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.

When Will The Thrashing Stop?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 12th, 2010


Observations:


1) Dylan Ratigan is a Mona Lisa of unexplained complexity. His efforts on the show today dragged the conversation up the food chain from the superficial to the, well, less superficial. Dylan explained to America that you can cut all you want but that austerity is not an equation for recapitalization. Wait, I did that in 14 words, it took Dylan 5400 and his message was diluted for its lack of cohesion.


Fresh off of his voter suppression efforts, Joe Scarborough was all to happy to edit out the progressive message that dubbed the deficit commission the “cat food commission”. That is suppression of another kind, but Joe’s greater argument that the extremes on both sides unduly control the debate allows this kind of editing. He has a point, a point I wish I could recall him enforcing in August of 2009 at the heat of the death panel scare.


So it was a great relief that Dylan couldn’t control the conversation and that Joe could just mock his inability to boil a matter down. It was a great relief because it would show that had Dylan not been there and Joe would have interviewed David Walker by himself, they would have never brought up revenue. That conversation, which happens way too often on Morning Joe, the one void of depth and in shallow pursuit of a key operating objective, exposes the show to its chief criticism that it only finds depth accidentally but left to its own devices is a magnet for superficiality.


Bravo for the show’s self awareness, for it’s relentless pursuit of depth, for knowing that if it was just Joe and Mika talking they would aggregate to less than Bill Karin’s segment.


Now if only Dylan could take an extension class on clarity, or at least the transfer of clarity from one’s mind to one’s rocket ship.


2) Not since the southeastern gas crisis in 2008 have we seen such an effort to blackout the media. I am of course talking about the rocket launch that occurred Monday off of the coast of California and has been dismissed with the most juvenile assertions from the government, its as if they are begging the country to dig deeper.


I can’t in good faith go into the story, as it would just lump me in with the Mel Gibson ‘Conspiracy Theory’ crowd, but I often look at the Morning Joe show as a bellwether for this blackout lever. Why? Because Joe Scarborough is at once very close to the intelligence community of Washington, DC, and a terrible, terrible liar. He is so bad at acting that when the obligatory brush off move comes up like it did 2 days ago on the air live, you can actually learn quite a bit about ‘the fix’ by watching his mannerisms.


I know, I know, that show “Lie To Me” is one of my wife’s favorite shows, and this is me telephoning some misperception of that process. I get it that it’s easy to criticize.


But what I saw stuck with me the same way James Woods still sticks with his story about seeing the dry run for 9/11. It was as if a really scared guy at the NSA was on the earpiece that Chris Licht normally operates whispering “look down, kill the story, move on quick, OK, we may have gotten away with it”. That same guy probably went to a meeting later and described Joe Scarborough’s inability to have a poker face in these situations a tragedy heretofore known as “the Scarborough situation”


What is the CIA going to do about “the Scarborough situation”


3) In other self serving suppression news, Morning Joe ran with a Politico based repeal health care story today without referencing the new uninsured figure of 59 million Americans. The election last week proves beyond a doubt that left to it’s own devices, the Americans who retain health care or financial wherewithal will act like chapter 7 of ‘Lord Of The Flies” all the way down the decline of our civilization.


The point is best represented by expatriates. I know someone who recently moved to Australia, and Morning Joe had an opportunity to run this Politico story while Chrystia Freeland was on the set. These people know that US healthcare is a giant Ponzi scheme at this point, and that other governments have systems in place that allow them to better compete in the global marketplace via a healthier population.


These expatriates look at what’s going on here and tell you the truth in the first ten minutes of the conversation. But left to our own devices, all of the central points of the Moynihan segment, Joe’s own don’t subscribe to political parties segments, the Jon Stewart segment about where the real conversation should be, are all lost in the wave of Morning Joe’s magic wand. Why say you hate the extremist controlling the argument, when on the same show on the same day, you reinstall the semantic system of demonizing solutions for the good of political control?


It was the same show, it wasn’t some amalgam of some month’s work, it was just today’s show. We are losing ground on health care every day and need a solution. And just like austerity is not a solution, but a dimension to an overall economic plan, you cannot just stick steely knives into solutions to a health care crisis for political gain.


