The Opposition Rebuttal to Morning Joe for September 7th, 2010
Observations:
1) Boy, this show is all about piling on. Don’t let it deter you that the Morning Joe cast sat around the campfire for the same 14 months they now complain about and predicted the end of health care and provided exactly zero jobs solutions while cynically complaining about that thing they couldn’t refine themselves.
So when Erin Burnett says that you need $2 trillion in infrastructure investment to simply find competitiveness with the Chinese, and you trot out the Zbigniew Brzezinski line about getting off of the plane from China and feeling DC to be comparatively in 1975, do you think that’s where you put the period?
See, that’s where your take is supposed to go. Yea, the whole cast was on vacation last week, and when you get to the non multiple choice part of your show it gets cumbersome, but that’s why you had to say the word ‘cynical’ about yourself all day today: it’s so easy to bash your opponents that when you have to set the bar for yourselves low, red herring baiting without detail provides the best return on investment.
Let’s not forget that you killed the stimulus from day one, but never said where you would have stood if it had been effective stimulus instead of the Pelosi handout. That is a defacto obstruction on par with what the Republicans have done this entire congressional term. I’m sad about the $787 billion too, but you’re Google away from being able to see an MJR blueprint in detail for the $2 trillion Erin mentions above. You? Tax cuts? Or just spurious kill the bill sound bites?
2) So, did Morning Joe think they were just gonna slink their new ad planner through and no one would notice? Are you kidding me? Remember when Joe Scarborough said as loud as he could that repealing anti-trust for health care insurers was key to a free enterprise solution? Let’s count the number of times that he brings that subject out of it’s box now that United Health is running lobby level endorsements of the Morning Joe show.
I was pretty depressed when Tom Daschle and Howard Dean took the money. I am a lot less depressed about Morning Joe taking the money. But just don’t go around pretending that you are no longer free of compromise on an issue that will continue to kill more people than smoking in the United States until change manifests. That’s right United Health owns monopoly health care operations in states like California, where individual plans go up 30% October 1st without debate. They are the operational equation behind where does that 32 cents of your health care dollar go that doesn’t go to health care? Switzerland and the Netherlands mandate that private industry health insurance revenues flow through at 90%. But your new sponsor will masquerade as the benign endorsement of Mika’s health walk in a BP-esque attempt to have a neutral credibility derived from that endorsement.
And oh yea, Ethanol? I was going to predict that you were re-upping with Extenze on the west coast, then the ethanol lobby beat me to it. Maybe Morning Joe has stumbled on a new business venture. Howitzer some part of the political spectrum, the least nationally useful the better, and see if they turn around and counter your message with those Archer Daniels Midland style branding ads to keep their momentum.
What I think Chris Licht should consider, is during the next round of mass vacations Morning Joe pre tape a segment with people who look like newscasters but actually work for either the Ethanol lobby or United Health. Then read editorials about the validity of these entities as if they were news. Maybe 10 minutes each? Possibly add a witty title like ‘Shine A Golden Light On Ethanol’ or 'Health Care Is A Privilege And Not A Right’.
That’s called double dipping my friend, a paid segment that looks like programming that you can repeat, thus lowering programming cost at the same time. Credibility? That sand castle found high tide a while ago.
3) I’m not as horrified by the sameness as I might sound. This is really just where Morning Joe and the country are going at nearly similar trajectories. But, alas, I do need to write everyday and the show doesn’t seem like it can provide content at that frequency in it’s current form. Sort’ve like that playground that seems smaller and smaller upon each return.
I’m happy to check in when the urge to throw the remote at the TV strikes, but the show seems incapable of surprise or traction at this point. Joe Scarborough is going to pontificate on approximately 15% of an issue as if it was the whole range of description or analysis available, Mika Brzezinski is going to be unconvincing in an Alan Colmes sort of way as the lefty foil, Mike Barnicle is going to take the days events and boil them into 60 seconds of Will Rogers without a call to action, and friends of the show will join them not in bringing about a new dynamic understanding of the world, but a hallow hip shot of the sort that gets us the election results of 2004 delivered in a nice mid term version this November.
It’s not like there are a million options out there. I haven’t watched Chris Matthews in a very long time, Dylan needs a spokesman, Keith is funny, but not helpful, Rachel is funny, but just funny, Ed is radio with a camera, and Lawrence’s new promo clip for his show shouts needs work at the top of its lungs. CNN is really out in the wilderness, save Fareed, Fox requires decompression, and Jon Stewart works a 4 day work week when he works, with a 39 hour delay. And Stewart, as funny and on point as he is, is really committed to less is more with 100 or so writers doing 2 segments and an interview as their semi daily yield.
As a collective cable news returns far less social good for money invested than our government run health care or educational systems. Television in general is a chief enabler of the breakdown in our political system. The news part is wholly owned by status quo industry barons, and the commercials that run the lions share of campaigns cost so much money, they are the real reason lobbyists have so much power. If you are GE, NBC, MSNBC or channel 39 in San Diego, you have a vested interest in keeping politics viewable best via your prism. Every single service to that interest is slightly defeated by solution, slightly leveraged by status quo or stalemate conflict.
We talked about the perverse dollar motivations in our health care system where cost control has zero incentive at any part of the health care process, doctors and patients feel best when they spend far beyond rationality. Television’s command of politics is that same reverse logic. In England when another not paid for advertisement runs, an executive at Sky News cries a silent tear for the what could have been as it exists in the US. Marketers are having a field day and myopic optics like the 'Young Guns' prove the point at each turn.
It’s an important addendum that political advertisement is sky rocketing at 312 times the rate of job growth. The only other multiplier out there that is similar is the current CEO to average employee pay in the United States. It’s a growth industry, a gravy train because it’s a war between the nations corporations and the nation’s people. Guess where the money is?
I still think that Joe Scarborough is a populist at heart. But remembering his core reasons for that populism isn’t getting any easier every day results like this are on his timecard.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label Howard Dean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Howard Dean. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Headless Horseman
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Stuck In LA Traffic
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 3rd, 2010
Observations:
1) Why even have a show? This three hour program boiled down to 3 significant events: Howard Dean in all of his abbreviated glory, Mike Pence in all of his Joe Barton - BP apologist glory, and the Rolling Stone refute that directly followed it. Those were, in fact, amazing segments.
But this observation is about what happened to the other two and a half hours. Credit the cast for having an amazing liveliness given a 3 AM airtime, but you forgot to read the news until an hour later. You came on like it was a small market talk show and ranted about polls and the Obama strategy of painting the Republicans as a collective step backwards, not because it’s not true, but because of the words they used to communicate the phenomenon.
We had a bit of a blow up last week when we, the Morning Joe show and the Rebuttal, collectively had shown little ability to write a new caption to this unchanging photograph. The Morning Joe show has lost it’s evolving nature, hopefully just for the moment, and it’s feet, the giant size 17s of its anchor, are stuck in top-kill mud. You are currently exposed anytime anyone with a new idea comes on the show as being a sit in the weeds and dumb down anything you see rather than engage entity.
News flash: you are a perfect representation of the Republican party when you do that. Is it really 9th grade unprofessionalism to make the claim Obama made yesterday? Or is it 9th grade unprofessionalism that he is seeking out to engage? I can’t help but notice that when you waste two shows like yesterday and today, you do so looking more like the future of local news on Fox owned and operated stations, full of agendized talking points that lead directly to non discourse.
2) OK, let’s move on to achievement number one. Mike Pence came on Morning Joe today and did what so many Republicans have done recently: he came down on the wrong side of an issue, and then defended it adamantly. It is so, so awesome that a guy from Indiana took a photo op down with the ‘small people’ in Louisiana and on the way to his big project of damning Obama for the drilling moratorium tried to paint dispersants as a good guy in this story. It stuck out when he said it, eons before the cast starting lobbing grenades at it. It stuck out like saying the holocaust was made up or that we owe BP an apology.
I am not going to claim some scientific high ground to the contrary. I have listened to and read from many outlets from NPR to Fox on the matter and it is a story that we don’t have the complete answer to in any sense. But the early indications are that 1.8 million gallons of dispersant were poured on the oil spill to make it invisible, in a strategy that could’ve been called ‘out of site out of mind’. The collective of the dispersant and the now unremovable oil is now set to disperse via microbiorganisms. This has never been tried at this level and has never been tested in a half-life of toxicity sense ever. So if you are worried about the economy of the region, why would you undercut it’s primary revenue sources: the fishing industry and tourism? Do you want to come down and hit a restaurant? Do you want to come down and jump on a day boat? It looks good! Do you want to go to your local store and get gulf shrimp and feed it to your kids?
We don’t know any of the long term answers to a rash decision made far outside of the control of our President. But short of details from a trusted source, amongst which the EPA and BP cannot be counted, we are likely going to be avoiding some of those important gulf business for the microbioorganic half life of about a generation.
I can’t help but think of the possible outcomes, and when you drift into that thought, you start thinking about Agent Orange and Japanese Mercury poisoning. Americans with family values will wait steadfastly for a credible environmental analysis from multiple trusted sources before thinking the ‘All Clear’ that Mike Pence tried to serve up today was anything other than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ for this news cycle.
Oh, and for an epilogue, let’s agree that the drilling moratorium might just be a moot point as of now and if that’s the only important revenue stream available to the region, maybe through the poisoning of 5% of the entire planet, we have cleared the way to return to ‘Drill Baby Drill’, nice work Pencie, that’s an American Energy Solution.
3) So…was Howard Dean booked for the second 5 minutes of his segment, or did Joe Scarborough install a hook button to exit any guest he can’t better from the outset? It gets worse when Scarborough goes into his first serious question and it’s the ‘demogoguery’ of Paul Ryan, a guy we have complimented here and there, and it’s a blatantly hypocritical use by Joe of litmus politics. Entitlement spending is a great point to debate, but when a Democrat makes the case that entitlements won’t be touched until military spending is also on the table, and Scarborough divides a compromise into two parts so he can try and foist a ‘party of no’ example on those Dems, he undercuts in the neighborhood of 500 of his legitimate arguments elsewhere.
Incidentally, Scarborough did this exact same thing yesterday to Anthony Weiner. At least yesterday Scarborough had to toss in a ‘we need to have you back’, believable or not. You don’t ‘have’ these guys back, friend, you get out debated, then you study up, then you try again and hope that it’s not revealed that these are two paths for which you do not possess a way forward.
After a scalding embarrassment about the congress, health care and the politics of governing a nation, Scarborough appeared to give up, we call it around here ‘pulling a Blumenthal’, but not before trying to tee up an antagonizing stimulus discussion between Dean and Andrew Ross Sorkin, but Sorkin didn’t pursue the item instead opting to go after technical items about having rich people be forced out of entitlements. It was as if Sorkin said ‘look, we have to move on from that conversation at some point’, and moved on.
That is the whole problem with Morning Joe currently. This powerful format is mired in it’s adolescence. Not quite grown up and cognizant of the importance of an evolving agenda, but expected to put in adult hours every day. These kinds of regressive periods are to be expected, they have to be ironed out without a historical template to guide that process, and there is an incredibly bright future to this format and this cast. I know that they will wake up soon and say stagnation is certain death, seek out revival and go somewhere uncharted with the show that uses the element of the media in today’s political process to further progress in a new way.
