For Keith, My Brother

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for the Week ending November 19th, 2010

Observations:

1) It started off innocuous enough, with the Morning Joe cast failing to demonstrate equal vision by taking a “stand” regarding the royal wedding news while stumbling through every media trap set by the Palin family. It was so obviously a double self imposed standard that they were left muttering to themselves on air about why the Palin non news kept getting devoted segments. On two consecutive days this occurred with Palin scoring devoted sets while the gang on Morning Joe attempted to pat itself on the back for its “filtering” of the wedding news. Even Willie got caught up trying to sell his features bit with a line about how the news portion of the show had standards but he could show a horse in a car. It’s really off putting when even Willie Geist loses leverage on what should have been a pretty good one liner because he suddenly realized the show had shown a horse named Palin in a car with zero filter for most of the week.

2) Then the cast took its Reagan era wood chopping technique and trained it on the House not passing unemployment extensions while simultaneously proposing tax breaks for the rich that are nearly 6 times as costly to our deficit. Joe Scarborough trotted out the line and logic that small business owners can’t get people to work for them for 17 dollars an hour because they don’t want to risk losing their unemployment. Like it’s a bad thing. Between the two revenue sources, which one has used the economy to reduce staff at every opportunity in the last two years, and which one has kept up its end of the bargain faithfully ever since the jobs began pouring out of the country? So if I can make 17 bucks an hour is that full time or part time? Does it have a 99 week guarantee of continuous employment or is it a casual? When you find an apples to apples comparison call me, but while interesting, your attempt to explain away the congressional action is really just the banal analysis of someone who has steady work in a ‘haves and have nots’ mentality.

3) No one is talking about the most disturbing element of the Palin presidency. If Sarah Palin rides a populist wave to the White House, she will be in the top office with at best an extension college education and the temperament of a me-first school board opportunist. Who will be her Dick Cheney? Is this the same line of action that brought us George W Bush? He is nice enough but just not of the mold required to be a leader of the free world. It is very interesting that Morning Joe crew and guests use the same ‘intellectual curiosity’ quip in describing Palin but are unable to connect the dots that this was the chief gripe about W.

Somewhere out there is Mr. Burns. Is he with United Technologies or Sempra now? Does he have some shadow elite position in a near government think tank? Was he already chosen as the next steward of our nation in the event that the nation can be stolen by Sarah Palin? We now lucidly acknowledge that the 43rd presidency was largely run by Dick Cheney, that there was an internal coup powered by Bush 41 executives somewhere around 2006 to wrest absolute power away from Cheney in a failed attempt to install Romney as successor, but that in the end it was best to use a placeholder, McCain, once the presidency was a foregone conclusion. This year’s midterms cast a foreboding image of what the next two years hold as the Republican party wants to have multiple paths to reinstalling it’s regime, one with Romney, one with Palin, probably another with Jeb.

4) Speaking of temperament, you have to hand it to the Republicans for having superior temperament. Mainly it’s Bill Maher that speaks to this issue, and shockingly in the Jon Stewart Obama interview, the superior temperament belonged to Stewart. Republicans do what they set out to do and compromise as little as possible. They telegraph that their foreign partnerships are only going to last as long as needed, that nothing is permanent, without any moral hesitation, and with remarkable purpose. It’s not fair, but it’s not a surprise. The lockstep obstruction of the last two years is simply remarkable as an extension of the Dick Cheney remorselessness from the previous regime. Maher’s reflection on compromise when it is really just goading Democrats closer to the Republican line systematically is spot on.

We are watching an erosion of the higher level consciousness in our government to a lower level consistency based attack organization. It appears to the naked eye to be a game of breakout where the obstacles to a Republican return to rule are being cast aside one brick at a time. The Democrats have only a couple of fighters, but a lot of marshmallow place holders who apparently know nothing of Machiavelli’s power vacuum.

I think it’s interesting that Joe Scarborough reads this megatrend and thinks independent candidates are the answer. I feel like he misses Bill Maher’s critical point, that the independent voter just got compromised and cooped, just like the Democratic Party. Independent voters just voted to bring back the architects of the failure because the party of consciousness didn’t appear to them to have the verve to drive the ship through rough seas. Independent voters have just made a type I statistical error. They got the hypothesis right in 2008, but irrationality made a false positive outcome occur in 2010. This is a critical theory for understanding what lies ahead. The voter is nowhere near getting what they want so they are just going to swing 180 degrees every two years. They are not rewarding any success or repudiating any failure anymore, they are simply reacting to the same negative state of things with randomly opposite outcomes.

A graph




Shows what irrational voter outcomes do for the next few election cycles. We will likely be in an economic malaise for some time, and with it the voter will toss out whatever bums they find in office every two years. Unfortunately, the midterms will destabilize the government, but unfortunately for Republicans, randomness favors Democrats during presidential elections.

When the message prevails over the substance, this kind of thing occurs. When reforms are mirages with doublespeak names, this kind of thing occurs. When a Democratic party enters into an unfavorable arena, one that asks it to compromise with an uncompromising adversary, and it lacks the LBJ will to toe its own value line, this kind of thing occurs.

5) John Tyner’s San Diego airport blowup is a martyrdom operation no doubt. He is simply asking that the humiliation stop, that US citizens not be seen as lambs in the face of yet another government contracts scandal. Scandals like subsidies nearly always cause anomalies that can over time turn a normal situation into a boundary-less one that needs citizen revolt to right the ship. In the United States it takes individual attack to correct this stuff, because unlike Greece or France, we have lost out civil protest gene somewhere along the way.

The scandal is clearly the Michael Chertoff lobby effort to install these radiation expelling body scanners, then enforcing their involuntary application by putting a typically Chertoff-draconian negative pat down as the alternative. The pilots aren’t saying it’s an inconvenience, they are saying the machines aren’t safe, and aren’t making us safer.

Neither is wanton disregard for the airline consumer. What other economic opportunities are there for the $500 it cost to fly these days? A washer or some other durable good? An Ipad? A new sofa? My point is that Janet Napolitano has flatly instructed the American consumer to explore alternatives to flying if they don’t want to submit to Chertoff gate. Did she check with the airlines before undermining their marketing message?

It is with untold embarrassment that I admit that this is likely the clearest example yet of an administration that just does not comprehend how business works. It is also confounding why they would dismantle the trust of the TSA, an organization whose trust is vital to the survival of our free and open society? I’m quite frankly on board with opt out day, if I wasn’t busy finding and employing alternatives to flying. Before there was this, there was already an all out war against the airlines for anti consumerism, they didn’t need this kind of help.

6) Speaking of martyrdom, the Joe Scarborough suspension might appear to be a martyrdom operation as well. Politico and Scarborough basically turned themselves in and demanded that MSNBC prosecute them similarly, so that they don’t get trapped later. It is by no means what the title of this week’s rant implies, a statement of support for arch rival Keith Olbermann. It is a self serving cleansing to undermine later turmoil before it starts.

Hey Phil Griffin, for those two days, I’m available, and I could fix a lot of stuff.

That’s all for now, see you Monday.

Paint The Target Orange

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.

Armed With 15% Of The Facts And A Howitzer

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 8th, 2010


Observations:


1) How embarrassing is Tim Kaine? Audacity is defined as making that quip “I don’t pretend anyone remembers a DNC chairmen 3 minutes after they’re gone”. Ummm, I think every registered Democrat remembers the last DNC chairman, that guy who WON elections. Howard Dean.


But rather than just lament the critical velocity in reverse that the above misquidedness represents, it’s more important to point out the sheer lack of lucidity when Kaine speaks. It is all rosy if you ask Mr. Kaine. Often you hear people say this would all be a little easier if someone in government was simply speaking like adults or business men (not their publicists).


That is the opposite of the effect given off when Kaine describes how strong the Health Care Reform polls. That is just wishful thinking and amateurish projection of that wishful thinking. Health Care polls as poorly as possible because the part people need is 40 months away, and all we can think about as we wait those 40 months is the sheer capitulation that occurred defanging the needed reform. When HCR gets in place will we then find out it actually has been outflanked by defensive maneuvers by the insurers who’ve had the 40 months to get back to status quo?


