The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 19th, 2011
Observations:
I haven’t really missed much of the show since I was last posting consistently, but the motivation to challenge the cast to evolve their show just seems to be falling off of the priority food chain to a spot normally reserved for chasing seagulls at the beach. All the winning stuff about the show is right there, right there, and for the most part goes underutilized or unused. In fact, the move of repeating the top of the show at the top of the 8am hour shows this production is running away from it’s competitive advantage in a counter logical way, and it hurts to view that new abbreviation each day it happens.
What do you think the threshold is for the repeat or not decision point? There has been no shortage of history these last 5 months, but apparently unless it’s an exclusive with Oprah or Bill Clinton, it’s just easier to, well, not work.
The other really disturbing trend is the guest programming. Now, I have some pretty solid personal experience with how this works, and it’s entirely possible that they aren’t keeping their lineup of guests really tight like a Phil Jackson playoff run, but likely there has been some chasm in their guest getting process where those likely to feel like they wouldn’t get a fair reflection point for their take on things looked for more civil discourse. This show didn’t start that way, it’s not overtly altruistic like Bill O’Reilly, but it’s overtly altruistic like the next best example of altruism to this rightward slant hiding behind many smokescreens of balance. Let’s use one of my very favorites on these matters Matt Taibbi, whose arguably in the top 5, like Zbigniew Brzeznski top 5, in the world in effectively communicating whats happening in said world in the most crystallizing form. Ever see him? Does he not call them, or do they not call him? Does it stem from Scarborough not being on set a couple times when his slot came up? Why the attrition? Is it money?
Does Gene Robinson just show up for the money? I really don’t think so but you have to ask the question. Robinson’s scathing ‘Reagan showed America how to forget the unfortunate in our country and let them find a new low of social support’ was arguably one of the finest takes in a tough situation that we will hear all year. But was this solid, winning debate on a decidedly pro Reagan everything television show a paid commentary accident?
Joe Scarborough seems like Colonel Kurtz at this point. There is a slouch, there is a bubble, there is an almost Beck-like ‘is there anyone else in the room or is it just me?’ absolution as the guy banters on circularly in a sphere normally reserved for a discussion over an 8 ball of cocaine between two self medicating experts. It’s been going that way from the outset, but really slowly, so you could watch even a year ago and still expect the show would take an evolutionary turn that would make the average politically interested subscriber say ‘I can count on them’ about their coverage. But the host of the show basically had a look on his face this past Friday that said he was ready to gas those who didn’t agree with his take on Wisconsin. It appears to the viewer that there was some kind of an off camera intervention and they tried later in the show to back pedal from the beach head they were pounding at 6 am.
The constant attack on entitlements and even the Pentagon attack that Morning Joe marches upon constitutes an enthusiastic proof of what I’ve been saying all along: we are being sold algebra when a more complex polynomial exists. The ‘math is simple’ and ‘we can’t afford it’ are two phrases on obscene overdrive on the show. But what most people really find offensive is whats left out of that simple equation that makes it so unrealistic.
Sorry about Social Security, we simply can’t afford it (should be part of a polynomial that includes) but these people have to be taken care of so we can’t afford not to do it, lest we complete Eugene Robinson’s earlier Reagan vision by adding a significant part of our burgeoning elderly class to the forgotten part of society currently not housing our mentally ill and homeless.
And
Sorry about Medicaid/Medicare, the math is simple (should be compliant in a long equation that conforms with) while we really should be creating a baseline for coverage for all Americans, something to replace the rapidly diminishing group health insurance plan, instead we want to lose the best scenario for said baseline coverage without acknowledging that most people who don’t have group health coverage don’t really have any significant health insurance, are being sold nearly worthless catastrophic policies, and are in effect going right along with the elderly to Ronald Reagan avenue into a long line of destitute former working professionals and their dependents who simply got sick and lost everything for a lack of a basic medical support system.
And
We can’t afford to skip the Pentagon in budget cutting, the math is simple (should be subservient to the higher order economic phenomenon) that while fraught with waste Pentagon houses the largest return on investment driver known on the planet. I’m bundling NASA into this, but most of the innovations that have made our largest industries thrive were simply shoplifted from funded research and development paid for under the guise of long term weapon system creation. These industries have been soaking the defense budget for 70 years getting rich but being a form of national economic growth that will go down in history as a highest attainable level. We spend 20 times what other superpowers spend on defense. It isn’t a pariah like most people are led to believe, it really has been our backbone through the greatest economic period imaginable, and before people with two dimensional math skills are allowed to turn this into a metal scrap heap resemblant of Detroit’s auto belt, we ought to really try and organize this into a proper complex vision where the military can drive the economy in a best returns fashion but lose the pointless German tank command outposts.
It’s probably time for Morning Joe to have a hard talk about what it’s doing and where it’s going as an entity. It’s turned into a bit of a Robert Redford romantic comedy (in reverse) and needs to NPR itself on one side and Paul Wolfowitz itself on the other. Isn’t it on anybody else’s radar that Wolfowitz should be running around cable news like Donald Trump with his neo-con architecture getting some real love right about now? It’s interesting to me, but I’m afraid our friends on our show are in too much of a rut to be on top of that right now, and sameness prevails.
There’s a fork in the road ahead, and we can all tell you will be turning right, right?
That’s all for now, see you soon.
Showing posts with label Matt Taibbi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Taibbi. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Trojan Horse
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for October 6th, 2010
Observations:
1) I feel like the national club of persons interested in providing a counterpoint to the Morning Joe show has left the show’s subscribers in good hands in my absence. The show appears incapable of seeing itself as a biased take on events, not in the Roger Ailes way, but in the inherent stubbornness borne of Joe Scarborough’s personality. Over time Scarborough has morphed into a second period Bill O’Rielly, the version that dug a moat around his version of events and took on all comers not by real debate but by a form of fact free semantic wrestling that timed out opponents rather than built a more resolute consensus. This type of phenomenon needs critics. Critics with the voracity to overcome dime store defense mechanisms and make those painfully constructive observations that allow resolute consensus to form with or without the self appointed protagonist.
And man have these critics come out of the woodwork. Two of note are @CallOutJoe and @The_AntiJoe. The former is a direct attack twitter feed that real time tweets on the show on a daily basis and is at this point a required resource for viewing. @The_AntiJoe has no direct correlation to the show but has come into the picture as an accidental resource of Deepak Chopra level enhancement to the aforementioned bias. Neither of these entities are Trojan Horse faculties of political action committees. These are real people like myself who seek catharsis. Cathartic relief from the volume granted to at a very important time to a single program in such a way that the bias would otherwise be a false consensus.
This Morning Joe megaphone has shouted at the top of its lungs that Clinton would be president, that health care and financial regulation would fail, that tax cuts for the rich have a dominant effect on job growth, and that we could have done without the financial interventions of late 2008 and early 2009. Not since the pre invasion propaganda of 2002 and 2003 has a source of opinion been allotted a factual, objective platform with such a large probability of false prognostication. The Morning Joe show needs critics and left to its own devices would morph into the echo chamber it seeks to evolve out of.
