The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 30th, 2010
Observations:
1) It’s as though Joe Scarborough thought he was bringing in the big guns when he put Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron on the show to strengthen his anti-Keynsian take on things. That was quackery at a level of bringing a chiropractor to heart surgery.
No I’m not on board with the Joe Conason venom directed at Prof. Miron. Mr. Conason would’ve been better served with temperance, even in the face of some goofy science, but goodness, you’re making a case for the other side.
What is even creepier is the blank stares Conason got when 1873 was brought up. No, I’m not talking down to people with that, equipped with some encyclopedic reference to past financial panics. But the thing that caught me off guard was that the Krugman article that might’ve set this debate off referenced the 1873 panic as part of it’s central thesis.
Mr. Scarborough, do you care to comment about an apparent hole in your homework? Your show is predicated on ‘must read op-eds’ and intertwined with takes from the great columnists working today. It would be a setback if it was that much of a façade that you didn’t actually read and understand the most important column of this week prior to embarking on this crusade for Herbert Hoover austerity.
2) Where you are off the reservation on austerity, you’re in the wheelhouse on Afghanistan. I listened closely, and even the best and the brightest are cautioning that they don’t want to seem too ‘Oliver Stone’, but still no one will talk about the financial windfall concept of why these wars are fought to seeming perpetuity.
Additionally, you seem to have ignored the story of the money transfer from Afghanistan to Dubai of $3 billion US dollars in recent weeks. That story would shore up the anger your trying to get Main Street to channel, so there doesn’t appear to be any logic to your deselection.
Additionally, that line to Joe Conason: “I know who I’m talking to, and they would never talk to you”, attempting to trump Mr. Conason’s intelligence on Afghanistan issues, is so misplaced you might as well be stabbing yourself in the face. Conason just spent 2 weeks in South Africa with Bill Clinton, so you’re dead wrong plus, what happens is that it looks like you’re trying to end a debate before having a debate, which is avoidance, which means you think you’re vulnerable. We learned this when Karl Rove shouted down a reporter with “but you're entitled to your math, I'm entitled to THE math”, just in time to get whipped soundly in 2006. Just don’t do it, it’s a pathway to losing.
But after three disparaging paragraphs, the point of this is you found a very important vein with the lack of an investment in the war by Main Street. Mike Barnicle found it weeks ago, but his persistent, Columbo-esque re-insertion of that as a main culprit for the apathy towards the war has proven to be a sound strategy as Morning Joe has found a consensus point, and I like the goal.
If a draft threat, I don’t support a real draft, brings this home to America, let’s get it out there. If an important domestic investment can be shown to be lost as a direct result of financial constraints of war, put a billboard next to it saying so. If a member of congress takes money from Halliburton, then praises the war effort disingenuously, publish the conflict of interest far and wide.
Let’s get out of Afghanistan, leaving behind the Biden predator plan, and basically make a single policy: we apologize to human shields in advance, but where we see pockets of terrorist activity that we feel threatens our original mission, we will annihilate them.
We should treat Afghanistan and Waziristan equally, and clearly instruct anybody in harms way that they risk death by being near our enemies in the region.
That’s not to say we couldn’t keep a green zone situation at Bagram, or a strike force for special operations like the capture of Bin Laden as needed, but nothing on the ground in Afghanistan warrants further investment under the confines of the original mission of 2001.
3) In a previous rant, I mentioned community service should involve teaching teachers how to work around localized corruption. Geoff Canada took this point to a universal level today by stating that the log jam of compromised influence upon the educational system is now 40 years in duration. The system atrophy that continues to cascade as a result of it will leave the US school system in rubble within our lifetime, per his diagnosis, and either we choose to break the false ceiling placed upon education workers every day with managed curriculum and ranking money higher than results, or we face that future.
The Morning Joe is so far out in front on this issue, that expectations have begun to ramp up towards real progress in the forms of charter school proliferation and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s agenda widely adopted.
There are an army of status quo barons ready for this fight, and one very large political conflict on the horizon. The unions, book publishers, outsource vendors and religious ideologues are all ready to make this ‘Obamacare II’. Conservatives are also going to ask a pretty legitimate question: if Joe Scarborough is a fiscal conservative wanting smaller government, then isn’t this issue counter to that? Shouldn’t a fiscal conservative be calling for the dissolution of the Department of Education, and leave the school system to the states?
