The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 2nd, 2010
Observations:
1) Seems distressingly odd that John Heilemann would ask the question about whether the lowering of the nominal unemployment rate would be trotted out as a positive by the White House. It’s distressing on two fronts: one is that they might actually do that despite as Savannah said it is a quirk that fell the other way 2 months ago and two, there is a simple mathematical reason why the rate fell that is a very negative piece of news. Over 600,000 people fell out of the workforce counted in the unemployment number, so the rate went down because the denominator in the equation went down. Those people went somewhere when they fell out of the workforce, they went to a category best described as hopeless.
So if you make the mistake of trotting that number out there, someone is going to damn you doubly for doing it, but it’s often difficult to resist for political types, which is why it caught the eye of Heilemann.
Tread carefully lest you be seen as trumpeting a false positive indicator for short term gain, very short term gain, with a backlash.
2) Norah O’Donnell unwittingly continued the anti Boehner campaign by adding chain smoking, poorly named a ‘love for butts’, and reinforced the boozing charge. In a public relations war, contrary to what the Wall Street Journal guy says, you want John Boehner on TV right now, because he is a trainwreck not seen since Jimmy and Tammy Fay Baker.
The late night shows had a field day with Boehner. A monster of a point was made with little fanfare by Willie Geist earlier this week, that Saturday Night Live being out of production right now is a huge break for the the Ohio congressman. Otherwise, he might get the kind of permanent roast that moves into the ‘more famous than the actual guy’ category.
I’m still stuck on ‘Breakfast Club’: “could you describe the ruckus, sir?”
3) In violation of the Morning Joe ban on any coverage of the BP oil spill, the skeleton crew took liberty today to show a 2 ½ minute clip of the oil in the gulf with some generic news sprinkled on top by Norah.
I hope they don’t get in too much trouble. I mean, it’s been decided right? This show is about politics and the most important story of the new decade can be shoved aside in the pursuit of a pure agenda. I haven’t seen such a plan Fox covered the inaugeration.
Not even the top of the hour news is certain to even mention the spill. The Boehner story got all the coverage that wasn’t the pregame on the unemployment number or the Week In Review.
I am thoroughly appalled that the Morning Joe show has completed another week in absolute ignorance of the Gulf oil disaster. I don’t know how it is happening, it’s confusing, and I wish it would correct.
That’s all for today, see you Tuesday.
Showing posts with label norah o'donnell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label norah o'donnell. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Senior Skip Day
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) God bless Dylan Ratigan. Optics, symbolic victories, 2 out of 3 major goals accomplished: hogwash. As predicted here, on the DR show and anywhere else where the whitewash doesn’t work anymore, the financial reform package is an 8 cylinder vehicle missing 7 spark plugs. In the dark of night Blanche Lincoln capitulated as expected on derivatives reform, and this morning CNBC was awash in fake complaining so as not to be seen as though dancing a jig.
This is not different than health care reform. Obama was correctly accused by Ratigan today of being as in bed with the barons of the status quo as the Republican party.
I would take it a step further.
That this is in fact the optics of being a Democratic politician. You are required to make laws with names that falsely claim populist reform but substantively move the needle further towards the status quo. Doublespeak. Will Obama become the greatest artist of doublespeak in history, or at least since Bill Clinton? His oratory soars like no one since Martin Luther King. But the substance is undeniably short of what the oratory claims.
Or am I just impatient with the checks and balances system? Will there be year two strengthening of all three major 2010 reform packages? We are stuck without that answer. We won’t get Ron Paul on the right or Howard Dean on the left. Ever. Howard may have even switched sides under the ‘life is too short to go out losing’ ideology.
I will be paying keen attention to Dylan Ratigan’s “Fix It Week” next week. Let the record show Matt Taibbi is now 100 for 100 in predicting the futility of government to govern in a time of crisis. Elizabeth Warren got a small victory with consumer protection, but at what larger cost?
2) This week has now morphed into BP week, through an absence of meaningful coverage of the spill. What appears to be happening is that the cast is tired of how bad this news is. Is the BP story bad for your career? Do you need some happy news? Is that what you signed up for?
