Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Let there be snark.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Tick tock motherfuckers!

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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61Comments

  2. 2.

    beltane

    There is already a diary up at GOS about how the Goldman Sachs settlement is proof that Obama is worse than Bush. And why couldn’t Obama have capped that oil well six months ago?

  3. 3.

    ellaesther

    I’m sorry, what was that? Good news?

    Does not compute. Terribly sorry.

    (Honestly, my internal response to someone’s tweet about both these things was: “Yippee, we’ve managed to alleviate some the massive damage done by a bunch of psychopathic idiots. Wheee!” But don’t mind me. I’m just bitter and out of work. Or out of work and bitter, whichever you’d prefer. You carry on with the happy. I’ll be in the corner).

  5. 5.

    matoko_chan

    this is not good news.
    the ergot poisoning continues at Sully’s.

    Chris Bodenner, Conservative Concern Troll–

    But for me the issue is a practical matter; was the NAACP resolution helpful for race relations? Based on the immediate and inflammatory backlash showcased in the MSM, I think not. Perhaps the NAACP could have approached TPM leaders in private first, offering to help with a PR strategy to purge the racist elements of the movement from its core, small government message. That would have been the Obama-esque approach. But publicly shaming the TPM into doing so doesn’t seem smart or pragmatic.

    im starting to work up a hate-on for this guy.
    THE JOB of the NAACP is not to “help race relations”, or “offer to help the TPM with a PR strat”……someone with juice needs to crush this guy like a bug.

    What Bodenner is describing here is the JOB OF CONSERVATIVE ELITES LIKE HIM AND WEIGEL, not whining and pissing and moaning about the NAACP righteously bashing the TPM for pandering to racists to get their votes.
    poseur.

  6. 6.

    Steve

    An awful lot of people tried to tell me that the case against Goldman was remarkably weak – including some of my colleagues in the securities law business. This time I was right.

  8. 8.

    Elizabelle

    Some good news is so welcome, and in each case your non-ideological American might think “some common sense regulation is a GOOD thing.”

    I am cautiously optimistic that voters will be smarter than corporate media types.

    There’s so much at stake. People have lost jobs, their kids are delaying college or attending community colleges. A fresh round of residential foreclosures is expected. Banks still aren’t lending, although they’re paying themselves well. Small businesses are folding right and left; starved of capital and customers.

    Are voters going to give rightwing Republicans another bite at the apple they poisoned? Really?

    PS: LA Times features photo of President Snowe, who voted for financial regulatory reform.

    NYT was more upfront that bill passed with little GOP support; LAT and WaPo bunted on that in early online editions.

    Good news on LA Times, though: Barbara Boxer has $11.3 million in her campaign chest. Fiorina has about $620,000.

  9. 9.

    Unabogie

    I’m looking at the oil well spewing nothing at all into the ocean. FinReg is headed to the President’s desk. Goldman admits wrongdoing.

    Can we just once celebrate progress?

    Because after November, Speaker Boehner will not pass any more legislation except perhaps articles of impeachment and I’m not really kidding. And I don’t think we can stop it. Liberals have gone insane, and the GOP will, in fact, take over the the congress in just six months because people who agree with Obama more than they agree with Limbaugh will “punish” the Democrats by not voting. And in the process, we’ll all be punished.

    Sigh.

  10. 10.

    beltane

    @matoko_chan: Sullivan’s stand-ins have been so awful this time around that I’m dropping the Daily Dish altogether. Really rancid stuff emanating from that place.

  11. 11.

    Zifnab

    @Martin: I doubt Goldman Sachs could muster $550B if you melted down every last golden hubcap on the executives’ cars.

    Half a billion dollars is a bunch-a-lotta money, particularly from the SEC. And this could theoretically open Goldman up to future private claims against them, assuming I’m reading this right and Goldman has acknowledged culpability.

    @beltane: Anybody with an internet connection and a free hand can post a DKOS diary. Please turn off the ORLY Factor and chill the fuck out.

  13. 13.

    Warren Terra

    The new cap is working well so far, BP claims.

    Of course, BP’s claims about the leak don’t have the best track record (see below). Still, all crossable appendages crossed.

    .__

    When I deride BP’s claims, I am of course referring to their steadily increasing estimates of daily oil leakage, each of which made them appear to be liars in all of their earlier claims as to the volume of oil leaked. That said, the far scarier hypothesis, which I read in a post at The Reality-Based Community, was that each of the estimates was in fact correct, but that the rate of flow really was steadily increasing as more and more cracks appeared in the pipe and/or the surrounding rock. If this BP-was-honest theory is correct, there may be no way to fully seal the leak, maybe not even with relief wells. So I really, really hope BP was lying.

