Matt Taibbi

wld be cool to be all we are launching this exciting new journalism project that will have high quality content and also be sort of prankish but then its 100% pranks

i will crowdfund u

cool ty

glad to see some good come of all this

amen

“We also have an idea we’re calling Apartment 538, a Facebook community of people who look like Nate Silver, and we’re just going to poll them on things,” said Taibbi. “Instead of having a Nate Silver-produced poll we’re just going to poll 87 people who look like Nate Silver.”

Jesus, I wish this had happened.

More Racket / Intercept fallout:

http://jimromenesko.com/2015/02/22/ken-silverstein-resigns-from-pierre-omidyars-first-look-media-blasts-dishonest-leadership/

So now NVC & KS have both left after having pt.2 of their Serial interview held back for a week

lol I was hoping never to think about that Serial thing again

the guy omidyar like why did he even want to do this

Investigative reporter Ken Silverstein has resigned from First Look Media’s The Intercept after 14 months, saying he and others were hired “under what were essentially false pretenses [by being] told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent, important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith.”

independent, important journalism = pt.2 of a Serial interview?

xp spectacular conceit. just a guess tho.

i mean cry me a river about 19th-rate-hunter-thompson-misogynist-half-smart-at-best-brodude poor beleaguered paragon of integrity matt taibbi being forced out of any job, but damn this sounds like a shit place to work

something potentially beneficial about this kerfuffle is that, after "accidentally" sitting out the 2014 midterms, say taibbi and pareene have platforms in time, they might come out guns blazing at bush the younger and/or "not that" scott walker or whoever the GOP ticket is. not to be partisan

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526

This is a good (and maddening) summary of the attempts to try and figure out what happened on the Garner grand jury:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-year-later-the-eric-garner-grand-jury-decision-still-stings-20151203

ON TRUMP:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

Long article, worth reading if you like feeling a creeping horror and bile rising in your throat.

there are some good grafs in there but was it edited? by anyone? it reads at times like someone cut all the grafs out and shook them up in a hat and started laying them down one after the other at random.

I had to skim it. Tracer OTM, it gets close to free association at points. Possibly from listening to too much Trump.

The number of predictable "he's got a real shot at this you guys" pieces between now and September is going to get really mind-numbing

gonzo writing sort of falls down when everyone already gets how nutty everything is.

on how the NYT gutted their 'positive' Sanders profile online

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-times-sandbagged-bernie-sanders-20160315?page=2

interesting

it's about time someone with (successful parents) a voice spelled it out ~

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/trump-isnt-the-campaign-medias-first-mistake-20160519?page=3

i think he gives the media too much credit. it's not like they were tricking americans into voting for these plutocrats. america elected reagan twice and liked it so much they elected his vp too. donald trump is a strange aberration and taibbi's "you should've seen it all along" is v self-congratulatory. now it makes sense to me that ppl should vote in their self-interest, but they didn't do that for so long that thomas frank wrote an entire book on the topic. taibbi understands the self-interest part but he has no explanation for why now.

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

i don't think he's giving the media credit so much as admitting their class bias is so steep few up top can see what's going on down below where the majority of america (without successful parents) scrambles to survive: "The tone of American political coverage for some time hasn't matched the reality of what voters have been going through. Even as America lost its manufacturing base and tens of millions of people were put out of good jobs, the campaign story for years remained the same weirdly celebratory soap opera." it's not the media who sets reagan, bush, bush, romney, and trump up to run; the (increasingly privileged) media is too class-blind to point out the plutocratic BS is his thesis i think

xpost

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

I think the dude grew up, it happens sometimes.

i'm not saying it should be held against him, really. i just have a hard time looking past it personally. it's not like he was sixteen years old in those days he was like, the age i am now.

i also realize mark ames was worse than taibbi

It's almost like he's a lurker

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609

except regular posters here don't want to hear that i'd bet

or know it already

hi matt!

taibbi is mostly right, but i suspect most of us would agree with him. but i don't think that what taibbi predicts is a foregone conclusion.

it seems like morbs is wearing some kind of weird anamorphic lenses when he reads ILX that cause him to make sweeping generalizations about our opinions that aren't remotely true. of his many odious traits, that's the most confounding and frustrating. i don't have any real explanation for it other than he must get off on feeling superior, so it serves his interests to project straw men onto those he's talking (or "talking") with.

and FWIW i do worry that trump's obvious odiousness, and the likely fact that hillary will win this thing in a (relative) rout, means that people will be a celebratory mood and won't hold her feet to the fire before or after the election. she'll interpret her major victory not just as the defeat of fascism but as a endorsement of her kind of corporatist incrementalism.

now, let's watch as morbs continues to condemn the lot of us as sniveling hillarybots.

feel like the lesson the democratic party hasn't learnt yet is how to get all yr constituents to go out to town halls over the summer and threaten to primary / vote out their congressmen if they refuse to pass the legislation that they want, or how to get them to come out in midterms to show that there's teeth behind that threat.

taibbi's point seems to be smugness above inhibits the rank and file. how to "ameliorate" that is a burning question

now, let's watch as morbs continues to condemn the lot of us as sniveling hillarybots.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, June 10, 2016 5:46 PM (17 minutes ago)

you know, you could do better not to bait him with every other post of yours

maybe he could, maybe he couldn't. hard to say.

yeah, i should just ignore it. it's hard when every third post in these political threads is him baiting the lot of us.

i shouldn't 'speak' for him but i think he's calling bullshit on self-styled enlightened egalitarians, not baiting people for the hell of it. sorry dr-m if i am misrepresenting you

i'm not speaking, so go ahead.

OTMx1000:

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

yep

no morbs but... they appoint Wall Street criminals to cabinet posts.. so not gonna happen

(sorry morbs)

no, because those interests bankroll the really fuckin' weird tv ads that speak to identity politics that motivate a fair number of voters

If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world

It's probably apocryphal, but there is a 'quote' out there along these lines: "I don't care who votes, so long as I choose the candidates." -- Boss Tweed --

The quote may be phony as a $3 bill, but the sentiment is correct enough and the rich and powerful endorse it through their actions in every election.