TV SoundOff: Sunday Talking Heads
Hello, everyone. My name is Jason and welcome to your Sunday Morning liveblog of the flickering images that befuddle and bemuse the political class this weekend morning. Today, announcement! We have started up a special blog post on these pages dedicated to monitoring the wooly world of lobbying. The guy who is writing it is a bit in over hid head but charming enough, so go bookmark that and watch for stories on the most vulgar side of politics.
As with the Sunday liveblog, we welcome tips, insights, and information. And as you all have been some of our site's most dedicated (and most fun) readers, we'd be remiss if we didn't invite your contributions to this new project.
But right now, we have this Sunday to worry about. So, as always, send emails, leave comments, throw away what's left of your attention span by agreeing to follow me on twitter. And enjoy. First up is the always fresh and innovative ICE ROAD FOX NEWS SUNDAY TRUCKERS.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Wow! Sonia Sotomayor! Will she "survive?" They are actually asking if she will "survive." And she will be "interrogated!" I guess this means waterboarding, or something. Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn are going to yammer about it.
Can Sotomayor be stopped! Cornyn cried about how the Democrats filibustered Miguel Estrada, such a loss for America! But Sotomayor will get an up and down vote. DiFi says that she'll be a lock for confirmation, but nevertheless lays on the Sotomayor PR so thich that you can frost your homemande mini-wheats just by placing them in front of the television. Cornyn isn't pervious to the charm offensive.
So, Wallace brings up the "wise Latina woman" crack, because he wants to know how she would explain this. DiFi says she'll probably discuss the context of it. I sort of wonder if my maybe wise, Latina women wouldn't do a better job than white people? Maybe they are, great at this! Maybe we should burn the whole Supreme Court down! Anyway, John Cornyn says that no one's ever accused him of being wise and I won't start doing that today. Anyway, it's a little hard for me to take Cornyn seriously as a decision maker on the Supreme Court, given his reaction to that courtroom shooting in Georgia, some years ago.
Wallace brings up the Ricci case, eliding over the fact that Sotomayor's judgement actually aligns with about half of the judges that have seen that case. So, when Cornyn says, "If Sotomayor had her way..." it's just silly. It's "if one side of the mainstream opinion of contemporary judges have their way." Cornyn is similarly being inane when he ascribes suspicious motives to the fact that the Second Circuit wrote their decision as a per curiam opinion.
What about torture investigations? Cornyn suggests that Obama is inviting an investigation on his own administration, which would be a disturbing trend. I think, though, that it would be a good thing, if the Obama administration were suspected of CRIMINAL ACTIVITY that it should be investigated. I don't know what the "disturbing trend" would be! Presidents might learn they're not above the law? That not everything they do can be legally justified? That they might be held accountable? THIS IS ALL TOO DISTURBING FOR ME.
Now it's time for Fox News Sunday's regular infomercial on the Future of the Republican Party, where they try to fix the GOP, because that's their role as journalists. Today, on SHAMWOW, Wallace will test the absorbency and dirt-picking-up ability of Eric Cantor.
They immediately get into figuring out what's wrong with the GOP, and suggesting a new path by...uhm...giving Cantor the opportunity to attack the stimulus package? This is supposed to address the future of the GOP? I thought that the GOP's fortunes were the ISSUE in this segment?
Well, let's talk about the rising future of the GOP, if Cantor won't:
Audra Shay, the Young Republican leader who became the subject of a national controversy after The Daily Beast uncovered racist comments she wrote on Facebook and other social networking sites, won the race to become head of the Young Republicans by approximately 50 votes (out of about 950 voting delegates) at their national convention this afternoon in Indianapolis.
