But Attaturk, Mika is a “best selling author” now.

Just f*cking tragic.

I have never had a reason to boycott Good Morning ‘Merika until now.

As are Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

In fact, there’s only one person involved in this post that isn’t a successful author.

Me.

But at least I’ve reached the station I deserve. ;-)

As I observed back when Jenna Bush was hired, the news doesn’t want reporters, they want celebrities. They could probably hire several reporters for what they’re paying Mika B. or Jenna, and they made the choice not to.

Go easy on Mika!

She’s still recovering from hitting her head on every step and landing on her infant daughter:

http://morningmika.com/worstweek.html

When her second daughter, Carlie, was about 14 weeks old, Brzezinski had the worst day of her life. She hurried home one afternoon to relieve her nanny. “I rushed upstairs and grabbed my baby. I was talking a hundred miles an hour, and I walked right off the top of the stairs.I fell down the complete flight.” Brzezinski landed on top of Carlie. She began repeating, “‘She’s got to be okay. She’s got to be okay,’ because I knew Carlie wasn’t okay. Her cry was all wrong.” At the hospital, doctors ran tests to see if Carlie’s back was broken. “I fell apart. I slid down the wall. My face was on the floor, and I wept.” It turned out that Carlie had suffered only a broken leg. Filled with guilt, Brzezinski vowed to quit and stay home, but found she couldn’t do it. Instead, she and her husband got more help at home.

“I really love my job,” she says. “I’d rather spend one good hour with my kids a day than eight bad ones.”

I’m sure your kids appreciate your absence, as well, Mika!

Oh, and Li’l Zbig, please go have hot cup o’ DIAF w/ your dad.

Thanks!

Beloved Attaturk,
You are the author of choice every week day at 3:30 am central in this household!

Good morning, and as always, thanks for the post.

Dad would be so proud. And these people move votes.

Mornin’, pups -

I’ve got a theory wrt these braindead pundits: when they do nothing but read a teleprompter, none of the information penetrates their memory banks (that’s laboring under the assumption they actually *have* memory banks). :-( Once they get off the teleprompter, they then spend the remainder of the day and night schlepping with the villagers vs. actually spending some of that time studying the events/history that are impacting whatever it is they’re reading from the scripts.

There’s an explanation to this. Criminal organizations and corrupt governments can’t afford to hire anyone talented, because talented people have some pride and are capable of challenging their bosses. Instead they hire minimally competent people who will be grateful for their job because they know they couldn’t get a better one. They also tend to rely on people with skeletons in their closet, since they can easily be disposed of whenever necessary, to the applause of the populace, whereas jailing people with independent reputations creates a scandal.

The main thing shady groups want is loyalty, and incompetent, shady people will be grateful and thus loyal. Look at Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat — without credentials, life experience, education, or talent they’re already at the top of their profession. They know what they’re supposed to say, and they say it.

Brownie of “heckuva job, Brownie” was a case of that. Nothing he’d done in his life had prepared him for the job he’d gotten. Partly for that reason, and because he was part of Bush’s social set, his loyalty could be relied on (right up until the point when they scapegoated him for one of the worst disasters inAmerican history, anyway. And note that he’s been silent after one outburst).

Besides being incompetent, though, those people are good at figuring out what flies and what doesn’t. There is a long list of reporters fired for doing too good a job by asking the wrong questions, and people in the biz know about that list. No one tells them what to do, they just figure it out by watching hirings, firings, and promotions.

Morin Joe is drunk, he starts with how Obama’s poll numbers are plummeting and goes right into “he working very hard on the situation in Haiti”.

We are a nation lead by propoganda from the big corporations and an echo chamber media. We the people have to dig deep to find out what is really going on. Read Climate Cover-up by James Hoggan. It’s a real eye opener!!

Joe allows that even though some people on the left are taking advantage of Haiti’s situation Rush is worse!

Morning Joe with Pat Buchanan (Scar on cigar, Mika on piano).

Pat Buchanan is on a teleprompter? If he is I want some writers fired:)

Yea, I don’t buy that. No way Joe’s rants are scripted.

We are taking advantage of the situation by what calling Pat Robertson a demented racist? Aside from that everything I’ve seen is news and pleas for donations.