2) The real Trojan Horse is the collection of pirates and proxy dupes that will combine to attempt to elect Republican candidates in this and future elections. If you listen to the “Pledge”, if you look at the money going into campaigns, if you watch closely the Jim Demint snafu, you get a pretty good picture that the embittered gun-clinging, god-justifying voter is the swing voter in play here. The business owner, or the highly educated citizen is not that swing voter and was not ever in play. The business owner is not content with his single vote, or his citizen level contribution to his pro commerce political agenda. The business owner is in constant search for the right trigger mechanism to enlist by proxy the guns and god crowd, and boy does that Citizens United case help his cause. The academic is unfortunately trying to reason with the electorate, but its no news flash that the electorate is irrational because it contains a significant population of swing voters willing to vote against their own interests for either short term gain or when victimized by mirages conjured up by political artists.
Matt Taibbi has documented this reformation of the Republican party extremely well in his latest article. In it, he draws the direct time line that once it became obvious that the libertarians phenomenon grew into a movement that became known as the Tea Party, the Republicans waited for their chance to coop it and re-define their own long standing principles as the core principles of the Tea Party despite the fact that it was often an ideological 180 degree shift. We have known this about the Republican party for some time, whether it’s foreign policy or domestic politics, you’ve got about 22 seconds of loyalty and in the 23rd second it’s on to the next exploitation.
So this concoction of opportunists and meek march on to bring about reversal of change meant to empower the middle class. The meek are prepared to vote for the next great transfer of wealth, their own wealth, to a ruling financial class. It’s insane, and it’s happening, and Morning Joe is doing its part to let it happen, mainly by not covering the identifying news stories that show the process as described above as a national myopia.
And don’t get me started on the elements of a political Trojan Horse bent on social restriction and non secular enshrinement of evangelical mores. This, my friends, is a business deal. If you are a rich banker and need to make the transfer of wealth described above happen, wouldn’t you, too, make deals with the southern evangelicals to make laws banning abortion and gay marriage or military service if it enabled said wealth transfer? Nothing like a zealot to bring you South Carolina’s electorate, and it’s wealth, all for some moral illusion. That is something for nothing, which by definition should be an illegal contract for its lack of consideration.
3) The Democratic party seems to be on autopilot with a programmed descent. In the face of all sorts of attackable phantom logic by their opponents, the Dems are shrunken academics attempting to reason with an impassioned voter. They don’t bring up the obvious points about themselves, elect us and we will get the health care program moved up two years, elect us and we will end outsourcing with powerful domestic corporate tax strategy that forces growth within our borders, elect us and we won’t let the next transfer of wealth happen. Elect us, middle class, for you have no other friend.
Nope, this is the party thinking about who to put in charge, and thinking of Robert Gibbs, the guy who could not communicate any of the things above for the last 2 years. In fairness he had help, for the architect creating the bird’s nest messages that came out of the White House was David Axelrod, who several satellites have spotted crying in the rose garden every time another of his uneventful near placations fell short of the resolute message required to lead a nation in tough times. These are good guys, they did one thing really well and expected to run the table. Joe Scarborough was all too happy this morning to make this point. Running the table certainly has not happened, you’re not special, and you need Daschle and Dean immediately. The fact you demonized Dean can now be forgiven as misguided youthful exuberance when you though you were going to run the country like Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook. You might have wanted to have some practical experience before really believing your self estimations, and now it’s time for a best and brightest moment to shore up your camp, and fend off hordes of looters hoping that 2010 is remembered as the year hypnosis on the right, and rookie missteps on the left conspired to hand them the nation, lock, stock, and barrel.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I feel like the national club of persons interested in providing a counterpoint to the Morning Joe show has left the show’s subscribers in good hands in my absence. The show appears incapable of seeing itself as a biased take on events, not in the Roger Ailes way, but in the inherent stubbornness borne of Joe Scarborough’s personality. Over time Scarborough has morphed into a second period Bill O’Rielly, the version that dug a moat around his version of events and took on all comers not by real debate but by a form of fact free semantic wrestling that timed out opponents rather than built a more resolute consensus. This type of phenomenon needs critics. Critics with the voracity to overcome dime store defense mechanisms and make those painfully constructive observations that allow resolute consensus to form with or without the self appointed protagonist.
And man have these critics come out of the woodwork. Two of note are @CallOutJoe and @The_AntiJoe. The former is a direct attack twitter feed that real time tweets on the show on a daily basis and is at this point a required resource for viewing. @The_AntiJoe has no direct correlation to the show but has come into the picture as an accidental resource of Deepak Chopra level enhancement to the aforementioned bias. Neither of these entities are Trojan Horse faculties of political action committees. These are real people like myself who seek catharsis. Cathartic relief from the volume granted to at a very important time to a single program in such a way that the bias would otherwise be a false consensus.
This Morning Joe megaphone has shouted at the top of its lungs that Clinton would be president, that health care and financial regulation would fail, that tax cuts for the rich have a dominant effect on job growth, and that we could have done without the financial interventions of late 2008 and early 2009. Not since the pre invasion propaganda of 2002 and 2003 has a source of opinion been allotted a factual, objective platform with such a large probability of false prognostication. The Morning Joe show needs critics and left to its own devices would morph into the echo chamber it seeks to evolve out of.
2) The real Trojan Horse is the collection of pirates and proxy dupes that will combine to attempt to elect Republican candidates in this and future elections. If you listen to the “Pledge”, if you look at the money going into campaigns, if you watch closely the Jim Demint snafu, you get a pretty good picture that the embittered gun-clinging, god-justifying voter is the swing voter in play here. The business owner, or the highly educated citizen is not that swing voter and was not ever in play. The business owner is not content with his single vote, or his citizen level contribution to his pro commerce political agenda. The business owner is in constant search for the right trigger mechanism to enlist by proxy the guns and god crowd, and boy does that Citizens United case help his cause. The academic is unfortunately trying to reason with the electorate, but its no news flash that the electorate is irrational because it contains a significant population of swing voters willing to vote against their own interests for either short term gain or when victimized by mirages conjured up by political artists.
Matt Taibbi has documented this reformation of the Republican party extremely well in his latest article. In it, he draws the direct time line that once it became obvious that the libertarians phenomenon grew into a movement that became known as the Tea Party, the Republicans waited for their chance to coop it and re-define their own long standing principles as the core principles of the Tea Party despite the fact that it was often an ideological 180 degree shift. We have known this about the Republican party for some time, whether it’s foreign policy or domestic politics, you’ve got about 22 seconds of loyalty and in the 23rd second it’s on to the next exploitation.
