The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 9th, 2010
Observations:
1) Morning Joe did a great job of presenting a diverse news program today and avoiding Koran-gate as an overwhelming force. It did get some high altitude observations here and there, but Mika made some pretty stringent requirements for how the show was not going to get sucked into a self perpetuating publicity stunt as a unwitting enabler.
They get it, I wish they would’ve gotten it during their plagues that overwhelmed them previously like Professor Gates, Reverend Wright, the ground zero muslim center, or the other 25 cover up assisting noise makers that Morning Joe helped blow completely out of proportion. The golden rule is if you talk about it, you might as well be burning a Koran yourself.
Mika seems to have circled in on this logic without fully realizing why. Here’s hoping that she will connect the dots and be the person to discover how to filter stunts from news. The amount of good that can be done by the program if it could properly filter out white noise and junk would be exponentially higher.
2) It’s not lost on anyone that Joe Scarborough ducked a major embarrassment today when he did not engage Ezra Klein on Social Security. Ezra is not alone in his finding that the real demagoguery belongs to those who call Social Security a doomed entitlement that needs to be stopped in the interest of America’s solvency.
The demagoguery claim is really simple, and Ezra Klein made it, and the Washington Post printed it: going after Social Security is the path of preying on the weakest amongst us because the antagonist himself is in fact too weak, or is motivated otherwise, to go after the segments of the government’s fiscal problems that need it more. You need to fix Medicare more, and you need to understand that Medicare is an entitlement whose subscriber base is going to grow whether the country adopts single payer or continues the horrific systemic disassembly into chaos it paths to currently. Same for the $700 billion defense budget. Same for the $2 billion a week wars. Same for the amalgamated subsidies, earmarks and sweetheart contracts that came in with teaser coverages but now at maturity cost the taxpayer a premium for less service whether its $578 million dollar schools, sugar and corn subsidies, or tax credits for business engaged in outsourcing our economy.
The problem is that there is collectively zero spine in our current form of government to fight those necessary battles, so what’s left of that group just goes after the weakest among us like a bad episode of Survivor. Joe Scarborough, promised to have Ezra Klein back at some point to have that discussion, probably on a day that is hosted by Willie Geist.
Just to finish the thought on the growth of the Medicare subscriber base. Sure in the hypothetical world of single payer in America it will grow. That is not what I’m talking about. Sooner or later the 50 million Americans that are currently uninsured will all grow into some form of qualification for Medicare. You may believe that the new Health Care reform will insure more Americans, but the morass of remaining fiefdoms like the state monopolies and the wrist slap punitives of not insuring people with preexisting conditions will continue to allow maneuvers that create uninsured citizens everywhere. And those people will walk into hospitals, and hospitals will find way to get Medicare reimbursement for them. Its similar to a back door draft in our wars. The private health insurers are still motivated to not insure the same 50 million citizens they didn’t insure last year, and you can bet they are quick at work finding ways to not cover them.
It’s something the Republicans simply don’t understand. You don’t have the option to not provide health care to people. I know it’s a deep concept, but until you start the conversation ready to admit that 100% of the population is going to get medical care if they seek it, you continue to throw useless histrionics at the problem.
The only real conversation you can have about Medicare is cost control. The industry paid you dearly to not have that conversation, so you opportuned elsewhere. Can anyone tell me the pro Social Security lobby budget? I know AARP will be up in arms when Social Security gets demagogued, but financially they are a flea in comparison to the combined forces of the health care interests.
So go ahead Joe Scarborough, tell us all how you want seniors to cut their entitlements first and those other problems can go on. I can’t wait.
3) One thing that Scarborough got right: Phil Griffin is panicking right now because he gave Lawrence O’Donnell his own show. That performance today was nearly on par with Joaquin Phoenix’s rap movie.
That dress down of Richard Trumpka was disgusting. The guy who has previously gone jugular on Marc Thiessen, Paul Cantor, Phil Musser and a cast of others can’t wait to have everyone whom he feels needs a good screaming at on his own show. The new show should be titled:
“When Crazy Larry Attacks”
I really am a fan of the in control version of Lawrence. His ability to find saliency on complex political issues leads the way whenever he is on Morning Joe. He is less effective in his various fill-in hosting jobs because the structure leads him to the bent version of himself that stops all debate and starts heaping vitriol.
That in control version comes from the framework of being a moderate foil to the combination of Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan. Those guys need a moderate foil. Especially Joe Scarborough due to his penchant for projecting wishful thinking on the likelihood of outcomes.
Take today, Boehner is too much of an unknown to be targeted in the Obama speech in Ohio. Pat Buchanan: “Targeting Downward” , Joe Scarborough “no national traction”. But wait Ezra Klein “it was in Boehner’s home state”, Tina Brown “Obama should call these do nothings out and forcefully” John Heilman “ditto on the ‘good to see Obama fighting” and Chuck Todd “they do need a target for their message” and O’Donnell: well, O’Donnell didn’t have a take because it was the Crazy Larry version and he was busy doing the Joaquin thing. But only Buchanan and Scarborough roped off the negative critique and presented it as obvious doctrine.
I am pretty sure it’s incumbent on the Obama administration to point out the cast of nobodies voters are about to put in charge of the legislature. I understand voter anger about the economy, about alienation of the white middle of America viewing a leadership that includes an African American, a woman, and Harry Reid. But as they go the other way with a tidal wave force they have to know these guys they’re putting in are known shoplifters and they are about to finish the pilfering they started under George W. Bush.
There’s a reason why there is no visible leader of the Republican party: no one wants to be the mug shot when their disingenuity is found out. That’s why John Boehner seems like Roland Burris right now. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for Boehner who’s career path should’ve topped out a long time ago.
But don’t expect Pat or Joe to figure that out for you, they’re busy trying to sell a script.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label pat buchanan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pat buchanan. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Vote For The Skunk
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Tiananmen In America
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 5th, 2010
Observations:
1) You can’t really write this column daily right now. One has to let the worm turn and that takes at a minimum 2 shows in a lot of cases. There is often not enough material to cover, not because there is not enough news, but because the show either chooses something you just wrote about to go nuts on, like the EPA not knowing the long term effects of the dispersants, or because they go after a subject superficially at first, knowing themselves and that any full take will lead to embarrassing revisions later.
The 14th amendment thing is one of those. The Morning Joe show had a take that the Republicans were far, far off the grid to be debating a repeal of the 14th amendment, but of course, that wasn’t the real debate. Pat Buchanan was able to quickly parse that the debate was about anchor babies, a subject that deserves debate and should in fact be covered in any forthcoming immigration legislation.
But the Morning Joe debate that yielded “the Republicans are dead wrong on this one” raged for all of yesterday unimpeded by the narrow scope of the Republican’s intended exploration. Not being a Republican, I should have been content to let that lumping of the issue go on unabated for as long as the cast was willing to trot through it at this superhumanly superficial level.
But if anything, the shouting despite the facts version of manufactured debate on Morning Joe is best highlighted when a faux separation from the right is the attempted engineering. This takes a complex issue and reduces it to a litmus decision: are you for or against repealing the constitution if that’s what it takes to solve our immigration crisis? We recently were forced to submit to this type of dilution of our constitutional rights with the Patriot act, now we’re looking at the 14th amendment from another angle given the next day coincidence of the California gay marriage rule.
