The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 3rd, 2010
Observations:
1) Why even have a show? This three hour program boiled down to 3 significant events: Howard Dean in all of his abbreviated glory, Mike Pence in all of his Joe Barton - BP apologist glory, and the Rolling Stone refute that directly followed it. Those were, in fact, amazing segments.
But this observation is about what happened to the other two and a half hours. Credit the cast for having an amazing liveliness given a 3 AM airtime, but you forgot to read the news until an hour later. You came on like it was a small market talk show and ranted about polls and the Obama strategy of painting the Republicans as a collective step backwards, not because it’s not true, but because of the words they used to communicate the phenomenon.
We had a bit of a blow up last week when we, the Morning Joe show and the Rebuttal, collectively had shown little ability to write a new caption to this unchanging photograph. The Morning Joe show has lost it’s evolving nature, hopefully just for the moment, and it’s feet, the giant size 17s of its anchor, are stuck in top-kill mud. You are currently exposed anytime anyone with a new idea comes on the show as being a sit in the weeds and dumb down anything you see rather than engage entity.
News flash: you are a perfect representation of the Republican party when you do that. Is it really 9th grade unprofessionalism to make the claim Obama made yesterday? Or is it 9th grade unprofessionalism that he is seeking out to engage? I can’t help but notice that when you waste two shows like yesterday and today, you do so looking more like the future of local news on Fox owned and operated stations, full of agendized talking points that lead directly to non discourse.
2) OK, let’s move on to achievement number one. Mike Pence came on Morning Joe today and did what so many Republicans have done recently: he came down on the wrong side of an issue, and then defended it adamantly. It is so, so awesome that a guy from Indiana took a photo op down with the ‘small people’ in Louisiana and on the way to his big project of damning Obama for the drilling moratorium tried to paint dispersants as a good guy in this story. It stuck out when he said it, eons before the cast starting lobbing grenades at it. It stuck out like saying the holocaust was made up or that we owe BP an apology.
I am not going to claim some scientific high ground to the contrary. I have listened to and read from many outlets from NPR to Fox on the matter and it is a story that we don’t have the complete answer to in any sense. But the early indications are that 1.8 million gallons of dispersant were poured on the oil spill to make it invisible, in a strategy that could’ve been called ‘out of site out of mind’. The collective of the dispersant and the now unremovable oil is now set to disperse via microbiorganisms. This has never been tried at this level and has never been tested in a half-life of toxicity sense ever. So if you are worried about the economy of the region, why would you undercut it’s primary revenue sources: the fishing industry and tourism? Do you want to come down and hit a restaurant? Do you want to come down and jump on a day boat? It looks good! Do you want to go to your local store and get gulf shrimp and feed it to your kids?
We don’t know any of the long term answers to a rash decision made far outside of the control of our President. But short of details from a trusted source, amongst which the EPA and BP cannot be counted, we are likely going to be avoiding some of those important gulf business for the microbioorganic half life of about a generation.
I can’t help but think of the possible outcomes, and when you drift into that thought, you start thinking about Agent Orange and Japanese Mercury poisoning. Americans with family values will wait steadfastly for a credible environmental analysis from multiple trusted sources before thinking the ‘All Clear’ that Mike Pence tried to serve up today was anything other than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ for this news cycle.
Oh, and for an epilogue, let’s agree that the drilling moratorium might just be a moot point as of now and if that’s the only important revenue stream available to the region, maybe through the poisoning of 5% of the entire planet, we have cleared the way to return to ‘Drill Baby Drill’, nice work Pencie, that’s an American Energy Solution.
3) So…was Howard Dean booked for the second 5 minutes of his segment, or did Joe Scarborough install a hook button to exit any guest he can’t better from the outset? It gets worse when Scarborough goes into his first serious question and it’s the ‘demogoguery’ of Paul Ryan, a guy we have complimented here and there, and it’s a blatantly hypocritical use by Joe of litmus politics. Entitlement spending is a great point to debate, but when a Democrat makes the case that entitlements won’t be touched until military spending is also on the table, and Scarborough divides a compromise into two parts so he can try and foist a ‘party of no’ example on those Dems, he undercuts in the neighborhood of 500 of his legitimate arguments elsewhere.
