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.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Lucidity Takes A Holiday, Part Seven
The Opposition Rebuttal to Morning Joe for September 7th, 2010
Observations:
1) Boy, this show is all about piling on. Don’t let it deter you that the Morning Joe cast sat around the campfire for the same 14 months they now complain about and predicted the end of health care and provided exactly zero jobs solutions while cynically complaining about that thing they couldn’t refine themselves.
So when Erin Burnett says that you need $2 trillion in infrastructure investment to simply find competitiveness with the Chinese, and you trot out the Zbigniew Brzezinski line about getting off of the plane from China and feeling DC to be comparatively in 1975, do you think that’s where you put the period?
See, that’s where your take is supposed to go. Yea, the whole cast was on vacation last week, and when you get to the non multiple choice part of your show it gets cumbersome, but that’s why you had to say the word ‘cynical’ about yourself all day today: it’s so easy to bash your opponents that when you have to set the bar for yourselves low, red herring baiting without detail provides the best return on investment.
Let’s not forget that you killed the stimulus from day one, but never said where you would have stood if it had been effective stimulus instead of the Pelosi handout. That is a defacto obstruction on par with what the Republicans have done this entire congressional term. I’m sad about the $787 billion too, but you’re Google away from being able to see an MJR blueprint in detail for the $2 trillion Erin mentions above. You? Tax cuts? Or just spurious kill the bill sound bites?
2) So, did Morning Joe think they were just gonna slink their new ad planner through and no one would notice? Are you kidding me? Remember when Joe Scarborough said as loud as he could that repealing anti-trust for health care insurers was key to a free enterprise solution? Let’s count the number of times that he brings that subject out of it’s box now that United Health is running lobby level endorsements of the Morning Joe show.
I was pretty depressed when Tom Daschle and Howard Dean took the money. I am a lot less depressed about Morning Joe taking the money. But just don’t go around pretending that you are no longer free of compromise on an issue that will continue to kill more people than smoking in the United States until change manifests. That’s right United Health owns monopoly health care operations in states like California, where individual plans go up 30% October 1st without debate. They are the operational equation behind where does that 32 cents of your health care dollar go that doesn’t go to health care? Switzerland and the Netherlands mandate that private industry health insurance revenues flow through at 90%. But your new sponsor will masquerade as the benign endorsement of Mika’s health walk in a BP-esque attempt to have a neutral credibility derived from that endorsement.
And oh yea, Ethanol? I was going to predict that you were re-upping with Extenze on the west coast, then the ethanol lobby beat me to it. Maybe Morning Joe has stumbled on a new business venture. Howitzer some part of the political spectrum, the least nationally useful the better, and see if they turn around and counter your message with those Archer Daniels Midland style branding ads to keep their momentum.
What I think Chris Licht should consider, is during the next round of mass vacations Morning Joe pre tape a segment with people who look like newscasters but actually work for either the Ethanol lobby or United Health. Then read editorials about the validity of these entities as if they were news. Maybe 10 minutes each? Possibly add a witty title like ‘Shine A Golden Light On Ethanol’ or 'Health Care Is A Privilege And Not A Right’.
That’s called double dipping my friend, a paid segment that looks like programming that you can repeat, thus lowering programming cost at the same time. Credibility? That sand castle found high tide a while ago.
3) I’m not as horrified by the sameness as I might sound. This is really just where Morning Joe and the country are going at nearly similar trajectories. But, alas, I do need to write everyday and the show doesn’t seem like it can provide content at that frequency in it’s current form. Sort’ve like that playground that seems smaller and smaller upon each return.
I’m happy to check in when the urge to throw the remote at the TV strikes, but the show seems incapable of surprise or traction at this point. Joe Scarborough is going to pontificate on approximately 15% of an issue as if it was the whole range of description or analysis available, Mika Brzezinski is going to be unconvincing in an Alan Colmes sort of way as the lefty foil, Mike Barnicle is going to take the days events and boil them into 60 seconds of Will Rogers without a call to action, and friends of the show will join them not in bringing about a new dynamic understanding of the world, but a hallow hip shot of the sort that gets us the election results of 2004 delivered in a nice mid term version this November.
