The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 26th, 2010
Observations:
1) Is it just me or was the self editing of the Scarborough take before and after Zbigniew Brzezinski’s segment gargantuan? Joe Scarborough declared war on all of Pakistan at approximately 7:05 AM EST, then Brzezinski called all pundits who describe all of Pakistan as the enemy dangerous for their lack of dimensional understanding. Then Joe Scarborough came back on the show after Mr. Brzezinski had left and claimed they had agreed all along.
Brzezinski showed a 360 degree view of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Russia, China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that contained each of their inter-connections. No one else aside from maybe Richard Haas with an Ipad could possibly have done that. Maybe it was unfair to Scarborough, who deserved to have his opinion evolve given the watershed of thought brought by Brzezinski. I just would have preferred to have it be more honest, with Scarborough using his own comeuppance as a teaching moment for all Americans trying so desperately to understand what we’re facing.
That’s right, what we’re facing. If we are spending all this money, blood and treasure over there, why should it be so hard to arrange and prioritize all the facts? Why can only one guy out of a thousand potential guests be able to adequately explain what’s going on? And why does it seem that the only reason Morning Joe is relevant or dominant on this issue is that the co anchor is related to that one guy who takes the time to explain what our reality in that region is?
Is it possible that there are interested parties out there that want this information to remain scarce? Is it possible, if you follow the money, that we are only actually accessing this logical path by accident, but money would have otherwise lined up the other 999 pundits to dilute the issue prior to any possible crystallizing moment?
There must be a reason for the lack of clarity here somewhere. But the persons out there nudging the conversation towards it’s logical center are heroes. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is among those people who peel away the scab now and again. When I see Democratic administrations use the “put American lives in danger” red herring in the face of this kind of activity, it moves beyond the hypocritical pale you would normally have labeled a Republican response, it moves into a post partisan ‘who is left to trust’ zone.
Zbigniew Brzezinski talked about this a little bit today, but from a distance. He talked about the dangerous progression of policy in Afghanistan that started in the early Obama speeches, into a nuanced tightrope of a US national policy last December, and now into a space where the policy is dictated by ‘events on the ground’. The summation of this path, said Brzezinski, is that Obama has ceded control to the military. The conflict of interest in having the military running this war is what Assange is talking about. Obama’s speeches in Turkey and Egypt were about a new American accountability, one that has re-vanished in 20 months.
Assange, for his pursuits, is targeted in the US with arrest in connection with the last WikiLeaks project that showed a US helicopter mowing down tens of Iraqi’s for no apparent reason, and has been forced by the certainty of his eventual arrest by our government, to release all the information he has prior. He wants to be sure that the people who might hope to contain damaging information have to continuously remain accountable. His arrest would be catastrophic for American foreign policy.
2) Before the fireworks concerning the WikiLeaks situation got underway, there was another quasi-scuffle early when Harold Ford tested out a pro-Bank of America sound byte. It didn’t go well. Ford wanted to make the point that the big banks paid back the TARP money and should be credited for making the US taxpayer and the US Treasury whole.
When you have Pat Buchanan lunging out of his chair at you and you are pro-commerce, it is not a good day in lobby land. Ford made what amounts to the classic ‘this little sliver of the story is the whole story – the end’ attempt. It’s a great tragedy that any credibility that he may have possessed left today, and that he chose to try and airbrush out the zero interest fed window loan direct to T-bills for profit scandal that will be in history books everywhere in 25 years. Harold also got called out on the AIG 100 cents on the dollar windfall scandal, one that will be in the same history books, and in his hasty back pedal admitted those derivative repayments probably shouldn’t have been at full value.
So, Harold, it’s just you and Brian Moynihan at lunch later today, and you’re reviewing how it went, you made Bank of America look like it wanted to move on, the TARP signified the end of the bad part of the financial crisis, that the tax free windfalls from the AIG bailout and the Fed window were deserved riches, and the future is bright.
Bank of America bought Countrywide during the meltdown. Countrywide owns more toxic mortgages than anyone. Wait, it owns the contract to service those mortgages having long ago transferred the nefarious valuation of those assets to either Fannie, Freddie or the Treasury, even Pat Buchanan knows that. So does that make the Halliburton-like relationship BofA now possesses to extract fees in maintenance on all these horrible loans scandal number 3? Did Bank of America see the future and buy all the toxic loans knowing the US government was going to trade insolvent assets for for T-bills so that two broke entities could shell-game up their part of the 23 trillion dollar scam?
