The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 13th, 2010
Observations:
1) Joe Biden had it figured out before all of us. What was amazing about the seemingly enlightened conversation that took place between Joe Conason, David Ignatius, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was what was missing. Seeming like a retroactive genius, Joe Biden had this Afghanistan debacle figured out light years before anyone else. Whether he was blasting Karzai to his face, or making the Pakistan math plain, or showing us the right solution, Joe Biden has been out in front for a long time. A lot longer then myself, a lot longer than the panel today.
We need to go back to a 15,000 person expeditionary force under CIA control. Maybe even less. And we need to control the airspace, freely using the predator system to make no corner of the vast, uninviting terrain of Afghanistan safe for enemies of the United States. That skeleton force should be agnostic to the government of Afghanistan and should rightly be as empowering to the opposition as it is to the ruling party.
The implication that the surge is having an opposite effect actually makes a lot of what Morning Joe has been wishing for suddenly realistic. If we can go from $100 billion in meaningless to $500 million in no one is safe if we’re not safe targeting, that’s a lot of fiscal change for our country.
I do understand that the last of the surge troops just got there in the last few weeks. That doesn’t make me happy, and should bring up continued charges of slow walking by the Pentagon. I am no longer sure if that slow walking was residual effect from the McChrystal regime or if it is a lingering issue, but either way the strategy by those doing it is fatally flawed. The flaw is that there was little calculus in a slow walking strategy for the deteriorating domestic fiscal situation.
A second possible scenario that would disturb anyone may have been that the slowing of the implementation was a process of obstruction by the Pentagon similar to what legislative Republicans do every day: we just won’t do our jobs until a friendly governing regime takes over in Washington. No one knows whether that is part of the calculus, but if Wall Street and Mitch McConnell are doing it, if United Technologies is openly endorsing regime change in the United States, what would generals in the US armed forces do if they want post retirement high paying work?
Nonetheless, now the December evaluation can’t come soon enough, and look for the Biden plan to get several million more eyeballs now that throwing $150 billion more dollars into the ocean didn’t work.
2) Who is retarded now? How can you not be motivated by the Frank Rich article over the weekend? When Rahm Emmanuel slighted the base of the Democratic Party over their incessant calls for real reform instead of lip service, all of us got a reality check. Did we really have a naiveté of a level that made wanting to fix our crumbling governing services on a real level an exercise in Shangri-la?
Reminded by Rich of the FDR vitriol spewed at the robber barons who used fallacy optics to try and populize their self serving enrichment, reminded of the Obama claims made on the way into the oval office that it was real change not something titled change that is being heralded as change but can’t pass any reasonable muster as change, you have to feel at least a little better that you weren’t just dreaming irrationally for the last 22 months.
Rahm is jumping ship. We are left with his awful compromises, and in need of someone who has his moxie, but aims that moxie at adversaries instead of eating his own young with it.
What happens next is clearly indicative of whether we were duped at the outset, or if this is the most cardiac arresting new scale yet of the Obama ‘real good in the fourth quarter” phenomenon. Is it a setup where all the Goldman guys got the finance gigs, Rahm the chief of staff gig, Gates stayed on as defense chief to keep the wolves circling? Will the Goolsbee appointment, a Warren nod, a new Defense Secretary, and a street fighter with the people on his prevailing agenda as the new chief of staff be Obama setting the tempo for a 6 year run of cementing the loose cornerstones into a formidable new style of US governance? Or is it next stop, Manchuria?
