While I give it a pass because sometimes it has interesting people and guests on, the host of that show, John Dankosky, can be completely clueless. He’s normally too eager to stick to he said/she said style debates, and sticks stubbornly to talking points he preps with even if guests or callers answer his “Well, what about” style questions. The show becomes repetitious because of it and, ultimately, boring.

Today, however, he went into silly territory. He complained about Obama’s speech being to general and lacking in specifics. Now, this may or may not be true, depending on how specific you want him to be, so that isn’t the silly part. The silly part was that he chose, as his example of something Obama said for the first time without specifics the part of Obama’s speech where he claimed he would lower taxes for 95% of Americans.

At that point I turned off the radio. This tax plan has been on the table for months. More importantly, it came up during that debacle of a debate with Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulus where Gibson said (and I’m paraphrasing) that “a lot of people make more than $250,000.” That’s the social security tax where he’s going to tax social security benefits again (right now, once you cross about $98K, you stop paying Social Security taxes), and he’s talked about raising other taxes that affect the top 1%. In aggregate, the changes affect roughly 5% of the population (the top two income tax brackets correlate pretty well to 5% of the population).

Even pieces critical of Obama’s tax plan have figured out how it works, and that Tax Policy Center report has been in the mainstream news for weeks (they just updated it, so don’t let the new date fool you).

I don’t know how someone in Dankosky’s line of work could miss that. I also wonder whether he thinks a convention speech, which is basically a pep rally, is the place to start going into the percentage points and numbers in detail. Regardless this plan isn’t new and it isn’t ambiguous. I couldn’t believe that he focused on that as the issue he wasn’t hearing enough about.