One of Trump's defining characteristics is his absolute lack of loyalty to his surrogates. He is spring-loaded to betray anyone who supports him once they are no longer useful to him.

The same can be said for Xitter edgelord Elon Musk, a paranoid bully who demands absolute loyalty from others but does not offer the same in return. — Read the rest

Journalist Matt Taibbi made a name for himself in 2010 with his brutal takedown of the finance companies that orchestrated and profited from the crippling mortgage meltdown, which ran in Rolling Stone. His description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," has gone down in the annals of investigative journalism history. — Read the rest

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi (previously) is one of my favorite political writers, with the style chops of Hunter S Thompson, but without Thompson's often juvenile politics (Taibbi having outgrown that phase, something Thompson never managed to do).

The finances of the US armed forces have been in a state of near-continuous audit for decades and despite spending billions of dollars and thousands of person-years trying to make sense of what the military spends, we're no closer to an answer, and no one disputes that there are trillions of dollars' worth of unaccountable transactions (but importantly, not trillions of dollars in spending) that make it impossible to figure out whether and when and how the Pentagon is being ripped off, or wasting money, or both.

Chris Christie's got a new memoir, "Let Me Finish," and Matt Taibbi (previously), Rolling Stone's most incandescent and relentless writer, has done us all the mercy of reading Christie so we don't have to.

Matt Taibbi (previously) is in characteristically fine form here: the average Congressjerk is mythologized as a "brilliant 4-D chess player" but "would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla": they are only in office because "someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. — Read the rest

Matt Taibbi is one of the best political writers working in the USA today, someone who can use the small, novelistic details of individuals' lives illuminate the vast, systemic problems that poison our lives and shame our honor; his 2014 book The Divide conducts a wide-ranging inquiry into the impunity of corporate criminals and the kafkaesque injustices visited on the poor people they victimize; in I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, Taibbi narrows his focus to the police murder of Eric Garner, a Staten Island fixture and father, and the system that put murderers in uniform in his path.

Matt Taibbi (previously), the best, angriest Rolling Stone writer today, turns in the definitive column on Trump's death-spiral as the mercurial millionaire realizes that he isn't going to win, and starts to lash out.

Matt Taibbi's The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap is a scorching, brilliant, incandescent indictment of the widening gap in how American justice treats the rich and the poor. Taibbi's spectacular financial reporting for Rolling Stone set him out as the best running commentator on the financial crisis and its crimes, and The Divide -- beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple -- shows that at full length, he's even better. Cory Doctorow reviews The Divide.

Matt Taibbi is touring the States with his new book, The Divide, which is on my must-read list right after I finish Capital in the 21st Century. Rick Kleffel caught up with him for his San Francisco NPR show and posted the interview, along with his notes (which includes links to his previous interviews with Taibbi). — Read the rest

Rolling Stone's loss is Pierre Omidyar's gain. Matt Taibbi is joining First Look Media, the same organization where Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras are on the masthead at The Intercept— but Taibbi will lead his own publication focused on financial and political corruption. — Read the rest

Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone columnist who has produced better coverage of Wall Street corruption and government collusion than just about anyone, has a list of suggested demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement; as you'd expect from Taibbi, they're informed, uncompromising, and bang on target:

1.

As always, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is incandescent on the subject of high financial fraud and misdoings, and the government complicity in the vast criminal ripoffs engineered by the finance industry. In his latest feature, he looks at the way that the SEC, America's financial regulator, has combined "self-policing" of criminal finance firms with a policy of destroying all records of previous investigations to produce an world in which no one has been punished for the vast financial crimes that brought the world to its knees. — Read the rest

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: "She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger."

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

I've always admired Matt Taibbi's writing and I've followed his byline from his hilarious early efforts at The eXile, a Moscow-based free paper for ex-pat Americans to his stint at The NY Press, and now at Rolling Stone, where he's been published for some time. — Read the rest

Rolling Stone has a story about televangelist John Hagee's church, written by Matt Taibbi.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon.

NPR reports that the conservative Texas judge overseeing billionaire Elon Musk's lawsuit against Media Matters has been playing the stock market with Tesla shares.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who's been dishing out rulings left and right in Musk's favor, was trading Tesla stock in 2023 — the very same year Musk filed his lawsuit. — Read the rest

Today's must-read long-read is Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, with "How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it." A profile of the gangster bankers our government forgave.

At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi on right-wing efforts (yeah, including Breitbart) to turn the "Occupy Wall Street" movement into a liberal-left conspiracy. "Don't fall for it," he writes. (via Dan Gillmor)

"They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it."— — Read the rest