Category: Hack Journalism

Demonstrating Why Matt Taibbi is the Only Credible Big Name Financial Reporter………

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Case in point, perhaps the highest profile financial reporter in the United States, the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who has gotten the vapors over Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street:

Wall Street stenographer Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times complains this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making it harder for Wall Street veterans to take on government jobs overseeing the financial industry, calling the former Harvard law professor and longtime industry critic “misinformed” in her opposition to investment banker Antonio Weiss’ nomination to a key Treasury Department post.

Weiss, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, is currently head of global investment banking at Lazard, which advised Burger King on its merger with Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons — a so-called inversion that will help Burger King avoid taxes. Warren cited Lazard’s work on inversions in explaining her opposition to Weiss’ nomination, but Sorkin contends that her concerns are “misplaced.” Sure, tax avoidance may have been “a consideration” in the BK-Tim Hortons deal, Sorkin concedes, but they weren’t the “primary factor.” At any rate, Weiss was “simply as one of several advisers” of the merger — hardly its mastermind.

Sorkin — who has criticized some inversions in the past — apparently finds no fault with the Obama administration seeking to enlist Weiss even as it pledges to crack down on corporate tax avoidance schemes.

While the inversion issue formed the crux of Sorkin’s substantive defense of Weiss, Warren has also pointed to the nominee’s financial industry background as a broad concern in itself.

Sorkin has been thoroughly captured by the financial industry, and he cannot be trusted to report on wrongdoing in the financial industry.

It could be argued that his role never was to reporting on wrongdoing, but instead his job is to document the official actions of the banking sector.

He reports on things like mergers, interviews CEOs, etc.

Of course, if that IS is real role, he is not a journalist. He is a stenographer.

Tommy Franks Needs to Apologize to Douglas Feith

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Because it appears that the good Mr. Feith appears not to be the dumbest guy on the f%$#ing planet.

Rather, it appears everyone at Breitbart’s research/fact-checking department are way stupider:

Members of the conservative media are attempting to scandalize President Obama’s Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch by suggesting she was involved in the Whitewater investigations of the 1990s. However, the Loretta Lynch that played a bit role in Whitewater — an investigation into fraudulent real estate deals that did not include any wrongdoing by the Clintons — is a different person than Obama’s attorney general nominee.

According to a November 8 Breitbart.com article by Warner Todd Huston, “few are talking about” the fact nominee Lynch “was part of Bill Clinton’s Whitewater probe defense team in 1992.” Huston pointed to a March 1992 New York Times article that “reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons’ Whitewater defense attorneys as well as a ‘campaign aide.'” And in a November 9 article Huston’s colleague, Breitbart.com Senior Editor-at Large Joel Pollak wrote, “The connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch’s confirmation hearings”:

The connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch’s confirmation hearings. It is odd that Obama chose someone so close to the Clintons–or perhaps not, given the prominent role played by Clinton insider John Podesta in the second term of the Obama White House. Lynch has been rewarded throughout her career for her political loyalty–not an unusual path up the career ladder for federal prosecutors, but certainly one that will allow the GOP, as well as Obama, to raise the political stakes.

Because it is so easy to confuse the two:

Morons.

That place must have even been more dysfunctional before Andrew Breitbart drank himself.

Chuck Todd is Toast

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On Meet the Press yesterday, newly minted host Chuck Todd interviewed Barack Obama.

It did not go well:

As he says, you’ve got to be on it, paying attention to every word. Watch him nail Chuck for missing four separate mentions of Syria before telling the President he hasn’t heard him mention Syria.

Chuck Todd has just sounded the death knell of his gig as a host.

I give him 6 months.

Hostility and criticism is one thing, but I do not think that NBC News can deal with his being a punch line.

It’s not gonna end when Letterman retires, because Stephen Colbert is replacing him.

It’s kind of like Joe Biden said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” of Rudy Giuliani.

What Dan Froomkin Says

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He asks the obvious question, why when we are looking at going back to war in Iraq, why have all of the discussions about this been about the politics, and not the merit, of the decision:

President Obama has started describing his new strategy to confront the Islamic State, and despite it being a mishmash of wishful thinking and perpetual militarism, the focus of the Washington elites in the press and elsewhere has been almost entirely on the optics: Is he overcoming the perception that he wasn’t doing enough? What will the political reaction be?

The question we should be asking, as I noted on Friday, is: Why the hell does he think it has any chance of working?

………

His plan calls for stepped-up airstrikes, inevitably leading to civilian casualties; for the kind of Middle-Eastern diplomatic needle-threading that has consistently eluded him in the past; for a political miracle in Iraq; and, despite all the precedent to the contrary, for American-trained indigenous military forces that actually fight.

Despite all the cause for skepticism, however, the press coverage of his remarks was largely stenographic — with the aforementioned overlay of politics and optics.

