Category Archives: Current Events

Fred Kaplan on how Barack and Hillary are getting along.

Rolling Stone, which previously only had excerpts available, seems to have posted the entirety of Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine," his massive bringdown of the Goldman, Sachs empire. The piece has been much-argued from every side, and the loudest voices against it seem to be those who feel Taibbi is letting others off the hook by zeroing in only on Goldman, Sachs. Give it a read if you're in the mood to get angry.

Dahlia Lithwick tells us what will happen in the just-now-commencing confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. It'll be a lot of square dancing as she pretends to have no controversial viewpoints and a lot of Senators pretend they just might stop her appointment.

Terry Gilliam remembers his MAD mentor, Harvey Kurtzman.

Brian Lowry of Variety writes about the Barnum & Bailey coverage of Michael Jackson's death. I see now that the Jackson family is speculating about "foul play." Why are we not surprised? Have to keep the circus going…

G.O.P. advisor David Frum surveys his party's presidential prospects for 2012. I can't believe someone better than Mitt Romney won't emerge from the sidelines.

James H. Burns, that fella who often sends me fun stuff that I share with you here, made the front page of the Sunday New York Times last weekend. Here's the article.

And here's the story of how he set the thing up. I don't know why he'd want to get mentioned in the New York Times when I mention him here but some people are strange.

Fred Kaplan remembers Robert McNamara, who died the other day. Mr. McNamara was, of course, one of the prime architects of the Vietnam War at its inception, though to his credit, he later tried to dial it down…and, still later, apologized and admitted some pretty deadly errors.

One wonders if Donald Rumsfeld will ever have the self-awareness to try and atone. His recent statement that he regrets how they happened to foresake compliance with the Geneva Conventions gives one hope. On the other hand, Rumsfeld doesn't regret that they did it; only that they seem to have done it sorta by accident.

Even before her recent resignation announcement, I didn't think Sarah Palin would ever win another elected office unless it was another term as governor of Alaska. If anyone thinks she has a chance now, read Fred Barnes on the topic. Barnes is kinda fascinating because he's emotionally incapable of writing an article which suggests that anything is bad for Republicans or good for Democrats. He still goes through life thinking not only that George W. Bush was a fabulous president but that pretty much everyone agrees.

Ms. Palin had no bigger supporter in the punditocracy and he still loves her…but even he doesn't think she has a presidential bid in her future. He says the only way is for her to run for Congress, win, move from that into the Senate in 2014 and then make a run for the White House in 2020. Yeah, like she might want to go that route.

The current issue of Rolling Stone has an article by Matt Taibbi called "The Great American Bubble Machine." It's a long piece that basically summarizes a lot of America's recent financial disasters and traces them to excessive greed, the clever manipulation of what's legal and shouldn't be, and some outright uninvestigated crimes…all courtesy of execs of Goldman, Sachs. Taibbi offers a colorful and, if true, devastating indictment of those folks and the system that let them get away with costing us bazillions. Goldman, Sachs is responding in a way that seems to want to deny every last word in the piece without getting into specifics and without calling too much attention to it.

Almost as if to aid the piece in not getting too much attention, Rolling Stone has only posted excerpts — not the whole article — on their website. There are bootlegs of the entire Taibbi screed online but I'm not comfy with linking to such things. I suspect Rolling Stone will see the wisdom of posting it in its entirety but for now, that's what's available.

I get that magazine in the mail…and I don't know why. I think I purchased something a year or two ago which came with a free subscription. So I got to read the whole essay and it's quite powerful and if your blood pressure's low, a great way to get it up to around 165 over 100. Wanna see fireworks tonight? Give it a peek.

Bruce Reed discusses Sarah Palin's surprise resignation. He discusses it from the standpoint of how it's a bad move if her goal is to win the presidency. I suspect that she's already resigned herself to the idea that any higher office is out of her reach and that what she wants to do is to ostensibly run for president and — like Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader and others we could name — derive the benefits of a candidacy without ever getting within a hundred miles of victory.

Palin's resignation speech itself demonstrated why she's a bad candidate. The whole point of it was to try and assert she was not taking "the quitter's way out" — a point she somehow thought she could score in a speech to announce that she was quitting and getting out. One gets the feeling that Ms. Palin's small band of fervent supporters has convinced her that she can say anything and get people to believe it. Or maybe she's just decided that all she cares about is that small band. And of course, she made her usual gaffes, like attributing to Douglas MacArthur a quote from someone else.

The thing that fascinates me about all this is that a lot of folks seem to confuse the candidate with the message. If he or she says the things they want to hear…well then, that person would unquestionably make a great president and will win in a walk if only he or she runs on that platform. I see lotsa folks whose political views mirror mine…but who I think are such clumsy orators, or who have so much baggage, that they could never win. Or they seem to lack the governing skills to turn those views into a working agenda.

If I believed in what Sarah Palin seems to believe in, she's just about the last public figure I'd want to throw my support behind. She makes those views seem kinda stupid and shallow. I'd be rallying for someone like Mike Huckabee. I personally don't buy his worldview or goals but he articulates them well and seems to know how to play the political game and get results. What he doesn't do, and this may be why more Conservatives aren't lining up behind him, is make Liberals froth. Palin does, and that seems to be the main thing that a lot of people like about her. But if that's all you want, you might as well nominate Michael Savage.

Bob Eckstein discusses the demise of his career as a freelance cartoonist. If everything he'd submitted had been as entertaining as this piece, he wouldn't have had to write this piece.

Todd Purdum writes one of those articles about how unfit Sarah Palin is to be a crossing guard, let alone holder of a high office. What's interesting about this one is that it seems to be based on interviews with folks high in the McCain campaign who were appalled at the person they had on their ticket.

Here's an important aspect of the debate on a "public option" in health care. As Zachary Roth notes, the fear that government-offered health insurance will be unfair competition misses the point. In a pretty large part of this country, insurance companies have no meaningful competition. That is, one company has a lock or near-lock on one area…and is fighting to keep things that way.

I don't think much of Christopher Hitchens as a human being but he's a colorful writer, especially when in his usual state of supreme outrage. That can be useful when, with a track record a little better than a stopped clock, he's directing it to good use. I laughed out loud just now when I read the following expression: "…the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don't even remember having eaten."

It's from the linked article about the newly-released Nixon tapes. Everything you ever heard about the moral bankruptcy of Richard Milhous turns out to be so — again and again and again…

You can listen to the new tapes or read transcripts here. This is the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, where every effort is made to put its subject into a sympathetic context and to suggest that the pressures of the era would have driven even a saint to treacherous action. But even if one accepts that framework, Nixon and his associates still look pretty damn bad.