Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

Well, except the wingnuts. fuck those guys!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

This really is a full service blog.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

This is how realignments happen…

People are complicated. Love is not.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

I don’t care how fun he is after a few whiskies. fuck that guy.

This blog will pay for itself.

The math demands it!

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

What fresh hell is this?

This is a big f—–g deal.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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Reader Interactions

146Comments

  2. 2.

    JonathanE

    Did you say something? I’m sorry, I was too busy drinking a highball while getting a deep tissue massage next to my olympic size swimming pool.

  3. 3.

    MikeJ

    I don’t understand. Someone whose work I don’t value has a large house. I’m guessing everyone on the fucking Yankees has a large house too.

  4. 4.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Was this before or after Wifey’s Daddy’s company got bought up cheap by its main rival?

    Actually, I think I read that even after the crash, Mrs F’s stake in General Properties (isn’t that it?) was worth 25 million

  6. 6.

    soonergrunt

    Well, at least we know where he keeps all the arab taxi drivers chained up for when he needs one for a quick, impromptu discussion that confirms his worldview. Right there in the basement of the lower left corner.

  8. 8.

    Bob L

    Seems a little over the top for a columnist doesn’t it? Sure he one of the top ones but still.

  10. 10.

    Sharl

    Some years ago (approx. 17 FUs, IIRC), I was chatting with my cab driver – a foreign-born gentleman wise in the ways of the world – when he gave me a tip on this fine bit of real estate.

    Third world cabbies rawk!

    /Tommie “suck on this” Friedman

  20. 20.

    John Cole

    Why does everyone keep saying Taibbi is taboo or controversial here? I think every one of the front pagers loves us some Taibbi. I don’t always agree with him, but I always like reading him.

  23. 23.

    HyperIon

    @Bob L: Seems a little over the top for a columnist doesn’t it? Sure he one of the top ones but still.

    wifey has lots o’money. less than before but still.

  24. 24.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @John Cole: It’s the usual “but he’s no Hunter S.” stuff. Probably because it seems like he tries to be relatively sober when he’s writing.

  25. 25.

    HumboldtBlue

    This should come as no surprise. As pointed out above, he married the heiress to the realty company that used to own our local mall. That company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

  28. 28.

    The Moar You Know

    In the not-so-distant future, with unemployment at 40%, when I am roaming the wilds of the United States, starving, looking for food, I will arrive at Mr. Friedman’s doorstep with an offer he won’t refuse; I’ll clean his pool and feed him bon mots for his columns for the privilege of eating the scraps from his garbage cans.

    All will go well for a few weeks, until at a pre-arranged time and date, I’ll open the security gates for my friends, a mob of starving, angry mohawked-up space punks on motorcycles, and we’ll rob and burn his estate and use his head for a soccer ball.

    For a dose of irony, we’ll leave his Lexus burning, upside down, in an olive grove somewhere.

  32. 32.

    Martin

    Uh oh, Cole forgot to feed Tunch:

    A West Virginia Air National Guard officer says a Navy helicopter has gone down during a joint training exercise
    …
    Gilliam says it’s unclear what caused the accident in a remote, hilly area.

  33. 33.

    CanadaGoose

    Book royalties bought that. NOT what he gets as a columnist. (Though of course, the column set up the contract for the books.)

  35. 35.

    MikeJ

    that’s not a house. that’s a compound.

    Not even close to a compound. The only other building is a small pool house. It’s a large house, but not even monstrously large by the standards of people with that much money.

    Heck, houses in that neighbourhood go from 1.3 to about 2.5, according to zillow. That’s not the price range of the super rich.

  38. 38.

    Bob L

    @Mark S.:

    Holy John McCain!

    Clearly I need to got find some heiress to shack up with. This relying on my own testicles and work ethic is just so quaintly 20th Century these days. I need to be a kept man.