The bottom line on our current DNC chairman is that he is the doctor whose bedside manner is so bad that he just lies. He tells the cancer victim that recovery is imminent so that he doesn’t have to do the tough work of telling them to write their will. Kaine is selling lottery tickets with his prediction that the Democrats will come back. All of the ‘he has to do that rationale’ is actually the strategy of the other side. This side gets its backbone by saying the truth, which is not centrist doctrine. The Kucinich's and Weiners of the world don’t go down making false promises that a nonexistent turnaround is just around the corner. They appeal to passion, and in Tim Kaine representation of the role of the DNC chairman today, could you spot that passion in any lucid form? No, it just seemed like a door to door Xerox salesman who would say anything.


While I’m throwing darts at that guy, I want to point out that there was a publicity stunt in February where it was leaked that Kaine would finally fulfill his potential as DNC Chair because Virginia inaugurated a new governor and Kaine would no longer have to split his time. His focus in the six months since has made things worse as he has been free to make more half pronouncements in a day than previously possible.


2) Now, its actually good news that Joe Scarborough can’t actually stop talking about the positive economic effects of extending tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. That opposing the extension is “mindless”. You can already see the retort on the Daily Show. Joe Scarborough would walk into this ambush like a basic training flunkee.


You can pick from about 87 3 minute rants all with the same message, jump to Mika endorsing with a “you’ve been saying that all along”, and then play 25 guests on the Morning Joe show that have lined up to say in a deep as available science that the economic foundation of Joe Scarboroughs argument is 100% fallacy.


One would say on an ROI basis with limited available funds, tax cuts to the rich are in last place, another would say it’s not 2% small business its less than that, a third small business growth we seek primarily offshoots from manufacturing growth, not singular business. At the end of 25, none of which would need to be Paul Krugman or Robert Reich mind you, it would be obvious that Joe Scarborough stands in distant opposition to genuine economic consensus, and makes you wonder about his motivation in doing so.


I fully realize that this rationale has zero effect on Joe or John Boehner’s complete rejection of letting the tax cuts expire, but I think there is also a growing consensus of people forced into a better understanding of economics by tough times asking why those leaders pursue this path? It seems dishonest with great costs to America associated to those dishonest claims.


The more middle America hears a false argument, the more a baseline realization that we're being duped sets in. We used to talk about how in polls Americans embarrassingly told pollsters they thought Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s safe to say that the awfulness of that national misunderstanding has corrected itself through repeating with great frequency just how embarrassingly wrong it was.


Similarly, Americans on the right, in the Tea Party or towards the middle right of America, will look with a degree of humiliation at where they were duped into making the comparatively poor investment of repealing a tax on the top 2% of America instead of directly investing in new jobs for their constituencies. You aren’t in that 2%. Supply side economics is the economics of waiting for crumbs, and you don’t have time to wait. Direct investments in your constituencies revive economies at a 2 to 1 rate compared to tax repeals for the rich, because the rich have the option to NOT spend the money, which they exercise at least HALF the time.


Why do John Boehner and Joe Scarborough make the trickle down case at every opportunity in defiance of any logic except the artificial one they simply concoct on the spot? It can only be one of two reasons: they are in the 2% or they are paid to protect the interest of the 2%.


3) As suspicious as I am about Maria Bartiromo, it was happy to see her on the show trying to find common ground with Arianna Huffington. But before that Willie Geist did a connect the jobs duty by asking Maria to weigh in on the small business negative impact of the tax cut for the rich debate. She of course ducked the question, instead going with the fact that if you want to talk negligible, talk about the amount of money the government gets via the top 2% returning to a 29.9% federal rate. It’s insignificant, its $36 billion dollars. Does that seem insignificant to you? Or did she just put some words together and hope nobody would check?


But yes, Arianna and Maria found middle ground. It’s as if Maria had a bit of an awakening working on her book where she was forced to analyze the role of market touts in explaining away the criminal behavior that’s taken control of Wall Street. Well, I obviously took it too far, but let’s see if over time Maria starts to look for an exit from fallacy island.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

The Elements Of Disintegration

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 3rd, 2010


Observations:


1) What should have been a ho-hum Friday filler with vacation coverage casting turned into a 9 way labyrinth of economic upheaval. Chris Jansing was quoting Anne Kornbluth, and Willie Geist was Eddie Haskell-ing his way through Pulitzer prizers and wunderkind like it was easy.


I’m not so sure that Carl Bernstein is right in his pessimism for the future, and actually Matt Lewis made the most salient point to counter said pessimism by encouraging all parties to not fear the shared power version of government. So what if the Republicans own some part of the legislative body? Won’t it just draw them out into actually having to govern as opposed to the convenient cover they have right now to not actually having to do anything, and the gain they make as a minority via obstruction?


You may not like Republican obstruction, or negative campaign ads. But it is now doctrine that both practices are highly effective. There are only two ways to end the obstruction, share power or bury the Republican Senate below 40 votes during a Democratic House. The only option that is in our future is the former, and embracing it isn’t such a bad thing. In fact, if you are pro government effectiveness, you have to see the shared power scenario as more useful than if the Democrats squeak out two victories.


I really take issue with the fact that we have to give up the House to the Republicans, when it is the Senate that is the most compromised away from effective government. It would actually be far better for America in a shared power environment if the Senate went Republican and the House stayed Democrat. That makes the Republicans responsible for the filibuster nonsense, removes the Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson corruption, and leaves subpoena power in the vault where it belongs.


2) The news surrounding the on air debate was fair cause for Bernstein’s depression. The Obama administration coming out and saying no second stimulus is a very bad optic showing that administration as hapless. That message should have been ‘we will do whatever it takes’. Instead the message is we are hamstrung by the political will of Washington and Congress.


The point above about Matt Lewis noting the effective possibilities in a shared power environment was even more shocking given that he made an idiot out of himself trotting out Bush era fallacy economics, which was torn apart by 4 other guests like a zebra on the Serengeti Plain. But listening to the Carl Bernstein part of the tear down was particularly poignant because it hit the Obama headwind right on the head. Obama can’t win with logic because the Republicans have succeeded in making a nonsensical economic theorem stick in the voter psyche. The ideology that serves the Republican theorem is not made to make the economy better or life better for the middle class, it is to arrange words in any order possible to say you are making the economy better while actually pilfering the tax base, cutting services and entitlements to the middle class, and privatizing government via sweetheart deals that enrich enablers. All this and then Lewis finishes by proving the double speak mantra with the unemployment number.


The unemployment number ticks down but the rate ticks up because of the good news, and the brutally honest Matt Lewis take is if Republicans parade the negative optics of the rate around then the voter won’t ever see the positive fine print number that carries it. That is Lord Of The Flies stuff, up is down, down is up, make the negative louder, making sense be damned.


3) Then, with a very long base of information feeding it, Eugene Robinson comes on and uses unfortunate words to describe the phenomenon of voter irrationality. The voter isn’t irrational because they suddenly became selfish or ‘spoiled brats’. They were taught. Taught by the Republican Party that says no taxation is ever safe on their watch. Taught by the Democratic Party that includes corrupt expenditures masked as provision in its spending plans.


Voters were more accustomed to an employer who provided many of the services other countries rely on their government for. As those employers turn the page on honestly providing job security, health care and pensions, that voter has been forced into an irrational position of having to go back to the government looking for those services.


The ultimate genesis of this voter irrationality, at least on my radar, was California proposition 13. A promise was made to find ways other than property taxes to pay for the Rolls Royce educational system and local governments in California, but those governments were no longer going to have the power to stay solvent via property taxes. This morphed over 35 years to become the mainstay public persona of the Republican party. The problem was whenever it was time to discuss solvency, the promise to remain solvent was broken, and deficit governments emerged everywhere. The California education and services systems are fatally wounded at this point, and the voter base doesn’t find it convenient to look at solutions. They have been taught when the dirty little secret of solvency shows up, you can turn your head the other way.


35 years ago, 99.9% of people never considered that they would be propped up by unemployment insurance, or that privatized health care would be afforded monopoly power and allowed to consume 32 cents of every health care dollar spent on ‘administration’, or that United Airlines would be allowed to use bankruptcy to void pensions and tell retired mechanics to go drive a truck to live out their days on this planet because their pension was gone. There was no such thing as a 401k 35 years ago.