So this concoction of opportunists and meek march on to bring about reversal of change meant to empower the middle class. The meek are prepared to vote for the next great transfer of wealth, their own wealth, to a ruling financial class. It’s insane, and it’s happening, and Morning Joe is doing its part to let it happen, mainly by not covering the identifying news stories that show the process as described above as a national myopia.
And don’t get me started on the elements of a political Trojan Horse bent on social restriction and non secular enshrinement of evangelical mores. This, my friends, is a business deal. If you are a rich banker and need to make the transfer of wealth described above happen, wouldn’t you, too, make deals with the southern evangelicals to make laws banning abortion and gay marriage or military service if it enabled said wealth transfer? Nothing like a zealot to bring you South Carolina’s electorate, and it’s wealth, all for some moral illusion. That is something for nothing, which by definition should be an illegal contract for its lack of consideration.
3) The Democratic party seems to be on autopilot with a programmed descent. In the face of all sorts of attackable phantom logic by their opponents, the Dems are shrunken academics attempting to reason with an impassioned voter. They don’t bring up the obvious points about themselves, elect us and we will get the health care program moved up two years, elect us and we will end outsourcing with powerful domestic corporate tax strategy that forces growth within our borders, elect us and we won’t let the next transfer of wealth happen. Elect us, middle class, for you have no other friend.
Nope, this is the party thinking about who to put in charge, and thinking of Robert Gibbs, the guy who could not communicate any of the things above for the last 2 years. In fairness he had help, for the architect creating the bird’s nest messages that came out of the White House was David Axelrod, who several satellites have spotted crying in the rose garden every time another of his uneventful near placations fell short of the resolute message required to lead a nation in tough times. These are good guys, they did one thing really well and expected to run the table. Joe Scarborough was all too happy this morning to make this point. Running the table certainly has not happened, you’re not special, and you need Daschle and Dean immediately. The fact you demonized Dean can now be forgiven as misguided youthful exuberance when you though you were going to run the country like Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook. You might have wanted to have some practical experience before really believing your self estimations, and now it’s time for a best and brightest moment to shore up your camp, and fend off hordes of looters hoping that 2010 is remembered as the year hypnosis on the right, and rookie missteps on the left conspired to hand them the nation, lock, stock, and barrel.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Wants Cake, Also Wants To Eat
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 13th, 2010
Observations:
1) Just an astounding conversation with Joe Scarborough and Andrew Ross Sorkin today where JS felt compelled to ask for 100% assurance of immediate containment of any spill prior to there being more drilling. Now far be it from me to feel like Scarborough needs a reality check, but in this case this was an absolutely egregious and selective personal optimization choice. Let’s list our components:
· Drove V8 forever
· All of his Florida and DC neighbors drove V8 forever
· Suddenly a “surprise” attack of an oil spill creates mea culpa
· Wants oil, but only with assurance
· Wants green overhaul of economy if no assurance is available
Now, this has all the hypocritical connotation of ‘clean coal’ or ‘natural gas’. We know the truth, that we are dependent on oil and have the world’s biggest consumer economy for it and are thus responsible not just for the consumption of, but logistics of transporting the 25% of the global oil supply.
In our haste to grow GDP quarter over quarter, we promote the recklessness that is BP’s environmental record in order to not have the supply of oil be any inhibition to our free enterprise system. The national economic security implications of the oil supply assure that the most profitable American companies are oil companies. It is known.
So with oil fueling the nation and its economy along with it, the pressure to grow the economy means eventually an anomaly will occur in that supply and we will have either a price catastrophe, security catastrophe, financial catastrophe or environmental catastrophe, wait, we’ve had all of these happen already.
And Mr. Scarborough loudly beckons for certainty? Quaint.
2) I understand that we on the left have empowered minor leaguers to run the country and are now facing a hefty mid term election task to keep these guys in place until they get the speed of the game. I understand that their inability to master their skill at national governance is being exploited by the right and the old guard left and that status quo continues to rule the day one maneuver at a time.
But are you really ready to send any part of this government back to the Iraq invading, Patriot en-Act-ing, Medicare “D” initiating, Cheney Energy Commission-ing, torture-ing, fear-baiting, mandate intolerance by law cronies that we all so desperately conspired to usher out over the last 40 months? You would give these guys the keys so that you could better afford Chinese socks from Wal-mart?
As you can see by some of my previous rants, I’m hard up to find who to trust. I trust myself, Elizabeth Warren, Nassim Taleb, Matt Taibbi, and get this: Joe Scarborough. I trust that Obama and Axelrod mean well but are currently outclassed and out framed in their governance. I don’t know anything about Rahm Emmanuel, and that’s a problem at this point.
But the list of people I don’t trust is long and growing. I learned not to trust most of them years ago, but every day another person makes the perp walk, not to jail, but to the microphone to lay out a doublespeak demonstration why they cannot support the middle class against the ruling elite for whatever hollow reason suits them that day, and today that was Tim Kaine (yikes!).
But I can tell you one thing, if Joe Barton is a committee chairmanship next year, it’s pitchfork time, if Boehner is in charge of anything other than the detention of the Breakfast Club, it’s pitchfork time.
You need to make an appropriately proportionate decision, immediately.
3) Thad Allen was not convincing in his reaction to Willie Geist’s well timed grenade about containment ship operations. The amount of unexplainable nonsense coming from the spill site is literally JFK-assassination-level unsavory. No one will ever convince the American people that there aren’t two stories, one told (sometimes) now, and one that will come out in 40 years talking about ‘the American people would’ve never accepted the real story’.
The earnings date, the Libya thing (that everyone knew already), the missing details on the containment, the press blockade, the scope of the disaster. These are all things that continue to amalgamate into a story of a disaster where everyone panicked.
I’m happy that we are seeing the story on the Morning Joe show after a long gap. It seems like it’s only on the show now because the good news is starting to show up, and it was too hard when the news was only bad. Stuff we learned when Iraq stopped getting covered in 2005.
If you’re serious, we need to get an environmental expert on the show who is willing to talk about the toxicity of the dispersants, who is willing to talk about the real fallout, willing to show the computer predictions of 15 years of oil flows. We need someone who can explain, like you got on PBS yesterday, that all of the animals that live in oceans drop down to the line of perpetual darkness to feed: whales, turtles, dolphins, fish, and that is likely where they will find a blinding pool of oil that no one has the courage to enumerate.
Can you find that courage, or are we just here to try and put a fake wrap on this story which will be with us like a generational plague? Mika seems really involved, but honestly, she appears to be an unwitting agent of distraction by finding her focus on the smaller parts of the story to the complete absence of the 150 million barrel guerrilla in the room, and to the complete absence of the 25 billion barrel apocalypse one geological anomaly away from replacing it as our nation’s disaster.