Just not today.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Why even have a show? This three hour program boiled down to 3 significant events: Howard Dean in all of his abbreviated glory, Mike Pence in all of his Joe Barton - BP apologist glory, and the Rolling Stone refute that directly followed it. Those were, in fact, amazing segments.
But this observation is about what happened to the other two and a half hours. Credit the cast for having an amazing liveliness given a 3 AM airtime, but you forgot to read the news until an hour later. You came on like it was a small market talk show and ranted about polls and the Obama strategy of painting the Republicans as a collective step backwards, not because it’s not true, but because of the words they used to communicate the phenomenon.
We had a bit of a blow up last week when we, the Morning Joe show and the Rebuttal, collectively had shown little ability to write a new caption to this unchanging photograph. The Morning Joe show has lost it’s evolving nature, hopefully just for the moment, and it’s feet, the giant size 17s of its anchor, are stuck in top-kill mud. You are currently exposed anytime anyone with a new idea comes on the show as being a sit in the weeds and dumb down anything you see rather than engage entity.
News flash: you are a perfect representation of the Republican party when you do that. Is it really 9th grade unprofessionalism to make the claim Obama made yesterday? Or is it 9th grade unprofessionalism that he is seeking out to engage? I can’t help but notice that when you waste two shows like yesterday and today, you do so looking more like the future of local news on Fox owned and operated stations, full of agendized talking points that lead directly to non discourse.
2) OK, let’s move on to achievement number one. Mike Pence came on Morning Joe today and did what so many Republicans have done recently: he came down on the wrong side of an issue, and then defended it adamantly. It is so, so awesome that a guy from Indiana took a photo op down with the ‘small people’ in Louisiana and on the way to his big project of damning Obama for the drilling moratorium tried to paint dispersants as a good guy in this story. It stuck out when he said it, eons before the cast starting lobbing grenades at it. It stuck out like saying the holocaust was made up or that we owe BP an apology.
I am not going to claim some scientific high ground to the contrary. I have listened to and read from many outlets from NPR to Fox on the matter and it is a story that we don’t have the complete answer to in any sense. But the early indications are that 1.8 million gallons of dispersant were poured on the oil spill to make it invisible, in a strategy that could’ve been called ‘out of site out of mind’. The collective of the dispersant and the now unremovable oil is now set to disperse via microbiorganisms. This has never been tried at this level and has never been tested in a half-life of toxicity sense ever. So if you are worried about the economy of the region, why would you undercut it’s primary revenue sources: the fishing industry and tourism? Do you want to come down and hit a restaurant? Do you want to come down and jump on a day boat? It looks good! Do you want to go to your local store and get gulf shrimp and feed it to your kids?
We don’t know any of the long term answers to a rash decision made far outside of the control of our President. But short of details from a trusted source, amongst which the EPA and BP cannot be counted, we are likely going to be avoiding some of those important gulf business for the microbioorganic half life of about a generation.
I can’t help but think of the possible outcomes, and when you drift into that thought, you start thinking about Agent Orange and Japanese Mercury poisoning. Americans with family values will wait steadfastly for a credible environmental analysis from multiple trusted sources before thinking the ‘All Clear’ that Mike Pence tried to serve up today was anything other than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ for this news cycle.
Oh, and for an epilogue, let’s agree that the drilling moratorium might just be a moot point as of now and if that’s the only important revenue stream available to the region, maybe through the poisoning of 5% of the entire planet, we have cleared the way to return to ‘Drill Baby Drill’, nice work Pencie, that’s an American Energy Solution.
3) So…was Howard Dean booked for the second 5 minutes of his segment, or did Joe Scarborough install a hook button to exit any guest he can’t better from the outset? It gets worse when Scarborough goes into his first serious question and it’s the ‘demogoguery’ of Paul Ryan, a guy we have complimented here and there, and it’s a blatantly hypocritical use by Joe of litmus politics. Entitlement spending is a great point to debate, but when a Democrat makes the case that entitlements won’t be touched until military spending is also on the table, and Scarborough divides a compromise into two parts so he can try and foist a ‘party of no’ example on those Dems, he undercuts in the neighborhood of 500 of his legitimate arguments elsewhere.
Incidentally, Scarborough did this exact same thing yesterday to Anthony Weiner. At least yesterday Scarborough had to toss in a ‘we need to have you back’, believable or not. You don’t ‘have’ these guys back, friend, you get out debated, then you study up, then you try again and hope that it’s not revealed that these are two paths for which you do not possess a way forward.
After a scalding embarrassment about the congress, health care and the politics of governing a nation, Scarborough appeared to give up, we call it around here ‘pulling a Blumenthal’, but not before trying to tee up an antagonizing stimulus discussion between Dean and Andrew Ross Sorkin, but Sorkin didn’t pursue the item instead opting to go after technical items about having rich people be forced out of entitlements. It was as if Sorkin said ‘look, we have to move on from that conversation at some point’, and moved on.
That is the whole problem with Morning Joe currently. This powerful format is mired in it’s adolescence. Not quite grown up and cognizant of the importance of an evolving agenda, but expected to put in adult hours every day. These kinds of regressive periods are to be expected, they have to be ironed out without a historical template to guide that process, and there is an incredibly bright future to this format and this cast. I know that they will wake up soon and say stagnation is certain death, seek out revival and go somewhere uncharted with the show that uses the element of the media in today’s political process to further progress in a new way.
Just not today.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Two Parties One Failure
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 4th, 2010
Observations:
1) I remember where I was when Mark Foley helped the Democratic party seem like they possessed the high ground, and oh how I long for those days. The entire institution has deteriorated from every angle and amongst all participants precipitously so since then. Today, I thought the fear based cartoons were the least bad of the day’s clown parade. I thought it was actually a worse day for Democrats, as they have ceded morality entirely in this news cycle.
I also found it ironic that it was an appearance day for Tim Kaines. This guy is in charge of the boiled down message for the Democratic party. What is a guy to do? Tell the truth? It certainly seems like his leadership is meant to evoke doublespeak as a mantra. A mantra that flows through the White House. And that’s a problem.
It’s a problem because another simultaneous act was another Obama speech with that forcefulness that used to mean uniting lucidity. Now it seems like it is a tool with an on-off switch. I still feel like the Obama speech made logical single truth based sense, but combined with all of the stuff above, the recipe is for dilution and doublespeak.
2) On health care, I don’t see the hypocritical equivalence of the Obama speech and the McConnell reaction. It seems that McConnell is in fact just plain saying two different things out of convenience, because his point isn’t progress it’s status quo that he has no intention of replacing with any other issue specific progress, new day, new way of saying no.
Conversely, you could make the point that Obama is guilty of nothing more than strategic correction in the name of progress, knowing his product is the only hope for a move forward on the issue in our lifetime. This is a correction the American people would hope he would make, rather than accept failure at the brink citing parliamentary design flaws as his excuse.
My great hope isn’t to parade around this health bill as a final solution to our need for reform, but that once in place it will be the province of the Al Franken’s and Howard Dean’s of the world as the carrier they can improve over time. There is a laundry list of improvements that can occur with the bill. Those improvements can’t exist without something to ride on.
3) Tort reform is also part of the bill. It isn’t the meaningful tort reform that Joe Scarborough is asking for, but it’s a starting point. I fail to see the cost justification of all the air time devoted to tort reform, which gets really spirited questioning from panelist after panelist, but continues to be JS’s Sally Struthers moment.
When it doesn’t have any equitable merit in the argument, it must be an obstruction or delay tactic. Remember, the Republicans aren’t going to vote for the bill, but the starting point for tort reform was in there anyway. Any further conversation on the matter as it pertains to this bill needs to come with some level of voting participation, otherwise wait until your cycle, and thank the Democrats for getting you started.
That’s right, the Republicans would never initiate health care reform. And, they will never repeal the reform. But if the legislature of the United States becomes Republican this fall, thanks to this bill, the Republicans can employ all of their improvements to the cause. Tort reform, medicare fraud enforcement, repeal the anti trust exemption, state lines, portability, and any other encumbrances to a free open market for national private health coverage.
I sincerely wish that 90% of all money paid to a health care insurer went to health care as opposed to a debatable 70% currently. It’s debatable because it’s a cat and mouse figure with enforcement tantamount to mortgage fraud enforcement in 2005. There are two paths to achieve 90% flow through. One is by government mandate, opening up an enforcement branch of government that would not be self-sustaining and result in inferior results towards the 90% goal.
The other is competition. If you want the last laugh against insurers, make them look at the airline industry, or the cell phone industry. Tell them in a hyper competitive market with multiple producers, and information they cannot collude to adjust, profit (the bellwether of flow through) moves to zero.
The airline industry really has an envy issue with the credit card industry. Man those contract tricks that let the credit card firms bilk customers for fees and fines, if bag charges could be that way, they might get some guaranteed money above the competitive wasteland. But they can’t, because in their business, smart consumers simply boil fees into their ticket price, with some travel sites doing it for you, the result, competition on final price wins.
We now possess the level of information technology to create a personal health profile for our family, to possess our medical records digitally and to shop our health needs to the penny competitively. We can even enforce emergency room and ambulance pricing, by having an alternative ready beforehand as opposed to an unnegotiated bill afterwards.
The Republicans can get a lot of this done, if my party can’t, in their 2 or so years in power starting this fall, if the Democrats continue to Carter themselves like they did today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) I remember where I was when Mark Foley helped the Democratic party seem like they possessed the high ground, and oh how I long for those days. The entire institution has deteriorated from every angle and amongst all participants precipitously so since then. Today, I thought the fear based cartoons were the least bad of the day’s clown parade. I thought it was actually a worse day for Democrats, as they have ceded morality entirely in this news cycle.
I also found it ironic that it was an appearance day for Tim Kaines. This guy is in charge of the boiled down message for the Democratic party. What is a guy to do? Tell the truth? It certainly seems like his leadership is meant to evoke doublespeak as a mantra. A mantra that flows through the White House. And that’s a problem.
It’s a problem because another simultaneous act was another Obama speech with that forcefulness that used to mean uniting lucidity. Now it seems like it is a tool with an on-off switch. I still feel like the Obama speech made logical single truth based sense, but combined with all of the stuff above, the recipe is for dilution and doublespeak.
2) On health care, I don’t see the hypocritical equivalence of the Obama speech and the McConnell reaction. It seems that McConnell is in fact just plain saying two different things out of convenience, because his point isn’t progress it’s status quo that he has no intention of replacing with any other issue specific progress, new day, new way of saying no.
Conversely, you could make the point that Obama is guilty of nothing more than strategic correction in the name of progress, knowing his product is the only hope for a move forward on the issue in our lifetime. This is a correction the American people would hope he would make, rather than accept failure at the brink citing parliamentary design flaws as his excuse.
My great hope isn’t to parade around this health bill as a final solution to our need for reform, but that once in place it will be the province of the Al Franken’s and Howard Dean’s of the world as the carrier they can improve over time. There is a laundry list of improvements that can occur with the bill. Those improvements can’t exist without something to ride on.