No you have taught the voter that government can get real small just by cutting off the tax revenue spigot, but you conveniently left out the fact that your new sevices partner is the unwilling potpourri of for profit banks, for profit health care companies, for profit colleges and student lenders, and for profit security firms. They don’t want to be taxed, they lobby the government into a hapless quivering mass, and they consider the middle class to be useless eaters unless they have a dollar left to spend.


The only thing left in the hands of the voter is the voter booth. But even that ‘vote the bums out’ ability seems to be operating in a manageable range. The Democrats have been forced to lie about their accomplishments, calling them ‘health care reform’ and ‘financial regulatory reform’ and ‘the end of combat operations’ when what’s left of the objective journalists in the country uniformly state that each of those descriptions is a misnomer.


It’s not a temper tantrum, Mr. Robinson. When that plane crashed into Rockaway Beach, the FAA figured out that the pilot, while trying to regain control, thrust the rudder all the way left then all the way right so many times that he eventually broke the tail of the plane off causing disintegration.


The voters are right there, right now.

Headless Horseman

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 30th, 2010


Observations:


1) If anyone sees anything other than great news out of the Glenn Beck debacle over the weekend, I may not be able to help you. The right is agitated and they want change now. But the fact is despite a spoiled brat mentality that covers the entire right of center spectrum, there is no leader. I know the feeling, because I lived it for 6+ years from the other side. John Kerry? Nothing elicits helplessness more fiercely than having the ‘for it before I was against it’ guy running your squad.


Glenn is out there because of the opportunity brought on by the absence of anyone approximating leadership in the Republican Party. Even if there were an heir apparent, his advisers would have him in an ice cave in Saskatchewan avoiding the recent implosion of the right into its two base parts. Recently is misleading, because the right has been best described as a poster child for identity crisis for the better part of a decade. Let gays in or persecute? Brown skinned Republicans or refuge for those of European descent? Like or dislike Eric Rudolph? All of these seemingly absurd questions show the peril of wanting to be on the right side of humanity without offending the extreme base of the party.


Enter master of doublespeak Glenn Beck. I know nothing of this man, proudly. When I try to watch the guys show, anything else seems more entertaining or informative. I basically get the feeling he is just guessing as he goes along with a piece of chalk in his hand. But look, there’s nothing hiding the fact that Rupert and Roger don’t want him actually making sense or his show even watchable. The more of a catacomb of self serving code that the show is, the more of a convenient device it is to be all things to all of the people mentioned above. There were brown skinned people at the rally and people who didn’t like having brown skinned people, well, at the rally. They were too confused by a lack of any real agenda to question why they were in the same circumstance without a partition.


My favorite fact overviewing the rally was the instruction sent out beforehand to avoid signage. It might as well have said: 'make Joe Scarborough guess your stand on the 2nd amendment, don’t make it obvious that you’re a 99.9% over my dead body crowd'. It was very hard to abide by that instruction. The Toby Keith garb was an overwhelming trend.


I can’t wait. Next, Glenn will say “let’s all meet just over the Potomac in Manassas and settle this thing once and for all”. The population is just weak enough right now because of everything that Glenn Beck is not talking about, to believe that might be the answer.


Lead to your untimely demise by a puppet being strung along by an Australian guy, you really need a leader to emerge prior.


2) Joe Scarborough has declared war on Paul Krugman. Krugman is the whipping post for Scarborough’s scathing dismissal of all things John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, Scarborough gets away with this despite having offered nearly zero solutions of his own. These are difficult times and what this war on Krugman and Keynes embodies is a disastrous demonizing process when we need solutions and everything should be on the table.


Keynes does not equal stimulus in his theoretical entirety. In fact the thing I find the most interesting about Keynes has to do with regulatory policy. Keynes was for significant segmentation of the financial services and would have been absolutely horrified at the black box that currently best describes the lawlessness that the entire industry operates under. Keynes also has another key ingredient: that the private financial sector has an obligation towards progressing a national goal of full employment.


Now as you digest those two things, ponder that they are higher order elements of Keynesian theory than stimulus to replace spending in a time of crisis. So if you want to wage a war on Krugman and Keynes, you owe your subscribers more than the sound bite sensibility you have exhibited in your vitriolic dismissal of these two great economists.


If you think Krugman called you stupid or insane, you know he has zero inhibition about coming on your show to shine a light on the circumstance or context of that. I agree with the Joe Scarborough assertion that once you base your argument in one dimensional insults like this, the argument is essentially over because you’ve stated that the other side is void of credibility. The bottom line is if the answer really does lie inclusive of some of the things these two historically credible people endorse, they need you to help explain it to the lost souls described in section #1 above.


Those guys around you with economic bonifides: Sorkin, Sachs, etc; I don’t think they would endorse a cold shoulder where a significant part of the collective answer might lie. Ask them.


3) You guys have really lost the plot as it pertains to Erin Burnett. The top 3 things got weighted down by a bunch of Cramer-esque props, and now she is back to fighting to get any intelligent discussion going. Mr. Licht, you had something, you had a path to getting Erin to be an asset, and then it kept getting tinkered with. Can’t you get enough control of the show to not lose assets like this with histrionics as the culprit?


We had this discussion a long time ago when the show got bent on features and forgot to cover the news. This is a microcosm of that discussion. Even when you watch Erin on CNBC she rarely gets an opportunity to wax philosophical on what she sees. You own the real estate ideally equipped to get that conversation from her, void of all the necessary CNBC automations, just what she thinks about things. Yet you let it slip away into a cooking show day after day.


It was a notable evolution of the show just minutes earlier when Howard Dean was done with a segment, and by the reverse magic of television did not have to disappear, in fact, reappearing magically to provide balance to at least two more segments. I remember a few weeks ago when the segment Dean was on was notably short, or shortened. Dean is a cornucopia of knowledge from the other side, and I think it was a great part of the show today when Willie Geist got a chance to ask Howard what he thought of Mark Halperin’s negative election prognosis for Democrats in November.


If you recall I was furious about the Halperin prognosis. But look at the track record of the Morning Joe show: health care has no chance, it’s Hillary for sure in '08, I’m sure there’s more, but the point is, you aren’t very good at prognoses regarding the Democrats, because your cast leader is on the other side. He is projecting his wish list on the Democrats, takes his pocket calculator with him, and needs an azimuth check by guys like Howard Dean periodically.


You have people like Dean and Burnett surrounding you, be sure you aren’t cutting them off and then filling in the blanks with what you wish they would have said or predicted.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

5 Days Of Wedge

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 20th, 2010


Observations:


1) The fever broke around 7:40 AM Friday morning. After 4 consecutive days and half of a fifth, the Morning Joe show got off of the mosque thing as it’s singular mission. What was most difficult was Thursday as the combat troops left Iraq, watching the cast struggle to cover that historic moment, because their head was elsewhere.


They would examine the same 4 facts and circle back every 10 minutes. The Gingrich thing, the majority of Americans thing, the Obama is nebulous thing, the Fox is misrepresenting Rauf thing. Stop. Repeat. The last column here was called 150 minutes talking about the inability to get off the story in an entire workday. Multiply times five.


I could not have pieced together anything to review for the last three days that was discernably different from that last column because of this great short circuit.


But then the fever broke today. There was just too much else accumulated that had been stacking on the sideline waiting for the patient to recover. These things relapse, so the jury is still out regarding whether a rested Morning Joe crew comes back and starts the same discussion all over again Monday.


2) The problem is the wedge. The wedge is supposed to be the shape of a slice of pie and has a sharp chisel nose purposed with driving large things apart one hammer stroke at a time. But all there is currently is a wedge. If relevant news items were dominating the agenda a wedge would look like that piece of pie, but Morning Joe has joined a bucket load of other mainstream media outlets and devoted itself to the wedge issues as a priority. So now the relevant parts of your morning briefing are either non existent or that smaller pie sized sliver while the wedge is 80% of the program.


That is backwards, and a self fulfilling prophecy. Like politicians who blame the media when the media is 90% of their communication structure, reporters and consumers alike who get mad about the wedge issues dominating news agendas appear to be in denial of their own perpetuating behavior. People will tell you all about how there ‘are better things to talk about’ but then confess their consumption of echo chamber media as the dominant pattern of information influx in their life.


