Taibbi has a great one up today, taking apart David Brooks’ attempted takedown of populism brick by brick - and hitting upon a very disturbing truth in the process:
That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but […]

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Employees of Goldman Sachs have apparently taken to carrying weapons in order to protect themselves from any unruly populist types.
Dunno why. The unruly populist types are all bent out of shape at government, not Goldman.

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Been saying this around here for quite some time; Eliot Spitzer gets it, too:
Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England […]

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Long but fascinating post over at Naked Capitalism on whether banking actually contributes to the good of society. Yves isn’t talking your local bank branch - she’s talking the finance sector, the Goldmans of the world. She cites a piece by Bill Black laying it all out:
The financial sector functions as the sharp canines that the […]

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I can’t stand it:
I have known countless people who have no worse medical problems than I do, but they sit home and collect welfare and Social Security. It’s people like me that find this appalling that you are asking about. I find it appalling when a government makes it’s people dependent upon it. I find […]

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This would be Peggy Noonan, famously a Republican, on Sarah Palin:
In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned […]

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Found, immediately bookmarked Matt Taibbi’s blog. Worth the price of admission and then some for this observation about the tea parties/Glenn Beck/mentality of Beck’s audience, which is a far more articulate version of something we’ve been trying to say around here for weeks:
After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be […]

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Steve Clemons hits it, and hits it hard:
The myth of rural virtue and urban vice is an old one in this country, and it persists no matter what the changes in the landscape. And whatever questions Palin may face in her debate with Biden, her paeans to small-town virtue aren’t likely to be among them.
Most […]

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