It seems like you’re making it harder than it already is, the question is why?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Just an astounding conversation with Joe Scarborough and Andrew Ross Sorkin today where JS felt compelled to ask for 100% assurance of immediate containment of any spill prior to there being more drilling. Now far be it from me to feel like Scarborough needs a reality check, but in this case this was an absolutely egregious and selective personal optimization choice. Let’s list our components:
· Drove V8 forever
· All of his Florida and DC neighbors drove V8 forever
· Suddenly a “surprise” attack of an oil spill creates mea culpa
· Wants oil, but only with assurance
· Wants green overhaul of economy if no assurance is available
Now, this has all the hypocritical connotation of ‘clean coal’ or ‘natural gas’. We know the truth, that we are dependent on oil and have the world’s biggest consumer economy for it and are thus responsible not just for the consumption of, but logistics of transporting the 25% of the global oil supply.
In our haste to grow GDP quarter over quarter, we promote the recklessness that is BP’s environmental record in order to not have the supply of oil be any inhibition to our free enterprise system. The national economic security implications of the oil supply assure that the most profitable American companies are oil companies. It is known.
So with oil fueling the nation and its economy along with it, the pressure to grow the economy means eventually an anomaly will occur in that supply and we will have either a price catastrophe, security catastrophe, financial catastrophe or environmental catastrophe, wait, we’ve had all of these happen already.
And Mr. Scarborough loudly beckons for certainty? Quaint.
2) I understand that we on the left have empowered minor leaguers to run the country and are now facing a hefty mid term election task to keep these guys in place until they get the speed of the game. I understand that their inability to master their skill at national governance is being exploited by the right and the old guard left and that status quo continues to rule the day one maneuver at a time.
But are you really ready to send any part of this government back to the Iraq invading, Patriot en-Act-ing, Medicare “D” initiating, Cheney Energy Commission-ing, torture-ing, fear-baiting, mandate intolerance by law cronies that we all so desperately conspired to usher out over the last 40 months? You would give these guys the keys so that you could better afford Chinese socks from Wal-mart?
As you can see by some of my previous rants, I’m hard up to find who to trust. I trust myself, Elizabeth Warren, Nassim Taleb, Matt Taibbi, and get this: Joe Scarborough. I trust that Obama and Axelrod mean well but are currently outclassed and out framed in their governance. I don’t know anything about Rahm Emmanuel, and that’s a problem at this point.
But the list of people I don’t trust is long and growing. I learned not to trust most of them years ago, but every day another person makes the perp walk, not to jail, but to the microphone to lay out a doublespeak demonstration why they cannot support the middle class against the ruling elite for whatever hollow reason suits them that day, and today that was Tim Kaine (yikes!).
But I can tell you one thing, if Joe Barton is a committee chairmanship next year, it’s pitchfork time, if Boehner is in charge of anything other than the detention of the Breakfast Club, it’s pitchfork time.
You need to make an appropriately proportionate decision, immediately.
3) Thad Allen was not convincing in his reaction to Willie Geist’s well timed grenade about containment ship operations. The amount of unexplainable nonsense coming from the spill site is literally JFK-assassination-level unsavory. No one will ever convince the American people that there aren’t two stories, one told (sometimes) now, and one that will come out in 40 years talking about ‘the American people would’ve never accepted the real story’.
The earnings date, the Libya thing (that everyone knew already), the missing details on the containment, the press blockade, the scope of the disaster. These are all things that continue to amalgamate into a story of a disaster where everyone panicked.
I’m happy that we are seeing the story on the Morning Joe show after a long gap. It seems like it’s only on the show now because the good news is starting to show up, and it was too hard when the news was only bad. Stuff we learned when Iraq stopped getting covered in 2005.
If you’re serious, we need to get an environmental expert on the show who is willing to talk about the toxicity of the dispersants, who is willing to talk about the real fallout, willing to show the computer predictions of 15 years of oil flows. We need someone who can explain, like you got on PBS yesterday, that all of the animals that live in oceans drop down to the line of perpetual darkness to feed: whales, turtles, dolphins, fish, and that is likely where they will find a blinding pool of oil that no one has the courage to enumerate.
Can you find that courage, or are we just here to try and put a fake wrap on this story which will be with us like a generational plague? Mika seems really involved, but honestly, she appears to be an unwitting agent of distraction by finding her focus on the smaller parts of the story to the complete absence of the 150 million barrel guerrilla in the room, and to the complete absence of the 25 billion barrel apocalypse one geological anomaly away from replacing it as our nation’s disaster.
It seems like you’re making it harder than it already is, the question is why?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Lucidity On 3 Fronts
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 16th, 2010
Observations:
1) On the ‘casino gambling with a taxpayer backstop’ theory who was first: Dylan Ratigan, Matt Taibbi or Micheal Lewis? I’m admittedly a bandwagoner here. I got into this game on the basis of ‘Dick Cheney is bad for America’ and have had to add health care, polling and financial crises to my elements of focus, and that time line does not allow me to answer the true source question. In fact, I remember the Michael Lewis ‘The Blind Side’ interview, only after Joe Scarborough reminded viewers it was the same guy, and remember the fateful question ‘so what’s your next project’. I remember Lewis talking about how he wanted to dissect the financial crisis and I remember thinking hasn’t that been covered?
I declare Taibbi as the entity that pioneered the concept that over 95% of Wall Street participants were either dumb as rocks or perpetrating a fraud for me. I declare Dylan Ratigan who has courageously kept this populist anger at incompetence and outright fraud on the front burner, despite lukewarm reception by the mainstream. But I wonder if Lewis, the author of Crash, is the genesis of both of those other movements. If you know, tell me. These people are important to me, and I would like to know for posterity’s sake.
2) Lawrence O’Donnell proved yesterday’s central thesis that the right idea is unelectable. He is the first person to come on to the Morning Joe show and declare that private insurance crosses an important line in cases like catastrophic illness where it should never be the provider of record. My record is clear here, although O’Donnell does not say the words, that the line is the definition we all, including Joe Scarborough, learned in economics 101: the public good. As with all economics, there’s word play here so lets redefine to prevent smart people mis-defining out of convenience. A public good is a product or service that cannot be efficiently produced in the private sector, thus is the role of government. Fire departments, schools and national defense are 3 others.
Lawrence has had the benefit of some really tough interviews and circumstances in the last week, and as much yelling for sport that the guy does, he is proving capable of the right kind of humanity. Scarborough had a similar occurrence a few weeks back on torture, unexpectedly facing a victim just after party lining the ‘get them before they get us’ histrionics, but didn’t seem to feel the conundrum he faced with an equal amount of human compassion. But O’Donnell, covering for Olbermann while his father passes, spending time with Michael Moore (did you hear JS groan at the mere mention?) and doing this interview with the leukemia victim highlighted by the president yesterday in Ohio, humanized quite differently.
As a fan of lucidity, you live for the one brief second, when an expert tells you the unelectable truth. We don’t have a choice. We have to embrace single payer medical in our lifetime or the entire system will only be available to 20% of the population in as soon as 10 years.
All of this bluster in the 3000 pages (and growing) of how to prop up the dying current system is hopefully a very short term incremental band aid. But we have to start talking openly not about how to get to single payer, but how to make all the real solutions electable.