Joe Scarborough will tell you he is sick and tired of litmus tests and wedge issues, but then carpet bomb the mosque story with 80% of his program for 5 days. So which is it? Where you for the prioritization of the news into useful order before you ignored your own demand, or did events on the ground collaborate to a new useful order?


There has been nary a day that host and guest alike didn’t redetermine that the priority should be jobs and the economy. But you certainly wouldn’t know about it from facts, interviews, graphs, charts, or other programming on the Morning Joe show. If you let the conspiracy theory part of your personality get the best of you, you might be able to convince yourself that the jobs acknowledgement is not actually an acknowledgement, it’s a trump card to allow an unrespondable complaint to repeatedly hit all media at the expense of the President and Democrats.


We have had this conversation before. We have delineated a long list of solutions to the jobs crisis and then reminded periodically that if you don’t like the jobs quagmire we’re in, be a catalyst for solutions. But solutions have never come from the Morning Joe program. The net result is that a complaint is droned in as an accessory to whatever news item is part of that day’s program as a constant reminder that no matter what else you accomplish this one unsolved crisis against the middle class marches on.


You might, in the aforementioned conspiracy analysis, theorize that if you own the part of the frequency range that is constantly beating the ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ drum, you place yourself in a superior light without having to do any of the heavy lifting of providing solutions. There is a strategy, tested wonderfully by the ‘just say no’ Republican congress, that it’s better to lob grenades than provide solutions or defend a constructive platform.


You would be giving the Morning Joe show too much credit embarking on any theory with strategy at it’s core. No, this is sloppiness and disorganization. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have become the Jimmy Buffet of political analysis. There is no long term construction, just wake up and talk about whatever is in front of your face, and hope that no one notices that after three years you haven’t built anything other than slightly more photogenic, centrist and impassioned Fox and Friends.


Instead of Margaritaville, this one lives in idiosyncrasy-land with a lost shaker of salt.


3) Who knows what next week brings us. Let us pray that we are free of Mosque-gate and the agenda is chock full of new constructs. Is there a deal that if Israel makes nice with some Palestinian peace talks, they can use some Iraqi airspace? Did Thad Allen come on the show the day before 22 new miles of oil spill were discovered on purpose? Is the United States in double dip denial? Is there empirical data about the concept of a jobless recovery, or is this the first time robber barons have tried to get away with it?


In a perfect world with three hours of coverage, the wedge stuff would go in the part of the hour currently assigned to Willie Geist. It would be made fun of as a feeble attempt to use the ball of string trick to get a nation in distress to ignore its problems and consume the distraction like an opiate. Jon Stewart is king of identifying the stuff that is meant to keep you from grabbing your pitchfork and heading down to 85 Broad Street.


The rest of the Morning Joe show would be 2 segments on the economy, one on one of the other 10 major issues facing the nation and a 4th that connects the dots politically. You have 4 chances an hour to dig into stuff. 12 news segments a day. This week you devoted a majority of those segments to canvassing a wedge issue that will be gone in a month. Were you snookered, or did you snooker?


Hey, I should be going the other way, I should be letting all this useless histrionic remain front and center. Talk of our economic troubles, the lack of cost controls in the Health Care law (stop calling it a bill), 22 mile oil slicks, or Goldman Sachs writing a glee memo about the non impact of financial regulatory reform doesn’t bode well for the Democratic party.


But I am just as mad at the Democrats as I am at the wedge pundits. Obama and the two legislative caucuses have been quick to complain about a lack of credit for their accomplishments. The right is trying to blow them up, and pointing out their lack of effectiveness. The left feels like the big legislative advances are essentially capitulations with big doublespeak titles. I am center left, and for me it’s all about teeth. There are no teeth in any of the accomplishments of the Obama era thus far.


But there is a list of stuff that remains today that had been promised to be addressed:


~Removal of health care exemption from anti trust

~Reestablishment of usury laws

~90% flow through on medical insurance premiums

~Reestablishment of credible regulation at the federal level

~A new Washington with lobbyist restrained to proportionate influence

~A real national green plan

~A government that governs without fine print

~The end of Fannie, Freddie and Sallie larceny by private sector

~An end to the unfunded federal mandate

~Lucidity where doublespeak once reigned.


When you listen to Obama, he does not appear to be entrenched in the typical doublespeak that you hear from others, Republican or Democrat. But that might just be a gift for oratory, because as the Morning Joe show stumbled upon today when the fever broke, Obama, the great campaigner and public speaker, has not notched a ton of essential communications since he took office that people can point to as his list of accomplishments. This net result is when the administration lists it accomplishments, both the left and the right can place asterisks next to each listed item, and this makes it easy for lists of non accomplishments like the one above to prevail.


History tells us the great leaders break on through to the other side right about now, so these long odds might still be a darkest before the dawn statement of hope.


Maybe that’s true for the Morning Joe show too, let’s hope that Joe Scarborough gets his team together and says “Hey it’s been 3 years, lets start planning our day based on getting something accomplished”.


That’s all for today, see you Monday.

Wants Cake, Also Wants To Eat

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 13th, 2010


Observations:


1) Just an astounding conversation with Joe Scarborough and Andrew Ross Sorkin today where JS felt compelled to ask for 100% assurance of immediate containment of any spill prior to there being more drilling. Now far be it from me to feel like Scarborough needs a reality check, but in this case this was an absolutely egregious and selective personal optimization choice. Let’s list our components:

· Drove V8 forever
· All of his Florida and DC neighbors drove V8 forever
· Suddenly a “surprise” attack of an oil spill creates mea culpa
· Wants oil, but only with assurance
· Wants green overhaul of economy if no assurance is available


Now, this has all the hypocritical connotation of ‘clean coal’ or ‘natural gas’. We know the truth, that we are dependent on oil and have the world’s biggest consumer economy for it and are thus responsible not just for the consumption of, but logistics of transporting the 25% of the global oil supply.


In our haste to grow GDP quarter over quarter, we promote the recklessness that is BP’s environmental record in order to not have the supply of oil be any inhibition to our free enterprise system. The national economic security implications of the oil supply assure that the most profitable American companies are oil companies. It is known.


So with oil fueling the nation and its economy along with it, the pressure to grow the economy means eventually an anomaly will occur in that supply and we will have either a price catastrophe, security catastrophe, financial catastrophe or environmental catastrophe, wait, we’ve had all of these happen already.


And Mr. Scarborough loudly beckons for certainty? Quaint.


2) I understand that we on the left have empowered minor leaguers to run the country and are now facing a hefty mid term election task to keep these guys in place until they get the speed of the game. I understand that their inability to master their skill at national governance is being exploited by the right and the old guard left and that status quo continues to rule the day one maneuver at a time.


But are you really ready to send any part of this government back to the Iraq invading, Patriot en-Act-ing, Medicare “D” initiating, Cheney Energy Commission-ing, torture-ing, fear-baiting, mandate intolerance by law cronies that we all so desperately conspired to usher out over the last 40 months? You would give these guys the keys so that you could better afford Chinese socks from Wal-mart?


As you can see by some of my previous rants, I’m hard up to find who to trust. I trust myself, Elizabeth Warren, Nassim Taleb, Matt Taibbi, and get this: Joe Scarborough. I trust that Obama and Axelrod mean well but are currently outclassed and out framed in their governance. I don’t know anything about Rahm Emmanuel, and that’s a problem at this point.


But the list of people I don’t trust is long and growing. I learned not to trust most of them years ago, but every day another person makes the perp walk, not to jail, but to the microphone to lay out a doublespeak demonstration why they cannot support the middle class against the ruling elite for whatever hollow reason suits them that day, and today that was Tim Kaine (yikes!).


But I can tell you one thing, if Joe Barton is a committee chairmanship next year, it’s pitchfork time, if Boehner is in charge of anything other than the detention of the Breakfast Club, it’s pitchfork time.


You need to make an appropriately proportionate decision, immediately.


3) Thad Allen was not convincing in his reaction to Willie Geist’s well timed grenade about containment ship operations. The amount of unexplainable nonsense coming from the spill site is literally JFK-assassination-level unsavory. No one will ever convince the American people that there aren’t two stories, one told (sometimes) now, and one that will come out in 40 years talking about ‘the American people would’ve never accepted the real story’.


