not lose assets like this with histrionics as the culprit?
We had this discussion a long time ago when the show got bent on features and forgot to cover the news. This is a microcosm of that discussion. Even when you watch Erin on CNBC she rarely gets an opportunity to wax philosophical on what she sees. You own the real estate ideally equipped to get that conversation from her, void of all the necessary CNBC automations, just what she thinks about things. Yet you let it slip away into a cooking show day after day.
It was a notable evolution of the show just minutes earlier when Howard Dean was done with a segment, and by the reverse magic of television did not have to disappear, in fact, reappearing magically to provide balance to at least two more segments. I remember a few weeks ago when the segment Dean was on was notably short, or shortened. Dean is a cornucopia of knowledge from the other side, and I think it was a great part of the show today when Willie Geist got a chance to ask Howard what he thought of Mark Halperin’s negative election prognosis for Democrats in November.
If you recall I was furious about the Halperin prognosis. But look at the track record of the Morning Joe show: health care has no chance, it’s Hillary for sure in '08, I’m sure there’s more, but the point is, you aren’t very good at prognoses regarding the Democrats, because your cast leader is on the other side. He is projecting his wish list on the Democrats, takes his pocket calculator with him, and needs an azimuth check by guys like Howard Dean periodically.
You have people like Dean and Burnett surrounding you, be sure you aren’t cutting them off and then filling in the blanks with what you wish they would have said or predicted.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label Chris Licht. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Licht. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Vote For The Skunk
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Two For One
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 21st, 2010
Observations:
1) I wish I could say that it was ESP that made me refuse to write about yesterdays show. I wish that I could honestly claim that I saw through the Breibart-infused ‘Drudge journalism’ that got so much media attention yesterday, and that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop today. But I was right there with the rest of the population more marginally confused by what I was seeing (being fed) than out in front. I didn’t understand Ms. Sherrod’s muffled take, I didn’t understand the firestorm from the media, I didn’t understand the government reaction, but I didn’t have a suspicion either.
The shoe dropped and now the Morning Joe show has had what can only be described as an uber-hypocritical moment. They have been doing this for some time, because they are analysts first and journalists second. But to have the revelations that we had today, and to stop short of apologizing, for even its Licht-researched version of events yesterday was irresponsible to journalistic endeavor, is troubling. Let’s also be honest that the show dodged a bullet with it’s loudest analyst off the set when he would have been the most susceptible of making that embarrassing video that would have been played to the shows detriment forever.
Whatever the roots, whatever the self-cleansing motives today, the net result was accurately portrayed: that the White House has yet another devil in the details embarrassment to try and explain away. This notion that there is an administrative feather trigger left over by the Gates debacle from a year ago is interesting but unconvincing. What is convincing is the take that the White House refers to the 24 hour news cycle as a detriment to judgment, but then participates and governs on that basis showing an immature haste. Yea, Scarborough got to launch some really painful zingers ala ‘if this is how they handle this, we need someone else in charge to handle Iran’. The White House has to circle this comment and remember this day, making it’s judgments on this basis, and understanding the scale commentary of Mr. Scarborough’s quip. In this case the 24 hour news cycle is useful, showing the risk associated from lacking an even keel in it’s own wake.
2) I hope the show got advertising money for letting Mike Papantonio on, because that was the most disgusting case of ambulance chasing I’ve ever seen nationally televised. Thank heaven that Mike Barnicle nailed that guy, the first time in history the ‘what have we learned today’ segment was useful. But to get away with unbacked comments like ‘Ken Feinberg is no Mother Theresa’ while telling desperate people to get involved in a class action lawsuit is shameless, and the show that lets it happen is equally so.
Lawyers serve some purpose in this country, but it will never be defined by their unjust compensation nor their unjust control over our lives. Anyone can sue anyone, but the legal ramifications of a lawsuit is entirely means based. You only sue rich people, you can only afford so much defense, you often find allowing the wrong version of events to proceed is better because of the out of scale cost of litigation. True centrists will acknowledge this is one item that Republicans have right, if they could ever remember to bring it up in it’s purest sense. They never will because like everything else, it’s only time for legal reform when it prevents competitive markets and free enterprise, but legal reform where it prevents fine print predation on the part of companies and usury is perfectly ok.
