Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article on Bernie Sanders is a must read.

In my opinion the entire article is a revelation, but this part stuck with me: 

Many of the battles he brought me along to witness, he lost. And no normal politician would be comfortable with the optics of bringing a Rolling Stone reporter to a Rules Committee hearing. 

But Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor. 

This is why his entrance into the 2016 presidential race is a great thing and not a mere footnote to the inevitable coronation of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. If the press is smart enough to grasp it, his entrance into the race makes for a profound storyline that could force all of us to ask some very uncomfortable questions. 

You know it is articles like this which makes me wish that Bernie Sanders could actually win the nomination over Hillary Clinton and defeat Jeb Bush in the general.

But the truth is he can't.

He is probably the perfect candidate, at the perfect time, but he is hampered by an incredibly imperfect election system.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has some choice words to day about Sarah Palin's free speech hypocrisy.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone: 

Sarah Palin, ably staying in character in her new role as a professional media ambulance-chaser, was one of the first to rush to Robertson's defense. She posted a photo of herself with the Robertsons and tweeted the following: 

"Free speech is endangered species; those "intolerants" hatin' & taking on Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing personal opinion take on us all" 

Conservatives have always had trouble grasping the difference between public censorship and private enterprise. With a few exceptions, like whistleblower laws and National Labor Relations Board protections against being fired for off-site discussions about work conditions (exceptions that, in almost every case, conservatives bitterly opposed), there is no legal or constitutional right to free speech on private property. 

You can be fired for calling your boss a dick, and you can just as easily be let go by a profit-seeking media company for imperiling its relationship with advertisers. And incidentally, this is the way true conservatives, and especially true hardcore speech advocates, have always wanted it. 

Could you imagine the uproar if someone passed a law saying that Martin Bashir couldn't be bounced from a broadcast job for saying Sarah Palin was a good candidate to have feces shoved in her mouth? Now that would be censorship. 

Remember, nobody heard a peep from Sarah Palin about free speech after that episode.

Yeah funny how tight lipped she was about free speech and the 1st Amendment while MSNBC was flooded with calls for Bashir's head. 

Palin's inability to grasp the difference between a first-amendment violation and corporate calculation is amazing because she literally just published a book on the subject. Her newly-released War-on-Christmas diatribe, Good Tidings and Great Joy, is all about the efforts by evil Jesus-hating atheists to sue the Christmas out of our public lives. (It's one of the funniest things ever written, by the way. I would write a review but I don't think I could make it all the way to the end without a cardiac episode). 

In writing this new book, Palin presumably spent the whole of the last year or so staring right at the issue of what may be said on private property versus what may be said on public property – the difference between putting up a nativity scene in front of a courthouse and putting one up on your lawn. Yet as this latest controversy shows, the underlying issue is still a total blur to her. 

Of course, Palin has a long history of getting things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. In the book, for instance, she describes buying her husband Todd "a nice, needed powerful gun" in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings and resulting anti-gun fervor. She described this warm act as a "small act of civil disobedience" that was "fun." 

Essential EVERYTHING that Sarah Palin says, tweets, or has written for her in a book or on Facebook, is in some way objectionable. However since she has no actual employer to kick her to the curb, there is rarely a noticeable consequence.

Though considering the dismal sales of this most recent book perhaps she finally is being censored by the only people left who even care about what she says, the rapidly dwindling, pathetically slow learning, Palin-bots.

Sarah Palin will NEVER stop saying ignorant things. The only question is how soon will she be saying them to an empty room?

Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article on Mitt Romney is a MUST read.

The set design in perfect for Romney's big convention speech.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone:

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected. 

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation. 

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race. 

And oh yeah, you DEFINITELY want to read the rest! Just click the link at the top to do so.

The LIBOR scandal explained in one graphic.

Click image to see larger version.

This graphic comes to us courtesy of the Rolling Stone magizine's Matt Taibbi.

Welcome to the biggest banking corruption scandal in history. And then ask yourself, why am I not hearing more about this?