The earnings date, the Libya thing (that everyone knew already), the missing details on the containment, the press blockade, the scope of the disaster. These are all things that continue to amalgamate into a story of a disaster where everyone panicked.


I’m happy that we are seeing the story on the Morning Joe show after a long gap. It seems like it’s only on the show now because the good news is starting to show up, and it was too hard when the news was only bad. Stuff we learned when Iraq stopped getting covered in 2005.


If you’re serious, we need to get an environmental expert on the show who is willing to talk about the toxicity of the dispersants, who is willing to talk about the real fallout, willing to show the computer predictions of 15 years of oil flows. We need someone who can explain, like you got on PBS yesterday, that all of the animals that live in oceans drop down to the line of perpetual darkness to feed: whales, turtles, dolphins, fish, and that is likely where they will find a blinding pool of oil that no one has the courage to enumerate.


Can you find that courage, or are we just here to try and put a fake wrap on this story which will be with us like a generational plague? Mika seems really involved, but honestly, she appears to be an unwitting agent of distraction by finding her focus on the smaller parts of the story to the complete absence of the 150 million barrel guerrilla in the room, and to the complete absence of the 25 billion barrel apocalypse one geological anomaly away from replacing it as our nation’s disaster.


It seems like you’re making it harder than it already is, the question is why?


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 2nd, 2010


Observations:


1) Seems distressingly odd that John Heilemann would ask the question about whether the lowering of the nominal unemployment rate would be trotted out as a positive by the White House. It’s distressing on two fronts: one is that they might actually do that despite as Savannah said it is a quirk that fell the other way 2 months ago and two, there is a simple mathematical reason why the rate fell that is a very negative piece of news. Over 600,000 people fell out of the workforce counted in the unemployment number, so the rate went down because the denominator in the equation went down. Those people went somewhere when they fell out of the workforce, they went to a category best described as hopeless.


So if you make the mistake of trotting that number out there, someone is going to damn you doubly for doing it, but it’s often difficult to resist for political types, which is why it caught the eye of Heilemann.


Tread carefully lest you be seen as trumpeting a false positive indicator for short term gain, very short term gain, with a backlash.


2) Norah O’Donnell unwittingly continued the anti Boehner campaign by adding chain smoking, poorly named a ‘love for butts’, and reinforced the boozing charge. In a public relations war, contrary to what the Wall Street Journal guy says, you want John Boehner on TV right now, because he is a trainwreck not seen since Jimmy and Tammy Fay Baker.


The late night shows had a field day with Boehner. A monster of a point was made with little fanfare by Willie Geist earlier this week, that Saturday Night Live being out of production right now is a huge break for the the Ohio congressman. Otherwise, he might get the kind of permanent roast that moves into the ‘more famous than the actual guy’ category.


I’m still stuck on ‘Breakfast Club’: “could you describe the ruckus, sir?”


3) In violation of the Morning Joe ban on any coverage of the BP oil spill, the skeleton crew took liberty today to show a 2 ½ minute clip of the oil in the gulf with some generic news sprinkled on top by Norah.


I hope they don’t get in too much trouble. I mean, it’s been decided right? This show is about politics and the most important story of the new decade can be shoved aside in the pursuit of a pure agenda. I haven’t seen such a plan Fox covered the inaugeration.


Not even the top of the hour news is certain to even mention the spill. The Boehner story got all the coverage that wasn’t the pregame on the unemployment number or the Week In Review.


I am thoroughly appalled that the Morning Joe show has completed another week in absolute ignorance of the Gulf oil disaster. I don’t know how it is happening, it’s confusing, and I wish it would correct.


That’s all for today, see you Tuesday.

Senior Skip Day

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 25th, 2010


Observations:


1) God bless Dylan Ratigan. Optics, symbolic victories, 2 out of 3 major goals accomplished: hogwash. As predicted here, on the DR show and anywhere else where the whitewash doesn’t work anymore, the financial reform package is an 8 cylinder vehicle missing 7 spark plugs. In the dark of night Blanche Lincoln capitulated as expected on derivatives reform, and this morning CNBC was awash in fake complaining so as not to be seen as though dancing a jig.


This is not different than health care reform. Obama was correctly accused by Ratigan today of being as in bed with the barons of the status quo as the Republican party.


I would take it a step further.


That this is in fact the optics of being a Democratic politician. You are required to make laws with names that falsely claim populist reform but substantively move the needle further towards the status quo. Doublespeak. Will Obama become the greatest artist of doublespeak in history, or at least since Bill Clinton? His oratory soars like no one since Martin Luther King. But the substance is undeniably short of what the oratory claims.


Or am I just impatient with the checks and balances system? Will there be year two strengthening of all three major 2010 reform packages? We are stuck without that answer. We won’t get Ron Paul on the right or Howard Dean on the left. Ever. Howard may have even switched sides under the ‘life is too short to go out losing’ ideology.


I will be paying keen attention to Dylan Ratigan’s “Fix It Week” next week. Let the record show Matt Taibbi is now 100 for 100 in predicting the futility of government to govern in a time of crisis. Elizabeth Warren got a small victory with consumer protection, but at what larger cost?


2) This week has now morphed into BP week, through an absence of meaningful coverage of the spill. What appears to be happening is that the cast is tired of how bad this news is. Is the BP story bad for your career? Do you need some happy news? Is that what you signed up for?


Look BP should have lost it all by now, they were given a reprieve, and why? Today was a triple witching news day, but two witches got off the hook. We decided to back hash the McChrystal and Patraeus situations, in a non event that smacks of running out of ideas, and let BP and financial reform get what amounts to a proportionate free pass. Yea, Ratigan got a rant, but is it a rant when the rest of the cast goes the other way? What happened is Halperin, Heilemann, O’Donnell, Deutsch and Geist all did a career check and rather than venture into dangerous waters, they opted for the good optics over the substantive futility, and looked the other way.


But systematically since 6:30 AM on Monday, the Morning Joe show abandoned the BP story. This is nothing short of a dramatic clutch victory for the villain oil company. The breathing room a week of media reprieve gives them may not be much because, as Geist says, this is a “creeping” story that will be back like groundhog day next week, but this is a wasted week with the show kicking the can down the road.


There is so much work to do. There is still an infrastuctural shortcoming in the spill containment plan. The Welch plan is still unattempted. The situation got worse, and the solution got farther.


On the infrastructure side, one thing keeps coming to mind. In our forest fire reaction in the United States, we use a Han Solo looking rag tag fleet of retired warplanes and commercial jets to do our fighting. Other countries make devoted fleets of firefighting airplanes, like Canada. Canada has float planes that land in any water, take on the water, take flight, and drop on a fire source. I saw this first hand when the bright, new yellow Canadian planes on loan landed off of Pacific Palisades a few years back to resupply their water to fight a Burbank fire. It seems so, well, evolved.


We are at a same situation with the BP spill. We are drafting shrimp boats to help contain oil rather than owning any specialized reaction vessels. Britain, Norway, Venezuela, and Canada all have that fleet and have offered it to us. At the height of my cynicism, I’m forced to believe that this slow walking of accepting those fleet’s aid is a political one, so we don’t seem so feckless, so beholden to commercial interest that we allow these oil companies to operate without any safety net in the United States, whether that net is public or private.


Would’ve been great to have the Morning Joe show be on point on that news as it emanated from the gulf this week. Where were you again?


3) This is the first show I’ve seen that didn’t include the new Erin Burnett 3 points feature, and on the day financial reform passed conference? And the first show that replayed old interviews to cover the absence of the stars. That replay thing actually seems like a good idea. Some of that stuff is worth repetition multiple times, and those chosen were in that category.


Producers go 1-1 on the day, well 1-2. The west coast stuff is awful. Those people look like Iranian prisoners, except for Lawrence O’Donnell.


That’s all for today, see you Monday

We’re Number 1

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 7th, 2010


Observations:


1) Did Willie Geist get a new agent or something? Not only does he get 10 am to fly solo when America is actually out of bed, but on the Morning Joe show, apparently they let him ask questions and stuff. CAA, better known as the Goldman Sachs of the agency world, must somehow be involved.