Shay faced calls to remove herself from the election after appearing to laugh at a racial slur about President Barack Obama, The Daily Beast's John Avlon exclusively reported. The comments, in which Shay responded to a comment calling blacks "coons," were quickly deleted, but prompted fellow Young Republicans to urge her to take her hat out of the ring for the national election. And though Shay issued a statement that neither she, nor her Young Republican slate, "condones the use of racial slurs on my wall," Avlon reports that Shay has a history of racial comments, encouraging extremism and partisan hate online.Before the election, Meghan McCain urged the group not to choose hate by electing Shay: "What exactly do the Young Republicans expect to achieve by electing a 38-year-old woman who thinks racial epithets are acceptable?"
Anyway, other than thet, Cantor says nothing new. They have "plans," by which they mean brochures, filled with pictures of hot air balloons. They say they'll "take their message to the American people," but so far having gone further than an inside-the-beltway Pie-Tanza.
Should every American have health insurance? "Every American should have access to health insurance," Cantor says. In other words, everyone should find themselves, from time to time, adjacent to insurance. "Government has never been able to" bring down costs, Cantor says, leaving aside Medicare and Medicaid, which insured the elderly after the market left them to crawl off and die in the streets.
Cantor, on sexytime scandaliciousness, says that the GOP is not about personalities, but about ideas. I'm not even sure what that means. I think if Mark Sanford hadn't had the IDEA to go off to Argentina to explore "the sex line," I wouldn't have ever known he HAD a personality.
Panel time! With Laura Ingraham filling in as the Brit Hume. Is Obama in grave danger? Kristol says YES YES. The stimulus has stunk up the joint! Williams says, WHATEVS his poll numbers are still quite good, and that people are still patient about the stimulus. Ingraham says that the fall would be a "better barometer" for judging the stimulus, but that the Obama administration shouldn't be beseeching the American people to be patient.
Kristol, moronically, says that the stimulus package's lack of realtime ZAZZ has stolen away support from his bigger policy initiatives, but that doesn't explain the public's crazy and substantial support for the public option -- of course, let me pause and recall that the administrations' had feet of clay on the public option lately, haven't they?
I could go on at length about Ingraham's comment on how the Obama adminstration "got the economy wrong." It's simultaneously a good point -- the administration is making excuses for the unemployment numbers, and it bespeaks a lacking, certainly -- with a fatal flaw: Ingraham wants to suggest that the problem is with "smart people" in government who are out of touch with normal Americans. I think that virtually everyone in government is out of touch with Americans, and the dumb ones, moreso. But this is typical class war wranglings. The real problem here isn't that Obama has "smart people" at the helm of the economy, but too many people who got things wrong in the first place. The reason Ingraham won't come out and say that, is that if she had her way, an administration she'd support would still be full up with people who got it wrong, because the one thing they've done well is enrich their little connected clique.
Holy crap, now they are all yelling at each other! Kristol is yammering about how all the adults would have to say that a year of no payroll taxes would have stimulated the economy better. Williams points out that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations had been tried over and over again. And now they are yelling some more.
This panel is apparently ignorant of how the CBO is coming down on the public option. The preliminary results are good:
According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option--the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill--should net somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion in savings over ten years.
The sources cautioned that these were only the preliminary estimates, based on previous discussions--that CBO had not yet issued final scoring on language in the actual bill. But the sources felt the final estimate would likely be close.Exactly how the plan produces those savings is, obviously, a key question. The reason--well, a reason--centrists and conservatives don't like a public plan is that they fear it will use the government's bargaining leverage to force doctors, hospitals, and drugmakers to accept unfairly low reimbursements. Private insurance would go out of business, since they couldn't compete; meanwhile, providers and producers of medical care would struggle to stay afloat.
Ingraham runs down her take on the polls, eliding over the runaway support for the public option.
Liasson says that the President will have to step in and work the health care deal himself, instead of letting the Congress mess about in the sandbox. Kristol goes on to try to frighten everyone with the threat of rationed care -- as always, no one seems to care that health care is brutally rationed now. You'll note that millions of people simply receive no ration! Millions more pay for their ration, only to discover that their portion won't be sufficient to keep them alive. And many Americans go into insane, lifetime debt to keep their loved ones healthy. Nobody calls these costs "taxes," but they may as well.
