Mock, Paper, Scissors

Actually, Frothy is an assault on everyone, not just women. Can someone explain to me what The Gregory was thinking having him on? He’s a third-tier candidate who didn’t even get press coverage when he announced last week.

A poor Filipino blacksmith’s son who stands less than 2 feet (60 centimeters) tall was declared the world’s shortest man by Guinness World Records on his 18th birthday Sunday, sparking a celebration in his hometown.

However, Meet the Press confirms that the littlest man remains David Gregory. Here’s the line-up of people discussing Weinergate:

–NBC’s “Meet the Press”: DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus; Rick Santorum; roundtable with Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Republican strategist Mike Murphy, Richard Wolffe and Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel

For the record, this is the first time that Dancing with the Gregory has had on
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and that is all you really need to know.

(It has not aired on the West Coast yet, so this is purely speculation, but I feel confident that Weiner’s weiner will be the topic, and no one will mention Vitter’s diapers.)

White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee insists this is not a jobless recovery and everything’s moving along just the way they planned.

I don’t think you have to be a Paul Krugman to realize that something is very, very wrong in the United States. The Recovery^®, such as it is, is a one-sided affair: corporations and their benefactors have recovered very nicely, thank you, and the rest of us can suck eggs.

So it takes a certain kind of gaul to appear on national television on the Sunday Talkies, no less, and tell us that this is not a jobless recovery. Take it away Mr. Goolsbee:

AMANPOUR: But what do you say to the American people when so many economists were expecting something, according to a Bloomberg survey, of 165,000 to 170,000 to be created this month, to see the unemployment come down a little, which it didn’t? What do you say to the American people about that? Where is the light, in other words?

GOOLSBEE: The first thing that I say is the same thing I said one month ago when it came in the opposite, 100,000 above expectations, and that is, let’s not conclude too much of anything from one report. Let’s look at what’s happened over six months.

And what has happened over six months is we’ve added a million jobs in the private sector. The president has enacted — we passed a tax policy in December, which has come into place this year and will continue over the course of this year, to put — to give a payroll tax of $1,000 plus to 150 million workers and to give direct incentives for business to start investing. And they’ve accumulated money on their balance sheet.

Our — our effort now as a government should be to get the private sector, to help them stand up and lead the recovery. It — the government is not the central driver of recovery.

emphasis mine

And maybe that’s the problem, Goolsbee. The hands-off approach from the very beginning of the very small stimulus (of which 1/3 was tax breaks to get the GOP and the Blue Dogs onboard) to the Darwinian survival of the richest of the current approach does nothing to address the lack of demand. Government should be driving the demand, or at least putting money in the hands of people who will spend it, immediately and generate demand.

AMANPOUR: Right, but, again, it is slower than expected. So, economists are asking and people are asking, is this kind of a wake-up call, do you think, to sort of shift the political debate from what’s been all about debt reduction and shift it back to job creation? I mean, is this an opportunity, for instance, to try to talk about creating jobs and adding maybe another stimulus? Let’s say there was no politics involved, in a perfect environment. What would you do to get this off the slow burner?

GOOLSBEE: Well, I would say two or three thing. The first is, the president has never stopped talking about jobs. For him, the growth strategy is the number-one issue.

Now, we must live within our means. We have a moment that we can talk about long-run deficit reduction. And the vice president’s leading an effort to do that, that the president has asked him to. But the president is getting up every day — on Friday, he’s going out to Ohio to talk about jobs in manufacturing, which manufacturing is having its best employment year in almost 15 years.

emphasis mine

So, in other words, even in a perfect political environment–the premise of AMANPOUR’s question–you would not do anything different? Deficit reduction, really? Look out, folks, that means that The Carebear really is prepared to cut Medicare. But let’s continue:

AMANPOUR: And yet that came down, as well, manufacturing jobs…

GOOLSBEE: Well, durable goods manufacturing was up.

AMANPOUR: But what specifically can you do to change this?

GOOLSBEE: OK. So the — we have shifted in the economy from a rescue phase, which is government-directed, to a phase in which government policies have got — we’ve got to rely on government policies that are trying to leverage the private sector and give incentives to the private sector to be doing the growth.