Now Joe Scarborough has a problem, and at it’s root is the utter hypocrisy of the Republican party.
If you really want to selectively ignore equal protection under the law so that the institution of marriage can discriminate against the union of same sex life partners, then how different is the selection of certain territorial births as not eligible for citizenship?
If I were to play the other side, on which I am firmly and permanently entrenched, I think the 14th amendment needs to protect gay marriage rights universally in this country, and I would welcome a debate about the exclusion of anchor babies from automatic citizenship
Republicans need the whole 14th amendment debated now that they want automatic citizenship repealed and they want to turn off the equal protection clause for gay marriage. Joe Scarborough can’t explain his anger yesterday about how ridiculous the Republicans were for their anti-14 stance, then explain in any reconciled manner his state’s right to void equal protection stance today. Maybe he can, double speak is a talent that allows you to be on both sides of an issue with a straight face.
2) While Mr. Scarborough had a point that today’s cast was largely identifiable as the coastal blue state types who would always support the evolution of our nation towards recognizing gay marriage, the proposing that the red state average voter should have a right to ban gay marriage at the state level is a revolting throwback to fiefdoms of hate that existed throughout the darkest moments of our nation’s history. What if the blue state types got away with this, would you arm the red state types and send them in to quash the liberal rebellion?
Isn’t that sort of what the real agenda of the Tea Party movement is all about? They lost the election and this is how red state America shows off how to be a sore loser? Isn’t that the core of the issue that ‘we have to take our country back’ types everywhere are militant in their disapproval of gays, immigrants, a black president, and Chinese debt?
Encouraging the middle of the country to stand up for their right to hate gay marriage is the sort of pandering that gets people killed. Elections everywhere have shown that 55% of Americans want the illegal immigrants out, and want gay marriage banned. This is 1859 all over again. The evolution is inevitable, and for all of the people who expressed wonderment that there weren’t tanks in the streets following the crooked path of the 2000 election of George W. Bush, where is that same determination not to have these similar evolutionary steps be peaceful?
How many Republicans are going to pander this way, the same way Joe Scarborough did all day today, to create an anger in their voter base? State’s rights! You have to let the states decide for themselves! In 1859, some states decided for themselves that slavery was enshrined in their states principles. How did that turn out?
Arizona is a bellwether for this kind of sentiment. The roots of the immigration law there are people who believe that it’s OK to promote a society based on the domination of settlers of ‘European descent’. They fear they will be overrun soon and that the lack of federal enforcement of the current immigration statutes have created an existential crisis for them, and that union be damned, they will fix this problem for themselves if the alternative is to let their state become dominated by a different demographic.
What happens if 30 states create anti immigration legislation, ban gay marriage, repeal the health care reform, and do so cooperatively in a soft secession? What next?
3) Speaking of faux anger, that charade today about the Peter King vs. Anthony Weiner dispute was a real step backward for the show. All the same recent symptoms: we can make the government change course by shaming them, making a complex issue a litmus issue, we are the first people to have this take, these were all present in their altruistic glory. All were regrettable occurrences.
Mr. Scarborough, even Peter King told you why the House of Representatives took the course that led to a 2/3rds approval process. He told you that they did it to prevent ‘poison pill’ amendments that have become customary tools of obstruction on behalf of the Republicans as they lock step towards trying to shut the government down. We have talked forever about the concept of Republican amendments attached to bills only to make them politically costly for those voting yes, knowing that the author of the amendment is inserting it even though he will vote no on the ultimate passage of the bill. That is dishonest governing and the type of gamesmanship that you should be angry about.
But no, here we go again, let’s say Nancy Pelosi’s name as spitefully as possible in the neighborhood of 30 times while ranting that this congressional leadership is to blame for it’s attempt to fend off unsavory tactics of it’s opponents.
You can’t vote no on a bill and put “this bill is criminally unjust” amendments on the bill as an additional condemning step. Congress is broken, and myopic interpretation adorned with an element of anger based fakery just won’t help matters.
Did you see Peter King go from his normal ‘waiting to get mad’ self to a sheepish ‘this is a mess’ regret? You made that happen by misguided histrionics, they were all ducking out of embarrassment.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) You can’t really write this column daily right now. One has to let the worm turn and that takes at a minimum 2 shows in a lot of cases. There is often not enough material to cover, not because there is not enough news, but because the show either chooses something you just wrote about to go nuts on, like the EPA not knowing the long term effects of the dispersants, or because they go after a subject superficially at first, knowing themselves and that any full take will lead to embarrassing revisions later.
The 14th amendment thing is one of those. The Morning Joe show had a take that the Republicans were far, far off the grid to be debating a repeal of the 14th amendment, but of course, that wasn’t the real debate. Pat Buchanan was able to quickly parse that the debate was about anchor babies, a subject that deserves debate and should in fact be covered in any forthcoming immigration legislation.
But the Morning Joe debate that yielded “the Republicans are dead wrong on this one” raged for all of yesterday unimpeded by the narrow scope of the Republican’s intended exploration. Not being a Republican, I should have been content to let that lumping of the issue go on unabated for as long as the cast was willing to trot through it at this superhumanly superficial level.
But if anything, the shouting despite the facts version of manufactured debate on Morning Joe is best highlighted when a faux separation from the right is the attempted engineering. This takes a complex issue and reduces it to a litmus decision: are you for or against repealing the constitution if that’s what it takes to solve our immigration crisis? We recently were forced to submit to this type of dilution of our constitutional rights with the Patriot act, now we’re looking at the 14th amendment from another angle given the next day coincidence of the California gay marriage rule.
Now Joe Scarborough has a problem, and at it’s root is the utter hypocrisy of the Republican party.
If you really want to selectively ignore equal protection under the law so that the institution of marriage can discriminate against the union of same sex life partners, then how different is the selection of certain territorial births as not eligible for citizenship?
If I were to play the other side, on which I am firmly and permanently entrenched, I think the 14th amendment needs to protect gay marriage rights universally in this country, and I would welcome a debate about the exclusion of anchor babies from automatic citizenship
Republicans need the whole 14th amendment debated now that they want automatic citizenship repealed and they want to turn off the equal protection clause for gay marriage. Joe Scarborough can’t explain his anger yesterday about how ridiculous the Republicans were for their anti-14 stance, then explain in any reconciled manner his state’s right to void equal protection stance today. Maybe he can, double speak is a talent that allows you to be on both sides of an issue with a straight face.
2) While Mr. Scarborough had a point that today’s cast was largely identifiable as the coastal blue state types who would always support the evolution of our nation towards recognizing gay marriage, the proposing that the red state average voter should have a right to ban gay marriage at the state level is a revolting throwback to fiefdoms of hate that existed throughout the darkest moments of our nation’s history. What if the blue state types got away with this, would you arm the red state types and send them in to quash the liberal rebellion?
Isn’t that sort of what the real agenda of the Tea Party movement is all about? They lost the election and this is how red state America shows off how to be a sore loser? Isn’t that the core of the issue that ‘we have to take our country back’ types everywhere are militant in their disapproval of gays, immigrants, a black president, and Chinese debt?
