DOWNLOADS: (84)

PLAYS: (195)

Embed

I don't know why anyone would think that Baghdad Bob a.k.a. neocon Dan Senor would be on anyone's short list to discuss the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, but MSNBC loves this guy so much that he's now apparently renting out Pat Buchanan's old cot in the back of the studios, ever since the Romney campaign hired him as an advisor.

The campaign might be over but sadly, our days with Senor on the air are not. He's been on Morning Joe so much over the year or so, there were weeks I was starting to wonder if he was going to take Mika's place as the co-host. If Chuck Todd and MSNBC are going to bring this guy on to talk about foreign policy, maybe they should let their viewers know that his Foreign Policy Initiative with the lovely sounding name is just the latest reincarnation of PNAC. A few more of them might be familiar with that group's name and how effectively they beat the war drums to get us into Iraq.

And maybe they could ask him if he ever found out what happened to that $9 billion that they managed to lose in Iraq, like Bill Maher did back in February of 2006 on Real Time: Dan Senor Tells Bill Maher How We Lost 9 Billion In Iraq.

Here's more on Senor and why MSNBC should be putting warning signs above his head every time they allow him on the air, from my post last April: Romney Adviser Dan Senor: Too Wrong to Fail.

DOWNLOADS: (211)

PLAYS: (1682)

Embed

From this Tuesday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, Chuck Todd brought in authors Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann to discuss the thesis of their new book and how the media has completely failed to cover the fact that we've got one party in this country that has gone completely off the rails and that all sides are not equal with who is at fault with our dysfunctional political system right now and in the process, managed to prove their point for them by doing the very thing they were writing about.

Egberto Willies at Addicting Info summed up the interview nicely here: Chuck Todd Argues Relevancy Of Mainstream Media With Authors, Mann and Ornstein (VIDEOS):

The mainstream press is starting to listen. Its fear of irrelevancy was evident in a nine minute segment on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown where Chuck Todd interviewed Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein on media reaction to their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism and subsequent Washington Post essay, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

The segment demanded a post mortem. It shows that the mainstream press is actively engaged with what is occurring in the alternate media, but seems unwilling or unable to correct their modus operandi. The introduction to the segment is fascinating. Chuck Todd relays the premise of Mann and Ornstein’s argument with a sarcastic caveat where he implies that their ostracism from the mainstream media was imagined. Their appearance on The Daily Rundown is likely the outcome of the impact the virality of their piece had on the Internet. [...]

Later in the interview Chuck Todd tries to defend the ineptitude of the mainstream media implying that balanced coverage was based on the party really believing the tenets it was espousing. [...]

His defense is a factually inaccurate characterization of how the press has been covering Republicans. One need only revisit the Healthcare debate. Much of the bill, (mandates, private insurance, etc.) was a product of the conservative think tankm “The Heritage Foundation,” yet Republicans opposed the bill on grounds they once stood for. [...]

Immediately after Ornstein talks about false equivalences, Chuck Todd shows that he still does not get why the mainstream press is held in disrepute. He immediately tries to link the past Democratic intransigence with the debt ceiling debate, with the economically damaging scenario perpetrated by the Republicans in 2011.

He just can't stop himself. More there so go read the rest. It was very frustrating to see Todd called out to his face for his terrible reporting and making the false equivalencies and watching it just fall on deaf ears and seeing him continue to do the very same thing they were talking about all throughout the interview.

And as far as Todd pretending he's doing them some big favor by finally having them on his show months and months late, and that they haven't been shunned, as Nicole pointed out back in June when Chris Hayes had them on his show, even though they were regular guests in the past, they weren't getting any phone calls for the Sunday shows shortly after they published their article.

DOWNLOADS: (88)

PLAYS: (156)

Embed

Here we go with more fearmongering over whether the super committee manages to come to some sort of agreement or not. A couple of weeks ago we had Chris Cillizza, filling in for Chuck Todd on MSNBC's Daily Rundown, allowing the senior Sununu to spread lies about Social Security and Medicare.

