I might have limited posting for a while…

Due to a medical emergency (the discovery of a potential brain tumor… aint that a kick in the head?) I’m going to be going in for several days of testing, etc., but I’ll try to keep up with you folks. I want you to know how much I appreciate the readers of Under The LobsterScope, and your e-mail to me is always welcome, as well as your likes and comments.

DON’T FORGET TO VOTE THIS MORNING IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY.

I don’t want to wake up in a hospital and find that Mitt the Twit is president.

 Nate Silver

I’m glad that Nate Silver in the NY Times, 538 column, is still got his usually very accurate poll predictions on Obama carrying most of the swing states… and his prediction that our president will be re-elected.

Your e-mail is always appreciated… Bill.

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• NATE SILVER: Obama’s Odds Of Winning Have Now Hit An Overwhelming 86% (businessinsider.com)
• Your New Internet Boyfriend: Nate Silver (thegloss.com)
• Why Conservatives and Pundits Are Petrified of Math Wiz Nate Silver (alternet.org)
• New Evidence that Cellphones Cause Brain Tumors — And How To Minimize Your Risk (forbes.com)
• Brain Cancer Grading (cancercenter.com)
• Understanding a Brain Tumor Prognosis (everydayhealth.com)

Romney screws up his own crowd energy in Ohio. Who would have guessed?

Today on Morning Joe I realized why I like watching this in the morning and why a RINO like Joe Scarborough is fun to watch. Here’s what happened this morning:

They rolled a clip of Romney and Ryan in Ohio. Romney introduces Ryan to the crowd and the crowd starts cheering spontaneously “Ryan, Ryan, Ryan!”

Wow! They crowd is fired up! This is the point, right? Right?

But then Romney has a major conflict. He looks at the crowd and at Ryan and then he admonishes the crowd with his hand held up in the HALT position, “Wait a sec, wait a sec! Romney, Ryan, Romney, Ryan, Romney, Ryan.” (Emphasis Romney)

 Does the crowd comply? No. The crowd falls silent. They are not chanting “Romney Ryan”. Awkward.

Romney seems to think the crowd has complied and says “There we go. That’s great.” Gesturing confusedly back to Ryan, he says, “Thank you.” Ryan fidgets in the background, sticks his hands in his pockets.

Romney is oblivious that he just ruined the one moment of energy they were going to get. Another self inflicted wound.

End clip. Cut to Joe and Mika in the studio. Joe has his hands over his face, and he mutters in agony, “Sweet Jesus.”

Want to see what it really looked like so you can experience the morning entertainment for yourself?

Here:

What fun! 🙂

Related articles

• Watching Romney in Ohio, Joe Scarborough Covers Face and Mutters ‘Sweet Jesus’ (politicususa.com)
• Joe Scarborough On Deadly Romney Crowd Reaction: ‘Sweet Jesus!’ Romney A ‘Horrible Politician’ (mediaite.com)
• Scarborough Cries ‘Oh, Sweet Jesus!’ as Romney Fails to Lead Chant (crooksandliars.com)
• Joe Scarborough’s Reaction To Mitt Romney’s Uninspiring Attempt At Enthusiasm Is Priceless (businessinsider.com)
• Ed Schultz Says Mitt Romney Has ‘An Ego Bigger Than Asia’ (mediaite.com)
• Addressing ‘the stench’ (maddowblog.msnbc.com)
• Mitt Romney fails Ohio audition for cheerleader-in-chief as chant fizzles (guardian.co.uk)

Even Conservatives are criticizing and condemning Romney’s comments on the mid-east tragedy yesterday…

A morning where Joe Scarborough, Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other conservatives are appearing on television and the press stating their disappointment in the anti-Obama words of Romney yesterday. That he politicized an incident where Americans should all evaluate the circumstances and support each other and the President, Romney seems to be trying to show Rush Limbaugh that he is a tough competitor. He has an inappropriate way of showing his ability to lead if he were in office.

Reince Priebus

This is more than a gaffe (although we’ve had a number of these, and it spread through his whole campaign staff… especially Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, someone whose comments throughout the election process has been unapprovable. Here’s a guy who should be canned rather than be allowed access to the Press.