And did you Harold, highlight this stuff as if you were a new pro consumer, anti BofA WikiLeaks, by simply sticking your toe in the water to see if you could float? “Hey Brian, watch this!”
3) After all that why I would embark on what is next is beyond me. The mid term elections and all elections subsequent are going to get so much media attention that a voter should be understandably overwhelmed by the coverage. While you watch people like Chuck Todd try and explain where “it” will be found in November, are you really able to tether to that singular fact which may or may not drive whatever faraway congressional election, and be convinced that result may have some bearing on your life?
What Americans don’t have is a personal relevancy scorecard. What companies do you do business with? What is your stake in the war in Afghanistan? Is it employment based or do you have a participant in your family? What is your prognosis for employment for the next 18 months, 5 years, to retirement? What is the effect of the last question upon your ability to provide health care for yourself or your family? What is the condition of your school system? What major corporations have recently infuriated you with predatory fine print, or made you wealthier via investment?
All too often, we are fighting someone else’s battle. It’s a common theme here that many of the votes cast in American elections are proxy votes. I tend to illustrate the fear proxy vote that elects my opponents, but in fairness union votes are generally the same. But this isn’t a sinister plot, it’s more a battle to empower the population that would normally enumerate voter attrition. People don’t vote because they don’t have access to what the choices mean to them. Proxy votes get them to the ballot with a thought in their head, it’s just not their own thinking.
These days even the big newspapers make a scorecard that shows their voting choices and their reasons, but essentially turn their readers into proxy votes. The right thing to do to promote voting in the new independent world would be if those same newspapers printed the architecture of the personal relevancy scorecard alongside their choices so that a person could look at the equation result of their vote.
I think Joe Scarborough would agree with me on this. We differ on abortion, not the act, but the legality of the act. But I have heard Mr. Scarborough complain consistently about litmus voting, and that is precisely what I am talking about here. I would hate to have a person find out later that they voted away their United Airlines pension based on a litmus issue like abortion. Understanding the various effects of their vote might be a solid way to get a centrist voting base to begin to generate votes that truly govern their country.
The first step is to admit proxy votes are votes for the dark side, and attrition would have been better. That might be “it” Chuck, Barack, and Rahm!
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label chuck todd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chuck todd. Show all posts
Monday, July 26, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Shrewd Rude Interlude
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 24th, 2010
Observations:
1) The shrewdness of the Obama move to put Patraeus on the front line of the Afghanistan struggle is dawning on all of us as the first full day of the new era concludes. We looked at polls galore today that were all bleak, but didn’t take into account this latest matrix fix that will surely shore up yea versus nay by this time next week.
I saw all the polls, and I just thought we were looking at last week’s news a second time. That is the lack of efficacy of polls when it’s this thick out there. The fact that no one on the Morning Joe show offers a time context and just starts racing to momentum analysis shows how quickly they can be distracted from complex thinking and reduced to misinformative algebra.
Even Chuck Todd should have been able to build a case for ‘what you're looking at is the baseline that the fix will move polls up from’. Chuck Todd had a moment of weakness when his theory heaped on the conventional wisdom that the administration better have some answers quick because we’re witnessing erosion and it’s now critical.
So wrong. I'm so used to Chuck being a step ahead, I don’t even know how to react. This is sine wave pattern, and the Patreaus and Barton effects are already moving the needle the other way.
2) Anyone who want to get a hold on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should watch the Zbigniew Brzezinski segment a few times until you can quote from it. This guy has it pasted together as a single narrative when most, including Richard Haas are just not able to clearly describe the moving parts singularly.
It’s troubling that we are all beginning to remember Mr. Brzezinski was the guy who baited the Russians into the first modern Afghan war. He and Charlie Wilson armed the opposition and 15 long years later, the Russians left, the global political objective of sinking the Soviet Union was successful, but 2 million souls were lost.
It’s sort of like asking BP to clean up the spill. Afghanistan is a chaos spill that dates back to a manufactured Soviet invasion that Zbigniew Brzezinski authored. We have paid a very dear price in the long run for our reconnaissance by fire approach to getting things to break our way. But, there is no better expert on the Afghanistan and Central Asian turmoil than that architect.