3) Tort reform is also part of the bill. It isn’t the meaningful tort reform that Joe Scarborough is asking for, but it’s a starting point. I fail to see the cost justification of all the air time devoted to tort reform, which gets really spirited questioning from panelist after panelist, but continues to be JS’s Sally Struthers moment.
When it doesn’t have any equitable merit in the argument, it must be an obstruction or delay tactic. Remember, the Republicans aren’t going to vote for the bill, but the starting point for tort reform was in there anyway. Any further conversation on the matter as it pertains to this bill needs to come with some level of voting participation, otherwise wait until your cycle, and thank the Democrats for getting you started.
That’s right, the Republicans would never initiate health care reform. And, they will never repeal the reform. But if the legislature of the United States becomes Republican this fall, thanks to this bill, the Republicans can employ all of their improvements to the cause. Tort reform, medicare fraud enforcement, repeal the anti trust exemption, state lines, portability, and any other encumbrances to a free open market for national private health coverage.
I sincerely wish that 90% of all money paid to a health care insurer went to health care as opposed to a debatable 70% currently. It’s debatable because it’s a cat and mouse figure with enforcement tantamount to mortgage fraud enforcement in 2005. There are two paths to achieve 90% flow through. One is by government mandate, opening up an enforcement branch of government that would not be self-sustaining and result in inferior results towards the 90% goal.
The other is competition. If you want the last laugh against insurers, make them look at the airline industry, or the cell phone industry. Tell them in a hyper competitive market with multiple producers, and information they cannot collude to adjust, profit (the bellwether of flow through) moves to zero.
The airline industry really has an envy issue with the credit card industry. Man those contract tricks that let the credit card firms bilk customers for fees and fines, if bag charges could be that way, they might get some guaranteed money above the competitive wasteland. But they can’t, because in their business, smart consumers simply boil fees into their ticket price, with some travel sites doing it for you, the result, competition on final price wins.
We now possess the level of information technology to create a personal health profile for our family, to possess our medical records digitally and to shop our health needs to the penny competitively. We can even enforce emergency room and ambulance pricing, by having an alternative ready beforehand as opposed to an unnegotiated bill afterwards.
The Republicans can get a lot of this done, if my party can’t, in their 2 or so years in power starting this fall, if the Democrats continue to Carter themselves like they did today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
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}
Man Up
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 17, 2010
Observations:
1) Today’s Morning Joe show was overbooked. The raw mechanics of what was on paper versus what came across was critically out of balance in that with all the ads that talked about Tim Kaine being on the show, when he was there, he was half of what the fractious audience needed to explain all the Democratic party dysfunction. It was no payoff to all of the buildup.
We are a mad electorate, and we have now loudly started to call for that man’s resignation. To finally get him on and to have him get away with being a statistical apologist for about 2 minutes and get only one question from Bob Woodward, and regrets from Sam Stein, is to give him sanctuary rather than shine a light on a huge issue.
The one questions from Bob Woodward said so much. “Sir, do you and the President talk?”. Wow.
2) So, yea, tough day for me in all the days travels, but I still got to be part of that glorious moment of Chris Dodd being on the show (on the same day as Tim Kaines), and saying with a straight face that filibuster isn’t the problem, it’s the transportation curve allowing Congress to no longer function like a boarding school that is the ill of the legislative branch. I’m sorry but that is the most excuse driven, cause and effect denial I have ever heard. It is also a golden ticket for Mr. Dodd to move to the next phase of his life, for he clearly displayed how he cannot be the path forward today.
Mr. Dodd might be a nice enough person, and his wife might have a point about the Countrywide scandal being an unfair bookmark on the guy's legacy. But that is really a cheap camouflage and someday someone will explain to his wife that the Countrywide situation is a convenient ‘explain away’ to cover other scandals far more distressing. What is happening here and in Iowa and in South Dakota, and on the other side of the aisle, is that a legion of Duke Cunninghams are choosing to get out or to have the world and the modern informational path congregate around the aggregated deals of their legislative lifetime, and see the rats.
3) But the real show was the Dr. Dean segment, where so much logic and order was placed upon the situation it was both infuriating and hopeful. Look, you had both the current and form DNC chairmen on one show. One guy came on late and all he could do was sound like a statistician anticipating a level of economic disarray, as if to say “here are all the reasons we should expect things to be bad”, but no solutions, and the other guy earlier in the day saying “the solution was right there”.
Today’s problems were solvable in 2009 but our administration was not man enough to accomplish them. And they will be much tougher to solve in 2010 because the odds will be further stacked against progress. If we complained bitterly about the effect of the 58th, 59th, and 60th vote in the Senate and how those three voting Senators were allowed to functionally change over half of the health care bill, can you imagine what our reaction will be if they are the 49th, 50th, and 51st vote? Maddening. If we look at Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman again in a 'pay the piper' way but at the crossroads of reconciliation, when we had it as an unused option and leverage in 2009, we will then cement on our psyche that we did this to ourselves through lack of certain leadership.
But the optimist is where we are on the calendar. Dr. Dean said what we have all said, so it might actually be true. We got the memo in January of 2010, Bill Clinton got the memo on Halloween of 1994. that 10 month gap might be the turnaround opportunity that saves us all. Mr. Obama is a different guy. He is taking hard shots across the bow of not just the Republican party but the dysfunction of Congress.
There is no doubt we are at a second genesis of this Presidency and thankfully so. If it is anything, it’s not too late, not because of the good break of the calendar, but because the Achilles heel of the Republican party is a hallow platform.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Today’s Morning Joe show was overbooked. The raw mechanics of what was on paper versus what came across was critically out of balance in that with all the ads that talked about Tim Kaine being on the show, when he was there, he was half of what the fractious audience needed to explain all the Democratic party dysfunction. It was no payoff to all of the buildup.
We are a mad electorate, and we have now loudly started to call for that man’s resignation. To finally get him on and to have him get away with being a statistical apologist for about 2 minutes and get only one question from Bob Woodward, and regrets from Sam Stein, is to give him sanctuary rather than shine a light on a huge issue.
The one questions from Bob Woodward said so much. “Sir, do you and the President talk?”. Wow.
2) So, yea, tough day for me in all the days travels, but I still got to be part of that glorious moment of Chris Dodd being on the show (on the same day as Tim Kaines), and saying with a straight face that filibuster isn’t the problem, it’s the transportation curve allowing Congress to no longer function like a boarding school that is the ill of the legislative branch. I’m sorry but that is the most excuse driven, cause and effect denial I have ever heard. It is also a golden ticket for Mr. Dodd to move to the next phase of his life, for he clearly displayed how he cannot be the path forward today.
Mr. Dodd might be a nice enough person, and his wife might have a point about the Countrywide scandal being an unfair bookmark on the guy's legacy. But that is really a cheap camouflage and someday someone will explain to his wife that the Countrywide situation is a convenient ‘explain away’ to cover other scandals far more distressing. What is happening here and in Iowa and in South Dakota, and on the other side of the aisle, is that a legion of Duke Cunninghams are choosing to get out or to have the world and the modern informational path congregate around the aggregated deals of their legislative lifetime, and see the rats.
3) But the real show was the Dr. Dean segment, where so much logic and order was placed upon the situation it was both infuriating and hopeful. Look, you had both the current and form DNC chairmen on one show. One guy came on late and all he could do was sound like a statistician anticipating a level of economic disarray, as if to say “here are all the reasons we should expect things to be bad”, but no solutions, and the other guy earlier in the day saying “the solution was right there”.
Today’s problems were solvable in 2009 but our administration was not man enough to accomplish them. And they will be much tougher to solve in 2010 because the odds will be further stacked against progress. If we complained bitterly about the effect of the 58th, 59th, and 60th vote in the Senate and how those three voting Senators were allowed to functionally change over half of the health care bill, can you imagine what our reaction will be if they are the 49th, 50th, and 51st vote? Maddening. If we look at Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman again in a 'pay the piper' way but at the crossroads of reconciliation, when we had it as an unused option and leverage in 2009, we will then cement on our psyche that we did this to ourselves through lack of certain leadership.
But the optimist is where we are on the calendar. Dr. Dean said what we have all said, so it might actually be true. We got the memo in January of 2010, Bill Clinton got the memo on Halloween of 1994. that 10 month gap might be the turnaround opportunity that saves us all. Mr. Obama is a different guy. He is taking hard shots across the bow of not just the Republican party but the dysfunction of Congress.
There is no doubt we are at a second genesis of this Presidency and thankfully so. If it is anything, it’s not too late, not because of the good break of the calendar, but because the Achilles heel of the Republican party is a hallow platform.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, February 5, 2010
In Like A Lion, Out Like A Lamb
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 5th, 2010
Observations:
1) I guess I made a mistake yesterday when I said I agreed with Joe Scarborough on most of the issues on health reform. Because today, it was Joe Scarborough the voodoo science obstructionist, conjuring up brand new numbers out of the air for the same old talking points, not even platform or policy, but talking points.
Joe’s math is now ‘60% of Americans don’t want health care reform’. It was 75% last week. Neither number is anywhere near the heart of sentiment on the matter. And nothing constructive can come from this message, that is so JS 5 months ago, that IT is dead and we should move on.
I want the current health care bill dead. I came out in support of the Dean decision that very day, and wrote both Senators Boxer and Feinstein asking that they vote against it. I itemized that more was lost than gained, the new coverage of 31 million was achieved by making uninsured people scofflaws if they didn’t buy a policy under the same awful conditions that exist in status quo, and that the pre-existing conditions part of the legislation was nothing more than a sound bite with no real enforcement that would create an additional cat and mouse game between insurers and hapless regulators.
Further, I’ve come out with a model for piecing together the good items into enforceable law in a bipartisan way and without loopholes, the leadership horse trade, and identified the mission as creating a hyper efficient private insurance model with strict accountability towards free market and full coverage. No state lines, no preexisting conditions under threat of lifetime liability, repeal of anti trust, and tort management.
Lastly, Joe parroting those old scripts is infuriating because we have uncovered in the last 5 months several anomalies that make American’s judgment of the issue the result of conflict of interest on almost every level. Massachusetts voters had universal coverage and thus were essentially voting a no new taxes mandate so they didn’t have to pay insurance cost for citizens of other states. Employed workers across the country are being victimized by propaganda that it will be reform that costs them insurance instead of the loss of a job or a cancellation by an insurance company on a technicality leaving them without a safety net. Uninsured are being told to vote against any mandate as a violation of their American freedoms.
And that leaves one small group of advocates. Americans who work for small businesses below the group threshold, are unemployed, are self employed or have some similar commonality that makes them outside of the reach of group insurance. Those people got news yesterday far worse than the Joe Scarborough betrayal of their trust. Blue Cross Anthem told 2.5 million California individual policy holders that they were getting a premium increase of 39% on March 1st. The average policy cost for a family of four is moving from $20,134 to $27,336 per year. Blue Cross Blue Shield have a near monopoly in this state. And there is zero regulatory recourse. The only thing that Blue Cross Anthem has to prove is that at least 70% of premiums make it to health care for covered patients. That’s not insurance anymore, that’s a siphon.
Joe Scarborough, stop with the talking points and become an advocate for an immediate solution, 2.5 million people found out yesterday, while you were in their state, how bad they need you to get this right.