But in the case of the BP oil spill the math is simple, and opposite of Mr. Papantonio’s take. It may hurt to wait until August 1st, that may be month 4, but Mr. Feinberg is the very best possible outcome for an individual, and the first option available to you that doesn’t feed more than two mouths in the process. C’mon Scarborough, that sucked.
3) Campaign contributions like the 501 c (4) ‘tax exemption while hidden’ formats are used by both sides of the political spectrum. But it is dirty wherever it’s used. You have a right to free speech, but not while hidden. That’s a hate crime. What I would like to see in response to the Rove mandated national swift boat campaign is a national light of day campaign. I want anyone participating in these attacks to be found out and susceptible to dollar votes. Dollar votes are really costly to companies. They face boycotts, they face competitive headwinds, they in the end aren’t worth it if bought on a false basis of confidentiality but traced like so many other cover-ups in this country.
I want the company or individual about to embark on a self convinced lark of assassinating someone’s character from a false province of privacy to have the same chance at ultimate confidentiality that a person getting a medical marijuana card or a Patriot Act library card options themselves: not likely. It should only be a matter of time before every donor of every dollar of the 50 million planned for by Rove is highlighted and forced to absorb the true political cost of their free speech.
Ultimately it was worth it for T. Boone Pickens to swift boat John Kerry. I’m personally more of a fan of Pickens than Kerry, but that particular transaction was so out of scale unjust, it can’t go on as a way of life in a Democracy. The middle class has to equip itself with methods to make this practice unprofitable and politically unfavorable.
You are being duped America, our ruling class is using you to vote away your own rights so they might exploit the nation’s riches more efficiently. You fight their oil wars, you pay for their risk insurance on Wall Street, corporate taxes are less than 7% of national revenue, they expect to profit from every transaction in your life: health, defense, public safety, education, even Social Security. Don’t believe me? United Health, the owner of Blue Cross/Blue Shield/Anthem, the monopoly health insurer in California that did not get its 39% rate increase last quarter, just announced it’s earnings for that quarter, and they were up 31%.
If that’s equity, I’m equitably more motivated to reverse this trend.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I wish I could say that it was ESP that made me refuse to write about yesterdays show. I wish that I could honestly claim that I saw through the Breibart-infused ‘Drudge journalism’ that got so much media attention yesterday, and that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop today. But I was right there with the rest of the population more marginally confused by what I was seeing (being fed) than out in front. I didn’t understand Ms. Sherrod’s muffled take, I didn’t understand the firestorm from the media, I didn’t understand the government reaction, but I didn’t have a suspicion either.
The shoe dropped and now the Morning Joe show has had what can only be described as an uber-hypocritical moment. They have been doing this for some time, because they are analysts first and journalists second. But to have the revelations that we had today, and to stop short of apologizing, for even its Licht-researched version of events yesterday was irresponsible to journalistic endeavor, is troubling. Let’s also be honest that the show dodged a bullet with it’s loudest analyst off the set when he would have been the most susceptible of making that embarrassing video that would have been played to the shows detriment forever.
Whatever the roots, whatever the self-cleansing motives today, the net result was accurately portrayed: that the White House has yet another devil in the details embarrassment to try and explain away. This notion that there is an administrative feather trigger left over by the Gates debacle from a year ago is interesting but unconvincing. What is convincing is the take that the White House refers to the 24 hour news cycle as a detriment to judgment, but then participates and governs on that basis showing an immature haste. Yea, Scarborough got to launch some really painful zingers ala ‘if this is how they handle this, we need someone else in charge to handle Iran’. The White House has to circle this comment and remember this day, making it’s judgments on this basis, and understanding the scale commentary of Mr. Scarborough’s quip. In this case the 24 hour news cycle is useful, showing the risk associated from lacking an even keel in it’s own wake.
2) I hope the show got advertising money for letting Mike Papantonio on, because that was the most disgusting case of ambulance chasing I’ve ever seen nationally televised. Thank heaven that Mike Barnicle nailed that guy, the first time in history the ‘what have we learned today’ segment was useful. But to get away with unbacked comments like ‘Ken Feinberg is no Mother Theresa’ while telling desperate people to get involved in a class action lawsuit is shameless, and the show that lets it happen is equally so.
