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Matt Taibbi sat down with Current TV's Eliot Spitzer to discuss the bipartisan debacle just passed by the Congress and signed by President Obama last week called the JOBS Act and the potential political fallout if this is made into an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.

Our own Jon Perr has been writing about what a terrible bill this was from the time it was introduced, when Eric Cantor was first pushing it on Fox News. Sadly, as Taibbi and Spitzer pointed out in the segment above, the law is going to effectively repeal about half of the meaningful rules that were put in place to prevent another bubble and all this did was take away what competitive advantage the stock market had in the United States because investors felt they could trust they were being told the truth about the companies they were investing in and their accounting methods.

Matt has more in his recent article at Rolling Stone here -- Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse:

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Matt Taibbi joined the set of Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. After weighing in on whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be playing right into the movement's hands with the upcoming move to try to clear Zuccoti Park, Taibbi discussed his recent article at Rolling Stone where he had some advice for those out there protesting.

My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters:

No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

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Keith Olbermann sat down with Matt Taibbi to discuss his latest article at Rolling Stone, Michele Bachmann's Holy War. As he noted in the article, a lot of people might be inclined to be dismissive of Bachmann because we view her as a "goofball" who no one should take seriously, but we do so at our peril.

As Matt discussed with Keith, unlike Sarah Palin, Bachmann actually loves and understands retail politics and likes getting out there and doing the hard work of campaigning, she's got a pretty formidable fundraising operation going, has hired the right campaign staff and she's moving up in the polls among a pretty large field of potential candidates right now.

I sincerely hope he's wrong, but this is a country that allowed George W. Bush to steal two elections, so I don't think anyone should dismiss Taibbi's warnings on Bachmann. As terrible as the current GOP field is, with the economy in the shape it is now and the fact that it doesn't look like it might be improving any time soon and with our complicit corporate media that won't tell voters the truth about much of anything, we take any of them too lightly at our peril.

You can read part of Matt's article here -- Michele Bachmann's Holy War:

The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard." Read on...

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Matt Taibbi has a new article on Rolling Stone on the recent hearings in the U.S. Senate and whether or not Goldman Sachs executives should be facing criminal trials or not in the wake of ongoing investigations into their part in the financial meltdown we went through a few years ago. CNN decided to bring in the Atlantic Monthly's Wall Street apologist Megan McArdle to debate Taibbi on Your Money.

I'm no financial expert and a lot of this stuff is over my head, but McArdle's arguments to me here seemed to be that all of these laws are just too terribly difficult to understand, therefore it's too difficult to figure out if they did anything wrong and to prosecute them, but the people they were selling these toxic assets to should have known better and understood what they were buying. Looks like a classic case of blame the victim to me.

FDL's TBogg weighed in on the segment here -- McBambi vs. Taibbzilla (Updated).

Mark Ames at AlterNet took her apart in this article -- Anti-Government Ideologue Megan McArdle's Amnesia About Her Privileged, Govt.-Funded Upbringing.

AlterNet's Chris Lehmann was critical of her glib dismissal of Taibbi's earlier reporting on Goldman Sachs here -- Matt Taibbi's Great Squid Hunt.

And Eric Salzman went into some specifics on why he disagreed with that same article of McArdle's -- Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On in his post here -- Taking Megan McArdle Apart - Part II.

So for any of you wonks on the financial industry out there, if you take issue with any of the articles I posted here, I welcome the input, because I'm not an expert on the financial industry and don't claim to be. That said, from a layman's perspective, what she did during this interview sure looked like a whole lot of apologizing for Goldman Sachs' behavior to me and exactly what CNN expected to get from her by bringing her on to counter Taibbi.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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MSNBC's Cenk Uygur talked to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi about his new article on Wall Street and the revolving door preventing any of them from being prosecuted -- Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?:

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's f**ked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's f**ked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

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The panel on the Fox News Watch, the weekend show on Fox News that claims to look for bias in the media, apparently isn't too happy with President Obama for telling Rolling Stone Magazine that their right wing propaganda network might not be so good for the country.

