The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 30th, 2010
Observations:
1) It’s as though Joe Scarborough thought he was bringing in the big guns when he put Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron on the show to strengthen his anti-Keynsian take on things. That was quackery at a level of bringing a chiropractor to heart surgery.
No I’m not on board with the Joe Conason venom directed at Prof. Miron. Mr. Conason would’ve been better served with temperance, even in the face of some goofy science, but goodness, you’re making a case for the other side.
What is even creepier is the blank stares Conason got when 1873 was brought up. No, I’m not talking down to people with that, equipped with some encyclopedic reference to past financial panics. But the thing that caught me off guard was that the Krugman article that might’ve set this debate off referenced the 1873 panic as part of it’s central thesis.
Mr. Scarborough, do you care to comment about an apparent hole in your homework? Your show is predicated on ‘must read op-eds’ and intertwined with takes from the great columnists working today. It would be a setback if it was that much of a façade that you didn’t actually read and understand the most important column of this week prior to embarking on this crusade for Herbert Hoover austerity.
2) Where you are off the reservation on austerity, you’re in the wheelhouse on Afghanistan. I listened closely, and even the best and the brightest are cautioning that they don’t want to seem too ‘Oliver Stone’, but still no one will talk about the financial windfall concept of why these wars are fought to seeming perpetuity.
Additionally, you seem to have ignored the story of the money transfer from Afghanistan to Dubai of $3 billion US dollars in recent weeks. That story would shore up the anger your trying to get Main Street to channel, so there doesn’t appear to be any logic to your deselection.
Additionally, that line to Joe Conason: “I know who I’m talking to, and they would never talk to you”, attempting to trump Mr. Conason’s intelligence on Afghanistan issues, is so misplaced you might as well be stabbing yourself in the face. Conason just spent 2 weeks in South Africa with Bill Clinton, so you’re dead wrong plus, what happens is that it looks like you’re trying to end a debate before having a debate, which is avoidance, which means you think you’re vulnerable. We learned this when Karl Rove shouted down a reporter with “but you're entitled to your math, I'm entitled to THE math”, just in time to get whipped soundly in 2006. Just don’t do it, it’s a pathway to losing.
But after three disparaging paragraphs, the point of this is you found a very important vein with the lack of an investment in the war by Main Street. Mike Barnicle found it weeks ago, but his persistent, Columbo-esque re-insertion of that as a main culprit for the apathy towards the war has proven to be a sound strategy as Morning Joe has found a consensus point, and I like the goal.
If a draft threat, I don’t support a real draft, brings this home to America, let’s get it out there. If an important domestic investment can be shown to be lost as a direct result of financial constraints of war, put a billboard next to it saying so. If a member of congress takes money from Halliburton, then praises the war effort disingenuously, publish the conflict of interest far and wide.
Let’s get out of Afghanistan, leaving behind the Biden predator plan, and basically make a single policy: we apologize to human shields in advance, but where we see pockets of terrorist activity that we feel threatens our original mission, we will annihilate them.
We should treat Afghanistan and Waziristan equally, and clearly instruct anybody in harms way that they risk death by being near our enemies in the region.
That’s not to say we couldn’t keep a green zone situation at Bagram, or a strike force for special operations like the capture of Bin Laden as needed, but nothing on the ground in Afghanistan warrants further investment under the confines of the original mission of 2001.
3) In a previous rant, I mentioned community service should involve teaching teachers how to work around localized corruption. Geoff Canada took this point to a universal level today by stating that the log jam of compromised influence upon the educational system is now 40 years in duration. The system atrophy that continues to cascade as a result of it will leave the US school system in rubble within our lifetime, per his diagnosis, and either we choose to break the false ceiling placed upon education workers every day with managed curriculum and ranking money higher than results, or we face that future.
The Morning Joe is so far out in front on this issue, that expectations have begun to ramp up towards real progress in the forms of charter school proliferation and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s agenda widely adopted.
There are an army of status quo barons ready for this fight, and one very large political conflict on the horizon. The unions, book publishers, outsource vendors and religious ideologues are all ready to make this ‘Obamacare II’. Conservatives are also going to ask a pretty legitimate question: if Joe Scarborough is a fiscal conservative wanting smaller government, then isn’t this issue counter to that? Shouldn’t a fiscal conservative be calling for the dissolution of the Department of Education, and leave the school system to the states?
I’m not a fiscal conservative, so it’s an easy choice for me. When a state’s education system can go from near the top to near the bottom or at the bottom in 10 years as Nevada has done, it clearly shows a need for a national expectation of standard.
But overall, this continues to rank at the very top of the shows accomplishments. I would like to see the show get out in front on the coming conflicts, and the consistency shown throughout the show’s existence makes it seem like that is going to happen.
4) See this empty observation? It’s still more than Morning Joe’s coverage of the oil spill today or recently.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
You Must Be Joe Keynes
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 29th, 2010
Observations:
1) It would be so easy to simply roast Joe Scarborough for painting a ‘depth takes a holiday’ argument about Keynes versus austerity in by-the-numbers water color. But hey, I learned something readying my take for the other side.
Maybe it’s a crystallizing moment, because I know every day we talk about China having out stimulus-ed us, but Andrew Ross Sorkin taught us they got infrastructure and immediate results, and every day we talk about the futility of our pittance of high speed rail, but we heard Tom Brokaw speak revealingly about China completing 41 lines of high speed rail to our three non connecting un-started plans. Keynesian stimulus certainly worked for the world’s largest economy, what happened in the US? Oh yea, the hardship of competing with central planning with our compromised legislative plan is a major failing point. Good for Google freedom, bad for high speed rail.
Is that Keynes’ fault? I don’t think so. And since when does Joe Scarborough get his economic leadership queues from the Europeans? That seemed a little too convenient to be credible. As goes Antwerp so goes Atlanta?
Krugman’s not isolated like Scarborough claims. In fact, Scarborough had to retreat from Keynsian economics ‘is dead’, to ‘it’s having a tough time’ when facing a trained economist, so what does that tell you? Sorkin who should’ve had more of a dog in the fight, could only muster ‘it’s not the stimulus, it’s the efficiency of the stimulus’ in an apparent back pedal defense of Krugman. But it was enough to show the answer is not convenient yes or no stuff but dimensions and degrees that are not sound bite portable.
It should tell you that politicians are the root of all that is wrong in this economic plan gone terribly awry. Keynes can’t control the efficiency of a stimulus plan from the grave, and if you’re building bird sanctuaries instead of innovating, you aren’t actually doing stimulus, you’re doing politics.
The worst of it has been that like a slow speed car chase, we have known this exact thing was happening from it’s genesis in Congress through this inevitable wind down in the temporary and limited effectiveness of a misguided inefficient handout. We know we wasted the money. Bob Herbert knows we wasted the money. 20 million Americans facing long term unemployment will all eventually know we wasted the money.