It’s not like there are a million options out there. I haven’t watched Chris Matthews in a very long time, Dylan needs a spokesman, Keith is funny, but not helpful, Rachel is funny, but just funny, Ed is radio with a camera, and Lawrence’s new promo clip for his show shouts needs work at the top of its lungs. CNN is really out in the wilderness, save Fareed, Fox requires decompression, and Jon Stewart works a 4 day work week when he works, with a 39 hour delay. And Stewart, as funny and on point as he is, is really committed to less is more with 100 or so writers doing 2 segments and an interview as their semi daily yield.
As a collective cable news returns far less social good for money invested than our government run health care or educational systems. Television in general is a chief enabler of the breakdown in our political system. The news part is wholly owned by status quo industry barons, and the commercials that run the lions share of campaigns cost so much money, they are the real reason lobbyists have so much power. If you are GE, NBC, MSNBC or channel 39 in San Diego, you have a vested interest in keeping politics viewable best via your prism. Every single service to that interest is slightly defeated by solution, slightly leveraged by status quo or stalemate conflict.
We talked about the perverse dollar motivations in our health care system where cost control has zero incentive at any part of the health care process, doctors and patients feel best when they spend far beyond rationality. Television’s command of politics is that same reverse logic. In England when another not paid for advertisement runs, an executive at Sky News cries a silent tear for the what could have been as it exists in the US. Marketers are having a field day and myopic optics like the 'Young Guns' prove the point at each turn.
It’s an important addendum that political advertisement is sky rocketing at 312 times the rate of job growth. The only other multiplier out there that is similar is the current CEO to average employee pay in the United States. It’s a growth industry, a gravy train because it’s a war between the nations corporations and the nation’s people. Guess where the money is?
I still think that Joe Scarborough is a populist at heart. But remembering his core reasons for that populism isn’t getting any easier every day results like this are on his timecard.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Boy, this show is all about piling on. Don’t let it deter you that the Morning Joe cast sat around the campfire for the same 14 months they now complain about and predicted the end of health care and provided exactly zero jobs solutions while cynically complaining about that thing they couldn’t refine themselves.
So when Erin Burnett says that you need $2 trillion in infrastructure investment to simply find competitiveness with the Chinese, and you trot out the Zbigniew Brzezinski line about getting off of the plane from China and feeling DC to be comparatively in 1975, do you think that’s where you put the period?
See, that’s where your take is supposed to go. Yea, the whole cast was on vacation last week, and when you get to the non multiple choice part of your show it gets cumbersome, but that’s why you had to say the word ‘cynical’ about yourself all day today: it’s so easy to bash your opponents that when you have to set the bar for yourselves low, red herring baiting without detail provides the best return on investment.
Let’s not forget that you killed the stimulus from day one, but never said where you would have stood if it had been effective stimulus instead of the Pelosi handout. That is a defacto obstruction on par with what the Republicans have done this entire congressional term. I’m sad about the $787 billion too, but you’re Google away from being able to see an MJR blueprint in detail for the $2 trillion Erin mentions above. You? Tax cuts? Or just spurious kill the bill sound bites?
2) So, did Morning Joe think they were just gonna slink their new ad planner through and no one would notice? Are you kidding me? Remember when Joe Scarborough said as loud as he could that repealing anti-trust for health care insurers was key to a free enterprise solution? Let’s count the number of times that he brings that subject out of it’s box now that United Health is running lobby level endorsements of the Morning Joe show.
I was pretty depressed when Tom Daschle and Howard Dean took the money. I am a lot less depressed about Morning Joe taking the money. But just don’t go around pretending that you are no longer free of compromise on an issue that will continue to kill more people than smoking in the United States until change manifests. That’s right United Health owns monopoly health care operations in states like California, where individual plans go up 30% October 1st without debate. They are the operational equation behind where does that 32 cents of your health care dollar go that doesn’t go to health care? Switzerland and the Netherlands mandate that private industry health insurance revenues flow through at 90%. But your new sponsor will masquerade as the benign endorsement of Mika’s health walk in a BP-esque attempt to have a neutral credibility derived from that endorsement.
And oh yea, Ethanol? I was going to predict that you were re-upping with Extenze on the west coast, then the ethanol lobby beat me to it. Maybe Morning Joe has stumbled on a new business venture. Howitzer some part of the political spectrum, the least nationally useful the better, and see if they turn around and counter your message with those Archer Daniels Midland style branding ads to keep their momentum.