  16. 16.

    Elizabelle

    @Unabogie:

    That won’t happen if we ALL contact Obama voters, particularly new voters, who might not understand importance of midterms.

    Instead of sitting around looking at our laptops and wringing our hands.

    Get out there, folks. The Tea Party will get to the polls. We need to get our voters out there too, and it takes MONTHS of work to do so.

  17. 17.

    matoko_chan

    @beltane: Chris is a regular.
    I guess he felt he had to let his inner teabagger out while the boss is gone.
    i see a lot of this “gentle leader” crap from the bourgie conservatives like McMegan and Friedersdorf…..its really the liberals fault that the teabaggers are retarded racist maniacs….if we would just be nicer to them they would get sane.

  18. 18.

    Warren Terra

    @beltane:

    There is already a diary up at GOS about how the Goldman Sachs settlement is proof that Obama is worse than Bush. And why couldn’t Obama have capped that oil well six months ago?

    Zifnab‘s point (“Anybody with an internet connection and a free hand can post a DKOS diary”) is of course the main one, and I hope the DKos diary is not intended fully seriously (though heaven knows there are such sincere Firebaggers there), but may I just point out that the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank less than three months ago, capping the well six months ago would have required powers of foresight that probably exceed those of Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald combined?

  19. 19.

    New Yorker

    Now if only we could upwardly revise the June jobs number to 500,000 created….

    …but hell, I’ll take other good news.

  21. 21.

    South of I-10

    It is so nice to look at the BP oil spill cameras and not see oil spewing. I hope it holds.

  22. 22.

    Punchy

    @trollhattan: It took them 3 fuckin months to design an oversized fucking bottle cap? It’s this easy? No downshaft or topkill or giant metal tent or hydrate eraser or choke lines, just a fucking cap and poof, shit’s good?

    /shakes fist at monitor

  23. 23.

    Sad_Dem

    Half a billion in, and how much out? The gubmint is the robber baron’s best friend.

  24. 24.

    Corner Stone

    Goldman agreed to settle the SEC’s charges without admitting or denying the allegations

    $550M is about 7 trading days of profit for them.
    I was told confidently by many here that this SEC filing was known as the “kiss of death” in how it was handled.
    In an unusual occurrence for me, I argued the counter to this point.

  25. 25.

    Frank

    @Steve:

    An awful lot of people tried to tell me that the case against Goldman was remarkably weak – including some of my colleagues in the securities law business. This time I was right.

    As I recall, a few days after the SEC filed its case, the so called experts on CNBC were claiming that the SEC did not have much of case. Guess CNBC was wrong…

  27. 27.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Zifnab:

    Half a billion dollars is a bunch-a-lotta money, particularly from the SEC. And this could theoretically open Goldman up to future private claims against them, assuming I’m reading this right and Goldman has acknowledged culpability.

    Agreed that the settlement is a lot of money, even for Goldman. The admission part is a lot more ambiguous. As the SEC’s press release indicates, Goldman very specifically:

    agreed to settle the SEC’s charges without admitting or denying the allegations by consenting to the entry of a final judgment that provides for a permanent injunction from violations of the antifraud provisions of the Securities Act of 1933.

    So, they haven’t acknowledged culpability in a legal sense. However, even admitting that there was incomplete information in the marketing materials could hurt them in any civil lawsuit. The problem here is that the harmed parties in this instance are not numerous; there’s really only two of them. I suspect that either of them is going to go ahead with a lawsuit.

    If that’s what we want, then we’re going to have to hope that someone else, who was part of a different deal, decides that they want to sue. In such a case, Goldman’s admission won’t hurt them as badly, if at all. By not admitting to any violations, and saying only that there were mistakes made in this on particular transaction, there’s little basis for anyone else to make a claim that Goldman has admitted to anything relevant to a different transaction.

    All that said, I think the SEC made the right call in this settlement. I thought that their case was going to be tricky to present in court. Hell, I’m not even sure that it rose to the level of actual fraud, given my suspicion that the German bank that bought the deal was not particularly concerned with what it was getting in the first place. Arguing that your customer was a complete idiot isn’t a defense against a fraud charge, but demonstrating that your customer was so clueless that they’d have made the exchange anyway is.

    Yes, I think lots of people in this mess were every bit as stupid as I’m arguing that this bank was.

  28. 28.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Elizabelle:

    Are voters going to give rightwing Republicans another bite at the apple they poisoned? Really?