We have to pass this bill, not because it’s a short term win for the insurers, but because the real solution will never ever occur without first this intermediate step.
Probably the same with finance.
3) Deem and pass is the right method if available in the eyes of the population that’s sick of waiting for the inevitable. Even opponents of health care would rather that if it’s going to happen, we should probably try and get off floor of the legislature so that they can go back to work elsewhere.
Why would you want to vote 3 times on the same process? Why wouldn’t a vote for the fixes be the net effect of a post conference reconfirmation? Historians, Republicans, obstructionists, and alarmists the world over risk being seen as requiring an insurmountable standard here, and hypocritically so. Remember, you may think you have the high ground because some manual somewhere on parliamentary procedure tells you so, but you would be reading that rule book to the skeptical voter for their first time. So ‘they broke the rules you never heard of’ and ‘the rules seemed designed to fail’ will fight to the death, and only the passed bill and the will to get it there will remain.
Lucid thought number 3, and you heard it here first.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) On the ‘casino gambling with a taxpayer backstop’ theory who was first: Dylan Ratigan, Matt Taibbi or Micheal Lewis? I’m admittedly a bandwagoner here. I got into this game on the basis of ‘Dick Cheney is bad for America’ and have had to add health care, polling and financial crises to my elements of focus, and that time line does not allow me to answer the true source question. In fact, I remember the Michael Lewis ‘The Blind Side’ interview, only after Joe Scarborough reminded viewers it was the same guy, and remember the fateful question ‘so what’s your next project’. I remember Lewis talking about how he wanted to dissect the financial crisis and I remember thinking hasn’t that been covered?
I declare Taibbi as the entity that pioneered the concept that over 95% of Wall Street participants were either dumb as rocks or perpetrating a fraud for me. I declare Dylan Ratigan who has courageously kept this populist anger at incompetence and outright fraud on the front burner, despite lukewarm reception by the mainstream. But I wonder if Lewis, the author of Crash, is the genesis of both of those other movements. If you know, tell me. These people are important to me, and I would like to know for posterity’s sake.
2) Lawrence O’Donnell proved yesterday’s central thesis that the right idea is unelectable. He is the first person to come on to the Morning Joe show and declare that private insurance crosses an important line in cases like catastrophic illness where it should never be the provider of record. My record is clear here, although O’Donnell does not say the words, that the line is the definition we all, including Joe Scarborough, learned in economics 101: the public good. As with all economics, there’s word play here so lets redefine to prevent smart people mis-defining out of convenience. A public good is a product or service that cannot be efficiently produced in the private sector, thus is the role of government. Fire departments, schools and national defense are 3 others.
Lawrence has had the benefit of some really tough interviews and circumstances in the last week, and as much yelling for sport that the guy does, he is proving capable of the right kind of humanity. Scarborough had a similar occurrence a few weeks back on torture, unexpectedly facing a victim just after party lining the ‘get them before they get us’ histrionics, but didn’t seem to feel the conundrum he faced with an equal amount of human compassion. But O’Donnell, covering for Olbermann while his father passes, spending time with Michael Moore (did you hear JS groan at the mere mention?) and doing this interview with the leukemia victim highlighted by the president yesterday in Ohio, humanized quite differently.
As a fan of lucidity, you live for the one brief second, when an expert tells you the unelectable truth. We don’t have a choice. We have to embrace single payer medical in our lifetime or the entire system will only be available to 20% of the population in as soon as 10 years.
All of this bluster in the 3000 pages (and growing) of how to prop up the dying current system is hopefully a very short term incremental band aid. But we have to start talking openly not about how to get to single payer, but how to make all the real solutions electable.
We have to pass this bill, not because it’s a short term win for the insurers, but because the real solution will never ever occur without first this intermediate step.
Probably the same with finance.
3) Deem and pass is the right method if available in the eyes of the population that’s sick of waiting for the inevitable. Even opponents of health care would rather that if it’s going to happen, we should probably try and get off floor of the legislature so that they can go back to work elsewhere.
Why would you want to vote 3 times on the same process? Why wouldn’t a vote for the fixes be the net effect of a post conference reconfirmation? Historians, Republicans, obstructionists, and alarmists the world over risk being seen as requiring an insurmountable standard here, and hypocritically so. Remember, you may think you have the high ground because some manual somewhere on parliamentary procedure tells you so, but you would be reading that rule book to the skeptical voter for their first time. So ‘they broke the rules you never heard of’ and ‘the rules seemed designed to fail’ will fight to the death, and only the passed bill and the will to get it there will remain.
Lucid thought number 3, and you heard it here first.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, March 1, 2010
New Month, Same Madness
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 1, 2010
Observations:
1) This whole situation with Charlie Rengel stinks, but the judge, jury and executioner take by the Morning Joe show seems like a hatchet job, even if they wind up being right on all of their analysis and predictions. An analysis that it looks bad is one thing, but not affording a person due process ultimately dilutes your punitive options. If your ultimate goal is to remove Mr. Rengel from the House Ways and Means Committee, you might want to rethink your strategy, before you create the technicality or the opposite reaction sympathy that prolongs his tenure.
The other part of this story that seems to have gone uncovered in the land of anecdotal evidence is just when Mr. Rengel and Mrs. Pelosi should be hiding, they’re not. Charlie Rengel made an announced ‘perp walk’ on Friday to give opportunity to the entire House press corps for their stories about him. Nancy Pelosi did not back away from any appearances knowing she would be dogged by this sort of meandering justice.
Here, I’ll do it too, he probably does need to look for new work or retire. But, I’m on his side of the aisle and it comes from a different place than a group of individuals hatcheting out their frustrations prematurely by about three processes.
2) Second in the gratuitous hatchet Morning Joe show, was the John McCain hack fest. By the 8:30 segment, the show decided it was more important to skip a financial segment to get a 5th hack at the ‘duped’ line by McCain. Again, I don’t disagree with the assessment that anybody of reasonable intelligence should have been adequately able to predict the money flow here. But you have missed an opportunity for ascension on this and that is the danger of three hours of instinct and anecdote where the in depth analysis should be.
Over the weekend George Soros joined the latest Matt Taibbi take which has centered around the Swedish treatment of it’s 1992 banking situation as superior based on forensically available information, to what we wound up doing at the behest of Paulson and Geithner.
That Swedish plan had the banks briefly nationalized to ensure banking stability, while renegotiating a path back toward privatization with the necessary alterations to the regulatory system and a simultaneous interactivity with the middle class occurring alongside.
The chief point anyone could make here in the US is that we got taken by a 3 page bailout with no terms leaving the term sheet entirely in the possession of the banks we were rescuing. The results are obvious that as they earned their way out of crisis, the US financial industry supported no other segment of the economy except by the virtue of their not being closed.