  39. 39.

    carlos the dwarf

    @robertdsc:

    A family friend has a house about half that size–it’s still quite big. He’s turned the first floor into a private museum of early American design, which he sometimes opens to graduate students in relevant disciplines. Other possibilities include a bed and breakfast, a library, or a brothel.

  40. 40.

    J.W. Hamner

    Honestly, if I had Friedman money I would buy an island and set it up like a Bond villain hideout. Frankly I’m a little disappointed in his lack of imagination. Nice looking house though.

  42. 42.

    Church Lady

    I wonder how many kilowatts get burned in that particular palace…… Guess conserving energy is for me, not for thee. Right, Tommy?

  43. 43.

    Bitty

    @Mark S.:

    The Wikipedia link reveals the interesting fact that Mrs. Friedman’s maiden name is Bucksbaum.

    If it were fiction, it would be totally implausible.

  44. 44.

    gbear

    @robertdsc:

    I have no idea what I would do with that much space.

    I worked as a drafter at a firm that designed high-end housing. One of the clients kept adding rooms to the house and the Architect finally descibed one of the extra rooms as ‘another place to sit and feel small’. I loved that line.

    Friedman: what a fucker.

    edit: gawd, you can tell I work in architecture. I capitalized ‘architect’. I’m so sorry…

  45. 45.

    drew42

    Hey! I know whose house that is without even checking.

    The Mustachioed One’s multi-gazillion dollar estate was discussed somewhere else fairly recently, around the time his in-law’s family fortune took a big hit.

  46. 46.

    Napoleon

    I am surprised no one mentioned this but Simon Properties made an unsolicited bid for his wife’s families company yesterday (or maybe the day before and I just saw it hit the papers yesterday). They say it is to low but it will be interesting what happens.

  47. 47.

    Fergus Wooster

    @John Cole:

    Why does everyone keep saying Taibbi is taboo or controversial here?

    Noted, and apologies – I’ve just seen some particularly heated discussions on his Wall Street coverage. Usually with some “he’s no Hunter Thompson”, or “he’s trying to be H.S.” subtext.

    I keep trying to insert – he has never intended to be a Thompson. He’s always envisioned himself as a follower of Mencken. Whether he lives up to that or not, it’s a completely different reference point.

    I’ve been a loyal admirer ever since his “Wolf Blitzer in the bread truck, swearing he’ll take it all back” column in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

  48. 48.

    ellaesther

    @robertdsc: I know. That’s where my mind always goes when I see these enormous places. I seem to recall that Candy Spelling had a room dedicated to wrapping presents. To which I could only go: Wha?

    Though, having said that, I wouldn’t mind a bigger kitchen…. Hey, I’m an expert on Israel/Palestine, and make more sense than Friedman does when he pulls his I/P expert card! Someone owes me a damn kitchen!

  49. 49.

    gwangung

    @Kevin Phillips Bong: well, who IS Hunter S. Thompson nowadays? A) There’s considerable amount of room between Thomspon and competent. B) Being competent is like being a supernova compared to the usual dregs that practice journalism on the national scene (and they need to practice some more because they surely don’t have it right).

  50. 50.

    Bas-O-Matic

    Not to be a killjoy or anything, but I was able to use the information in that picture to find Friedman’s house on Google Maps.

    Just Sayin’

  51. 51.

    demkat620

    So let me get this straight, that’s Friedman’s house, his wife is a mega mall heiress, he’s a multimillion dollar author and he’s riding around in taxies in third world countries and nobody has question that before?

    Yeah right. His wife’s lawyers let that happen? Discard the whole Ransom of Red Chief vibe, but seriously nobody worries about that possibility?

  52. 52.

    MikeJ

    Zillow :
    Zestimate $4,410,500
    Monthly Payment: $18,771
    Baths: 8.5
    Sqft: 11,420
    Lot: 326,825
    Built: 2003
    Heating system: Other

    (address left out, but it ain’t hard to find. I used to date a girl in his ‘hood.)