Incidentally, Scarborough did this exact same thing yesterday to Anthony Weiner. At least yesterday Scarborough had to toss in a ‘we need to have you back’, believable or not. You don’t ‘have’ these guys back, friend, you get out debated, then you study up, then you try again and hope that it’s not revealed that these are two paths for which you do not possess a way forward.
After a scalding embarrassment about the congress, health care and the politics of governing a nation, Scarborough appeared to give up, we call it around here ‘pulling a Blumenthal’, but not before trying to tee up an antagonizing stimulus discussion between Dean and Andrew Ross Sorkin, but Sorkin didn’t pursue the item instead opting to go after technical items about having rich people be forced out of entitlements. It was as if Sorkin said ‘look, we have to move on from that conversation at some point’, and moved on.
That is the whole problem with Morning Joe currently. This powerful format is mired in it’s adolescence. Not quite grown up and cognizant of the importance of an evolving agenda, but expected to put in adult hours every day. These kinds of regressive periods are to be expected, they have to be ironed out without a historical template to guide that process, and there is an incredibly bright future to this format and this cast. I know that they will wake up soon and say stagnation is certain death, seek out revival and go somewhere uncharted with the show that uses the element of the media in today’s political process to further progress in a new way.
Just not today.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label mike pence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mike pence. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Birdie Golf And Short Circuits
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 1st, 2010
Observations:
1) The budget sucks. There is no good angle to it. The OMB director came on the show, seemed competent, but just like Volker last week and Sommers at Davos, did not inspire confidence. Why? Birdie golf. When Orszag bases his whole premise on the fact that we are going to come within 33% of sustainability (4% deficit vs 3% deficit), and then need to do further soul searching to find that last percentage point, it seems failure is the doctrine. Birdie golf, karate, overwhelming force, these are all doctrines of success. You use your golf game to play one better than par, in karate the force of the punch doesn’t stop at the target, but 2 feet behind it, you get the point.
Orszag needed to say he won’t rest until the budget is at surplus. No one on the show even attempted to define why 3% of GDP as a budget deficit was sustainable. It sounds like if they had they would have said that, it was because we could afford the minimum payment.
The one foundation-building point made in the entire discussion was the aside that market conditions after World War II let the United States economy churn it’s way out of it’s postwar economic hole, and those conditions are not going to recur for the US economy at any point on the current time horizon. Kudos to Joe Scarborough for putting the WWII context into the conversation, but it’s not a pretty picture when your Budget Director can’t point to the surface of the water, only to a more modest drowning.
Further to this same point, what an awful appearance by Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling. The math contained in his chief point had the sole purpose to mislead grandmothers in Texas, and he needs to be called out. This atrocious month versus year deficit spending analysis uses another era’s budget surplus to claim Republican budget superiority. It also is undermined by using nominal dollar figures versus constant dollar figures. The picture is bad, but if you use 3rd grade algebra poorly on national TV twice in a week, we get to change your name to Jim, just to protect you from embarrassing yourself.
2) No one was defending the KSM trial today when Joe Scarborough temporarily lost his inner compass and went off the deep end. Look, when you repeat your point without furthering your point, that’s just agitation on display, think when that Senator on “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” slips into French on camera.
Lost in the shout downs was the ultimate point. Do we get any return on our investment if we use a public court? Is that return only some added credibility on the streets of Luxembourg? Or is that gone because of the taint put upon any public proceedings by the leading statements of the administration over the weekend?
If effectively managing your conversation, it should have gone one more step. The return on investment on any of this is whether on the margin we are creating or disenchanting the next round of potential terrorists. Take KSM’s face off the screen and stop showing it. Put the face of the suicide bomber that’s being recruited next week and have that supplant all others in this discussion. That is the calculus.
Your job as always is to aid and abet the multi-front conversation that is so complex that the leader of the free world and his administration are struggling with it. We need less Giuliani, less Robert Gibbs bizarre false bravado, less bellicose histrionics, and more sober analysis where it counts.
3) Mike Barnicle hit a ball out of the park today. At 8:15 EST, Mike connected the dots and is the first person to go on record saying that the Obama / Republican discussion Friday was great, but the similarly formatted Obama / Democrat discussion is the missing link to last year's failures and it should also be televised. The whole reason I got into this was that most days this critical connection goes unmade, that the format has to fight the tendency to repeat rather than evolve. I had already written, in my head, the scorched earth piece about you guys missing the boat again, then Barnicle went yard.