    If colored people have to bite twice, and go first, yes. If you promise a good war, hell, yes.

    Scapegoat, not chicken, is America’s white meat. And the GOP are the Colonel Sanders of scapegoat — marketed heavily, and available on every commerical strip. They’ll even let you choose between Regular Scapegoat and Extra-Crispy.

  29. 29.

    Frank

    @Corner Stone:

    $550M is about 7 trading days of profit for them.

    They made about $13.8 billion last year (If I’m looking at the right numbers). If so, I don’t think it amounts to 7 trading days. It’s higher than that.

    Besides, don’t you measure the punishment compared to the crime, not to what the criminal could have paid?

  30. 30.

    danimal

    Funny how a few pieces of good news changes the it’s-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it attitude around here.

    Don’t engrave the Speaker Boehner nameplates just yet.

  31. 31.

    Mark S.

    In particular, it was a mistake for the Goldman marketing materials to state that the reference portfolio was “selected by” ACA Management LLC without disclosing the role of Paulson & Co. Inc. in the portfolio selection process and that Paulson’s economic interests were adverse to CDO investors. Goldman regrets that the marketing materials did not contain that disclosure.

    They admitted that the guy picking the mortgages had the exact opposite interests to the investors. I’m no expert in these things, but that really seems like fraud to me.

  32. 32.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Frank:

    Besides, don’t you measure the punishment compared to the crime, not to what the criminal could have paid?

    My object all sublime
    I will achieve in time:
    To let the punishment fit the crime,
    The punishment fit the crime.

    And make each prisoner pent
    Unwillingly represent
    A source of innocent merriment,
    Of innocent merriment.

    — The Mikado of Japan

  33. 33.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Frank:

    They made about $13.8 billion last year (If I’m looking at the right numbers).

    Just over $13.3 billion, but pretty close. That overstates things a bit, though, since it’s significantly larger than their earnings in almost any year in the last decade. It is also a figure for a 13 month period instead of 12 because of a change in their fiscal year.

  34. 34.

    Bob L

    @Davis X. Machina:

    @Elizabelle: Are voters going to give rightwing Republicans another bite at the apple they poisoned? Really?

    Might be something along the lines of “too much, too fast” As people have been pointing out for all the drama this congress has been awfully successful in undoing a lot of damage. Heck the deafening and constant roar of wingnut hysteria proves that. If Obama was really the Black Jimmy Carter and this was a caretaker congress then the Right wouldn’t have much to say before 2012.

  35. 35.

    Davis X. Machina

    Is the settlement like the discount for a retailer? You gotta figure that if the retailer can knock off 30%, the original markup was at least 40%, or they wouldn’t even bother….

  36. 36.

    PeakVT

    The new cap is working well so far, BP claims.

    I hope they don’t press their luck and assume the well structure is stable all the way down. They should get at least one oil processing ship hooked up ASAP.

  38. 38.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Mark S.:

    They admitted that the guy picking the mortgages had the exact opposite interests to the investors. I’m no expert in these things, but that really seems like fraud to me.

    Morally you’re correct, but in legal terms, fraud is much narrower than that. Among other things, the plaintiff (or prosecutors in a criminal trial) have to show that the incorrect statements had a material effect in inducing the other party to enter into the contract. That’s the part that I’m not convinced of. I admit, you would have to be pretty stupid for it not to, but some of the behavior of IKB leads me to conclude that they probably were that reckless.

  39. 39.

    Corner Stone

    @Frank: I was referring to this report:

    The bank has disclosed that it had 131 trading days last year in which it made at least $100 million in net trading revenue — a new record for the bank.

    GS Sets Record for $100M Trading Days

    And I’m happy they are paying a price. Just pointing out there were some hysterics at the time about how the SEC filing was the end for GS, and how this relatively small fine (compared to their profitability), isn’t really going to cramp their style too much.

  40. 40.

    Martin

    @Zifnab: Half a billion is what, 8% of their quarterly bonus pool? Color me unsympathetic to their plight. Fuck, BP is spending that much every 2 weeks on this weak-ass cleanup effort.

    Hell, GS received more taxpayer bailout money than they’re returning in penalties for fucking up. I wish I could rob a bank of a million dollars and pay a $100K fine for the infraction, and still keep the million.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    @Frank:

    Besides, don’t you measure the punishment compared to the crime, not to what the criminal could have paid?

    And in criminal court I think the answer is yes. But I believe this was a civil suit, so damages work a little differently.

