Morning gang. How is everyone this morning? Am trying to wake up here…the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.

Christy,

I’m about to get my second. After watching Ridge’s tap dance last night, he is the one who should be on Dancing with the Stars, not Tom Delay.

I thought it might be political…. but no one would ever expect the leader of the country to con the people into a phony war … but it was never political.

Oops,

I accidentally deleted the first part:

After his tap dance last night, Ridge should be on Dancing with the Stars, not Tom DeLay.

It got lost again – never mind!

It’s there — you have to refresh your screen. For some reason, there is a bug in my code that has issues with the use if italics in a comment. But if you refresh your whole screen, you’ll see that it is there.

Morning all. That interview is such a treat. I don’t think Ridge even knew what hit him in the last segment. The point that the Republicans have no credibility until they admit their mistakes is way beyond them. I noticed that Ridge looks awful. I would guess he is under full assault by the Bush group. Rachel is so much better than any of the others except perhaps Bill Moyers.

I love that Rachel over-prepares for all her interviews. She’s always been like that, even with the short radio appearances I’ve done on her show. It’s very impressive.

I used to do the same thing in the courtroom — I don’t like surprises, so I’d overprepare for all the potential tangents that I could identify. Comes in very handy when you need to do Q&A, I can tell you.

It is such a treat to have a well informed host. I do have to add Thom Hartmann to the well informed list. Some mean well – like Ed Schultz – but are just blow hards. Those of us who spend our time trying to be well educated on the issues are way ahead of them. I’m sure we all spend out time yelling at the TV and radio. I have spent many emails complaining about lack of preparation and the passing on of incorret information.

I think a big part of it is her obvious intelligence. She sees the logical path to take with facts that follow one another. There are really not a lot of people with that ability. When you consider the bell curve with most people within (memory from long ago)I think 2 standard deviations from the mean, there are just a small percent with that sort of ability.

The ones that drive me crazy are the failure to ask the obvious follow-up questions when the guest is either flat-out lying or utterly misinformed. I hate that — it’s as though whatever was scripted by a staffer beforehand is easier than actually listening to the guest.

Members of Congress do that, too, in hearings and it bugs the crap outta me. Ask the follow-up — it’s often the more important question anyway.

Listening to the guest and understanding the import of the comment and going to the logical next step requires skills often not possesed. Obvious to you and to me but not to most. That requires more than superficial background.

If the impact of the terror alerts on politics and ratings was not a factor why were they analyzing the impact after the fact?

True, and it also requires an ability to think and analyze on the fly which is not the strong suit of a lot of folks. But still — if you are going to put yourself out there in a position where you are responsible for getting answers on these sorts of questions either as a journalist or as a politician, you ought to at least take that responsibility seriously enough to have a decent background on the issues in hand before opening your yap.

Of course, that presupposes you care about the issue as oposed to getting camera time or print space. Which is a whole other post. SIGH

Doesn’t the fact that analysis was even done on the issue of political impact for terror alerts raise big red flags about perceptions before any analysis is even done? The fact that it was necessary to try and measure the impact says that a correlation was at least assumed somewhere, doesn’t it?

Exactly!

Big egos are usually in evidence for those people so they would not recognize such a lack of talent in themselves. I have been watching some of these politicians in the town halls and wondering how they ever convinced anyone to vote for them. Many of them are clueless.

That 47 second town hall in Texas was very revealing wasn’t it.

Yes, yes and yes. It’s almost like, they are out hunting for rabbits (for food), so when a, let’s say, cow comes down the trail, they don’t even see it. It’s not what they are looking for.
Is that too wild of an analogy?

I think that it is more of a career focus. Some, like Bill Moyers want to uncover the underlying facts of an issue and inform the public. Others, like David Gregory, want to advance their careers and income as well as feed their egos.

Completely get what you are saying. And I always wonder if they are just not paying attention or if there is a deliberate missing of the opportunity — or, worse, not caring if they do. Beyond frustrating.

Definitely about Bill Moyers — he takes the public information and responsibility portion of his job very seriously. Wish all of them did.

That’s what I was going for. Bill Moyers is looking for the food. Gregory is just looking for the magic rabbit.
Sorry. Sometimes my mind is too obscure. My analogy was also for the former administration, ie. who could have imagined, etc.

A lot of the fault lies with the management. What are they looking for in their staff. Who in their right mind would hire Jenna Bush if they were looking for competent reporting?

Going further in analogy – instead of looking for rabbits – they were probably looking for Jackalopes.

At least on TRMS, Rachel the interviewer did homework.

By contrast, did anyone see Cheney interviewed by Chris Wallace? It was an insult to the professional stantards of high school newspaper reporters everywhere.

O/T – HuffPo infers Justice Stevens preparing for retirement.

Oh damn will be down in the hills of Kentucky. out of the loop.

Christy these are my questions.

Mr. Ridge during your interview with Rachel Maddow you stated that the invasion of Iraq was important based “at the time given what they knew”

Sir many experts and former CIA officials, analyst and former Presidents questioned the validity of the pre-war intelligence. Including Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, President Carter, I even heard Robert McNamara question the validity of this intelligence. Also the head of the IAEA at the time Mr. El Baradei came out in early March of 2003 and told the world that the Niger Documents were false documents and bad forgeries at that.

Many questioned the intelligence at that time. Why do you insist on repeating that there were no questions as to the validity of that intelligence?

Also why have we yet to witness anyone held accountable for that false pre-war intelligence? No one has been held accountable for the Niger Documents. Why?

Hey Christy Rep Sestak and Toomey are having a town hall meeting on health care starting right now.

Hope this link works

http://joesestak.com/townhall

I would also like to ask Tom Ridge.

Does he have any concerns about the number of Iraqi people who have been killed, (Lancet reported over a million, Iraqi Body Count reports around 500,000) injured or displaced (5 million) as a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq based on a “pack of lies”?

Conventional wisdom says about 2.5% are more than 2 SD above the mean, but trying to apply it in this case is BS.

Statistics is a useful tool for lots of things, but you have to have a well-defined population to begin with. I don’t think it exists here, and there aren’t any psychometric tests that measure interviewer skill.

It suffices to say that Dr. Maddow is one of the best interviewers in American broadcast media today. Being Dr. Maddow is one of the things that makes her one of the best.

Yeah. When someone asks a question like, “What’s the relationship between terrah [sic] alert levels and polling support for X?” the first question that should be asked is, “Why do you care?”