Look BP should have lost it all by now, they were given a reprieve, and why? Today was a triple witching news day, but two witches got off the hook. We decided to back hash the McChrystal and Patraeus situations, in a non event that smacks of running out of ideas, and let BP and financial reform get what amounts to a proportionate free pass. Yea, Ratigan got a rant, but is it a rant when the rest of the cast goes the other way? What happened is Halperin, Heilemann, O’Donnell, Deutsch and Geist all did a career check and rather than venture into dangerous waters, they opted for the good optics over the substantive futility, and looked the other way.
But systematically since 6:30 AM on Monday, the Morning Joe show abandoned the BP story. This is nothing short of a dramatic clutch victory for the villain oil company. The breathing room a week of media reprieve gives them may not be much because, as Geist says, this is a “creeping” story that will be back like groundhog day next week, but this is a wasted week with the show kicking the can down the road.
There is so much work to do. There is still an infrastuctural shortcoming in the spill containment plan. The Welch plan is still unattempted. The situation got worse, and the solution got farther.
On the infrastructure side, one thing keeps coming to mind. In our forest fire reaction in the United States, we use a Han Solo looking rag tag fleet of retired warplanes and commercial jets to do our fighting. Other countries make devoted fleets of firefighting airplanes, like Canada. Canada has float planes that land in any water, take on the water, take flight, and drop on a fire source. I saw this first hand when the bright, new yellow Canadian planes on loan landed off of Pacific Palisades a few years back to resupply their water to fight a Burbank fire. It seems so, well, evolved.
We are at a same situation with the BP spill. We are drafting shrimp boats to help contain oil rather than owning any specialized reaction vessels. Britain, Norway, Venezuela, and Canada all have that fleet and have offered it to us. At the height of my cynicism, I’m forced to believe that this slow walking of accepting those fleet’s aid is a political one, so we don’t seem so feckless, so beholden to commercial interest that we allow these oil companies to operate without any safety net in the United States, whether that net is public or private.
Would’ve been great to have the Morning Joe show be on point on that news as it emanated from the gulf this week. Where were you again?
3) This is the first show I’ve seen that didn’t include the new Erin Burnett 3 points feature, and on the day financial reform passed conference? And the first show that replayed old interviews to cover the absence of the stars. That replay thing actually seems like a good idea. Some of that stuff is worth repetition multiple times, and those chosen were in that category.
Producers go 1-1 on the day, well 1-2. The west coast stuff is awful. Those people look like Iranian prisoners, except for Lawrence O’Donnell.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Observations:
1) God bless Dylan Ratigan. Optics, symbolic victories, 2 out of 3 major goals accomplished: hogwash. As predicted here, on the DR show and anywhere else where the whitewash doesn’t work anymore, the financial reform package is an 8 cylinder vehicle missing 7 spark plugs. In the dark of night Blanche Lincoln capitulated as expected on derivatives reform, and this morning CNBC was awash in fake complaining so as not to be seen as though dancing a jig.
This is not different than health care reform. Obama was correctly accused by Ratigan today of being as in bed with the barons of the status quo as the Republican party.
I would take it a step further.
That this is in fact the optics of being a Democratic politician. You are required to make laws with names that falsely claim populist reform but substantively move the needle further towards the status quo. Doublespeak. Will Obama become the greatest artist of doublespeak in history, or at least since Bill Clinton? His oratory soars like no one since Martin Luther King. But the substance is undeniably short of what the oratory claims.
Or am I just impatient with the checks and balances system? Will there be year two strengthening of all three major 2010 reform packages? We are stuck without that answer. We won’t get Ron Paul on the right or Howard Dean on the left. Ever. Howard may have even switched sides under the ‘life is too short to go out losing’ ideology.
I will be paying keen attention to Dylan Ratigan’s “Fix It Week” next week. Let the record show Matt Taibbi is now 100 for 100 in predicting the futility of government to govern in a time of crisis. Elizabeth Warren got a small victory with consumer protection, but at what larger cost?
2) This week has now morphed into BP week, through an absence of meaningful coverage of the spill. What appears to be happening is that the cast is tired of how bad this news is. Is the BP story bad for your career? Do you need some happy news? Is that what you signed up for?