3) Can I get an economist, please? I’ll remind you of one other nugget from my month long pro Paul Krugman rant: part of Keynesian doctrine insists that the private sector be harnessed in times of crisis and made to work towards a common goal of full employment. That is not from any Krugman rant, surprisingly, but is a most valid connection to this weekend’s Frank Rich column. You have to not let the Wall Street guys hold you hostage, it has to be the other way around. Listen to the Joe Scarborough harping on capital gains taxes today and you will see my point. Joe Scarborough desperately needs to have an economist on set at all times right now because he rarely makes more than base algebraic sense when he talks about the subject. But when you raise the capital gains tax without going the extra step of steepening the raise for gains made at the expense of the domestic tax base, and lessening or removing the tax for gains made that evolve the domestic tax base you leave a resonating point on the table. When you make numbers move without a substantive reasoning you give hipshot anecdotes like what came from Scarborough today a whole new round or repetition, and repetition outlasts, and can ultimately undermine, more logical paths when mixed with political rhetoric.
You, Mr. Obama, also have to not let the guys running around without a logical leg to stand on maintain the high ground simply by attrition of your will. I’ll gladly continue to take a pickaxe to Scarborough’s fallacy economics every time it comes up. He has yet to be right with that argument about the top-level tax expiration. The only reason he is almost right about the capital gains thing is that the administration lacked the conviction to use targeting of the capital gains tax to grow the economy, a reason Scarborough didn’t cite or base his argument on, he just got lucky.
Mr. Scarborough, you got the high ground via attrition, don’t get used to it.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Showing posts with label david ignatius. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david ignatius. Show all posts
Monday, September 13, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Everyone’s Favorite President Is Lincoln On The Eve Of A New Civil War
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 15th, 2010
Observations:
1) The Morning Joe show did little to solve America’s problems today. It in fact seemed bent on preserving the wedge nature of Sunday talk shows as the substance of it’s Monday program. The Vice Presidential discord was replayed on the show 8 different times and ways as a reference point.
When the panelist went around the room, they all chose Lincoln as their favorite President. Its not lost on the viewer that the Lincoln Presidency has an eerie parallel to modern times as we have grown into two divided populations beholden to a wildly swinging middle independent voter. And that middle independent voter swings so wildly because he has no representation in Washington.
When the independent voter swings one way, the base of the losing party grows militant in their call for a shadow government to view the actions of the nation from their perspective. That is the need that calls Dick Cheney to the podium again and again. That is the antithesis of post election cohesion.
It’s not the progressives that are abandoning Obama, it’s the independent voter. And it’s not because of torture, it’s because the agencies protecting America were asleep at the wheel on Christmas day. It’s not because of a “Government takeover” of health care, it’s because the false reform plan was a lobbyist giveway with the Democrats acting like the untrustworthy Republicans that had just been shown the door.
No one is serving the consensus population, and that population is growing.
2) In this process of neither party seeming particularly capable of trustworthy governing, it’s fair to say that this angry middle voter is susceptible to distortions planted in the news by either party’s pandering. Miranda has become a rallying cry because Scott Brown used it to great effect to symbolize inefficiency in the steps taken to secure the homeland. That word was a leading edge similar to ‘death panels’. It has since been marginalized amongst the pundits, but the damage to the middle voter is a lagging scar no longer based in facts on the ground. Just like ‘death panels’.
Miranda rights to enemy combatants is an endangered species because the middle voter now sees it as the reason we won’t stop the next attack. If you put David Ignatius under truth serum, he would likely say that rather than Miranda, it’s bitter infighting causing ruptured information flow between security agencies that will victimize this country’s defense. The show today highlighted a symptom of that with Joe Scarborough centering his discussion of the matter around Miranda symbolizing the disintegration of the CIA interrogation program. Read that again. One agency prevails over another agency, and the left out entity has thrown it’s hands up.
Do you feel safer?
Yea, I would like that CIA option back, too. But is the answer really to swing the middle voter with a malfeasance of the Miranda story? Is this an indication of the health of this country as a voter and government? If we recently allowed some credence to the theory that the voter has been thrown into an irrational state and shown positively schizophrenic voting patterns, what are we to expect as a result if a poll can be found that Americans want Miranda out, but also want the best method possible, which might include Miranda?
