Geithner Does Some Good Explaining on Morning Joe Video

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explains what reforms will do--contain risk and leverage and dismember failed banks. Geithner also says the Obama administration is going to look at the entire housing finance market, including Fannie and Freddie, and recommend reforms:

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Geithner on reducing the deficits:

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Media Getting Pissy About Access to Obama Administration

In this video, Chuck Todd refers to the White House attitude toward the press as "grumpiness." Folks like Chuck are complaining because they can. They're the ones who stand in front of the camera. In a sense, they hold all the power because they can spin a story any way they want and they do.

Chuck's griping also gives the appearance of bias, especially when he's complaining to a conservative, in this case Joe Scarborough. It also strikes me as unprofessional and irresponsible.

There's so much wrong with journalism today.

It's my contention that if they did a better job and behaved like journalists instead of giving us 24/7 tea party/Sarah Palin coverage, they'd get more access. Where was the healthcare analysis? I can't remember the last time I read a story that didn't have bias toward a conservative or a liberal viewpoint.

Newspapers blame advertisers for their demise, but if they had a quality product that people wanted to read, they might have advertisers. They've failed to look at their product.

Yesterday's NYT's story about Robert Gates is an example of how the NYT's use of anonymous sources probably led to an inaccurate story. The NYT appears to have been manipulated by someone with an agenda.

Who loses? The reader.

Scarborough actually mentions the Gates memo at the end of the video and Chuck Todd appears biased.

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An update to this post: Robert Gibbs said the NYT didn't even have the full memo.

Scarborough Pushing For Ouster of White House Officials

This is how rumors get started. Joe Scarborough, who is apparently discontent that liberals are hammering him on Twitter (he complains regularly), is using his platform to push the notion that White House officials are incompetent. He pushes the narrative by saying everyone believes that Obama's team is incompetent, but I really haven't heard a lot of people, other than the republicans, saying that David Axelrod or Robert Gibbs are a liability. People complain a lot about Rahm Emanuel, but he seems to be one of the few people who gets stuff done.

We know that the republicans will do just about anything to avoid doing actual work. They'd rather play the games.

Scarborough digs up Les Gelb to talk about firing White House staff:

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Schumer and Hatch's Idea on Halting Payroll Taxes on New Hires

Chuck Schumer and Orrin Hatch talk about their new idea, which they wrote about in the NYT a couple of days ago. If an employer hires, they don't have to pay payroll taxes for a year. Joe Scarborough is salivating. Democrats sound like they're going to give up on healthcare. If they think that's going to get them re-elected, they've got another thing coming. Either that or just for PR purposes, they're pretending to put healthcare on the back burner because apparently, most people don't have the sense to realize that healthcare is about jobs. If we made healthcare into reality TV, we could better educate Americans on the key points.

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Tea Partiers Rebel Against Scott Brown

That, according to Joe Scarborough, who wrote a piece for Newsweek. Dick Armey, who supports the tea party through his FreedomWorks, is pleased with Brown. But the more loathsome of the tea party, the Glenn Beck followers, don't like Scott Brown one bit:

The Fox News host used his TV and radio shows to launch vicious verbal attacks on the newly elected senator. "I want a chastity belt on this man," Beck laughingly said the morning after Brown's epic victory over Democrat Martha Coakley. "I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern." Just in case the audience had somehow missed his suggestion that Brown was capable of having an affair with, and then murdering, a female intern, Beck repeated the line.

What is going on here? Why are the tea partyers turning on their own? Like any nascent populist movement, the tea party was born of deep skepticism and dissatisfaction with the status quo. As it turns out, many of its most passionate and vocal members seem just as mistrusting of each other as they are of the federal government. Read the whole thing

My working definition of the tea party: A collection of a wide variety of people from the haters, the bigots, the racists, to the the tax haters, who all share a disdain of government, be it out of intellect or stupidity. There isn't enough uniformity to pull together as a real party, but there is enough uniformity to knock the other parties off balance.

Limbaugh Urges Listeners NOT to Donate to Haiti Rescue

Rush tells his followers that they shouldn't donate to Haiti because, somehow, he sees the devastation in Haiti as a positive thing, politically, for Obama. How twisted is that? How evil is that? Some people who have medical emergencies like Rush did in Hawaii rethink life. It seems that Rush is still thoughtless and very hung up on race.