This is the discussions that we get when Obama is talking about involving us in a war that will last at least 3 years.

Seriously.

We’re going to war again, for an extended period, and all that anyone appears to be concerned about is the f%$#ing optics:

All that leaves me pondering this question: Is Obama’s new plan something he genuinely believes in? Or does he recognize it’s stupid, and is just doing it for the optics?

There’s a dismal precedent for the latter option: His decision to extend what he knew was a dead-end war in Afghanistan for two years because of the bellicose promises he’d made in order to look tough during his first political campaign. That time, he traded about 1,300 American lives for optics.

Who knows what the trade might be this time?

You know, Obama’s sated foreign policy philosophy, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” appears to be in abeyance, and this is not a good thing.

Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel

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Noted intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian, who has written on intelligence issues for both the LA Times and Associated Press, has been revealed to have pre cleared his stories with the CIA:

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events. Reporters who have addressed the CIA include the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, the former ombudsmen for the New York Times, NPR, and Washington Post, and Fox News’ Brett Baier, Juan Williams, and Catherine Herridge.

The money quote on this is, “Of course, journalists routinely curry favor with government sources (and others) by falsely suggesting that they intend to amplify the official point of view. But the emails show that Dilanian really meant it.”

Read the rest, but basically, not only did act as a CIA stooge, he uncritically regurgitated CIA lies about things like civilian drone strike casualties.

H/t Gawker.

It’s a Gang Sign, He’s Black. QED

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It appears that both CNN and the right wing twitterverse think that any hand gesture by a black man is a gang symbol:

Today in Ferguson, Mo., news, The Washington Post takes on the assertion that Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson has been photographed flashing gang signs with members of the community.

He has not.

To reiterate: Capt. Johnson is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity that was formed in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, and the hand sign you see in the pictures below is a Kappa greeting. The Kappas are part of the Divine Nine or the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the nine historically black fraternities and sororities that include Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Alpha Phi Alpha, Omega Psi Phi, Phi Beta Sigma, Zeta Phi Beta, Sigma Gamma Rho and Iota Phi Theta, none of which are gangs.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, a back man is President, so there is no more racism in society.

Make the stupid stop. Please.

Why I Don’t Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity

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The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks:

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?

Charlie Pierce on a Rant is a Thing of Beauty

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In a post entitled, “Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Mainline Antifreeze, Part The Infinity,” he takes on Politico‘s hosting a fete of, and then writing a fawning article about Papa Dick and Baby Dick Cheney:

Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d’erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.

It goes on, and most of it near the perfection of, “He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.“

Read the rest of it, and then someone please nominate Mr. Pierce for a Pulitzer.

Who Says That Irony is Dead?

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Remember the now debunked story about Senator Bob Menendez and a Dominican Prostitute from Tucker Carlson’s so-called news site Daily Caller?

Well, it turns out that they were not making it all up. The Daily Caller was used as a stooge for an intelligence operation carried out by Cuba:

Sen. Robert Menendez is asking the Justice Department to pursue evidence obtained by U.S. investigators that the Cuban government concocted an elaborate plot to smear him with allegations that he cavorted with underage prostitutes, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In a letter sent to Justice Department officials, the senator’s attorney asserts that the plot was timed to derail the ­political rise of Menendez (D-N.J.), one of Washington’s most ardent critics of the Castro regime. At the time, Menendez was running for reelection and was preparing to assume the powerful chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

According to a former U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of government intelligence, the CIA had obtained credible evidence, including Internet protocol addresses, linking Cuban agents to the prostitution claims and to efforts to plant the story in U.S. and Latin American media.

The alleged Cuba connection was laid out in an intelligence report provided last year to U.S. government officials and sent by secure cable to the FBI’s counterintelligence division, according to the former official and a second person with close ties to Menendez who had been briefed on the matter.

The intelligence information indicated that operatives from Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence helped create a fake tipster using the name “Pete Williams,” according to the former official. The tipster told FBI agents and others he had information about Menendez participating in poolside sex parties with underage prostitutes while vacationing at the Dominican Republic home of Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor, donor and friend of the senator.

A spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which functions as the island’s U.S. diplomatic outpost, did not respond to requests for comment.

The allegations against Menendez erupted in public in November 2012, when the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, quoted two Dominican women claiming Menendez had paid them for sex.

The FBI investigated the prostitution claims but was unable to corroborate them. Last year, three Dominican women who had initially claimed to reporters that they had been paid to have sex with Menendez recanted their story.

BTW, the inestimable Charlie Pierce notes some additional irony here.

You noticed the name of the source that misled Tucker Carlson and His Evil Minions™?