  53. 53.

    ellaesther

    @Fergus Wooster: He bugs the crap out of me! But I don’t think I’m the person you’re thinking of…. Also, I wouldn’t ever call any writer “taboo,” if I were Queen. You know, open dialogue and your whatnot.

    But alas, I am not Queen. The world, she is too cruel!

  55. 55.

    gbear

    @ellaesther:

    Hey, I’m an expert on Israel/Palestine, and make more sense than Friedman does when he pulls his I/P expert card! Someone owes me a damn kitchen sugar daddy!

    Closer to the truth in Friedman-world.

  56. 56.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @ellaesther: Ah, but you aren’t a serious I/P expert, see. If you were a serious I/P expert, you’d have a column in a major newspaper, you’d have written serious books that serious people read, and you’d have a Seriously Big Fucking House to live in, see.

  59. 59.

    Fergus Wooster

    @ellaesther:
    Never said taboo! Not “taboo”! Merely “controversial”!!

    I don’t think that was offsides – many things are controversial here. Including his Wall Street coverage.

    I’m more or less in his camp, as he has more insights in one of his profanity-laden columns than the drier coverage you get in, say, the NYT. Although I concede to the controversy of his trillion-dollar nominal figures.

    Although seriously, that is a hazard of big-picture financial reporting – you have no publicly-available figures on combined private and public obligations that have been netted or marked-to-market. The notional amounts are all you have to work with.

  61. 61.

    asiangrrlMN

    Repeat from the previous thread:

    By the way, someone here linked to the Esquire article on Roger Ebert. I can’t remember who linked it, but thank you so much. I really like Ebert, and this article was poignant and beautiful.

    @Mike E: Ha! He wears pie so very well. Me likey!

  62. 62.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Knowing that he married into wealth is far better if you ask me, If I thought that he lived like that off writing those inanely incomprehensible books I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.


    This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.”

    One of the most biting, well-written take downs I’ve read, from any century.

    I get that some people don’t like Taibbi’s style or politics, but people who claim “he can’t write” are just kidding themselves. If even that.

  64. 64.

    Fergus Wooster

    @inkadu:
    No it doesn’t. At least I bloody hope not, as does the Missus.

    It still doesn’t compare to the earlier one he wrote, confessing that when Taibbi had had a drug problem, he’d call the NYT office staff and pretend to be Friedman ranting about his parking space. “The Wildebeest of Freedom and the Mongoose of Discontent”. Classic.

  65. 65.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Fergus Wooster: Sorry I hadn’t seen your post. At least I posted a companion article instead of the one you did.

    Just reading this one again and marveling, not to mention laughing out loud:

    Moreover, Friedman’s book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author’s metaphors.

  66. 66.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @asiangrrlMN:

    By the way, someone here linked to the Esquire article on Roger Ebert. I can’t remember who linked it, but thank you so much. I really like Ebert, and this article was poignant and beautiful.

    Thanks, asiangrrlMN, for linking again. (I think it was actually John who mentioned it originally, but am not sure now.) Anyhow, I had made a mental note to look for it and then of course I forgot to do so until your reminder. Looking forward to reading it at leisure. I do love Ebert.

  67. 67.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @gwangung: I see his journalism as more a reportage of what an event “felt” like, more than what actually happened. Ether binges tend to make a hash of your notetaking. Like Fergus Wooster says, Taibbi leans more toward Mencken who I think would have said “f8ck” just as much if it were the vernacular of the day. And yes, few of today’s practitioners of “journalism” are more than stenographers copying down what those in charge tell them is important.

  69. 69.

    inkadu

    @Fergus Wooster: I’m reading his stuff at the NY Press. I’ve moved from arousal to love. I’m going to slip into something comfortable, pour myself a glass of wine, and spend the evening with Matt.

    Ok, so, now am I gay?

    He does seem a bit larger than life, though. Maybe he can be the Gen X Hunter S. I can’t remember giving a shit about individual journalists since Molly Ivins.

