Matt Taibbi

seems like the bigger question is if those individual policy positions are really so popular, why don't majorities vote for politicans that support those policies

or why don't they pressure sitting politicians to support them, or threaten them with primary challenges if they don't

I suspect the answer is partly that many people don't vote based on individual policy positions (tribal identification much more significant), partly that support for some/all of those policies is soft (as compared to, say, gun nuts' belief in gun ownership), and partly that support for those specific policies is concentrated in certain geographic areas/portions of the population (as opposed to dispersed evenly throughout the country)

dispersed distributed

I think the answer to why people don't vote for politicians that support these ideas is that almost no politicians have had the guts to run as straight-up liberals. As for why people don't pressure them/primary them from the left is that they are up against a huge amount of money and power, and many feel powerless and disenfranchised. Alls I keep saying is that I don't understand why more dems aren't trying the straight-up liberal route, even without pressure from their constituents. If a cranky old jew from Brooklyn can almost win the presidential nomination running on an extremely liberal platform, imagine what someone with an ounce or two of charisma could do...

i think you're underestimating bernie's charisma. it wasn't the classical kind but it was a straight-talking authenticity that a lot of ppl responded to. a more polished candidate couldn't have conveyed precisely what resonated w/ ppl in bernie. i think that had at least as much to do w/ it as his platform (lots of articles suggested he drew supporters from across the political spectrum).

i think mordy is right about sanders. edwards and even o'malley were running as populists but their obvious oiliness didn't mix well with that ethos.

There's a different between populist and progressive, imo.

I've been reading a biography of Henry Wallace (the third one of the family, Henry Agard Wallace, who was Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt and later VP). At that time, even the original drafting of New Deal policies, which were definitely progressive government action, were not aimed at the problems of the agriculture sector, which were the main concern of the rural base. It took some wrangling to get congress on board, and this was when the portion of the population in rural areas was much higher.

Much of that was recognizing the difference between the manufacturing industry, which is more restricted by strict supply and demand economics and agriculture, which has a relatively constant demand curve relating to population but is cyclical in supply due to the boom/bust cycle of crop production.

Agriculture is relatively stable due to the controls put in at that time (although the financial markets still speculate ignorantly on research companies), but the urban/rural divide parts of the narrative are too familiar. At the time, masses of farmers would crowd auctions for foreclosed properties and strong-arm them into "penny auctions" where the land would be sold to the original owners. Officials who were enforcing the extant laws were targeted for attack.

There's a new underclass that's not specifically rural but identifies with the same sentiments in that they feel particularly underserved by the economic bailouts that targeted large industry, the diminishing value and increasing cost of education, and what they see as the displacement of jobs.

Looking at the 1930s, there was a similar paradox in perceived causes versus economic reality. In our time, there are a lot of people who think that jobs are being taken or displaced, whether it's recent immigrants doing low-paying jobs or manufacturing occurring overseas. The truth is that many of those jobs no longer exist due to factory efficiency initiatives, mechanization, or industries becoming obsolete. In the 30s, agriculture was knocked out not by the financial downturn but by a series of boom years where production and prices were very high, followed by a huge surplus and the bottom falling out of the market.

At the time, political affiliation was less of an issue. I'm naive to the larger trend, but in the scope of rural issues and agriculture, a number of republicans decided to side with large industry and banking and ignored cyclical agriculture and former republicans joined Roosevelt's administration.

There's a disconnect now, although more polarized. I should find the republican party platform of southwest Iowa that was published in the last year -- from a national standpoint, it looks absolutely schizoid. It's half strong conservatism on social issues (abortion, minority rights, sexual discrimination) and cheering on the austerity of a small national government. The other half is exhortations to strongly subsidize wind energy, ethanol production, and agriculture, all of which are local industries.

Oh yeah, and even with the renewable energy subsidy support, I think they still threw in something about global warming being fake

"Trump ... is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler.

"There's some logic in that, but it's flawed logic. When journalists start acting like politicians, we pretty much always end up botching things even more politically and crippling our businesses to boot."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi-on-the-summer-of-the-media-shill-w434484

We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

he's ... not terribly bright sometimes

Taibbi needs to get a fresh take on this election other than his weird false equivalency meme bc it makes him sound like an idiot. The new batch of State Dpt emails was on the NYT front page. The MSM has covered every new Hillary scandal dutifully. Maybe not hysterically but pretending like anything involving her server is comparable to Trump's offenses would make them like Taibbi - unable to weigh offenses against one another and confused about what constitutes important journalism. Nothing published by the right wing echosphere is valuable journalism. There is certainly important journalism that Democrats would hate but you won't find it on Fox News. Maybe on The Intercept.

calling what he's advocating "false equivalency" is silly but hey, there are messageboard shills too.