Well, the name Pete Williams has a history:

And, it appears that the Cuban spooks may well have a more finely honed sense of humor than we previously have noticed. Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a senator from New Jersey named Harrison Williams.Senator Williams was a Democrat of decent instincts,but he also was something of a grab-it-all and, one day, a phony Arab sheikh in the employ of the FBI dropped in on him with some money the sheikh said he’d like to share in exchange for Williams’s help in buying the output of a defunct titanium mine. This bit of American Hustle landed forced Williams to resign from the Senate and landed him in the federal sneezer for three years.

As it happens, because his given name was Harrison Arlington Williams, Jr., his friends all called the senator, “Pete.”

“Pete Williams.”

Well-played, Cuban spies. Very well-played indeed.

I think that I can authoritatively state that the schadenfreude drought is officially over.

Michael Kinsley Comes Out in Favor of Stalinism

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In a New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, Kinsley declares that it must be the government, and not the journalist, who determines when a sensitive information can be published:

The trouble is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to “use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly — but are you? And even if you do trust Greenwald’s judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

This is not a problem, this is a free press, and one of the consequences of this is that stuff that the government does not want to be pubic knowledge will be public knowledge.

Shorter Michael Kinsley, “Journalism, Schmournalism, we need better stenographers.”

H/t Gawker.

The Washington Post has Done the Impossible

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In rewriting an OP/Ed contributed by Ramesh Ponnuru, some as yet unamed editor has actually lowered the quality of the indicted right wing pundit’s writing.

Speaking to the universal desire of the right wing to excise the memory of Abraham Lincoln from our recent memory, he wrote in the Post that we should go back to calling it Washington’s Birthday.  (I am old enough to remember when both Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were both holidays, and not spot welded together), and some nameless editor at the paper changed his words in a fairly significant way:

“Getting rid of President’s Day would not be difficult. All we would have to do is start calling the third Monday of February by its proper name under federal law: Washington’s Birthday. That’s the practice state governments and advertisers ought to follow.” The version the Post ended up running struck the third sentence and replaced the second with ”All we would have to do is designate the third Monday of February to mark George Washington’s Birthday.”

As an aside, I had a fair number of discussions about the writing business with science fiction author and editor Ben Bova, and noted that when he was editor-in-chief at Omni,* he had to fire a number of editors who refused to stop rewriting stuff. (He makes a distinction with minor copy edits, and the editor asking for changes from the authors)

Whoever made this change should be fired.  Period.  Full Stop.

*I am not sure if this was an issue during his stint at Analog Science Fiction, but I got the impression that it was less of an issue, probably because the editors were less likely to be frustrated writer English majors.

Times Ombud Calls Out Shoddy Financial Reporting

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The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticizes their coverage of Bank of America’s latest financial results, because they completely ignored the massive fines for fraud:

Reading The Times’s coverage of Bank of America’s quarterly loss last week, I almost felt sorry for the financial behemoth. It has mortgage troubles, you see. It has onerous legal costs.

“The disappointing news shows how Bank of America is still paying for its mortgage problems nearly six years after the financial crisis,” the article said.

I thought of sending a small check to help or at least conveying my sympathy.

I really should have remembered what this is all about because it was only last month that Bank of America settled a lawsuit that claimed the bank had committed mortgage fraud. The cost of the settlement? More than $9 billion. Bank of America was one of the banks that sold mortgage securities backed by subprime mortgages, which went south during the housing and financial crises – in many cases driving American consumers into financial ruin.

Some Times readers wrote to me about it, pointing out that there was more to the story. They hadn’t forgotten what happened, it seemed. Jamison Wilcox, for example, noted in an email that he was “dismayed to see the term ‘legal costs’ given a vague and euphemistic meaning – and repeated in a headline – as a short replacement for the specific identification of monies paid out … as a legal consequence of wrongful conduct by a corporation or bank.”

………

The language certainly isn’t overheated. In fact, nowhere in this article is there any straightforward mention of what really caused these legal troubles and costs.

It says only this: “At the heart of the additional legal expenses was a $6.3 billion settlement that the bank announced last month to settle a lawsuit arising from troubled mortgage-backed securities it bundled and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the financial crisis.” (The bank also agreed to buy back $3.2 billion in mortgage securities, bringing the penalties to $9.5 billion.)

Bundles and troubles and costs, yes. Fraud accusations, not so much.

I do not think that this will make a difference, though.

The Stupidest Political Scandal of the Season (So Far)

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Seriously, why the hell does anyone care if a candidate for the US Congress in Florida does vampire LARP?

An attorney challenging first-term Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) moonlights as a live-action vampire role-player, according to a Florida political news site.

 SaintPetersBlog on Tuesday detailed Jake Rush’s involvement in the Mind’s Eye Society, a national community of live-action role-players. Rush played a host of supernatural characters — “Chazz Darling” and “Staas van der Winst” were just two of his alter-egos — and kept up an active presence on the Camarilla Wiki Project, a Wikipedia-like website that allowed role-players to share content.