Now they are all yelling at each other, again. It makes one long for the civilized, marm-like goo the ebbs forth from...
THE CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW
Today, it looks like we're setting up the Sotomayor confirmation hearings with Joan Biskupic, Dan Rather, Helene Cooper, and Pete Williams.
Anyway, Sotomayor, what is this about? Seems like only a million years ago this was important, and yet we're all still talking about that "wise Latina lady" quote that offended so many white people, especially the ones who've gone and elected a racist to head the young Republicans. By the way: WHAT A WORLD IN WHICH I AM YOUNGER THAN THE HEAD OF THE YOUNG REPUBLICANS.
Anyway, Pete Williams says that Sotomayor has a great biography. Biskupic says that Sotomayor will be more public than Souter, who was a notorious cabin-dwelling shut-in who hates the smell of Washingtonians and desperately wants to get back to churning his own butter and never speaking to a blessed soul ever again. She won't be "shy about things" and a "player," Biskupic says, but not a "leader on the left" from the outset.
Chris Matthews is all, WOMEN JUDGES, HEH HEH, LIKE JUDGE JUDY, HEH, SHE'S GREAT. Sotomayor is a BIG CITY ETHNIC from the MEAN STREETS. Like she was a character on FAME or something. Biskupic points out that everyone's from New York City or New Jersey on the Supreme Court. SHARKS AND JETS will fight over the heart of Maria! Chris Matthews feels pretty! Chromium steel in AmerEEKa!
Helena Cooper says "Obama wanted Sotomayor from the start." Matthews asks, "What happened in the room?" Cooper says, "They really clicked!...He wanted her to click!" DID OBAMA CROSS THE SEX LINE? How many of Sotomayor's decisions will be made from her Fortress of Solitude, in Argentina. What is Sotomayor's Appalachian Trail Name? CLICK DAMN YOU, CLICK!
Matthews says, WOW, "empathy was the bellringer." Rather says she won't "throw brickbats at Scalia" and she's "smart" and did not "just go to school to eat her lunch."
Will Sotomayor be a surprise on abortion? Or will she have a surprise abortion? Pete Williams says no, everyone is vetted like crazy, these days.
Biskupic says that there could be another woman on the SCOTUS, maybe, but who knows, SO MANY OTHER JUSTICES MIGHT "GO." Williams says, yeah, we never thought "Williams Rehnquist would 'GO' when he did." ALL SUPREME COURT JUSTICES "GO" TO A FARM, MAYBE. Where Souter churns butter and yells at them all day long, for disturbing him, because he hates people.
Williams says the GOP are "practicing" their opposition to Obama's justices on Sotomayor, which will be an awesome plan provided he picks another Latina lady with a controversial decision on Connecticut firefighters on her records.
Also, JOE BIDEN TALKS FOREVER SOMETIMES ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL, FOR HOURS. Then Sarah Palin broke all of his records this past weekend, in Alaska.
So, President Obama has been office for six months without being burned as a witch. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? It's because of NIPPING AND TUCKING ABILITY. Right Dan Rather? YES, Dan Rather says. TELL ME WHAT YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF, AMERICA? Rather says that Obama needs more humor.
Matthews praises the White House unit for "keeping Obama cool." What a thing to talk about in the week that Biden blow up the spot talking about how bad they fracked up the economic metrics without actually saying that they had badly fracked it up, and in which Rahm went wandering off the reservation on public option triggers. YEAH. This was one IN SYNC, KEEPIN' IT COOL team this week, all righty!
Helene Cooper says that she thinks the Obama administration has gotten a bit of an easy ride from the White House Press Corps. BUT HELENE! YOU FORGET HOW BRAVE THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS IS. Let's remember the brave way they all disclosed their attendance at the White House's Fourth of July Party!
Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend. Why didn't you know that? Because they were sworn to secrecy.