Willie put his brand of “everyman wants to know” inquisition towards every single guest today, and while results were varied, I have to say Kurt Loder would’ve been proud. Geist may actually have a niche on the hard news side after all, asking the questions that the 18-30 demo needs to know, that get skipped over or sneered at by the main two chairs. I remember the old days with absolute remorse where Geist tried to drag Maxine Waters, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, and even Elizabeth Warren into his cesspool of features coverage, and am beyond thankful that those streams may never cross again.


2) Where is Red Adair? For those of you who don’t recall, we used to have a John Wayne-esque hero on oil disasters named Red Adair. Platform fires used to call this guy to come in like the cavalry and cap oil wells, even when they were generating 100 foot plumes of flame. It was this same conquering force that took to the fields of Kuwait subsequent to the first Iraq war.


Come to think of it, where are the Bush’s? George, W., and Jeb are all significant stakeholders and prizeholders from the Gulf and Texas oil riches.


Last week, Apple passed Microsoft for number 1, wait, that was for number 2. Who is number 1? Exxon Mobil is the largest company in the United States.


Ok, so BP is chairing our disaster and may be nationalized in the end. They are likely somewhere in the UK shredding documents and sending money to Switzerland and India as we speak. Their stock is plummeting, the truth about the scope of the disaster is now plain to see.


But there is something remarkably fishy about the lack of nationalization of the disaster. It appears to the viewer in an equally plain way that the Houston domestic oil technology mafia, the large domestic oil companies, and the well known oil barons of our time are letting this disaster stay contained with BP and Obama for each of their singular gains.


And yes, Obama is letting this happen. I mean its great to get to scapegoat a competitor for the disaster, great business move, only 11 men died and our entire eastern saltwater coast will be oil saturated. But hey, number 1 ain’t easy.


3) Senator Schumer came on the Morning Joe show today and willfully mislead a nation. Granted, this thought is not entirely my own, but the fact that we continue to get sold on “hopes and dreams” level legislation like derivatives reform, while we know the whisper plan is to declaw the financial reform package in conference is an apocalyptic omen for America.


All this doublespeak while appearing to speak lucidly is further to the process of ultimate disenfranchisement.


Joe Scarborough, who appears to be drifting microscopically left in time lapse, is generally credited for teaching the world the method where a Senator just wants to appear to have tried hard, but will make his ultimate transaction at the end, letting special interest prevail, for money. But Chuck Schumer takes this to a whole new level. He is a hit at parties, a wink and nod to be the next majority leader, got a 1600 on his SAT and is two pom-pom’s and a skirt short of making America believe their team is about to win.


Mika couldn’t get a question out, but I think her question was how is financial reform relevant if it doesn’t break up too big to fail, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. A journalist, a guy who knows he is watching a sleight of hand, an ad exec, and a rising star in the day talk field all conspired to let Chuck chuck the truth a safe distance down the road.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow. No, really.

You've Been Karzai'd!

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for April 6th, 2010


Observations:


1. So in a science experiment I decided to let a couple weeks pass and then view the shows in a combined time-lapse 1/10 sequence animation. The combined shows ran for the same three or so hours. The results were hilarious. Even at that time shifted kilter, the words ‘I’m going to have to stop you there, because you’re wrong about every single thing” we’re as clear as when they were shouted at Tina Brown in real time.


Even in time lapse the only real noticeable differences were there was some sort’ve kerfuffle in Florida where public education was defined as a public good necessitating strong government action, and then Joe Scarborough disappeared for either 90 minutes or a week and a half, so he didn’t have to extend the same logic to health care.


It was like a dream sequence, with a lot of inordinately important people in the Florida thing, then Willie Geist ran the network for like 6 months until I woke up.



2) Cut to today and give me a break. That Afghanistan conversation, apparently grounded because conservatives and progressives alike agree, was still mired in more one-dimensional mud than a viewer should be asked to tolerate. Yea, you can say you’re on Biden’s team when it’s convenient, you can say Karzai was another example of a failure about to happen that could be seen from space, but when you try and put it together you just cement your role as falling for whatever the opposition is selling on a news cycle basis.


Has Morning Joe ever gone into the blinders policy of the opium crop in Afghanistan? It was as if when the words ‘drug problem’ were uttered a single time and then the subject was evacuated like an Irwin Allen movie in an attempt to keep the conversation simple, where an Ozzie and Harriet consensus could be achieved without a nap or a headache. I have a long history claiming the vacuum of critical thought that permeates the Afghanistan discussion on Morning Joe is a disservice, to put it kindly. And that analysis stayed true today. Look, when one thing like the Karzai situation goes predictably south, maybe try and follow your own advice and stay calm and move along rather than pull out a Chicken Little routine out of convenience.


In Afghanistan today, the Americans are letting the Afghans have a safe haven in their opium trade, they are taking the lowlands by a surge of military force because it will be more plausible they could retain control there, and they have adopted a Biden strategy in the mountains, where the New York Times just wrote about a climate of no safe haven on either side of the border. This is a complex strategy that deserves to be shown in the context of equally complex strategies in Iran and Pakistan and then, and only then, can your algebraic arguments find any solvency test. Otherwise, you’re just speaking in political code, in an attempt to sway the argument more on a popularity basis than a basis of any real wisdom.


I’m not saying you’re resultant consensus is right or wrong, or that you’re misreading the 10% of the facts you’re acknowledging, it just sounds like Mr. Ed talking with his hoof when there is so much more out there and you know it.


3) Rudy Giuliani in real time or Maria Bartiromo in time lapse, it’s all the same. These people are eroding their credibility with every appearance. In my dream the White House listened to Maria riff on the stimulus for about 45 minutes then intervened. In real time Rudy Giuliani had a perfect opportunity to get somewhere today when Arianna Huffington just lost her mind and cheapened every solid argument she had made in the last 5 years with grade school insults that would get her arrested in Massachusetts. But instead of making any critical establishment of a way forward, his mind was again exposed for the binary mechanism of catastrophe it has become: shoot Karzai, Rubio because of old sandbox scraps with Crist, and I saved New York and the World so I think I know the menace of a social democracy coming when I see it.


If I was mad last August when Obama was having that Mighty Ducks ‘give the bad guys a huge lead’ moment, I just can’t imagine being the guy behind the guy, behind the guy, behind the guy who was behind Michael Steele who was just fired. Those guys are likely pitch-forking each other in a scene out of Lord Of The Flies at this point, pointing to the screen as a former presidential candidate is going on national television with the sole purpose of showing the wide divide within the Republican party. Could that be farther from a message? Rove and Orwell are pissed.


You’ve heard of eating your young, now you’ve seen it.


That’s all for today, see you soon!

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.

What If Anything Did The Kids Teach At School

The MJR Cliff notes for February 3rd, 2010


[not quite a rebuttals worth of stuff here despite a powerhouse lineup]


When Joe and Mika leave the keys to the car on the table and take off here's what happens:


1) Gays in the military openly


2) Canada’s financial system get’s imported


3) When they need a chair they take Barnicle’s instead of Geist’s


4) Rich white guys start applying at chicken factories


5) Mortgages require 20% down


6) Portugal's sovereign debt fails


7) David Wilson says Willie Geist is the 101st Grio


8) They let Joe Biden fly solo on TV


9) The microanalysis of the mortgage crisis is moved to 2nd homes in the Hamptons


10) And where an anchor normally channels Brokaw or Murrow, Geist has chosen Chase, Chevy Chase, as his anchor model and is likely working on a pratfall for his next show. Straight face? Naah.


This is the equivalent of the sky raining frogs folks, its useful in a Ferris Bueller way about once every 60 days, but more than that and you’ll find smoldering embers when you get home from your California junket.

The 58 Market Strategy

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 29th, 2010


Observations:


1) There are 472 elections coming to congress this year. For the first time in our lifetime, the mid term elections have an easy to access amalgamator on wikipedia that allows you to track competitive races and see where all of these Democratic seats are going to be lost.


What if Obama got there first? What if a designated marketing area analysis was made and each DMA of a competitive race was targeted for town halls, not cozy co-campaigns, but town halls where a voter felt like he was entering into a contract with the party to implement in a timely manner his will, not the will of lobbyist or incumbents.


