The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) It’s not lost on Joe Scarborough that the Katrina vs. BP equation is a slippery slope to the deconstruction of the American psyche. That BP seems worse to Americans is either ‘out of sight, out of mind’ convenience or more questionable polling.
I’m sure it’s a case of both, but the only common denominator in this equation is that the same part of the US is affected. Other than that nothing good can come from the endless comparisons, endless opportunisms, and endless attempts to define two tragedies by any relation. But while Joe Scarborough is correct in his assessment of the poll having the facts backwards, he is also a primary causal factor for the backwards-ness.
A three hour echo chamber devoted to the “street-ness” of Obama’s anger, the lack of options, the moving forward with other drilling projects while the spill continues, and the number of times the President has visited is tantamount to a time release nausea pill that makes a person uncomfortable every 12 minutes for 3 straight hours. No one else has that kind of direct access to stewing America currently. Morning Joe is the center of the national nausea turnpike as of today.
2) The deficit is as big a boondoggle as health care and financial reform. Built into the budget is a suffocating quantity of entitlements, not to individuals as covered beyond any proportional sense, but to commerce. Ethanol, defense, prescription drug companies, oil companies, logging companies and really any industry with a lobbyist, are given unfettered access to the treasury on an annual basis.
Why the conversation rests on individual citizen entitlement when so much of the crushing deficit is non ROI based ‘investment’ in well represented private companies is a perfect example of disenfranchisement of the middle class through sleight of hand.
You could balance the budget in 10 minutes and grow the economy, and along with it jobs, just by making the budget for the people. But now that the laughing gas has worn away, any actuarial analysis of results would determine that there is little legislative will to de-corrupt our budget. While the Morning Joe show fiddled about deficits as a word not an amalgam, our leadership position in the world’s economy burned like a supernova.
Joe Scarborough’s defining mantra is small governments and a reduction of the budget. So let’s count the number of times he gets the budget out and redefines how government interacts with it’s citizens and compares it with how the government entitles the nations commercial sector. This is not a Republican or Democratic thing, this is everyone, and when a guy on the right is on a network from the left perpetuating the boondoggle, no one is safe.
Don’t let anyone tell you that these private sector investments are the answer to jobs problems. They are in fact part of the jobs problem, because as we have found out with TARP, none of our current investments to the private sector are jobs accountable. There is no enforcement of how many jobs a private sector investment creates. This is amply evidenced by the inability of the administration to count the jobs they created with the stimulus, and the inability of a translation of TARP to available credit.
3) The humility of the cast in regards to the Helen Thomas situation is a really hopeful element in a day of gray disdain.
That is all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label Ron Brownstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ron Brownstein. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
The 58 Market Strategy
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 29th, 2010
Observations:
1) There are 472 elections coming to congress this year. For the first time in our lifetime, the mid term elections have an easy to access amalgamator on wikipedia that allows you to track competitive races and see where all of these Democratic seats are going to be lost.
What if Obama got there first? What if a designated marketing area analysis was made and each DMA of a competitive race was targeted for town halls, not cozy co-campaigns, but town halls where a voter felt like he was entering into a contract with the party to implement in a timely manner his will, not the will of lobbyist or incumbents.
As much as we would like to go to Iowa again, a state that Obama carried in the election, and get our revenge against Chuck Grassley, we know that Arkansas and Illinois are where better outcomes opportune themselves. It’s a wonderful double message: Arkansas and Illinois get a real contract for change, but Iowa, unless you can work out your issues, you’re stuck with Grassley for a 58th year, and he is a senile embarrassment.
The town halls, the Q and A’s, the letting the voter tell Obama directly how disappointing 2009 and his caving on health care were, these are the real messages voters want heard. The only way the message won’t be Scarborough’s distortion, '75% of America didn’t want health care’, and will be the true take of the independent voter, ‘keep lobbyist out of the equation like you promised, and protect consumers’, is if the voice of the voter gets 58 chances to be heard between now and November 2nd.
2) The interview with the leader of the teachers union was disgusting. I really felt like the cast of the show did a wonderful job pinning Randi Weingarten down that she, in fact, did cost the New York educational system $700 million dollars by her action. But, when it should have gotten further detailed, when she should have been forced to parse the ‘we want this for all teachers’ and ‘get the teachers the tools they need’ lines, to expose them for the self serving double speak they are, the cast stopped short.
‘We want this for all teachers and all students’ is a thinly veiled stiff arm to competition in the educational arena. If the quote could have also been ‘we don’t want to compete with the charter school for resources’ then the quote is double speak. Joe and Willie Geist are on top of this issue and need to mount a more vigorous campaign when facing the single biggest bottleneck to teacher accountability with unprecedented access. Randi Weingarten is a perfect example of the kind of obstruction that used to be rampant in the old municipal world, that can today be turned over like so many mossy rocks due to better availability of all angles of information on the matter.
Rather than call this a setback, I think of this missed opportunity as more of a call to action for the show as it looks for new ways to cover greater availability of information and evolves as an advocate of better educational results.
Arne Duncan just can’t get enough coverage, and a solid next step would be to have him back to look at the situation as the missing third element to this story. Unfortunately there is a fourth element to the story as well, and if the New York state legislature is anything like the California one, shame doesn’t work with those bag men.