We reported yesterday that Politico's Mike Allen was spotted milling about as a guest at the White House's "backyard bash" by the pool reporter, who was allowed into the event for 40 minutes and kept in a pen before being ushered out. When Allen quoted from the pool report in his Playbook column the next day, he deleted a reference to his own name and didn't bother to tell his readers that he was actually at the party.Well, he wasn't alone. Gawker has learned that the White House gave tickets to virtually every major news organization that covers the president--the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, CBS News, and so on, about 30 in all. The reporters were invited to attend on the following condition:
"You are being invited to attend this event as a guest. Blogging, Twittering or otherwise reporting on this event is not permitted. If you feel that you cannot agree to abide by these ground rules, please don't claim a ticket."That's right: Much of the White House press corps spent the Fourth schmoozing with White House staffers, catching performances by the Foo Fighters and Jimmy Fallon, and watching the fireworks from the most exclusive vantage point in the D.C. metro area, all off the record--not to mention off-the-Facebook and off-the-Twitter. These are the same people who just a week ago were whining in the press briefing about Obama's malicious and dastardly attempts to "control the press."
Give it up for the Baltimore Sun's Paul West, who noted that Mike Allen was attending the party, providing the thread on which to pull. Anyway, SUCH COURAGE! And that brings me to the Pitney-gate segment of the liveblog:
LIST OF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS WHO WOULD REFUSE TO SHOW UP IF THE WHITE HOUSE TOLD THEM THEY WOULD BE CALLED ON TO ASK A QUESTION:
_________________________________________________
NO NAMES YET.
Oh, well! Better luck next week. Remember, White House Press Corps, anytime you guys want to put your name on this list, here's my email!
Williams is one of the few people in the mainstream media to specifically call out Obama for decisions at the Justice Department that are similar to the Bush White House -- specifically states' secrets, military tribunals.
Rather keeps saying that Obama needs to be funny.
Tell Chris Something He Doesn't Know: An Ongoing Series Of Near Infinite Size, continues. Joan Biskupic says that Sotomayor's SCOTUS colleagues will be watching the nomination process themselves. Rather says that Dubai is helping Iran gather intelligence and launder money. Cooper says the administration is worried about Taliban infiltration of Swat Valley refugee camps. Williams says that the Obama detainee review is not turning up anyone to fit into the category of "person that must be held indefinitely without trial."
You know, it occurs to me that there should be a show where the topics brought up be Rather, Cooper, and Williams gets in depth discussion, instead of shunted into some silly little format bucket, as it has here. Matthews has been all, "WOW THAT'S REALLY INTERESTING." But you know next week this show, like all the others save GPS, will be murmurring about the SHINY POLITICAL THINGS they saw that week.
Pete Williams, by the way? Making a strong case for further, deeper, Sunday show participation today.
CASE IN POINT: Matthews big question, is Obama a FDR reform everything type, or a conservative, "hold on to what's valuable" type? Biskupic says the latter, Rather says he's a bit of both, Cooper says the latter, and Williams says you can't say he's conservative because of the way he's intervened in the economy.
All right, here we go...
MEET THE PRESS
Today, John McCain will have to account for Sarah Palin and Chuck Schumer will have to account for other things.
But first, McCain, who's now done this show 86,759 times. What about Dick Cheney, keeping everyone in the dark about the CIA? McCain hasn't heard anything about it, but thinks that Cheney needs to "be heard from," but it's too early for him "to reach a conclusion." He figures it as the start of a larger story, so he's not going to suggest that there needs to be an investigation until he knows more.
What about torture investigations? McCain says they would be a bad idea? Why does he think that? He says he fought against torture and waterboarding and the like. So why does he think that investigations would be a bad idea? He says that when we torture, it harms our image abroad. So why does he think that investigations would be a bad idea? He says that we "all know bad things were done." So why does he think that investigations would be a bad idea? He says we should follow Obama's lead, and not look back, but rather look forward, which involves a lot of CLOSING YOUR EYES and fumbling away around all the piles of shit that have been left on the carpet. So why does he think that investigations would be a bad idea?