The way forward is even more gutting. Now the Europeans are mucking up the program by going the Hoover austerity route, making the real step forward all the harder to sell via our compromised legislative governance.
Yup, we will have to actually do a Chinese style overhaul as stimulus, 2 years later than we should, and over the protest of carpetbaggers and tea party opportunists everywhere.
Yup, Keynes will be proven out, and the pain will by global, with Joe Scarborough having to explain why he sided with the European austerity reactionaries. Mr. Scarborough will have to admit, it was not from a complex thought that he had, he just limited himself to an algebraic if-then statement and guessed wrong.
2) T Boone Pickens and I seemed to have coalesced upon the ‘fuel choices for consumers’ ideal where customers can choose their fuel and make the alternative versions compete.
Unfortunately, his version is a very bad plan. It maintains the grid, you go to a central fuel provision depot, managed by Exxon, and they sell you your choice of 8 fuels based on your need. I wonder if that market would be manipulated at all?
The idea is to have the bottom fall out of demand for 87 octane refined gasoline. What happens then? In Pickens' version, Exxon and Saudi Arabia go for an 18 month predatory pricing plan that makes that product 85 cents a gallon to see if that’s enough to get the other 7 options to go bankrupt. If not, they go another 18 months.
Unless a Byzantine equalizing mechanism prevents this, no amount of RICO prosecution can prevent big oil from pricing based on survival instinct.
My version of the Pickens’ plan for automobiles involves people having a non grid option, whether it was electricity, or bio fuel, or a home natural gas line, or several.
I want Exxon to seem like MCA Records: the gravy train is gone, and we can’t give this stuff away. Pickens’ plan tries to keep those guys in the gravy post paradigm.
Two footnotes.
It’s pretty safe to say that the various producers would seem a lot like the cell phone companies, attempting to get subscription commitments at every turn to prevent real competition from happening.
And ethanol? Come on, is someone really still trying to sell that boondoggle? It will be a very nice byproduct when we find out the truth about genetic corn dangers, but short of that, a child cries in Africa every time a suit diverts a food grain to power an SUV.
3) Scott Brown wants to have his cake and eat it too. Why do we let him do this? Where is the Morning Joe show on this issue? This is a guy who used straight talk and no hidden agendas to get elected, now, he agreed to vote for the financial regulatory reform act, via inserting the Scott Brown ‘3 percent” component, then when the Byrd situation made Brown’s vote pivotal, he turned into Joe Lieberman.
We really need to start by line item removing any component from any opportunist who changes his mind with the spotlight on. Brown already cashed the check from the lobbyist who paid him to insert. It would be nice if he had to give refunds when he became the latest McConnell disciple to agree upon, then betray, progress and governing.
There is less and less doubt that Brown is part of a future ticket. That is a Democratic advantage, and the exploiting should come right here, right now.
Now I know, there is some ‘no tax increase’ debate after the Brown insertion that gives Brown cover to bail out, but I don’t believe it. I listened to Scarborough and read Brown react to the cost recapture tax inserted into the bill as being unfair to an industry that paid the TARP money back.
That’s so misleading it hurts to hear. They continue to rake in money by getting an unlimited line of credit from the discount window at near zero interest. If you were a citizen and hit the lottery like that, whether literally or by some windfall calculus, do you think the IRS would pat you on the back and say, ‘way to go, lucky’?
Of course not, and the AMT and those aggressive audits where the IRS makes you reinsert the real value of things in sweetheart deals proves Main Street doesn’t get away with this kind of math, so why should Bank Of America? Joe? Scott?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) It would be so easy to simply roast Joe Scarborough for painting a ‘depth takes a holiday’ argument about Keynes versus austerity in by-the-numbers water color. But hey, I learned something readying my take for the other side.
Maybe it’s a crystallizing moment, because I know every day we talk about China having out stimulus-ed us, but Andrew Ross Sorkin taught us they got infrastructure and immediate results, and every day we talk about the futility of our pittance of high speed rail, but we heard Tom Brokaw speak revealingly about China completing 41 lines of high speed rail to our three non connecting un-started plans. Keynesian stimulus certainly worked for the world’s largest economy, what happened in the US? Oh yea, the hardship of competing with central planning with our compromised legislative plan is a major failing point. Good for Google freedom, bad for high speed rail.
Is that Keynes’ fault? I don’t think so. And since when does Joe Scarborough get his economic leadership queues from the Europeans? That seemed a little too convenient to be credible. As goes Antwerp so goes Atlanta?
Krugman’s not isolated like Scarborough claims. In fact, Scarborough had to retreat from Keynsian economics ‘is dead’, to ‘it’s having a tough time’ when facing a trained economist, so what does that tell you? Sorkin who should’ve had more of a dog in the fight, could only muster ‘it’s not the stimulus, it’s the efficiency of the stimulus’ in an apparent back pedal defense of Krugman. But it was enough to show the answer is not convenient yes or no stuff but dimensions and degrees that are not sound bite portable.
It should tell you that politicians are the root of all that is wrong in this economic plan gone terribly awry. Keynes can’t control the efficiency of a stimulus plan from the grave, and if you’re building bird sanctuaries instead of innovating, you aren’t actually doing stimulus, you’re doing politics.
The worst of it has been that like a slow speed car chase, we have known this exact thing was happening from it’s genesis in Congress through this inevitable wind down in the temporary and limited effectiveness of a misguided inefficient handout. We know we wasted the money. Bob Herbert knows we wasted the money. 20 million Americans facing long term unemployment will all eventually know we wasted the money.
The way forward is even more gutting. Now the Europeans are mucking up the program by going the Hoover austerity route, making the real step forward all the harder to sell via our compromised legislative governance.
Yup, we will have to actually do a Chinese style overhaul as stimulus, 2 years later than we should, and over the protest of carpetbaggers and tea party opportunists everywhere.
Yup, Keynes will be proven out, and the pain will by global, with Joe Scarborough having to explain why he sided with the European austerity reactionaries. Mr. Scarborough will have to admit, it was not from a complex thought that he had, he just limited himself to an algebraic if-then statement and guessed wrong.
2) T Boone Pickens and I seemed to have coalesced upon the ‘fuel choices for consumers’ ideal where customers can choose their fuel and make the alternative versions compete.
Unfortunately, his version is a very bad plan. It maintains the grid, you go to a central fuel provision depot, managed by Exxon, and they sell you your choice of 8 fuels based on your need. I wonder if that market would be manipulated at all?
The idea is to have the bottom fall out of demand for 87 octane refined gasoline. What happens then? In Pickens' version, Exxon and Saudi Arabia go for an 18 month predatory pricing plan that makes that product 85 cents a gallon to see if that’s enough to get the other 7 options to go bankrupt. If not, they go another 18 months.
Unless a Byzantine equalizing mechanism prevents this, no amount of RICO prosecution can prevent big oil from pricing based on survival instinct.
My version of the Pickens’ plan for automobiles involves people having a non grid option, whether it was electricity, or bio fuel, or a home natural gas line, or several.