Look BP should have lost it all by now, they were given a reprieve, and why? Today was a triple witching news day, but two witches got off the hook. We decided to back hash the McChrystal and Patraeus situations, in a non event that smacks of running out of ideas, and let BP and financial reform get what amounts to a proportionate free pass. Yea, Ratigan got a rant, but is it a rant when the rest of the cast goes the other way? What happened is Halperin, Heilemann, O’Donnell, Deutsch and Geist all did a career check and rather than venture into dangerous waters, they opted for the good optics over the substantive futility, and looked the other way.
But systematically since 6:30 AM on Monday, the Morning Joe show abandoned the BP story. This is nothing short of a dramatic clutch victory for the villain oil company. The breathing room a week of media reprieve gives them may not be much because, as Geist says, this is a “creeping” story that will be back like groundhog day next week, but this is a wasted week with the show kicking the can down the road.
There is so much work to do. There is still an infrastuctural shortcoming in the spill containment plan. The Welch plan is still unattempted. The situation got worse, and the solution got farther.
On the infrastructure side, one thing keeps coming to mind. In our forest fire reaction in the United States, we use a Han Solo looking rag tag fleet of retired warplanes and commercial jets to do our fighting. Other countries make devoted fleets of firefighting airplanes, like Canada. Canada has float planes that land in any water, take on the water, take flight, and drop on a fire source. I saw this first hand when the bright, new yellow Canadian planes on loan landed off of Pacific Palisades a few years back to resupply their water to fight a Burbank fire. It seems so, well, evolved.
We are at a same situation with the BP spill. We are drafting shrimp boats to help contain oil rather than owning any specialized reaction vessels. Britain, Norway, Venezuela, and Canada all have that fleet and have offered it to us. At the height of my cynicism, I’m forced to believe that this slow walking of accepting those fleet’s aid is a political one, so we don’t seem so feckless, so beholden to commercial interest that we allow these oil companies to operate without any safety net in the United States, whether that net is public or private.
Would’ve been great to have the Morning Joe show be on point on that news as it emanated from the gulf this week. Where were you again?
3) This is the first show I’ve seen that didn’t include the new Erin Burnett 3 points feature, and on the day financial reform passed conference? And the first show that replayed old interviews to cover the absence of the stars. That replay thing actually seems like a good idea. Some of that stuff is worth repetition multiple times, and those chosen were in that category.
Producers go 1-1 on the day, well 1-2. The west coast stuff is awful. Those people look like Iranian prisoners, except for Lawrence O’Donnell.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Monday, March 8, 2010
The Precipice Of Victory
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) Really a great job strengthening the lineup to go without Joe Scarborough today. In a first, Willie Geist moves to the JS chair with Mika still on set, and carefully walks the appropriate line between the features guy and the shows coordinator. Its sort of a role reversal where Mika gives up a lot of the coordination job and goes after the ideological high ground. This culminates in Willie leading the charge when Mika too runs off to other activity. In a word or two, it worked, surprisingly, and the show has even more tools to carry three hours than it did Friday.
This isn’t possible without 3 hours stints from Pat Buchanan and Norah O’Donnell. Mika appears comfortable and cognizant with this reality in that she actually hands off to Norah when she isn’t confident she will launch the best inquiry into a subject. I’m satisfied that will result in less meandering, because while it’s a 3 hour show, those 10 minute Youtube friendly segments can be a disaster without clutch questions early to define the debate.
Still, Pat isn’t Joe, and the show leans left when Joe is gone, but more than one viewpoint gets a consistent entry into most debates.
2) The Bai segment was particularly interesting in that it seems like we are really trying to find consensus on where progress will come from. We have spent time on lobbyists, the management of the Obama administration, and the irrationality of the voting population, but to sum up that it’s still the 535 guys in the legislature responsible for their own votes, legacy, response to voters, response to lobbyist, and behavior is an integration that seems not just appropriate, but next level consensus building.
We don’t often hear this type of guest defending the health industry’s right to affect legislation. Admittedly it was self-contrarian, but it’s still a refreshing bit of lucidity saying in a more advanced world there isn’t a ban on lobbying, just a realistic balance between progress and fairness that incorporates all stakeholders in a debate.