Good morning, pups. It’s Bobo, Cohen and Krugman today. Bobo addresses “The Underlying Tragedy” and says the devastation from the earthquake in Haiti should be used as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. In this he actually includes the line “… the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.” This from the “intrusive big gummint” hater… Or maybe we only get intrusively paternal with brown people, Bobo? Mr. Cohen, who is in Chongqing, China, addresses “Google vs. China.” He says openness for China is a means to an end — prosperity and development — but not a value. This is the paradox Google now appears bent on challenging. Prof. Krugman, in “Bankers Without a Clue,” says financial system reformers should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, whose testimony showed they have no wisdom to offer.

Here they are.

The coffee, tea and hot chocolate are ready, and I’ve got banana pancakes this morning. In my office we’re feeling quite upbeat because we managed to pin an insurance company to the mat yesterday. The company (which shall remain nameless) was refusing (for the THIRD TIME)to authorize a CT scan for a patient until he had been treated with 30 days of antibiotics in 2 months. Well, the patient has only one kidney… In a letter we subtly suggested they were trying to kill him and, presto, he gets his CT scan. Have a great day.

Maybe they only read the news off the teleprompter their opinions are their own. But when a question like who is your favorite Founding Father comes up Waccamaw is right their brains can’t produce answers.
Jefferson and Franklin are my favorites just for the record.

Hey, that Button Gwinett really was an asshole, even for a guy from Georgia. He’d be on teh national teebee today, specializing in commentary on Florida. Or blabbing about how Madison was a fuckstick. Or that Patrick Henry was a big jerkoff.

Besides being incompetent, though, those people are good at figuring out what flies and what doesn’t. There is a long list of reporters fired for doing too good a job by asking the wrong questions, and people in the biz know about that list. No one tells them what to do, they just figure it out by watching hirings, firings, and promotions.

I think they all get e mails from Karl all the GOPers have the same take on the issue of the day and say the same thing on every channel.
The issue of the day is also picked by Rove noway they all pick the same issue of the day most of the time. No way they all decide to cover the same stories at the same time.
But aside from that I agree with the rest of your theory.

The main thing shady groups want is loyalty, and incompetent, shady people will be grateful and thus loyal. Look at Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat — without credentials, life experience, education, or talent they’re already at the top of their profession. They know what they’re supposed to say, and they say it.

A look at the top GOP talking heads and their *cough * experience would be interesting George Will talking about climate change or Bobo on how great the Bush economy right before the banking collapse.

Bobo addresses “The Underlying Tragedy” and says the devastation from the earthquake in Haiti should be used as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. In this he actually includes the line “… the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.” This from the “intrusive big gummint” hater… Or maybe we only get intrusively paternal with brown people,

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

We only care when brown people have oil normally we ignore tragedy but Bobo suggesting intrusive paternalism? That almost sound like he wants us to go in and fix things? I think Bobo will want us to send in troops next.

I’ve been trying to figure out the *story* from the pundits since this all started and, so far, it goes something like this:

Day 1: Q. – How many people are dead/are going to die?

Day 2: Q. – How long will it be before violence breaks out? (Now would be a good time to send in Blackwater so they can gin up violence for the cameras)

Day 3: Stories of sensationalism: touchy feel-good vs. tales of horror (anderson cooper: oooooooooo, be afraid! be very afraid! There are all these horrible people who escaped from prison!) What I found even more horrible were the figures of how many people the jail was intended to house vs. the number of people who were actually in it.

Day 4: ?

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

Isn’t Sarah against building codes? Hmm? I wonder if her new house bought and built by her contractor friends sunk in posts so the foundation would not sag as the Alaska Permafrost thaws?
If they did then Sarah lives in a home adjusted for global warming, if not her foundation should crack if the ground where her home is built on has permafrost under it.
I admit Alaska geology is not my area of expertise. I wonder if we can get some building plans?

Well done….now only 200 million cases to go!

Sriously well done. The battles that the med business has with insurance cos and the horror stories that surely nearly everyone in America has heard should make the “reform” be a piece of cake until we realize that Oh Bummah! has told us to go eat it!

