CNBC's Morning Joe: Scarborough, Brezinski, and Burnett

Yoga, Caffeine, and the Morning News

Are you like me? Spending half an hour each morning multi-tasking before the computer screen with the television set on while doing an uninspired yoga routine? Forgot to mention the cup of coffee. The yoga routine gets an extra boost from the caffeine.

Yes, I'm aware of the contradictions, the collision between the daily cacophony of the world, the caffeine, and my inner peace. However, I must absorb the day's daily of dose of useful and useless knowledge so that I can go out into the world with the illusion that I am insulated and protected somehow because I have "the news".

I need my "Morning Joe." MSNBC's "Morning Joe" features Joe Scarborough, Mikah Brezinski, and Willie Geist.

Willie Geist is the latest and welcome addition to the show. Pulled down from the production staff (producer for Carlson Tucker, later in the day), Geist has an intelligent and deadpan crossover manner which plays simultaneously to trend and tradition.

Scarborough is a Republican of a sort. I think he represents a disenchanted element of the "Reagan Revolution". To me, his politics seem to be all over the chart, but perhaps I am too simple-minded for the complexities of modern politics. If I had to identify the "Morning Joe" in terms of genus, species, and phylum, I would identify it as center-liberal-left.

Or perhaps left-liberal-center. Well, never mind! I'm not the only one these days who has difficulty defining the locus of politics in a time of issue disintegration and reformulation.

Mika Brezinski is another of the anchor persons on the Morning Joe. She's the daughter of Zbigniew Brezinski, former national security advisor under the Carter presidency. Sometimes I imagine that Mika was put on earth to make the other two morning news guys uncomfortable.

Mika found the lost chord of American television back in July of this year when she refused to do a story on Paris Hilton's release from jail. Not only did Ms. Brzezinski refuse, but she grabbed a cheap plastic cigarette lighter from co-host Willie Geist's pocket and proceeded to ignite the baloney script on live TV.