Where this gets back to Joe, Mika and guests is that you have again reduced an important, horrible situation like the choices faced by John McCain in 2008 to unrealistic algebra. His remorse is less about the bait and switch by Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, than about the fact that many believe there was a better option, just not better for Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and he feels duped because some conflicts of interest at the highest level prevented the government from taking the right path at a crucial moment. You have missed that zeppelin in the pursuit of a cheap canned analysis, and you need to do better.
3) Third is the health care debate that deservedly permeates everything at this point. Again, same as points 1 and 2 above, I agree with all of the points made: the junk in the bill is awful, shameful and a direct result of Obama doing what we hated about Republicans, there are great small fixes coming from the Republican side (although JS mentioning tort reform first is grossly out of order), and Democrats have mismanaged their opportunities to a historic extent.
But where the show goes fatally off the track is it’s misinterpretation, or misrepresentation of opportunity. When a Republican implies that they want to start over with a blank page, they are lying because they historically have never initiated nor will they ever initiate health care reform. Only a Democratic majority will option health care to it’s agenda. It’s the way of the world.
When the Democrats get health care done, it will be the true beginning of the incrementalist approach. We wont get any meaningfully incremental health care concepts done stand-alone, they have to be improvements to or reactions to an omnibus bill. And as I laid out for Joe Scarborough months ago, now is the time for our generation, because it takes 15-30 years to get the stars aligned to put such a sweeping measure on an agenda in this country.
So when I hear incremental, when I hear start over, when I hear better off without the bill (my own take on the Senate version as is), I do so knowing full well that fatal is the right word above, because it’s a generationally permanent death to health care reform. This is our only real chance to get the long necessary process started. Look at it from all walks of life, Warren Buffet called our broken health system a tapeworm on American business trying to compete internationally, the middle class is on its way from having it to not having it at all, and the lower class is a cold away from bankruptcy.
Who doesn’t need reform, despite wickedly irrational calls from the populace otherwise?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) This whole situation with Charlie Rengel stinks, but the judge, jury and executioner take by the Morning Joe show seems like a hatchet job, even if they wind up being right on all of their analysis and predictions. An analysis that it looks bad is one thing, but not affording a person due process ultimately dilutes your punitive options. If your ultimate goal is to remove Mr. Rengel from the House Ways and Means Committee, you might want to rethink your strategy, before you create the technicality or the opposite reaction sympathy that prolongs his tenure.
The other part of this story that seems to have gone uncovered in the land of anecdotal evidence is just when Mr. Rengel and Mrs. Pelosi should be hiding, they’re not. Charlie Rengel made an announced ‘perp walk’ on Friday to give opportunity to the entire House press corps for their stories about him. Nancy Pelosi did not back away from any appearances knowing she would be dogged by this sort of meandering justice.
Here, I’ll do it too, he probably does need to look for new work or retire. But, I’m on his side of the aisle and it comes from a different place than a group of individuals hatcheting out their frustrations prematurely by about three processes.
2) Second in the gratuitous hatchet Morning Joe show, was the John McCain hack fest. By the 8:30 segment, the show decided it was more important to skip a financial segment to get a 5th hack at the ‘duped’ line by McCain. Again, I don’t disagree with the assessment that anybody of reasonable intelligence should have been adequately able to predict the money flow here. But you have missed an opportunity for ascension on this and that is the danger of three hours of instinct and anecdote where the in depth analysis should be.
Over the weekend George Soros joined the latest Matt Taibbi take which has centered around the Swedish treatment of it’s 1992 banking situation as superior based on forensically available information, to what we wound up doing at the behest of Paulson and Geithner.
That Swedish plan had the banks briefly nationalized to ensure banking stability, while renegotiating a path back toward privatization with the necessary alterations to the regulatory system and a simultaneous interactivity with the middle class occurring alongside.
The chief point anyone could make here in the US is that we got taken by a 3 page bailout with no terms leaving the term sheet entirely in the possession of the banks we were rescuing. The results are obvious that as they earned their way out of crisis, the US financial industry supported no other segment of the economy except by the virtue of their not being closed.
Where this gets back to Joe, Mika and guests is that you have again reduced an important, horrible situation like the choices faced by John McCain in 2008 to unrealistic algebra. His remorse is less about the bait and switch by Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, than about the fact that many believe there was a better option, just not better for Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and he feels duped because some conflicts of interest at the highest level prevented the government from taking the right path at a crucial moment. You have missed that zeppelin in the pursuit of a cheap canned analysis, and you need to do better.
3) Third is the health care debate that deservedly permeates everything at this point. Again, same as points 1 and 2 above, I agree with all of the points made: the junk in the bill is awful, shameful and a direct result of Obama doing what we hated about Republicans, there are great small fixes coming from the Republican side (although JS mentioning tort reform first is grossly out of order), and Democrats have mismanaged their opportunities to a historic extent.
But where the show goes fatally off the track is it’s misinterpretation, or misrepresentation of opportunity. When a Republican implies that they want to start over with a blank page, they are lying because they historically have never initiated nor will they ever initiate health care reform. Only a Democratic majority will option health care to it’s agenda. It’s the way of the world.
When the Democrats get health care done, it will be the true beginning of the incrementalist approach. We wont get any meaningfully incremental health care concepts done stand-alone, they have to be improvements to or reactions to an omnibus bill. And as I laid out for Joe Scarborough months ago, now is the time for our generation, because it takes 15-30 years to get the stars aligned to put such a sweeping measure on an agenda in this country.
So when I hear incremental, when I hear start over, when I hear better off without the bill (my own take on the Senate version as is), I do so knowing full well that fatal is the right word above, because it’s a generationally permanent death to health care reform. This is our only real chance to get the long necessary process started. Look at it from all walks of life, Warren Buffet called our broken health system a tapeworm on American business trying to compete internationally, the middle class is on its way from having it to not having it at all, and the lower class is a cold away from bankruptcy.
Who doesn’t need reform, despite wickedly irrational calls from the populace otherwise?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
This Party Sucks, That Party Sucks, Let’s Just Stay Home
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 6th, 2010
Observations:
1) I just couldn’t be happier that Senator Dodd is retiring. What the Democratic party, what the Republican party for that matter needs, is fresh leaders who are willing to make a solemn oath to put people first. There is no legal requirement to make such an oath, but if you want any votes at all in an election, the voters at this point are going to require a contract, signed in your blood.
We have to weed out the Liebermans, we have a responsibility to the union to send representatives that will both serve our interests at home, and not shame our nation with juvenile obstructionism or petty larceny while on duty.
Chris Dodd was guilty of petty larceny while on duty as a Senator. What makes it worse is that it affected his judgment on future necessary reforms. He was going to be Citibank’s fair haired boy on financial reforms like the replacement of the Glass–Steagall Act. But on the way to the dirtiness, he was prepared to trot out the same old “tried hard” trick of a reform package that meant something when written, but was feckless upon completion of his work. One larceny followed by another, covered by a misrepresentation of intent.