David Gregory asks, "But where's the accountability?" WHOA-HO, Mr. Gregory! What's this aroma a whiff, coming off my teevee? The scent of balls, newly dropped from their tight abdominal tethering place, mayhap? McCain says, that people's reputations have been harmed already. You know, the way people said, OH YES, OJ SIMPSON MAY HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH MURDER, BUT HEAVENS TO HUFFLEPUFF, CONSIDER HIS REPUTATION!
Anyway, McCain thinks the "dragging it out" would be bad for America, because why would America want to be known as the sort of place that holds wrongdoers accountable! Better that the world understand that we think the wrongness of torture deserves the fine, eloquent lipservice of John McCain, but when push comes to shove we shall use it! "What's going to be the positive result of airing out and ventilating details," asks John McCain. Funny you should use the words "air out" and "ventilate," because when the corpse of moral authority crawls into my apartment to die, having been filleted by the daggers of political convenience, the first thing I do is open my windows so I don't have to live with the stink. Then, if it's all the same to everyone else, it's time to get all CSI on that stuff.
Anyway, "We do not excuse it," McCain says, excusing it. Gregory accepts this, saying "let me turn to politics," and the wet, sucking sound you here are Gregory's testicles re-ascending to their traditional home, adjacent to his duodenum.
Was McCain shocked by Palin's resignation? He was "surprised," not shocked. She'll be more effective as the leader of Alaska if she'd stopped being the leader of Alaska. Gregory says, "BUT YOU NEVER QUIT, MR. MCCAIN BY GOD YOU ARE A MARVEL OF UNQUITTING THAT I WORSHIP." McCain says, OH BUT THE MEDIA. ALWAYS POINTING OUT HER SHORTCOMINGS.
Anyway, McCain chose her because he read the back of cereal box, with a five line bio of Palin, and whatever, she'll be awesome. McCain says that it's totally okay to quit your job if you would be more effective at that job if you let someone else do that job. McCain says she's qualified to be President, but would not endorse her, at least not today. "I'm confident she's make a fine president," depending on the "political scenario." So, I'm gathering that if the political scenario was that she was the only American left, McCain might endorse her for President.
McCain says he would do it all again -- name Palin his running mate -- and I do not believe him, not for one second.
McCain wants to know "who thought five months ago that we would own" car companies and AIG and banks. That's right! He was so busy campaigning that he missed the whole Bush-Paulson TARP stuff that made it pretty clear we were going to take ownership of some massive pieces of the private sector. Maybe if John McCain had suspended his campaign during that time to examine what was going on, he would have noticed that all that stuff was coming to pass!
McCain, though, does a nice job at pointing out Obama's constant use of straw man arguments, though. But then he loses me by complaining about our high corporate tax rates. Yes, they are high in name only, but they do not capture revenue. Loopholes make them a sieve. I'm happy to re-present Matt Yglesias's "Up With Ireland" argument again.
Would McCain support a second stimulus? No, he'll support TAX CUTS! I LOVE POLICIES THAT HAVE CLASSIC (TM) FAILURE WRITTEN ALL OVER THEM. What will happen when the economy gets better? MCCAIN WILL SUPPORT TAX CUTS. What will happen if the economy gets worse? TAX CUTS. The moon explodes? TAX CUTS. Mark Sanford is caught in three way? TAX CUTS.
McCain is basically UP WITH BAD NO-GROWTH ECONOMIC CYCLES! Small businesses will surely flourish in this era where nobody lends, and nobody can get credit, and everyone is saving money!
John McCain thinks that America needs to demonstrate to Iran that we are with them in spirit, which makes me wonder if he's actually been using Twitter.
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First Posted: 07-12-09 08:30 AM | Updated: 08-12-09 05:12 AM