2) Obama, the bad juggler part 2. Mike Allen revealed side by side today that the administration got chewed out by the junior Senator from Minnesota Al Franken, who at this point is the heir apparent to the Howard Dean lucidity throne, and then promptly that same administration sent legislators on the road to a jobs bill without a map.
If this is true, it is another major setback for an administration that is now getting Carter comparisons daily. I’m not one of them. But I’ve used the words feckless, hapless, vacuum of leadership, and rookie to describe what we saw in 2009 and as 2010 gets underway, to see the same needs to be a call to action for all of us.
Franken went off saying everything we have discussed about a lack of leadership on the issues, and went specifically after David Axelrod. Sound familiar? I remember the day that the health bill turned into untenable sausage and Howard Dean came out against it. I remember how Axelrod came out not asking to look at the issues, but to sell the talking points, and asking not for understanding but loyalty. That’s an outrage. It was an outrage listening to Senators turned into doublespeak salesmen, it was an outrage seeing the opposite of necessity nearly enacted into law, it was an outrage to have proven the opposition right.
I went to bed that night thinking maybe football is fixed and Oliver Stone’s Mr. X was the closest I would come to the truth in this lifetime.
Scarborough is the opposition, not the extremists like Limbaugh or Erickson. We have to be the example of the availability of bipartisan progress here, so the drill in the coming days is the same as oft described here: get the good people on the set, Dean, Warren, Krugman, and come out of the 10 minute segments with 4 consensus parts to a solution to each of the demons plaguing America right now, Health, Finance and Jobs.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Observations:
1) I guess I made a mistake yesterday when I said I agreed with Joe Scarborough on most of the issues on health reform. Because today, it was Joe Scarborough the voodoo science obstructionist, conjuring up brand new numbers out of the air for the same old talking points, not even platform or policy, but talking points.
Joe’s math is now ‘60% of Americans don’t want health care reform’. It was 75% last week. Neither number is anywhere near the heart of sentiment on the matter. And nothing constructive can come from this message, that is so JS 5 months ago, that IT is dead and we should move on.
I want the current health care bill dead. I came out in support of the Dean decision that very day, and wrote both Senators Boxer and Feinstein asking that they vote against it. I itemized that more was lost than gained, the new coverage of 31 million was achieved by making uninsured people scofflaws if they didn’t buy a policy under the same awful conditions that exist in status quo, and that the pre-existing conditions part of the legislation was nothing more than a sound bite with no real enforcement that would create an additional cat and mouse game between insurers and hapless regulators.
Further, I’ve come out with a model for piecing together the good items into enforceable law in a bipartisan way and without loopholes, the leadership horse trade, and identified the mission as creating a hyper efficient private insurance model with strict accountability towards free market and full coverage. No state lines, no preexisting conditions under threat of lifetime liability, repeal of anti trust, and tort management.
Lastly, Joe parroting those old scripts is infuriating because we have uncovered in the last 5 months several anomalies that make American’s judgment of the issue the result of conflict of interest on almost every level. Massachusetts voters had universal coverage and thus were essentially voting a no new taxes mandate so they didn’t have to pay insurance cost for citizens of other states. Employed workers across the country are being victimized by propaganda that it will be reform that costs them insurance instead of the loss of a job or a cancellation by an insurance company on a technicality leaving them without a safety net. Uninsured are being told to vote against any mandate as a violation of their American freedoms.
And that leaves one small group of advocates. Americans who work for small businesses below the group threshold, are unemployed, are self employed or have some similar commonality that makes them outside of the reach of group insurance. Those people got news yesterday far worse than the Joe Scarborough betrayal of their trust. Blue Cross Anthem told 2.5 million California individual policy holders that they were getting a premium increase of 39% on March 1st. The average policy cost for a family of four is moving from $20,134 to $27,336 per year. Blue Cross Blue Shield have a near monopoly in this state. And there is zero regulatory recourse. The only thing that Blue Cross Anthem has to prove is that at least 70% of premiums make it to health care for covered patients. That’s not insurance anymore, that’s a siphon.
Joe Scarborough, stop with the talking points and become an advocate for an immediate solution, 2.5 million people found out yesterday, while you were in their state, how bad they need you to get this right.
2) Obama, the bad juggler part 2. Mike Allen revealed side by side today that the administration got chewed out by the junior Senator from Minnesota Al Franken, who at this point is the heir apparent to the Howard Dean lucidity throne, and then promptly that same administration sent legislators on the road to a jobs bill without a map.
If this is true, it is another major setback for an administration that is now getting Carter comparisons daily. I’m not one of them. But I’ve used the words feckless, hapless, vacuum of leadership, and rookie to describe what we saw in 2009 and as 2010 gets underway, to see the same needs to be a call to action for all of us.
Franken went off saying everything we have discussed about a lack of leadership on the issues, and went specifically after David Axelrod. Sound familiar? I remember the day that the health bill turned into untenable sausage and Howard Dean came out against it. I remember how Axelrod came out not asking to look at the issues, but to sell the talking points, and asking not for understanding but loyalty. That’s an outrage. It was an outrage listening to Senators turned into doublespeak salesmen, it was an outrage seeing the opposite of necessity nearly enacted into law, it was an outrage to have proven the opposition right.
I went to bed that night thinking maybe football is fixed and Oliver Stone’s Mr. X was the closest I would come to the truth in this lifetime.
Scarborough is the opposition, not the extremists like Limbaugh or Erickson. We have to be the example of the availability of bipartisan progress here, so the drill in the coming days is the same as oft described here: get the good people on the set, Dean, Warren, Krugman, and come out of the 10 minute segments with 4 consensus parts to a solution to each of the demons plaguing America right now, Health, Finance and Jobs.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Monday, January 11, 2010
Morning Low
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 11th, 2010
Observations:
1) This is the very worst showing for Joe Scarborough since the show began. I agree often with the intellectual basis and strategy musings of Mr. Scarborough on Morning Joe and that continued even today. I was completely disappointed by his inability to control his petty glee. The quote “Negro Dialect” was uttered by JS 36 times. Again, I made that number up but stand by the larger point that his repetition was damaging to his long term credibility. Further, if you’re going to make a point of how destructive it is to give a peek at back room insight with a single contextually unclear quote…
… then you may not want to have a mock back room agreement with yourself, Andy Card, and Pat Buchanan where you wave an African-American genius like Jonathan Capehart off in a “let the men talk” manner, and then have a judge, jury, and executioner passage of judgment regardless of any of the other viewpoints that resultantly favors your minority standing as to what needs to prevail.
This is tantamount to protesting the murder of a single victim by murdering 36 more victims to show how bad murder is, then going to Simi Valley to find a jury of your peers.
2) But look, in that 36 repeat coda, the repeats fell off just enough in the second ninety minutes as the credible guests began lining up to try and repair context on your show. The shift moved to the book that appears to be a nuclear news generator. As a fan of what goes on behind the scenes, I’m riveted by all the stuff flying off of this phenomenon. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin make it clear that there is still a legion of background to learn as to how President Barack Obama happened. Is this a positively ending version of the Oliver Stone JFK style of event reading by either bugging or pretending to know what happened in the back room along the way?
I think the insinuation that Bill Clinton has a mistress while his wife is running for President, that he still thinks Barack Obama is an intern (the coffee quote has zero race in it, despite the shows mistaken consensus) is a news item that will have more legs going forward than anything else I've heard. The back room of the Democratic party definitely believed it, and thus shoved Hillary aside and made Barack president for the sake of the party’s survival. Wow.
3) We are going to have to examine the vacuum effect when a story like this grabs 99% of your three hours on the air. Howard Dean’s frustration was correct of intent but was useless in the face of the gravity of the Reid story. We saw Erin Burnett bumped, we saw health care shut out, we saw drone attacks uncovered, we saw the biggest story of the day, the bonus handout commencement, unmentioned. This country needs to hand out pitchforks and head to New York, yet the show followed the Harry Reid story exclusively like a trout after a spinner.
The bonus situation is so frustrating, because we are already saying a clawback 4-5 years in retroactive duration needs to occur, but we are allowing the another round of illegitimate redistribution of the nation’s wealth. The Wall Street firms are not just unapologetic, they are running around saying “get used to it”.
4) There is another darker examination of the Reid story that turns the Morning Joe show into a dupe. What if this is a Democratic back room strategy to make Harry Reid’s swan song be the health care vote, followed by a retirement, followed by Chuck Schumer as leader, followed by a healthier candidate showing themselves in Nevada that, like JS alluded to, had a Chris Dodd 'bad news on the singular issue made good news on five others' result. If Harry Reid’s goose is cooked prior to the story, what does the story accomplish that already wasn’t baked in? Mister X says follow the money.
This possibility means we are going to need Lawrence O’Donnell going forward, and without taking sides, if it's even questionable where Joe Scarborough’s work wound up today on the credibility map, shooting critics would be a major setback.
It’s just Monday people, take a breath and focus.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) This is the very worst showing for Joe Scarborough since the show began. I agree often with the intellectual basis and strategy musings of Mr. Scarborough on Morning Joe and that continued even today. I was completely disappointed by his inability to control his petty glee. The quote “Negro Dialect” was uttered by JS 36 times. Again, I made that number up but stand by the larger point that his repetition was damaging to his long term credibility. Further, if you’re going to make a point of how destructive it is to give a peek at back room insight with a single contextually unclear quote…
… then you may not want to have a mock back room agreement with yourself, Andy Card, and Pat Buchanan where you wave an African-American genius like Jonathan Capehart off in a “let the men talk” manner, and then have a judge, jury, and executioner passage of judgment regardless of any of the other viewpoints that resultantly favors your minority standing as to what needs to prevail.
This is tantamount to protesting the murder of a single victim by murdering 36 more victims to show how bad murder is, then going to Simi Valley to find a jury of your peers.
2) But look, in that 36 repeat coda, the repeats fell off just enough in the second ninety minutes as the credible guests began lining up to try and repair context on your show. The shift moved to the book that appears to be a nuclear news generator. As a fan of what goes on behind the scenes, I’m riveted by all the stuff flying off of this phenomenon. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin make it clear that there is still a legion of background to learn as to how President Barack Obama happened. Is this a positively ending version of the Oliver Stone JFK style of event reading by either bugging or pretending to know what happened in the back room along the way?
I think the insinuation that Bill Clinton has a mistress while his wife is running for President, that he still thinks Barack Obama is an intern (the coffee quote has zero race in it, despite the shows mistaken consensus) is a news item that will have more legs going forward than anything else I've heard. The back room of the Democratic party definitely believed it, and thus shoved Hillary aside and made Barack president for the sake of the party’s survival. Wow.
3) We are going to have to examine the vacuum effect when a story like this grabs 99% of your three hours on the air. Howard Dean’s frustration was correct of intent but was useless in the face of the gravity of the Reid story. We saw Erin Burnett bumped, we saw health care shut out, we saw drone attacks uncovered, we saw the biggest story of the day, the bonus handout commencement, unmentioned. This country needs to hand out pitchforks and head to New York, yet the show followed the Harry Reid story exclusively like a trout after a spinner.
The bonus situation is so frustrating, because we are already saying a clawback 4-5 years in retroactive duration needs to occur, but we are allowing the another round of illegitimate redistribution of the nation’s wealth. The Wall Street firms are not just unapologetic, they are running around saying “get used to it”.