The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition... it is part of the tradition that has a very clear point of view. It's a point of view that I disagree with... It's a point of view that is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.

Jim Pinkerton immediately confuses Fox's propagandized viewers to Fox itself and pretends the president said their viewers are destructive to the country. He also manages to give two whole examples of some reporting he didn't like during that “golden age” from back in the 1930's and the 1960's from Walter Duranty and Daniel Schorr. Nothing like holding some old grudges there.

I find the gripe against Shorr particularly amusing since it's for a "hit piece" he did on Barry Goldwater. Here's how the right wing rag Newsbusters portrayed the story. Looking Back at Schorr’s Goldwater-Nazi Axis CBS Evening News Hit Piece. And here's how it was portrayed in his obit in the New York Times linked above.

Goldwater had held a grudge since 1964, when Mr. Schorr, while at CBS, reported on the enthusiasm of right-wing Germans for Goldwater as he secured the presidential nomination that year. Mr. Schorr noted that a planned postconvention Goldwater trip mainly involved time at an American military recreation center in Berchtesgaden, site of a favorite Hitler retreat.

Heaven forbid someone was doing some guilt by association in their reporting. We all know the "reporters" on Fox "News" would never do a thing like that.

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Last week, CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan blasted a Rolling Stone reporter whose report may have cost Gen. Stanley McChrystal his job as commander in Afghanistan. Jamie McIntyre, a former CNN reporter who covered the Pentagon for 16 years, slammed Logan's comments Sunday.

After Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings exposed inflammatory comments by McChrystal and his staff about the President Barack Obama and the civilian leadership, Logan suggested that it was the job of a reporter to cultivate the trust of sources by not reporting certain damaging remarks.

"Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has," she told CNN's Howard Kurtz.

In a blog posting, McIntyre took exception to Logan's comments. "In defending herself and her compatriots in the press corps, against charges they are too chummy with the military, Logan wounded them grievously with misaimed friendly fire. She unfortunately reinforced the worst stereotype of reporters who 'embed' with senior military officers but are actually 'in bed' with them," he wrote.

"The most damaging thing she said was when she made the comment disparaging Michael Hastings by referring to the fact that he hadn't served his country the way the military did," McIntyre told Kurtz Sunday.

"That comment fed this perception that we're more interested in protecting the members of the military than pursuing aggressive journalism and in that sense it was a very damaging comment to make," he said.

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Geraldo Rivera goes after Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for his reporting which led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and goes so far as to compare him to al Qaeda. This is coming from the same guy that the military kicked out of Iraq back in 2003 because he disclosed information about troop movements on the air. He made similar remarks earlier in the week on Fox when he appeared with KT McFarland when he said "whoever was in charge of putting that reporter with those soldiers in that context allowed a rat to be in an eagle's nest." More on that from Reason Magazne:

Losing the War in Afghanistan? Blame Rolling Stone, Suggests Geraldo Rivera:

And now some pundits are making the reporter, Michael Hastings, out to be the bad guy. [...]

True, there are strategic implications: We learned that the top general in Afghanistan surrounds himself with idiots. As KT McFarland points out in the video, public officials and their aides should know better than to make disparaging and derogatory remarks in front of reporters. Far from having jeopardized our mission in Afghanistan—which is what Rivera is implying—the Rolling Stone article reveals important details about the people McChrystal relied on. Like, for instance, the McChrystal aide who described a meeting with a French minister as "f**king gay." Does this sound like the best team to head a war effort where the U.S. needs to win the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

I suspect Rivera is probably just jealous that someone went out and did real reporting for a change. Other journalists are jealous, too. Check out Jon Stewart making fun of them here.

During this interview with O'Reilly, Geraldo rails on about how the soldiers remarks should have been considered "off the record", he claims that they didn't know they were beig interviewed, he accuses Rolling Stone Magazine of being just as dangerous as al Qaeda to the mission in Afghanistan and wanting to rush the story to press without checking with the military first and even O'Reilly who obviously hates Rolling Stone for the article they did about him has to call out Geraldo for going over the top.

