July 03, 2009
Rolling Stone finally realized that the ganked versions of Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs article were attracting eyeballs that could be pointed at RS, and have finally put the article online. So you may now read it without guilt.And in Taibbi's own little online presence (oddly, not hosted by RS), he prints Goldman's response to his article and then writes about that, too, and also addresses a basket full of other more grown-up critical response -- that his reporting is one-sided, leading the charge. His defense:
I’m aware that some people feel that it’s a journalist’s responsibility to “give both sides of the story” and be “even-handed” and “objective.” A person who believes that will naturally find serious flaws with any article like the one I wrote about Goldman. I personally don’t subscribe to that point of view. My feeling is that companies like Goldman Sachs have a virtual monopoly on mainstream-news public relations; for every one reporter like me, or like far more knowledgeable critics like Tyler Durden, there are a thousand hacks out there willing to pimp Goldman’s viewpoint on things in the front pages and ledes of the major news organizations...Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it. Given all of this, I personally think it’s absurd to talk about the need for “balance” in every single magazine and news article. I understand that some people feel differently, but that’s my take on things.
I'd add that one only complains to the ref when one doesn't like the call. Reporting is not supposed to be even-handed; it is supposed to be accurate. Goldman was given a chance to respond on the record and they chose not to.
And my favorite reaction is Choire Sicha's, who really captures the enormity of the events being discussed and the suffocating anxiety that one might not ever be smart/learned enough to talk about these matters -- hey, I know that feeling!
Posted at 09:35 AM
July 02, 2009
In light of the breathy bodice-ripper that is the slow unraveling of Gov. Mark Sanford, here's something:In the past decades of scandal after scandal concerning America's public figures and the places that they should not take off their pants but do anyway, I don't recall seeing in print mention that marriage, while a sacred institution, etc., is ultimately the business of the wife and the husband. Like, it is conceivable that there is a marriage in which an "arrangement" is made, for the good of the kids or the careers or what have you. Even with my humble Appalachian roots I have been privy to marriages like this, where the love isn't entirely gone but the ardor is, and exigencies dictate that non-traditional measures be taken. I'm not condoning it, but grown-ups are grown-ups and it really ain't none of my business. And the elephant in the room for me w/r/t some of the instances of cheating that we've all tut-tutted about is that, well, maybe that's the marriage they have, dude. And who are we, a bunch of Puritans, to gripe about the concessions that adults make for their mutual good? Especially when it's not really any of our beeswax?
I'm not saying that the Sanford marriage is like that -- I didn't know who Mark Sanford was until he made a big deal about refusing to accept stimulus money. But if it is like that, there's not a thing wrong with it, unless you hew to certain precepts concerning adultery and Godlessness. And those hewers are definitely Sanford's base, which might be the problem.
Also, let me join the small chorus giving Sanford props for being honest. Sure, it's definitely a TMI sort of honesty, but there's not a focus-grouped sentence in there.
Posted at 11:34 AM
July 01, 2009
If any of you powerful Washington lobbyists out there are anxious to get some lobbying done but cannot afford the rates asked by the Washington Post, then please won't you consider spending some of that good lobbying money on me. All of my friends are talented, and one or two of them are actually important! So then the quo for your quid would be a concerted whining campaign from my circle of tastemakers (which circle may be reduced to just me if exigencies require) in favor of whatever insidious cause you support -- all with nary an ethical quandary.And really, all I'm talking about is a nice dinner and maybe a couple of them Yuppie foodstamps so I can buy myself something to remember you by -- that's like just the car service to get the senators to the airport before you fly them to Aruba or someplace else exotic and filled with luxury and ladies of the evening. A significant savings.
Plus I am excellent dinner company, unless you start talking about how right Glenn Beck is. Who knows, maybe I'll talk about Doritos.
(Ah yes, one of those constructions wherein the speaker offers himself up as a substitute for a situation that the speaker is clearly not qualified, creating an incongruence between expectation and reality -- that is how the sausage gets made.)