We are creating this irrationality. Morning Joe got nabbed for the Mark Penn appearance on the show, unrelated to this subject but important for the concept, so as a penance, it should be sure that it’s a forum for consensus, not a forum for lobbyists to come on under the guise of analysis and drive red herring sound bites into wedge issues bent on being a domestic media civil war. And it should be even more careful not to embody that wedge building concept via it’s own cast and writing.
3) If the stock market would’ve opened today, it would’ve fallen 500 points. Germany is pulling out of the Greece bailout. Goldman Sachs has been found to be a chief participant in hidden activities bent on reducing the visibility of sovereign debt it was selling in markets it makes.
Tomorrow, it remains to be seen if there is any way to recover from this parade of negative news from across the pond. Early in the show, Mika alluded to a story regarding this, yet the show never covered in in the 3 hours.
Maybe the show could’ve reshown the Biden - Cheney wedge tournament 2 less times, and talked about a multi-trillion dollar wealth shift in the making instead?
You solved little, developed no consensus, highlighted the extreme edges most prominently, and resolved that the two parties should try and talk out their differences. All this while missing some important stories going on elsewhere.
Am I the only one who wants more out of Morning Joe?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) The Morning Joe show did little to solve America’s problems today. It in fact seemed bent on preserving the wedge nature of Sunday talk shows as the substance of it’s Monday program. The Vice Presidential discord was replayed on the show 8 different times and ways as a reference point.
When the panelist went around the room, they all chose Lincoln as their favorite President. Its not lost on the viewer that the Lincoln Presidency has an eerie parallel to modern times as we have grown into two divided populations beholden to a wildly swinging middle independent voter. And that middle independent voter swings so wildly because he has no representation in Washington.
When the independent voter swings one way, the base of the losing party grows militant in their call for a shadow government to view the actions of the nation from their perspective. That is the need that calls Dick Cheney to the podium again and again. That is the antithesis of post election cohesion.
It’s not the progressives that are abandoning Obama, it’s the independent voter. And it’s not because of torture, it’s because the agencies protecting America were asleep at the wheel on Christmas day. It’s not because of a “Government takeover” of health care, it’s because the false reform plan was a lobbyist giveway with the Democrats acting like the untrustworthy Republicans that had just been shown the door.
No one is serving the consensus population, and that population is growing.
2) In this process of neither party seeming particularly capable of trustworthy governing, it’s fair to say that this angry middle voter is susceptible to distortions planted in the news by either party’s pandering. Miranda has become a rallying cry because Scott Brown used it to great effect to symbolize inefficiency in the steps taken to secure the homeland. That word was a leading edge similar to ‘death panels’. It has since been marginalized amongst the pundits, but the damage to the middle voter is a lagging scar no longer based in facts on the ground. Just like ‘death panels’.
Miranda rights to enemy combatants is an endangered species because the middle voter now sees it as the reason we won’t stop the next attack. If you put David Ignatius under truth serum, he would likely say that rather than Miranda, it’s bitter infighting causing ruptured information flow between security agencies that will victimize this country’s defense. The show today highlighted a symptom of that with Joe Scarborough centering his discussion of the matter around Miranda symbolizing the disintegration of the CIA interrogation program. Read that again. One agency prevails over another agency, and the left out entity has thrown it’s hands up.
Do you feel safer?
Yea, I would like that CIA option back, too. But is the answer really to swing the middle voter with a malfeasance of the Miranda story? Is this an indication of the health of this country as a voter and government? If we recently allowed some credence to the theory that the voter has been thrown into an irrational state and shown positively schizophrenic voting patterns, what are we to expect as a result if a poll can be found that Americans want Miranda out, but also want the best method possible, which might include Miranda?
We are creating this irrationality. Morning Joe got nabbed for the Mark Penn appearance on the show, unrelated to this subject but important for the concept, so as a penance, it should be sure that it’s a forum for consensus, not a forum for lobbyists to come on under the guise of analysis and drive red herring sound bites into wedge issues bent on being a domestic media civil war. And it should be even more careful not to embody that wedge building concept via it’s own cast and writing.