In a way, it appears that America’s shortcoming is our pursuit of shortcuts and our denial of the true cost of things. What’s next for an underinvested America trying to use technology or bribes or neighbor armies to do its biding? Probably Mr. Brzezinski, should he be asked would advocate the use of a mercenary army to accomplish our goals. That mercenary army wouldn’t be your typical cast of South Africans, Germans and former Rhodesians, but instead the Chinese army in a trade for lithium mineral rights.
Oh wait, that’s already happening.
3) Is there some reason why the Erin Burnett segment isn’t ever put on the replay website? Today Erin brought to bear a simple theory that helps the bell curve of the population not be so emotional about outsourcing jobs. Jobs are a perishable good in America. They have a shelf life. We are at this point the number one new economy innovator. China and Japan and Germany might have rehoused the industrial and materials based economies we dominated in economic cycles past. Russia and India may have legions of code writers ready to escalate any new cyber intellect into the next ebay, google or twitter. But we are where whats going to work next comes from.
The Russian President Medvedev made the Khrushchev - Disneyland move of our lifetime because he realizes that. He visited Twitter. He wonders how to be a system innovator and not a gas pipeline baron, then ponders why his economy for all of its intellect wealth and many of the same infrastructures as the US has about the same chance as Mongolia of patenting what comes next in the world’s innovation march.
You could cheaply paraphrase it 'trickle down theory'. But its more of a compartmentalization of core components in the global economy and the life spans of those compartments as they go from their global adoption to their commoditization to their obsolescence. And until Stanford and MIT are commoditized, I think were safe.
They have great universities the world over, but Stanford and MIT and about 100 American universities like them are chief collecting points for intellectual innovation that breeds those clutch evolutionary movements of the technology/commerce curve.
No other place can collect the human equivalent of cloud computing like those places.
Thanks Erin, that’s twice you’ve made this point on the Morning Joe show, but the new format allowed it to not be set to Bad Company, so it might have stuck.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) The shrewdness of the Obama move to put Patraeus on the front line of the Afghanistan struggle is dawning on all of us as the first full day of the new era concludes. We looked at polls galore today that were all bleak, but didn’t take into account this latest matrix fix that will surely shore up yea versus nay by this time next week.
I saw all the polls, and I just thought we were looking at last week’s news a second time. That is the lack of efficacy of polls when it’s this thick out there. The fact that no one on the Morning Joe show offers a time context and just starts racing to momentum analysis shows how quickly they can be distracted from complex thinking and reduced to misinformative algebra.
Even Chuck Todd should have been able to build a case for ‘what you're looking at is the baseline that the fix will move polls up from’. Chuck Todd had a moment of weakness when his theory heaped on the conventional wisdom that the administration better have some answers quick because we’re witnessing erosion and it’s now critical.
So wrong. I'm so used to Chuck being a step ahead, I don’t even know how to react. This is sine wave pattern, and the Patreaus and Barton effects are already moving the needle the other way.
2) Anyone who want to get a hold on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should watch the Zbigniew Brzezinski segment a few times until you can quote from it. This guy has it pasted together as a single narrative when most, including Richard Haas are just not able to clearly describe the moving parts singularly.
It’s troubling that we are all beginning to remember Mr. Brzezinski was the guy who baited the Russians into the first modern Afghan war. He and Charlie Wilson armed the opposition and 15 long years later, the Russians left, the global political objective of sinking the Soviet Union was successful, but 2 million souls were lost.
It’s sort of like asking BP to clean up the spill. Afghanistan is a chaos spill that dates back to a manufactured Soviet invasion that Zbigniew Brzezinski authored. We have paid a very dear price in the long run for our reconnaissance by fire approach to getting things to break our way. But, there is no better expert on the Afghanistan and Central Asian turmoil than that architect.
In a way, it appears that America’s shortcoming is our pursuit of shortcuts and our denial of the true cost of things. What’s next for an underinvested America trying to use technology or bribes or neighbor armies to do its biding? Probably Mr. Brzezinski, should he be asked would advocate the use of a mercenary army to accomplish our goals. That mercenary army wouldn’t be your typical cast of South Africans, Germans and former Rhodesians, but instead the Chinese army in a trade for lithium mineral rights.
Oh wait, that’s already happening.
