We needed one. What have I missed?
Archives for June 2010
I Drink Your Milkshake
The brokerage firm that’s faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.
According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter.
If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman’s holdings — meaning that Goldman’s remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.
Doesn’t look like anything criminal or untoward was done, just lucky.
Crisis Averted
Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s irony meter is completely non-functional:
We need to always remember that we aren’t North America or Western Europe, we live in the Middle East, in a place where there is no mercy for the weak and there aren’t second chances for those who don’t defend themselves.
And he’s not the only one:
He said that the army had decided against sabotaging a ship in the Gaza flotilla at the center of Monday’s deadly clashes, out of fear that the vessel would be stranded in the middle of the ocean and at risk of a humanitarian crisis. […]
During his briefing on the operation to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Colonel Itzik Turgeman hinted that the IDF had sabotaged the engines of the other five ships, saying that “they took care of them.”
This Should Surprise No One
I’m really not sure what these guys are thinking:
Alabama Republican Rep. Parker Griffith was soundly defeated in a Republican primary tonight, the second party switcher to lose an intraparty fight in the past two weeks.
Madison County Commissioner Mo Brooks had 51 percent of the vote to Griffith’s 33 percent and 16 percent for Les Phillip with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Although the Associated Press had not called the race, local media reported that Griffith had conceded the contest to Brooks.
Griffith, who had been elected as a Democrat to the northern Alabama 5th district, switched parties last year with promises from House Republican leaders that they would back him to the hilt.
So, in Pennslyvania, given a choice between a Democrat and a Republican who switched just to keep office, Democratic voters chose the Democrat. In Alabama, given the choice between a Republican and a democrat who switched just to keep office, Republican voters chose… a Republican.
I’m shocked.
I Thought We Were Opposed to Assisted Suicide
Another smart Larison piece:
I appreciate Jim’s point that there are not many specific measures that Turkey or any other state can take that will directly harm Israel, but how has it reached a point that Turkish unwillingness to go to war with Israel has become proof of Israeli success? Four years ago, the Turkish public was angry with Israel over Lebanon and Erdogan’s government expressed some displeasure. A year and a half ago, the Turkish public was furious with Israel over Gaza, and the Turkish government was angry, which later prompted Erdogan’s Davos tirade. Various diplomatic slights and pointed insults have been exchanged since then. Now the Turkish public is incandescently outraged, and the Turkish government is furious. Self-defeating hyperbole aside, when the foreign minister of one of Israel’s better allies likens one of its actions to 9/11 and the Turkish PM threatens serious consequences in retaliation, this is not evidence that Israel has won anything. It is proof that in four short years Turkey and Israel have gone from being on reasonably good terms to being practically at daggers drawn. That is the result of repeated Israeli strategic failures that have had a cumulative effect over the last several years.
Oddly, it is continued uncritical, automatic U.S. backing that enables the worst instincts in Israel’s government, and it is this that allows it to persist in its self-destructive course long after it should have stopped and corrected its course. It is that very backing that will let Israel continue down this path until it will become impossible for the U.S. to balance its relationships with its other allies and its one-sided relationship with Israel.
Not that this will stop Anthony Weiner and Congress.
I Thought We Were Opposed to Assisted SuicidePost + Comments (93)
Asked and Answered
This story would be amusing if we weren’t propping up this ineffective clown:
In his speech, which was interrupted by a rocket that exploded close by and an exchange of gunfire, forcing Mr. Karzai to tell his audience not to worry, he spoke directly to the Taliban, calling on them to join the government.
Within minutes, a larger explosion from another rocket shook the large tent where the gathering, known as a jirga, was being held.
Also, too, his police force is a Keystone Kops operation.
Late Night Open Thread: Queen of Not-A-Lot
Vanity Fair has posted Evgenia Peretz’ high-gloss profile of Sally Quinn, Queen of the DC Media Village:
… Still quite the looker at 68, pulled together in gray wool pants and a lavender cardigan, Sally is ensconced in one of the many sitting areas of her stately Georgetown town house as she sets the record straight. First, she would like to clarify that she wasn’t canned; the “Party” column had been intended only as a holiday-season offshoot of her On Faith Web site, and she’d started phasing it out anyway. Second, she feels no need to apologize. After the firestorm, she entered the concrete meditation labyrinth her husband had built for her on their country estate in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to think. When she came out the other side, she was clear. “I did exactly the right thing,” she says. The story of the “dueling” weddings had been out there, she explains, prompting all kinds of nasty online comments about her son and his bride-to-be. “I wrote that piece to protect them… If somebody goes after my kids, look out.”