Here is the right way forward. Listen close. Repeal will be a political loser. Get those things you wanted included last time, and make them phase 2 of the big fix. Be a solution seller. Get the state lines situation fixed, the anti trust exemption fixed, and fix the microeconomic incentive in a way that allows the customer to choose services and participate in the cost curve. Trade the mandate for that. Make your free market improvements alongside what Obama got done. But if you’re on the repeal team because ‘elections have consequences’, you’ve got 40, maybe just 20, months to live.


Keep calm and carry on, despite the missiles overhead


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Nice Job Morning Joe You Helped Steal An Election

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for Election Day, 2010


Observations:


1) I guess I should have known when there was a managed media blackout on Morning Joe suppressing coverage of the gulf oil spill, that the show was doing a bit of a dry run in preparation to be that outpost on MSNBC that emulates Fox News’ efforts to suppress the progressive vote.


On the surface, it all seems so reasonable, Joe is a right leaning guy, his henchmen Halperin and Buchanan have a vested interest in the outcome, so why all the surprise that they would perform a service to the ruling class by convincing voters that they need no longer participate in the democratic process, for it is a foregone conclusion that the 78% unfavorable Republicans will be handed the halls of the nation’s legislature.


The demonization of progress, the irrationality of scapegoating the wrong guy for all the job losses, and the indescribably logic free notion that further enriching the ultra rich is the way out of the economic downturn caused by the net effect of the last wealth transfer is stunning for it's myopic effectiveness.


Joe Scarborough is guilty for terming the next step of the disintegration of the middle class necessary progress, and that step is this pre-ordained Republican victory. You can’t waste your days hoping Ed Schultz will bust on the set and beat Scarborough’s ass (you know he wants to), you just have to know what is happening around you and figure out your next step.


2) This notion of voter suppression is so irrational that it may be a greater mystery than what causes cancer.


We all know that the final margin in the Reagan – Carter presidential was drastically affected by the media coverage handing the country to Reagan before anyone from Colorado to the Pacific Ocean had voted. The margin of victory was significantly widened when those states that amalgamate to a huge progressive voting block, became suddenly disaffected voters. The undercard elections in those states swung mercilessly right and outcomes throughout the west were distorted by unprecedented leaps, resulting in permanent damage.


This phenomenon has driven strict media rules that for the most part don’t help at all, because of the nature of new media, and it’s ability to move information around any attempt to suppress.


So here we are today and the lessons, not the constructive ones that had us trying to curb election steering by showing the eastern state's results, but the diabolical ones about how a person stays home if you convince him it’s a lost cause, are now part and parcel to modern political science. The election process of buying media advertisements and debating is an expensive stalemate process. The new needle mover is voter suppression, and the historic turnout in 2008 is the greatest threat to future Republican power holds, the simple fact being the return on investment is greater in this arena than the traditional campaign tactics.


The evidence is as simple as looking at what mandated voting would look like. There would be two drastic effects: a devaluation of the white vote, and an end to the effectiveness of gerrymandering. Oh there would be one other effect, a Democratic super majority for the foreseeable future, and an end to the current corporate control of the nation’s capital. If you’re a Republican, a white person interested in retaining control of the politics of the United States, or a chamber of commerce, voter suppression is vital to your survival.


3) Social Media could produce the next step necessary in modern politics. For lack of a better descriptive, Facebook or its nextgen could be the architecture for a form of a witch-hunt that could use its loose interpretation of privacy to build a virtual inventory of the voter base. Add in one sprinkle of Google maps or Zillow real estate chronicling, and there could be an available tracking of who is voting and who is not, and pressure could be applied to those submitting to voter suppression to endear upon them the patriotic loss that goes with their missing vote.


That’s right, I said it, I have extreme disdain for the 60% who will hand power elsewhere today. It’s on my list of national crises and I want answers from those people. I had a very good chance this election cycle when Meg Whitman suddenly wanted to control the California governor’s office despite here disinterest in voting until the age of 46. That kind of hypocrisy is a punishable event, and 150 million dollars is a good riddance deserved.


But as an equal opportunist in this realm, I have equal disdain for people who attend protests, there aren’t enough recent examples if you’ve noticed, but who have an imperfect record of participating in the voting process. The last time there was a solid protest schedule was in the run up to the Iraq war. I felt then and I feel now that those protests were hollow because of how many of the participants didn’t vote. I irrationally think people who did not vote should be arrested if they attend a protest for their hypocrisy. The net effect is the protests ran out of gas, and protest have become more and more diluted and easily policed in this country.


