Matt Taibbi is fun to read, but also shrill, predictable, and at times pretty clearly underinformed. I really like his political writing, though I don't always agree with his conclusions, but his writing on finance has often been just one or two notches more credible than ZeroHedge.

I generally always feel like Taibbi is deliberately writing to get a rise out of people. I didn't particularly like Sullivan --- my opinions of him hardened during the first term of Bush II --- but I did feel like he was trying to be careful.

I dispute the idea that it's hard to find similarly careful journalists today. What's perhaps hard is to find blogospheric gravity wells like Sullivan. This thread compared him to Ta-Nahisi Coates and Matt Yglesias, but neither perfectly fit Sullivan's mold. Coates doesn't cover politics, and Yglesias is an econ reporter. You have to assemble a Sullivan out of parts now, but I think those parts are of higher quality than Sullivan's (say) 2005 competition.