I’m not a fiscal conservative, so it’s an easy choice for me. When a state’s education system can go from near the top to near the bottom or at the bottom in 10 years as Nevada has done, it clearly shows a need for a national expectation of standard.
But overall, this continues to rank at the very top of the shows accomplishments. I would like to see the show get out in front on the coming conflicts, and the consistency shown throughout the show’s existence makes it seem like that is going to happen.
4) See this empty observation? It’s still more than Morning Joe’s coverage of the oil spill today or recently.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label karl rove. Show all posts
Showing posts with label karl rove. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Accidentally, Morning Joe
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 23rd, 2009
Observations:
1) So there we were content to let this be a phone in program, what with Christmas upon us and the news that the GOP admits it’s powerless to stop tomorrow’s health care vote. But wait, Mika Brzezinski had another idea: let’s get this day off to a start by looping Bernie Sanders alarm on the functionality of the government, bring in Carl Bernstein and start ambushing guests on why this is a celebration rather than a placation.
Bravo. I was ready to go back to bed when the Bernstein interview took off. “A systemic failure of the legislative branch of government”. “It’s necessary to reform towards a public funding of campaign finance”. A 1-2 punch that we’ve heard before, but right now, right this second, when we are looking at the crowning achievement of a 60 vote voter induced mandate on health care that looks like a Chinese made recreation of reform on sale at Wal-Mart for $19.99 with the proceeds going to Connecticut and Nebraska, I think this time that systemic message has more intrinsic weight than Uranium-238.
This along with some very necessary measure from Andrew Ross-Sorkin on what reasonable people should expect looking a lot like the status quo, and a late arriving Joe Scarborough adding the crucial connecting point that the systemic failure has to point to the executive branch and the money signals that appear to be guiding the Presidency as well, what we have here is some Oliver Stone level fixing going on. Because of MSNBC, Howard Dean, Firedog Lake, and ironically Lindsay Graham, this fix has been more transparent than Mr. Obama intended when he claimed transparency but was relying on the limits of a public’s comprehension of the inner workings of government.
Not today. The cat is out of the bag. No longer can you put a “D” next to your name and claim to be insulated from the corruption failing 2 branches of our government. A 6th grader now knows that it’s not right or left but systemic that the government of the United States is making its deals in violation of the interests of it’s citizens. That consequently the American citizen is not even in the top ten of the food chain, and the top ten in that food chain are dismantling the riches of a nation and heading to higher ground with their new and our former wealth.
And I doubted you Mika Brzezinski, shame on me.
2) I wrote my Senator Barbara Boxer when I promised to do so last week and asked for a no vote on health care. I got a letter back that I’ve seen before from her. “Thanks for your note, here’s my position irrespective of how you feel”. Then she came on the show and I was ashamed. The Senate has lost it’s will and is fighting not for the people but for its war chest in 2010 and 2012. Joe Scarborough is dead on with the cross hairs being the ability to purchase 30 second spots when it matters.
Senator Boxer did not miss a single message from the party line in a moment Karl Rove would’ve been proud of. What sucks is that same 6th grader from above knows its not a message with any lucid restraint, but in the a good concept Steven A Smith had provided to the show, that message is everything we ever hated about John Kerry, hyperbole at every turn.
Message 1: 31 million Americans get insurance that didn’t have it before. That is a number driven by the mandate. The show didn’t catch that underlying ugliness. The math here is that healthy 20-somethings look at the mess of health care and choose with dollar votes not to participate. They are also, if they’re not employed or underemployed, in a lower tax bracket simultaneously, so not paying via taxation either, and are getting a free ride. If they get in an emergency, the service is provided. That 31 million people are those people who have opted out, not people that were barred from the market. You didn’t insure 31 million Americans in a rush to charity, you enslaved 31 million Americans by mandate to enrich private insurers and re-establish the pool they were avoiding by choice.
Message 2: Pre existing conditions are no longer a way out of, or preventing the acquiring of, health insurance. If the penalty for drunk driving were a $61 dollar fine, would it be effective, or would it still amortize out as less than the cost of cabs 5 times a month? If a business not bounded by a universal requirement amortizes out that it’s better off to pay a small fine than insure a child with a hole in their heart, get ready for that to happen. You can call something illegal, heck, marijuana, driving 71 miles an hour, banking in Antigua to avoid taxes, and keeping a handgun under the seat are all illegal, but their commonplace occurrence displays that you can’t effectively manage unless there is real consequence, and there isn’t here.