4) There is another darker examination of the Reid story that turns the Morning Joe show into a dupe. What if this is a Democratic back room strategy to make Harry Reid’s swan song be the health care vote, followed by a retirement, followed by Chuck Schumer as leader, followed by a healthier candidate showing themselves in Nevada that, like JS alluded to, had a Chris Dodd 'bad news on the singular issue made good news on five others' result. If Harry Reid’s goose is cooked prior to the story, what does the story accomplish that already wasn’t baked in? Mister X says follow the money.
This possibility means we are going to need Lawrence O’Donnell going forward, and without taking sides, if it's even questionable where Joe Scarborough’s work wound up today on the credibility map, shooting critics would be a major setback.
It’s just Monday people, take a breath and focus.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Morning Joe Torture Test
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) While it may have felt good to get Dylan Ratigan on the set, it accomplished very little. There he was like a frustrated 5 year old, frustrated because the words aren’t serving the ideas racing about his head, and he was trying to ask the uber-polished Rudy Giuliani a simple question. “Mr. Giuliani, if it was your watch, what would you do going forward 10 years”. But alas, by the time the question got out, he had worn out everyone with endless qualifications, and the music was playing. But this isn’t about Dylan, it’s about Mika and Joe, who had an opportunity to listen to Giuliani hedge at Obama’s expense and then redirect him to Dylan’s intent. “That’s great Mr. Mayor, but what would you do going forward 10 years, what are your big ideas?”
Dylan desperately needs a teaching moment, his thought process is leading edge, but the machine is broken. Over time Joe and Mika (and Mike and Willie?) have become ace question/grenade lobbers, and they need to get that skill transferred to Mr. Ratigan.
2) I feel like there was a great equalizing force between the show today and the prior show that elicited the complaint of bias on it’s reporting of Democratic election prognoses. Joe Conason leveled the playing field and it appeared convinced even Joe Scarborough that the right is overcounting its support and underestimating its split.
The additional daily dose of Micheal Steele reporting points to a remarkable move towards realistic expectations on behalf of those on the right, I mean, he almost sounds like DNC era Howard Dean for the opposition. Howard will be on the show on Monday and it would be a fair subject to try and define if Michael Steele is “doing what Howard would do” for the Republicans.
I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid to the extent that I think Steele has dropped agenda-speak and that the Republicans are now realizing that they’ll have to separate distant agenda items like abortion and fiscal responsibility to ever win the middle again. But what candidates like mega conservative Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania are doing is trying to sway the conversation away from base baiting subjects. He has given interviews to left leaning publications and had the content been exclusively economic, leaving out some fairly important hate mongering subjects, in an effort to appeal to middle voters, like myself, who put fiscal leanings of some Republicans in high regard, but litmus them away upon discovering their dark social restriction.
A while ago, Joe Scarborough made a very valid point, that there is an equation where you can agree explicitly and up front, to remove a nasty albatross like abortion from a discussion or even a platform, for a term, in order to focus solely on other priorities if you were deemed to be the best leader for the accomplishment of those other priorities. That concept, if Michael Steele ever mastered it, would do more to re-unify the Republican party based on his established program, than anything else.
3) San Diego got a shout out when Ron Insana talked about the available gold rush of real estate bargains in cities like this one. It’s a fact. I saw a house with a horizon view of the ocean go in north San Diego country last month for less than $300,000. It’s unreal, but also an equation. The big negative for this area for a long time is unless you’re married to the service industry, the jobs are there, just not fulfilling or an exercise in career growth. Houses a fraction of the size of the one above are still getting $800,000 2 counties north because a job there means 3 times as much as a job here.
When you’re cutting jobs at your mega company, you close the esoteric satellite operations first, and doesn’t that sound like San Diego? Until that changes, yea you can buy some investment houses and rent them to San Diego State students, but there is little opportunity to look at this region as our state’s Oregon.
4) The Morning Joe torture is when you bring a guest on at the top of the hour, and then get to him at 15 past the hour, and that’s after making him watch a fight from "Jersey Shore". If he doesn’t tell you all the information you want right on cue, you can move your torture to a waterboarding level by asking him what he thought of the fight on "Jersey Shore". If that doesn’t work, play the music and show the Koalas.
That’s Stern meets Clockwork Orange level stuff and today I thought it was done on purpose because it was Joe Conason, then I remembered you did it to Richard Haas. I am alerting Geneva.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Observations:
1) While it may have felt good to get Dylan Ratigan on the set, it accomplished very little. There he was like a frustrated 5 year old, frustrated because the words aren’t serving the ideas racing about his head, and he was trying to ask the uber-polished Rudy Giuliani a simple question. “Mr. Giuliani, if it was your watch, what would you do going forward 10 years”. But alas, by the time the question got out, he had worn out everyone with endless qualifications, and the music was playing. But this isn’t about Dylan, it’s about Mika and Joe, who had an opportunity to listen to Giuliani hedge at Obama’s expense and then redirect him to Dylan’s intent. “That’s great Mr. Mayor, but what would you do going forward 10 years, what are your big ideas?”
Dylan desperately needs a teaching moment, his thought process is leading edge, but the machine is broken. Over time Joe and Mika (and Mike and Willie?) have become ace question/grenade lobbers, and they need to get that skill transferred to Mr. Ratigan.
2) I feel like there was a great equalizing force between the show today and the prior show that elicited the complaint of bias on it’s reporting of Democratic election prognoses. Joe Conason leveled the playing field and it appeared convinced even Joe Scarborough that the right is overcounting its support and underestimating its split.
The additional daily dose of Micheal Steele reporting points to a remarkable move towards realistic expectations on behalf of those on the right, I mean, he almost sounds like DNC era Howard Dean for the opposition. Howard will be on the show on Monday and it would be a fair subject to try and define if Michael Steele is “doing what Howard would do” for the Republicans.
I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid to the extent that I think Steele has dropped agenda-speak and that the Republicans are now realizing that they’ll have to separate distant agenda items like abortion and fiscal responsibility to ever win the middle again. But what candidates like mega conservative Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania are doing is trying to sway the conversation away from base baiting subjects. He has given interviews to left leaning publications and had the content been exclusively economic, leaving out some fairly important hate mongering subjects, in an effort to appeal to middle voters, like myself, who put fiscal leanings of some Republicans in high regard, but litmus them away upon discovering their dark social restriction.
A while ago, Joe Scarborough made a very valid point, that there is an equation where you can agree explicitly and up front, to remove a nasty albatross like abortion from a discussion or even a platform, for a term, in order to focus solely on other priorities if you were deemed to be the best leader for the accomplishment of those other priorities. That concept, if Michael Steele ever mastered it, would do more to re-unify the Republican party based on his established program, than anything else.
3) San Diego got a shout out when Ron Insana talked about the available gold rush of real estate bargains in cities like this one. It’s a fact. I saw a house with a horizon view of the ocean go in north San Diego country last month for less than $300,000. It’s unreal, but also an equation. The big negative for this area for a long time is unless you’re married to the service industry, the jobs are there, just not fulfilling or an exercise in career growth. Houses a fraction of the size of the one above are still getting $800,000 2 counties north because a job there means 3 times as much as a job here.
When you’re cutting jobs at your mega company, you close the esoteric satellite operations first, and doesn’t that sound like San Diego? Until that changes, yea you can buy some investment houses and rent them to San Diego State students, but there is little opportunity to look at this region as our state’s Oregon.
4) The Morning Joe torture is when you bring a guest on at the top of the hour, and then get to him at 15 past the hour, and that’s after making him watch a fight from "Jersey Shore". If he doesn’t tell you all the information you want right on cue, you can move your torture to a waterboarding level by asking him what he thought of the fight on "Jersey Shore". If that doesn’t work, play the music and show the Koalas.
That’s Stern meets Clockwork Orange level stuff and today I thought it was done on purpose because it was Joe Conason, then I remembered you did it to Richard Haas. I am alerting Geneva.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Accidentally, Morning Joe
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 23rd, 2009
Observations:
1) So there we were content to let this be a phone in program, what with Christmas upon us and the news that the GOP admits it’s powerless to stop tomorrow’s health care vote. But wait, Mika Brzezinski had another idea: let’s get this day off to a start by looping Bernie Sanders alarm on the functionality of the government, bring in Carl Bernstein and start ambushing guests on why this is a celebration rather than a placation.
Bravo. I was ready to go back to bed when the Bernstein interview took off. “A systemic failure of the legislative branch of government”. “It’s necessary to reform towards a public funding of campaign finance”. A 1-2 punch that we’ve heard before, but right now, right this second, when we are looking at the crowning achievement of a 60 vote voter induced mandate on health care that looks like a Chinese made recreation of reform on sale at Wal-Mart for $19.99 with the proceeds going to Connecticut and Nebraska, I think this time that systemic message has more intrinsic weight than Uranium-238.
This along with some very necessary measure from Andrew Ross-Sorkin on what reasonable people should expect looking a lot like the status quo, and a late arriving Joe Scarborough adding the crucial connecting point that the systemic failure has to point to the executive branch and the money signals that appear to be guiding the Presidency as well, what we have here is some Oliver Stone level fixing going on. Because of MSNBC, Howard Dean, Firedog Lake, and ironically Lindsay Graham, this fix has been more transparent than Mr. Obama intended when he claimed transparency but was relying on the limits of a public’s comprehension of the inner workings of government.
Not today. The cat is out of the bag. No longer can you put a “D” next to your name and claim to be insulated from the corruption failing 2 branches of our government. A 6th grader now knows that it’s not right or left but systemic that the government of the United States is making its deals in violation of the interests of it’s citizens. That consequently the American citizen is not even in the top ten of the food chain, and the top ten in that food chain are dismantling the riches of a nation and heading to higher ground with their new and our former wealth.
And I doubted you Mika Brzezinski, shame on me.
2) I wrote my Senator Barbara Boxer when I promised to do so last week and asked for a no vote on health care. I got a letter back that I’ve seen before from her. “Thanks for your note, here’s my position irrespective of how you feel”. Then she came on the show and I was ashamed. The Senate has lost it’s will and is fighting not for the people but for its war chest in 2010 and 2012. Joe Scarborough is dead on with the cross hairs being the ability to purchase 30 second spots when it matters.
Senator Boxer did not miss a single message from the party line in a moment Karl Rove would’ve been proud of. What sucks is that same 6th grader from above knows its not a message with any lucid restraint, but in the a good concept Steven A Smith had provided to the show, that message is everything we ever hated about John Kerry, hyperbole at every turn.
Message 1: 31 million Americans get insurance that didn’t have it before. That is a number driven by the mandate. The show didn’t catch that underlying ugliness. The math here is that healthy 20-somethings look at the mess of health care and choose with dollar votes not to participate. They are also, if they’re not employed or underemployed, in a lower tax bracket simultaneously, so not paying via taxation either, and are getting a free ride. If they get in an emergency, the service is provided. That 31 million people are those people who have opted out, not people that were barred from the market. You didn’t insure 31 million Americans in a rush to charity, you enslaved 31 million Americans by mandate to enrich private insurers and re-establish the pool they were avoiding by choice.