Posted at 08:55 PM
I can't help myself. I was upstate over the weekend and in some gas station saw an even newer snack food innovation brought to us by Doritos -- "Flavor Shots!!!" So yeah I bought it, but was reluctant until today to actually eat them, like a fanboy with the mint copy of the comic book he's afraid to read.But I got hungry, so, here you go.
Primarily, the bag consists of a bunch of normal nacho cheese flavored chips, the same angry red as usual. But also in the bag there is a "flavor packet" -- additional flavor dust, double-wrapped. This specific packet is labeled "Blazin' Buffalo Rush", which I take to be a reference to buffalo wings and not actual buffalo. And the packet is an unwieldy little cuss -- you have to fish around in the bag to get it and then figure out how to open it (scissors). Have handy-wipes handy.
If you're like me, you experienced a period of Dorito experimentation somewhere between elementary school and high school -- Doritos on sandwiches, dipped in Pepsi -- and this new "Flavor Shot!" concept harkens back to that, deliberately, I'd say. And the taste? The nacho cheese and the buffalo flavors have a little fistfight in your mouth. Disgusting, but in an interesting way, like, "Hey, this is disgusting -- try it."
Snack food technology speeds along, just like everything else. Soon Doritos will be delivered in little jetpacks. And apples and cheese will still be taking the bus, just like ham'n'eggers like you and me.
Posted at 05:07 PM
By the way, in composing the immediately previous post, discussing a story published by the website Politico (no link! keep reading), I noticed that when I cut and pasted a portion of the story for the blockquote -- a small portion of the story, absolutely within the realm of fair use -- when I pasted the selection, a sentence appeared after the paste with the URL to the Politico page and a mild exhortation to read more there.It's easy enough to delete, but it's a pain in the ass, and it's an insult -- I'm gonna cut/paste without attribution and a link? And if I were that type of dude, is some whiny message automatically added to my clipboard going to change my mind?
So, duh, we'll avoid linking Politico directly. Though no surprise that Politico is the first one out of the gate on this, is it?
Posted at 10:38 AM
That I'd read a story on the civil war that's broken out amongst the campaign advisors of the McCain campaign is no big shock. (And I think we can stop saying "Shadenfreude" for a few years -- it's getting played out, even though, like most German words, it is precise and singular in meaning.) I need things to fill my eyes with, and tales of internecine GOP warfare is both instructional and edifying.In this instance, the schism is caused by the Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin, which I'm going to have to read to see if the undertones are more "Pygmalion" or "Being There" starring Tracy Flick, and its full of excellent crunchy bits concerning the machines that drove the campaign and pretty open war waged between Steve Schmidt and Bill Kristol. Who doesn't love a good chair fight?
But, the most useful thing to take from this story is a reminder of the employment history of Bill Kristol -- a Neocon thinker of whom I'm not very fond. As phrased by Schmidt:
"After all, [Kristol's] management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away," Schmidt continued.
"Former Quayle chief of staff" is a whole lot more fun to type every time Kristol comes up than "Neocon thinker of whom I'm not too fond" -- excellent.
Posted at 08:27 AM
June 30, 2009
Tonight you should join us at McNally Jackson in the proud neighborhood of SoHo for my friend Samantha Peale's reading of her excellent debut novel "The American Painter Emma Dial". If you are not the type to go to readings, then this is your big chance to dip your toe in.And if you are busy or outside the greater metropolitan NYC area, then you should just buy her book and read it. It really is an exceptional work -- a spare and taut reminder that the coming of age is not necessarily dependent on a certain age. (Not that I need that reminder over here, no, not at all. Heh.)
Posted at 01:04 PM
June 29, 2009
I hate to recommend something that might have been obtained in a non-traditional fashion, but go read Matt Taibbi's latest feature for Rolling Stone, which is not available online and has been accordingly been put up by a soul looking out for the information that wants to be free.The article is about Goldman Sachs and its long story. And while I may be off the reservation when I ask rhetorical questions about the provenance of Goldman Sachs, Taibbi is one of those writers that is actually a reporter and more able to be held to account when he writes a paragraph like:
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.