There had been little advances, like suggestions that the meetings be regular, but no one had made the ultimate connection. History will show the waste of 60 votes as a rare opportunity in 2009 was done with Democratic obstructionists like Stupak, Lieberman and Nelson able to hide in their office and deny their role in the damage done to the Obama administration. No part of the Legislature should be allowed to distort or obstruct in privacy or without an explanation to the President of the United States for their actions. The formula is so right and so timely, it might be the one part of the way forward that lights an optimistic path.
Of course, Joe Scarborough did the subscriber a great service by saying what no other Republican would say out loud: “having the Friday meeting was a {rare} mistake" in the Republican lockstep obstruction game. A mistake on par with Russia missing it's veto vote on the Korean War. Mike Pence must have an interesting list of voice mails today. If Chris Matthews calls your idea heroic, what does Roger Ailes say?
Speaking of Roger Ailes, the face off that Morning Joe repeated was only part of the story with Arianna Huffington and Ailes on ABC over the weekend. Huffington had him avoiding the subject of Fox dropping it’s coverage of the Friday Obama / Republican meeting early because it showed the Republicans in a bad light. Ailes directly avoided the question and slipped out the back door to avoid the green room part of the show. Ailes without words, agrees with Joe Scarborough that Mike Pence gave away part of the store with this invitation.
Because the store is power not progress.
That’s all today, see you tomorrow
Observations:
1) The budget sucks. There is no good angle to it. The OMB director came on the show, seemed competent, but just like Volker last week and Sommers at Davos, did not inspire confidence. Why? Birdie golf. When Orszag bases his whole premise on the fact that we are going to come within 33% of sustainability (4% deficit vs 3% deficit), and then need to do further soul searching to find that last percentage point, it seems failure is the doctrine. Birdie golf, karate, overwhelming force, these are all doctrines of success. You use your golf game to play one better than par, in karate the force of the punch doesn’t stop at the target, but 2 feet behind it, you get the point.
Orszag needed to say he won’t rest until the budget is at surplus. No one on the show even attempted to define why 3% of GDP as a budget deficit was sustainable. It sounds like if they had they would have said that, it was because we could afford the minimum payment.
The one foundation-building point made in the entire discussion was the aside that market conditions after World War II let the United States economy churn it’s way out of it’s postwar economic hole, and those conditions are not going to recur for the US economy at any point on the current time horizon. Kudos to Joe Scarborough for putting the WWII context into the conversation, but it’s not a pretty picture when your Budget Director can’t point to the surface of the water, only to a more modest drowning.
Further to this same point, what an awful appearance by Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling. The math contained in his chief point had the sole purpose to mislead grandmothers in Texas, and he needs to be called out. This atrocious month versus year deficit spending analysis uses another era’s budget surplus to claim Republican budget superiority. It also is undermined by using nominal dollar figures versus constant dollar figures. The picture is bad, but if you use 3rd grade algebra poorly on national TV twice in a week, we get to change your name to Jim, just to protect you from embarrassing yourself.
2) No one was defending the KSM trial today when Joe Scarborough temporarily lost his inner compass and went off the deep end. Look, when you repeat your point without furthering your point, that’s just agitation on display, think when that Senator on “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” slips into French on camera.
Lost in the shout downs was the ultimate point. Do we get any return on our investment if we use a public court? Is that return only some added credibility on the streets of Luxembourg? Or is that gone because of the taint put upon any public proceedings by the leading statements of the administration over the weekend?
If effectively managing your conversation, it should have gone one more step. The return on investment on any of this is whether on the margin we are creating or disenchanting the next round of potential terrorists. Take KSM’s face off the screen and stop showing it. Put the face of the suicide bomber that’s being recruited next week and have that supplant all others in this discussion. That is the calculus.
Your job as always is to aid and abet the multi-front conversation that is so complex that the leader of the free world and his administration are struggling with it. We need less Giuliani, less Robert Gibbs bizarre false bravado, less bellicose histrionics, and more sober analysis where it counts.
3) Mike Barnicle hit a ball out of the park today. At 8:15 EST, Mike connected the dots and is the first person to go on record saying that the Obama / Republican discussion Friday was great, but the similarly formatted Obama / Democrat discussion is the missing link to last year's failures and it should also be televised. The whole reason I got into this was that most days this critical connection goes unmade, that the format has to fight the tendency to repeat rather than evolve. I had already written, in my head, the scorched earth piece about you guys missing the boat again, then Barnicle went yard.