Information is so much more efficiently distributed at this point, that there is less of a threat that a politician can hide in a Berlusconi-esque world of effacing media. This process which drives the Fox News type outlets in our world, doesn’t take into account the Opencongress’ and the Wikipedia’s of the world that are fiercely bringing a C-Span type of information to a Google population.
In that kind of informational society, the voter is the editor. They can choose to listen to their ideology sermonized back to them, or they can seek out a lucid truth. They also are forced more and more to disclose on what basis did they come upon their ideology. Their church? Fox News? Jon Stewart? Rachel Maddow? Their union? Their husband or wife? Their employer? More and more, most of us prefer two or more sources and more and more of us prefer provable consensus. This probably stems from the instinctive knowledge that disinformation lives out in the open now more than ever, and before we invade Iraq again, we want to be sure we have access to our own Mr. X to double check the facts on the ground.
3) At risk of violating a principle that I hold in very high regard, the jinx rule, there has to be a little bit of optimism at this point that we are at the threshold of history. No, not because health care is about to pass, or that the Iraqi election is interesting, or that Pakistan is doing it’s part to turn extremism out, or that Iran is not able to effect trouble around it because of it’s domestic turmoil, or that even Mitt Romney is talking carbon tax. It’s the synthesis. The integration of those facts. Is there another 25 year hiatus from combat deployment coming? Will we have health services come to us? Will a fatwa against use of terrorism bring 96% of Islam into the global fold and progress the principle of an open global society?
Of course, there was some attempt to include financial reform in that today on the show. I’m definitely not there, but those other facts seem to be a drag on the ascent of the perception of the value of the gold Krugerrand today in the face of hollow financial reforms. The Euro isn’t ever going to be the same, the US financial reform is hollow, the Goldman’s of the world appear to have gotten away with it and don’t face any imminent clawback, which they clearly should.
But just using the Goldman example here, 9/11 perversely created a global war profiteer world that might be showing signs of subsiding, the health care bubble that currently artificially siphons money from sick people to Wall Street may be at it’s apex this winter and face a different set of prospects, and carbon emission has been an untaxed free for all for every American business for our entire history. Without those things, Goldman will have to find a new bubble to manipulate it’s proprietary siphon as a net result.
That one could say Haliburton is a stock that might have seen it’s best days, that Blue Cross will have to accept assigned risk patients at unprofitable premiums, and that Exxon and Sempra can’t cloud our skies while running green themed advertisements, those are the real set of benchmarks to underpin optimism today.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Really a great job strengthening the lineup to go without Joe Scarborough today. In a first, Willie Geist moves to the JS chair with Mika still on set, and carefully walks the appropriate line between the features guy and the shows coordinator. Its sort of a role reversal where Mika gives up a lot of the coordination job and goes after the ideological high ground. This culminates in Willie leading the charge when Mika too runs off to other activity. In a word or two, it worked, surprisingly, and the show has even more tools to carry three hours than it did Friday.
This isn’t possible without 3 hours stints from Pat Buchanan and Norah O’Donnell. Mika appears comfortable and cognizant with this reality in that she actually hands off to Norah when she isn’t confident she will launch the best inquiry into a subject. I’m satisfied that will result in less meandering, because while it’s a 3 hour show, those 10 minute Youtube friendly segments can be a disaster without clutch questions early to define the debate.
Still, Pat isn’t Joe, and the show leans left when Joe is gone, but more than one viewpoint gets a consistent entry into most debates.
2) The Bai segment was particularly interesting in that it seems like we are really trying to find consensus on where progress will come from. We have spent time on lobbyists, the management of the Obama administration, and the irrationality of the voting population, but to sum up that it’s still the 535 guys in the legislature responsible for their own votes, legacy, response to voters, response to lobbyist, and behavior is an integration that seems not just appropriate, but next level consensus building.
We don’t often hear this type of guest defending the health industry’s right to affect legislation. Admittedly it was self-contrarian, but it’s still a refreshing bit of lucidity saying in a more advanced world there isn’t a ban on lobbying, just a realistic balance between progress and fairness that incorporates all stakeholders in a debate.