That's just one of a couple hundred -- as useful as ever, if you can get past the rage/vitriol. (Which rage/vitriol I share and endorse but understand is an acquired taste.) And if you feel bad about reading a scanned copy, I suppose you could also go buy Rolling Stone as well. For nostalgia's sake.
Posted at 02:19 PM
God, these days drag sometimes. Soon I'll start posting about even more inane things than usual, like the weather or the Mets.But here's a brief distraction that's getting me through the early afternoon -- I've lost count of how many times I've referenced this song. And I'm not one for the live footage, usually, either.
And it's got a dirty word in it, so don't play it around your grandma or your baby sister.
Posted at 01:15 PM
Hey now, it's a little early in the administration for this stuff, if you ask, me, but I'm naive, and I don't have invisible robots in my teeth. As reported by At-Largely:Apparently, some glue-sniffing types are hoping that our own military will be inspired by the Honduras coup to overthrow our own president in order to save democracy. I kid you not. I have been reading the comments at several blogs and they are mind-blowing.
And they are! I'm not gonna reprint them here, but they read like those parts of a James Ellroy novel (like "The Cold Six Thousand") that you hope he's making up.
The crazy-making thing is that I can't think of an act by the Obama Administration that crossed some crazy-person line. No guns have been taken away, no forced gender assignment, no dissolution of the dollar. It's like the coup-hopers have two emotional states: gloating triumph, and outrage. I'm sure it doesn't boil down to a psychological simplicity -- there's plenty else wrong in there -- but it's an interesting aspect. From the moment that Obama won, then it was time to foment unrest, because no electoral victory by an opponent of crazy people will ever be considered legitimate.
Plus there's the whole thing with the president being black, which must be a total freak-out to the black helicopter crowd, let alone the garden variety racists who don't think there's gonna be a highway that runs from Canada to Mexico filled with NWO snipers, shooting white people.
Still: good times! These treason advocacy organizations and/or individuals could use a little more light of day, I say.
Posted at 07:31 AM
June 28, 2009
Briefly, and this might speak to how I spent my weekend, but when the bride and the groom are having their first dance, or feeding each other the cake? The grimy phalanx of wedding-goers with their iPhones held high, kneeling an arm's length from the action, become a bigger story than the action that is being multiply, psychotically, photographed (or whatever that word will become when there are no more cameras only phones).Is that how you want to remember meaningful events? As an aggressive self-documenter? ("...and here's where I snapped them dancing, and, oh! here's where I snapped their first kiss!")
Obviously, these wedding-goers are not bad people, but they are exhibiting a behavior that could lead one to believe that they are bad people. Or at least shallow. No, that's not fair -- why not either live that shit and have excellent memories, or just become a photographer and have excellent documentation of other people living excellent shit?
Of course, this makes me a bad person. But Jess & Erin, you hit those vows like champions, like grinning champions. I was proud to be there, and congratulations.
Posted at 09:56 PM
June 26, 2009
Yesterday about 10 minutes after the death of Farrah Fawcett was reported, I got about 200 words into a post about how I'm a bad person because I frown upon the RIPs in your Tweets and your Status Updates. Just me being cranky and pretending that I have decorum in some aspect. And now looking at the entirety of the day, I'm really glad that I didn't. Because, for this guy right here, Farrah and MJ were two cultural immovable objects of childhood, and I presume the same holds true for the rest of the cathode-ray set (thanks, JessicaD). So, especially for we navel-gazing types, yesterday was alarming as measurable percentages of nostalgia real estate -- entire towns -- were obliterated. And it kind of left me feeling, "Well, are you grown up yet?"Actually, probably not. But hey, what a day, huh? I start complaining about questionable news pushing the rest of the news off the front page, and now more legitimate non-news does so.