There had been little advances, like suggestions that the meetings be regular, but no one had made the ultimate connection. History will show the waste of 60 votes as a rare opportunity in 2009 was done with Democratic obstructionists like Stupak, Lieberman and Nelson able to hide in their office and deny their role in the damage done to the Obama administration. No part of the Legislature should be allowed to distort or obstruct in privacy or without an explanation to the President of the United States for their actions. The formula is so right and so timely, it might be the one part of the way forward that lights an optimistic path.
Of course, Joe Scarborough did the subscriber a great service by saying what no other Republican would say out loud: “having the Friday meeting was a {rare} mistake" in the Republican lockstep obstruction game. A mistake on par with Russia missing it's veto vote on the Korean War. Mike Pence must have an interesting list of voice mails today. If Chris Matthews calls your idea heroic, what does Roger Ailes say?
Speaking of Roger Ailes, the face off that Morning Joe repeated was only part of the story with Arianna Huffington and Ailes on ABC over the weekend. Huffington had him avoiding the subject of Fox dropping it’s coverage of the Friday Obama / Republican meeting early because it showed the Republicans in a bad light. Ailes directly avoided the question and slipped out the back door to avoid the green room part of the show. Ailes without words, agrees with Joe Scarborough that Mike Pence gave away part of the store with this invitation.
Because the store is power not progress.
That’s all today, see you tomorrow
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
When Outnumbered: Name, Rank, And Serial Number
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 26th, 2010
Observations:
1) Chris Hayes and Michael Crowley had Joe Scarborough cornered. Joe had played possum along the incumbent point we’ve all made recently: that Dems and Republicans alike are in trouble if incumbent. Then Joe took a leap of faith when he claimed this is all the sign of a center right nation. Both guests didn’t react emotionally to the claim, they dropped science: Chris Hayes said this isn’t center anything, it’s anti incompletion because no administration can do the people’s business and appear to be at the service of Wall Street and special interests, while Michael Crowley took a dismissive interpretation by JS of Chris Hayes and knocked it out of the park with the simple science that between cloture and the redefining of the national demographic by the Senate, where California and Alabama have equal representation, the center right as a population is over represented by the most severe magnitude in government. The two takes, one the peoples judgment, and one the peoples representation, Joe Scarborough could only mutter his new catch phrase “nothing to see here, move along people”. Implying the guests were somehow misconstruing his altruistic version of the tea leaves.
The music played over loud protests by the two guests who were being mis-paraphrased to such an extent that Chris Hayes got a further question in asking Joe if there was a double standard or if JS the candidate would fall within the same expectations and use anti incumbency to his benefit in any case, revealing that the voter is getting duped whether the administration accomplishes it’s goals or not.
I call it possum because it’s the same thing that Mike Pence is doing in Indiana, but from a façade of equal peril for both parties. Joe knows full well that anti incumbent has nothing to do with an anti big government platform but is instead cyclical. The size of government is coincidental with whomever resides in power at the time of the next upheaval. The voter is triggered by a feeling of powerlessness that corporate interests will continue to rule the day, and is continuing to send incumbents home in increasing droves.
2) This point was furthered by the Bob Herbert segment. All the same objections are there: we would’ve been in financial meltdown if we hadn’t acted when we did, and possibly the problems we face are ungovernable in our current structure. But there are two results of the actions we took financially, one good and one cataclysmic: we staved off a depression, but we gave every dollar we had to Wall Street, who traded the apocalypse for personal enrichment without recourse. Simultaneously, there is a worsening situation regarding doing the people’s business in Washington: the insiders are intent on holding on to power, and the war chest for doing so comes from the anti-populist interests, and the last vestiges of control over how that war chest is distributed just got thrown out by the supreme court.
The coming election will be the most obscene thing anyone has ever seen. Up will be down. Truth will be heresy. Over 100 people with the same look in their eyes as Mitt Romney will look into the camera and say literally whatever placation is available to them to make their base (the weakest, most fear based voters) walk in lockstep. It will be the disintegration of any inconvenient science or math or economic theory by sheer white noise in opposition, sort’ve like what we’ve seen on the global warming front, but on steroids.
