Today marks a Very Serious Literary Event: the release of Wall Street turncoat/general sad sack Greg Smith’s highly anticipated non-fiction debut, Why I Left Goldman Sachs.

Smith’s book expands upon an op-ed he wrote for The New York Times back in March in which he decried his former employer’s once-noble culture as “toxic and destructive” while claiming to be shocked at “how callously people talk about ripping their clients off”. The article’s best-known revelation was the fact that managers referred to their clients as “muppets”—and not in an endearing Fozzie Bear kind of way.

First the obvious: Most Americans don’t think too highly of Goldman Sachs right now, no matter what Mr. Smith says. When Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone referred to the company as a “great vampire squid”, he wasn’t just engaging in colorful hyperbole: According to the widely cited YouGov Brand Index, GS remains engaged in a bad-PR battle with JPMorgan Chase to determine which financial organization Americans hate most.

Politicians may have plenty of love for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, but the average “man on the street” feels differently. So how will the biggest name in investment banking deal with its most visible enemy? Until now, the organization has largely ignored Mr. Smith, but a curious internal memo reveals that this is no longer the case.

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Today in Bad Media Relations News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s well-named spokesman Philippe Reines—who has served as a State Department official under Clinton since her 2009 appointment–recently told Buzzfeed political reporter and Rolling Stone veteran Michael Hastings to “f**k off” and “have a good life” via email.

What led to this unbecoming outburst? It all began with a series of sharp questions regarding the State Department’s behavior following the recent tragedy at Benghazi and its response to the scandal in which CNN admitted to removing the deceased US Ambassador’s diary from the scene of the crime and using its contents in a later report without the permission of the man’s surviving family members.

The entire exchange was extremely antagonistic on both sides, and it makes for a fascinating mini-case study in media relations. Hastings begins by calling Reines’s public condemnation of CNN “offensive” and unashamedly blames lax State Department security measures for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. So yeah, the tension was quite obvious, even over email, and we weren’t surprised when Hastings described Reines’s official explanations of the Benghazi situation as “bullshit.”

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Photo credit: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

According to Rolling Stone , Mitt Romney‘s arch-conservative running-mate Paul Ryan has cited Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands. Yet the discrepancy between the band’s messages and Ryan’s political ideals is glaringly obvious to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of their music. More specifically, the group has a history of vocal opposition to the Republican party — they staged a protest concert on the lawn of the Minnesota State Capitol during the Republican National Convention in 2008. The sheer irony of Ryan’s fandom hasn’t escaped the band’s notice: In an exclusive op-ed in Rolling Stone, guitarist Tom Morello expresses his amusement at Ryan’s musical choices as well as his own, well, rage at virtually everything the Wisconsin Rep. stands for. Read more