Hopeful sign from the Obama Administration on financial crime

Even the chronically skeptical Matt Taibbi is hopeful about recent developments in the Obama Administration's approach to financial crime. Matt Taibbi ponders whether Obama's embrace of populist rhetoric is already impacting Wall Street Countdown with Keith Olbermann YouTube date 01/28/2012:



Tags: matt taibbi, obama administration

Racial references to President Obama, from "both sides"

From Doug Lamborn Apologizes To Obama For 'Tar Baby' Comments Huffington Post 08/02/2011:

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Co.) has apologized for the controversial "tar baby" comment he made on a local radio show last week while discussing President Barack Obama and the debt ceiling debate.

On the 630 KHOW Capils and Silverman radio show, Lamborn said:

"Even if some people say, 'Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,' they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It's like touching a tar baby and you get it, you're stuck, and you're a part of the problem now and you can’t get away."

From Matt Taibbi, Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal Rolling Stone 07/11/2011:

Obama's new plan, for instance, might involve slashing Medicare and Social Security under "pressure" from the Republicans.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch. [my emphasis in bold]

Both the Tar Baby and briar patch referernces are both from the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, whose purpose was to revise the image of antebellum Southern race relations in the eyes of his readers, to present them as benign in order to enforce the white supremacist sentiments of postwar Southern white conservatives.

From Matt Taibbi, Debt Ceiling Deal: The Democrats Take a Dive Rolling Stone 07/11/2011:

Back in 2008, the congress and George Bush rewarded Hank Paulson and Wall Street for pulling the Cleavon-Little-"the-next-man-makes-a-move-the-n---er-gets-it" routine by tossing trillions of bailout dollars at the same people who had wrecked the economy.

This is the context of explaining that Obama was happy for the Republican Tea Party to pull the same thing this time.

Matt Taibbi is a good political analyst, although his free use of insults and vulgarity as always bugged me a bit; he seems to be trying to achieve the cyncial and irreverent tone of Hunter Thompson's journalistic style. But these racial references make me wonder if he's preparting to repositioning himself from a left-leaning cynic to one more pleasing to Republican Tea Party sensibilities. At the least, I wish he would clean up his act in regard to the dubious racial references.

Tags: doug lamborn, joel chandler harris, matt taibbi, white racism

Our broken political press and the clerical chimpanzee

Is Matt Taibbi in Merchants of Trivia Rolling Stone 01/10/08 intending to criticize our broken press corps? Or is he unintentionally letting something slip? Either way, it says a lot about how broken our political press is:

Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending.

Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren't watching politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years. That's the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don't get to sit at that table.

Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge. We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do, they almost never answer.

If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above monkey level is that we get to guess who wins. (my emphasis)

His comment that "most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job" is really telling. It doesn't have to be that way. But our "press corps" today doesn't have the imagination or the energy to do much more than clerical work in their reporting.

But that is also a very incomplete statement of the problem. Because their clerical note-taking is often very selective. They like to take down quotes about mistakes and attacks. But doing even clerical work on what the candidates say about actual issues seems too much effort to most of them. Let alone actually researching the claims they use to support their positions.

Is it true that reporters "rarely get to ask the candidates real questions"? I don't know exactly what he means in terms of access to the candidates. But what's pretty clear is that what they do ask the candidates, especially on TV coverage, doesn't sound much like "real questions" a lot of the time. Taibbi seems to imply this is somehow the candidates' fault. Isn't it supposed to be, like, the job of the journalists to ask "real questions"?

But when he writes, "If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job", it's hard to argue with that. I don't mean whether or not Biden's speeches are boring. But even Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby wouldn't argue that "you could train a chimpanzee" to do the job much of our Establishment press is doing these days.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, matt taibbi

Future Ron Paul voter?

Did you know there is a Web site called GodTube.com? Neither did I, until I saw a link to the following video in Sarah Posner's "FundamentList" column of 11/14/07 at The American Prospect Online. Their home page as of this writing was featuring a video of a Catholic priest suggesting that Britney Spears is not "a friend of God." (I'm telling you, the fundis hate her!) The video below is of a fundi guy condemning Pat Robertson for endorsing Benito Giuliani for the Republican Presidential nomination.

I'm not posting this because I think it's unintentionally humorous, or because the guy has any particular insight. But I think it is a useful glimpse at a set of attitudes that is very common among grassroots Christian Rightists. He evidently hasn't picked up on the idea which most people learned in, oh, the 1970s, that "girl" is usually not the appropriate description for an adult female.