Encouraging the middle of the country to stand up for their right to hate gay marriage is the sort of pandering that gets people killed. Elections everywhere have shown that 55% of Americans want the illegal immigrants out, and want gay marriage banned. This is 1859 all over again. The evolution is inevitable, and for all of the people who expressed wonderment that there weren’t tanks in the streets following the crooked path of the 2000 election of George W. Bush, where is that same determination not to have these similar evolutionary steps be peaceful?
How many Republicans are going to pander this way, the same way Joe Scarborough did all day today, to create an anger in their voter base? State’s rights! You have to let the states decide for themselves! In 1859, some states decided for themselves that slavery was enshrined in their states principles. How did that turn out?
Arizona is a bellwether for this kind of sentiment. The roots of the immigration law there are people who believe that it’s OK to promote a society based on the domination of settlers of ‘European descent’. They fear they will be overrun soon and that the lack of federal enforcement of the current immigration statutes have created an existential crisis for them, and that union be damned, they will fix this problem for themselves if the alternative is to let their state become dominated by a different demographic.
What happens if 30 states create anti immigration legislation, ban gay marriage, repeal the health care reform, and do so cooperatively in a soft secession? What next?
3) Speaking of faux anger, that charade today about the Peter King vs. Anthony Weiner dispute was a real step backward for the show. All the same recent symptoms: we can make the government change course by shaming them, making a complex issue a litmus issue, we are the first people to have this take, these were all present in their altruistic glory. All were regrettable occurrences.
Mr. Scarborough, even Peter King told you why the House of Representatives took the course that led to a 2/3rds approval process. He told you that they did it to prevent ‘poison pill’ amendments that have become customary tools of obstruction on behalf of the Republicans as they lock step towards trying to shut the government down. We have talked forever about the concept of Republican amendments attached to bills only to make them politically costly for those voting yes, knowing that the author of the amendment is inserting it even though he will vote no on the ultimate passage of the bill. That is dishonest governing and the type of gamesmanship that you should be angry about.
But no, here we go again, let’s say Nancy Pelosi’s name as spitefully as possible in the neighborhood of 30 times while ranting that this congressional leadership is to blame for it’s attempt to fend off unsavory tactics of it’s opponents.
You can’t vote no on a bill and put “this bill is criminally unjust” amendments on the bill as an additional condemning step. Congress is broken, and myopic interpretation adorned with an element of anger based fakery just won’t help matters.
Did you see Peter King go from his normal ‘waiting to get mad’ self to a sheepish ‘this is a mess’ regret? You made that happen by misguided histrionics, they were all ducking out of embarrassment.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, July 26, 2010
My Dad Knows Everything
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 26th, 2010
Observations:
1) Is it just me or was the self editing of the Scarborough take before and after Zbigniew Brzezinski’s segment gargantuan? Joe Scarborough declared war on all of Pakistan at approximately 7:05 AM EST, then Brzezinski called all pundits who describe all of Pakistan as the enemy dangerous for their lack of dimensional understanding. Then Joe Scarborough came back on the show after Mr. Brzezinski had left and claimed they had agreed all along.
Brzezinski showed a 360 degree view of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Russia, China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that contained each of their inter-connections. No one else aside from maybe Richard Haas with an Ipad could possibly have done that. Maybe it was unfair to Scarborough, who deserved to have his opinion evolve given the watershed of thought brought by Brzezinski. I just would have preferred to have it be more honest, with Scarborough using his own comeuppance as a teaching moment for all Americans trying so desperately to understand what we’re facing.
That’s right, what we’re facing. If we are spending all this money, blood and treasure over there, why should it be so hard to arrange and prioritize all the facts? Why can only one guy out of a thousand potential guests be able to adequately explain what’s going on? And why does it seem that the only reason Morning Joe is relevant or dominant on this issue is that the co anchor is related to that one guy who takes the time to explain what our reality in that region is?
Is it possible that there are interested parties out there that want this information to remain scarce? Is it possible, if you follow the money, that we are only actually accessing this logical path by accident, but money would have otherwise lined up the other 999 pundits to dilute the issue prior to any possible crystallizing moment?
There must be a reason for the lack of clarity here somewhere. But the persons out there nudging the conversation towards it’s logical center are heroes. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is among those people who peel away the scab now and again. When I see Democratic administrations use the “put American lives in danger” red herring in the face of this kind of activity, it moves beyond the hypocritical pale you would normally have labeled a Republican response, it moves into a post partisan ‘who is left to trust’ zone.
Zbigniew Brzezinski talked about this a little bit today, but from a distance. He talked about the dangerous progression of policy in Afghanistan that started in the early Obama speeches, into a nuanced tightrope of a US national policy last December, and now into a space where the policy is dictated by ‘events on the ground’. The summation of this path, said Brzezinski, is that Obama has ceded control to the military. The conflict of interest in having the military running this war is what Assange is talking about. Obama’s speeches in Turkey and Egypt were about a new American accountability, one that has re-vanished in 20 months.
Assange, for his pursuits, is targeted in the US with arrest in connection with the last WikiLeaks project that showed a US helicopter mowing down tens of Iraqi’s for no apparent reason, and has been forced by the certainty of his eventual arrest by our government, to release all the information he has prior. He wants to be sure that the people who might hope to contain damaging information have to continuously remain accountable. His arrest would be catastrophic for American foreign policy.
2) Before the fireworks concerning the WikiLeaks situation got underway, there was another quasi-scuffle early when Harold Ford tested out a pro-Bank of America sound byte. It didn’t go well. Ford wanted to make the point that the big banks paid back the TARP money and should be credited for making the US taxpayer and the US Treasury whole.
When you have Pat Buchanan lunging out of his chair at you and you are pro-commerce, it is not a good day in lobby land. Ford made what amounts to the classic ‘this little sliver of the story is the whole story – the end’ attempt. It’s a great tragedy that any credibility that he may have possessed left today, and that he chose to try and airbrush out the zero interest fed window loan direct to T-bills for profit scandal that will be in history books everywhere in 25 years. Harold also got called out on the AIG 100 cents on the dollar windfall scandal, one that will be in the same history books, and in his hasty back pedal admitted those derivative repayments probably shouldn’t have been at full value.
So, Harold, it’s just you and Brian Moynihan at lunch later today, and you’re reviewing how it went, you made Bank of America look like it wanted to move on, the TARP signified the end of the bad part of the financial crisis, that the tax free windfalls from the AIG bailout and the Fed window were deserved riches, and the future is bright.
Bank of America bought Countrywide during the meltdown. Countrywide owns more toxic mortgages than anyone. Wait, it owns the contract to service those mortgages having long ago transferred the nefarious valuation of those assets to either Fannie, Freddie or the Treasury, even Pat Buchanan knows that. So does that make the Halliburton-like relationship BofA now possesses to extract fees in maintenance on all these horrible loans scandal number 3? Did Bank of America see the future and buy all the toxic loans knowing the US government was going to trade insolvent assets for for T-bills so that two broke entities could shell-game up their part of the 23 trillion dollar scam?
And did you Harold, highlight this stuff as if you were a new pro consumer, anti BofA WikiLeaks, by simply sticking your toe in the water to see if you could float? “Hey Brian, watch this!”