You had a good career, and history will show that you knew that you would see Matt Taibbi’s face throughout the state of Connecticut while trying to convince the beaten down masses that your 7th term would be in their best interests, so you are going to quit while you’re temporarily ahead and hope there is not a Nurenberg-esque clawback trial while you’re still walking this earth.
2) Senator Dorgan can go right with him. Joe Scarborough and the cast were painting this as a big setback for the Democratic party and numerically they are absolutely right, but the intent of this Senator was not to prioritize health care and similar to the head of the Florida Republican party yesterday, Dorgan is leaving in protest of having to support a progressive agenda in the first term rather than just focusing on jobs.
I am not a subscriber to that, and if he feels that strongly about it, we will again need to bring anti-status quo people in. If it’s not in the cards in 20 years time in North Dakota, it’s still better than having reluctance in your ranks when you have some of the most important work ahead.
If we still have cloture, election reform, banking reform, tax reform, a balanced budget amendment with close the government down teeth, and avoiding a lost economic decade on our program, how can reluctance serve?
3) What on earth is the show doing looping Nancy Pelosi and not backing it up? You played the loop 6 times and never talked about it. Mika threw in the same canned “is she serious, I think she is” quote in a distressingly robotic form, and as a whole, your ensemble accomplished nothing.
Obama is telling Nancy Pelosi to take the awful Senate health care bill intact and shove it through the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi has informed the nation with that quote: “he promised a lot of things on that campaign” that she is holding him accountable for the version of health care he advertised before accepting the “tried hard” Senate bailout bill.
I think it’s time for the nation in it’s insistence to not feel duped by Congress to stand in support of Nancy Pelosi as one person who is trying to move the conversation towards the 2008 election result and away from the usual Washington self serving status quo.
Admittedly, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t do herself any favors by using the “never been more open” rationale for turning down CSPAN at the informal conference. But, it appears she is bent on getting some concession for her work. And if you held up the work of Pelosi versus the work of Reid, who delivered and who was beholden to the insurance industry?
4) The American people are in no hurry to run to the Republican party. Michael Steele knows this and is actually pretty impressive in his attempt to get his party off of the rocks in time for the election. He has a mess in Florida, a bigger mess nationally, and he is not telling people what they want to hear. There is no air of superiority in the Republican party and that has been the one thing that has been their hallmark in my lifetime.
You can talk to them about the issues, you can talk to them about the country, but as recently as the week before the 2006 elections, a party line Republican would listen to you talk but be saying to himself: you have your numbers, I have THE numbers. This person is implying you’re wasting your time trying to reason, because they’re winning based on superior information, and are therefore superior.
Those days are gone. The Republicans appeared blindsided a week later. They aren’t finally recovering, Their former constituents are reforming under another mantra that reads like “we won’t get screwed again”. Michael Steele is in the same spot that the Democratic party is in. Voters are going to demand a contract that limits their representative from saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite while in power.
Promises just don’t cut it anymore.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I just couldn’t be happier that Senator Dodd is retiring. What the Democratic party, what the Republican party for that matter needs, is fresh leaders who are willing to make a solemn oath to put people first. There is no legal requirement to make such an oath, but if you want any votes at all in an election, the voters at this point are going to require a contract, signed in your blood.
We have to weed out the Liebermans, we have a responsibility to the union to send representatives that will both serve our interests at home, and not shame our nation with juvenile obstructionism or petty larceny while on duty.
Chris Dodd was guilty of petty larceny while on duty as a Senator. What makes it worse is that it affected his judgment on future necessary reforms. He was going to be Citibank’s fair haired boy on financial reforms like the replacement of the Glass–Steagall Act. But on the way to the dirtiness, he was prepared to trot out the same old “tried hard” trick of a reform package that meant something when written, but was feckless upon completion of his work. One larceny followed by another, covered by a misrepresentation of intent.
You had a good career, and history will show that you knew that you would see Matt Taibbi’s face throughout the state of Connecticut while trying to convince the beaten down masses that your 7th term would be in their best interests, so you are going to quit while you’re temporarily ahead and hope there is not a Nurenberg-esque clawback trial while you’re still walking this earth.
2) Senator Dorgan can go right with him. Joe Scarborough and the cast were painting this as a big setback for the Democratic party and numerically they are absolutely right, but the intent of this Senator was not to prioritize health care and similar to the head of the Florida Republican party yesterday, Dorgan is leaving in protest of having to support a progressive agenda in the first term rather than just focusing on jobs.
I am not a subscriber to that, and if he feels that strongly about it, we will again need to bring anti-status quo people in. If it’s not in the cards in 20 years time in North Dakota, it’s still better than having reluctance in your ranks when you have some of the most important work ahead.
If we still have cloture, election reform, banking reform, tax reform, a balanced budget amendment with close the government down teeth, and avoiding a lost economic decade on our program, how can reluctance serve?
3) What on earth is the show doing looping Nancy Pelosi and not backing it up? You played the loop 6 times and never talked about it. Mika threw in the same canned “is she serious, I think she is” quote in a distressingly robotic form, and as a whole, your ensemble accomplished nothing.
Obama is telling Nancy Pelosi to take the awful Senate health care bill intact and shove it through the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi has informed the nation with that quote: “he promised a lot of things on that campaign” that she is holding him accountable for the version of health care he advertised before accepting the “tried hard” Senate bailout bill.
I think it’s time for the nation in it’s insistence to not feel duped by Congress to stand in support of Nancy Pelosi as one person who is trying to move the conversation towards the 2008 election result and away from the usual Washington self serving status quo.
Admittedly, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t do herself any favors by using the “never been more open” rationale for turning down CSPAN at the informal conference. But, it appears she is bent on getting some concession for her work. And if you held up the work of Pelosi versus the work of Reid, who delivered and who was beholden to the insurance industry?
4) The American people are in no hurry to run to the Republican party. Michael Steele knows this and is actually pretty impressive in his attempt to get his party off of the rocks in time for the election. He has a mess in Florida, a bigger mess nationally, and he is not telling people what they want to hear. There is no air of superiority in the Republican party and that has been the one thing that has been their hallmark in my lifetime.
You can talk to them about the issues, you can talk to them about the country, but as recently as the week before the 2006 elections, a party line Republican would listen to you talk but be saying to himself: you have your numbers, I have THE numbers. This person is implying you’re wasting your time trying to reason, because they’re winning based on superior information, and are therefore superior.
Those days are gone. The Republicans appeared blindsided a week later. They aren’t finally recovering, Their former constituents are reforming under another mantra that reads like “we won’t get screwed again”. Michael Steele is in the same spot that the Democratic party is in. Voters are going to demand a contract that limits their representative from saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite while in power.