Information is so much more efficiently distributed at this point, that there is less of a threat that a politician can hide in a Berlusconi-esque world of effacing media. This process which drives the Fox News type outlets in our world, doesn’t take into account the Opencongress’ and the Wikipedia’s of the world that are fiercely bringing a C-Span type of information to a Google population.
In that kind of informational society, the voter is the editor. They can choose to listen to their ideology sermonized back to them, or they can seek out a lucid truth. They also are forced more and more to disclose on what basis did they come upon their ideology. Their church? Fox News? Jon Stewart? Rachel Maddow? Their union? Their husband or wife? Their employer? More and more, most of us prefer two or more sources and more and more of us prefer provable consensus. This probably stems from the instinctive knowledge that disinformation lives out in the open now more than ever, and before we invade Iraq again, we want to be sure we have access to our own Mr. X to double check the facts on the ground.
3) At risk of violating a principle that I hold in very high regard, the jinx rule, there has to be a little bit of optimism at this point that we are at the threshold of history. No, not because health care is about to pass, or that the Iraqi election is interesting, or that Pakistan is doing it’s part to turn extremism out, or that Iran is not able to effect trouble around it because of it’s domestic turmoil, or that even Mitt Romney is talking carbon tax. It’s the synthesis. The integration of those facts. Is there another 25 year hiatus from combat deployment coming? Will we have health services come to us? Will a fatwa against use of terrorism bring 96% of Islam into the global fold and progress the principle of an open global society?
Of course, there was some attempt to include financial reform in that today on the show. I’m definitely not there, but those other facts seem to be a drag on the ascent of the perception of the value of the gold Krugerrand today in the face of hollow financial reforms. The Euro isn’t ever going to be the same, the US financial reform is hollow, the Goldman’s of the world appear to have gotten away with it and don’t face any imminent clawback, which they clearly should.
But just using the Goldman example here, 9/11 perversely created a global war profiteer world that might be showing signs of subsiding, the health care bubble that currently artificially siphons money from sick people to Wall Street may be at it’s apex this winter and face a different set of prospects, and carbon emission has been an untaxed free for all for every American business for our entire history. Without those things, Goldman will have to find a new bubble to manipulate it’s proprietary siphon as a net result.
That one could say Haliburton is a stock that might have seen it’s best days, that Blue Cross will have to accept assigned risk patients at unprofitable premiums, and that Exxon and Sempra can’t cloud our skies while running green themed advertisements, those are the real set of benchmarks to underpin optimism today.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Dogs And Cats Living Together
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) How can you watch Elizabeth Warren and not go out and start hoarding gold Krugerrands? I mean that’s a bleak outlook, the small signs are there that a big second financial struggle is upon us. The Norah O’Donnell question is the crux of it all, how has the financial industry been allowed to create a second precipice unchecked, and it’s an important point. That should be Mika asking that question. Currently the show needs to import someone to ask the connect the dots question. We have done nothing to prevent the next collapse and the second bubble is forming.
Buchanan brings up the Chinese divestment strategy on US bonds. Perriello quotes ‘the recession is already over for the rich in this country, but the rest of us are miserable without a sign of our recession ending’. But Warren, she has turned into the true canary in the coal mine. And she looks near as though her hope is eroding.
2) Anthony Wiener didn’t have to be in the room to still be kicking Republican ass. John Shadegg, the baby lifter, is on the show trying to not be a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance. He sounds like a salesman you would try and avoid. Like the guy that the second after you sign his deal, his demeanor changes to ‘you work for me now’. There you are, feeling like if you don’t talk at the speed of light and create cocktail talking points at a rate of 5 per second, Anthony Wiener wins, and he is not even in the room.
Yea, I know, it seems like I’m doing the denial, that Democrats are equally guilty of allowing special interest to poison the well, that the mandate is in both current bills, that unions are preventing some of the competition that would help the overall market. But the bottom line is that the Republicans sound great now, but were silent for their run. They will get their chance to put those three things into law only because the Democrats will have enacted the first blueprint to fix the system.
Your status quo is far more damaging than the compromises that are present to get that toughest first step completed. Don’t ever forget, the 16 years that the Republicans didn’t do a single thing to fix health care, and did something tragically grift-worthy with their prescription drug work, you were getting the lions share of the buy off from the benefiting lobbies. Your wholly owned subsidiary cashed checks that whole time. The only reason you’ve got all your good ideas out there now is that you’ve lost control of the spot light.