Unfortunately, the anti-incumbent tendency of the independent voter favors a dramatic swing back to the pro-corporate profit camp, not by any wisdom, but simply by cyclical, emotional mechanics. If we said above that big or small government was accidental in the cyclical anti-incumbent tendency, we are about to face the most unhappy of accidents.
3) What’s missing from all of this gloom and doom? As my daily optimistic aside, I give you what’s missing is the synthesis of the soaring rhetoric that turned us all into believers not once but at least 5 different times with Obama, and governing.
Everyone is really mad at Barack Obama. They are mad not at his intent or belief, but at the symptoms of his inaction. We are all convinced that we’ve made a bad choice because he got into office and was reduced to George Bush II showing even a Harvard-ite struggles with the learning curve of the job. We have interpreted that as incompetence.
What’s missing is that just like a quarterback just entering the professional level, the speed of the game is a demon early on and you look like an absolute moron. While he may have thought that he needed to keep the Goldman guys close in the first post apocalyptic year, for fear that they would engineer an outright meltdown if the financial crisis wasn’t managed to their liking, he may have thought he had to use his majority in Congress to accomplish his toughest mission in his first year, he could not have thought that the sheer speed of the game would make him seem like he was a step late or outright invisible on issues that needed out front leadership.
We may not have been wrong about Barack Obama after all. There may be a tornado coming. But the stakes are clear: even though it’s conventional wisdom that it’s the 3rd year where even a great quarterback adjusts to the speed of the game, if you are the chosen one, you’re period to deliver is from right now until November 2nd, 2010.
This isn’t an endorsement, but my optimism is that sometimes it’s the stakes that deliver the goods.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Chris Hayes and Michael Crowley had Joe Scarborough cornered. Joe had played possum along the incumbent point we’ve all made recently: that Dems and Republicans alike are in trouble if incumbent. Then Joe took a leap of faith when he claimed this is all the sign of a center right nation. Both guests didn’t react emotionally to the claim, they dropped science: Chris Hayes said this isn’t center anything, it’s anti incompletion because no administration can do the people’s business and appear to be at the service of Wall Street and special interests, while Michael Crowley took a dismissive interpretation by JS of Chris Hayes and knocked it out of the park with the simple science that between cloture and the redefining of the national demographic by the Senate, where California and Alabama have equal representation, the center right as a population is over represented by the most severe magnitude in government. The two takes, one the peoples judgment, and one the peoples representation, Joe Scarborough could only mutter his new catch phrase “nothing to see here, move along people”. Implying the guests were somehow misconstruing his altruistic version of the tea leaves.
The music played over loud protests by the two guests who were being mis-paraphrased to such an extent that Chris Hayes got a further question in asking Joe if there was a double standard or if JS the candidate would fall within the same expectations and use anti incumbency to his benefit in any case, revealing that the voter is getting duped whether the administration accomplishes it’s goals or not.
I call it possum because it’s the same thing that Mike Pence is doing in Indiana, but from a façade of equal peril for both parties. Joe knows full well that anti incumbent has nothing to do with an anti big government platform but is instead cyclical. The size of government is coincidental with whomever resides in power at the time of the next upheaval. The voter is triggered by a feeling of powerlessness that corporate interests will continue to rule the day, and is continuing to send incumbents home in increasing droves.
2) This point was furthered by the Bob Herbert segment. All the same objections are there: we would’ve been in financial meltdown if we hadn’t acted when we did, and possibly the problems we face are ungovernable in our current structure. But there are two results of the actions we took financially, one good and one cataclysmic: we staved off a depression, but we gave every dollar we had to Wall Street, who traded the apocalypse for personal enrichment without recourse. Simultaneously, there is a worsening situation regarding doing the people’s business in Washington: the insiders are intent on holding on to power, and the war chest for doing so comes from the anti-populist interests, and the last vestiges of control over how that war chest is distributed just got thrown out by the supreme court.
The coming election will be the most obscene thing anyone has ever seen. Up will be down. Truth will be heresy. Over 100 people with the same look in their eyes as Mitt Romney will look into the camera and say literally whatever placation is available to them to make their base (the weakest, most fear based voters) walk in lockstep. It will be the disintegration of any inconvenient science or math or economic theory by sheer white noise in opposition, sort’ve like what we’ve seen on the global warming front, but on steroids.