Day 2: Q. – How long will it be before violence breaks out? (Now would be a good time to send in Blackwater so they can gin up violence for the cameras)

They are talking up violence already? Violence which of course must be put down. Hmmm Cuba gots some offshore oil maybe the oil companies think Haiti does too?

Are the Press preparing the public for troops to be sent?

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

Bobo the World Bank lends money to the Elite Rich who skim the cash and the big projects are not well chosen.
The country goes bankrupt and then you get a Lefty Government.
Chicago School economic theory the Shock Doctrine does not work it just takes a few decades to fail. Maybe we need real Lefty plans for giving?

The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next.

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

Cognitive Dissonance Bobo China grew its economy with protectionism and by buying our debt. They built up their industry by protecting it.
The Press floats the story China bought our debt to shield China from currency shocks. They also note they have devalued their currency below what the free market would place it.
A third reason is China owns so much of our debt that politically we can’t ever decide to protect our own industry from Chinese competition.

Thanks. We battle with them daily, and it feels good to get a win.

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

Maybe microlending and charity could come up with a coordinated plan? By working with the government?
A government that is concerned with helping the people more than helping the Elite?

The 2004 Haiti rebellion was a coup d’etat that happened after conflicts that occurred for several weeks in Haiti during February 2004. It resulted in the premature end of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s second term, in which he left Haiti on a United States (U.S.) plane accompanied by U.S. military/security personnel. Controversy remains regarding the involvement of the U.S. in his departure and whether or not the departure was voluntary. Aristide described his departure as a kidnapping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Haitian_rebellion

Hell’s bells and codfish! That was *yesterday’s* talking point. :-( Nothing the TV people would like better than mass destruction in the streets. You can almost see them droolin’ at the prospect. :-(

Rudy Giuliani, the man who was mayor of New York City during the 9/11 attacks, appeared on Good Morning America today to say President Obama should take lessons from former President George W. Bush on how to prevent a terrorist attack.

“What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/rudy-we-had-no-domestic-attacks-under-bush-we-had-one-under-obama.php

My bold Uh Rudy, Anthrax attack, the Shoe bomber?

They only get this worked up over oil. Lets see if the Press keeps the possibility of violence story in the news?
I wonder if Pat is invested in sweat shops in Haiti or the Dominican Republic?

the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.” This from the “intrusive big gummint” hater… Or maybe we only get intrusively paternal with brown people, Bobo?

Can you say Shock Doctrine? I know the Haitians don’t have much left for outsiders to steal, but whatever it is, we’ll get it.

George Stephanopoulos could not follow up after Rudy gave him that opening? George reported on all these stories what did he just forget?
George did Rudy only agree to go on your show if there were no follow up questions? The people have a right to know if your in the tank.

My theory is oil.

OT your tax dollars at work:

In a remarkable rebound from the depths of the financial crisis, Morgan earned $11.7 billion last year, more than double its profit in 2008. The bank earned $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/business/16morgan.html?ref=business

Well, it seems that Krugman saw the same testimony that I did, and not at all the one that Cynthia Kouril observed.

More amazing (or not), though, is Krugman’s selective blindness. He sees how clueless and/or self-serving the banksters are, but thinks Bernanke, equally clueless and/or self-serving, but who hired Krugman at Princeton, is a fine upstanding fellow.

We need the press to just admit before interviews with famous people that nothing the guest says will be contradicted on air because thats the only way the guest would agree to appear on tv.
Next we need to get the fake Liberals like Juan Williams who are paid to take a dive whenever a GOPer opens their mouth.

He didn’t expand on the statement.

Any evidence, or just a guess? There is no civil society left in Haiti. All that kind of stuff has been preempted by outside orgs.

We loaned money to all the banks to save the entire banking system from collapse. Therefore the entire banking system that took the cash should be paying back the entire debt.

To earn that $11.7 billion, what products did they manufacture? What crops did they produce? What essential services did they provide?

Haiti made a pact with the Devil thats why the earthquake happened just how could even Pat expand on/out crazy that statement?
Still our side aside from yelling at Pat well I haven’t seen us trying to use this tragedy for political purpose much less lie about it like Pat has.