Posted at 10:03 AM
June 25, 2009
It's useful sometimes to find the sober equivalent of what I'm trying to say, because I tend to spin out of control with either rage or whimsy. Or both! Or beer/cheese!Ezra Klein on why insurance companies are not necessarily the entities we want safeguarding our health:
The issue isn't that insurance companies are evil. It's that they need to be profitable. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. And as [whistle-blower Wendell] Potter explains, he's watched an insurer's stock price fall by more than 20 percent in a single day because the first-quarter medical-loss ratio had increased from 77.9 percent to 79.4 percent.
That ratio referred to there represents the amount of money spent by the insurer on health care costs -- payment to your doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc. -- compared to the aggregate income of the insurer. So, the more they pay for our health care the worse it goes for them. The takeaway from that seems pretty obvious.
And this is Klein on the free market argument:
The reason we generally like markets is that the profit incentive spurs useful innovations. But in some markets, that's not the case. We don't allow a bustling market in heroin, for instance, because we don't want a lot of innovation in heroin creation, packaging and advertising. Are we really sure we want a bustling market in how to cleverly revoke the insurance of people who prove to be sickly?
Well I don't know, not me. Though I would like to congratulate Klein for the comparison of health insurers to heroin pushers, though I could think of worse.
Posted at 12:58 PM
I logged on last night, after a pleasant evening of cheese/beer tasting at Sycamore, to see what kind of legs this fascinating/scary story had and I found out that it had NONE AT ALL because Gov. Sanford not only managed to apologize his way into the hearts of a news-hungry America but also managed to let some third party release his mash notes to the adulteree, which I would not read for all the cheese/beer tastings in the world and which dominated every inch of available newsspace in the universe.Even the usually redoubtable TPM was not only drenched with steamy Sanford, it even ran a post yesterday afternoon using Sanford to make a Where We Are Now observation:
If you read only the print edition of the New York Times, you would still not know anything about the Mark Sanford saga, according to my search of the paper's archives.
Yes, true that, as the NYT is printed in the middle of the night before, so things that happen after printing has occurred generally don't make the edition. Also, the sweep of irrational Sanford exuberance wouldn't have yet been in the newsweeklies, the Atlantic Monthly, novels or major motion pictures -- we get it. (Though, it was on the NYT website, so I'm not sure what the point is other than "rotary phones were cool but doomed".)
But, maybe there is a segment of the reading public that would actually prefer to have a Sanford-free zone, a place where the reporting of the news is a little less hysterical. The instantaneity of web news coverage is an awful lot like I remember high school -- shrill, foolishly self-assured, blithely fad-adherent, gossipy and subject to wide behavior swings and cognitive self-deceptions thanks to buckets of hormones flooding through everyone. Now, I remember high school fondly, and I enjoy and treasure my website news portals, but I don't recall anyone yesterday stopping and asking themselves, or the world, if Schadenfreude and prurient interest constitute newsworthiness. Because they don't. Another governor cheated on his wife (albeit spectacularly). Give it a paragraph, move on to the news, and let the Perez Hiltons of the world wallow in the details.
Or don't. Who am I to say? Maybe my reluctance to care about another man's dirty-talk emails make me wrong, and I do not plan on ever being unaccustomed to being wrong.
The fascinating/scary story referenced above, by the way, is about geothermal energy, and how a by-product of geothermal energy is seismic activity, and how they want to drill a geothermic well two hours from San Francisco. It's countless hundreds of words long, and it's worth your time.
Posted at 08:45 AM
June 24, 2009
Say what you want about the serial apologizing of Governor Mark Sanford, but give him this: he has successfully hijacked the news for another twenty-four hours.It seems like an awful lot of effort to do so, but I guess he might've been frustrated that his continued efforts to deny bailout money to the people of South Carolina weren't gaining enough traction. But, way to take one for the team.
Oh well. If we hunker down and watch a ball game tonight, this should all be blown over by tomorrow lunchtime.
And a confused nation asks: "Wait, there's a South Carolina?"
Posted at 03:31 PM