MIKA AND JOE DEFEND REMARKS

MIKA BRZEZINSKI

Holy "waka flocka flame" Batman:

“Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough defended remarks they made Wednesday morning that linked a racist Sigma Alpha Epsilon chant caught on video to rap lyrics on this morning’s broadcast. Brzezinski explained that the discussion “got real” and said there was “no moral equivalency” but there was a “news connection.”

They brought on MSNBC host Al Sharpton and Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial to discuss the connection they made yesterday, in which they discussed rapper Waka Flocka’s decision not to return to the University of Oklahoma campus to perform for SAE over the chant.

“If you look at every single song, I guess you call these, that [Waka Flocka’s] written, it’s a bunch of garbage,” Brzezinski said yesterday. “It’s full of n-words, it’s full of f-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself.”

Guest Bill Kristol agreed, “Popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they've been hearing.”

Scarborough weighed in: “The kids that are buying hip hop or gangster rap, it’s a white audience, and they hear this over and over again. So do they hear this at home? Well, chances are good, no, they heard a lot of this from guys like this who are now acting shocked.”

The remarks got wide media coverage, and a Twitter hashtag #rapalbumsthatcausedslavery popped up to mock the discussion.

Flocka himself responded to the remarks on MSNBC later that day, “This isn't about rap. This is about what happened on that bus. This isn’t about my rap music. I feel like they’re running away from what we’re talking about.”

On Thursday, Scarborough noted that as someone raised in the south, he was simply trying to figure out where the kind of words included in the rant come from.

Brzezinski tried explain the remarks, saying, “We’re all trying our best here to figure out our way through this and yesterday the conversation got real and I think some people conflated it with other things, but there’s no moral equivalency between something like rap lyrics and what happened on that bus. Those kids made that decision, they made that choice and it was disgraceful, disgusting and chilling what they were saying. That separate conversation is only related in these stories because there was someone who was going to perform — who performed on that campus who cancelled, and is not going back to that campus, because he’s disgusted by what he saw happened. And he happens to be someone who has lyrics that are questionable, and that is a separate conversation. There’s no moral equivalency, but there’s a news connection.”

Our first clue that this freight train was going to run off the rails was having Bill Krisol on their show for a segment about race and racism.

NFTOS

Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS

POTUS WITH 79% CHANCE OF BEING A SECOND TERM PRESIDENT

The last few days have just about caused the American Taliban a coronary. Why you ask?

The Albert Einstein of statistical analysis, also the owner of "five thirty eight blog" AKA Nate Silver, has all but called the election for President Obama. The statistician has Obama at a 79% chance of winning, and needless to say, the radical righties are livid. If facts elude this unlettered group, can we really expect them to grasp histograms, analysis of variance, better known as ANOVA? Something tells me no.

The battle has gotten so heated that Silver even tweeted to MSNBC tea bagger Joe Scarborough, that he'd bet him a thousand dollars that his data would prove correct on election day.

The wingnuts of the right keep saying that Silver is a incompetent ideologue, and why not, all this from a group who have a total collected IQ of less than 2.

Let's be realistic readers, Silver is a political polling genius. Fortunately, our most prominent numbers cruncher has been giving us the straight story, instead of capitalizing on this anxiety. Silver's accuracy last November 2008 - presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—which won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 1%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that same year.

Silver’s backstory reads like a quirky screenplay. While working as a transfer pricing consultant who helped companies minimize tax exposure from overseas investments, he spent his evenings and weekends perfecting an ingenious computer system for evaluating baseball players’ stats, which outperformed the analyses of many experts. A company running an Internet site for Rotisserie League fans bought his system. Silver used the money to stake himself as a full-time online poker player, quickly earning $400,000. Shortly thereafter, congressional grandstanding before the 2006 midterm elections stifled the online poker business with regulations, leading the best professional players, deprived of the overconfident amateurs they had been feasting on, to go after players like Silver. He lost $130,000. So he turned to politics, attempting to predict the partisan composition of the next Congress to help him decide whether to cut his losses and move on from poker. Thus was born the sideline that became fivethirtyeight.com.

This Prediction is bad news for the American Taliban, and we all know how much teapublicans like to delude themselves. You know, the flat earth mentality, the earth was created in 6 days, 6000 years ago, man has had no impact on the climate, and as everyone knows, tobacco is perfectly harmless.

I say step up Joe. You have considerably more wealth than Silver. How confident are you? Take the bet, put you money where your mouth is!

NFTOS

Editor-In-Chief

Roger West