3) Is there some reason why the Erin Burnett segment isn’t ever put on the replay website? Today Erin brought to bear a simple theory that helps the bell curve of the population not be so emotional about outsourcing jobs. Jobs are a perishable good in America. They have a shelf life. We are at this point the number one new economy innovator. China and Japan and Germany might have rehoused the industrial and materials based economies we dominated in economic cycles past. Russia and India may have legions of code writers ready to escalate any new cyber intellect into the next ebay, google or twitter. But we are where whats going to work next comes from.
The Russian President Medvedev made the Khrushchev - Disneyland move of our lifetime because he realizes that. He visited Twitter. He wonders how to be a system innovator and not a gas pipeline baron, then ponders why his economy for all of its intellect wealth and many of the same infrastructures as the US has about the same chance as Mongolia of patenting what comes next in the world’s innovation march.
You could cheaply paraphrase it 'trickle down theory'. But its more of a compartmentalization of core components in the global economy and the life spans of those compartments as they go from their global adoption to their commoditization to their obsolescence. And until Stanford and MIT are commoditized, I think were safe.
They have great universities the world over, but Stanford and MIT and about 100 American universities like them are chief collecting points for intellectual innovation that breeds those clutch evolutionary movements of the technology/commerce curve.
No other place can collect the human equivalent of cloud computing like those places.
Thanks Erin, that’s twice you’ve made this point on the Morning Joe show, but the new format allowed it to not be set to Bad Company, so it might have stuck.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
A Shopping Mall Full Of News And You’ve Only Got One Bag
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 27th, 2010
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Morning Hijinks
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 18th, 2009
Observations:
1) The missing political roundtable from yesterday was basically today’s entire show. The subscriber needed closure on the caravan of disparate thought flying around like the Karamazov brothers yesterday, and the show neatened things up today by taking a very deliberate tempo and making every attempt to sound out what’s out there. Remember the discussion of yesterday’s missing roundtable likely would’ve been ‘what’s next, given current events’.
Lawrence O’Donnell continues to be the best guest for the what’s next conversation, and it’s disturbing that his answer is I don’t see the end game clearly. It’s an honest appraisal given that when it was his playoff march in 1994 he was already showered and done with a loss in the books and starting the post game analysis, so he doesn’t really know the look and feel of completion. It’s not inevitable that we’re at a point of completion, we don’t know, the nation doesn’t know, and the uncertainty is killing us. But at least by having the closest thing to experience in your cast you can appropriately show the stakes and mechanics of the outcome.
One key misinterpretation is the shoehorning of the Howard Dean position as a kill the bill and start over analysis from Joe Scarborough. I agree Dean might’ve said those exact words on television and made a sound bite error that has given John McCain some new material, but it’s not the Dean position. Dean wants the process to play out in conference, he would prefer that the Senate strip out a lot of what’s in its bill and just take the things that don’t qualify for reconciliation. Care centers, no pre-existing cancellations or bans, and the like stay in. He then would hold out hope that the post-conference bill is closer to either reform or a two step process involving reconciliation.
It’s a flawed strategy for the simple reason of double cloture. If you put any of the Lieberman antagonizing hallmarks back in or allude to a two step strategy, he gets to double Lieberman you. As humiliating as it is, at least we know that cloture is going to go the way of the dodo bird in our lifetimes now that a real news cycle has been forced to bear witness to its tendency to favor obstruction in a nations time of need for reform and need to move on and govern elsewhere. The nation spoke by putting 60 in the democratic caucus, but to be told that that’s not enough and that it would take 65 to be able to disregard the holdouts in their own party, is shocking.
So there it is, the bill will have to pass and stay fairly tame, maybe some architecture could be adjusted to make it more defensible to the fiscal scalpel in future budget battles, but become a juggernaut that over time whittles it’s way to a single payer system.
I would not be surprised to see Dean come around to this in the next day or so, now that he is re-established himself to be the equivalent of Elizabeth Warren in this forum: the guy telling you the lucid truth now that both sides have gone robotic.
2) It’s polling that is the hijinks I refer to. There were how many guests on your show today? 15? Of the guests and hosts, how many used the phrased “the polling shows” in a sentence? The answer is 3: the hosts and Chuck Todd. What does that tell you: one monumental weakness on the show is it’s credit bestowed on polling. I know that in some cases the science of politicking includes the use of polling, but those cases normally center around a project or campaign with assets being deployed and measured for effectiveness. No one is doing that in regards to health care, financial reform or Afghanistan. The polls seeking sentiment on all of these current events are deemed useless by so many of the people your looking at for consensus, you should really be taking it as a sign.