Jesus man, I was talking about what Joe said. Take a deep breath and step away from the keyboard for a minute.

Cuba is a big Island kinda near our coast they have offshore oil deposits. The island Haiti is on is a big island kinda near our cost. I assume they have similar geological formations.
I believe people looking for oil look for geological formations that they have found oil in before so yes I’m speculating. But what else explains the interest in Haiti one of the poorest economies on earth?

Sorry guys like Pat make me mad I wasn’t mad at you.

Does three card monty count?

Their already reporting looting going on.Whata despicable media we have, a
long with their corporate masters.When black people fight for survival its called looting,and when white people do it,its called shopping.
Sons of bitches may they rot in hell for eternity.

Oh!Yeah,Good Mornin,Everybody

People need food water clothes and in a society as poor as Haiti well there would be less looting if people actually had enough to get by on.
How many rich areas hit by disaster loot? Societies with an unequal distribution of goods that leaves some people struggling can expect looting.

That’s an apt description of their business model.

Going on 4 days now with no food or water so this shouldn’t be surprising at all: The UN World Food Programme says its warehouses in the Haitian capital have been looted.

What time is SCOTUS gonna release their decision overturning campaign finance reform? Is that another 5 o’clock on Friday data dump?

we’re cool

Its the ability to get unlimited billions from the FED at 0% int. rate.Then invest those monies in Foreign Credit Derivatives at a return of,OH SAY,5% to 10% and then 3 months later pay back the original loan.
Rinse and Repeat,Rinse and Repeat

Abraham Lincoln was not a founding father , he came along a little too late for that.

Heard something mentioned this morning about sweatshops and whether children w/o families might be snatched off the street (either cnn or scar – was switching back and forth) and the question was being asked of someone from one of the aid organizations. It was one of those gotcha questions where the talking head was hoping for a sensational comment… to the aid worker’s credit, he sidestepped the stupidity quite nicely. I got a sneaky feeling someone who’s willing to go out and work among the poor like they do has a much firmer grasp on reality than these idiots on TV.

On a thread yesterday, I typed that perhaps you could say that Lincoln refounded the country, so he was a refounding father. *g*

4 days yes I would expect looting after all no power everything in the fridge is ripe and the can goods have probably ran out, never mind no power to cook stuff I fear everyone is lighting fires to cook stuff and someone will get careless with all the wood lying around in the ruble fires could spread easy.

DING DING DING We have a winner!!!

Ah yes, the JP Morgan story just gets better:

Those cheery figures were accompanied by news that JPMorgan has earmarked $26.9 billion to compensate its workers, 18 percent higher than in 2008, much of which will now be paid out as bonuses. Workers in JPMorgan’s investment bank would, on average, earned roughly $272,000 each. Top producers, however, expect to collect multimillion-dollar paychecks.

Flirting with fire IMHO.

I watched SP on Glen Beck. Just couldn’t resist. And when he asked her that question, you could practically hear the rocks in her head banging against her head…..knowing that there was a trick to the question. And if she blurted out a name that wasn’t a founding father, she’d be in a lot deeper sh*& than Mika will ever be in.

I personally like Ben Franklin (and not just because he’s Aretha’s great, great, great grandfather).

Flirting with fire IMHO

Definitely. Obama will send a sternly worded letter.

(Unofficially and briefly translated in English by Ezili Danto, June 25, 2006 – Please refer to original Nouvelliste article in French by Roberson Alphonse for exact language at “Forez, puis pompez le pétrole d’Haïti !” Nouvelliste, June 18, 2008)

Drill, and then pump the oil of Haiti! by Roberson Alphonse, Nouvelliste, June 18, 2008

The signs, (indicators), justifying the explorations of oil (black gold) in Haiti are encouraging. In the middle of the oil shock, some 4 companies want official licenses from the Haitian State to drill for oil.

http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/gas_oil.html#drill

Oil in Haiti? Well the oil companies are interested in looking.

Heh. I picked Ben too. Someone on the thread reminded that, in addition to being a renaissance man, he was also a ladies’ man, and I owned up that part of my attraction might be that he would be an interesting person to go out with.

doG. What Bush/Cheney could do with this: The US says it has been granted rare permission to use Cuban airspace to fly aid to Haiti – AFP report.