As much as we would like to go to Iowa again, a state that Obama carried in the election, and get our revenge against Chuck Grassley, we know that Arkansas and Illinois are where better outcomes opportune themselves. It’s a wonderful double message: Arkansas and Illinois get a real contract for change, but Iowa, unless you can work out your issues, you’re stuck with Grassley for a 58th year, and he is a senile embarrassment.


The town halls, the Q and A’s, the letting the voter tell Obama directly how disappointing 2009 and his caving on health care were, these are the real messages voters want heard. The only way the message won’t be Scarborough’s distortion, '75% of America didn’t want health care’, and will be the true take of the independent voter, ‘keep lobbyist out of the equation like you promised, and protect consumers’, is if the voice of the voter gets 58 chances to be heard between now and November 2nd.


2) The interview with the leader of the teachers union was disgusting. I really felt like the cast of the show did a wonderful job pinning Randi Weingarten down that she, in fact, did cost the New York educational system $700 million dollars by her action. But, when it should have gotten further detailed, when she should have been forced to parse the ‘we want this for all teachers’ and ‘get the teachers the tools they need’ lines, to expose them for the self serving double speak they are, the cast stopped short.


‘We want this for all teachers and all students’ is a thinly veiled stiff arm to competition in the educational arena. If the quote could have also been ‘we don’t want to compete with the charter school for resources’ then the quote is double speak. Joe and Willie Geist are on top of this issue and need to mount a more vigorous campaign when facing the single biggest bottleneck to teacher accountability with unprecedented access. Randi Weingarten is a perfect example of the kind of obstruction that used to be rampant in the old municipal world, that can today be turned over like so many mossy rocks due to better availability of all angles of information on the matter.


Rather than call this a setback, I think of this missed opportunity as more of a call to action for the show as it looks for new ways to cover greater availability of information and evolves as an advocate of better educational results.


Arne Duncan just can’t get enough coverage, and a solid next step would be to have him back to look at the situation as the missing third element to this story. Unfortunately there is a fourth element to the story as well, and if the New York state legislature is anything like the California one, shame doesn’t work with those bag men.


3) One of the things that Morning Joe could be doing more often is showing available paths forward and strategies. I know that was done today with an analysis of the way forward for health care. But if, for a second, we looked at health care as a giant symptom of the more fundamental problems that are coming up over and over again, the Bernie Sanders ‘Congress is in the pocket of lobbyist’ and the Ron Brownstein ‘lets get 51 vote rule in the Senate if the megatrend is parliamentary in its partisan divide’, then the show should be at that level in it’s discussion. Aren’t these 2 subjects more important than even election reform, if it could be argued that election reform is also a symptom and would be diluted if tackled before congressional reform?


What are the paths forward to get lobbyist out? To get the cloture rule out? Is it referendum? Is it legal challenge? Could the Senate move to 51 vote rule with 51 votes on its session bylaws vote that starts every session? What experts can the show deliver to examine whether this is an attainable goal?


What I don’t want to see is these things covered as passing references in passionate statements by credible guests a fifteenth and sixteenth time without the show giving that more fundamental debate teeth. It’s all about the order of things and if you stick to the jobs vs. health debate, you are playing it safe, and all the while refusing to move the debate closer to the frustrations of the American people. Those voters wan’t government to be less paralyzed, and they want lobbyists out.


Randi Weingarten could’ve just as easily been a lobbyist for CIGNA or Senator Joe Lieberman with the doublespeak she got away with today.


That’s all for today, see you Monday.

Chaos – It’s What’s For Breakfast

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 25th, 2010


Observations:


1) Why are the cast members fighting? Why does Willie refer to his segment on the show as ‘trotting out’ the news no one else is willing to associate themselves with? Why does Chris Licht act as though he has had ‘just about enough’ of Mika, and why is Joe Scarborough oblivious?


How on earth was this the backdrop to 3 of the most intense philosophical debates concerning the way forward anyone could have hoped for?


A word of warning if any of the cast take this forward: I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. Mika Brzezinski does not have an ego problem, it’s the psycho mechanical defense mechanism that you have to put a label on everything, and if you had to swim upstream everyday in a world not really trying to ween itself of nonessential pop culture, you might seem during the grind of a 3 hour daily show to be driven by something beyond the normal pale. That’s not ego, that is determination.


The fallout of mis-diagnosis is disintegrative. Its plain that there are giant egos everywhere you look on MSNBC. But those bonfires are of necessity. Your entry into the female lead category for which there is no Emmy, is fighting with you like a psychotic sister and you either argue on the merits, or stay on the sidelines.


2) In the fallout of Massachusetts, everyone is finding consensus rapidly. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs very efficiently speaks on this matter as condensed as Richard Hass speaks to foreign affairs. His take is that dilution of Obama’s economic objectives is what the protest is all about. About the same number of people voted for a public option as voted for a giant industry handout: zero. And when sausage making was the story of the entire first year, revolt ensued.


Everyone is finding consensus that is, except Obama, Congress and Washington. It would seem to the naked eye that this denial is some form of gravy train maintenance. The most effective use of the media in the second year is to amplify this disconnect as loudly as possible. I am enamored with the clarity with which Joe Scarborough basically told Republicans today ‘wipe that smile off of your face, this apocalypse is yours as well’. Obstruction is sausage as well.


This denial, as has been well documented on Morning Joe for some time, was mine as well. And if you look back at my defense of public options and the Obama technique, it was that there must be a secret weapon waiting in the wings. Howard Dean? Reconciliation? Conference? I never thought that was the whole strategy I was watching. The what you see is what you get, we never really had a plan, plan. As it became apparent that no silver bullet existed and that Obama had retreated from the high ground without a plan to fight for it, no megaphone was loud enough for me to shout alongside those on the center right: that’s not leadership, that’s not even realism, that’s attrition. And further, I smell a rat.


3) But as always, optimism must prevail. Obama is having a hard time making a fairly obvious move, and Congress is having a difficult time making a parallel move. Bernanke and Somers have got to be shown the door. Volker, Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to be injected into the conversation, and the first order of business is whether Tim Geithner is a useful conduit in a checks and balances infused financial team or if he needs to go as well. If they fail at this, and I daresay the decision is more evident in the Plouff hiring, as he will be effective in communicating to the administration how damaging a continued Goldman tie is, that failure would be a voter trigger.


That Joe Scarborough is finding optimism in what a better balanced health care move would look like with the stuff the middle of America wanted in that bill back on the table from death’s door, is a very good sign that the voter may get a result after all. If I had one beef with Congress it’s its inability to multi-task. The fact that it’s been broken trying to write health care for months, that the results were failure, that no side looked like a finisher, and that the jobs work was set aside the entire time Congress was busy failing, that fact is a voter trigger.


Congress needs a supervisor much like the cashier at McDonalds needs one. They need to be told that only 20% of their productivity can be allocated to the health care debate but they must come forward with a bipartisan product, post conference, by the summer break. 30% budget, 40% job creation, 10% everything else, no failure permitted or else the voter will be triggered by that lack of accomplishment. That supervisor is meant to be Obama, not by constitution, but as a representative of the revolting voter.


In a dream world, on Wednesday, during the state of the union address, Obama would ask Pelosi, Reid, McConnell and Boehner to stand with him, and they would unveil an 8 item bipartisan health bill where each got a fair bit of representation, and that the majority only determined the order of choice, not the exclusion of choice. Then Obama would reveal that the plan was hammered out in 3 hours in the oval office the day before over Chinese food, and that no longer will the Congress of the United States obstruct the nation’s business for it’s own selfish benefit.


That would be a voter trigger.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

It's Important People, Let's Get It Done Now

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 15th, 2010


Observations:


1) Don’t leave work today without getting one of these two things done.

Yele Haiti
Wyclef Jean's grassroots org
Text Yele to 501501 to donate $5 via your cell phone

Or text "HAITI" to "90999" and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.

Get this done immediately in case you have to do it a second time in the next few days.