Lawyers serve some purpose in this country, but it will never be defined by their unjust compensation nor their unjust control over our lives. Anyone can sue anyone, but the legal ramifications of a lawsuit is entirely means based. You only sue rich people, you can only afford so much defense, you often find allowing the wrong version of events to proceed is better because of the out of scale cost of litigation. True centrists will acknowledge this is one item that Republicans have right, if they could ever remember to bring it up in it’s purest sense. They never will because like everything else, it’s only time for legal reform when it prevents competitive markets and free enterprise, but legal reform where it prevents fine print predation on the part of companies and usury is perfectly ok.
But in the case of the BP oil spill the math is simple, and opposite of Mr. Papantonio’s take. It may hurt to wait until August 1st, that may be month 4, but Mr. Feinberg is the very best possible outcome for an individual, and the first option available to you that doesn’t feed more than two mouths in the process. C’mon Scarborough, that sucked.
3) Campaign contributions like the 501 c (4) ‘tax exemption while hidden’ formats are used by both sides of the political spectrum. But it is dirty wherever it’s used. You have a right to free speech, but not while hidden. That’s a hate crime. What I would like to see in response to the Rove mandated national swift boat campaign is a national light of day campaign. I want anyone participating in these attacks to be found out and susceptible to dollar votes. Dollar votes are really costly to companies. They face boycotts, they face competitive headwinds, they in the end aren’t worth it if bought on a false basis of confidentiality but traced like so many other cover-ups in this country.
I want the company or individual about to embark on a self convinced lark of assassinating someone’s character from a false province of privacy to have the same chance at ultimate confidentiality that a person getting a medical marijuana card or a Patriot Act library card options themselves: not likely. It should only be a matter of time before every donor of every dollar of the 50 million planned for by Rove is highlighted and forced to absorb the true political cost of their free speech.
Ultimately it was worth it for T. Boone Pickens to swift boat John Kerry. I’m personally more of a fan of Pickens than Kerry, but that particular transaction was so out of scale unjust, it can’t go on as a way of life in a Democracy. The middle class has to equip itself with methods to make this practice unprofitable and politically unfavorable.
You are being duped America, our ruling class is using you to vote away your own rights so they might exploit the nation’s riches more efficiently. You fight their oil wars, you pay for their risk insurance on Wall Street, corporate taxes are less than 7% of national revenue, they expect to profit from every transaction in your life: health, defense, public safety, education, even Social Security. Don’t believe me? United Health, the owner of Blue Cross/Blue Shield/Anthem, the monopoly health insurer in California that did not get its 39% rate increase last quarter, just announced it’s earnings for that quarter, and they were up 31%.
If that’s equity, I’m equitably more motivated to reverse this trend.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
A Shopping Mall Full Of News And You’ve Only Got One Bag
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 27th, 2010
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Dear Chris Licht – A Technical Note
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 11th, 2009
Dear Chris Licht:
It has become obvious in the last several weeks that news and analysis have taken a backseat to features on the show and I feel the need to explain the peril that you face by continuing such a downward slide.
1) It keeps happening that a guest of some journalistic or political esteem is asked to participate in an awkward acknowledgment of bad behavior as news. It happened today with Richard Haas. Watch tape to see if you can catch your part in the dumbing down of America, today’s chapter.
We all know where we were when Willie Geist asked Maxine Waters about Carrie Prejean and was resoundingly scolded. It was so out of place that there was a sense of shame on the whole crew for creating an atmosphere that permitted that. Symptomatic of the current problems is that this is now commonplace, the Michigan Governor last week, anyone?
2) Structurally we lost one of the Geist segments, then it came back under a different name, and lets be honest, he has a whole show at 5:30 that you could Tivo if you want that content, otherwise one segment would be plenty. Do you remember when he went out, Letterman-esque, to the upper westside in a McCain shirt? That’s Geist’s gift, not turnstiling interruptive nonsense 3 times a show. No one has disdain for Willie Geist’s role in the program until he is the face of the interruption of the program’s core competencies.