  70. 70.

    maus

    @The Moar You Know:

    In the not-so-distant future, with unemployment at 40%, when I am roaming the wilds of the United States, starving, looking for food, I will arrive at Mr. Friedman’s doorstep with an offer he won’t refuse; I’ll clean his pool and feed him bon mots for his columns for the privilege of eating the scraps from his garbage cans. All will go well for a few weeks, until at a pre-arranged time and date, I’ll open the security gates for my friends, a mob of starving, angry mohawked-up space punks on motorcycles, and we’ll rob and burn his estate and use his head for a soccer ball. For a dose of irony, we’ll leave his Lexus burning, upside down, in an olive grove somewhere.

    God, I have a friend who worked on one of the Fallout games. I wish I had thought of that plot point to beg him to include, ghoul manservant and all.

  71. 71.

    Violet

    This only makes me hate him more. I wish a crowd with pitchforks and torches would show up and storm the gates. Bastille time, baby.

    I wonder if a cab driver would give him a heads up if the pitchfork-n-torch crowd were on the way?

  75. 75.

    Gwangung

    @Kevin Phillips Bong: Yeah. I’m not saying he’s crap and i’m not saying he’s the pinnacle of journalistc practice. Being very good is it’s own reward (and doesn’t prevent you from making mistakes or taking bad approaches to a particular subject).

  76. 76.

    JK

    @asiangrrlMN:

    Hi,

    Thanks for linking to that great article on Roger Ebert again.

    I would have bet dollars to donuts that the house in question belonged to Maureen Dowd.

  78. 78.

    maus

    @Violet:

    I wonder if a cab driver would give him a heads up if the pitchfork-n-torch crowd were on the way?

    That assumes that the jolly little people he interacts with (but only in transit) ever escape his head.

  79. 79.

    Brian J

    I don’t really care what sort of house he lives in, even though it’s probably wasteful as far as energy use goes.

    What I want to know is why he charges $75,000 a speech. I mean, despite being off base at times, he seems like a reasonably smart person, but he doesn’t really have academic expertise in any particular area. He’s not a famous military general or businessman. He’s not a movie star or band member. Or better yet, who in their right mind is paying him $75,000 a speech?

  81. 81.

    FlipYrWhig

    Taibbi is horrible and self-important and his writing blows (invective is easy), but at least he has good taste in enemies. And Friedman is much, much worse, and his writing blows worse, and he causes actual damage in the actual world.

  82. 82.

    Fergus Wooster

    @inkadu:

    I’m reading his stuff at the NY Press. I’ve moved from arousal to love.

    It’s really pretty good stuff, right up until the “diary of a collaborator” and “40 funny things about the upcoming death of the pope”, which I still found a little funny.

    All of the Friedman stuff is gold. And the Stalinist fantasies about the death of our punditocracy, platinum.

  83. 83.

    Rock

    Seen it. Wouldn’t want to clean it.

    But since the world is flat and crowded I wouldn’t be surprised if Friedman’s outsourcing policies have doing just that soon….

  84. 84.

    Kevin K.

    @John Cole: I still like Taibbi, but I liked his writing a lot better before he became an economist. I miss stuff like this when he was undercover as a Bush volunteer in ’04:

    In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn’t vote. He didn’t make any promises.

  87. 87.

    Fergus Wooster

    @Kevin K.: He also wrote a really bizarre hatchet-job on Wes Clark in 2004 for The Nation. Can’t find link, but was really strange. The article has seldom been referred to since.

    Still, it demands reading. Imagine Evan Bayh running, but with 4-stars.

  90. 90.

    FlipYrWhig

    @freelancer: What can I say, the guy gets on my nerves. He’s like the pundit equivalent of that player on every professional sports team who’s called “scrappy” and “pesky” and a “sparkplug” by his team’s fans and “fucking aggravating” by everyone else’s fans. It’s not like I go out of my way to bring him up, but if he should be the subject, I’ll go through my ritualized gestures noting my low tolerance for him.

    Same goes for Greenwald.

  92. 92.