In this video below, Limbaugh makes it sound as though Rahm Emanuel said that the Haiti crisis was too good to waste. Rush's listeners probably know no better. When Emanuel made those remarks he meant that while we're digging ourselves out of a hole, we can simultaneously fix the things that need to be fixed, so that our nation doesn't have another meltdown like this one. He meant we could turn lemons into lemonade. Here is Emanuel's often misinterpreted quote from an WSJ story in 2008:

This opportunity isn't lost on the new president and his team. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.

He elaborated: "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." WSJ

I'd hate to be Rush Limbaugh. Ick. He's rotting on the inside.

Joe Scarborough thinks Rush might walk back his comments, but he's only been escalating them:

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Pat Robertson Blames Haitian Earthquake on Pact With Devil

As Joe Scarborough aggressively defends Pat Robertson's efforts to help Haiti, Robertson is defeating his own cause by blaming the earthquake on a Haitian pact with the devil. The words Robertson's speaks have consequences. Saying ridiculous things doesn't help the people of Haiti. Robertson is sitting in judgement, influencing a whole population of people who know no better. That's why many people are turned off by religion.

Geography, not the devil, is the cause of natural disasters in Haiti:

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Joe Scarborough Has a Spasm Over Napolitano

Anyone who still believes that Janet Napolitano--who said "the system worked"--actually meant that, is just being making political hay. I didn't take it that way but then again, I don't think that the Obama administration is weak on terror or that it's engaged in nefarious activities. Many wingnuts think exactly that. Joe Scarborough is not a wingnut, but rather a moderate conservative who usually at least makes an attempt to be reasonable.

Not this time though.

Obviously the system didn't work. Napolitano is obviously not an idiot, therefore a reasonable person can conclude that she didn't mean the system worked.
The day after her Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, she clarified what she meant-- that the system response following the incident worked. Obama backed her up in his speech. Even Bush's former intel chief Michael Chertoff backed up Napolitano, saying she was competent and highly qualified.

Janet Napolitano's head is not going to roll.

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Republican Swan Dive Into the Deep End

Rush Limbaugh is out of his mind. What's with the little baby noises he makes? How do people listen to that and not feel corroded? Republicans cheer Chicago's loss:

Joe Scarborough Demonstrates Constructive Conservatism

Joe Scarborough gets it.

Politics has gotten too bitter. Most people want our government to do a good job for the sake of everyone. Scarborough makes a good case for conservatism because he's decent. Ugly rhetoric is such a turn off--on the left and the right.

All of a sudden this Alan Grayson guy, someone who uttered Holocaust and healthcare reform in the same sentence, has moved into hero status on the left. He's fighting for a good cause but that kind of hyperbole shouldn't be coming from anyone's mouth. He's doing exactly what the left has been attacking the right for. Hyperbole is mistaken for backbone these days.

Perhaps that's because there is a void of reason and the obnoxious can easily jump in to fill the emptiness.

Scarborough's column yesterday thanked the Obamas for trying to win the Olympics but made a larger point:

For the better part of 20 years, a bitterness has infected our politics that has weakened our country.
We Republicans spent eight years trying to delegitimize Bill Clinton.
Democrats spent the next eight years doing the same to George W. Bush.
Now that a Democrat is in the Oval Office again, it is the GOP who is trying to delegitimize a sitting president.
When I try to talk to Republicans about the need to break this cycle of viciousness, some cite the chapter and verse of every hateful left wing attack against George W. Bush.
Whenever I attempt to have a conversation with some Democrats about the need for us respect our president-- whether he be an Obama or a Bush-- I am told that Bush deserved whatever he got because he was a lying war criminal who hated the Constitution and loved torturing people.
Fortunately, there are a growing number of Americans who believe we cannot continue going on this way.
You and I may disagree on how the CIA handled terror suspects. But that does not mean that you are soft on terrorism anymore than it means that I hate the Constitution.
You and I may have a different approach to Afghanistan. But just because you want to stay there another five years doesn't mean you are an imperialist. And if I believe a decade in that forsaken land is more than enough, that doesn't mean I'm soft on al Qaeda or the Taliban.
It just means that we view the world differently. HP

Obama's Problem in Health Care: The Democrats

Interesting debates on the Sunday shows. Someone needs to invent a Lying Hat that will light up when politicians are exaggerating, distorting and outright lying. On Meet the Press, Orrin Hatch was lying through his teeth, exaggerating at best, and for the most part, David Gregory let him get away with it.