[…] __
Sally’s ascent to social arbiter in the nation’s capital was done with similar determination—and flair. The daughter of a three-star general, William Quinn, and a quintessential southern belle, Bette, Sally came to the Post in 1969 to report on parties for the Style section. In her employment interview, Bradlee asked the 28-year-old if she could show him something she’d written. “Mr. Bradlee,” she told him, “I’ve never written anything. Not a word.” When he told his colleague editorial-page editor Phil Geyelin about this, Geyelin replied, “Nobody’s perfect.” Sally, who graduated at the bottom of her class at Smith, may not have written a word, but she had wit and irreverence and an obsession with who was up, who was down—something she picked up while accompanying her father at social functions and in her previous Washington jobs, including social secretary for the Algerian ambassador. “It was intoxicating to be around real power,” she would later write. “To have senators pay attention to you, sit across from famous administration types at little Georgetown restaurants, be invited by ambassadors to visit their countries.”
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Though it was the lowest job on the Post’s totem pole, Sally made party coverage come alive. She had an eye for the mortifying moment, as when a congressman’s wife berated the help because the flambé wasn’t in flames, and an ear for self-immolating quotes, a talent she quickly brought to profiles of Washington personalities big and small… But along the way to stardom she humiliated a number of subjects—many of whom were harmless, barely public figures… the running theme being: Everyone in town thinks so-and-so is a tacky social climber. Vicki Bagley, who was the subject of one such profile when she was married to R. J. Reynolds tobacco heir Smith Bagley and working as a fund-raiser for Jimmy Carter, recalls turning Sally down for an interview and then getting phone-stalked by her for weeks. “She was getting more and more threatening,” says Bagley, who recalls hearing that Sally was looking into the lives of her children. “She called us all social climbers. Well, a bigger social climber will have never been…. Sally was the very person she was writing about…. We were all doing things. We were all working. Sally wanted what we had, and she wanted to destroy us because we had it.”
[…] __
From their enormous perch on N Street, Ben and Sally became the Bogart and Bacall of Washington. “They were our movie stars,” says David Ignatius. “I remember when [my wife] Eve and I were first invited to go to their New Year’s Eve party, it was like we’d won the lottery.” Each New Year’s Eve, the limos would snail up N Street, and the guest list might include Ted Kennedy, Kay Graham, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Colin Powell, Tom Brokaw, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron. “The New Year’s list was the ‘Honours List’ of Washington,” says Matthews. “They’re the reason Washington glows.”
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Maintaining the Establishment—and her role at the top of it—wasn’t easy work. First Families came and went in the White House, and often didn’t realize, in Sally’s view, how Washington worked, a phenomenon she griped about in many of her articles during those years. “You come in from another community and you don’t know anything about the people,” she says, explaining why the Establishment is so critical to governance. “So you don’t know what perspectives they bring to something and what the relationships are and … who’s feuding and why…. And all of that is extremely important information for people in the White House to know.”
On the surface, the article is very much the standard VF puff piece, but of course Quinn isn’t the only society journalist with “an eye for the mortifying moment… and an ear for self-immolating quotes.” All the encomiums, the wealth of detail and the details of wealth, end up brutally summarizing the Brilliant Career of a sad, silly Pamela Harriman wanna-be, a woman whose hard-earned achievements amount to nothing better than a third-hand husband, a second-hand spotlight in proximity to the genuinely powerful and accomplished, pathetically meticulous copies of family treasures and society landmarks. And, of course, the undisputed “queenship” of the District of Columbia… a social position roughly analogous to being the theatrical queen of Darien or the leading literary light of West Palm Beach. Edith Wharton wrote tragedies about similar women, but Sally Quinn seems to be recapitulating those novels as a farce.
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