BENEFITS OF HAVING LIVED IN RUSSIA IN THE LATE 90S: You can make a comment like this:

 The reality, of course, is that this is a make-or-break moment for Goldman, Sachs. It just may be that the Democrats, after years of intimate partnership with this firm, have finally decided to “go in a different direction” and cut Goldman loose, purely for political reasons. A close friend of mine from Russia points out that there are parallels here to Putin’s ascension to power, when a rookie president pushed into his seat by a gang of oligarchs decided upon election to whack the most obviously odious of the bunch — Bank Menatep’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky — in order to firm up his “reform” credentials and, politically speaking, put himself on the other side the obscene corruption of the Yeltsin era.

And make me think--hey, maybe Taibbi's onto something there.