    YellowJournalism

    @SiubhanDuinne: My god. I can’t finish that article right now. I’m at the part where it explains his “sign language” and it’s just killing me. I admire that man so much. I need to read the article when all is quiet. (Canada vs the Swiss is on right now, so it’s hard read something so emotional while the hubby is cheering at the TV.)

    I wrote an email to Ebert once asking some silly question about the dialogue screens in silent films. He actually wrote me back, which greatly suprised me. I wish I’d saved that e-mail. So let me add a thank-you to those who brought the article up in this thread.

  94. 94.

    Corner Stone

    @The Moar You Know:

    For a dose of irony, we’ll leave his Lexus burning, upside down, in an olive grove somewhere.

    This may be the funniest thing you’ve ever posted here. Granted, there’s zero competition from your other posts.
    But I have to admit I gave a mildly intemperate golf clap when I read this.

  95. 95.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Fergus Wooster: I think I remember the Clarkies on DKos and Atrios being livid about that one. It was a bit like a James O’Keefe operation: show up, act weird, see what happens, blame the room for falling for you.

  96. 96.

    freelancer

    @rootless_e:
    @FlipYrWhig:

    I think he has his place (I think his prose on Friedman deserves its own wing in the Smithsonian, yet his economic coverage is nothing short of hyperbolic armaggedon forecasting), but I was more highlighting the dissent out to Cole, since he seemed to be so oblivious to it.

  97. 97.

    maus

    @Brian J:

    Or better yet, who in their right mind is paying him $75,000 a speech?

    Plenty of oversized businesses that have 75k to splurge on “inspirational globalist” peptalks, apparently.

  98. 98.

    gwangung

    @freelancer: What can I say, the guy gets on my nerves. He’s like the pundit equivalent of that player on every professional sports team who’s called “scrappy” and “pesky” and a “sparkplug” by his team’s fans and “fucking aggravating” by everyone else’s fans.

    AKA “talentless white guy”.

  100. 100.

    inkadu

    @scudbucket: Thanks for that article… I’m still wondering why the question about financial bonuses isn’t, “How can those bastards be making as much money in a recession as during a bubble?” Bickering about bonuses seems petty.

  101. 101.

    The Populist

    @cleek:

    This pic is further proof that these guys who defend the status quo do so because they have benefited most from it.

    I am certainly not against people who make an honest living or earn it by creating something but guys like this live off the myth of the free market.

    What Friedman and his ilk need to do is prove how we have a “free market” in this country when only the strong get by and the small businessman has to scrape because their business is under siege by the “market forces” of big multi-nats.

  102. 102.

    AhabTRuler

    Hell, for their kind of money, the location is teh suxxor. I would look for something in Chevy Chase, Rock Creek Park, or Foxhall (that local rich dickhead Rupert Murdoch wannabee, Joe Allbritton has or had a house there). There are some bomb-ass properties to be had in NW Washington, DC if you have real money to throw around (and trust me, the DC government actually works for the people in those neighborhoods). But you definitely don’t need mad money to get into that part of Bethesda, especially now. 2 lawyer income would do it, to say nothing of the large number of civil servants who nest in those environs.

  103. 103.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @FlipYrWhig:

    (invective is easy)

    rootless @84 is a pretty clear demonstration of the fallacy of that statement.

    If simply writing invective made your writing seem brilliant then comments sections all over the Internet would be seemingly packed with literary geniuses.

    Trust me when I say that they’re not.

  104. 104.

    Comrade Jake

    I thought you were going to tell us that was Cole’s pad. A couple million hits on the naked Pam Anderson link and voila!

  105. 105.

    wrb

    It’s a nice house but nothing like country houses the English, Romans etc. built at the height of their empires. Small and tawdry in comparison, actually. As are almost all of the mansions of our rich.

    Americans seen to have suffered from a lack of vision, or confidence in their worth, or in our empire’s permanence.

  106. 106.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brian J:

    What I want to know is why he charges $75,000 a speech… Or better yet, who in their right mind is paying him $75,000 a speech?