Message 2: Pre existing conditions are no longer a way out of, or preventing the acquiring of, health insurance. If the penalty for drunk driving were a $61 dollar fine, would it be effective, or would it still amortize out as less than the cost of cabs 5 times a month? If a business not bounded by a universal requirement amortizes out that it’s better off to pay a small fine than insure a child with a hole in their heart, get ready for that to happen. You can call something illegal, heck, marijuana, driving 71 miles an hour, banking in Antigua to avoid taxes, and keeping a handgun under the seat are all illegal, but their commonplace occurrence displays that you can’t effectively manage unless there is real consequence, and there isn’t here.
Message 3: 15% margin. History shows that the accounting practices of US Corporations are designed to make a 35 look like a 7.4, the difference between the corporate tax rate and the rate of tax contributions of the Fortune 500. So, yea, we’re talking politics.
That Barbara Boxer asked for the show’s credibility by saying she was a progressive completes this shameful observation of what amounts to 50% of the hope I have for reform from the Senate reduced to a shell game removing my interests and the interests of my Fox-watching conservative neighbors with equal effectiveness.
3) I write about this show. I am not a subscriber of the show that was the Morning Meeting. I am not because I largely agree with every single thing that Dylan Ratigan says and don’t need to participate in an echo chamber. I can watch that show once a week and catch all I need from his debate, which has been painfully circular and woefully without discipline, but just so right as rain for its entire run.
I hope that viewers don’t look at hack commentary based on the numbers of viewers for that show and its viewership decline and eventual cancellation and derive some take void of critical thought that it must’ve sucked. It had all the hard edges of U2’s first album when they really didn’t know how to play their instruments. But the heart present in these cases should be ample to win out over time, and I sincerely hope that MSNBC realizes that talent development is where the content comes from.
The 4 PM slot is no picnic. Many a generic show have gone there to die or placate a contract. But the 9 AM slot is equally difficult. The entire range from 9-5 is tough, because lets face it, we’ve already heard the reading of the news, there is little new content, we don’t have the free time to think critically about politics, and it’s just better for your career to switch to CNBC at that time.
Your mission at Morning Joe is to embolden what’s working with Dylan’s message and help develop what’s going on there. He didn’t come from lefty radio like Ed and Rachel, from congress like Chris, from sports like Keith, but from CNBC, the very place your show needs to relate to better, yet he has all the chops of a whistle blower gone mad.
What I did see when I watched that show is that it found stuff further in the details than Morning Joe could. As I’ve often been critical of missing underlying details on Morning Joe, which relies on expert guests and pure political instinct, it would be fair to say jettisoning the depth that the Morning Meeting provided in the hours after your show isolates your show further, and you'll need to find some depth and resolution that the sameness of a political scorecard show like what Savannah and Chuck are going to do just won’t provide you.
Personally, I think that Dylan should be lobbying for the overnight shift, and drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes on the set. Getting guests might be hard. It would be very, very good live TV and conspiracy theorists the world over would set their Tivo's accordingly. I vote for the Midnight Meeting, only on MSNBC.
Have a great holidays, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) So there we were content to let this be a phone in program, what with Christmas upon us and the news that the GOP admits it’s powerless to stop tomorrow’s health care vote. But wait, Mika Brzezinski had another idea: let’s get this day off to a start by looping Bernie Sanders alarm on the functionality of the government, bring in Carl Bernstein and start ambushing guests on why this is a celebration rather than a placation.
Bravo. I was ready to go back to bed when the Bernstein interview took off. “A systemic failure of the legislative branch of government”. “It’s necessary to reform towards a public funding of campaign finance”. A 1-2 punch that we’ve heard before, but right now, right this second, when we are looking at the crowning achievement of a 60 vote voter induced mandate on health care that looks like a Chinese made recreation of reform on sale at Wal-Mart for $19.99 with the proceeds going to Connecticut and Nebraska, I think this time that systemic message has more intrinsic weight than Uranium-238.
This along with some very necessary measure from Andrew Ross-Sorkin on what reasonable people should expect looking a lot like the status quo, and a late arriving Joe Scarborough adding the crucial connecting point that the systemic failure has to point to the executive branch and the money signals that appear to be guiding the Presidency as well, what we have here is some Oliver Stone level fixing going on. Because of MSNBC, Howard Dean, Firedog Lake, and ironically Lindsay Graham, this fix has been more transparent than Mr. Obama intended when he claimed transparency but was relying on the limits of a public’s comprehension of the inner workings of government.
Not today. The cat is out of the bag. No longer can you put a “D” next to your name and claim to be insulated from the corruption failing 2 branches of our government. A 6th grader now knows that it’s not right or left but systemic that the government of the United States is making its deals in violation of the interests of it’s citizens. That consequently the American citizen is not even in the top ten of the food chain, and the top ten in that food chain are dismantling the riches of a nation and heading to higher ground with their new and our former wealth.
And I doubted you Mika Brzezinski, shame on me.
2) I wrote my Senator Barbara Boxer when I promised to do so last week and asked for a no vote on health care. I got a letter back that I’ve seen before from her. “Thanks for your note, here’s my position irrespective of how you feel”. Then she came on the show and I was ashamed. The Senate has lost it’s will and is fighting not for the people but for its war chest in 2010 and 2012. Joe Scarborough is dead on with the cross hairs being the ability to purchase 30 second spots when it matters.
Senator Boxer did not miss a single message from the party line in a moment Karl Rove would’ve been proud of. What sucks is that same 6th grader from above knows its not a message with any lucid restraint, but in the a good concept Steven A Smith had provided to the show, that message is everything we ever hated about John Kerry, hyperbole at every turn.
Message 1: 31 million Americans get insurance that didn’t have it before. That is a number driven by the mandate. The show didn’t catch that underlying ugliness. The math here is that healthy 20-somethings look at the mess of health care and choose with dollar votes not to participate. They are also, if they’re not employed or underemployed, in a lower tax bracket simultaneously, so not paying via taxation either, and are getting a free ride. If they get in an emergency, the service is provided. That 31 million people are those people who have opted out, not people that were barred from the market. You didn’t insure 31 million Americans in a rush to charity, you enslaved 31 million Americans by mandate to enrich private insurers and re-establish the pool they were avoiding by choice.
Message 2: Pre existing conditions are no longer a way out of, or preventing the acquiring of, health insurance. If the penalty for drunk driving were a $61 dollar fine, would it be effective, or would it still amortize out as less than the cost of cabs 5 times a month? If a business not bounded by a universal requirement amortizes out that it’s better off to pay a small fine than insure a child with a hole in their heart, get ready for that to happen. You can call something illegal, heck, marijuana, driving 71 miles an hour, banking in Antigua to avoid taxes, and keeping a handgun under the seat are all illegal, but their commonplace occurrence displays that you can’t effectively manage unless there is real consequence, and there isn’t here.
Message 3: 15% margin. History shows that the accounting practices of US Corporations are designed to make a 35 look like a 7.4, the difference between the corporate tax rate and the rate of tax contributions of the Fortune 500. So, yea, we’re talking politics.
That Barbara Boxer asked for the show’s credibility by saying she was a progressive completes this shameful observation of what amounts to 50% of the hope I have for reform from the Senate reduced to a shell game removing my interests and the interests of my Fox-watching conservative neighbors with equal effectiveness.
3) I write about this show. I am not a subscriber of the show that was the Morning Meeting. I am not because I largely agree with every single thing that Dylan Ratigan says and don’t need to participate in an echo chamber. I can watch that show once a week and catch all I need from his debate, which has been painfully circular and woefully without discipline, but just so right as rain for its entire run.
I hope that viewers don’t look at hack commentary based on the numbers of viewers for that show and its viewership decline and eventual cancellation and derive some take void of critical thought that it must’ve sucked. It had all the hard edges of U2’s first album when they really didn’t know how to play their instruments. But the heart present in these cases should be ample to win out over time, and I sincerely hope that MSNBC realizes that talent development is where the content comes from.
The 4 PM slot is no picnic. Many a generic show have gone there to die or placate a contract. But the 9 AM slot is equally difficult. The entire range from 9-5 is tough, because lets face it, we’ve already heard the reading of the news, there is little new content, we don’t have the free time to think critically about politics, and it’s just better for your career to switch to CNBC at that time.
Your mission at Morning Joe is to embolden what’s working with Dylan’s message and help develop what’s going on there. He didn’t come from lefty radio like Ed and Rachel, from congress like Chris, from sports like Keith, but from CNBC, the very place your show needs to relate to better, yet he has all the chops of a whistle blower gone mad.
What I did see when I watched that show is that it found stuff further in the details than Morning Joe could. As I’ve often been critical of missing underlying details on Morning Joe, which relies on expert guests and pure political instinct, it would be fair to say jettisoning the depth that the Morning Meeting provided in the hours after your show isolates your show further, and you'll need to find some depth and resolution that the sameness of a political scorecard show like what Savannah and Chuck are going to do just won’t provide you.
Personally, I think that Dylan should be lobbying for the overnight shift, and drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes on the set. Getting guests might be hard. It would be very, very good live TV and conspiracy theorists the world over would set their Tivo's accordingly. I vote for the Midnight Meeting, only on MSNBC.
Have a great holidays, see you Monday.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
There Are No Good Answers But No
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 16th, 2009
Observations:
1) If Zbigniew Brzezinski can’t figure out Iran, we are all in real trouble. The trouble stems from the fact that we have heard his line of thinking, and it is largely unchanged, for some time now. Joe Scarborough has caught up with this particular doctrine and pointed out that over time he has grown “less superficial” on the matter.
The reason JS has caught up is that this strategy is unchanged, and it can best be described as solution free loggerheads. There is no progress versus the previous regime. Sabre rattling and personal notes from various American leaders have produced the same result. Now that a laundry list of sanctions have started to get laid out, all the while a quiet resignation has set in to all parties on either side of the aisle. We are going to stand aside on this one and allow Israel to be our mercenary. We will probably make it an open secret that while we won’t allow airspace infiltration, we won’t enforce it actionably. We are heading to a proxy war there in 90 days.
Don’t forget that Israeli military success stories have suffered to a recent parity in opposing sides in the region of late, so this is no 90 seconds over Syria situation. And who was the military might opposing Israel in the fields of Lebanon last time…. Iran by proxy of Hamas.
2) There is a real lack of outrage about the progress of financial reform. I can’t really figure out any agenda anywhere unless it’s the agenda of invisibility. My best guess is that the financial industry has launched an effective campaign to stop regulation efforts and debunk regulation publicity without buying an ad or putting spokesmen out on the circuit but instead to buy silence and pay people not to go public on the matter. It’s a real glass wall, and completely an opposite strategy of the health care debate.
Ask yourself, have you seen the ad “1 million tea party members want your hands off of our bank?” or seen Ron Christie go on a talk show and talk about a government takeover of the American financial industry?
Silence is a sellout too. I have consistently held the platform that if you have not voted for no other reason than personal attrition in every recent election, you should not be allowed to attend a political protest of any kind. I would extend that to say if you muzzle your rage about the sellout of the American government in its attempt to reform the financial industry and prevent a second financial failure, then Mr. Scarborough’s commonplace fiscal outrage is too selective to be genuine.