 Business Insider also reported that Rush appears to have held a prominent position with a Florida-based group called the “Covenant of the Poisoned Absinthe,” which stages “an assortment of games from White Wolf’s selection, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Lost, and Mage: The Awakening.” White Wolf publishes live-action role-playing games for the Mind’s Eye community.

Seriously.

Why does anyone give a f%$# about this?

This Takedown is Worthy of Matt Taibbi

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On The Baffler Alex Pareene systematically demolishes New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin’s dealings, and double dealings with, the finance industry:

The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.

 How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.

 Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCormicks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.

 Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.

 ………

 In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture:

DealBook caters to a high-level audience of C-Suite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.

The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible:

Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.

So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.

And then there is this delicious bit:

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

This is really a thing of beauty.

Read the whole thing.

I am adding Alex Pareene to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”

Pass the F%$#ing Popcorn

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There are now rumors that former Congressman and current MSNBC journalistic impersonater Joe Scarborough is considering a run for President:

This is only slightly less embarrassing than engaging with a rumor about Donald Trump, how do they say, “mulling a presidential bid,” so let’s start with an apology: I’m sorry. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the lowly business of the day. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s wake-up chat show “Morning Joe,” is “mulling a presidential bid,” according to a couple of anonymous people and Mark McKinnon, who spoke to Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website. What a world.

Even without the inevitability of some Republican Karl Rove wannabee making an issue of Lori Klausutis, his candidacy would make the Freddie Dalton Thompson clown look like the Obama campaign.

BTW, that rumbling you feel is not an earthquake.  It is the writing staff of The Daily Show frantically high fiving each other. 

Pravda on the Potomac Blames Ukraine For Enacting U.S. Like Laws

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The Washington Post is criticizing the Yanukovych government in the Ukraine for laws that exist in their hometown without any comment:

The lunatics writing the Washington Post editorials want to blame the Ukraine (and the Russian president Putin) for its remarkable patient defense against the foreign supported, neo-nazi vandals of the Svoboda party who try to storm and take over government buildings in Kiev.
One paragraph especially shows their unmatched hypocrisy:

The repressive new restrictions, which criminalize such activity as wearing helmets and setting up tents in public spaces, look a lot like the strategy the Russian ruler used to crush mass demonstrations against his regime in 2011 and 2012. Mr. Yanukovych even adopted the regulation Russia imposed on nongovernment groups that receive foreign funding — a product of Mr. Putin’s paranoid conviction that pro-democracy movements in his country and elsewhere are the result of Western government plots.

Wearing helmets and masks at demonstrations has been unanimously criminalized by the D.C. Council in the Washington Post’s hometown. Tents set up in public spaces by the Occupy movement have been outlawed and cleared by force all over the United States. The Russian and Ukrainian laws that regulate foreign money to political organisations are copies of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act which is law of the land since 1938.

(emphasis original)

There is very little difference between how the Ukraine is using law as an instrument for crushing political protest, and how the United States s using law as an instrument for crushing political protest.

OK, I Get That This Guy Was Scum Who Ripped off the EPA

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But it seems that every story is some variant of, “EPA reels as climate-change expert awaits sentencing for $1m CIA fraud.”

This is simply not true.  Not the “fraud” part, nor the “EPA” part, nor the “CIA”, part, they are all true:

It is a story that flummoxed investigators – how a highly paid climate-change expert at the Environmental Protection Agency managed to defraud the government of nearly $1m, by pretending for a decade to be an undercover CIA agent.

John Beale, 65, is to undergo sentencing in a DC federal court on Wednesday, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of $900,000 in salary and other benefits. Beale, who used his ruse to disappear for months at a time, has agreed to pay some $1.3m in restitution. He faces up to three years in jail.

The scandal could rebound against the current administrator of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, and her efforts to carry out President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda. Last week, an official investigation found that she knew of the fraud for more than a year. Other officials who worked with Beale at the agency are under investigation and in a report last week, the EPA inspector general said senior agency officials had “enabled” Beale by failing to challenge any of his stories or expense claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Beale, who retired last April after learning he was under investigation, earned salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, far more than his supervisors. His fraud consisted largely of failing to turn up for work – in one instance for 18 months – and offering excuses connected to his fake intelligence role at the CIA.

(emphasis mine)

It’s the “climate change expert” bit that is wrong.  He’s not a scientist, his background in public affairs and law, with a Master’s Degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Law Degree from New York University (PDF, and here is the Google cache if they purge it).

Yes, this sh%$ is mind boggling, but this guy managed (when he was actually, like, you know, there) the office.

But every story that I’ve seen has something like, “Lead Scientist,” or “Lead Expert.”

Still, engineering what is in effect a no show job for over a decade is a pretty remarkable bit of bureaucratic Jiujitsu.