    Rich, entitled arseholes who wish to be reassured that they’re rich because of their brilliant grasp of the newest paradigm, not because they were born to the right parents and/or lucky. Although they’re probably not “paying” Friedman so much as charging his fee back to their corporation, to be offset against taxes. So, my guess is, your hard-earned tax dollars & mine are siphoned back to pay the Moustache of Understanding to tell the Masters of the Universe that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Feel better now?

    @JK:

    I would have bet dollars to donuts that the house in question belonged to Maureen Dowd.

    To bring class and gender back into the equation, against TimF’s explicit instructions… “Witty female political columnists”, however often they are quoted by their fellow Media Village Idiots, do not have anywhere near the income-earning potential of their “serious male business” fellows. Part of this is that it’s easier to expense Friedman telling them that the world is just as they want it described in their business models than it is to expense Dowd telling them that Obama, like Al Gore, is pussy-whipped. But the big difference is that Ms. Buckbaum’s brothers wouldn’t get enough social points for marrying a NYTimes-certified Serious Person. Friedman is very much a Trophy Husband, but the vast majority of Trophy Wives are still tanned, blond Social X-Rays with a limited shelf life. A sugar daddy who chooses a smart girltoy over a pretty one is very much a curiosity — and a sugar mama who chooses a pretty boytoy over a smart one is a public joke. One more way sexism shapes our economic landscape (grin).

  107. 107.

    mr. whipple

    How come I couldn’t marry an heiress like Tom did? I can’t write worth a damn, and I grew a mustache, too. But not a single real estate heiress could I meet.

    Is this one of those class things?

  110. 110.

    Anne Laurie

    @wrb:

    Americans seen to have suffered from a lack of vision, or confidence in their worth, or in our empire’s permanence.

    Most of us are the children or grandchildren of people who had good reason to believe that eventually the Land-Lords would show up with a piece of paper and their own private army to evict us. Being ready to quit the premises one step ahead of the authorities is very much a part of the American psychological genome.

  111. 111.

    JK

    @Anne Laurie:

    Good points.

    At least the NY Times has Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristoff, and Frank Rich to sort of balance out Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd.

    As a booklover, I’m grateful to the NY Times for being one of the last newspapers in America that still publishes a separate, standalone Sunday Book Review section.

  112. 112.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Bill E Pilgrim: Point taken. I suppose I meant more that it’s a lot easier to win fans with invective, rather than that it’s a lot easier to _write_ invective. Taibbi’s insults are often verbally creative, but they’re still essentially calling the people he doesn’t like–generally easy targets–stupid and evil. Meh. It doesn’t do much for me. It’s like coming up with another version of “The Aristocrats.”

    (I also think he fits facts around a thesis rather than vice-versa, like in the banking pieces, where he ended up having to characterize Austan Goolsbee, one-time proof that Obama was a Chicago-school free-trader, as an ignored progressive. But we’ve been through that before.)

  113. 113.

    mr. whipple

    @demo woman:

    Maybe it’s where I’m looking. I approached literally thousands of women. I quickly learned if they were pushing a grocery cart filled with plastic bags and aluminum cans, they probably weren’t real esate heiresses.

    I figured they probably drove nice cars, so I’d stake out busy street corners, look for nice cars stopped at a light, and run out and wash their windows. I figured they’d appreciate my iniative and verstility. Still no heiresses.

    I then figured out that if they are real estate heiresses, they must be in the real estate business, so I hung out for days in front of Century 21 offices. I did discover several women that wore gold jackets, and I thought those must be the heiresses I was looking for, but they said if I didn’t leave they’d call the police.

    So if anyone knows any heiresses, tell them about my mustache, ok?

  114. 114.

    inkadu

    @Fergus Wooster: I’m a bit bummed by New York Press’ indexing of Taibbi’s stuff. Every article seems to have a different list.