2) It felt like the streams got crossed on the proton generators today when Brown passed Coakley in the polls. What a disaster. I was waiting for a gloating moment from Joe Scarborough, and I never got it. I don’t think its lost on Republicans that being a default choice is no victory. Right now, and this theme was pressed on this show, we are all losers. Our only victory will be some organized relief result with Haiti, but we have no victory imminent in Massachusetts regardless of outcome. That is also the takeaway for the coming 2010 elections.

I felt like even today, the denial rampant in the Democratic party, evident in candidate Coakley, evident in our President is at a level unseen since “American Psycho”. Are you really just going to go through the motions with your entire health care bill at stake with this election? Where is Tim Kaine? How bad does the DNC and the President miss Chairman Dean? What would Mike Allen say? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

3) Who is that guy who came in dressed as Harold Ford Jr.? A guy came in and was referred to as the Tennessee congressman, but when he spoke, there was an edge that scared little children and when he looked at Willie Geist, the searing heat removed all hope that at some point Mr. Geist would grow facial hair.

That guy is about as electable as Charles Manson, and may want to assemble a focus group of babys and grandparents to work through his issues before he wastes anyone’s contributions. My problem specifically is that Mr. Ford appears Manchurian. Normally, New York embraces the best and the brightest from anywhere and has benefited from that openness with great leaders like Hillary Clinton and Mike Bloomberg. But I think in this case the voters will scrutinize any quick fix platforms or industry underwriting very closely and suspect the worst.

I really like Harold Ford and Barack Obama, but I have lost all patience for disorganization whether its message, management, or focus. This was the key point today and it’s even lost on the cast and guests of the Morning Joe show. What’s different between this year and 1994? This year and 1982? The internet, have you heard of it? Corporately controlled cable news with 5 unique heads, have you heard of it? We have mashed comprehensible bits of information into neutrons and the Diaspora of said information reaches even grandmothers and babys in mere minutes. Today in Texas, Mr. Ford’s words on Morning Joe will be rebroadcast ad nauseum by some swift boat level 527 PAC, and I assure you the results will not be kind. And worst of all, it was 100% preventable by Mr. Ford, if he had simply decided to play himself on TV today.

That’s all for today, see you Monday.

The TSA, Asset Or Liability?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 29th, 2009


Observations:


1) Kudos to the show for bringing in Digger Phelps to update on it's charity efforts. Not because the floor in the gym is getting done, but because Digger has re-aimed the effort from the school to the real task of getting the full service hospital the city of New Orleans so desperately needs.


The show is on to something with its charity choice, but you can’t just neglect the singular item that brought you to this task in the first place. As you have pathed towards New Orleans, you have kept this flagship task at arm’s length. You are going to be in a bad spot if you haven’t agendized the hospital by the next time Digger Phelps comes on the show, or you’ll have to schedule it during your next vacation, but that might be too obvious an avoidance.


2) It is an amazing coalescence around the center where Eugene Robinson and Pat Buchanan are finding common ground. This mini-drama surrounding the near miss bombing attack has given us a Petri dish view of what larger hysteria would look like. The right is using current events to gain ground on having more options and less responsibility toward our anti torture mantra when an enemy combatant is found. The center left is letting them.


The left is using this as an opportunity to get an ‘I told you so’ moment to say that the conventional war in Afghanistan is provably misguided. The right is letting them make that point. The common ground is amazing but how much of it will be retrenched away from this point in the near to medium term as the hysteria subsides. It’s a bizarre scientific experiment showing the effects of powerlessness and fear upon your moral compass.


3) The center left is a willing participant in the ‘black hole’ policy. If you are trying to do us harm, you have a Jack Ryan decision coming to you that you will either tell us 100% of the information you possess and we need to ensure the nations safety in a way that we are 100% convinced, or you will be taken into a black hole, which starts with a rendition, continues through an advanced interrogation, and dumps you out in Guantanamo or Illinois, where you will reside until we feel like all of the information concerning you has surfaced, and then your life sentence will be confirmed by a military tribunal.


Remember, you were given a choice at the entry to the black hole, and you chose your fate. I couldn’t care less about the international debate on torture as long as it’s not a secret what’s being done. When it is a secret, you are feeding the tortuous regimes in Iran and elsewhere with an ideological crutch, which is where we are now. But if we just had the courage to come out and say that pertinent only to violent terrorism bent on mass casualties, we are going to overtly suspend our ideals that we serve to uphold regarding human rights of a few savage individuals, but do it publicly, I believe the international community would understand, and we could add a tool to the fight.


4) This show established a communion with the nation’s feeling that the TSA are morons acting like an early 1980’s Japanese toy robot trying to pass off learning to take 3 steps as artificial intelligence. It actually points to the dysfunction of Congress where the post-9/11 civil defense funds were mis-spent trying to prevent a terrorist attack on Spokane, Washington by speed boat when we could’ve installed full body monitoring devices in every airport in the US and every incoming gateway airport in the World. Those machines are expensive, but at least you own an armored anti invasion boat in Spokane instead.


The privacy concerns that lawmakers cited in slowing the establishment of the full body scans are the exact lack of imagination that infuriates Americans who have been humiliated in their own airports by their own government for 8 years, have been an additional kick in the teeth to airlines who have never made money since the attacks, given our enemies new opportunities to attack us, and set us back financially on the war on terror a full decade. Way to go Congress. If you’re counting at home that’s a 70% idiot quotient for a Rebublican legislature, a 30% idiot quotient for a Democratic legislature, and another in the perpetually growing number of fronts that our government is demonstrating an abject failure to govern with any efficiency at all. After all that Digger Phelps answered your privacy concern in one statement: “You could just ask the flier, they would opt-in 95% of the time”.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Dear Chris Licht – A Technical Note

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 11th, 2009


Dear Chris Licht:


It has become obvious in the last several weeks that news and analysis have taken a backseat to features on the show and I feel the need to explain the peril that you face by continuing such a downward slide.


1) It keeps happening that a guest of some journalistic or political esteem is asked to participate in an awkward acknowledgment of bad behavior as news. It happened today with Richard Haas. Watch tape to see if you can catch your part in the dumbing down of America, today’s chapter.


We all know where we were when Willie Geist asked Maxine Waters about Carrie Prejean and was resoundingly scolded. It was so out of place that there was a sense of shame on the whole crew for creating an atmosphere that permitted that. Symptomatic of the current problems is that this is now commonplace, the Michigan Governor last week, anyone?


2) Structurally we lost one of the Geist segments, then it came back under a different name, and lets be honest, he has a whole show at 5:30 that you could Tivo if you want that content, otherwise one segment would be plenty. Do you remember when he went out, Letterman-esque, to the upper westside in a McCain shirt? That’s Geist’s gift, not turnstiling interruptive nonsense 3 times a show. No one has disdain for Willie Geist’s role in the program until he is the face of the interruption of the program’s core competencies.


3) It’s not just Morning Joe, but the entire 5 AM – 1 PM EST corridor is bogged down by a gross over repetition of the news slideshow. You’re cashing a check, right? Then it is your job to come up with some way out of 6 readings of the same news on your watch. The fact that the last story is rarely covered as the reading is perpetually drowned out the first time through, combined with the fact that the first two readings seemingly bump up together, should be a sign that you could creatively intersperse the news once over a whole hour so that it is not the useless logjam that it is now.


These are dynamics errors. Willie would be funnier if we wasn’t drowning himself out. Mika could bring the news to the debate, if there wasn’t a need for a hard break that often disrupts the real work going on while desensitizing or worse antagonizing the selected five or so headlines of the day.


A lack of a demonstration of core competency can have devastating effects. There is no roadmap for this show, as it has different time factors and deadline factors than any of the other shows on cable news. But the negative consequences of not getting it right are the same. If you can’t differentiate yourself in each half hour with value and brand value, your executives won’t justify your cost difference over having Alex Witt or Contessa Brewer generically reading the same script, and guests of the level of Richard Haas don’t go on that program. In fact, how many upper echelon guests are feeling a mysterious attrition coming to their appearance choice for fear of being adjacent embarrassing programming? How quickly will people you want as guests start to avoid you for fear of being set next to a man in a donkey suit? Where is that threshold today as opposed to yesterday?


I guess the jobs vigil is back too, as the subject of jobs itself took a holiday to a New Jersey beach.


I’m waiting for someone to try and claim it must’ve been a slow news day.


That’s all for today, see you Monday.