3) After all that why I would embark on what is next is beyond me. The mid term elections and all elections subsequent are going to get so much media attention that a voter should be understandably overwhelmed by the coverage. While you watch people like Chuck Todd try and explain where “it” will be found in November, are you really able to tether to that singular fact which may or may not drive whatever faraway congressional election, and be convinced that result may have some bearing on your life?
What Americans don’t have is a personal relevancy scorecard. What companies do you do business with? What is your stake in the war in Afghanistan? Is it employment based or do you have a participant in your family? What is your prognosis for employment for the next 18 months, 5 years, to retirement? What is the effect of the last question upon your ability to provide health care for yourself or your family? What is the condition of your school system? What major corporations have recently infuriated you with predatory fine print, or made you wealthier via investment?
All too often, we are fighting someone else’s battle. It’s a common theme here that many of the votes cast in American elections are proxy votes. I tend to illustrate the fear proxy vote that elects my opponents, but in fairness union votes are generally the same. But this isn’t a sinister plot, it’s more a battle to empower the population that would normally enumerate voter attrition. People don’t vote because they don’t have access to what the choices mean to them. Proxy votes get them to the ballot with a thought in their head, it’s just not their own thinking.
These days even the big newspapers make a scorecard that shows their voting choices and their reasons, but essentially turn their readers into proxy votes. The right thing to do to promote voting in the new independent world would be if those same newspapers printed the architecture of the personal relevancy scorecard alongside their choices so that a person could look at the equation result of their vote.
I think Joe Scarborough would agree with me on this. We differ on abortion, not the act, but the legality of the act. But I have heard Mr. Scarborough complain consistently about litmus voting, and that is precisely what I am talking about here. I would hate to have a person find out later that they voted away their United Airlines pension based on a litmus issue like abortion. Understanding the various effects of their vote might be a solid way to get a centrist voting base to begin to generate votes that truly govern their country.
The first step is to admit proxy votes are votes for the dark side, and attrition would have been better. That might be “it” Chuck, Barack, and Rahm!
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Is it just me or was the self editing of the Scarborough take before and after Zbigniew Brzezinski’s segment gargantuan? Joe Scarborough declared war on all of Pakistan at approximately 7:05 AM EST, then Brzezinski called all pundits who describe all of Pakistan as the enemy dangerous for their lack of dimensional understanding. Then Joe Scarborough came back on the show after Mr. Brzezinski had left and claimed they had agreed all along.
Brzezinski showed a 360 degree view of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Russia, China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that contained each of their inter-connections. No one else aside from maybe Richard Haas with an Ipad could possibly have done that. Maybe it was unfair to Scarborough, who deserved to have his opinion evolve given the watershed of thought brought by Brzezinski. I just would have preferred to have it be more honest, with Scarborough using his own comeuppance as a teaching moment for all Americans trying so desperately to understand what we’re facing.
That’s right, what we’re facing. If we are spending all this money, blood and treasure over there, why should it be so hard to arrange and prioritize all the facts? Why can only one guy out of a thousand potential guests be able to adequately explain what’s going on? And why does it seem that the only reason Morning Joe is relevant or dominant on this issue is that the co anchor is related to that one guy who takes the time to explain what our reality in that region is?
Is it possible that there are interested parties out there that want this information to remain scarce? Is it possible, if you follow the money, that we are only actually accessing this logical path by accident, but money would have otherwise lined up the other 999 pundits to dilute the issue prior to any possible crystallizing moment?
There must be a reason for the lack of clarity here somewhere. But the persons out there nudging the conversation towards it’s logical center are heroes. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is among those people who peel away the scab now and again. When I see Democratic administrations use the “put American lives in danger” red herring in the face of this kind of activity, it moves beyond the hypocritical pale you would normally have labeled a Republican response, it moves into a post partisan ‘who is left to trust’ zone.
Zbigniew Brzezinski talked about this a little bit today, but from a distance. He talked about the dangerous progression of policy in Afghanistan that started in the early Obama speeches, into a nuanced tightrope of a US national policy last December, and now into a space where the policy is dictated by ‘events on the ground’. The summation of this path, said Brzezinski, is that Obama has ceded control to the military. The conflict of interest in having the military running this war is what Assange is talking about. Obama’s speeches in Turkey and Egypt were about a new American accountability, one that has re-vanished in 20 months.
Assange, for his pursuits, is targeted in the US with arrest in connection with the last WikiLeaks project that showed a US helicopter mowing down tens of Iraqi’s for no apparent reason, and has been forced by the certainty of his eventual arrest by our government, to release all the information he has prior. He wants to be sure that the people who might hope to contain damaging information have to continuously remain accountable. His arrest would be catastrophic for American foreign policy.
2) Before the fireworks concerning the WikiLeaks situation got underway, there was another quasi-scuffle early when Harold Ford tested out a pro-Bank of America sound byte. It didn’t go well. Ford wanted to make the point that the big banks paid back the TARP money and should be credited for making the US taxpayer and the US Treasury whole.
When you have Pat Buchanan lunging out of his chair at you and you are pro-commerce, it is not a good day in lobby land. Ford made what amounts to the classic ‘this little sliver of the story is the whole story – the end’ attempt. It’s a great tragedy that any credibility that he may have possessed left today, and that he chose to try and airbrush out the zero interest fed window loan direct to T-bills for profit scandal that will be in history books everywhere in 25 years. Harold also got called out on the AIG 100 cents on the dollar windfall scandal, one that will be in the same history books, and in his hasty back pedal admitted those derivative repayments probably shouldn’t have been at full value.
So, Harold, it’s just you and Brian Moynihan at lunch later today, and you’re reviewing how it went, you made Bank of America look like it wanted to move on, the TARP signified the end of the bad part of the financial crisis, that the tax free windfalls from the AIG bailout and the Fed window were deserved riches, and the future is bright.
Bank of America bought Countrywide during the meltdown. Countrywide owns more toxic mortgages than anyone. Wait, it owns the contract to service those mortgages having long ago transferred the nefarious valuation of those assets to either Fannie, Freddie or the Treasury, even Pat Buchanan knows that. So does that make the Halliburton-like relationship BofA now possesses to extract fees in maintenance on all these horrible loans scandal number 3? Did Bank of America see the future and buy all the toxic loans knowing the US government was going to trade insolvent assets for for T-bills so that two broke entities could shell-game up their part of the 23 trillion dollar scam?
And did you Harold, highlight this stuff as if you were a new pro consumer, anti BofA WikiLeaks, by simply sticking your toe in the water to see if you could float? “Hey Brian, watch this!”
3) After all that why I would embark on what is next is beyond me. The mid term elections and all elections subsequent are going to get so much media attention that a voter should be understandably overwhelmed by the coverage. While you watch people like Chuck Todd try and explain where “it” will be found in November, are you really able to tether to that singular fact which may or may not drive whatever faraway congressional election, and be convinced that result may have some bearing on your life?
What Americans don’t have is a personal relevancy scorecard. What companies do you do business with? What is your stake in the war in Afghanistan? Is it employment based or do you have a participant in your family? What is your prognosis for employment for the next 18 months, 5 years, to retirement? What is the effect of the last question upon your ability to provide health care for yourself or your family? What is the condition of your school system? What major corporations have recently infuriated you with predatory fine print, or made you wealthier via investment?