This guy did have a bit of a problem around the fact that Robertson is a successful evangelist who presumably saved many souls from Hail. But he reconciled it by saying, "Let's face it. According to the Bible, God spoke through a jackass". Lordy, it almost sounds like he thinks Robertson has become a, a ... liberal!!!

This guy admits to the semi-scandalous act of having once voted for a Democrat himself. He's pushing Mike Huckabee here to beat "the odious Hillary Clinton". Speaking of Brother Huckabee, Matt Taibbi just profiled him in Mike Huckabee, Our Favorite Right-Wing Nut Job 11/14/07 Rolling Stone.

Tags: authoritarianism, christian right, matt taibbi, mike huckabee, pat robertson

Will the Establishment press start noticing war profiteering?

Before I gripe about Mark Shields Friday appearance on the PBS Newshour in another post, I want to point out that the same hour included the first of three segments on (gasp! choke!) war profiteering. They don't use that phrase. Too old-fashioned, I guess. But it's a good piece: Defense Department Examines Body Armor 09/21/2007.

The segment even included an interview with someone from the Center for Defense Information, a watchdog group that monitors defense spending with a critical eye for boondoggles. Of which there are plenty.

Rolling Stone magazine ran an article on Iraq War corruption called The Great Iraq Rip-off 08/23/07. The current (10/04/07) print issue has a piece called "The Truth About Missile Defense" by Jack Hitt, which is apparently not online as of this writing.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone appears in a recent interview on Antiwar.com talking about the massive corruption in the Pentagon's Iraq contracting, one subject that has been attracting a notable bit of press attention, if only because it was so big and blatant that it was impossible to totally ignore. (Caution: Taibbi has dissed Britney Spears pretty harshly so his judgment on some subjects is questionable.)

Let's hope this trend continues. Military spending needs to be debated in the context of redefining the overall mission of the US military. But these investigations of waste, questionable and outright corruption are a necessary part of that.

Tags: jack hitt, matt taibbi, missile defense, star wars, war profiteering

A hip-cynical view of the ISG Iraq Report

Matt Taibbi wrote writes on politics for Rolling Stone does some good political reporting. But in this article from last December on the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG) report, he spends most of the space finding variations of phrase to say the same thing over and over again, and in the hip-cynical tone that Rolling Stone strives to affect: That Iraq Report? More of the Same Rolling Stone Online 12/06/06.

And the message is basically that the ISG report on the Iraq War was aimed at kicking the can down the road a couple of years. Here's one of the meatier variations on the theme:

With the military inundating the newspapers with leaks that basically pass the buck for the Iraq disaster to the diplomats and the politicians, the Bush administration still refusing to publicly face reality, and the politicians outside the administration hiding behind a Baker-Hamilton report that shelves any meaningful decisions until some undetermined date far into the future (while being careful to avoid "not-so-open" confrontations with the president), the Iraq catastrophe can now be safely perpetuated ad nauseum - and the only people who will suffer for it will be people who don't matter in Washington, i.e. the soldiers and the Iraqi people.

We may soon have to face this fact: With the midterm elections over, and George Bush already a lame duck, the Iraq war is no longer an urgent problem to anyone on the Hill who matters. The Democrats are in no hurry to end things because it will benefit them if Iraq is still a mess in '08; just as they did this fall, they'll bitch about the war without explicitly promising to end it at any particular time. George Bush has already run his last campaign and he's not about to voluntarily fuck up his legacy with a premature surrender or a humiliating concession to Syria or Iran. At least publicly, John McCain is going to head into '08 siding with those in the military who believe the problem is a lack of troops.

For the Iraq disaster to end, someone among these actors is going to have to make a difficult decision - admit defeat, invite a bloody civil war, lose face before a pair of rogue terror-supporting states - and it's obvious that none of them is ever going to do that, not until there's absolutely no choice.

It seems like I'm saying this a lot these days. But if the road into Iraq was paved with bad Second World War analogies, the road out will be paved part of the way with bad Vietnam War analogies.