Unfortunately, the anti-incumbent tendency of the independent voter favors a dramatic swing back to the pro-corporate profit camp, not by any wisdom, but simply by cyclical, emotional mechanics. If we said above that big or small government was accidental in the cyclical anti-incumbent tendency, we are about to face the most unhappy of accidents.
3) What’s missing from all of this gloom and doom? As my daily optimistic aside, I give you what’s missing is the synthesis of the soaring rhetoric that turned us all into believers not once but at least 5 different times with Obama, and governing.
Everyone is really mad at Barack Obama. They are mad not at his intent or belief, but at the symptoms of his inaction. We are all convinced that we’ve made a bad choice because he got into office and was reduced to George Bush II showing even a Harvard-ite struggles with the learning curve of the job. We have interpreted that as incompetence.
What’s missing is that just like a quarterback just entering the professional level, the speed of the game is a demon early on and you look like an absolute moron. While he may have thought that he needed to keep the Goldman guys close in the first post apocalyptic year, for fear that they would engineer an outright meltdown if the financial crisis wasn’t managed to their liking, he may have thought he had to use his majority in Congress to accomplish his toughest mission in his first year, he could not have thought that the sheer speed of the game would make him seem like he was a step late or outright invisible on issues that needed out front leadership.
We may not have been wrong about Barack Obama after all. There may be a tornado coming. But the stakes are clear: even though it’s conventional wisdom that it’s the 3rd year where even a great quarterback adjusts to the speed of the game, if you are the chosen one, you’re period to deliver is from right now until November 2nd, 2010.
This isn’t an endorsement, but my optimism is that sometimes it’s the stakes that deliver the goods.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
If Republicans Think This Is Their Time, Let Them Delude
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 21st, 2010
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo needs the truth-o-meter. Loretta Sanchez had it bad enough with the classic ‘never empower the question’ histrionics of Rudy Giuliani, but when future Wall Street super lobbyist Bartiromo claims any sort of divining rod in what’s right and rational in the banking system at this level, she is exposed as an arbiter of conflict of interest. Just Google Maria Bartiromo and try and find hard hitting journalism about the role of Moody’s in the financial meltdown, and all you’ll find is pro business fluff pieces. That’s what an apologist does, that’s what a lobbyist does. Loretta Sanchez had it exactly right, fine, talk about Countrywide, but give equal time the sub prime mortgage securitization process and the role a compromised Moody’s played in that. You were there, Maria, you were part of the hoax.
Now, as for Rudy, I don’t need game film to call you out for all of the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ level anecdotal nonsense, it just isn’t necessary. You do enough yourself. If anyone doesn’t characterize Giuliani getting off of a plane in Massachusetts as wanton opportunism, if they can’t directly see that part in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ where the fat incumbent Governor Pappy O'Daniel dances a jig to George Cluny’s sudden hero, then they simply don’t understand the shallow place hermit crab Giuliani has chosen to dwell this week.
2) Mike and Willie did something very right today when they didn’t become the 104th on-air opportunity for Indiana Republican Mike Pence, who went everywhere else to try and claim a victory lap for the Republican party based on the Massachusetts election. This guy is looking for the airtime just to float his coming senatorial campaign. But the fact that he has decided to break national based on a dubious read of momentum is astounding.
We had a super shift in the standing of the independent voter in Massachusetts. There was no pro Republican message anywhere in the Brown campaign. Pence is so far off in his interpretation of the Brown message, that he probably should be counseled by the RNC prior to causing a huge schism in any real opportunity possessed by them in the next 12 months. An incumbent is an incumbent. Financial records will already show they’re in the bag for special interests and voters have reacted to a modern media phenomenon where virtual inventory of your vast bank of conflicts of interest is part of their voting decision.
The jig is up for the Dodds and the Sessions of the world equally. Pence running around with an elephant flag is Gary Larson level misinterpretation on display.
The show, instead of having Pence, or anyone else with any party delusion for that matter, on to try and spin rightward, chose a very moderate Nicole Wallace, and a very scholarly Melissa Harris-Lacewell to have an adult discussion of the facts on the ground subsequent to the Massachusetts (and New Jersey) elections. That is an astounding victory for the show where your competitors were letting Republicans shoot episodes of ‘The Far Side’.
3) I thought it was interesting today that Mike Barnicle talked about his checkered past with banks, foreclosures, repossession and credit. This comes a couple of days after this column blasted Mike and Harold Ford Jr. for being part of the machine while claiming to be agents of honest appraisal. I want to know more, because I find this self-characterization of today troubling.