Message 3: 15% margin. History shows that the accounting practices of US Corporations are designed to make a 35 look like a 7.4, the difference between the corporate tax rate and the rate of tax contributions of the Fortune 500. So, yea, we’re talking politics.
That Barbara Boxer asked for the show’s credibility by saying she was a progressive completes this shameful observation of what amounts to 50% of the hope I have for reform from the Senate reduced to a shell game removing my interests and the interests of my Fox-watching conservative neighbors with equal effectiveness.
3) I write about this show. I am not a subscriber of the show that was the Morning Meeting. I am not because I largely agree with every single thing that Dylan Ratigan says and don’t need to participate in an echo chamber. I can watch that show once a week and catch all I need from his debate, which has been painfully circular and woefully without discipline, but just so right as rain for its entire run.
I hope that viewers don’t look at hack commentary based on the numbers of viewers for that show and its viewership decline and eventual cancellation and derive some take void of critical thought that it must’ve sucked. It had all the hard edges of U2’s first album when they really didn’t know how to play their instruments. But the heart present in these cases should be ample to win out over time, and I sincerely hope that MSNBC realizes that talent development is where the content comes from.
The 4 PM slot is no picnic. Many a generic show have gone there to die or placate a contract. But the 9 AM slot is equally difficult. The entire range from 9-5 is tough, because lets face it, we’ve already heard the reading of the news, there is little new content, we don’t have the free time to think critically about politics, and it’s just better for your career to switch to CNBC at that time.
Your mission at Morning Joe is to embolden what’s working with Dylan’s message and help develop what’s going on there. He didn’t come from lefty radio like Ed and Rachel, from congress like Chris, from sports like Keith, but from CNBC, the very place your show needs to relate to better, yet he has all the chops of a whistle blower gone mad.
What I did see when I watched that show is that it found stuff further in the details than Morning Joe could. As I’ve often been critical of missing underlying details on Morning Joe, which relies on expert guests and pure political instinct, it would be fair to say jettisoning the depth that the Morning Meeting provided in the hours after your show isolates your show further, and you'll need to find some depth and resolution that the sameness of a political scorecard show like what Savannah and Chuck are going to do just won’t provide you.
Personally, I think that Dylan should be lobbying for the overnight shift, and drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes on the set. Getting guests might be hard. It would be very, very good live TV and conspiracy theorists the world over would set their Tivo's accordingly. I vote for the Midnight Meeting, only on MSNBC.
Have a great holidays, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) So there we were content to let this be a phone in program, what with Christmas upon us and the news that the GOP admits it’s powerless to stop tomorrow’s health care vote. But wait, Mika Brzezinski had another idea: let’s get this day off to a start by looping Bernie Sanders alarm on the functionality of the government, bring in Carl Bernstein and start ambushing guests on why this is a celebration rather than a placation.
Bravo. I was ready to go back to bed when the Bernstein interview took off. “A systemic failure of the legislative branch of government”. “It’s necessary to reform towards a public funding of campaign finance”. A 1-2 punch that we’ve heard before, but right now, right this second, when we are looking at the crowning achievement of a 60 vote voter induced mandate on health care that looks like a Chinese made recreation of reform on sale at Wal-Mart for $19.99 with the proceeds going to Connecticut and Nebraska, I think this time that systemic message has more intrinsic weight than Uranium-238.
This along with some very necessary measure from Andrew Ross-Sorkin on what reasonable people should expect looking a lot like the status quo, and a late arriving Joe Scarborough adding the crucial connecting point that the systemic failure has to point to the executive branch and the money signals that appear to be guiding the Presidency as well, what we have here is some Oliver Stone level fixing going on. Because of MSNBC, Howard Dean, Firedog Lake, and ironically Lindsay Graham, this fix has been more transparent than Mr. Obama intended when he claimed transparency but was relying on the limits of a public’s comprehension of the inner workings of government.
Not today. The cat is out of the bag. No longer can you put a “D” next to your name and claim to be insulated from the corruption failing 2 branches of our government. A 6th grader now knows that it’s not right or left but systemic that the government of the United States is making its deals in violation of the interests of it’s citizens. That consequently the American citizen is not even in the top ten of the food chain, and the top ten in that food chain are dismantling the riches of a nation and heading to higher ground with their new and our former wealth.
And I doubted you Mika Brzezinski, shame on me.