Let’s look at it another way: (hypothetical) “in the latest Fox News Poll, that terrorist fist bump we showed you between Barack and Michelle Obama was troubling to 64% of you and 36% only felt he should be deported”. OK, first the use of the word terrorist was a distortion limiting the ability of the audience to be measured on a factual basis, and the polling no matter how widely sampled still suffers from a preaching to the choir segmentation because non Fox subscribers just hang up on the survey, and lastly the questions are never a complete set of outcomes.
Now bring it home: the weakness of today's poll on health care was specifically the lack of a factual basis amongst the sample. There is no requirement that the sample be able to define the debate in at minimum consensus terms and likely many still think the Senate is voting on single payer. Further how many feel that if they say yes to the poll they will be stripped of their employer based coverage? And lastly, how old is the 75% number that Joe Scarborough referred to five times today, (like 3 months?) and it too was a daily tracking number during the death panel campaign. I think your subscribers want more than that.
Sure, these pollsters that your show uses are respectable bunch of meaningful prognosticators. But in any poll if there is little connectivity between the results and what 12 of your guests are deeming the predictable future or real sentiment. I continue to attribute what I’m seeing en masse from polling as a darkest before the dawn phenomenon, but if you borrow science from the closest cousin of the poll, the stock market, Mark Haynes wouldn’t touch anything short of a 200 day weighted moving average. This makes what you do with polling a denigration to the conversation you’re trying to have. Stop taking static results as a sign of anything and try harder to understand the real weight of momentum and the psychology of cycles. Therein lies an answer that will separate you from the pack going forward.
3) Copenhagen is an unneeded distraction. I really had a hard time even watching the speech, and was really pleased it was short. In my line of work, if the world had been betrayed at this level previously and even Barack Obama came promising to make good, I would require full prepayment prior to signing anything further. The argument they are having is a tired futile attempt to shame all the nations into compliance.
I really think the debate amongst nations has no bearing on the debate the show should be having. I think the micro economic debate is where it all is heading. The kind of equations like leaving an incandescent light bulb on overnight costs one bucket of coal. If we are 50% coal in this country and coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, it seems fair game to make every transaction in a person’s typical day, week, or month a transaction on that basis to emphasize conservation. You spend so much, and what do you do to neutralize what you spend? Plant a tree a week? It’s the micro economics that would bring this home.
A funny side effect is with the decentralization of employment, Tina Brown refers to it as gigs rather than jobs, a micro economic discussion is a very pertinent shortcut in the formation of green jobs and industry because if you have a problem like neutralizing your own personal carbon footprint being pondered worldwide, you have a lot more entrepreneurs. In Scotland there is a personal electric windmill company that sells a garage top windmill that generates enough electricity to offset that bucket of coal we talked about. That would sell here, but I can’t buy one in this country yet. Do you think that a machinist in Detroit could use that information?
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) The missing political roundtable from yesterday was basically today’s entire show. The subscriber needed closure on the caravan of disparate thought flying around like the Karamazov brothers yesterday, and the show neatened things up today by taking a very deliberate tempo and making every attempt to sound out what’s out there. Remember the discussion of yesterday’s missing roundtable likely would’ve been ‘what’s next, given current events’.
Lawrence O’Donnell continues to be the best guest for the what’s next conversation, and it’s disturbing that his answer is I don’t see the end game clearly. It’s an honest appraisal given that when it was his playoff march in 1994 he was already showered and done with a loss in the books and starting the post game analysis, so he doesn’t really know the look and feel of completion. It’s not inevitable that we’re at a point of completion, we don’t know, the nation doesn’t know, and the uncertainty is killing us. But at least by having the closest thing to experience in your cast you can appropriately show the stakes and mechanics of the outcome.
One key misinterpretation is the shoehorning of the Howard Dean position as a kill the bill and start over analysis from Joe Scarborough. I agree Dean might’ve said those exact words on television and made a sound bite error that has given John McCain some new material, but it’s not the Dean position. Dean wants the process to play out in conference, he would prefer that the Senate strip out a lot of what’s in its bill and just take the things that don’t qualify for reconciliation. Care centers, no pre-existing cancellations or bans, and the like stay in. He then would hold out hope that the post-conference bill is closer to either reform or a two step process involving reconciliation.