Making a political broadside against the Commander In Chief in this situation does not even come close to understanding foreign policy. The Republicans circling the wagons does very little to support his election possibility.

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• Foreign Policy Moves Front Burner in 2012 Presidential Election With Death of American Ambassador, Libya and Egypt Attacks and Netanyahu Tiff (themoderatevoice.com)
• Romney doubles down on criticism of White House’s response to Egypt, Libya attacks (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Joe Scarborough On Romney: ‘A Real Conservative Would Be Winning Now’ (mediaite.com)
• “Libya Surprise” Could Be Death Knell for Romney Campaign (newyorker.com)
• Has Romney Erred on Obama Criticism? (commentarymagazine.com)
• Mitt Romney Is a Guy Who Doesn’t Know When to Quit (motherjones.com)
• On Libya/Egypt attacks, it’s Ryan vs. Romney (seattlepi.com)
• Peggy Noonan concern trolls Romney: ‘Not doing himself any favors’ with remarks on embassy attacks (twitchy.com)
• Romney criticizes Obama administration for “sympathizing” with attackers. Did it? (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Cataloguing Romney’s Lies On The Libya Tragedy (alan.com)

Scarborough Library Follies

Todd and John setting up the remote studio

John and I broadcast Winners and Losers from Shepherd University‘s Scarborougfh Library this morning, adding an extra hour to our regular show. Todd Cotsgreave, our Station Manager, spent close to two days setting up the equipment, testing it and getting rerady for the broadcast, for which we express great thanks.

I was really struck by the signs and posters they had outside of the Library building and all over the inside that showed John and me broadcasting (pictures swiped from this blog going back quite a ways).

We interviewed members of the Library staff, program directors, student volunteers and Lisa Welch from the Film Society (movie tonight, btw – George Clooney ‘s Good Night and Good Luck). It was all set up by the Library Dean and we even had a mini breakfast and coffee for all attendees.

It all worked out pretty well and we’ll probably do it again in 6 months or so.

At this point, I think Obama has kissed Democrats goodbye…

As of this morning it seems that Obama is ready to deal with the Right… extend the Bush tax cuts for a couple of years in exchange for one year’s extension of Unemployment funding. The tax cut deal is tentative. It hasn’t gone through Congress yet (although McConnell is probably dribbling with laughter in his office), but it probably will.

When even Conservatives like Joe Scarborough sees and comments on the fact that Obama is moving directly to the Right…
which will not increase job creation much, but will add at least a trillion new bucks to the deficit…we know it’s a lot of money.  And who is going to lend it to us? The Chinese? Are we going to listen to Obama’s financial team that extending tax cuts are going to get us out of recession?

And now we won’t be able to blame this crap on Bush anymore. Obama owns it and is most likely making himself a one-term President. And a lot of very unhappy Democrats like me will probably help him to become a one-termer. As Joe Scarborough just said: “At least they can’t call him a Socialist any more.”

I think it is up to Nancy Pelosi (certainly not Harry Reid) to try to hold this arrangement off… and, as I have said before, it would be better to have this whole arrangement with the Right flushed down the toilet and get NO tax cut extensions for ANYONE, than to do anything like what is coming out of the White House. (Steny Hoyer, however, will go along with it… miserable power seeker… and will undermine Pelosi.)

So now we have to pay for increased troops in Afghanistan where we are getting nowhere even faster than before, we have to suffer increasing rather than decreasing unemployment making our tax revenues even lower, and we can look forward to a GOP-controlled future… amazing with a Democratic White House and Senate… which will take us further from the America that was built by generations of progressive leaders from Roosevelt (FDR) through Johnson.

If the Tea Party takeover has taught us anything, it is that we need a new grass-roots progressive movement. And we have to push from the ground up. It’s going to take 30 years.

At least.

Quote of the Week – from Joe Scarborough of all people!

“This is one Republican who would prefer that the former half-term governor promote her reality shows and hawk her books without demeaning the reputations of Presidents Reagan and Bush. These great men dedicated their lives to public service and are too good to be fodder for her gaudy circus sideshow. If Republicans want to embrace Palin as a cultural icon whose anti-intellectualism fulfills a base political need, then have at it. I suppose it’s cheaper than therapy. But if the party of Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio wants to return to the White House anytime soon, it’s time that Republican leaders started standing up and speaking the truth to Palin,”

– Joe Scarborough.