What I think Chris Licht should consider, is during the next round of mass vacations Morning Joe pre tape a segment with people who look like newscasters but actually work for either the Ethanol lobby or United Health. Then read editorials about the validity of these entities as if they were news. Maybe 10 minutes each? Possibly add a witty title like ‘Shine A Golden Light On Ethanol’ or 'Health Care Is A Privilege And Not A Right’.
That’s called double dipping my friend, a paid segment that looks like programming that you can repeat, thus lowering programming cost at the same time. Credibility? That sand castle found high tide a while ago.
3) I’m not as horrified by the sameness as I might sound. This is really just where Morning Joe and the country are going at nearly similar trajectories. But, alas, I do need to write everyday and the show doesn’t seem like it can provide content at that frequency in it’s current form. Sort’ve like that playground that seems smaller and smaller upon each return.
I’m happy to check in when the urge to throw the remote at the TV strikes, but the show seems incapable of surprise or traction at this point. Joe Scarborough is going to pontificate on approximately 15% of an issue as if it was the whole range of description or analysis available, Mika Brzezinski is going to be unconvincing in an Alan Colmes sort of way as the lefty foil, Mike Barnicle is going to take the days events and boil them into 60 seconds of Will Rogers without a call to action, and friends of the show will join them not in bringing about a new dynamic understanding of the world, but a hallow hip shot of the sort that gets us the election results of 2004 delivered in a nice mid term version this November.
It’s not like there are a million options out there. I haven’t watched Chris Matthews in a very long time, Dylan needs a spokesman, Keith is funny, but not helpful, Rachel is funny, but just funny, Ed is radio with a camera, and Lawrence’s new promo clip for his show shouts needs work at the top of its lungs. CNN is really out in the wilderness, save Fareed, Fox requires decompression, and Jon Stewart works a 4 day work week when he works, with a 39 hour delay. And Stewart, as funny and on point as he is, is really committed to less is more with 100 or so writers doing 2 segments and an interview as their semi daily yield.
As a collective cable news returns far less social good for money invested than our government run health care or educational systems. Television in general is a chief enabler of the breakdown in our political system. The news part is wholly owned by status quo industry barons, and the commercials that run the lions share of campaigns cost so much money, they are the real reason lobbyists have so much power. If you are GE, NBC, MSNBC or channel 39 in San Diego, you have a vested interest in keeping politics viewable best via your prism. Every single service to that interest is slightly defeated by solution, slightly leveraged by status quo or stalemate conflict.
We talked about the perverse dollar motivations in our health care system where cost control has zero incentive at any part of the health care process, doctors and patients feel best when they spend far beyond rationality. Television’s command of politics is that same reverse logic. In England when another not paid for advertisement runs, an executive at Sky News cries a silent tear for the what could have been as it exists in the US. Marketers are having a field day and myopic optics like the 'Young Guns' prove the point at each turn.
It’s an important addendum that political advertisement is sky rocketing at 312 times the rate of job growth. The only other multiplier out there that is similar is the current CEO to average employee pay in the United States. It’s a growth industry, a gravy train because it’s a war between the nations corporations and the nation’s people. Guess where the money is?
I still think that Joe Scarborough is a populist at heart. But remembering his core reasons for that populism isn’t getting any easier every day results like this are on his timecard.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, September 3, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
I was inspired today by a small comment in a Paul Krugman blog post:
I was equally revolted by Morning Joe commentary concerning the coming doom of the mid term elections, without even mentioning the Howard Dean differentiating take from yesterday.
So I made an exercise for us to try and imagine this time next year.
[editors note: there is no way that I will ever top the seminal outing of the Morning Joe idiosynchratic parade contained in last month's video. This is not that at all, and this new one is really just trying to hard focus on one topic that Paul Krugman and I feel like the nation could use some help visualizing]
...as far as I can tell, hardly any of the new anti-Obamanites is thinking at all about what will really happen once John Boehner is speaker.
I was equally revolted by Morning Joe commentary concerning the coming doom of the mid term elections, without even mentioning the Howard Dean differentiating take from yesterday.
So I made an exercise for us to try and imagine this time next year.
[editors note: there is no way that I will ever top the seminal outing of the Morning Joe idiosynchratic parade contained in last month's video. This is not that at all, and this new one is really just trying to hard focus on one topic that Paul Krugman and I feel like the nation could use some help visualizing]
Monday, August 30, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Vote For The Skunk
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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