Promises just don’t cut it anymore.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sometimes It Takes A Monday
The Morning Joe Rebuttal For December 7th, 2009
Observations:
1) Just like you can’t get completely back on track without some regenerating moment, it appears the weekend had its wondrous effect on our favorite morning team as they found dominant space once again for issues in their program. Unfortunately, when you lose as much ground as you did last Thursday and Friday, Monday’s show was more of a refresher on the issues at hand than a hit the ground running moment. Still, it is a step in the right direction, and I’ll take the awkward abbreviation of luminaries like Ed Rendell as a temporary phenomenon. When you are more on your game and up to speed, you won’t cut the most important spot on the show short to hide your lack of retort.
2) Kudos to Andrea Mitchell for standing up and saying what people like Matt Taibbi have said for some time now. Tom Friedman needs an analogies editor in the worst way, and it took hurting some people to bring that out. It also points to a strength in the show. Other programs would’ve missed this boat and been slammed for seemingly going the wrong way by accepting Friedman’s point blind to its collateral damage. This show had timeless experience whisper in it’s ear in time to avoid some long term embarrassment later, thanks to its longer list of experts than other less dimensional formats.
3) It’s getting to the point that we need a vigil. The vast cast of experts on Morning Joe just cannot find a collective wisdom on jobs. I won’t let a day pass without reminding Joe Scarborough that he has again commented on jobs from 30,000 feet and seems to have an anxiety attack when his G5 gets too close to the solutions and real life issues. Today, JS showed he has no ability to reconcile jobs and health care and is opening himself up to a critical flank attack by going party line with the 30k platform that it’s an “either or” issue. We already had 8 years of a President who played more checkers than chess, and if you think the American people didn’t learn a brutal lesson from what history will define as our Peter Sellers “Being There” period, then just go with that take and be prepared for some real “unable to lead” ammunition from your adversaries for showing a lack of depth here.
4) Copenhagen is a very interesting litmus on the govern-ability of the United States. Dating back to Kyoto, the United States is unable to keep up with other world governments in the “getting it done” department. Leaving climate change aside, it’s more important to look at states like California as leading indicators of hardships on the road ahead for the Federal government. All of the supreme issues of the day: health care, stimulus, banking reform, law and order, infrastructure, and many others find better planning efficiencies in other governments. No one is saying “I hate America” when they express envy that China out-stimulus-ed us by a landslide, that Europe out reformed it’s too big to fail banks by a landslide, that Ecuador is ahead of us in health care provision. We have to begin to apply an efficiency mandate to our government. I don’t envy freedoms lost to a state run economy or media or Internet, but if “we can’t afford it” is the Obama opposition mantra, it’s also a good rallying cry for reform of our broken political process.
5) The west is not kind to Morning Joe. As a fan of the show, I would really advise against any pronounced appearance of the show in the westernmost time zones. While Iowa forever gave the show a flair for being on the ground at the source of news, I’ve seen one too many redeye broadcasts from San Diego, Carlsbad, San Francisco and a “give up on live and tape it” Reagan Library episode to think that you can thrive out here. Remember: 3 hours. It’s not just a time change, not just a show length, it’s a movement from a part of the world that is adequately in motion to support the show to a place that should only be asked to help in an emergency. This is not Brokaw from Berlin. Its Chris Licht on hallucinogens. Don’t do it. Land the G5 at Burbank on Saturday, eat at the chef’s room at the Polo Lounge, catch a football game, and go back to work. Oh and there’s that other thing, no one in this time zone has a clue about the show except a few Orange County people and some Tivo-junkies, so it’s not like you’re abandoning us, it’s that majority of the population from Chicago to New York that gets shorted.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Just like you can’t get completely back on track without some regenerating moment, it appears the weekend had its wondrous effect on our favorite morning team as they found dominant space once again for issues in their program. Unfortunately, when you lose as much ground as you did last Thursday and Friday, Monday’s show was more of a refresher on the issues at hand than a hit the ground running moment. Still, it is a step in the right direction, and I’ll take the awkward abbreviation of luminaries like Ed Rendell as a temporary phenomenon. When you are more on your game and up to speed, you won’t cut the most important spot on the show short to hide your lack of retort.
2) Kudos to Andrea Mitchell for standing up and saying what people like Matt Taibbi have said for some time now. Tom Friedman needs an analogies editor in the worst way, and it took hurting some people to bring that out. It also points to a strength in the show. Other programs would’ve missed this boat and been slammed for seemingly going the wrong way by accepting Friedman’s point blind to its collateral damage. This show had timeless experience whisper in it’s ear in time to avoid some long term embarrassment later, thanks to its longer list of experts than other less dimensional formats.
3) It’s getting to the point that we need a vigil. The vast cast of experts on Morning Joe just cannot find a collective wisdom on jobs. I won’t let a day pass without reminding Joe Scarborough that he has again commented on jobs from 30,000 feet and seems to have an anxiety attack when his G5 gets too close to the solutions and real life issues. Today, JS showed he has no ability to reconcile jobs and health care and is opening himself up to a critical flank attack by going party line with the 30k platform that it’s an “either or” issue. We already had 8 years of a President who played more checkers than chess, and if you think the American people didn’t learn a brutal lesson from what history will define as our Peter Sellers “Being There” period, then just go with that take and be prepared for some real “unable to lead” ammunition from your adversaries for showing a lack of depth here.
4) Copenhagen is a very interesting litmus on the govern-ability of the United States. Dating back to Kyoto, the United States is unable to keep up with other world governments in the “getting it done” department. Leaving climate change aside, it’s more important to look at states like California as leading indicators of hardships on the road ahead for the Federal government. All of the supreme issues of the day: health care, stimulus, banking reform, law and order, infrastructure, and many others find better planning efficiencies in other governments. No one is saying “I hate America” when they express envy that China out-stimulus-ed us by a landslide, that Europe out reformed it’s too big to fail banks by a landslide, that Ecuador is ahead of us in health care provision. We have to begin to apply an efficiency mandate to our government. I don’t envy freedoms lost to a state run economy or media or Internet, but if “we can’t afford it” is the Obama opposition mantra, it’s also a good rallying cry for reform of our broken political process.
5) The west is not kind to Morning Joe. As a fan of the show, I would really advise against any pronounced appearance of the show in the westernmost time zones. While Iowa forever gave the show a flair for being on the ground at the source of news, I’ve seen one too many redeye broadcasts from San Diego, Carlsbad, San Francisco and a “give up on live and tape it” Reagan Library episode to think that you can thrive out here. Remember: 3 hours. It’s not just a time change, not just a show length, it’s a movement from a part of the world that is adequately in motion to support the show to a place that should only be asked to help in an emergency. This is not Brokaw from Berlin. Its Chris Licht on hallucinogens. Don’t do it. Land the G5 at Burbank on Saturday, eat at the chef’s room at the Polo Lounge, catch a football game, and go back to work. Oh and there’s that other thing, no one in this time zone has a clue about the show except a few Orange County people and some Tivo-junkies, so it’s not like you’re abandoning us, it’s that majority of the population from Chicago to New York that gets shorted.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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