3) If the stock market would’ve opened today, it would’ve fallen 500 points. Germany is pulling out of the Greece bailout. Goldman Sachs has been found to be a chief participant in hidden activities bent on reducing the visibility of sovereign debt it was selling in markets it makes.
Tomorrow, it remains to be seen if there is any way to recover from this parade of negative news from across the pond. Early in the show, Mika alluded to a story regarding this, yet the show never covered in in the 3 hours.
Maybe the show could’ve reshown the Biden - Cheney wedge tournament 2 less times, and talked about a multi-trillion dollar wealth shift in the making instead?
You solved little, developed no consensus, highlighted the extreme edges most prominently, and resolved that the two parties should try and talk out their differences. All this while missing some important stories going on elsewhere.
Am I the only one who wants more out of Morning Joe?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Morning A' La Carte
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 5th, 2010
Observations
1) As much as I’m critical about the Morning Joe show missing key elements of a story, I have to admit that I caught the Cuba flight list item yesterday, but either ran out of room to talk about it or just didn’t. I’m happy that the show and it’s longtime reality measuring guest Eugene Robinson tackled the prima facie of the matter today.
But the missing dimension is that if anything, it’s a good sign for Cuba that the administration is considering them among these 14 nations. It must be read that the administration is preparing for the eventuality of a normal relationship with Cuba and the good and bad that come with it. We have a prison there. We have listened to cautionary takes for a long time that if that base were domestic it would be a terrorism target. We must adjust that if we were to allow domestic bound flights from Cuba, it must carry with it the possibility of pass through terrorism from persons relating themselves to Guantanamo inmates. So as a potential conduit, it’s smartly on the list.
Eugene’s take has another problem in that it reads as a tit for tat from the side of the far left. Ever talk to Chris Matthews about Cuba? He still wants to nuke them for assassinating JFK. We have established the MJR lucidity test, and of these two far left takes, Eugene Robinson’s fails, and Chris Matthews’ irrational outburst passes. Crazy.
2) But any day that David Ignatius is on the show is a great day for lucidity. He in fact has come off of the Harrison Ford perch for a second to tackle the very subject. As Joe Scarborough butcher para-titled: the “Californication of American Government”. JS has for a long time considered California ungovernable. But in typical fashion it’s a talking point that mysteriously has lacked any detail or substance ever in the history of the show, allocating it to the mile high pile of negative broadstrokes that define his and the shows greatest challenge.
Ignatius eloquently put his finding in a paragraph. The state started with a 60 billion dollar budget imbalance, wound up with a 21 billion dollar one, and is running around telling itself it did its job governing. It bodes grimly for the whole union in that it is a microcosm for the fundamental inability of the legislative and executive branches, as designed by our forefathers, to make a difficult people first decision, instead deciding based on lobby, campaign, earmark, and commerce.
Mort Zuckerman quickly paralleled the health care process where a three word ideal took 2600 pages in congress just to pay everyone off but the American citizen.
What I found striking is that Joe Scarborough conveniently missed an opportunity to defend his take that the cloture rule “softens” legislation as a necessary stabilizing force in good governments. We have invented another test here at MJR called the scoreboard test, and you fail that test friend, there are no results of good government anywhere in sight, just deliberative bodies instead deciding based on lobby, campaign, earmark, and commerce.
3) Another great missed opportunity was the fantastic dichotomy of Ignatius’ point and the earlier Erick Erickson interview. Believe it or not, there is some merit in Erickson’ take if you could pick and choose. But you know the problem, we all know the problem, it’s the purity test.
If the next great political party is purple, guys like Erickson unfairly bind the voter into platforms unassociated with each other. You can’t be purple if you can’t take each item a' la carte.
Being an independent to me is fiscal responsibility, mixed with privacy protections that keep the government out of my social life. What it means to another demographic can be polar opposite, and they are equally invited. It’s the lack of a connectivity to the unrelated agenda items that is key to being in the middle.