Nothing published by the right wing echosphere is valuable journalism

yeah I think this is really the key thing. It's debatable how much of a pass various outlets give Clinton (I don't think the WaPo and NYT are torpedoing stories for ex.), but when you're talking about Fox and Breitbart etc these are outlets that literally do not do anything resembling the job of journalism. Investigative reporting, fact-based analysis, carefully vetted sources, shit even just basic editing - these are not things right wing media outlets bother with.

xp

He's advocating reading right wing media to learn what mainstream media is suppressing. That's why the comparison to Russian v American media. But that is dumb as hell for reasons I already gave.

Reading IS dumb.

nah it's easy you just ignore what the article actually says and call the author stupid

standard ILX (neo)liberal tactic

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Tennieldumdee.jpg

Reading Is Dumbdamental

dude forgot your beard, but has Shakey down p well

It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. He deserves it all. But he's not the only stupid, lying, corrupt politician in the world, which is the impression one could easily get watching certain stations these days.

yes, if they were born yesterday. which includes all of us except Dr Morbius so there.

The situation he's describing is actually more like this: one candidate continues - despite exceeding the imaginations of many, many people - to produce MAN BITES DOG material on not a weekly, not a daily, but on a multiple-times-per-day basis. This is the nominee of one of the two major parties in the country. The other candidate, and the party she represents, continue to be the subject of several DOG BITES MAN stories, followed up with quotes about paint drying and it being hot outside. But the need to fill column inches and airtime is a totally new thing that has never afflicted journalism before 2016, so this means that America is doomed.

One of these days our country will actually fall apart and I look forward to Matt's awesome 40-paragraph essay about how he saw it coming and he said so and it's everybody else's fault.

I'm sure you will live to see it

The other candidate! What will we call her after Nov 8?

also one of those DBM stories led to the resignation of three DNC officials, that's a good dog, here boy here boy

http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/bg/Dave+walks+his+dog+yuEpWqafzD-l.jpg
DMB stories? I did what with what dog now?

too bad no msm orgs reported on the dnc email leaks so it remained in the right wing echo chamber and dws was never fired :( i guess taibbi was right

The other candidate!

Yes. To be a candidate for something you actually have to have a nonzero chance of achieving it. Jill Stein is a "candidate" for President like I am a "candidate" for Pope.

hey guys guess who you deserve

clearly the discourse of a rabid misanthropist w. nothing to say. better to take yr suffering in this world than the world to come i guess.

and dws was never fired

the fact-impaired do not suffer as much, i know

lol you don't understand anything what a great poster child for the far left. ignorant and self-righteous.

i don't know anything but what i don't know i feel v strongly about!

taibbi sucks ass

i remember liking him a lot in college after reading griftopia and some hilarious brooks/friedman take downs and being pissed at joe while reading this thread trying to tar him as a not-that-smart self-righteous macho "gonzo" dbag but he was totally right and i'm glad i have seen the light

i liked griftopia and some of his earlier stuff (and when i was younger i really liked the eXile - i even interview mark ames once) but this election season has scrambled the brains of the left commentariat for some reason - michael moore producing some equally head-scratchingly bad stuff recently.

xp i got caught up in his thing in 2009 but yeah i can't read him anymore. wayyy too heavy on the empty mythmaking / macho language. huge generalizations. not all that insightful. similar to a poster here now that i think about it.

taibbi sucks ass

what other sexual practices do u like to use as slurs (don't answer that)

i will though! go fuck yourself

anyway bye guys enjoy the Restoration

the answer to my question above is HILLZ! btw. The More Efficient, Mundane Evil.

can't believe ppl are slut shaming ass eaters

Talking about PRACTICE

Someone mention Groceries?

damnit i restrained myself from using my reflexive 'sucks balls'... didn't even think of the plight of the ass eaters

you are the ones who are the ball lickers

[tmi] i always interpreted eating ass as licking the rim & tonguing... literally sucking on a butthole never crossed my mind as an irl thing ppl do [/tmi]

Taibbi is talking about the clinton foundation story, which should be much bigger than it is, not the dncleaks stuff. But you wouldn't know it from this thread. and that's probably because the people in this thread haven't paid attention to the clinton foundation stuff, because of people not making a big deal of it in the media, which is precisely taibbi's point.

I kind of feel like the Clinton foundation story is suffering death by slow leak, combined with the fact that no one (that I know of anyway) has done a really good job of tying everything together.

yeah there was a bit of talk about that Daily Caller story in the election thread, but there's a limit to how seriously we can take a story that doesn't cross over from batshit mediaworld

the problem with the clinton foundation story is that there's no story yet. there is speculation - enough that i listened to a 45 minute NPR panel on the topic on Monday (they did a v poor job burying the story) and read numerous NYT stories on the topic (including back when the story first broke and it was about whether state approved arms deals in exchange for donations to the foundation). even the arms story was mostly speculation. it's an unsexy story (maybe some ppl got access to state bc of donations to a charitable foundation) and there isn't a smoking gun. despite that the media has, in their quixotic quest for parity, reported on every new detail.