    What did you find bizarre about the Clark piece? It seemed OK to me; but I don’t know much about Clark except that I never understood the appeal.

  116. 116.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @FlipYrWhig: I felt that way once in a while, in some of the more crude and really over the top imagery for example.

    On the other hand have you actually read those Friedman critiques, the two linked above?

    Taibbi’s not always on, but he can be one of the funniest and best stylists around when he wants to be, and he sure wanted to be when he wrote those.

    As you say, worthy target in that case. I tried to read that Flat book once and I couldn’t finish a page, it was some of the worst writing I’d ever seen. I found Taibbi’s review of it a year or more later and was gratified that others had noticed. He’s the opposite for me, I could read him all day long.

  118. 118.

    mr. whipple

    Just my luck. I’m in love with Julia Mancuso. I googled her hoping to find her phone number. What does wiki say?

    “When she was five, her father, real estate developer Ciro Mancuso, was arrested and convicted of running a $140 million marijuana smuggling operation.[1]”

    So close to an heiress!

  119. 119.

    Jager

    Looks like it was designed by the same firm that did work for Saddam. A tip from a middle eastern cab driver perhaps?

  120. 120.

    Brian J

    @maus:

    Wouldn’t that money be better spent by, say, hiring a team of energy efficiency experts to find out how to save money on electricity and heating?

  122. 122.

    And Another Thing...

    One of my Taibbi favorites is “Jesus Made me Puke” from Rolling Stone a couple of years ago:

  126. 126.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @YellowJournalism #91
    @Demo Woman #107

    Wow. I just finished reading the Esquire piece by Chris Jones and I am drained. It would be churlish and glib to use words like “inspirational,” but I’ve gotta say, I am not at all sure I would be capable of Ebert’s equilibrium were I in similar circumstances.

    The section about Gene Siskel just chewed me up. The original TV shows with the dueling thumbs were brilliant and intelligent entertainment. And please, may we use the full panoply of asiangrrlMN’s rusty toolshed on whomever at Disney signed off on removing Ebert’s tribute show to Siskel. Not to mention trashing the balcony set. I don’t have words enough in my vocabulary to express my outrage.

    Ebert’s respomnse was both classic and classy. As is he. He may be “dying in increments,” as Chris Jones has it, but I hope those increments are tiny and widely spaced. Ebert is a treasure and I selfishly want him around for a very long time.

  130. 130.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Since he lives in Montgomery County, not only do we have property tax, but we have county income tax. Thank you Thomas Friedman for helping fund my local services!

  131. 131.

    slag

    Giant houses out in the middle of nowhere are just another item on my list of things I don’t understand about rich people. What a bland, soulless existence. You’d have to pay me to live in this place.

    (yes, I’m a snob)

  134. 134.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @J.W. Hamner:

    Honestly, if I had Friedman money I would buy an island and set it up like a Bond villain hideout. Frankly I’m a little disappointed in his lack of imagination. Nice looking house though.

    I’d have a war room like the one in Dr. Strangelove.

  135. 135.

    maus

    @Brian J:

    Wouldn’t that money be better spent by, say, hiring a team of energy efficiency experts to find out how to save money on electricity and heating?

    See, it’s just this attitude that keeps people from understanding why we need to DEEPLY compensate failed financial experts. What is wrong with you??!

  137. 137.

    beatty

    Fergus Wooster: thanks for the link to Taibbi’s article. He sure knows how to pack a punch. I didn’t realize there were so many shrinking violets / commenters of Balloon Juice.

  141. 141.

    woody

    Friedman married “well”: an heiress whose family fortune fell by nearly 90% when the real estate bubble burst. Still has a comfortable couple of hundred mill, but no longer the billionaires of former times…

  144. 144.

    akak

    @cleek:

    According to the media, only a few types of people have “compounds” – the Kennedys, the FLDS crazies and the Taliban.

  145. 145.

    jajaja

    KarenJ – idiots like you kill me. Friedman is the one telling us how to live our lives due to the danger of climate weirding.

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