And that — so the president has started these tax cuts that will continue over the rest of this year, has put in place this regulatory review in which all of the major agencies are going to go through, find any outmoded regulations, ones that are excessively costly for their benefits, find ways to streamline.

emphasis mine

And if that is not enough GOP-talking points coming to you from the President’s economic advisors, I don’t know what is.

The powers that be inside the beltway and on Wall St. are fully recovered from the recession and doing well, so screw the little guys. They are sitting on literally trillions of dollars in cash – there is no shortage of money, the US remains the wealthiest country on the earth–so the problem is not that they cannot afford to hire us, it is that they don’t need to. They are doing great without us.

Emerging markets, emerging middle class in China and India are the real opportunities in our globalized economy. The US has a population of just under 300 million people; China has over 3 billion. The Great Gretzky says that the secret to hockey is to go to where the puck will be, not to where it is, and so that is what our multinational corporations have done: they’ve Hoovered up all the cash here, and now they are off to where the money is, which is not here.

So when Goolsbee says that everything is going according to plan, I think you can believe it. It’s the plan that needs to be questioned, not the accuracy of his statement.

Update: Real-Economics says something similar. Maybe I’m not a crackpot?

(Quotes from Crooks and Liars)

NBC’s Meet The Gregory: Newt Gingrich. Roundtable: EJ Dionne, Mark Halperin, Peggy Noonan, Helene Cooper.

Is there anyone on that show that is not past their sell-by date? (OK, Nooner might be the exception, but only because she is pickled.)

Two odd bits of demographics to start our little gray cells this morning, Scissorheads:

Damn Liberal Media

Meet the Press (NBC): Tom Donilon, Michael Chertoff, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Hayden

Fox News Sunday (Fox): Tom Donilon, Dick Cheney

This Week (ABC): Tom Donilon, Condoleeza Rice, Husain Haqqani. Panel: Liz Cheney, Tom Ricks, Lawrence Wright

Face the Nation (CBS): Sen. Kerry, Donald Rumsfeld

State of the Union (CNN): Tom Donilon, Sen. Lugar, Anita Dunn, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Tom Davis

Do you notice anything odd about that guest list? The Sunday morning talk shows are going to feature, Bush’s former, Sec. of Homeland Security (Chertoff), Bush’s former CIA director (Hayden), Bush’s former vice president (Cheney), Sec. of Defense (Rumsfeld), Bush’s former Sec of State (Rice), and former Deputy Asst. Sec of State (Liz Cheney). Other Republicans on the shows will be Tom Davis, Rudy Giuliani, and Dick Luger.

The current members of the Obama administration featured on the Sunday morning shows total one Obama’s National Security Advisor Tom Donilon.

(Politics USA)

Popular!

-John McCain and Joe Lieberman have been intertwined a lot over the last few years and here’s another place where they share company- they are two of the three least popular out of the 81 sitting Senators PPP has done approval polls on since the beginning of 2010. McCain’s approval rating is only 34% with 53% of voters disapproving of him. That makes him the third least popular. Lieberman is the least popular and John Ensign is the second least popular.

Lieberman and McCain have the same problem- they’re not very popular with their party base but no one else likes them either. Only 44% of Republicans approve of McCain to 40% who disapprove and his spread is only 31/58 with independents and 23/67 with Democrats. There are other ‘maverick’ Senators who are not all that popular within their own parties- the Olympia Snowes and Susan Collins’ and Lindsey Grahams of the world- but they make up for it with good numbers from independents and Democrats. McCain and Lieberman’s actions have just caused pretty much everyone to dislike them.

(Public Policy Polling)

A Hamilton College class and their public policy professor analyzed the predicts of 26 pundits — including Sunday morning TV talkers — and used a scale of 1 to 5 to rate their accuracy. After Paul Krugman, the most accurate pundits were Maureen Dowd, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

… Those scoring lowest – “The Ugly” – with negative tallies were conservative columnist Cal Thomas; U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC); U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI); U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, a McCain supporter and Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut; Sam Donaldson of ABC; and conservative columnist George Will.

