Dylan Ratigan and Matt Taibbi, Consiglieri to Occupy DC

(Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)

Ann Althouse highlights the exchange of emails between MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan and occupiers of Washington.  Here is the email stream.  Also included in this set of emails is one with advice from Matt Taibbi, currently of Rolling Stone and Men's Journal.

Althouse seems to take umbrage in Ratigan's alleged violation of a reporter's requisite "objectivity".  But anyone who has watched Ratigan on MSNBC knows that he is a major purveyor of his opinions in rants of famously interminable length.  There is no pretense of objectivity, just his insistence on stating his own brilliant positions for the edification of the great unwashed, ie. everyone else.

Taibbi, described by Wikipedia as a "polemical journalist", is also clearly not objective.  According to Wiki, he also has a history of physical explosiveness when encountering resistance to his "truth telling".

Regardless of both mens' predisposition to support the Occupy movement, it is a fascinating insight into what are probably the normal back and forth between such advocacy reporters and many of the subjects of their "reporting".  It should come as a shock to no one that many journalists regularly tailor the presentation of their "subjects" to maximize the effectiveness of their "journalistic" oeuvre.

Steve Jobs, Creator of Beautiful Technology

I bought an Apple IIe in the early 80's.  It was a thing of beauty, opening up a whole new world of possibility.  But, my God, how primitive it was by today's standards!  The first time I touched an iPhone and experienced the magic of its interface I had another WOW moment.  By coincidence, today I ordered an iPad 2.  I had been thinking about buying another tablet, but after seeing one in a hotel bar over the weekend, I again fell in love with the thing.  What a peculiar and wondrous ability the man possessed.  He knew intuitively how the look and feel of a thing could stir the heart as well as the mind.

Steve Jobs will be missed.  He was one of a kind.  America is poorer for his going, but how marvelous to have shared his time on the planet.

Sara Finally Cashes In Her Chips

The jig is finally up for Ms. Palin.  The time had come when she either had to piss or get off the pot.  As I've believed she would for many months, she chose the later.

The Times reports:

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, ended her inscrutable cat-and-mouse game with the political establishment on Wednesday afternoon by saying that she would not join the field of Republican candidates seeking her party’s nomination, but would still work to oust President Obama.

What Rough Beast Indeed

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    
Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    
The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


William Butler Yeats, 1919

While we are not in anything like the bloodbath of World War I, there is the strong whiff of chaos in the air.  It made me think of Yeats' great poem.