All too often, we are fighting someone else’s battle. It’s a common theme here that many of the votes cast in American elections are proxy votes. I tend to illustrate the fear proxy vote that elects my opponents, but in fairness union votes are generally the same. But this isn’t a sinister plot, it’s more a battle to empower the population that would normally enumerate voter attrition. People don’t vote because they don’t have access to what the choices mean to them. Proxy votes get them to the ballot with a thought in their head, it’s just not their own thinking.
These days even the big newspapers make a scorecard that shows their voting choices and their reasons, but essentially turn their readers into proxy votes. The right thing to do to promote voting in the new independent world would be if those same newspapers printed the architecture of the personal relevancy scorecard alongside their choices so that a person could look at the equation result of their vote.
I think Joe Scarborough would agree with me on this. We differ on abortion, not the act, but the legality of the act. But I have heard Mr. Scarborough complain consistently about litmus voting, and that is precisely what I am talking about here. I would hate to have a person find out later that they voted away their United Airlines pension based on a litmus issue like abortion. Understanding the various effects of their vote might be a solid way to get a centrist voting base to begin to generate votes that truly govern their country.
The first step is to admit proxy votes are votes for the dark side, and attrition would have been better. That might be “it” Chuck, Barack, and Rahm!
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Dollar Votes Extend To Corporations, Too
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 9th, 2010
Observations:
1) From both sides, the Senator Menendez interview was the crux of the show today. it wasn’t a watershed of new ideas, it was the crux of the dispute. Question 1: from John Heilmann went something like ‘Wall Street is abandoning you, what would you say to them to regain their trust so that they might embrace your candidates and programs going forward”? Answer, They will realize they should thank us at some point. What is going on here? Menendez has gone ostrich on us and just dove in the sand rather than answer the question. If I was Wall Street, I would say AHA, these guys are pandering at our expense and can’t even look us in the eye.
Question #2: 'your stimulus policies are largely a failure how can you expect the people to trust you' (paraphrased from Mort Zuckerman)? Answer: I think you're wrong, and Wall Street should be more to blame than the stimulus. Wrong answer. Why does Democrat after Democrat feed their own disdain? It is simply ludicrous for the Democratic party to on one hand talk about how the stimulus had any effect at all on the financial crisis, while on the other hand ask the taxpayer to fund a second correcting program. Your administration made a drunken sailor prediction on the high water mark of unemployment, using a wishful thinking, algebraic cause and effect rationale relating a truckload of disjointed handouts to a macro economic phenomenon. You have proven that you will play the dysfunctional middle and blunt any program that might resolve the nation’s ills. And today, with stimulus a bad word, you are as guilty as the other side of doublespeak for your inability to be a believable critic of your own work.
What needed to happen right there is more of the Elizabeth Warren ‘People Vs. Companies' stuff where you make your antagonist come to the table via a position of confidence. What happened instead is a guy who seemed a lot like Jimmy Carter, I have no answer and will mumble that same old ‘the American people’ desperation plea and hope people like me with or without substance.
Did Menendez go rogue to be this lacking in credibility? I think the Rahm Emmanuel quotes during the show answer that. This is Bambi wondering why the guys in the militia outfits are shooting at him, folks.
2) Wall Street influenced as much as possible on the financial regulatory reform. They kneaded the process and had a plan to fix the entire bill at the end, ala’ health reform, so that it was a dog and pony show with no teeth. This would make it like every other piece of legislation in the last quarter century. In the ‘people vs. companies’ equation, the companies have won every time.
Financial regulatory reform did not accomplish 90% of what it set out to do, just like health reform. But Wall Street and the health care industry don’t care about their short term victory of influence over the legislative branch of government. Their positon is "we cannot take the risk of having this morph into an organic reform where our market power is diminished and competition erodes our price controls. We may not have lost here, but the existence of something that said we got reformed could enable further challenges and we have to put a stop to any of that momentum."
Thus, these industries are now on the other side. It doesn’t matter what the balance of the Republican agenda is, the pro commerce Barton, Tauzin, Liebermann types need to be re-seated to preside over the government or the landscape is uncertain. You listen to CNBC and all day its ‘uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty’ as it relates to the business environment and Obama is to blame for that. Businesses are choosing to horde cash and not invest.
This is business making dollar votes. They are establishing their power over government in what amounts to an economic coup. "We won’t tolerate any ‘for the people’ populism at our expense. We will operate unencumbered free to pursue profits with as few obstacles as possible. If our profiteering results in social costs like oil spills, 40 million Americans without health coverage, 45 million unemployed, or financial panics, the government needs to clean that up at no cost to us and assist in our recovery first."
"Obama, when making deals with us, needs to understand that it will never be enough, and meeting us halfway is seen as a delaying tactic more than any compromise by our side as we wait out the political cycle’s inevitable turn and expect that the other party will return us to the status quo at godspeed."
US commercial interests have now, thanks to Barack Obama, seen the precipice of a return to populism, and they have seen enough. It’s dark comedy in the face of it that the Obama people are looking for ways to placate business rather than reading the double cross writing on the wall. It’s dark comedy that the remaining constituency of the Obama administration, the middle class, sees this first overture go to business rather than people, again.
On the show today, you have a billionaire Mort Zuckerman essentially saying this exact thing out loud, valuable and terrifying at the same time, and you have Pat Buchanan connecting the dots on the Obama administration alienating both sides, then stunningly Mika counts backwards 5.4.3.2.1 and fades to black quickly, as if that wasn’t in the script, cutting to two pre-recorded segments and signing off. Disturbing, to say the least.
3) I find it on the ugly side of convenience that after effectively sequestering the hate filled extremism of Anne Coulter for the better part of 2 years, now that she has fired a fractious shot at the Republican party she is trending again. I wish this didn’t seem like the hypocritical equivalent of ‘the benefits of brown on brown crime’, but it is. If you are to abandon hate, you have to even when it might be to your short term advantage to show how the other side is shooting at each other.
I wish I could’ve believed Joe Scarborough when he rejected any discrediting of Coulter by saying 'we don’t normally allow her any credence, but this time she has a point'. But convenience ruled the day and like Hitler walking into a bar in New York this past Tuesday while the Germans prepared to play World Cup soccer, Coulter gets to parade around as an example of the kind of extremist right wing anger that used to be OK with 90% of Republicans as recently as 2 years ago.
Back to the bunker, both of you.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) From both sides, the Senator Menendez interview was the crux of the show today. it wasn’t a watershed of new ideas, it was the crux of the dispute. Question 1: from John Heilmann went something like ‘Wall Street is abandoning you, what would you say to them to regain their trust so that they might embrace your candidates and programs going forward”? Answer, They will realize they should thank us at some point. What is going on here? Menendez has gone ostrich on us and just dove in the sand rather than answer the question. If I was Wall Street, I would say AHA, these guys are pandering at our expense and can’t even look us in the eye.
Question #2: 'your stimulus policies are largely a failure how can you expect the people to trust you' (paraphrased from Mort Zuckerman)? Answer: I think you're wrong, and Wall Street should be more to blame than the stimulus. Wrong answer. Why does Democrat after Democrat feed their own disdain? It is simply ludicrous for the Democratic party to on one hand talk about how the stimulus had any effect at all on the financial crisis, while on the other hand ask the taxpayer to fund a second correcting program. Your administration made a drunken sailor prediction on the high water mark of unemployment, using a wishful thinking, algebraic cause and effect rationale relating a truckload of disjointed handouts to a macro economic phenomenon. You have proven that you will play the dysfunctional middle and blunt any program that might resolve the nation’s ills. And today, with stimulus a bad word, you are as guilty as the other side of doublespeak for your inability to be a believable critic of your own work.