3) The jobs bill is a sad joke. Even today, MSNBC is running around touting the positive political gains of a win. What win? To win hollow victories really only cements the charge of mismanagement levied upon the White House. It’s time for the White House to turn MSNBC off, because they are entering an echo chamber that allows them to claim victory over meaningless gains. It’s like when Verizon is at the Lakers game and they draw a winner for a free cell phone. There are 20,000 people in the building when they do that. And 15,000 of them are smart enough to elicit a Bronx cheer when someone ‘wins’ a contract for $1400 of charged cell phone service by virtue of a ‘free’ phone.
It’s more important to circle back to Rep. Perriello. He is physically upset at the jobs bill. He is as upset at the jobs bill as Wiener is at Republican doublespeak and Democratic weakness. The common denominator? We need a youth movement that disallows placebo.
And as Morning Joe is the pre game show for the big summit, do you predict that it will feel anything like a youth movement at Blair House, or some really angry entrenched old guys who are locked into their many years of back room deals and can’t map a way forward?
Observations:
1) How can you watch Elizabeth Warren and not go out and start hoarding gold Krugerrands? I mean that’s a bleak outlook, the small signs are there that a big second financial struggle is upon us. The Norah O’Donnell question is the crux of it all, how has the financial industry been allowed to create a second precipice unchecked, and it’s an important point. That should be Mika asking that question. Currently the show needs to import someone to ask the connect the dots question. We have done nothing to prevent the next collapse and the second bubble is forming.
Buchanan brings up the Chinese divestment strategy on US bonds. Perriello quotes ‘the recession is already over for the rich in this country, but the rest of us are miserable without a sign of our recession ending’. But Warren, she has turned into the true canary in the coal mine. And she looks near as though her hope is eroding.
2) Anthony Wiener didn’t have to be in the room to still be kicking Republican ass. John Shadegg, the baby lifter, is on the show trying to not be a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance. He sounds like a salesman you would try and avoid. Like the guy that the second after you sign his deal, his demeanor changes to ‘you work for me now’. There you are, feeling like if you don’t talk at the speed of light and create cocktail talking points at a rate of 5 per second, Anthony Wiener wins, and he is not even in the room.
Yea, I know, it seems like I’m doing the denial, that Democrats are equally guilty of allowing special interest to poison the well, that the mandate is in both current bills, that unions are preventing some of the competition that would help the overall market. But the bottom line is that the Republicans sound great now, but were silent for their run. They will get their chance to put those three things into law only because the Democrats will have enacted the first blueprint to fix the system.
Your status quo is far more damaging than the compromises that are present to get that toughest first step completed. Don’t ever forget, the 16 years that the Republicans didn’t do a single thing to fix health care, and did something tragically grift-worthy with their prescription drug work, you were getting the lions share of the buy off from the benefiting lobbies. Your wholly owned subsidiary cashed checks that whole time. The only reason you’ve got all your good ideas out there now is that you’ve lost control of the spot light.
3) The jobs bill is a sad joke. Even today, MSNBC is running around touting the positive political gains of a win. What win? To win hollow victories really only cements the charge of mismanagement levied upon the White House. It’s time for the White House to turn MSNBC off, because they are entering an echo chamber that allows them to claim victory over meaningless gains. It’s like when Verizon is at the Lakers game and they draw a winner for a free cell phone. There are 20,000 people in the building when they do that. And 15,000 of them are smart enough to elicit a Bronx cheer when someone ‘wins’ a contract for $1400 of charged cell phone service by virtue of a ‘free’ phone.
It’s more important to circle back to Rep. Perriello. He is physically upset at the jobs bill. He is as upset at the jobs bill as Wiener is at Republican doublespeak and Democratic weakness. The common denominator? We need a youth movement that disallows placebo.
And as Morning Joe is the pre game show for the big summit, do you predict that it will feel anything like a youth movement at Blair House, or some really angry entrenched old guys who are locked into their many years of back room deals and can’t map a way forward?
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