2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

just imagine if he did drink.

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/m6uF6uwZCMK699p8cmBYqw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9aW5zZXQ7aD02MTI7cT04NTt3PTQwNA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/18def5e09ff34c03060f6a706700b51f.jpg

does his flag pin have a flag pin?

Gets some points back for not wearing cuff links.

i can't kiss a baby i'm running for president for pete's sake

I've never read any Matt Taibbi before - has he always been channelling Hunter S Thompson quite so blatantly? Not that I'm complaining, it's high quality stuff.

yes always

He doesn't loathe Obama as much as HST loathed Humphrey; RS readers would rebel.

matt taibbi is a horrible writer who often knows v little of what hes writing abt but i appreciate him for pointing out the obvs big picture stuff that many are too 'polite' to, like that the finainal industry is a parasite

jho do you think chris hitchens was a good writer y/n?

i always appreciate your absolutist literary verdicts

ha hitchens is p you know complicated, I had a post in his rip thread where iI m/l made my case, but in short he's imho an obvs a v accomplished stylist, not a great thinker, and is limited in his scope of expression by being an intolerable pompous ass

yeah i p much agreed with that post but also i don't get the accomplished stylist thing but i am probably blinded by dislike.

ha just read something where hes bodying someone u h8

i don't know if we hate anyone in common!

oh there was one not that long ago tryin to remember, it was v satisfying

the mamet book?

ha ok here u go http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html

lolxp

haha oh shit am i about to become a hitchens-ite? i'm going in.

p easy target to tbh

matt taibbi is a horrible writer who often knows v little of what hes writing abt but i appreciate him for pointing out the obvs big picture stuff that many are too 'polite' to, like that the finainal industry is a parasite

idk, i thought Griftopia was pretty great. it could be that he screwed up a lot of what he was writing about and I'm just not educated enough to notice it but some of the chapters were pretty dense with information alongside his characteristic stone-cold bludgeonings

just realized who you were, lag∞n!

i can never keep track. anyway i was about to post you on the ilx milk carton thread!

ha hi! I am luna its great to be back yall

anyway im no taibbi scholar I just find every time im reading him he makes a lot of assertions that make me go 'o rly based on what dude' - also i can just not stand the histrionic ott style, dont like thompson either tho so yrmv

some of his stuff is better and some is lazier

okay that mamet piece was satisfying and, i suppose, well-written. i feel sort of deflated now.

lols at one of his points of agreement with mamet being the hypocrisy of feminists during the clinton-lewinsky scandal and also at christopher hitchens calling someone who is not christopher hitchens "pointlessly aggressive," but okay.

ha well yes he cannot stop being christopher hitchens

tho tbf I guess he has now

basically agree w/ ice tho have only read the rs articles

tabbai is a polemicist in the age of technocrats, if only there were a way to combine the two

http://prospect.org/article/errors-matt-taibbi
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2009/12/12/195422/blame-obama-first

I mean I support the existence of taibbi for mass fb-friendly goldman sachs vilifying, I think 'readability' matters, but he doesn't seem to be the guy to go to for higher-level analysis

tabbai is a polemicist in the age of technocrats, if only there were a way to combine the two

krugman

ha yes he did come to mind

as yglesias points out some of taibbis views are m/l conventional ignorance, which is really too bad, cause I would love for him to rail against our disfunctional governmental structures AND bash goldman

yeahh

actually I remember reading some of taibbi's book at OWS library and being annoyed at his not-really-getting-quantitative easing

ha well yes he cannot stop being christopher hitchens

― lag∞n, Monday, February 6, 2012 1:05 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tho tbf I guess he has now

― lag∞n, Monday, February 6, 2012 1:05 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ohhhh shit

(what is "m/l")

more or less

more or less m/l

m/l

aaahh thx

matt taibbi is a horrible writer who often knows v little of what hes writing abt

ok waht

You can't separate style and thought but if I'm generous and ignore his at times hysterical prose I find I've learned quite a bit about credit default swaps and securitization, not to mention his work covering Congress in the mid 2000s and Russia before then.

lots of people write about credit default swaps and securitization and as far as pop-friendly-explanations of that stuff michael lewis is prob a better dude to go to

you gotta pay for michael lewis's stuff tho

yeah I dont think taibbi is off tm all the time but ive seen enough fudging in his work to basically not trust him at this point

Examples of mistakes? No snark, just curious.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/quantitative-easing-the-hidden-government-subsidy-for-banks-20101115

There are so many things about QE that are crazy, but there’s one thing that I’d like to point out in particular. Yes, this is a huge money-printing program with potentially disastrous inflationary consequences. And yes, the influx of all this money could easily distort markets and prices far beyond the extreme distortions we’ve already been dealing with (commodities prices shot through the roof after this latest QE round was announced).

this link I posted upthread is just errors in one piece http://prospect.org/article/errors-matt-taibbi as for the stuff ive caught personally lol I dont remember

fwiw i have been talking shit on matt taibbi for like five years now

there are left- and right-wing lines of criticism about finance and wall st, they aren't really compatible at a certain pt, my cursory reading is that taibbi can kind of flatter both

i do give him props for one lil moment i caught tho: being interviewed on the "alyona show" she kept bringing up some kind of total upheaval 3rd party insurgency type of response to how badly people hate wall st, and he was like "yeah don't get your hopes up about that"

One of the great mysteries of our time: "Anybody have a theory about why women don’t like Gingrich?"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/02/newt_gingrich_s_woman_problem_.html