Yeah, I know what you are thinking, "Holy crap!"

Essentially this is what the Occupy Wall Street protestors have been trying to say, except it has never been reported exactly HOW corrupt the banking system has become. Until now.

If you want to know how we got here, then take some time and read this. (Here is a hint: The majority of the blame falls firmly on the shoulders of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Yeah, go figure.)

And if you are wondering if President Obama is trying to do anything about this, the answer is yes he is, in the form of the Dodd-Frank bill. However the facts are that the bill really only addresses the problems "around the edges" and due to significant push-back from lobbyists and their Republican attack dogs, the bill was watered down to the point where it will do little to address the metastasizing corruption within the banks themselves.

By the way Robert Diamond, who quit this week as chief executive officer of Barclays, and was mentioned in the video above, has now had a change of heart and is now telling British lawmakers that they DO need to look at how the banks are regulated (Or essentially NOT regulated) more closely.

Ordered to testify to British lawmakers after Barclays agreed to pay a record 290-million-pound ($455 million) fine for rigging the London interbank offered rate, Diamond said yesterday he was “disappointed” regulators failed to act on repeated warnings from Barclays that competitors had lowballed their submissions. Legislators challenged him on why he took so long to uncover his own firm’s attempts to manipulate the rate.

You might have thought that my headline was hyperbolic, but I think once you really understand the ramifications of this scandal you will feel I was not being evocative enough.

Update: Here is Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article, which lays out the scandal quite clearly. Damn!                       

Matt Taibbi writes the "obituary" of Andrew Breitbart that many of his detractors wanted to read, and immediately suffers the kinds of attacks that one expects from the fans of this hateful prick.

Here is a portion of Matt's tongue in cheek send off for Breitbart:  

So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead. 

I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor. 

For instance, it would be dishonest not to tip a hat to him for that famous scene when he hijacked Anthony Weiner’s own self-immolating "apology" press conference, and held up the entire event by standing at the lectern and congratulating himself at length, before Weiner could let the humiliating healing begin. 

For that one, brief, shining moment– still one of the most painful-to-watch YouTube spectacles of all time, right there with Mitt Romney’s priceless attempt at singing "Who Let the Dogs Out?" with a group of black voters in Florida in 2008 – Breitbart could legitimately claim to have the biggest, hairiest balls on earth. 

(You can read the rest by clicking here.)

As you can see Taibbi certainly did NOT pull any punches, and considering who he was talking about why should he?

However it was what happened next that illustrates EXACTLY the kind of contribution to American politics that Breitbart left clinging, like a hateful dingleberry, to the ass of this great country with his passing.

Well done, Breitbart fans, well done! In less than 24 hours you’ve hacked into my Wiki page, published my telephone number on Twitter, called the Rolling Stone offices pretending to be outraged “advertisers” (anonymous ones, who hung up before we could figure out which “ads” to pull), and then spent all night calling and texting my phone with various threats and insults, many of them directed at my family. “Better grow eyes in the back of your head,” was one; “I’m going to take a shit on your mother’s grave,” was another; a third called my wife a “piece of shit like you,” and many others called me a “pile of human excrement.” 

Those last ones to me were the most interesting because that quote is lifted directly from Breitbart’s own obit of Ted Kennedy, which like me Breitbart ran just hours after his subject died. So that means the writers of these letters knew that what I did was exactly the same as what Breitbart had done, and yet they still found a way to be unironically outraged on Breitbart’s behalf. I thought: “These people don’t even get their own jokes.” 

If there is a hell, you have to know that Breitbart is tied upside down above a flaming pit of magma, grinning to himself through the pain as the flames seer the flesh from his porcine body, at the legacy that will live on without him of vicious attacks, harassing phone calls, and cowardly yellow bellied "journalism."

You know if you believed in that kind of thing. Which in this case, I almost wish I did.

Update: David Frum offers a more measured, yet equally damning, send off of his own.