Largely disintegrated by our lack of a Democratic credibility, we Americans can only watch with confused admiration while French and Greek citizens keep their governments in exponentially more effective check. The reason is so simple, yet today we risk a dangerous repeat of our irrational path. The reason is we think its OK to hand the government to agents of our demise via voter attrition to the tune of 60%.


Various elements of the corporate interest have actually broken away from the indirect suppressive effort and tried to run ads that simply told people who weren’t going to vote in their favor to not vote. Those ads never made it to the airwaves but you would never know it given the coverage they received from the media. It’s a modern phenomenon that you can run this stuff knowing that it won’t actually be televised on a paid basis, but you will have a publicity effect for your message because it’s so extreme that it can be called news, despite it’s blatant marketing composition. Was the media duped? No, they consider this stuff tools to their ultimate goal.


Joe Scarborough has been projecting wishful thinking since 1994. This is his most successful year. It is much easier to effect the country from a commercial pulpit, and he is really ready to cement his will on the nation from here for a long time. It’s evident that he became interested in his electability late last year, and got his answer: stay in media. No background checks, deserved or not, and no fact checks. You can go on forever in this environment, that is unless any of the changes that need to happen see the light of day: campaign finance reform, disassociation of lobby interests from congress, and a comprehensive study on the process of steering our politics via formerly objective journalism.


4) How can I make these outlandish claims? In the 3 hours of Morning Joe directly adjacent to the mid term election, there were Pulitzer Prize winning left leaning journalists, there was the DNC chair, and there was Scarborough going after any Republican that claims to be ready to solve any problems as having no credibility.


To me, the left elements of the show were pure capitulation, lead by Mika Brzezinski, in one of her finest Alan Colmes moments. Eugene Robinson seemed forlorn, and Tim Kaine seemed just as delusional as when he began the malpractice he calls his tenure at the top of the Democratic Party.


John Stewart captured the same delusional moment from DCCC chair Van Hollen. Stewart then called it delusional. Shock, he called a spade a spade.


It all seems so credible when presented on the show, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski has indicated conclusively, Morning Joe is the most extreme example of superficial objectivity currently being televised. At least Fox makes no illusion of really being fair and balanced. The roots of the superficiality are the extreme talent of Joe Scarborough at taking distorted anecdote and turning it into a mantra for governing, no matter how falsely based.


Wow, and you are going to fall for it.

A Tunnel To Tragedy

The Hudson River tunnel stoppage is a national tragedy. Rather than rant as I’ve done repeatedly about the Krugman-Keynes versus Republican denial debate, it’s more important to ponder how Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough can have formed a blind alliance with Chris Christie and immediately came down in favor of his work stoppage order. They then went on to cite the travel musings of Chrystia Freeland in Turkey and the second Zbigeniew Brzezinski compare and contrast observation in the last few months, and went further citing Germany’s austerity program, and could not make cohesive sense if their life depended on it.


Germany can afford austerity because its public works is at a rate of completion that it isn’t perpetually 20 years behind in terms of infrastructure maintenance needs like the US is. The two recent foreign travelers are basically saying every day we do things like stop the second Hudson River tunnel the closer we come to having the infrastructure of the third world and having global business look elsewhere.


Freeland and Erin Burnett have made this as clear as they can, but choosing talking points over logic, Morning Joe has pre-aligned itself with the Republican party and cheers any new loss of momentum in governing as some great victory. Freeland and Burnett pointing out the money we would use to make public works happen is beneficial as a whole economy revival and is cheaper now on both a nominal interest basis and a real cost basis than when we had a budget surplus in 1999.


But Morning Joe’s mind is made up and that’s all there is to it. Stop building infrastructure and reverse anything else in the name of austerity. Tragic.



Conveniently the unemployment numbers boost critics either way. The unemployment figures released today were the opposite of the numbers released last month. Last month the nominal jobs lost was better than expected but because more people entered the workforce and looked for work the rate ticked up to 9.6%. The good news caused the uptick but the critics went crazy looking for ways to blame the administration for the rate.