2) I wrote my Senator Barbara Boxer when I promised to do so last week and asked for a no vote on health care. I got a letter back that I’ve seen before from her. “Thanks for your note, here’s my position irrespective of how you feel”. Then she came on the show and I was ashamed. The Senate has lost it’s will and is fighting not for the people but for its war chest in 2010 and 2012. Joe Scarborough is dead on with the cross hairs being the ability to purchase 30 second spots when it matters.
Senator Boxer did not miss a single message from the party line in a moment Karl Rove would’ve been proud of. What sucks is that same 6th grader from above knows its not a message with any lucid restraint, but in the a good concept Steven A Smith had provided to the show, that message is everything we ever hated about John Kerry, hyperbole at every turn.
Message 1: 31 million Americans get insurance that didn’t have it before. That is a number driven by the mandate. The show didn’t catch that underlying ugliness. The math here is that healthy 20-somethings look at the mess of health care and choose with dollar votes not to participate. They are also, if they’re not employed or underemployed, in a lower tax bracket simultaneously, so not paying via taxation either, and are getting a free ride. If they get in an emergency, the service is provided. That 31 million people are those people who have opted out, not people that were barred from the market. You didn’t insure 31 million Americans in a rush to charity, you enslaved 31 million Americans by mandate to enrich private insurers and re-establish the pool they were avoiding by choice.
Message 2: Pre existing conditions are no longer a way out of, or preventing the acquiring of, health insurance. If the penalty for drunk driving were a $61 dollar fine, would it be effective, or would it still amortize out as less than the cost of cabs 5 times a month? If a business not bounded by a universal requirement amortizes out that it’s better off to pay a small fine than insure a child with a hole in their heart, get ready for that to happen. You can call something illegal, heck, marijuana, driving 71 miles an hour, banking in Antigua to avoid taxes, and keeping a handgun under the seat are all illegal, but their commonplace occurrence displays that you can’t effectively manage unless there is real consequence, and there isn’t here.
Message 3: 15% margin. History shows that the accounting practices of US Corporations are designed to make a 35 look like a 7.4, the difference between the corporate tax rate and the rate of tax contributions of the Fortune 500. So, yea, we’re talking politics.
That Barbara Boxer asked for the show’s credibility by saying she was a progressive completes this shameful observation of what amounts to 50% of the hope I have for reform from the Senate reduced to a shell game removing my interests and the interests of my Fox-watching conservative neighbors with equal effectiveness.
3) I write about this show. I am not a subscriber of the show that was the Morning Meeting. I am not because I largely agree with every single thing that Dylan Ratigan says and don’t need to participate in an echo chamber. I can watch that show once a week and catch all I need from his debate, which has been painfully circular and woefully without discipline, but just so right as rain for its entire run.
I hope that viewers don’t look at hack commentary based on the numbers of viewers for that show and its viewership decline and eventual cancellation and derive some take void of critical thought that it must’ve sucked. It had all the hard edges of U2’s first album when they really didn’t know how to play their instruments. But the heart present in these cases should be ample to win out over time, and I sincerely hope that MSNBC realizes that talent development is where the content comes from.
The 4 PM slot is no picnic. Many a generic show have gone there to die or placate a contract. But the 9 AM slot is equally difficult. The entire range from 9-5 is tough, because lets face it, we’ve already heard the reading of the news, there is little new content, we don’t have the free time to think critically about politics, and it’s just better for your career to switch to CNBC at that time.
Your mission at Morning Joe is to embolden what’s working with Dylan’s message and help develop what’s going on there. He didn’t come from lefty radio like Ed and Rachel, from congress like Chris, from sports like Keith, but from CNBC, the very place your show needs to relate to better, yet he has all the chops of a whistle blower gone mad.
What I did see when I watched that show is that it found stuff further in the details than Morning Joe could. As I’ve often been critical of missing underlying details on Morning Joe, which relies on expert guests and pure political instinct, it would be fair to say jettisoning the depth that the Morning Meeting provided in the hours after your show isolates your show further, and you'll need to find some depth and resolution that the sameness of a political scorecard show like what Savannah and Chuck are going to do just won’t provide you.
Personally, I think that Dylan should be lobbying for the overnight shift, and drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes on the set. Getting guests might be hard. It would be very, very good live TV and conspiracy theorists the world over would set their Tivo's accordingly. I vote for the Midnight Meeting, only on MSNBC.
Have a great holidays, see you Monday.
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