Looks like the Repiglicans face a great divide.

Related Articles

• Joe Scarborough: GOP Needs To “Man Up” To Sarah Palin And Her “Gaudy Circus Sideshow” (businessinsider.com)
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• Joe Scarborough On Palin: Her Biography Makes Obama’s Look Like Winston Churchill’s (alan.com)
• Scathing Scarborough Skewers Sister Sarah…. (tagg-lines.com)
• “Joe Scarborough tells GOP to man up and confront Sarah Palin” and related posts (coalitionoftheswilling.net)

Juan Cole, too! Most of the best bloggers on the web have made support statements for Olbermann…

…and many, me included, are just not going to turn MSNBC back on unless Olbermann is restored.

Here’s part of Juan Cole‘s LONG piece… get all of it HERE:

That Olbermann is being treated unfairly is obvious. Joe Scarborough has also donated to a political campaign while at MSNBC. And Sean Hannity at Fox has given far more money to candidates than Olbermann ever did. In fact, Hannity donated to Michele Bachmann, which suggests he is better suited to playing a bit part in a remake of the Night of the Living Dead than to anchoring a major ‘news’ show.

Hell, most of the main Republican candidates for president are working for Fox Cable News! So it goes beyond giving some campaign a couple thousand dollars, nowadays!

Fox argues that Hannity is not a news anchor but the equivalent of an op-ed columnist, a purveyor of opinions, and so may also be a political actor.

But MSNBC has already marked Olbermann also as an opinion person, not a hard news anchor, when it took him off election coverage in 2008. So MSNBC has put Olbermann in the same category as Fox has put Hannity. But one is on the air and the other is not.

MSNBC has a long history of throwing liberals under the bus, despite its recent strategy of trying to use them to counter-program against Fox.

In the build-up to the Iraq War, MSNBC had Phil Donahue, whose evening magazine show was the highest-rated thing on the network. As the momentum for war built, the top corporate management became very nervous about having a show starring an anti-war liberal, so they fired Donahue Rick Ellis wrote at the time that General Electric-owned NBC had commissioned a study of its public image, and that the consultants produced a report in which they wrote, that Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report worried that the war fever would benefit rival, pro-war, pro-Bush networks and implied that Donahue might succeed in branding NBC in a way that caused viewership and therefore advertising revenues to plummet.

MSNBC replaced Donahue with far right wing shock jock Michael Savage, Dick Armey and Republican Joe Scarborough (who went on to donate to a Republican politician while on the air).

Related Articles

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Even Bill Kristol opposes MSNBC’s Olbermann Action…

This from William Kristol… and who is more Conservative?:

MSNBC’s suspension of Keith Olbermann is ludicrous.

First, he donated money to candidates he liked. He didn’t take money, or favors, in a way that influenced his reporting.

Second, he’s not a reporter. It’s an opinion show. If Olbermann wants to put his money where his mouth is, more power to him.

Third, GE, the corporate parent of MSNBC, gives money to political organizations. GE executives and, I’m sure, NBC executives give money. Why can’t Olbermann?

Perhaps Olbermann violated NBC News “policy and standards.” But NBC doesn’t have real news standards for MSNBC—otherwise the channel wouldn’t exist. It’s a little strange to get all high and mighty now.

But there’s now a Republican House, and perhaps GE is trying to curry favor by dumping Olbermann?

Republicans of the world, show you believe in the free expression of opinion! Tell the crony corporatists at NBC—keep Keith!

Related Articles

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• TV Newser: “Insiders” say Olbermann won’t be back (hotair.com)
• You: Olbermann suspension ignites debate (latimes.com)
• MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann indefinitely over political contributions (capitolhillblue.com)

Quote of the Day (Thanks to Deus Ex Malcontent)

“Screw ’em.”

— Joe Scarborough on the GOP if it doesn’t like the fact that he’s defending the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero

Joe Scarborough Identifies Fox News as the “Only Organizing Institution for the Republican Party”

Amazing! I heard this this morning and didn’t really believe that Joe said it.