This time the rate was expected to go up to 9.7% for the same positive reasons, but it didn’t, because again we didn’t lose as many jobs as we thought. But now the critics are camped on the fact that because there was a net job loss at all, Obama must be held accountable. It all looks like the analysis of convenience.


In a weird convergence with Yelp.com, Morning Joe just seems to scroll itself to whomever is complaining and cover that. Again you have that future commerce secretary Maria Bartiromo on the show chomping at the bit to show business is ready to revolt because Obama can’t give them the rest of the wealth they haven’t already pilfered.


Objective types continue to fail to break through with rational mathematical reasoning with the Morning Joe cast. In fairness the White House is having the same problems reasoning with people, as we talked about yesterday. But the inability of the show to connect the dots seems intentional.

NY Pro-Choice Ad And Marketing In The New World

The shock and dismay displayed on the faces of the cast of Morning Joe upon viewing the Pro-Choice for New York ad came off like theater at the same level as the casting call for hicks ad for West Virginia. The claim that any non economy or jobs related ad is missing the national point is a group of analysts showing their age.


Seth Godin has laid it out for you, and Malcom Gladwell has spent two books worth of time supporting him: modern advertising revolves around speaking to the different factions or tribes of your target market in a way that moves them.


Many of the people who would be targeted by the pro choice ad have jobs and money. They would be chief candidates for voter apathy on jobs and economic elections, but a reminder of the social Trojan Horse that rides along with Tea Party and Republican candidates gets them out of their safe haven to the voter booth.


Chris Hayes has accurately depicted the atmosphere in Washington DC is that of an island of full employment where people with money go out to dinner and live normal lives in blissful ignorance of the situation on the ground one mile off the I-15 freeway opposite the Las Vegas strip where one in four is unemployed and a new member of the poverty class, a former resident of the middle class.


The tribe of those who have not been affected by the economic downturn is not likely to vote unless something that actually affects them is brought into the equation. The Democrats do themselves a disservice by not bringing all subjects to the table in a way that moves the most people to vote.


The consensus at the Morning Joe show that the two parties run solely on the generic ballot and the single most important issue isn’t just misguided it’s also not how American politics functions, thus they are asking for voters to be duped. I wish I could believe this is just a senior moment, but I don’t, I think it was another Fox & Friends moment of palpable dishonesty on display.

Trojan Horse

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for October 6th, 2010


Observations:


1) I feel like the national club of persons interested in providing a counterpoint to the Morning Joe show has left the show’s subscribers in good hands in my absence. The show appears incapable of seeing itself as a biased take on events, not in the Roger Ailes way, but in the inherent stubbornness borne of Joe Scarborough’s personality. Over time Scarborough has morphed into a second period Bill O’Rielly, the version that dug a moat around his version of events and took on all comers not by real debate but by a form of fact free semantic wrestling that timed out opponents rather than built a more resolute consensus. This type of phenomenon needs critics. Critics with the voracity to overcome dime store defense mechanisms and make those painfully constructive observations that allow resolute consensus to form with or without the self appointed protagonist.


And man have these critics come out of the woodwork. Two of note are @CallOutJoe and @The_AntiJoe. The former is a direct attack twitter feed that real time tweets on the show on a daily basis and is at this point a required resource for viewing. @The_AntiJoe has no direct correlation to the show but has come into the picture as an accidental resource of Deepak Chopra level enhancement to the aforementioned bias. Neither of these entities are Trojan Horse faculties of political action committees. These are real people like myself who seek catharsis. Cathartic relief from the volume granted to at a very important time to a single program in such a way that the bias would otherwise be a false consensus.


This Morning Joe megaphone has shouted at the top of its lungs that Clinton would be president, that health care and financial regulation would fail, that tax cuts for the rich have a dominant effect on job growth, and that we could have done without the financial interventions of late 2008 and early 2009. Not since the pre invasion propaganda of 2002 and 2003 has a source of opinion been allotted a factual, objective platform with such a large probability of false prognostication. The Morning Joe show needs critics and left to its own devices would morph into the echo chamber it seeks to evolve out of.