This week, he brings in Sununu's son and conserva-Dem Blanche Lincoln to espouse the values of bipartisan negotiations so we can have members of Congress make cuts to our social safety nets in return for “tax reform.” Of course by “reform”, they're taking about lowing rates for corporations and the wealthiest among us and supposedly closing some loopholes or tax deductions, which I'll believe will happen when hell freezes over since Republicans have done nothing but obstruct any effort to do so in the past, no matter what the supposed trade-off.

CILIZZA: Well, this is a happy topic to bring you two in on, but let's start with, we are now seven days away from a deal. The super committee is keeping their cards relatively close to the vest. You guys have been in intense negotiations when you know the American public wants something, but you just can't make your colleagues do it. What's the attitude in the Democratic caucus right now, Sen. Lincoln if you had to guess?

So Cillizza thinks Lincoln knows something about Congressional negotiations and being on the side of what the public wants? Really? I hate to break it to him, but Blanche Lincoln was not on the side of public opinion during the health care debate. She was on the side of the insurance companies before finally starting to flip-flop after enough public pressure was put on her to do so.

Lincoln replied by fearmongering over the super committee not reaching an agreement supposedly interfering with holiday spending that our own RJ Eskow wrote about here – If the Super Committee Doesn't Cut Your Medicare, Santa Claus Will Die!.

LINCOLN: Well, I would think it's frustration, just like the rest of the country. I mean, people understand on capitol hill how big these issues are and how important it is. One of the things I hope that they'll understand is that the timing of this is crucial too. I mean, you're going to hit Black Friday and cyber-Monday about the same time you come out with the possibility of nothing coming out of the super committee and what does that do to consumer confidence?

Apparently the producers of Chuck Todd's show and Chris Cillizza think their audience has short memories and have no clue about Blanche Lincoln and who's interests she was looking out for during her time in the Senate. Shameful. Here are a few posts I'd recommend any of them read before they bring her back on again, not that it matters. I'm pretty sure they know perfectly well how dishonest they're being to the viewers.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (320)

PLAYS: (733)

Embed

MSNBC's Chuck Todd spoke to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus about this week's GOP debate and asked Priebus if he was concerned at all on whether Mitt Romney's arguments against Rick Perry during that debate on Social Security might not work given the fact that now Republican Sen. Ron Johnson who beat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" as well and won.

As Chuck Todd pointed out, the conventional wisdom that Perry's rhetoric is going to turn off voters in the Republican base might very well be wrong, and Todd asked Priebus if that was what he learned after watching the race between Johnson and Feingold.

Priebus responded by saying that "people understand that the government is making promises it can't keep" and asked if we can "be adults" and admit that and said the second question is what we are going to do to solve it. He then went on to praise Paul Ryan's and the House Republican's plan to privatize Medicare and said he thinks it's a "safe place" for all of our candidates to go and that "it's pretty clear that we have to start tackling our entitlements."

Priebus went onto note that even the Obama administration has said that we need to tackle our "entitlements" and downplayed Perry's over the top rhetoric, and Karl Rove's criticism of Perry as well. Sadly, he's right that we're going to find out before long whether one, the Obama administration helps the Republicans in the next election and cedes the ground to them on protecting our social safety nets rather than hammering them on the best issue they have to make some gains the next election.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (900)

PLAYS: (1857)

Embed

Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column that the clip above depicts perfectly where Chris Cilizza and the panel on Chuck Todd's show on MSNBC are bemoaning the loss of those great "compromisers" in the U.S. House of Representatives -- those rotten corporate Blue Dogs who got voted out of office during the last election.

Heaven forbid we've now got some actual Republicans with an "R" behind their name instead of a "D", but they're rabid right wingers who would rather burn the whole house down than give an inch on their extremist ideology.