3) It’s not just Morning Joe, but the entire 5 AM – 1 PM EST corridor is bogged down by a gross over repetition of the news slideshow. You’re cashing a check, right? Then it is your job to come up with some way out of 6 readings of the same news on your watch. The fact that the last story is rarely covered as the reading is perpetually drowned out the first time through, combined with the fact that the first two readings seemingly bump up together, should be a sign that you could creatively intersperse the news once over a whole hour so that it is not the useless logjam that it is now.
These are dynamics errors. Willie would be funnier if we wasn’t drowning himself out. Mika could bring the news to the debate, if there wasn’t a need for a hard break that often disrupts the real work going on while desensitizing or worse antagonizing the selected five or so headlines of the day.
A lack of a demonstration of core competency can have devastating effects. There is no roadmap for this show, as it has different time factors and deadline factors than any of the other shows on cable news. But the negative consequences of not getting it right are the same. If you can’t differentiate yourself in each half hour with value and brand value, your executives won’t justify your cost difference over having Alex Witt or Contessa Brewer generically reading the same script, and guests of the level of Richard Haas don’t go on that program. In fact, how many upper echelon guests are feeling a mysterious attrition coming to their appearance choice for fear of being adjacent embarrassing programming? How quickly will people you want as guests start to avoid you for fear of being set next to a man in a donkey suit? Where is that threshold today as opposed to yesterday?
I guess the jobs vigil is back too, as the subject of jobs itself took a holiday to a New Jersey beach.
I’m waiting for someone to try and claim it must’ve been a slow news day.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Dear Chris Licht:
It has become obvious in the last several weeks that news and analysis have taken a backseat to features on the show and I feel the need to explain the peril that you face by continuing such a downward slide.
1) It keeps happening that a guest of some journalistic or political esteem is asked to participate in an awkward acknowledgment of bad behavior as news. It happened today with Richard Haas. Watch tape to see if you can catch your part in the dumbing down of America, today’s chapter.
We all know where we were when Willie Geist asked Maxine Waters about Carrie Prejean and was resoundingly scolded. It was so out of place that there was a sense of shame on the whole crew for creating an atmosphere that permitted that. Symptomatic of the current problems is that this is now commonplace, the Michigan Governor last week, anyone?
2) Structurally we lost one of the Geist segments, then it came back under a different name, and lets be honest, he has a whole show at 5:30 that you could Tivo if you want that content, otherwise one segment would be plenty. Do you remember when he went out, Letterman-esque, to the upper westside in a McCain shirt? That’s Geist’s gift, not turnstiling interruptive nonsense 3 times a show. No one has disdain for Willie Geist’s role in the program until he is the face of the interruption of the program’s core competencies.
3) It’s not just Morning Joe, but the entire 5 AM – 1 PM EST corridor is bogged down by a gross over repetition of the news slideshow. You’re cashing a check, right? Then it is your job to come up with some way out of 6 readings of the same news on your watch. The fact that the last story is rarely covered as the reading is perpetually drowned out the first time through, combined with the fact that the first two readings seemingly bump up together, should be a sign that you could creatively intersperse the news once over a whole hour so that it is not the useless logjam that it is now.
These are dynamics errors. Willie would be funnier if we wasn’t drowning himself out. Mika could bring the news to the debate, if there wasn’t a need for a hard break that often disrupts the real work going on while desensitizing or worse antagonizing the selected five or so headlines of the day.
A lack of a demonstration of core competency can have devastating effects. There is no roadmap for this show, as it has different time factors and deadline factors than any of the other shows on cable news. But the negative consequences of not getting it right are the same. If you can’t differentiate yourself in each half hour with value and brand value, your executives won’t justify your cost difference over having Alex Witt or Contessa Brewer generically reading the same script, and guests of the level of Richard Haas don’t go on that program. In fact, how many upper echelon guests are feeling a mysterious attrition coming to their appearance choice for fear of being adjacent embarrassing programming? How quickly will people you want as guests start to avoid you for fear of being set next to a man in a donkey suit? Where is that threshold today as opposed to yesterday?
I guess the jobs vigil is back too, as the subject of jobs itself took a holiday to a New Jersey beach.
I’m waiting for someone to try and claim it must’ve been a slow news day.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