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com On “Morning Joe” Monday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called Fox News chairman Roger Ailes “the most powerful voice in the Republican Party,” and the channel itself “the only organizing institution for the GOP.” Scarborough said this at the tail end of a discussion of former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Guest Mark Halperin noted that Huckabee’s Fox News show has won him many new converts who might be inclined to support him in a potential 2012 run. Scarborough called Fox News “the wild card” for Huckabee: “That is the wild card. If you’d wanna win, seriously, Roger Ailes, everybody goes who runs the Republican–Roger Ailes is the most powerful voice in the Republican Party. He has set up something that — it is the only organizing institution for the GOP because everybody’s let Republicans down in Washington DC. It’s Roger.”

Obama is making his fourth trip to the Gulf. Will it matter?

I guess we’ll know tomorrow with his “speech to the nation,” as it is being called by the TV Pundits. It’s been 56 days now since the explosion that started the oil eruption under water and just about everything that has been tried has been functionally useless (there’s a cap of sorts taking our a small percentage of the flow, but not enough to make a difference, and two relief wells are being drilled to cut off the leak itself, but we’re about two months away from it happening).

BP is spending millions on advertising where they say that they are taking “full responsibility” for the leak and the cleanup, and that no American taxpayers will have to pay  for this. Of course, such a statement is utter bullshit, since all the news shows talk about lately is business owners and fishermen on the Gulf who have appealed to BP for recompense do to their losses in the tragedy and have not been able to get the oil company to pay for anything.

BP put this out on it’s website:

BP’s onshore response efforts have rapidly expanded, with equipment and people staged and ready in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. BP has positioned rapid response teams in Alabama and Louisiana to enable quick response and cleaning of areas where oil may come ashore. These 12-person teams will assess initial impacts, and then call in a larger contingent of trained responders and volunteers to clean the affected area.

If that sounds good you should tie it to the word yesterday afternoon from Alabama that their beaches were now covered with tarballs and oil mass and their summer tourist season has been destroyed (along with the wildlife.) So much for “rapid response.” One of the things Obama is supposed to be doing today is speaking with BP officials. Let’s see if that gets him anywhere.

Joe Scarborough made what I thought was the best suggestion on his show this morning…and I rarely agree with Joe Scarborough… when he said that Obama should use the “speech to the nation” to bring our National Dream into a non-oil-dependent energy target. He compared it to JFK’s famous speech pledging to put a man on the moon in a decade.

This from Scarborough:

“I would make the John Kennedy speech that by the end of the decade, we will go to the moon. This president can say, thank god it’s the beginning of the decade, by the end of a decade, America will break its dependence on foreign oil. By the end of the decade, we will control our own destiny. By the end of the decade, we will be positioned to dominate the world in energy for the next century. We will do it because we must do it…”

That’s a terrific idea.

I’ll be astonished if it happens.

A Quote for The Day … on Rand Paul

… and his canceling out on Meet The Press:

“My feeling is that if a politician can’t handle an interview, they can’t handle the Senate.”

– Joe Scarborough

Gee, and from a conservative Republican!

Joe Scarborough is Shocked and Awed by Single-Payer Logic

Here’s part of a great article that Truthout picked up from The Nation.
The original is HERE.

clipped from www.truthout.org Something rather remarkable happened on Tuesday’s Morning Joe. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York pointed out that the health insurance industry has no clothes, and Joe Scarborough, after first trying to spin it some gossamer threads, broke down and said, By God, you’re right, this emperor is a naked money-making machine! Well, he didn’t use those exact words, but Joe did seem to finally get that America has granted insurance companies the right to create bottlenecks in the financing of health care in order to extract profits out of the suffering of ordinary people-without providing any actual health care whatsoever. “Why are we paying profits for insurance companies?” Weiner asked Scarborough. “Why are we paying overhead for insurance companies? Why,” he asked, bringing it all home, “are we paying for their TV commercials?” “What is an insurance company? They don’t do a single check-up. They don’t do a single exam, they don’t perform an operation. Medicare has a 4 percent overhead rate. The real question is why do we have a private plan?” “It sounds like you’re saying you think there is no need for us to have private insurance in health care,” Joe asked at one point. Weiner replied: “I’ve asked you three times. What is their value? What are they bringing to the deal?”