Erickson has a great take about commerce (mentioned above) being a disaster to government as displayed in supernova fashion in the health care debate. But because I think that health care is a public good, we apparently can never be friends.
Until the show can create a lucid dialogue between the Erickson take and the Ignatius take on its same show, it fails the third test we are unveiling here on Morning Joe Rebuttal: the connect the dots in real time test. You can’t idolize ideology at 6 and damn ideology at 8
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations
1) As much as I’m critical about the Morning Joe show missing key elements of a story, I have to admit that I caught the Cuba flight list item yesterday, but either ran out of room to talk about it or just didn’t. I’m happy that the show and it’s longtime reality measuring guest Eugene Robinson tackled the prima facie of the matter today.
But the missing dimension is that if anything, it’s a good sign for Cuba that the administration is considering them among these 14 nations. It must be read that the administration is preparing for the eventuality of a normal relationship with Cuba and the good and bad that come with it. We have a prison there. We have listened to cautionary takes for a long time that if that base were domestic it would be a terrorism target. We must adjust that if we were to allow domestic bound flights from Cuba, it must carry with it the possibility of pass through terrorism from persons relating themselves to Guantanamo inmates. So as a potential conduit, it’s smartly on the list.
Eugene’s take has another problem in that it reads as a tit for tat from the side of the far left. Ever talk to Chris Matthews about Cuba? He still wants to nuke them for assassinating JFK. We have established the MJR lucidity test, and of these two far left takes, Eugene Robinson’s fails, and Chris Matthews’ irrational outburst passes. Crazy.
2) But any day that David Ignatius is on the show is a great day for lucidity. He in fact has come off of the Harrison Ford perch for a second to tackle the very subject. As Joe Scarborough butcher para-titled: the “Californication of American Government”. JS has for a long time considered California ungovernable. But in typical fashion it’s a talking point that mysteriously has lacked any detail or substance ever in the history of the show, allocating it to the mile high pile of negative broadstrokes that define his and the shows greatest challenge.
Ignatius eloquently put his finding in a paragraph. The state started with a 60 billion dollar budget imbalance, wound up with a 21 billion dollar one, and is running around telling itself it did its job governing. It bodes grimly for the whole union in that it is a microcosm for the fundamental inability of the legislative and executive branches, as designed by our forefathers, to make a difficult people first decision, instead deciding based on lobby, campaign, earmark, and commerce.
Mort Zuckerman quickly paralleled the health care process where a three word ideal took 2600 pages in congress just to pay everyone off but the American citizen.
What I found striking is that Joe Scarborough conveniently missed an opportunity to defend his take that the cloture rule “softens” legislation as a necessary stabilizing force in good governments. We have invented another test here at MJR called the scoreboard test, and you fail that test friend, there are no results of good government anywhere in sight, just deliberative bodies instead deciding based on lobby, campaign, earmark, and commerce.
3) Another great missed opportunity was the fantastic dichotomy of Ignatius’ point and the earlier Erick Erickson interview. Believe it or not, there is some merit in Erickson’ take if you could pick and choose. But you know the problem, we all know the problem, it’s the purity test.
If the next great political party is purple, guys like Erickson unfairly bind the voter into platforms unassociated with each other. You can’t be purple if you can’t take each item a' la carte.
Being an independent to me is fiscal responsibility, mixed with privacy protections that keep the government out of my social life. What it means to another demographic can be polar opposite, and they are equally invited. It’s the lack of a connectivity to the unrelated agenda items that is key to being in the middle.
Erickson has a great take about commerce (mentioned above) being a disaster to government as displayed in supernova fashion in the health care debate. But because I think that health care is a public good, we apparently can never be friends.
Until the show can create a lucid dialogue between the Erickson take and the Ignatius take on its same show, it fails the third test we are unveiling here on Morning Joe Rebuttal: the connect the dots in real time test. You can’t idolize ideology at 6 and damn ideology at 8
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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