It’s a flawed strategy for the simple reason of double cloture. If you put any of the Lieberman antagonizing hallmarks back in or allude to a two step strategy, he gets to double Lieberman you. As humiliating as it is, at least we know that cloture is going to go the way of the dodo bird in our lifetimes now that a real news cycle has been forced to bear witness to its tendency to favor obstruction in a nations time of need for reform and need to move on and govern elsewhere. The nation spoke by putting 60 in the democratic caucus, but to be told that that’s not enough and that it would take 65 to be able to disregard the holdouts in their own party, is shocking.
So there it is, the bill will have to pass and stay fairly tame, maybe some architecture could be adjusted to make it more defensible to the fiscal scalpel in future budget battles, but become a juggernaut that over time whittles it’s way to a single payer system.
I would not be surprised to see Dean come around to this in the next day or so, now that he is re-established himself to be the equivalent of Elizabeth Warren in this forum: the guy telling you the lucid truth now that both sides have gone robotic.
2) It’s polling that is the hijinks I refer to. There were how many guests on your show today? 15? Of the guests and hosts, how many used the phrased “the polling shows” in a sentence? The answer is 3: the hosts and Chuck Todd. What does that tell you: one monumental weakness on the show is it’s credit bestowed on polling. I know that in some cases the science of politicking includes the use of polling, but those cases normally center around a project or campaign with assets being deployed and measured for effectiveness. No one is doing that in regards to health care, financial reform or Afghanistan. The polls seeking sentiment on all of these current events are deemed useless by so many of the people your looking at for consensus, you should really be taking it as a sign.
Let’s look at it another way: (hypothetical) “in the latest Fox News Poll, that terrorist fist bump we showed you between Barack and Michelle Obama was troubling to 64% of you and 36% only felt he should be deported”. OK, first the use of the word terrorist was a distortion limiting the ability of the audience to be measured on a factual basis, and the polling no matter how widely sampled still suffers from a preaching to the choir segmentation because non Fox subscribers just hang up on the survey, and lastly the questions are never a complete set of outcomes.
Now bring it home: the weakness of today's poll on health care was specifically the lack of a factual basis amongst the sample. There is no requirement that the sample be able to define the debate in at minimum consensus terms and likely many still think the Senate is voting on single payer. Further how many feel that if they say yes to the poll they will be stripped of their employer based coverage? And lastly, how old is the 75% number that Joe Scarborough referred to five times today, (like 3 months?) and it too was a daily tracking number during the death panel campaign. I think your subscribers want more than that.
Sure, these pollsters that your show uses are respectable bunch of meaningful prognosticators. But in any poll if there is little connectivity between the results and what 12 of your guests are deeming the predictable future or real sentiment. I continue to attribute what I’m seeing en masse from polling as a darkest before the dawn phenomenon, but if you borrow science from the closest cousin of the poll, the stock market, Mark Haynes wouldn’t touch anything short of a 200 day weighted moving average. This makes what you do with polling a denigration to the conversation you’re trying to have. Stop taking static results as a sign of anything and try harder to understand the real weight of momentum and the psychology of cycles. Therein lies an answer that will separate you from the pack going forward.
3) Copenhagen is an unneeded distraction. I really had a hard time even watching the speech, and was really pleased it was short. In my line of work, if the world had been betrayed at this level previously and even Barack Obama came promising to make good, I would require full prepayment prior to signing anything further. The argument they are having is a tired futile attempt to shame all the nations into compliance.
I really think the debate amongst nations has no bearing on the debate the show should be having. I think the micro economic debate is where it all is heading. The kind of equations like leaving an incandescent light bulb on overnight costs one bucket of coal. If we are 50% coal in this country and coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, it seems fair game to make every transaction in a person’s typical day, week, or month a transaction on that basis to emphasize conservation. You spend so much, and what do you do to neutralize what you spend? Plant a tree a week? It’s the micro economics that would bring this home.
A funny side effect is with the decentralization of employment, Tina Brown refers to it as gigs rather than jobs, a micro economic discussion is a very pertinent shortcut in the formation of green jobs and industry because if you have a problem like neutralizing your own personal carbon footprint being pondered worldwide, you have a lot more entrepreneurs. In Scotland there is a personal electric windmill company that sells a garage top windmill that generates enough electricity to offset that bucket of coal we talked about. That would sell here, but I can’t buy one in this country yet. Do you think that a machinist in Detroit could use that information?
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
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