You had three guests on today all on the subject and reduced yourself to a narrator of the eventual financial failure. You coronated the Fed Chairman with no acknowledgment of the lack of preventative technology, just for treating the symptoms, placated Ron Paul until a convenient “hard break” prevented any resolution, and flat out argued with Steven Pearlstien the wrong way that banks are our best way forward. I could’ve found a better debate at Margaritaville.
3) And yea, there was health care. It is ultimately confounding that Howard Dean and Joe Scarborough have become the latest odd couple bedfellows. Joe Scarborough and his various guests flat out predicted the future: that a dishonest bill inclusive of real reform would be paraded around Washington for 5 months. A bill that had a public option. And in the 11th hour the ruling party’s elite would come to the camera and “while they really fought for it” they had to move forward with the second coming of a corporate giveaway bearing the Orwellian doublespeak title of “Health Care Reform”.
Howard Dean was duped, and I was too. His credibility was allowed to seep into the conversation all along just to make the case that the pre bait and switch version of the bill was a bill with “real teeth”. That is tantamount to a Tiger Woods billboard for Accenture’s professional consulting services at this point.
Further to this is the downright malicious distancing occurring by the administration from Dr. Dean. The fact that it was at a Christmas party that lines like “irrelevant” and “he’s more the problem than Lieberman” surfaced is a ‘show us what your made of’ moment for this administration. And I will accept nothing less than the head of Rahm Emmanuel for the transgression.
This is reform off of the rails by lack of leadership. The deafening vacuum coming from the White House will rank amongst the largest discredits and lack of forthrightedness ever in US Presidential history.
Three guys you would’ve never guessed now are on final approach to a NO vote on health care as it is defined by the industry itself through bought and paid for representatives calling themselves Senators: Joe Scarborough, Howard Dean, and yours truly. I’ll write Ms. Boxer and Feinstein next.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) If Zbigniew Brzezinski can’t figure out Iran, we are all in real trouble. The trouble stems from the fact that we have heard his line of thinking, and it is largely unchanged, for some time now. Joe Scarborough has caught up with this particular doctrine and pointed out that over time he has grown “less superficial” on the matter.
The reason JS has caught up is that this strategy is unchanged, and it can best be described as solution free loggerheads. There is no progress versus the previous regime. Sabre rattling and personal notes from various American leaders have produced the same result. Now that a laundry list of sanctions have started to get laid out, all the while a quiet resignation has set in to all parties on either side of the aisle. We are going to stand aside on this one and allow Israel to be our mercenary. We will probably make it an open secret that while we won’t allow airspace infiltration, we won’t enforce it actionably. We are heading to a proxy war there in 90 days.
Don’t forget that Israeli military success stories have suffered to a recent parity in opposing sides in the region of late, so this is no 90 seconds over Syria situation. And who was the military might opposing Israel in the fields of Lebanon last time…. Iran by proxy of Hamas.
2) There is a real lack of outrage about the progress of financial reform. I can’t really figure out any agenda anywhere unless it’s the agenda of invisibility. My best guess is that the financial industry has launched an effective campaign to stop regulation efforts and debunk regulation publicity without buying an ad or putting spokesmen out on the circuit but instead to buy silence and pay people not to go public on the matter. It’s a real glass wall, and completely an opposite strategy of the health care debate.
Ask yourself, have you seen the ad “1 million tea party members want your hands off of our bank?” or seen Ron Christie go on a talk show and talk about a government takeover of the American financial industry?
Silence is a sellout too. I have consistently held the platform that if you have not voted for no other reason than personal attrition in every recent election, you should not be allowed to attend a political protest of any kind. I would extend that to say if you muzzle your rage about the sellout of the American government in its attempt to reform the financial industry and prevent a second financial failure, then Mr. Scarborough’s commonplace fiscal outrage is too selective to be genuine.
You had three guests on today all on the subject and reduced yourself to a narrator of the eventual financial failure. You coronated the Fed Chairman with no acknowledgment of the lack of preventative technology, just for treating the symptoms, placated Ron Paul until a convenient “hard break” prevented any resolution, and flat out argued with Steven Pearlstien the wrong way that banks are our best way forward. I could’ve found a better debate at Margaritaville.
3) And yea, there was health care. It is ultimately confounding that Howard Dean and Joe Scarborough have become the latest odd couple bedfellows. Joe Scarborough and his various guests flat out predicted the future: that a dishonest bill inclusive of real reform would be paraded around Washington for 5 months. A bill that had a public option. And in the 11th hour the ruling party’s elite would come to the camera and “while they really fought for it” they had to move forward with the second coming of a corporate giveaway bearing the Orwellian doublespeak title of “Health Care Reform”.
Howard Dean was duped, and I was too. His credibility was allowed to seep into the conversation all along just to make the case that the pre bait and switch version of the bill was a bill with “real teeth”. That is tantamount to a Tiger Woods billboard for Accenture’s professional consulting services at this point.
Further to this is the downright malicious distancing occurring by the administration from Dr. Dean. The fact that it was at a Christmas party that lines like “irrelevant” and “he’s more the problem than Lieberman” surfaced is a ‘show us what your made of’ moment for this administration. And I will accept nothing less than the head of Rahm Emmanuel for the transgression.
This is reform off of the rails by lack of leadership. The deafening vacuum coming from the White House will rank amongst the largest discredits and lack of forthrightedness ever in US Presidential history.
Three guys you would’ve never guessed now are on final approach to a NO vote on health care as it is defined by the industry itself through bought and paid for representatives calling themselves Senators: Joe Scarborough, Howard Dean, and yours truly. I’ll write Ms. Boxer and Feinstein next.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, December 14, 2009
The Real Morning Joe Torpedo Is Lieberman
The Morning Joe Rebuttal For December 14th, 2009
Observations:
1) The news that Joe Lieberman has found a 9th life as a torpedo to health care reform is as unprecedented as it is predictable. The fact that Morning Joe has apparently lost it’s access to the Senator despite Mika’s Connecticut roots and Mike Barnicle’s relationship speaks volumes to the value of isolation. Mr. Lieberman has found the most personally profitable vacuum in political history and appears bulletproof to affect from either political party. With all the centrist, populist talk around this show it is particularly confounding that when you credit the middle for getting things done, it’s actually the pinnacle of obstructionism, and now you have your poster child.
Joe Scarborough’s thinly disguised glee at the torpedo is troubling by virtue of the inactivity endorsed as a governing strategy. Maybe if we got out 20 dry pinto beans we would have a better chance of figuring out government than listening to hallow sloganing like Mr. Scarborough is constant with. You’re right, the money has to come from somewhere, and the country can’t afford to reform health care. But the problem is that you also can’t afford not to reform health care. The bankruptcy you trumpeted concerning Medicare will actually come quicker by paying the health care costs of the uninsured in the current system, which is exploding at a faster rate. The pinto beans would prove that, but your slogans seem to conveniently forget.
2) The financial rhetoric on bank reform from Congress, the Morning Joe show, the President and the financial industry is the apex of uninspiring. It appears the citizens of the United States have no friends. What is talked about is the raise of the debt ceiling, but not how we got there. The show could’ve used a pie chart to effective success in communicating the elements of the debt. But as I always love to point out, nary a connection was made between the debt ceiling, banking reform in congress and the President’s meeting with financial CEOs. These three items were talked about on Morning Joe today as if the issues had Blackwater controlling their perimeters to avoid interconnection. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
The integration of the three issues and four stakeholders is this: we narrowly averted disaster less than a year ago, and all the will of the nation to reform and restructure, to de-leverage our countries future from private industry indiscretion, has already dissipated, yet we are closer than ever to a second coming that we cannot structurally afford to avert a second time. Will the Chinese give us another 30 trillion dollars to fix the same issue a second time? Is the government actually reforming or now that the cards are on the table, is this going to be the fall of the Roman empire? The rest of the world has gotten the message and we are in last place on all three key issues: bank reform, debt management, and governability.
I heard 2 guys talking in a Target store in Phoenix three weeks ago about an apparently open plot to try and persuade remaining liquidity in the US financial system back into the equities market via false positive market tactics, and then create a final solution selloff. There really aren’t a lot of Goldman Sachs guys in Phoenix, and this was in the toy aisle while their wives shopped. Apparently it’s an open secret that market manipulation is unbridled and our future looks a lot like bubble wrap, one bubble after the next to infinity.
3) Now that it’s out don’t you wish you had been more on top of the issue of the Taliban’s Afghanistan command center being in Pakistan? As a matter of service to the show, I provided you with the key components of the Afghanistan debate back before you had any detail at all in your portfolio. One of those facts was that Quetta, Pakistan was their CENTCOM. Today when the LA Times is reporting that the drone program is expanding to Quetta, your show was unprepared and unqualified to cover that story. In fact, you couldn’t even say the name of the city or why the drone program was expanding there.
We need you. In my open letter to Chris Licht on Friday, my attempt was to reduce the immaterial from your program so that you have an even wider canvas to bring in the best and the brightest and converge on the most intelligent consensus available. It was evident today that you are in a “back to work” mode, but missing elements like the Quetta story and the connectivity of the 3 financial stories should be a call to arms for you guys. It’s a damn serious time and no one is going to solve it in an hour in the afternoon on your network, or once a week on CNN or Meet The Press. The hallmark of Joe Scarborough is accountability, it’s why Joe Lieberman is avoiding you, it’s why Howard Dean comes on your show anytime.
All I know is I want more. Can you evolve?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) The news that Joe Lieberman has found a 9th life as a torpedo to health care reform is as unprecedented as it is predictable. The fact that Morning Joe has apparently lost it’s access to the Senator despite Mika’s Connecticut roots and Mike Barnicle’s relationship speaks volumes to the value of isolation. Mr. Lieberman has found the most personally profitable vacuum in political history and appears bulletproof to affect from either political party. With all the centrist, populist talk around this show it is particularly confounding that when you credit the middle for getting things done, it’s actually the pinnacle of obstructionism, and now you have your poster child.
Joe Scarborough’s thinly disguised glee at the torpedo is troubling by virtue of the inactivity endorsed as a governing strategy. Maybe if we got out 20 dry pinto beans we would have a better chance of figuring out government than listening to hallow sloganing like Mr. Scarborough is constant with. You’re right, the money has to come from somewhere, and the country can’t afford to reform health care. But the problem is that you also can’t afford not to reform health care. The bankruptcy you trumpeted concerning Medicare will actually come quicker by paying the health care costs of the uninsured in the current system, which is exploding at a faster rate. The pinto beans would prove that, but your slogans seem to conveniently forget.
2) The financial rhetoric on bank reform from Congress, the Morning Joe show, the President and the financial industry is the apex of uninspiring. It appears the citizens of the United States have no friends. What is talked about is the raise of the debt ceiling, but not how we got there. The show could’ve used a pie chart to effective success in communicating the elements of the debt. But as I always love to point out, nary a connection was made between the debt ceiling, banking reform in congress and the President’s meeting with financial CEOs. These three items were talked about on Morning Joe today as if the issues had Blackwater controlling their perimeters to avoid interconnection. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
The integration of the three issues and four stakeholders is this: we narrowly averted disaster less than a year ago, and all the will of the nation to reform and restructure, to de-leverage our countries future from private industry indiscretion, has already dissipated, yet we are closer than ever to a second coming that we cannot structurally afford to avert a second time. Will the Chinese give us another 30 trillion dollars to fix the same issue a second time? Is the government actually reforming or now that the cards are on the table, is this going to be the fall of the Roman empire? The rest of the world has gotten the message and we are in last place on all three key issues: bank reform, debt management, and governability.