O'Reilly tells him that Rolling Stone claims they ran the quotes by Gen. McChrystal and he allowed the story to go to print and Geraldo does a complete 180 and says he'll take the magazine at their word and then credits Gen. McChrystal for "not trying to sleaze away." I guess it was asking too much of Geraldo to maybe actually find out himself if the magazine cleared the story with the military first before he went on the air and accused their reporter of being akin to a terrorist.

Transcript below the fold.

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Jon Stewart takes a swipe at the media and their grave concern about why Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings got the access he did to Gen. McChrystal. Jason summed this up nicely over at the HuffPo.

Jon Stewart Mocks Media Reaction To Michael Hastings' Ability To Do Actual Journalism (VIDEO) [UPDATE]:

Rolling Stone's digital media strategy aside, I'm a bit dumbstruck at the way the traditional media have treated the magazine's story on General Stanley McChrystal as some sort of flukey journalistic junkshot that no one could have possibly expected.

Chris Matthews, bless his stuck-in-the-1970s heart, was agog this past Tuesday that a beacon of the "counterculture" could have ever gained access to McChrystal. I sort of wondered why the traditional media couldn't have done more, with all of their access!

So I was glad to see that "The Daily Show" took up the matter last night, with Jon Stewart mocking these past few days, in which "America's finest reporters" have been beside themselves with wonder at how a Rolling Stone reporter pulled off "reporting." Quipped Stewart: "At approximately 11:04 Eastern Standard Time, the American news media finally realized they kind of sucked."

And as Jason pointed out Jay Rosen has a great piece up about how Politico accidentally told the truth about being more concerned about access than actual journalism and then pulled it from the post.

The Politico Opens the Kimono. And then Pretends it Never Happened.:

As everyone who pays attention to the news knows by now, an article appeared in Rolling Stone this week by freelance reporter Michael Hastings that wound up forcing the resignation of General Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of American troops in Afghanistan. Hastings had been invited to hang out with McChrystal and his staff and was witness to their contempt for the civilian side of the war effort, which he reported on. It was a shock to everyone in Washington that McChrystal would make such a blunder, and the press began immediately to dissect it.

The Politico was so hopped up about the story that it took the extraordinary step of posting on its site a PDF of Rolling Stone’s article because Rolling Stone had not put it online fast enough. In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Now this seemed to several observers—and I was one—a reveal. Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to “burn bridges” with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down. Read on...

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Rick Sanchez seems shocked to learn that Wall Street's lobbyists out numbered the poor unpaid lobbyists working on the side of financial reform 1800 to 60. No big shock here. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi talked to Sanchez about that and the problems with the financial regulation reform bill that would be expected after that amount of intense lobbying on the Congress, such as not addressing to too big to fail and the derivatives market.

SANCHEZ: Now to this. You know how I feel as we have these conversations every day, and we talk about a lot of different things, you and I. But you know how I feel about conventional wisdom. As far as I'm concerned more often than not, you know, a quarter will buy you a blow pop. Conventional wisdom often will get you very little. More often than not it's more like conventional idiocy, as a matter of fact.

I want to bring in somebody who often tackles conventional wisdom as well. As you know, he works for the "Rolling Stone," Matt Taibbi. And he's writing now about this new financial reform that all of us have been reading and writing about that most have believed is the right thing to do that will salvage the situation on Wall Street and never let us have to go through what we've been through before, meaning what happened two and a half years ago.

He joins us now, and let me start -- let me start with this -- general question to you, Matt. If what they're doing is undoing the problem that led us to the meltdown itself, you know, putting back in the regulations that we needed, putting back in some of the laws we've gotten rid of, isn't that a good thing?

TAIBBI: It is, but they just didn't do enough of that. They really address add few things. There are some good things in this bill, but the really, really key thing, the big problems they left unaddressed or they did a half-measures or quarter measures, and they didn't really tackle the problems head-on.

The key things are too big to fail, they didn't really fix that problem, and they didn't really solve the derivatives issue very well.

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