What needed to happen right there is more of the Elizabeth Warren ‘People Vs. Companies' stuff where you make your antagonist come to the table via a position of confidence. What happened instead is a guy who seemed a lot like Jimmy Carter, I have no answer and will mumble that same old ‘the American people’ desperation plea and hope people like me with or without substance.
Did Menendez go rogue to be this lacking in credibility? I think the Rahm Emmanuel quotes during the show answer that. This is Bambi wondering why the guys in the militia outfits are shooting at him, folks.
2) Wall Street influenced as much as possible on the financial regulatory reform. They kneaded the process and had a plan to fix the entire bill at the end, ala’ health reform, so that it was a dog and pony show with no teeth. This would make it like every other piece of legislation in the last quarter century. In the ‘people vs. companies’ equation, the companies have won every time.
Financial regulatory reform did not accomplish 90% of what it set out to do, just like health reform. But Wall Street and the health care industry don’t care about their short term victory of influence over the legislative branch of government. Their positon is "we cannot take the risk of having this morph into an organic reform where our market power is diminished and competition erodes our price controls. We may not have lost here, but the existence of something that said we got reformed could enable further challenges and we have to put a stop to any of that momentum."
Thus, these industries are now on the other side. It doesn’t matter what the balance of the Republican agenda is, the pro commerce Barton, Tauzin, Liebermann types need to be re-seated to preside over the government or the landscape is uncertain. You listen to CNBC and all day its ‘uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty’ as it relates to the business environment and Obama is to blame for that. Businesses are choosing to horde cash and not invest.
This is business making dollar votes. They are establishing their power over government in what amounts to an economic coup. "We won’t tolerate any ‘for the people’ populism at our expense. We will operate unencumbered free to pursue profits with as few obstacles as possible. If our profiteering results in social costs like oil spills, 40 million Americans without health coverage, 45 million unemployed, or financial panics, the government needs to clean that up at no cost to us and assist in our recovery first."
"Obama, when making deals with us, needs to understand that it will never be enough, and meeting us halfway is seen as a delaying tactic more than any compromise by our side as we wait out the political cycle’s inevitable turn and expect that the other party will return us to the status quo at godspeed."
US commercial interests have now, thanks to Barack Obama, seen the precipice of a return to populism, and they have seen enough. It’s dark comedy in the face of it that the Obama people are looking for ways to placate business rather than reading the double cross writing on the wall. It’s dark comedy that the remaining constituency of the Obama administration, the middle class, sees this first overture go to business rather than people, again.
On the show today, you have a billionaire Mort Zuckerman essentially saying this exact thing out loud, valuable and terrifying at the same time, and you have Pat Buchanan connecting the dots on the Obama administration alienating both sides, then stunningly Mika counts backwards 5.4.3.2.1 and fades to black quickly, as if that wasn’t in the script, cutting to two pre-recorded segments and signing off. Disturbing, to say the least.
3) I find it on the ugly side of convenience that after effectively sequestering the hate filled extremism of Anne Coulter for the better part of 2 years, now that she has fired a fractious shot at the Republican party she is trending again. I wish this didn’t seem like the hypocritical equivalent of ‘the benefits of brown on brown crime’, but it is. If you are to abandon hate, you have to even when it might be to your short term advantage to show how the other side is shooting at each other.
I wish I could’ve believed Joe Scarborough when he rejected any discrediting of Coulter by saying 'we don’t normally allow her any credence, but this time she has a point'. But convenience ruled the day and like Hitler walking into a bar in New York this past Tuesday while the Germans prepared to play World Cup soccer, Coulter gets to parade around as an example of the kind of extremist right wing anger that used to be OK with 90% of Republicans as recently as 2 years ago.
Back to the bunker, both of you.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Whackamole’
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) With the welcome reinsertion of the BP oil spill into the agenda today (who knows if it was an anomaly), the cast attempted to re-learn the dimensions of the crisis. Pat Buchanan smartly doubled the show back to Erin Burnett’s game changer yesterday, but then did it for the wrong news item all while the show forgot to go back to Erin today.
It’s not the size differential between BP and Exxon, it’s the net effect of the oil spill is that it’s an acquisition opportunity for offshore interests to own an even bigger profit potential for the continued sale of oil to the United States. Still missing, still the biggest story. Andrew Ross Sorkin sort of tried to bring the equity sale into the conversation, but had a tourist’s understanding of the details and described it as a non-issue. Will he seem like an expert’s expert if he writes its memoir after the fact?
And as all the conversation waged in the realm of the political implications of BP’s earnings call being coincidentally named the new ambitious target date for the well’s sealing, of the Photoshop scandal with the Economist, and the afterthought treatment of the severely dampened containment reaction thus far to the catastrophe, it was an ever so slight grenade from England that got by the group today. ‘In the trashing of BP, America refuses to acknowledge it’s infinite demand for oil as an equal culprit in the disaster’.
Your V8 engine is likely more responsible for the oil spill than the company known as BP. It is inevitable that this disaster can be festooned upon 10 middle managers that will likely face prosecution at some point, but this will serve as little restitution for the nation as it seeks to blame away the responsibility for the spill. Those managers acted the same as any managers asked to mesh profitability with safety where profitability is accounted for with 100 times the acumen.
You, America, caused this disaster. What you do next will determine the next disaster. If we do nothing about the oil situation, we will certainly have this happen to us again, as the for profit companies get more and more desperate to feed monolithic worldwide oil consumption without squandering any opportunity cost.
If we were to devalue the per barrel oil price by any marginal activity, the first thing that goes is the riskiest extraction. The last thing that goes is the availability. America is doing the math of a society bent on extinction, and the status quo barons are all too happy to be there to own the treasure once the society is vanquished.
2) Mark Halperin has velcroed himself to the set. I have had others come to me and say negative things about his often prominent role in the show, but I have mainly considered him a non entity who occasionally offers credence to the Scarborough led conversations with fair compliment. There is no discounting his book wins political journal of the year accolades everywhere, but I’m far more prone to credit John Heilemann for turning over the rocks that made the book news. I also find more of a stature to the Heilemann debate on items, right or wrong, finding that he has a take beyond evaluation of optics.
Evaluation of optics appears to be Halperin’s 5 degrees of expertise. I don’t know whether there was a shift in the MSNBC matrix as it relates to Chuck Todd, but Todd is perpetually up there with Chris Matthews in their ability to look at possible scenarios playing out and explain them. With Halperin, it just feels like he is describing what the caption should be on an existing picture. It’s a new situation and everyone should be allowed to find their way over significant time, so hope continues for a bit. This is a give and take world though, and today Mr. Halperin’s newness steered an entire conversation the exact wrong way.
Is it weakness optically to make a recess appointment? Are you kidding? It is a strength, a show of power of the Presidency. To allow the gridlock of the legislative branch to turmoil over this, to re-avow their positions, is to allow the legislative branch to derelict the real job of governing and make sales calls for the November election.