3) One of the things that Morning Joe could be doing more often is showing available paths forward and strategies. I know that was done today with an analysis of the way forward for health care. But if, for a second, we looked at health care as a giant symptom of the more fundamental problems that are coming up over and over again, the Bernie Sanders ‘Congress is in the pocket of lobbyist’ and the Ron Brownstein ‘lets get 51 vote rule in the Senate if the megatrend is parliamentary in its partisan divide’, then the show should be at that level in it’s discussion. Aren’t these 2 subjects more important than even election reform, if it could be argued that election reform is also a symptom and would be diluted if tackled before congressional reform?
What are the paths forward to get lobbyist out? To get the cloture rule out? Is it referendum? Is it legal challenge? Could the Senate move to 51 vote rule with 51 votes on its session bylaws vote that starts every session? What experts can the show deliver to examine whether this is an attainable goal?
What I don’t want to see is these things covered as passing references in passionate statements by credible guests a fifteenth and sixteenth time without the show giving that more fundamental debate teeth. It’s all about the order of things and if you stick to the jobs vs. health debate, you are playing it safe, and all the while refusing to move the debate closer to the frustrations of the American people. Those voters wan’t government to be less paralyzed, and they want lobbyists out.
Randi Weingarten could’ve just as easily been a lobbyist for CIGNA or Senator Joe Lieberman with the doublespeak she got away with today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) There are 472 elections coming to congress this year. For the first time in our lifetime, the mid term elections have an easy to access amalgamator on wikipedia that allows you to track competitive races and see where all of these Democratic seats are going to be lost.
What if Obama got there first? What if a designated marketing area analysis was made and each DMA of a competitive race was targeted for town halls, not cozy co-campaigns, but town halls where a voter felt like he was entering into a contract with the party to implement in a timely manner his will, not the will of lobbyist or incumbents.
As much as we would like to go to Iowa again, a state that Obama carried in the election, and get our revenge against Chuck Grassley, we know that Arkansas and Illinois are where better outcomes opportune themselves. It’s a wonderful double message: Arkansas and Illinois get a real contract for change, but Iowa, unless you can work out your issues, you’re stuck with Grassley for a 58th year, and he is a senile embarrassment.
The town halls, the Q and A’s, the letting the voter tell Obama directly how disappointing 2009 and his caving on health care were, these are the real messages voters want heard. The only way the message won’t be Scarborough’s distortion, '75% of America didn’t want health care’, and will be the true take of the independent voter, ‘keep lobbyist out of the equation like you promised, and protect consumers’, is if the voice of the voter gets 58 chances to be heard between now and November 2nd.
2) The interview with the leader of the teachers union was disgusting. I really felt like the cast of the show did a wonderful job pinning Randi Weingarten down that she, in fact, did cost the New York educational system $700 million dollars by her action. But, when it should have gotten further detailed, when she should have been forced to parse the ‘we want this for all teachers’ and ‘get the teachers the tools they need’ lines, to expose them for the self serving double speak they are, the cast stopped short.
‘We want this for all teachers and all students’ is a thinly veiled stiff arm to competition in the educational arena. If the quote could have also been ‘we don’t want to compete with the charter school for resources’ then the quote is double speak. Joe and Willie Geist are on top of this issue and need to mount a more vigorous campaign when facing the single biggest bottleneck to teacher accountability with unprecedented access. Randi Weingarten is a perfect example of the kind of obstruction that used to be rampant in the old municipal world, that can today be turned over like so many mossy rocks due to better availability of all angles of information on the matter.
Rather than call this a setback, I think of this missed opportunity as more of a call to action for the show as it looks for new ways to cover greater availability of information and evolves as an advocate of better educational results.
Arne Duncan just can’t get enough coverage, and a solid next step would be to have him back to look at the situation as the missing third element to this story. Unfortunately there is a fourth element to the story as well, and if the New York state legislature is anything like the California one, shame doesn’t work with those bag men.
3) One of the things that Morning Joe could be doing more often is showing available paths forward and strategies. I know that was done today with an analysis of the way forward for health care. But if, for a second, we looked at health care as a giant symptom of the more fundamental problems that are coming up over and over again, the Bernie Sanders ‘Congress is in the pocket of lobbyist’ and the Ron Brownstein ‘lets get 51 vote rule in the Senate if the megatrend is parliamentary in its partisan divide’, then the show should be at that level in it’s discussion. Aren’t these 2 subjects more important than even election reform, if it could be argued that election reform is also a symptom and would be diluted if tackled before congressional reform?
What are the paths forward to get lobbyist out? To get the cloture rule out? Is it referendum? Is it legal challenge? Could the Senate move to 51 vote rule with 51 votes on its session bylaws vote that starts every session? What experts can the show deliver to examine whether this is an attainable goal?
What I don’t want to see is these things covered as passing references in passionate statements by credible guests a fifteenth and sixteenth time without the show giving that more fundamental debate teeth. It’s all about the order of things and if you stick to the jobs vs. health debate, you are playing it safe, and all the while refusing to move the debate closer to the frustrations of the American people. Those voters wan’t government to be less paralyzed, and they want lobbyists out.
Randi Weingarten could’ve just as easily been a lobbyist for CIGNA or Senator Joe Lieberman with the doublespeak she got away with today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
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