Jim Baker would be proud of the "bipartisansship" Taibbi displays in this article. Although he's dumping on the report, we see in that quote that he's willing to make the Democrats equally irresponsible on the war as the Bush administration. And that particular kind of cynicism benefits the Republicans. Because people who like to display this kind of "been there, done that" cynicism are usually people who vote Republican. And, oddly enough, these worldly cynic wannabes can be amazingly credulous when it comes to a fantastic justification for a tax cut for the wealthy or a Wilsonianism-on-steroids pitch about bringing democracy to the Middle East via bombs, bullets and torture.

Ironically, Taibbi is more caught up in a fundamentally erroneous framework that at least some Democrats realize is a false assumption: the idea that how long the Iraq War continues is essentially exclusively an American decision.

And there's where the bad Vietnam War analogy comes in. The punditocracy and many politicians are processing the current situation as the beginning of "Vietnamization" in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson decided to begin peace talks and made his famous bombing halt.

Now, I actually enjoy thinking through historical comparisons. And it would be good, clean fun to go through the many ways that this is a bad analogy. But it's so off-base I'll settle here for saying that the enemy has a say in what happens. Our allied government in Iraq is weak, weak in the extreme actually. It's military and policie forces are little more than Shi'a partisan militias, Kurdish partisan militias (peshmerga) in the Kurdish provinces.

If the government collapses and/or the Shi'a militias turn against the Americans, the Saigon 1975 could well be the only half-plausible Vietnam War analogy left.

Assuming that the administration's early signals are implemented, there will be no regional diplomacic drive involving Iran and Syria and a real attempt to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the short run, there will be a tilt to the Shi'a parties SCIRI and Da'wa and an attempt to isolate and defeat Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia. The idea of negotiating with the Sunni rebels will be off the table. The civil war and ethnic cleansing will continue and intesify.

If that's the direction things go, the question will not be whether Democrats or Republicans in America have more influence over policy, or whether the American civilian government is following the advice of the American military. It will be, how secure are the American supply lines and escape routes to and from Kuwait? Whether the end can be postponed for two more years would be an open question. But the enemy (enemies, really) will have a big say in the answer.

Tags: iraq study group, iraq war, matt taibbi

Matt Taibbi on the problems with the press (part of it, anyway)

All my posts today are dedicated to the memory of Molly Ivins.

Following up on my recent post, ironically Matt Taibbi has just done a column slamming the bad habits of the press: Punish the Right-Wing Liars Alternet.org 01/31/07. But he does what most journalists done when they address this, as the Daily Howler endlessly points out. He focuses on the fantasists and polemicists at FOX News and Oxycontin radio. And, of course, on those naughty bloggers who have shaken up the neat and orderly kingdom of the David Broders and Tim Russerts.

Do I need to say there was not a hint of self-reflection about his vapid, silly piece on Hillary Clinton that I previously discussed?

Of course, Republican media is bad on a lot of different levels. But the primary media problem for Democrats looking to have their issues put before the voting public, and for the general public wanting to get accurate information on issues that affect our lives like Social Security or health care or war with Iraq or Iran, is not the rightwing media. Our problem is the incredible dysfunction of the Establishment press, the respectable, sober, sensible, responsible, mainstream press, both print and broadcast. And the problem is only partly political and class bias. It's also laziness in fact-checking, a phony this-side-says/the-other-side says concept of "balance", an unwillingness to point out straight-up falsehoods from powerful officials, kissing up to sources for that precious Access by softballing their reporting on them, an obsession with scandal and trivia, an addiction to shared conventional "scripts" about individuals and issues.

Yeah, it took a group of sleazy unreconstructed Arkansas segregationists to cook up the initial batch of horse poop that became collectively known as "Whitewater". But it took the Jeff Gerth of the New York Times to be conned by a group of guys so dubious that most people wouldn't trust them to give directions to the store around the corner to legitimate it and make it into a long-term political war. Bob Woodward acting as court historian to the Bush administration added a great deal of credibility to the administration's pretensions to Churchillian greatness. Judith Miller's disgraceful pimping of Ahmad Chalabi's war propaganda on the front page of the Times added completely undeserved credibility to the phony charges about Iraqi WMDs.

And look at what we're seeing in the Scooter Libby trial and the whole Plame case. Judith Miller, Bob Novak, Bob Woodward and other reporters making shameless pandering to their sources (to put it gently!) a higher priority than their any obligation to the public to report the news.

Matt Taibbi trashes Hillary Clinton in the silliest way. And then points to the bad boys and girls at FOX News and Republican hate radio as the people who are screwing up journalism.

Tags: conservative movement, matt taibbi, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press