Nope, a recess appointment is just what the doctor ordered, and as infuriating as it was when George W Bush did it to avoid re-debating the war and torture in his tenure, Obama must be selectively brutal with the power he owns to force compromise anew amongst the warring sides. He should look at whether he can force Republicans to disavow ideological parades or face a charge of politicking rather than governing. And that’s just what he did.
We have crushed our President with the charge that he is a patsy to the faux virtues of bipartisanship. Now we have to live with the consequences that he will look at each new challenge he faces and give more credence to crushing back.
3) I look forward to the midterm elections. The Republicans are energized, they have benefited greatly from our administrations missteps. Our administration has been humbled by the speed of the game.
But fortune is not had until the day after the day of determination. We have won late every time in Washington, and should that ability to close out be propagated to the DNC’s management of it’s candidate’s elections ever, we could have a surprising success.
I like to think that, like with Whitman and Fiorina in California, this is a bloodletting operation. The opponents are furiously spending money and making new slogans and talking points. Those talking points are being refined to energize their base like never before. Sell the disillusionment. Sell the blame for disasters. Sell the misstep of going harder at Afghanistan. Sell the blame for the job loss.
It’s simple math really, if you are pro business you are pro jobs. If you don’t want your kids to be destitute you are for austerity. Why didn’t Obama fix and contain the spill faster. Afghanistan is unwinnable. Your stimulus did not deliver jobs as promised and is now a fiscal eyesore.
Go ahead pile on. But look again, look hard, and find a new idea anywhere in that platform.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) With the welcome reinsertion of the BP oil spill into the agenda today (who knows if it was an anomaly), the cast attempted to re-learn the dimensions of the crisis. Pat Buchanan smartly doubled the show back to Erin Burnett’s game changer yesterday, but then did it for the wrong news item all while the show forgot to go back to Erin today.
It’s not the size differential between BP and Exxon, it’s the net effect of the oil spill is that it’s an acquisition opportunity for offshore interests to own an even bigger profit potential for the continued sale of oil to the United States. Still missing, still the biggest story. Andrew Ross Sorkin sort of tried to bring the equity sale into the conversation, but had a tourist’s understanding of the details and described it as a non-issue. Will he seem like an expert’s expert if he writes its memoir after the fact?
And as all the conversation waged in the realm of the political implications of BP’s earnings call being coincidentally named the new ambitious target date for the well’s sealing, of the Photoshop scandal with the Economist, and the afterthought treatment of the severely dampened containment reaction thus far to the catastrophe, it was an ever so slight grenade from England that got by the group today. ‘In the trashing of BP, America refuses to acknowledge it’s infinite demand for oil as an equal culprit in the disaster’.
Your V8 engine is likely more responsible for the oil spill than the company known as BP. It is inevitable that this disaster can be festooned upon 10 middle managers that will likely face prosecution at some point, but this will serve as little restitution for the nation as it seeks to blame away the responsibility for the spill. Those managers acted the same as any managers asked to mesh profitability with safety where profitability is accounted for with 100 times the acumen.
You, America, caused this disaster. What you do next will determine the next disaster. If we do nothing about the oil situation, we will certainly have this happen to us again, as the for profit companies get more and more desperate to feed monolithic worldwide oil consumption without squandering any opportunity cost.
If we were to devalue the per barrel oil price by any marginal activity, the first thing that goes is the riskiest extraction. The last thing that goes is the availability. America is doing the math of a society bent on extinction, and the status quo barons are all too happy to be there to own the treasure once the society is vanquished.
2) Mark Halperin has velcroed himself to the set. I have had others come to me and say negative things about his often prominent role in the show, but I have mainly considered him a non entity who occasionally offers credence to the Scarborough led conversations with fair compliment. There is no discounting his book wins political journal of the year accolades everywhere, but I’m far more prone to credit John Heilemann for turning over the rocks that made the book news. I also find more of a stature to the Heilemann debate on items, right or wrong, finding that he has a take beyond evaluation of optics.
Evaluation of optics appears to be Halperin’s 5 degrees of expertise. I don’t know whether there was a shift in the MSNBC matrix as it relates to Chuck Todd, but Todd is perpetually up there with Chris Matthews in their ability to look at possible scenarios playing out and explain them. With Halperin, it just feels like he is describing what the caption should be on an existing picture. It’s a new situation and everyone should be allowed to find their way over significant time, so hope continues for a bit. This is a give and take world though, and today Mr. Halperin’s newness steered an entire conversation the exact wrong way.
Is it weakness optically to make a recess appointment? Are you kidding? It is a strength, a show of power of the Presidency. To allow the gridlock of the legislative branch to turmoil over this, to re-avow their positions, is to allow the legislative branch to derelict the real job of governing and make sales calls for the November election.
Nope, a recess appointment is just what the doctor ordered, and as infuriating as it was when George W Bush did it to avoid re-debating the war and torture in his tenure, Obama must be selectively brutal with the power he owns to force compromise anew amongst the warring sides. He should look at whether he can force Republicans to disavow ideological parades or face a charge of politicking rather than governing. And that’s just what he did.
We have crushed our President with the charge that he is a patsy to the faux virtues of bipartisanship. Now we have to live with the consequences that he will look at each new challenge he faces and give more credence to crushing back.
3) I look forward to the midterm elections. The Republicans are energized, they have benefited greatly from our administrations missteps. Our administration has been humbled by the speed of the game.
But fortune is not had until the day after the day of determination. We have won late every time in Washington, and should that ability to close out be propagated to the DNC’s management of it’s candidate’s elections ever, we could have a surprising success.
I like to think that, like with Whitman and Fiorina in California, this is a bloodletting operation. The opponents are furiously spending money and making new slogans and talking points. Those talking points are being refined to energize their base like never before. Sell the disillusionment. Sell the blame for disasters. Sell the misstep of going harder at Afghanistan. Sell the blame for the job loss.
It’s simple math really, if you are pro business you are pro jobs. If you don’t want your kids to be destitute you are for austerity. Why didn’t Obama fix and contain the spill faster. Afghanistan is unwinnable. Your stimulus did not deliver jobs as promised and is now a fiscal eyesore.
Go ahead pile on. But look again, look hard, and find a new idea anywhere in that platform.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Man, That White Noise?
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 24th, 2010
Observations:
1) I don’t think I would’ve liked to have read Joe Scarborough’s Twitter feed yesterday. He re-Tweeted some of the most disappointing stuff ever and it was all from the left. I have to say I was able to easily find consensus on my point amongst the white noise of vitriol, but the vitriol won the day, which is a loss for the left. I re-looked at my own column yesterday, and if the noisiest thing I wrote was that in defending Goldman Sachs by blaming the middle class for causing the mortgage crisis, you are representing the dark side, I feel like I employed restraint I was comfortable with.
But the consensus outside of the hatespeak was that Joe Scarborough talked over Chris Hayes. That he used volume and editing to cover a lack of debatable facts. Joe Scarborough knows that the white noise is the cost of doing business, so when he edits what he rebroadcasts on Twitter, and then plays the victim on today’s show, but doesn’t acknowledge the good part of the post show debate, he empowers his less classy detractors. They are allowed by Joe to defeat the message, by replacing it with hatespeak.