On one hand, it could be that all the personal experience led a rational broke person to marry well so that he could carry on with his low paying populist vocation comfortably. On the other hand, he might’ve run game film on himself and felt the need to place some populist credibility on his public record. Either way, Countrywide came up again today. They are hurting people. Bank of America owns them. Mortgage restructurings account for less than five percent of all defaults. The banks are not allowing any of the government mortgage relief mandates to move forward. They are slow walking the mandates trying to force a 100 cents on the dollar subsidization of mortgage restructuring by the government similar to the deal Goldman got for it’s AIG repayment. That is Bank of America hurting main street for profit, trying to dynamically force an enriching bailout one American family tragedy at a time. Who pays your mortgage again?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo needs the truth-o-meter. Loretta Sanchez had it bad enough with the classic ‘never empower the question’ histrionics of Rudy Giuliani, but when future Wall Street super lobbyist Bartiromo claims any sort of divining rod in what’s right and rational in the banking system at this level, she is exposed as an arbiter of conflict of interest. Just Google Maria Bartiromo and try and find hard hitting journalism about the role of Moody’s in the financial meltdown, and all you’ll find is pro business fluff pieces. That’s what an apologist does, that’s what a lobbyist does. Loretta Sanchez had it exactly right, fine, talk about Countrywide, but give equal time the sub prime mortgage securitization process and the role a compromised Moody’s played in that. You were there, Maria, you were part of the hoax.
Now, as for Rudy, I don’t need game film to call you out for all of the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ level anecdotal nonsense, it just isn’t necessary. You do enough yourself. If anyone doesn’t characterize Giuliani getting off of a plane in Massachusetts as wanton opportunism, if they can’t directly see that part in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ where the fat incumbent Governor Pappy O'Daniel dances a jig to George Cluny’s sudden hero, then they simply don’t understand the shallow place hermit crab Giuliani has chosen to dwell this week.
2) Mike and Willie did something very right today when they didn’t become the 104th on-air opportunity for Indiana Republican Mike Pence, who went everywhere else to try and claim a victory lap for the Republican party based on the Massachusetts election. This guy is looking for the airtime just to float his coming senatorial campaign. But the fact that he has decided to break national based on a dubious read of momentum is astounding.
We had a super shift in the standing of the independent voter in Massachusetts. There was no pro Republican message anywhere in the Brown campaign. Pence is so far off in his interpretation of the Brown message, that he probably should be counseled by the RNC prior to causing a huge schism in any real opportunity possessed by them in the next 12 months. An incumbent is an incumbent. Financial records will already show they’re in the bag for special interests and voters have reacted to a modern media phenomenon where virtual inventory of your vast bank of conflicts of interest is part of their voting decision.
The jig is up for the Dodds and the Sessions of the world equally. Pence running around with an elephant flag is Gary Larson level misinterpretation on display.
The show, instead of having Pence, or anyone else with any party delusion for that matter, on to try and spin rightward, chose a very moderate Nicole Wallace, and a very scholarly Melissa Harris-Lacewell to have an adult discussion of the facts on the ground subsequent to the Massachusetts (and New Jersey) elections. That is an astounding victory for the show where your competitors were letting Republicans shoot episodes of ‘The Far Side’.
3) I thought it was interesting today that Mike Barnicle talked about his checkered past with banks, foreclosures, repossession and credit. This comes a couple of days after this column blasted Mike and Harold Ford Jr. for being part of the machine while claiming to be agents of honest appraisal. I want to know more, because I find this self-characterization of today troubling.
On one hand, it could be that all the personal experience led a rational broke person to marry well so that he could carry on with his low paying populist vocation comfortably. On the other hand, he might’ve run game film on himself and felt the need to place some populist credibility on his public record. Either way, Countrywide came up again today. They are hurting people. Bank of America owns them. Mortgage restructurings account for less than five percent of all defaults. The banks are not allowing any of the government mortgage relief mandates to move forward. They are slow walking the mandates trying to force a 100 cents on the dollar subsidization of mortgage restructuring by the government similar to the deal Goldman got for it’s AIG repayment. That is Bank of America hurting main street for profit, trying to dynamically force an enriching bailout one American family tragedy at a time. Who pays your mortgage again?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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