I heard 2 guys talking in a Target store in Phoenix three weeks ago about an apparently open plot to try and persuade remaining liquidity in the US financial system back into the equities market via false positive market tactics, and then create a final solution selloff. There really aren’t a lot of Goldman Sachs guys in Phoenix, and this was in the toy aisle while their wives shopped. Apparently it’s an open secret that market manipulation is unbridled and our future looks a lot like bubble wrap, one bubble after the next to infinity.
3) Now that it’s out don’t you wish you had been more on top of the issue of the Taliban’s Afghanistan command center being in Pakistan? As a matter of service to the show, I provided you with the key components of the Afghanistan debate back before you had any detail at all in your portfolio. One of those facts was that Quetta, Pakistan was their CENTCOM. Today when the LA Times is reporting that the drone program is expanding to Quetta, your show was unprepared and unqualified to cover that story. In fact, you couldn’t even say the name of the city or why the drone program was expanding there.
We need you. In my open letter to Chris Licht on Friday, my attempt was to reduce the immaterial from your program so that you have an even wider canvas to bring in the best and the brightest and converge on the most intelligent consensus available. It was evident today that you are in a “back to work” mode, but missing elements like the Quetta story and the connectivity of the 3 financial stories should be a call to arms for you guys. It’s a damn serious time and no one is going to solve it in an hour in the afternoon on your network, or once a week on CNN or Meet The Press. The hallmark of Joe Scarborough is accountability, it’s why Joe Lieberman is avoiding you, it’s why Howard Dean comes on your show anytime.
All I know is I want more. Can you evolve?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Scarborough Tries The Old Ball O’String Trick
The Morning Joe Rebuttal For November 25th, 2009
Observations:
1) Now look, any day that John Boehner looks bad is a good day for the truth. This person is the minority leader of the House of Representatives. They are currently in charge of obstruction of progress for the American people and have spent the last 2 years and 11 months trying to harm America, sell doublespeak as fact, and reinforce the movement of the distribution of wealth in our country forever northward.
But that’s not what Joe Scarborough intended when golf-gate was the main story today. It is that technique of using what amounts to a benign occurrence with very bad optics to appear to be closer to the middle, only to use that regained false credibility to attack a far more substantive matter: health care, jobs, Afghanistan, take your pick.
It’s what your older brother did to you in the back of the car on family trips to steal your ice cream sandwich, look {Morning Joe Viewer} there’s the worlds biggest ball of string, then BAM!, when your head’s turned your ice cream was gone!
Don’t let them get away with it. The best defense is to blithely play along, let the damage to Boehner be maximized, and then refute the first attempt by JS to use that momentum for any “see, I’m on your side” munitions. That’s called the engineered backfire technique and I know you’re up to it.
2) Speaking of doublespeak, I have an antidote for you, and his name is Dr. Howard Dean. If you had to trust any one person with your future, you have chosen Barack Obama, but if you ever wavered, ever wondered why so many Goldman guys are in power, why guys who are going to vote no anyway got to shelve anti-trust provisions for health care, why the American people are still in last place in the domestic food chain, who should you pick next? John Boehner and let commerce govern you for another eternity, or Howard Dean, the one guy on the planet left who didn’t have to be a billionaire already to tell you the truth and really govern.
Dr. Dean is like that guy on Fast Times At Ridgemont High who is “just flown in for games”. The reason he doesn’t have a gig right now, after managing the resurrection of the Democratic party culminating in the first sweeping majority in 35 years, is that he is the party’s designated hitter and free to attack whatever trouble spot exists while the party’s in power.
Dr. Dean has a position on health care and it’s the one that will serve as kryptonite to the right if needed. He will be the person who will be the face of reconciliation if that’s what it takes to put a bill through the Senate either pre- or post-conference containing real teeth. He is Harry Reid’s best friend in the world right now, and if you had a hellfire missile like him with a clumsy crusading army of obstructionist approaching, you would like your chances.
3) Independent voters the world over have a single motivating force: they know that both parties are forced to mislead them due to the structural engineering of their platform. If you don’t have 8 of 10 items right on your Republican checklist, guess what, you’re now an independent. If you didn’t want to reverse the annexation of the Panama Canal, ditto. This prevalence of managed messages and agenda talking points bundle stuff you need from either side and forces you to embrace or exile. Exile is where the overwhelming majority of Americans are today, and it’s a new kind of paradise in formation.
The Democrats know this and they are comforted going forward by showing the infighting that’s going on as healthy, hoping that independent voters will come back once they look at the Republican party and see the checklist. The checklist is absolute suicide, and lets hope it’s here to stay. John Boehner reading that checklist and looking like the principal in Breakfast Club, trying to represent the future? I must be dreaming.
John Hughes was a generational treasure.
Have a great Thanksgiving, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) Now look, any day that John Boehner looks bad is a good day for the truth. This person is the minority leader of the House of Representatives. They are currently in charge of obstruction of progress for the American people and have spent the last 2 years and 11 months trying to harm America, sell doublespeak as fact, and reinforce the movement of the distribution of wealth in our country forever northward.
But that’s not what Joe Scarborough intended when golf-gate was the main story today. It is that technique of using what amounts to a benign occurrence with very bad optics to appear to be closer to the middle, only to use that regained false credibility to attack a far more substantive matter: health care, jobs, Afghanistan, take your pick.
It’s what your older brother did to you in the back of the car on family trips to steal your ice cream sandwich, look {Morning Joe Viewer} there’s the worlds biggest ball of string, then BAM!, when your head’s turned your ice cream was gone!
Don’t let them get away with it. The best defense is to blithely play along, let the damage to Boehner be maximized, and then refute the first attempt by JS to use that momentum for any “see, I’m on your side” munitions. That’s called the engineered backfire technique and I know you’re up to it.
2) Speaking of doublespeak, I have an antidote for you, and his name is Dr. Howard Dean. If you had to trust any one person with your future, you have chosen Barack Obama, but if you ever wavered, ever wondered why so many Goldman guys are in power, why guys who are going to vote no anyway got to shelve anti-trust provisions for health care, why the American people are still in last place in the domestic food chain, who should you pick next? John Boehner and let commerce govern you for another eternity, or Howard Dean, the one guy on the planet left who didn’t have to be a billionaire already to tell you the truth and really govern.
Dr. Dean is like that guy on Fast Times At Ridgemont High who is “just flown in for games”. The reason he doesn’t have a gig right now, after managing the resurrection of the Democratic party culminating in the first sweeping majority in 35 years, is that he is the party’s designated hitter and free to attack whatever trouble spot exists while the party’s in power.
Dr. Dean has a position on health care and it’s the one that will serve as kryptonite to the right if needed. He will be the person who will be the face of reconciliation if that’s what it takes to put a bill through the Senate either pre- or post-conference containing real teeth. He is Harry Reid’s best friend in the world right now, and if you had a hellfire missile like him with a clumsy crusading army of obstructionist approaching, you would like your chances.
3) Independent voters the world over have a single motivating force: they know that both parties are forced to mislead them due to the structural engineering of their platform. If you don’t have 8 of 10 items right on your Republican checklist, guess what, you’re now an independent. If you didn’t want to reverse the annexation of the Panama Canal, ditto. This prevalence of managed messages and agenda talking points bundle stuff you need from either side and forces you to embrace or exile. Exile is where the overwhelming majority of Americans are today, and it’s a new kind of paradise in formation.
The Democrats know this and they are comforted going forward by showing the infighting that’s going on as healthy, hoping that independent voters will come back once they look at the Republican party and see the checklist. The checklist is absolute suicide, and lets hope it’s here to stay. John Boehner reading that checklist and looking like the principal in Breakfast Club, trying to represent the future? I must be dreaming.
John Hughes was a generational treasure.
Have a great Thanksgiving, see you Monday.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Joe Scarborough "We Can Do Health Care Reform Any Time We Want"
Joe Scarborough Takes A Stand: Kill Health Care To Save Our Budget And Jobs Because We Will Have Another Chance At Reform In The Near Future!
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 19th, 2009
This is not news. But this is the single biggest reason I started this project. The quote “You don’t do health care when unemployment is 10% you wait until unemployment is handled then you revisit health care then”
This is the biggest shell game a person could ever attempt, and I am begging Joe Scarborough to limit myopic distortions of the real world from his game.
Why do you think smart people don’t understand that the phenomenon of a congress and president coming into simultaneous unified power is a unique momentum opportunity that occurs every 35 years at best?
Why do you deny reality that any delay in the health care vote is a death sentence to the prospects of it’s passage in our lifetimes.
Why do you allude to this denial-based version of events as a rational choice?
Is this why you rarely take a stand? Because when you do it’s so easy to see that you’re playing to the kick the can down the road crowd? Playing to the crowd that’s afloat in health care lobby money? This is the antithesis of what you want people to believe about you, that you’re a populist.
This is dishonest, and it has your name on it. You’ve said this repeatedly, and no one on the show ever calls you out for how unique this situation is.
Here’s what you’re going to need to do to correct this: any pairing of Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Matthews, Mark Haynes, Dr. Howard Dean, and your choice of any non-congressional right center ally that you can find all in a round table and you make the case that a second opportunity at health care reform, after this next 6 months, exists. Just that. No yes or no on health care, just you defending your blatantly false rationale that there is ubiquitous opportunity to reform health care.
Otherwise you need to find a more credible stand, because a false choice has caught up with you today.
Have a nice day, see you tomorrow.
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 19th, 2009
This is not news. But this is the single biggest reason I started this project. The quote “You don’t do health care when unemployment is 10% you wait until unemployment is handled then you revisit health care then”
This is the biggest shell game a person could ever attempt, and I am begging Joe Scarborough to limit myopic distortions of the real world from his game.
Why do you think smart people don’t understand that the phenomenon of a congress and president coming into simultaneous unified power is a unique momentum opportunity that occurs every 35 years at best?
Why do you deny reality that any delay in the health care vote is a death sentence to the prospects of it’s passage in our lifetimes.
Why do you allude to this denial-based version of events as a rational choice?
Is this why you rarely take a stand? Because when you do it’s so easy to see that you’re playing to the kick the can down the road crowd? Playing to the crowd that’s afloat in health care lobby money? This is the antithesis of what you want people to believe about you, that you’re a populist.
This is dishonest, and it has your name on it. You’ve said this repeatedly, and no one on the show ever calls you out for how unique this situation is.
Here’s what you’re going to need to do to correct this: any pairing of Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Matthews, Mark Haynes, Dr. Howard Dean, and your choice of any non-congressional right center ally that you can find all in a round table and you make the case that a second opportunity at health care reform, after this next 6 months, exists. Just that. No yes or no on health care, just you defending your blatantly false rationale that there is ubiquitous opportunity to reform health care.
Otherwise you need to find a more credible stand, because a false choice has caught up with you today.
Have a nice day, see you tomorrow.
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