So if the left loses but the white noise agents win, Joe covers a loss by claiming a crime of non-contextual contempt on behalf of the left, where is the progress? I hate to say it but victims aren’t winners either. You would have been better off to do what you normally do, what your best analytics tell you to do: white noise is meant to be filtered out, and you probably should attempt to make the Chris Hayes debate recur with a level playing field. Test your ability to defend your philosophy, but don't bury it using the left’s white noise as your defense.
Chris will be there to offer up that challenge any time you want, I’m guessing.
2) For me, the big numbers went unconnected today, again. The jobs bill is $15 billion, the Wall Street bonus pool $20 billion. And everyone is high-fiving each other. What a win-win! We have declared the jobs bill pocket change. Simultaneously, we have talked of the recurrence of a single employee of a Wall Street firm getting $30,000 to $9 million in bonuses per head, which is the opposite of pocket change.
So this is a money flow that is this period’s transfer of wealth. Mika reads both sides, you’ve got Sam Stein, Pat Buchanan right there, and nothing. I think you need a connect the dots czar on the show, because it appears to me that the crew is too comfortable and you lack a competitor making you try to raise the bar.
The last two days has you blaming the middle class for the mortgage crisis and handing the baton to Pat Buchanan on today’s bonuses, where he says he thinks that they’ve earned those bonuses. That’s Cavuto level distortion.
At least Sorkin mentioned the ‘wasted for its minimalism’ view of the jobs bill, but that was yesterday, and that would be asking too much to connect.
3) I think my optimism can withstand another round of arbitrary ‘the public option is dead’ opinions from your cast today. I find the lack of coverage of the growing number of public option votes, plus the backlash of the Gibbs downplay of the public option, plus the pointing to the progress of the existing framework as the only workable solution, to be business as usual favoritism on Morning Joe. I am the first to admit that I was surprised that the calculus predicted on the show last year won out, not because the show was right, but because the Obama administration seemed to perpetuate the negative outcome via its mismanagement.
Whether or not the public option is going to prevail, as I’ve indicated before, the carrot and stick mentality is in play, and it’s not the Obama administration, it’s those legislators who have realized that the voter doesn’t need a contract with them to hold them accountable for a lack of a spine. That the non-utilization of the 60 vote majority in 2009 is a national shame, and blaming the mismanagement of Obama this time around is a legislative body unable to learn. They don’t seem to be waiting for the President to get up to game speed anymore, realizing he is on a different electoral calendar. Both the House and the Senate have had a comeuppance, that they had better show a bit of self reliance, a little less waiting as a strategy, and a lot more clock management or it’s over.
They may not have heard what they wanted from the Obama press secrateary yesterday, but gone are the days where that matters. Obama can’t stump for them and be a game changer. Obama can’t get out of bed with his awful deals with pharma and the insurers. The Dems can distance themselves, and as interesting as anything going into tomorrow, they can distance themselves on the side of progress and show the President as part of the obstruction.
That’s a form of competition on my side of the aisle we haven’t seen in a very long time. More of that Rubik’s cube alluded to today than we have banked on.
Now if only Morning Joe had that kind of competition, maybe they could say the news and see the news at the same time. Aww, you know I just kid, kid.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I don’t think I would’ve liked to have read Joe Scarborough’s Twitter feed yesterday. He re-Tweeted some of the most disappointing stuff ever and it was all from the left. I have to say I was able to easily find consensus on my point amongst the white noise of vitriol, but the vitriol won the day, which is a loss for the left. I re-looked at my own column yesterday, and if the noisiest thing I wrote was that in defending Goldman Sachs by blaming the middle class for causing the mortgage crisis, you are representing the dark side, I feel like I employed restraint I was comfortable with.
But the consensus outside of the hatespeak was that Joe Scarborough talked over Chris Hayes. That he used volume and editing to cover a lack of debatable facts. Joe Scarborough knows that the white noise is the cost of doing business, so when he edits what he rebroadcasts on Twitter, and then plays the victim on today’s show, but doesn’t acknowledge the good part of the post show debate, he empowers his less classy detractors. They are allowed by Joe to defeat the message, by replacing it with hatespeak.
So if the left loses but the white noise agents win, Joe covers a loss by claiming a crime of non-contextual contempt on behalf of the left, where is the progress? I hate to say it but victims aren’t winners either. You would have been better off to do what you normally do, what your best analytics tell you to do: white noise is meant to be filtered out, and you probably should attempt to make the Chris Hayes debate recur with a level playing field. Test your ability to defend your philosophy, but don't bury it using the left’s white noise as your defense.
Chris will be there to offer up that challenge any time you want, I’m guessing.
2) For me, the big numbers went unconnected today, again. The jobs bill is $15 billion, the Wall Street bonus pool $20 billion. And everyone is high-fiving each other. What a win-win! We have declared the jobs bill pocket change. Simultaneously, we have talked of the recurrence of a single employee of a Wall Street firm getting $30,000 to $9 million in bonuses per head, which is the opposite of pocket change.
So this is a money flow that is this period’s transfer of wealth. Mika reads both sides, you’ve got Sam Stein, Pat Buchanan right there, and nothing. I think you need a connect the dots czar on the show, because it appears to me that the crew is too comfortable and you lack a competitor making you try to raise the bar.
The last two days has you blaming the middle class for the mortgage crisis and handing the baton to Pat Buchanan on today’s bonuses, where he says he thinks that they’ve earned those bonuses. That’s Cavuto level distortion.
At least Sorkin mentioned the ‘wasted for its minimalism’ view of the jobs bill, but that was yesterday, and that would be asking too much to connect.
3) I think my optimism can withstand another round of arbitrary ‘the public option is dead’ opinions from your cast today. I find the lack of coverage of the growing number of public option votes, plus the backlash of the Gibbs downplay of the public option, plus the pointing to the progress of the existing framework as the only workable solution, to be business as usual favoritism on Morning Joe. I am the first to admit that I was surprised that the calculus predicted on the show last year won out, not because the show was right, but because the Obama administration seemed to perpetuate the negative outcome via its mismanagement.
Whether or not the public option is going to prevail, as I’ve indicated before, the carrot and stick mentality is in play, and it’s not the Obama administration, it’s those legislators who have realized that the voter doesn’t need a contract with them to hold them accountable for a lack of a spine. That the non-utilization of the 60 vote majority in 2009 is a national shame, and blaming the mismanagement of Obama this time around is a legislative body unable to learn. They don’t seem to be waiting for the President to get up to game speed anymore, realizing he is on a different electoral calendar. Both the House and the Senate have had a comeuppance, that they had better show a bit of self reliance, a little less waiting as a strategy, and a lot more clock management or it’s over.
They may not have heard what they wanted from the Obama press secrateary yesterday, but gone are the days where that matters. Obama can’t stump for them and be a game changer. Obama can’t get out of bed with his awful deals with pharma and the insurers. The Dems can distance themselves, and as interesting as anything going into tomorrow, they can distance themselves on the side of progress and show the President as part of the obstruction.
That’s a form of competition on my side of the aisle we haven’t seen in a very long time. More of that Rubik’s cube alluded to today than we have banked on.
Now if only Morning Joe had that kind of competition, maybe they could say the news and see the news at the same time. Aww, you know I just kid, kid.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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