Swim is up…

Does everyone notice that with all the awful but skewered economic news that comes out everyday,the market still goes up??
They chased and banckrupted the small guy out of the markets and now whats left are the Trillion Dollar Hedge Funds and State Govs.playing their casino-style trading,all with the backstop of the Taxpayer Dime

Oil in Haiti
- By Dr. Georges Michel ————

Since time immemorial, it is no secret that in the basement of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters, there are significant deposits of oil still untapped,

http://www.lngplants.com/HaitiGeology.htm

You have to scroll down a bit to find this story past the stories of gold deposits.

Yup. And it could just be me, but the volume for the last year has seemed really, really light.

Just had to point that out.

Recently for some unknown reason the name Button Gwinnett just kinda popped up in my head. I knew I had heard the name before but I just couldn’t place where .
Well , now I know !!

Looking at it from the perspective of the formation of the GOP, Abe was the founding father who then gave the current bunch validation for their visceral hatred of dark people when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and completely ruined that wonderful plantation system (after the plantation owners and their political friends ruined it first by firing on Fort Sumter).

I would have thought tha George Stephanopolous would have become more vigilant after he took such a big hit from the Rudy interview.

But, nope, on his Sunday show he went right ahead and let Liz “spawn of Cheney” off the hook too. He asked her a direct question which she chose not to answer. No follow-up there either. I thought Liz only got treated with those kind of kid gloves on FOX and “Morning Joe”.

Looking confident will always be more useful than being technically correct on the TV. The producers of MSM shows generally understand that a narrow consensus is more likely to keep viewers that complex arguments that reach ambiguous conclusions or topics that are covered for more than 5 minutes. Boredom seeps in and the viewer changes the channel. If the show can hold them long enough, the raucous randomness of the commercial block that follow will wipe many of viewer’s memories clean so they can start over.

Chimps like most monkeys love to watch random patterns and we’re not any different. In the end, critiquing the accuracy of TV news will always miss the point of the show unless the effect of consensus is taken into account. Fox is generally winning the ratings wars because the consensus is designed in. Their incompetence is a feature, not a bug.

Saw that, too, timncguy. Rachel Maddow did a segment on it. Cheney daughter ignores tough questions

Now that’s the kind of tough questioning I’d like to see Maddow give Mika’s dad, Zbig Brzezinski, next time he’s on. Last time, she fairly swooned at the feet of the guy who thought starting a bogus holy war in Afghanistan was a good idea.

How far can she go, how far is she willing to go, questioning the Democratic PTB?

At the time, while we were being told one thing, Mika’s dad knew the CIA was starting to aid the mujahideen in Afghanistan, thereby to induce the Soviets to invade, inflicting on the Soviet Union their own Vietnam.

Mika’s freakin’ dad bragged about setting the Afghan trap that now traps us.

Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

[*William Blum, translator.]

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

TRNN’s Paul Jay did an interview with ZB, The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt1 at the end of which Jay mentions ZB’s involvement in setting the Afghan trap, saying he’ll ask ZB about it in part 2. Should be a good interview.

It’s not incompetence, it’s just that the job is now propaganda, not journalism.

Paul Jay’s interview with Dr. Brzezinski, the man who thought it a good idea to set the Afghan trap, that has killed well over a million while making billions of dollars for our MIC, and now traps us, is up at TRNN.

The interview I quoted @76 is central to the piece.

The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt2
Complete with transcript and fact-checking documents! Now that’s what real journalism looks like.

So brilliant! I think this is also applicable to all corporate jobs out there, of which the gov’t and media are subsidiaries. You should spin this explanation off into a book. Think of how all the liberal arts-schooled independent thinkers who are miserable in their jobs or who are unemployed and posting on this website all day would LAP IT UP!

I actually think Pat Buchanan lives in the MSNBC green room. In exchange for rent-free accommodations, he’s available 24/7 to fill air time.

Mike Brzezinski?

I’d have chosen Franklin. Who better?

Do you suppose that the transition to doing early morning TV and the havoc it must wreak on one’s circadian rhythms might cause an apparent loss of IQ?