2) The real Trojan Horse is the collection of pirates and proxy dupes that will combine to attempt to elect Republican candidates in this and future elections. If you listen to the “Pledge”, if you look at the money going into campaigns, if you watch closely the Jim Demint snafu, you get a pretty good picture that the embittered gun-clinging, god-justifying voter is the swing voter in play here. The business owner, or the highly educated citizen is not that swing voter and was not ever in play. The business owner is not content with his single vote, or his citizen level contribution to his pro commerce political agenda. The business owner is in constant search for the right trigger mechanism to enlist by proxy the guns and god crowd, and boy does that Citizens United case help his cause. The academic is unfortunately trying to reason with the electorate, but its no news flash that the electorate is irrational because it contains a significant population of swing voters willing to vote against their own interests for either short term gain or when victimized by mirages conjured up by political artists.


Matt Taibbi has documented this reformation of the Republican party extremely well in his latest article. In it, he draws the direct time line that once it became obvious that the libertarians phenomenon grew into a movement that became known as the Tea Party, the Republicans waited for their chance to coop it and re-define their own long standing principles as the core principles of the Tea Party despite the fact that it was often an ideological 180 degree shift. We have known this about the Republican party for some time, whether it’s foreign policy or domestic politics, you’ve got about 22 seconds of loyalty and in the 23rd second it’s on to the next exploitation.


So this concoction of opportunists and meek march on to bring about reversal of change meant to empower the middle class. The meek are prepared to vote for the next great transfer of wealth, their own wealth, to a ruling financial class. It’s insane, and it’s happening, and Morning Joe is doing its part to let it happen, mainly by not covering the identifying news stories that show the process as described above as a national myopia.


And don’t get me started on the elements of a political Trojan Horse bent on social restriction and non secular enshrinement of evangelical mores. This, my friends, is a business deal. If you are a rich banker and need to make the transfer of wealth described above happen, wouldn’t you, too, make deals with the southern evangelicals to make laws banning abortion and gay marriage or military service if it enabled said wealth transfer? Nothing like a zealot to bring you South Carolina’s electorate, and it’s wealth, all for some moral illusion. That is something for nothing, which by definition should be an illegal contract for its lack of consideration.


3) The Democratic party seems to be on autopilot with a programmed descent. In the face of all sorts of attackable phantom logic by their opponents, the Dems are shrunken academics attempting to reason with an impassioned voter. They don’t bring up the obvious points about themselves, elect us and we will get the health care program moved up two years, elect us and we will end outsourcing with powerful domestic corporate tax strategy that forces growth within our borders, elect us and we won’t let the next transfer of wealth happen. Elect us, middle class, for you have no other friend.


Nope, this is the party thinking about who to put in charge, and thinking of Robert Gibbs, the guy who could not communicate any of the things above for the last 2 years. In fairness he had help, for the architect creating the bird’s nest messages that came out of the White House was David Axelrod, who several satellites have spotted crying in the rose garden every time another of his uneventful near placations fell short of the resolute message required to lead a nation in tough times. These are good guys, they did one thing really well and expected to run the table. Joe Scarborough was all too happy this morning to make this point. Running the table certainly has not happened, you’re not special, and you need Daschle and Dean immediately. The fact you demonized Dean can now be forgiven as misguided youthful exuberance when you though you were going to run the country like Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook. You might have wanted to have some practical experience before really believing your self estimations, and now it’s time for a best and brightest moment to shore up your camp, and fend off hordes of looters hoping that 2010 is remembered as the year hypnosis on the right, and rookie missteps on the left conspired to hand them the nation, lock, stock, and barrel.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Have We Lost Yet?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 13th, 2010


Observations:


1) Joe Biden had it figured out before all of us. What was amazing about the seemingly enlightened conversation that took place between Joe Conason, David Ignatius, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was what was missing. Seeming like a retroactive genius, Joe Biden had this Afghanistan debacle figured out light years before anyone else. Whether he was blasting Karzai to his face, or making the Pakistan math plain, or showing us the right solution, Joe Biden has been out in front for a long time. A lot longer then myself, a lot longer than the panel today.


We need to go back to a 15,000 person expeditionary force under CIA control. Maybe even less. And we need to control the airspace, freely using the predator system to make no corner of the vast, uninviting terrain of Afghanistan safe for enemies of the United States. That skeleton force should be agnostic to the government of Afghanistan and should rightly be as empowering to the opposition as it is to the ruling party.