The Villagers love "centrism" and compromise as long as it always means everyone governing like Republicans and as Krugman points out later in his column, their fetish for it is allowing the extremism in the Republican Party to go unpunished. As John already wrote about here, I'm not sure what it will take to get them to quit with the "both sides" false equivalencies either, but I'm as tired of it as Krugman is.

Sadly the example in the clip above is just one of hundreds that are being pushed by the Villagers on every network day, after day, after day.

The Cult That Is Destroying America:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook. Read on...

DOWNLOADS: (313)

PLAYS: (1838)

Embed

Chuck Todd not only decided to take a cheap shot at the Obama's this morning on MSNBC, but also managed to trivialize just who would be harmed if the Republicans continue their hostage taking on the debt ceiling.

TODD: The Obama's are millionaires according to new financial disclosure forms released yesterday. The forms show the President and First Lady Michelle Obama hold assets between $2.8 million and $11.8 million and are you ready for this? Almost all of their investments are in T-bills. So nobody would be hurt more by the debt ceiling not being raised than the President.

Really, Chuck? No one else would be hurt more? If the Republicans put us into another recession or worse yet a depression, I think there are going to be a lot of other people who will come out that a lot worse than the President of the United States. I think somehow the Obama's would manage to recover. I can't say the same for the millions of people who are just getting by now and for whom it might mean life and death if our country's economy gets thrown into a tailspin.

h/t David for the video

DOWNLOADS: (446)

PLAYS: (1059)

Embed

As quite a few took note of today, Eric Cantor finally admitted that extending the Bush tax cuts will increase the deficit during his appearance on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown. Now that Cantor has tried to change the conversation to job creation, Steve Benen made this point today...

Oddly enough, I consider this something of a breakthrough. For 18 months, Democrats, most notably President Obama, have said the deficit matters, but the state of the economy matters more. Republicans and their Tea Party base have argued the opposite, insisting that the deficit has to take priority; we're facing a debt crisis; etc.

Cantor's line, repeated as if it were obvious, puts Republicans in a different place -- if boosting the economy means "digging the hole deeper," so be it. I happen to agree wholeheartedly.

At this point, then, it's time for a different debate. For a year and a half, it's been economic growth vs. deficit reduction. Cantor is signaling a new argument -- economic growth through spending vs. economic growth through tax cuts.

Instead of arguing over whether to increase the deficit, Cantor seems prepared to concede the point, and argue deficit increases are unfortunately necessary. Democrats should welcome his new-found wisdom, and initiate a discussion over the efficacy of spending vs. the efficacy of tax cuts.

And David Dayden followed Benen's post with this.

He basically said, “Sure, less revenues theoretically increase the deficit, but we’re about getting people back to work, and low taxes for ‘job creators’ facilitates that.”

So I wouldn’t say he conceded the point so much as he raised a different one, a point which is equally wrong as the Laffer curve, incidentally. He claims that lower and lower taxes facilitates job creation. But the two Bush terms saw the lowest taxes for the wealthy, presumably the “job creators” Cantor is talking about. And those two terms saw the worst job creation in recorded American history going back to the Depression. This chart from the Wall Street Journal lays it out. Nobody since Hoover had worse annual job growth than George W. Bush, at a time when it was not at all expensive for “job creators” to make money.

I agree with Steve Benen that Cantor is conceding that the economy matters more than the deficit, a key bit of info. But if you think that paves the way for a legitimate discussion of these issues you haven’t seen one Washington Republican speak over the past decade.

Meanwhile, I’d rather pigeonhole Republicans along the lines of what Andrew Samwick asks of those still clinging to the idea that tax cuts raise revenue: if that’s the case, where does it end? Where does the Laffer curve bend? At what point do marginal tax rates, in this theory, end up becoming counter-productive and decreasing revenue?

I agree completely and if the Republicans want to make the argument that those Bush tax cuts created jobs, let them explain this chart.