No score on Pegginton Noonington, we suspect because she kept whispering about strawberries and clicking coins.

(Poynter)

Seriously, WTF?

Bachmann-the-Nut put an asterisk by her vote? What the heck does that mean? She still voted for it, asterisk and all. Why doesn’t Chris Wallace just ask her what the heck that means? Oh, wait. Fox News.

…and she speaks!

OK, I’m not one to defend the Carebear, but… he did not say that Republicans are un-American. He said:

Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They’re worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

That said, perhaps Perino is projecting? Destroying the social safety net is Un-American.

Perhaps all the Botox has slipped into her brain?

(Crooks and Liars)

…to his old friend and colleague, David Broder.

The WaPo tells us…

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is pushing Sarah Palin off her throne as queen of the Tea Party.

…and of course, the WaPo cites this interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It is like watching some two-year olds on a play date, just babbling at each other, unaware that the other baby is even there. David Gregory, easily the most compliant interviewer on the teevee machine, gets aggressive but finally gives up and goes back to his list of questions and when Bachmann does start answering him, true to form, he doesn’t do any follow-up. But still, for a while she sort of forced him to do his job.

Poor old Grandpa Walnuts is confused again. You see, in his day, when you bought something in the United States it means it was built in the United States. “Take the buggy whip,” he did not say.

Anyway, given that he thinks the US economy is doing just dandy because his booze heiress wife is still raking in serious millions of bucks annually (and he really did think that middle class income was around $5 million), of course he would be on the Sunday Talkies expounding on the US economy.

I would also point out that if you emptied that house, if you had left a computer there or an iPad or an iPhone, those are built in the United States of America.

Actually, Walnuts, they are designed in Cupertino California, but they are manufactured in China.

But the best part is that after he finishes with that bit of nonsense, he then tells ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that is why we need more free trade agreements, so our exports will be cheaper.

(Raw Story has a video with a follow-up that smashes his assertion that Apple’s products are manufactured here.)

…will have the only Union Rep on the Sunday Talkies (Meet the Press).

Yes, Politico reports thatTurdblossom’s back-up singer, David “Goodhair” Gregory will have AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka along with Gov. Scott Walker.

Goodhair: Governor Walker, are you trying to bust unions?

Walker: No.

Goodhair: OK. Comrade Trumka, what was the bagpipe song that your thugs played when they entered the majestic Wisconsin Capitol’s rotunda?

Trumka: What?

Goodhair: Follow-up question for you, Comrade. If you have an isosceles triangle with the base of three inches and the hight of four inches, what is the hypotenuse?

Trumka: What?

Goodhair: OK, since you won’t answer my questions, Comrade Trumka, I’m going to follow up with Governor Walker. Governor Walker, that’s a nice tie. Where did you buy it?

Walker: I’m glad you asked that, David…

Not one single labor spokesperson has been booked for the Sunday Talkies.

I can hardly wait to see how fast Cokie Roberts agrees with George Will about the shabby way union thugs dress.

(Plum Line)

First he votes against extending unemployment to (formerly) working Americans. Then he pulls this:

Sen. Kyl: $678-billion tax break for rich should not be offset

Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, believes that any extension to unemployment benefits “ought to be paid for.” But when it comes to the $678-billion cost of extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, the senator says no offsetting is necessary.

In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace Sunday, Kyl argued that Congress and the Obama administration should extend the tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush during his first term.

Extending the entire package of tax cuts would cost the US $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years. The Obama administration has argued in favor of allowing to expire at least the part of the tax cuts that applies to people earning over $250,000 a year. That portion is estimated to cost $678 billion over 10 years.

via Raw Story

April 11, 2010: The fact checking on This Week debuts at Politifact.com. David Gregory tells Howard Kurtz that it’s an “interesting idea” that Meet the Press will not be adopting . “People can fact-check ‘Meet the Press’ every week on their own terms,” Gregory says.

…and thus Gregory assures us a rich assortment of crackpots and GOP spinmeisters. But I repeat myself.

Nothing like inviting people into your living room to lie to you.