I want Exxon to seem like MCA Records: the gravy train is gone, and we can’t give this stuff away. Pickens’ plan tries to keep those guys in the gravy post paradigm.
Two footnotes.
It’s pretty safe to say that the various producers would seem a lot like the cell phone companies, attempting to get subscription commitments at every turn to prevent real competition from happening.
And ethanol? Come on, is someone really still trying to sell that boondoggle? It will be a very nice byproduct when we find out the truth about genetic corn dangers, but short of that, a child cries in Africa every time a suit diverts a food grain to power an SUV.
3) Scott Brown wants to have his cake and eat it too. Why do we let him do this? Where is the Morning Joe show on this issue? This is a guy who used straight talk and no hidden agendas to get elected, now, he agreed to vote for the financial regulatory reform act, via inserting the Scott Brown ‘3 percent” component, then when the Byrd situation made Brown’s vote pivotal, he turned into Joe Lieberman.
We really need to start by line item removing any component from any opportunist who changes his mind with the spotlight on. Brown already cashed the check from the lobbyist who paid him to insert. It would be nice if he had to give refunds when he became the latest McConnell disciple to agree upon, then betray, progress and governing.
There is less and less doubt that Brown is part of a future ticket. That is a Democratic advantage, and the exploiting should come right here, right now.
Now I know, there is some ‘no tax increase’ debate after the Brown insertion that gives Brown cover to bail out, but I don’t believe it. I listened to Scarborough and read Brown react to the cost recapture tax inserted into the bill as being unfair to an industry that paid the TARP money back.
That’s so misleading it hurts to hear. They continue to rake in money by getting an unlimited line of credit from the discount window at near zero interest. If you were a citizen and hit the lottery like that, whether literally or by some windfall calculus, do you think the IRS would pat you on the back and say, ‘way to go, lucky’?
Of course not, and the AMT and those aggressive audits where the IRS makes you reinsert the real value of things in sweetheart deals proves Main Street doesn’t get away with this kind of math, so why should Bank Of America? Joe? Scott?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Economic War
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 28th, 2010
Observations:
1) There was a fight about the way forward in Afghanistan early on the Morning Joe show today, but ‘round about the second hour of the program all sides agreed they were supporting agents disingenuous, and stopped fighting, instead opting to complain to invisible powers over the pointlessness of the continuing conflict.
While it’s no great mystery what’s happening in Afghanistan, somehow a long esteemed list of cast members and guest journalists could not pinpoint it. Rather than remedy, the Morning Joe cast seemed content to have an ever-evolving but undeniably circular argument for 180 minutes.
You are at war because it is part of the economic stimulus policy for the United States. The fact that everywhere there are austerity arguments, and Krugman articles refuting them, has less to do with the United States, because there is no austerity in war. It is a license to print deficit budgets and pump that money into the economy of this country like a ventilator prolongs the life of a 65 year old emphysema-suffering lifelong smoker.
We did this in Vietnam, we did this in Iraq, and we are doing this in Afghanistan. Do you realize how mad Raytheon or Bell became in 1991 when the hostilities stopped after just weeks of conflict? That in some circles Gulf War I was seen as a missed opportunity to bail the US out of it’s early 90’s financial malaise?
So as a nation watches, no less than 8 well-educated individuals went on national television and as a consensus agreed the “pro war” vote in congress was the prevalent force without inserting a lucid ‘why’ component that involved the economy.
All this while using the word disingenuous.
2) For a while now, and I got this from my parents, my service has been to do peoples taxes for them. The parents went into the inner city and filled out tax forms for people who would’ve otherwise just not filed and become criminals for not applying for money owed them.
I love this message and I love it more than the service program solicited today on the Morning Joe show and the invocation of civic responsibility attempted by its organizers.
Look, I have a trust issue with the folks that are telling me “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.
That line was really, really powerful in the early 60’s when we mixed free enterprise with a national citizenship idealism that had not yet learned distrust from assassination or issues like #1 above.
But now, that question seems like someone else’s interpretation of events. My idea of service is now helping Mexican citizens avoid oppression in Southern California when they should be treated as guest workers. My idea of service is telling people how to avoid the bill that comes from the company that represents the ambulance that says “your city’s fire and rescue” on the side of it when you call 911 for a child’s medical emergency. My idea of service is teaching teachers to revolt against local corruption rampant as the current state of affairs in education.
I have an moderately long resume of traditional service work dating back to junior high school. The trading of traditional service for the areas of immediate need above represent a sea change from the world we inhabited back when Kennedy challenged a nation, to where we are today. This is not some uber-cynical temporary malfeasance. There are real social costs to the way the overriding momentum in this country has created artificial wars, polluted the landscape, privatized health and education, and used fear to find a proxy voter segment to hide their distribution in wealth equation from plain sight.
Until someone convinces me that I won’t have to spend my time defending families and people from what Elizabeth Warren describes as the ‘fine print predators’ in this country, the United Way will have to wait, or help.
3) I’m ready to say that the Morning Joe show is abandoning it’s mission to the Gulf to represent those citizens annihilated by the oil spill.
It’s as if a focus group found out this story is a loser, and the show’s creative team has sized up a clever array of work-arounds. “How can we seem concerned but not have our show seem so messy?”
The ‘solutions’ feature and it’s central failure: that the solutions go to BP not the EPA, was covered and uncovered, respectively, with the deft touch of a local news staff not wanting to get ‘icky’.
The Brian Williams segment was cut off so fast it was if there was a risk of infection.
The only thing that isn’t unduly harsh that I can add to this complaint, is that these are optic effects: ‘icky, infection, messy’ and that I largely surmise this is unintentional.
I have said all last week and now that these are signs of immaturity in this show and its unorthodox format. Immaturity can mean the cast has no idea that their coverage of the BP oil spill looks this bad, defines their intent this poorly or redefines Scarborough’s representation of that part of the US from vital to superficial. To a person in need of a more perpetual evolution in understanding one of the worlds greatest ecological, economic and human disasters, I think a lot more is warranted.
That’s all today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) There was a fight about the way forward in Afghanistan early on the Morning Joe show today, but ‘round about the second hour of the program all sides agreed they were supporting agents disingenuous, and stopped fighting, instead opting to complain to invisible powers over the pointlessness of the continuing conflict.
While it’s no great mystery what’s happening in Afghanistan, somehow a long esteemed list of cast members and guest journalists could not pinpoint it. Rather than remedy, the Morning Joe cast seemed content to have an ever-evolving but undeniably circular argument for 180 minutes.
You are at war because it is part of the economic stimulus policy for the United States. The fact that everywhere there are austerity arguments, and Krugman articles refuting them, has less to do with the United States, because there is no austerity in war. It is a license to print deficit budgets and pump that money into the economy of this country like a ventilator prolongs the life of a 65 year old emphysema-suffering lifelong smoker.
We did this in Vietnam, we did this in Iraq, and we are doing this in Afghanistan. Do you realize how mad Raytheon or Bell became in 1991 when the hostilities stopped after just weeks of conflict? That in some circles Gulf War I was seen as a missed opportunity to bail the US out of it’s early 90’s financial malaise?
So as a nation watches, no less than 8 well-educated individuals went on national television and as a consensus agreed the “pro war” vote in congress was the prevalent force without inserting a lucid ‘why’ component that involved the economy.
All this while using the word disingenuous.
2) For a while now, and I got this from my parents, my service has been to do peoples taxes for them. The parents went into the inner city and filled out tax forms for people who would’ve otherwise just not filed and become criminals for not applying for money owed them.
I love this message and I love it more than the service program solicited today on the Morning Joe show and the invocation of civic responsibility attempted by its organizers.
Look, I have a trust issue with the folks that are telling me “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.
That line was really, really powerful in the early 60’s when we mixed free enterprise with a national citizenship idealism that had not yet learned distrust from assassination or issues like #1 above.
But now, that question seems like someone else’s interpretation of events. My idea of service is now helping Mexican citizens avoid oppression in Southern California when they should be treated as guest workers. My idea of service is telling people how to avoid the bill that comes from the company that represents the ambulance that says “your city’s fire and rescue” on the side of it when you call 911 for a child’s medical emergency. My idea of service is teaching teachers to revolt against local corruption rampant as the current state of affairs in education.
I have an moderately long resume of traditional service work dating back to junior high school. The trading of traditional service for the areas of immediate need above represent a sea change from the world we inhabited back when Kennedy challenged a nation, to where we are today. This is not some uber-cynical temporary malfeasance. There are real social costs to the way the overriding momentum in this country has created artificial wars, polluted the landscape, privatized health and education, and used fear to find a proxy voter segment to hide their distribution in wealth equation from plain sight.
Until someone convinces me that I won’t have to spend my time defending families and people from what Elizabeth Warren describes as the ‘fine print predators’ in this country, the United Way will have to wait, or help.
3) I’m ready to say that the Morning Joe show is abandoning it’s mission to the Gulf to represent those citizens annihilated by the oil spill.
It’s as if a focus group found out this story is a loser, and the show’s creative team has sized up a clever array of work-arounds. “How can we seem concerned but not have our show seem so messy?”
The ‘solutions’ feature and it’s central failure: that the solutions go to BP not the EPA, was covered and uncovered, respectively, with the deft touch of a local news staff not wanting to get ‘icky’.
The Brian Williams segment was cut off so fast it was if there was a risk of infection.
The only thing that isn’t unduly harsh that I can add to this complaint, is that these are optic effects: ‘icky, infection, messy’ and that I largely surmise this is unintentional.
I have said all last week and now that these are signs of immaturity in this show and its unorthodox format. Immaturity can mean the cast has no idea that their coverage of the BP oil spill looks this bad, defines their intent this poorly or redefines Scarborough’s representation of that part of the US from vital to superficial. To a person in need of a more perpetual evolution in understanding one of the worlds greatest ecological, economic and human disasters, I think a lot more is warranted.
That’s all today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Senior Skip Day
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) God bless Dylan Ratigan. Optics, symbolic victories, 2 out of 3 major goals accomplished: hogwash. As predicted here, on the DR show and anywhere else where the whitewash doesn’t work anymore, the financial reform package is an 8 cylinder vehicle missing 7 spark plugs. In the dark of night Blanche Lincoln capitulated as expected on derivatives reform, and this morning CNBC was awash in fake complaining so as not to be seen as though dancing a jig.
This is not different than health care reform. Obama was correctly accused by Ratigan today of being as in bed with the barons of the status quo as the Republican party.
I would take it a step further.
That this is in fact the optics of being a Democratic politician. You are required to make laws with names that falsely claim populist reform but substantively move the needle further towards the status quo. Doublespeak. Will Obama become the greatest artist of doublespeak in history, or at least since Bill Clinton? His oratory soars like no one since Martin Luther King. But the substance is undeniably short of what the oratory claims.
Or am I just impatient with the checks and balances system? Will there be year two strengthening of all three major 2010 reform packages? We are stuck without that answer. We won’t get Ron Paul on the right or Howard Dean on the left. Ever. Howard may have even switched sides under the ‘life is too short to go out losing’ ideology.
I will be paying keen attention to Dylan Ratigan’s “Fix It Week” next week. Let the record show Matt Taibbi is now 100 for 100 in predicting the futility of government to govern in a time of crisis. Elizabeth Warren got a small victory with consumer protection, but at what larger cost?
2) This week has now morphed into BP week, through an absence of meaningful coverage of the spill. What appears to be happening is that the cast is tired of how bad this news is. Is the BP story bad for your career? Do you need some happy news? Is that what you signed up for?
Look BP should have lost it all by now, they were given a reprieve, and why? Today was a triple witching news day, but two witches got off the hook. We decided to back hash the McChrystal and Patraeus situations, in a non event that smacks of running out of ideas, and let BP and financial reform get what amounts to a proportionate free pass. Yea, Ratigan got a rant, but is it a rant when the rest of the cast goes the other way? What happened is Halperin, Heilemann, O’Donnell, Deutsch and Geist all did a career check and rather than venture into dangerous waters, they opted for the good optics over the substantive futility, and looked the other way.
But systematically since 6:30 AM on Monday, the Morning Joe show abandoned the BP story. This is nothing short of a dramatic clutch victory for the villain oil company. The breathing room a week of media reprieve gives them may not be much because, as Geist says, this is a “creeping” story that will be back like groundhog day next week, but this is a wasted week with the show kicking the can down the road.
There is so much work to do. There is still an infrastuctural shortcoming in the spill containment plan. The Welch plan is still unattempted. The situation got worse, and the solution got farther.
On the infrastructure side, one thing keeps coming to mind. In our forest fire reaction in the United States, we use a Han Solo looking rag tag fleet of retired warplanes and commercial jets to do our fighting. Other countries make devoted fleets of firefighting airplanes, like Canada. Canada has float planes that land in any water, take on the water, take flight, and drop on a fire source. I saw this first hand when the bright, new yellow Canadian planes on loan landed off of Pacific Palisades a few years back to resupply their water to fight a Burbank fire. It seems so, well, evolved.
We are at a same situation with the BP spill. We are drafting shrimp boats to help contain oil rather than owning any specialized reaction vessels. Britain, Norway, Venezuela, and Canada all have that fleet and have offered it to us. At the height of my cynicism, I’m forced to believe that this slow walking of accepting those fleet’s aid is a political one, so we don’t seem so feckless, so beholden to commercial interest that we allow these oil companies to operate without any safety net in the United States, whether that net is public or private.
Would’ve been great to have the Morning Joe show be on point on that news as it emanated from the gulf this week. Where were you again?
3) This is the first show I’ve seen that didn’t include the new Erin Burnett 3 points feature, and on the day financial reform passed conference? And the first show that replayed old interviews to cover the absence of the stars. That replay thing actually seems like a good idea. Some of that stuff is worth repetition multiple times, and those chosen were in that category.
Producers go 1-1 on the day, well 1-2. The west coast stuff is awful. Those people look like Iranian prisoners, except for Lawrence O’Donnell.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Observations:
1) God bless Dylan Ratigan. Optics, symbolic victories, 2 out of 3 major goals accomplished: hogwash. As predicted here, on the DR show and anywhere else where the whitewash doesn’t work anymore, the financial reform package is an 8 cylinder vehicle missing 7 spark plugs. In the dark of night Blanche Lincoln capitulated as expected on derivatives reform, and this morning CNBC was awash in fake complaining so as not to be seen as though dancing a jig.
This is not different than health care reform. Obama was correctly accused by Ratigan today of being as in bed with the barons of the status quo as the Republican party.
I would take it a step further.
That this is in fact the optics of being a Democratic politician. You are required to make laws with names that falsely claim populist reform but substantively move the needle further towards the status quo. Doublespeak. Will Obama become the greatest artist of doublespeak in history, or at least since Bill Clinton? His oratory soars like no one since Martin Luther King. But the substance is undeniably short of what the oratory claims.
Or am I just impatient with the checks and balances system? Will there be year two strengthening of all three major 2010 reform packages? We are stuck without that answer. We won’t get Ron Paul on the right or Howard Dean on the left. Ever. Howard may have even switched sides under the ‘life is too short to go out losing’ ideology.
I will be paying keen attention to Dylan Ratigan’s “Fix It Week” next week. Let the record show Matt Taibbi is now 100 for 100 in predicting the futility of government to govern in a time of crisis. Elizabeth Warren got a small victory with consumer protection, but at what larger cost?
2) This week has now morphed into BP week, through an absence of meaningful coverage of the spill. What appears to be happening is that the cast is tired of how bad this news is. Is the BP story bad for your career? Do you need some happy news? Is that what you signed up for?
Look BP should have lost it all by now, they were given a reprieve, and why? Today was a triple witching news day, but two witches got off the hook. We decided to back hash the McChrystal and Patraeus situations, in a non event that smacks of running out of ideas, and let BP and financial reform get what amounts to a proportionate free pass. Yea, Ratigan got a rant, but is it a rant when the rest of the cast goes the other way? What happened is Halperin, Heilemann, O’Donnell, Deutsch and Geist all did a career check and rather than venture into dangerous waters, they opted for the good optics over the substantive futility, and looked the other way.
But systematically since 6:30 AM on Monday, the Morning Joe show abandoned the BP story. This is nothing short of a dramatic clutch victory for the villain oil company. The breathing room a week of media reprieve gives them may not be much because, as Geist says, this is a “creeping” story that will be back like groundhog day next week, but this is a wasted week with the show kicking the can down the road.
There is so much work to do. There is still an infrastuctural shortcoming in the spill containment plan. The Welch plan is still unattempted. The situation got worse, and the solution got farther.
On the infrastructure side, one thing keeps coming to mind. In our forest fire reaction in the United States, we use a Han Solo looking rag tag fleet of retired warplanes and commercial jets to do our fighting. Other countries make devoted fleets of firefighting airplanes, like Canada. Canada has float planes that land in any water, take on the water, take flight, and drop on a fire source. I saw this first hand when the bright, new yellow Canadian planes on loan landed off of Pacific Palisades a few years back to resupply their water to fight a Burbank fire. It seems so, well, evolved.
We are at a same situation with the BP spill. We are drafting shrimp boats to help contain oil rather than owning any specialized reaction vessels. Britain, Norway, Venezuela, and Canada all have that fleet and have offered it to us. At the height of my cynicism, I’m forced to believe that this slow walking of accepting those fleet’s aid is a political one, so we don’t seem so feckless, so beholden to commercial interest that we allow these oil companies to operate without any safety net in the United States, whether that net is public or private.
Would’ve been great to have the Morning Joe show be on point on that news as it emanated from the gulf this week. Where were you again?
3) This is the first show I’ve seen that didn’t include the new Erin Burnett 3 points feature, and on the day financial reform passed conference? And the first show that replayed old interviews to cover the absence of the stars. That replay thing actually seems like a good idea. Some of that stuff is worth repetition multiple times, and those chosen were in that category.
Producers go 1-1 on the day, well 1-2. The west coast stuff is awful. Those people look like Iranian prisoners, except for Lawrence O’Donnell.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Shrewd Rude Interlude
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 24th, 2010
Observations:
1) The shrewdness of the Obama move to put Patraeus on the front line of the Afghanistan struggle is dawning on all of us as the first full day of the new era concludes. We looked at polls galore today that were all bleak, but didn’t take into account this latest matrix fix that will surely shore up yea versus nay by this time next week.
I saw all the polls, and I just thought we were looking at last week’s news a second time. That is the lack of efficacy of polls when it’s this thick out there. The fact that no one on the Morning Joe show offers a time context and just starts racing to momentum analysis shows how quickly they can be distracted from complex thinking and reduced to misinformative algebra.
Even Chuck Todd should have been able to build a case for ‘what you're looking at is the baseline that the fix will move polls up from’. Chuck Todd had a moment of weakness when his theory heaped on the conventional wisdom that the administration better have some answers quick because we’re witnessing erosion and it’s now critical.
So wrong. I'm so used to Chuck being a step ahead, I don’t even know how to react. This is sine wave pattern, and the Patreaus and Barton effects are already moving the needle the other way.
2) Anyone who want to get a hold on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should watch the Zbigniew Brzezinski segment a few times until you can quote from it. This guy has it pasted together as a single narrative when most, including Richard Haas are just not able to clearly describe the moving parts singularly.
It’s troubling that we are all beginning to remember Mr. Brzezinski was the guy who baited the Russians into the first modern Afghan war. He and Charlie Wilson armed the opposition and 15 long years later, the Russians left, the global political objective of sinking the Soviet Union was successful, but 2 million souls were lost.
It’s sort of like asking BP to clean up the spill. Afghanistan is a chaos spill that dates back to a manufactured Soviet invasion that Zbigniew Brzezinski authored. We have paid a very dear price in the long run for our reconnaissance by fire approach to getting things to break our way. But, there is no better expert on the Afghanistan and Central Asian turmoil than that architect.
In a way, it appears that America’s shortcoming is our pursuit of shortcuts and our denial of the true cost of things. What’s next for an underinvested America trying to use technology or bribes or neighbor armies to do its biding? Probably Mr. Brzezinski, should he be asked would advocate the use of a mercenary army to accomplish our goals. That mercenary army wouldn’t be your typical cast of South Africans, Germans and former Rhodesians, but instead the Chinese army in a trade for lithium mineral rights.
Oh wait, that’s already happening.
3) Is there some reason why the Erin Burnett segment isn’t ever put on the replay website? Today Erin brought to bear a simple theory that helps the bell curve of the population not be so emotional about outsourcing jobs. Jobs are a perishable good in America. They have a shelf life. We are at this point the number one new economy innovator. China and Japan and Germany might have rehoused the industrial and materials based economies we dominated in economic cycles past. Russia and India may have legions of code writers ready to escalate any new cyber intellect into the next ebay, google or twitter. But we are where whats going to work next comes from.
The Russian President Medvedev made the Khrushchev - Disneyland move of our lifetime because he realizes that. He visited Twitter. He wonders how to be a system innovator and not a gas pipeline baron, then ponders why his economy for all of its intellect wealth and many of the same infrastructures as the US has about the same chance as Mongolia of patenting what comes next in the world’s innovation march.
You could cheaply paraphrase it 'trickle down theory'. But its more of a compartmentalization of core components in the global economy and the life spans of those compartments as they go from their global adoption to their commoditization to their obsolescence. And until Stanford and MIT are commoditized, I think were safe.
They have great universities the world over, but Stanford and MIT and about 100 American universities like them are chief collecting points for intellectual innovation that breeds those clutch evolutionary movements of the technology/commerce curve.
No other place can collect the human equivalent of cloud computing like those places.
Thanks Erin, that’s twice you’ve made this point on the Morning Joe show, but the new format allowed it to not be set to Bad Company, so it might have stuck.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) The shrewdness of the Obama move to put Patraeus on the front line of the Afghanistan struggle is dawning on all of us as the first full day of the new era concludes. We looked at polls galore today that were all bleak, but didn’t take into account this latest matrix fix that will surely shore up yea versus nay by this time next week.
I saw all the polls, and I just thought we were looking at last week’s news a second time. That is the lack of efficacy of polls when it’s this thick out there. The fact that no one on the Morning Joe show offers a time context and just starts racing to momentum analysis shows how quickly they can be distracted from complex thinking and reduced to misinformative algebra.
Even Chuck Todd should have been able to build a case for ‘what you're looking at is the baseline that the fix will move polls up from’. Chuck Todd had a moment of weakness when his theory heaped on the conventional wisdom that the administration better have some answers quick because we’re witnessing erosion and it’s now critical.
So wrong. I'm so used to Chuck being a step ahead, I don’t even know how to react. This is sine wave pattern, and the Patreaus and Barton effects are already moving the needle the other way.
2) Anyone who want to get a hold on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should watch the Zbigniew Brzezinski segment a few times until you can quote from it. This guy has it pasted together as a single narrative when most, including Richard Haas are just not able to clearly describe the moving parts singularly.
It’s troubling that we are all beginning to remember Mr. Brzezinski was the guy who baited the Russians into the first modern Afghan war. He and Charlie Wilson armed the opposition and 15 long years later, the Russians left, the global political objective of sinking the Soviet Union was successful, but 2 million souls were lost.
It’s sort of like asking BP to clean up the spill. Afghanistan is a chaos spill that dates back to a manufactured Soviet invasion that Zbigniew Brzezinski authored. We have paid a very dear price in the long run for our reconnaissance by fire approach to getting things to break our way. But, there is no better expert on the Afghanistan and Central Asian turmoil than that architect.
In a way, it appears that America’s shortcoming is our pursuit of shortcuts and our denial of the true cost of things. What’s next for an underinvested America trying to use technology or bribes or neighbor armies to do its biding? Probably Mr. Brzezinski, should he be asked would advocate the use of a mercenary army to accomplish our goals. That mercenary army wouldn’t be your typical cast of South Africans, Germans and former Rhodesians, but instead the Chinese army in a trade for lithium mineral rights.
Oh wait, that’s already happening.
3) Is there some reason why the Erin Burnett segment isn’t ever put on the replay website? Today Erin brought to bear a simple theory that helps the bell curve of the population not be so emotional about outsourcing jobs. Jobs are a perishable good in America. They have a shelf life. We are at this point the number one new economy innovator. China and Japan and Germany might have rehoused the industrial and materials based economies we dominated in economic cycles past. Russia and India may have legions of code writers ready to escalate any new cyber intellect into the next ebay, google or twitter. But we are where whats going to work next comes from.
The Russian President Medvedev made the Khrushchev - Disneyland move of our lifetime because he realizes that. He visited Twitter. He wonders how to be a system innovator and not a gas pipeline baron, then ponders why his economy for all of its intellect wealth and many of the same infrastructures as the US has about the same chance as Mongolia of patenting what comes next in the world’s innovation march.
You could cheaply paraphrase it 'trickle down theory'. But its more of a compartmentalization of core components in the global economy and the life spans of those compartments as they go from their global adoption to their commoditization to their obsolescence. And until Stanford and MIT are commoditized, I think were safe.
They have great universities the world over, but Stanford and MIT and about 100 American universities like them are chief collecting points for intellectual innovation that breeds those clutch evolutionary movements of the technology/commerce curve.
No other place can collect the human equivalent of cloud computing like those places.
Thanks Erin, that’s twice you’ve made this point on the Morning Joe show, but the new format allowed it to not be set to Bad Company, so it might have stuck.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 23rd, 2010
Observations:
1) We have talked about how often the White House and other politically charged situations avoid making news when the Morning Joe show is on. It’s not that hard because the show comes on so early, but still evidence that those in charge of decisions that impact us not to have that decision be a cable news interactive one exist everywhere.
But let’s face it, shortly after the ‘what have we learned today’ segment on the Morning Joe show, Stan McChrystal was out and the US scored a historic goal to advance. That is the real news of the day, and the entire show as it was produced and went off, was a pregame to those events.
Some might declare that the pregame impact of Joe Scarborough’s tenacious pursuit of a firing added weight to that version of decision events. I would ask that people look at the Patraeus insertion as evidence that the White House wasn’t watching, and using the precious few ticks on the clock that they had since the story broke to figure out what’s next.
The Morning Joe show was nowhere near the what’s next decision all morning. That is why it was a pregame, and not part of the process. Time after time, Joe Scarborough failed to look at the situation from 360 degrees and left the viewer short of possible scenarios. Time after time, Scarborough could do no more than reinforce his entrenched view.
We wanted more.
2) A big winner for a second day in a row is BP. This has gone from an afterthought to an outright oversight resulting in what amounts to a publicity victory for the reckless villain. Why, because today was the day that the oil found Pensacola. And while we should’ve been playing ‘Taps’ and Joe Scarborough should’ve been forced to hold back tears for the death of his home city’s most precious natural wonder, the Velcro attaching Morning Joe to the McChrystal story snatched the bigger story’s coverage almost in it’s entirety.
Yea, they showed the oil hitting. But it was at best a split screen with a few seconds of only mildly troubled banter until time ran out and they had to cut to an inactive Pentagon parking lot for the 25th useless time.
You have some explaining to do. Start dialing area code 904 and any number and explain to your hometown one by one how you took your eye off of the ball. You have time. If the Prince William Sound is any indication in Alaska, you have a lifetime. This is a permanent change that will have people born next decade wondering: how did this happen?
3) Patton was the analogy that I liked. I liked it a lot more before ghastly Senator Shelby used it. With all the talk of MacArthur, where there really was no comparison, this really was more of a Patton infraction, but not a Patton comparable usefulness in the field.
George Patton struck fear in the heart of his opponents. Erwin Rommel needed a daily briefing on Patton just to sleep at night. Patton was a folk hero at home for taking the fight to the enemy and being the great momentum builder.
McChrystal is nowhere near that. I got to read in full the Rolling Stone article since yesterday, and luckily I got a lot of the stuff yesterday right. It’s a roll of the dice because the context in the news cycle gets obscenely stretched and distorted.
What struck me were the bad things that McChrystal had been getting away with all along. He altered the record of Pat Tillman’s death. His reprieve was a statement of his bright possible future. He started to refuse to accept command over prisons because he felt good people were getting unfairly bashed for what should be normal at prisons. What?
And then there is the version of events that he is viewed by the boots on the ground as a significant reason the war is a losing effort, because of his policy on limiting combat engagement. I can’t have it both ways and be Sean Penn on the prison take, and Audie Murphy on this one, wait, yes I can. You play to win. Civilian casualties harden a population against an invading army, but they also prevent the enemy from easily living within the population. Just ask the Al-Qaeda command structure in the mountains of Waziristan. Would you have your family anywhere near them?
The Afghanis are empowered by the current COIN system that allows them to freely choose whether to support the Taliban or defeat them without fear that any pro-Taliban collaboration has consequences, violent or political. The inverse is not true, as pro US collaborators will meet certain consequences at the hands of the Taliban.
This is a construct where the only interested party is the US armed contingent. Even NATO is a figurehead arrangement at this point.
You can’t win that way. You can just hold ground and count bodies, for a while.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) We have talked about how often the White House and other politically charged situations avoid making news when the Morning Joe show is on. It’s not that hard because the show comes on so early, but still evidence that those in charge of decisions that impact us not to have that decision be a cable news interactive one exist everywhere.
But let’s face it, shortly after the ‘what have we learned today’ segment on the Morning Joe show, Stan McChrystal was out and the US scored a historic goal to advance. That is the real news of the day, and the entire show as it was produced and went off, was a pregame to those events.
Some might declare that the pregame impact of Joe Scarborough’s tenacious pursuit of a firing added weight to that version of decision events. I would ask that people look at the Patraeus insertion as evidence that the White House wasn’t watching, and using the precious few ticks on the clock that they had since the story broke to figure out what’s next.
The Morning Joe show was nowhere near the what’s next decision all morning. That is why it was a pregame, and not part of the process. Time after time, Joe Scarborough failed to look at the situation from 360 degrees and left the viewer short of possible scenarios. Time after time, Scarborough could do no more than reinforce his entrenched view.
We wanted more.
2) A big winner for a second day in a row is BP. This has gone from an afterthought to an outright oversight resulting in what amounts to a publicity victory for the reckless villain. Why, because today was the day that the oil found Pensacola. And while we should’ve been playing ‘Taps’ and Joe Scarborough should’ve been forced to hold back tears for the death of his home city’s most precious natural wonder, the Velcro attaching Morning Joe to the McChrystal story snatched the bigger story’s coverage almost in it’s entirety.
Yea, they showed the oil hitting. But it was at best a split screen with a few seconds of only mildly troubled banter until time ran out and they had to cut to an inactive Pentagon parking lot for the 25th useless time.
You have some explaining to do. Start dialing area code 904 and any number and explain to your hometown one by one how you took your eye off of the ball. You have time. If the Prince William Sound is any indication in Alaska, you have a lifetime. This is a permanent change that will have people born next decade wondering: how did this happen?
3) Patton was the analogy that I liked. I liked it a lot more before ghastly Senator Shelby used it. With all the talk of MacArthur, where there really was no comparison, this really was more of a Patton infraction, but not a Patton comparable usefulness in the field.
George Patton struck fear in the heart of his opponents. Erwin Rommel needed a daily briefing on Patton just to sleep at night. Patton was a folk hero at home for taking the fight to the enemy and being the great momentum builder.
McChrystal is nowhere near that. I got to read in full the Rolling Stone article since yesterday, and luckily I got a lot of the stuff yesterday right. It’s a roll of the dice because the context in the news cycle gets obscenely stretched and distorted.
What struck me were the bad things that McChrystal had been getting away with all along. He altered the record of Pat Tillman’s death. His reprieve was a statement of his bright possible future. He started to refuse to accept command over prisons because he felt good people were getting unfairly bashed for what should be normal at prisons. What?
And then there is the version of events that he is viewed by the boots on the ground as a significant reason the war is a losing effort, because of his policy on limiting combat engagement. I can’t have it both ways and be Sean Penn on the prison take, and Audie Murphy on this one, wait, yes I can. You play to win. Civilian casualties harden a population against an invading army, but they also prevent the enemy from easily living within the population. Just ask the Al-Qaeda command structure in the mountains of Waziristan. Would you have your family anywhere near them?
The Afghanis are empowered by the current COIN system that allows them to freely choose whether to support the Taliban or defeat them without fear that any pro-Taliban collaboration has consequences, violent or political. The inverse is not true, as pro US collaborators will meet certain consequences at the hands of the Taliban.
This is a construct where the only interested party is the US armed contingent. Even NATO is a figurehead arrangement at this point.
You can’t win that way. You can just hold ground and count bodies, for a while.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
McChrystalized
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 22nd, 2010
Observations
1) Does anybody else think this is a big win for the American public? Normally a historian will find dissent in the ranks of a failed mission 15 years later in the Pentagon Papers or Nixon tapes. This morning, the real time feedback of the command and control personnel on the ground in Afghanistan got a voice. That voice seemed like that of a guy who did not have his hand on the wheel and was busy checking his hair and talking to his memoirs consultant.
The air of ‘we got this’ in the commentary and dialog leaked and advanced by Rolling Stone is the same mission-jeopardizing groupthink that has sunk mission after mission in wartime and space. What I think we’re actually seeing by shining a light on the matter is that our mission is being bungled by people who weren’t ready for prime time in the first place, and proved it at every turn.
This is at the feet of General Petraeus. You cannot blame a guy like McChrystal, who is comfortable in his own skin, and has never promised to be your ideal publicity savvy war executive. He has told you time and time again, I came from special forces, we live under rocks, and we play by a seriously different set of rules over there.
Petraeus’ gamble was that it would take a special forces guy to sequester the Afghan resistance. That gamble was based on the fact that another conventional general would mount front loaded offensives and then hand the land back to the enemy in a predictable way that assured defeat to the Americans.
But the gamble wouldn’t pay off if, as Niall Ferguson commented, Colonel Kurtz showed up. It’s definitely not that bad, in fact that’s an undeserved compliment to McChrystal. By not ready for prime time, I suggest these people have lived in a bunker for their professional career, and have missed out on some of the socio-political complexity that might tell them adolescent humor at the helm of a war effort makes it seem like they are simply unfamiliar with the path of American national expectation.
2) BP got a day off from the howitzer for the most part today, and it should be an alert to their publicist. Maybe they should engineer some news elsewhere on the planet on a systematic calendar just to gain some breathing room here and there so that they don’t become the ant under the magnifying glass pointed at the sun.
Don’t take that seriously, in fact, the Morning Joe show needs to have a bit of the multi-tasking ability. The show I complimented yesterday should be able to use its long format to make BP seem like that mouse that is clearly ensnared by the cat, but periodically the cat lets it run a few feet away, as a game. I would’ve loved to see Mika and Joe get systematic, and put out a “just in case you though we were distractible, here’s another reminder that BP is the architect of the world’s greatest environmental disaster”.
But, alas, our show proved that it can Velcro to a story like any other news outlet. What’s particularly troublesome is that it appears that the show’s cast and producers can smell blood in the water, e.g. we might be able to make some news here, and see if their ramping up of an issue can get a person fired or a statement generated from a higher source.
That appears to your biggest fans and most ardent subscribers to be out of balance, and an immature facet of a new format.
3) The stimulus will haunt the administration for as long as any part of government is still controlled by the Democrats, unless a sea change is made that is evidence of intelligent correction. On one hand the European community has gone austerity, giving the Republicans a talking point suggesting Obama can’t help but follow suit. On the other hand, the Chinese out-stimulus-ed us 2 billion to 400 million, or 5 to 1. Not in terms of dollars spent, but in terms of dollar effectiveness of the programs engaged. They went the public works route.
While LA is talking 30/10 where its moving it’s transit system to a decade completion goal, instead of the ‘we’ll all be dead so why are we fighting’ 30 years the plan originally called for, that plan is all headwind and not certain. Conversely, the Chinese embarked 2 years ago on a 3-5 year infrastructure upgrade at the national level and are already seeing major implementation.
Any of the national issues we talk about every day could have been stimulus. These include the reformation of the automobile industry away from fossil fuels, the health care initiative, the erosion of the national highway system, the education system overhaul, the dominance of coal in the national electrical grid.
None of them were even close to being included. Anyone who wants to put some pittance study or micro project forward in any of those fields as stimulus is selling you something.
No, it’s a more certain truth that we are paralyzed by the barons of the status quo. They control government, they control media, the control the environment, they control the distribution of wealth, and they control your healthcare and education.
I love the World Cup, but I’m constantly reminded by it’s South African location, that there are parts of that country that attempt to charge poor people for potable water. Be a good citizen and learn meaning from those sorts of extreme examples when analyzing the marginal momentum in your country.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations
1) Does anybody else think this is a big win for the American public? Normally a historian will find dissent in the ranks of a failed mission 15 years later in the Pentagon Papers or Nixon tapes. This morning, the real time feedback of the command and control personnel on the ground in Afghanistan got a voice. That voice seemed like that of a guy who did not have his hand on the wheel and was busy checking his hair and talking to his memoirs consultant.
The air of ‘we got this’ in the commentary and dialog leaked and advanced by Rolling Stone is the same mission-jeopardizing groupthink that has sunk mission after mission in wartime and space. What I think we’re actually seeing by shining a light on the matter is that our mission is being bungled by people who weren’t ready for prime time in the first place, and proved it at every turn.
This is at the feet of General Petraeus. You cannot blame a guy like McChrystal, who is comfortable in his own skin, and has never promised to be your ideal publicity savvy war executive. He has told you time and time again, I came from special forces, we live under rocks, and we play by a seriously different set of rules over there.
Petraeus’ gamble was that it would take a special forces guy to sequester the Afghan resistance. That gamble was based on the fact that another conventional general would mount front loaded offensives and then hand the land back to the enemy in a predictable way that assured defeat to the Americans.
But the gamble wouldn’t pay off if, as Niall Ferguson commented, Colonel Kurtz showed up. It’s definitely not that bad, in fact that’s an undeserved compliment to McChrystal. By not ready for prime time, I suggest these people have lived in a bunker for their professional career, and have missed out on some of the socio-political complexity that might tell them adolescent humor at the helm of a war effort makes it seem like they are simply unfamiliar with the path of American national expectation.
2) BP got a day off from the howitzer for the most part today, and it should be an alert to their publicist. Maybe they should engineer some news elsewhere on the planet on a systematic calendar just to gain some breathing room here and there so that they don’t become the ant under the magnifying glass pointed at the sun.
Don’t take that seriously, in fact, the Morning Joe show needs to have a bit of the multi-tasking ability. The show I complimented yesterday should be able to use its long format to make BP seem like that mouse that is clearly ensnared by the cat, but periodically the cat lets it run a few feet away, as a game. I would’ve loved to see Mika and Joe get systematic, and put out a “just in case you though we were distractible, here’s another reminder that BP is the architect of the world’s greatest environmental disaster”.
But, alas, our show proved that it can Velcro to a story like any other news outlet. What’s particularly troublesome is that it appears that the show’s cast and producers can smell blood in the water, e.g. we might be able to make some news here, and see if their ramping up of an issue can get a person fired or a statement generated from a higher source.
That appears to your biggest fans and most ardent subscribers to be out of balance, and an immature facet of a new format.
3) The stimulus will haunt the administration for as long as any part of government is still controlled by the Democrats, unless a sea change is made that is evidence of intelligent correction. On one hand the European community has gone austerity, giving the Republicans a talking point suggesting Obama can’t help but follow suit. On the other hand, the Chinese out-stimulus-ed us 2 billion to 400 million, or 5 to 1. Not in terms of dollars spent, but in terms of dollar effectiveness of the programs engaged. They went the public works route.
While LA is talking 30/10 where its moving it’s transit system to a decade completion goal, instead of the ‘we’ll all be dead so why are we fighting’ 30 years the plan originally called for, that plan is all headwind and not certain. Conversely, the Chinese embarked 2 years ago on a 3-5 year infrastructure upgrade at the national level and are already seeing major implementation.
Any of the national issues we talk about every day could have been stimulus. These include the reformation of the automobile industry away from fossil fuels, the health care initiative, the erosion of the national highway system, the education system overhaul, the dominance of coal in the national electrical grid.
None of them were even close to being included. Anyone who wants to put some pittance study or micro project forward in any of those fields as stimulus is selling you something.
No, it’s a more certain truth that we are paralyzed by the barons of the status quo. They control government, they control media, the control the environment, they control the distribution of wealth, and they control your healthcare and education.
I love the World Cup, but I’m constantly reminded by it’s South African location, that there are parts of that country that attempt to charge poor people for potable water. Be a good citizen and learn meaning from those sorts of extreme examples when analyzing the marginal momentum in your country.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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