The implication that the surge is having an opposite effect actually makes a lot of what Morning Joe has been wishing for suddenly realistic. If we can go from $100 billion in meaningless to $500 million in no one is safe if we’re not safe targeting, that’s a lot of fiscal change for our country.


I do understand that the last of the surge troops just got there in the last few weeks. That doesn’t make me happy, and should bring up continued charges of slow walking by the Pentagon. I am no longer sure if that slow walking was residual effect from the McChrystal regime or if it is a lingering issue, but either way the strategy by those doing it is fatally flawed. The flaw is that there was little calculus in a slow walking strategy for the deteriorating domestic fiscal situation.

A second possible scenario that would disturb anyone may have been that the slowing of the implementation was a process of obstruction by the Pentagon similar to what legislative Republicans do every day: we just won’t do our jobs until a friendly governing regime takes over in Washington. No one knows whether that is part of the calculus, but if Wall Street and Mitch McConnell are doing it, if United Technologies is openly endorsing regime change in the United States, what would generals in the US armed forces do if they want post retirement high paying work?


Nonetheless, now the December evaluation can’t come soon enough, and look for the Biden plan to get several million more eyeballs now that throwing $150 billion more dollars into the ocean didn’t work.


2) Who is retarded now? How can you not be motivated by the Frank Rich article over the weekend? When Rahm Emmanuel slighted the base of the Democratic Party over their incessant calls for real reform instead of lip service, all of us got a reality check. Did we really have a naiveté of a level that made wanting to fix our crumbling governing services on a real level an exercise in Shangri-la?


Reminded by Rich of the FDR vitriol spewed at the robber barons who used fallacy optics to try and populize their self serving enrichment, reminded of the Obama claims made on the way into the oval office that it was real change not something titled change that is being heralded as change but can’t pass any reasonable muster as change, you have to feel at least a little better that you weren’t just dreaming irrationally for the last 22 months.


Rahm is jumping ship. We are left with his awful compromises, and in need of someone who has his moxie, but aims that moxie at adversaries instead of eating his own young with it.


What happens next is clearly indicative of whether we were duped at the outset, or if this is the most cardiac arresting new scale yet of the Obama ‘real good in the fourth quarter” phenomenon. Is it a setup where all the Goldman guys got the finance gigs, Rahm the chief of staff gig, Gates stayed on as defense chief to keep the wolves circling? Will the Goolsbee appointment, a Warren nod, a new Defense Secretary, and a street fighter with the people on his prevailing agenda as the new chief of staff be Obama setting the tempo for a 6 year run of cementing the loose cornerstones into a formidable new style of US governance? Or is it next stop, Manchuria?



3) Can I get an economist, please? I’ll remind you of one other nugget from my month long pro Paul Krugman rant: part of Keynesian doctrine insists that the private sector be harnessed in times of crisis and made to work towards a common goal of full employment. That is not from any Krugman rant, surprisingly, but is a most valid connection to this weekend’s Frank Rich column. You have to not let the Wall Street guys hold you hostage, it has to be the other way around. Listen to the Joe Scarborough harping on capital gains taxes today and you will see my point. Joe Scarborough desperately needs to have an economist on set at all times right now because he rarely makes more than base algebraic sense when he talks about the subject. But when you raise the capital gains tax without going the extra step of steepening the raise for gains made at the expense of the domestic tax base, and lessening or removing the tax for gains made that evolve the domestic tax base you leave a resonating point on the table. When you make numbers move without a substantive reasoning you give hipshot anecdotes like what came from Scarborough today a whole new round or repetition, and repetition outlasts, and can ultimately undermine, more logical paths when mixed with political rhetoric.


You, Mr. Obama, also have to not let the guys running around without a logical leg to stand on maintain the high ground simply by attrition of your will. I’ll gladly continue to take a pickaxe to Scarborough’s fallacy economics every time it comes up. He has yet to be right with that argument about the top-level tax expiration. The only reason he is almost right about the capital gains thing is that the administration lacked the conviction to use targeting of the capital gains tax to grow the economy, a reason Scarborough didn’t cite or base his argument on, he just got lucky.


Mr. Scarborough, you got the high ground via attrition, don’t get used to it.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow