Matt Taibbi, National Treasure

   Matt Taibbi is an eminently reliable dissector of national politics for Rolling Stone. His piece in the current issue uncovers the con-artist-level financial malfeasances practiced by Wall Street investment companies and U.S. banks in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse and last year's bailout debacle. 
   Taibbi's style is conversational, his research unassailable. He has a gift for making arcane financial dealings understandable for the average idiot (me). The only problem is that when the average idiot (me) understands, thanks to the Matt Taibbis of the world, what exactly is happening within the so-called financial "structure" of this country, the average idiot (me) finds himself contemplating a long walk off a short pier. 
   But that's no reason not to read Taibbi's piece; indeed, all of his pieces. I'd offer a link to his work in the RS archives, but the site is so poorly designed and organized - and/or I am so dumb - that I can't find one. 
   As luck (and modern journalism) would have it, Tabbi writes a blog. On Jan. 27 he offered an impassioned explanation for his relentless print pursuit of Wall Street miscreants, a post occasioned by a strange and poorly-argued anti-populism piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks.  
   For those who like to watch the sausages get made, Taibbi's Feb. 19 post details what he had to cut from the RS bailout piece for space reasons. He notes,  "...there is actually a more subtle story out there about the mutual dependency of our increasingly broke-ass, politically desperate government in Washington and their [sic] virtually insolvent partner-banks on Wall Street. I would like to get into that more in the future."  
   By all means, have at it. If not you, Matt Taibbi, then who? 

Taibbi, in excelsis

   (Style note: this post has no less than five hyperlinks. Not a single one is showing up in the final product. This has been true for other posts into which one has embedded, or whatever the correct term is, hyperlinks. They're there when the post first goes up, and then they disappear after a day. If readers have  suggestions as to how to address this, please leave them in the "comments" section. I'm counting on you, because the good people at Google-backed Blogger.com have failed, thus far, to fix this glitch, the -- and we mean this with love -- fucking assholes.)