The public option debate is way out of control. It's such a simple concept that has been mangled by the right.

On Meet the Press, I think Joe Scarborough nailed the root of Obama's health care problem -- Obama doesn't have all the democrats on board. That's because the democratic party is a larger party, more reflective of America, while the republican party is, as Paul Krugman called them, the "rump." I can't think of a better word.

So now Obama has this bigger divide among democrats to contend with, the liberals on one end and the blue dogs on the other. Liberals, especially, have bailed on Obama. They act as though they own Obama. They only have his back if they get what they want. Tavis Smiley says Obama is backtracking on the public option. I don't think so at all. The media made a big to-do over it last Sunday and liberals got scared. Liberals are scared like the Rump (republicans) is scared. The entire debate of healthcare reform was getting bogged down by the public option because the Rump was able to persuade enough people that the public option was a government takeover.

In the end, the bill will have a public option because it is a small, important sliver of reform. Obama's intention has always been to insure those who can't afford insurance.

I'm glad Obama is on vacation because healthcare reform turned into a side show.

Another side note, Tavis Smiley was dead on about the hate at the Obama rallies. As a society, we can't accept strapping a gun to your leg and then going to a presidential town hall as anger. It's not anger. It's irrational hate. These cockroaches have been drawn out of the woodwork. Scarborough also said that it's wrong and it makes the job of the Secret Service tougher. Scarborough said that most of the angry people have just taken up sides, and they don't even know what they're talking about. They couldn't even define public option.

Watch the entire show here.

Scarborough Wonders Why Conservatives Are so Nasty

Conservative Joe Scarborough, promoting his new book on conservatism, says he doesn't understand why conservatives are calling democrats racists and communists and generally talking like fools.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin offers that the two groups don't socially mix anymore.
I say conservatives have split and the majority group has grown more hateful and extreme (and loud) because they feel threatened by our changing (for the better) nation. But they perceive that the nation is getting worse.
There are those who are slower to progress. Some people resist any kind of change. Another thing, older people (many with an old fashioned, closed mindset, still thinking about the good old days) are living longer. Future generations of older people will have a more progressive mindset because they will be today's youth, who are much more broad minded and, dare I say, enlightened. 

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Fleischer Says Palin Needs Substance

Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary, nails it. He says neither Newt nor Sarah Palin are presidential material. Newt is a fabulous dinner speaker and Sarah Palin needs to get more policy experience, he said. "She has a long way to go to be presidential." Exactly. That is why whenever Palin talks, she sounds dim witted. Needless to say Fleischer's comments will probably cause more uproar within the party.
I also agree with Joe Scarborough--republicans need to change their tone. First, you have to get people to listen but as long as republicans all sound like a bunch of wackos, people will tune them out.

Loudmouth Cable Guys Afraid of Jon Stewart Too?

This is nutty. They sure can dish it out but when Gibbs strikes back they wimp. Stewart did speak truth to power, the power of people like Cramer who suck up to the people who ripped us off. Stewart's got all the evidence. Watch it here.

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This is just comedic relief:

Republican Party Narrowing

On the Meet the Press roundtable, David Brooks says the Colin Powell endorsement of Obama highlights the weakness in the republican party -- that it's narrowing.
Palin illustrates how it's narrowing, though I wouldn't call it narrowing. I'd call it embarrassing. That's why people are jumping ship and some are moving into the Obama camp. The fact that the republican party has campaigned on smearing Obama as unAmerican is disgusting.
Brooks blames the republican party -- not McCain. But isn't McCain the leader of the republican party? Isn't he supposed to provide guidance?
That's what's sad about McCain. Anyone who's been watching can see that he's been pulled in a million different directions.
McCain lacks leadership abilities. If he was able to lead, he could've let his party in on his vision and told them to go out and sell it. But McCain has no overarching vision to provide. 
Joe Scarborough believes that the only reason Obama is ahead is because the economy turned. That's just wrong. For one, the economy didn't just turn. The economy turned a while ago. That's what Obama knows.