  43. 43.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Corner Stone:

    And in criminal court I think the answer is yes. But I believe this was a civil suit, so damages work a little differently.

    Uhm, no. In civil court the damages that can be awarded are limited by the damages suffered by the plaintiff. In most cases, they are limited to, at most, the amount that the tort cost the plaintiff. In a few circumstances, when the behavior is shown to be particularly negligent or reckless, that amount can be tripled.

    The tricky thing in many cases, but not something like this, is establishing just what the damages were. Once that’s established, though, it puts a cap on the award. How much the defendant could pay is relevant only in the sense that, if they can’t pay the damages awarded, then you won’t end up collecting the full amount.

  45. 45.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Corner Stone:

    GS Sets Record for $100M Trading Days

    That’s cherry picking. There are more than 131 trading days in the year. I can’t find what statement in the 10-k the author is referring to, but it’s pretty easy to create impressive profit figures if you exclude the days where you lose money. Hell, if I’d been allowed to do that, market making probably wouldn’t have been as stressful.

  48. 48.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Perry Como: Your point is? Multiply Q1 earnings by four and you get – pretty much that same number. I’m not sure quite what argument you are trying to make, but you can’t just project a good quarter forward and take that as annual earnings.

    Well, you can, but you should expect to miss most of the time. It’s really just the corporate version of Voros’ Law.

  50. 50.

    Bill Murray

    @Frank: well for 200 trading days in a year, that comes out to 483 million per 7 trading days. At 260 trading days a year it’s about 10 trading days

  51. 51.

    Unabogie

    @Elizabelle:

    You’re exactly right. I just signed up to volunteer for the DPO and Kurt Schrader.

    Thanks for the bonk on the head.

  52. 52.

    Splitting Image

    Addition to the good news feed:

    Argentina legalized gay marriage today

    Hands up everyone who had Argentina as the second country in the Americas to legalize same-sex marriages.

    Me neither.

    Trivia note: 2010 was the first World Cup final between two teams from countries that have legalized gay marriage and the first ever to be held in a country that has legalized it.

    Four days after the final, Argentina makes it legal and fellow also-ran Brazil votes on civil unions later this year. Coincidence?

  53. 53.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    @Corner Stone: So the fuck what? For one thing, you don’t even know that your statement is correct. The claim was that, over the course of a year, there were 131 days in which GS made more than $100 million. We have no idea what the longest such stretch of days was.

    Your claim is simply that, if you pull five days preselected from being among the top half of all the days GS had, you can say that they earned more than the settlement. Big fucking deal. Without some idea of what the other half of the days were like, we have no idea what that looks like compared to an average week. As was noted in one of the articles linked to, GS achieved this but taking on greater risk than they had previously. It’s easy to juice up the number of days where you have big profits if you do that, but what did it do to the other days? You’ve increased the number of days you’re going to make big losses, too.

    If you want to claim that the settlement is only one week’s worth of trading profits, that’s the number you need to look at. What you’re doing is pointless. That’s not a surprise, but it’s still annoying.

    What is also true is that the trading profits for a particular day aren’t terribly meaningful. The vast majority of GS’s expenses are accounted for in places that are subtracted from revenues (of which trading profits is a measure, rather than it being a measure of overall earnings) and not subtracted from trading profits in determining gross profit. You’re looking at a top line account and making bottom line arguments about it. Anything that is cited as “daily trading profits” isn’t about how much money GS really made that day.

  54. 54.

    Steve

    @That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:

    All that said, I think the SEC made the right call in this settlement. I thought that their case was going to be tricky to present in court. Hell, I’m not even sure that it rose to the level of actual fraud, given my suspicion that the German bank that bought the deal was not particularly concerned with what it was getting in the first place. Arguing that your customer was a complete idiot isn’t a defense against a fraud charge, but demonstrating that your customer was so clueless that they’d have made the exchange anyway is.

    Your point is reasonable, but I think if the German bank didn’t care what it was getting, Goldman wouldn’t have gone through such an elaborate subterfuge to conceal Paulson’s role. It’s hard for them to argue now that it wouldn’t have mattered, since they obviously believed it mattered at the time.

  56. 56.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)

    @Steve: The subterfuge wasn’t elaborate. They just left some stuff out of the prospectus and other marketing materials. Further, it wouldn’t be hard for them to argue at all; the question is whether it would be hard for the SEC to prove that it did matter.

  57. 57.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)

    @Corner Stone: Okay, rather than accidentally being a moron by citing something you didn’t understand, you’re deliberately being a moron by posting something that anyone who gave it a second’s thought would realize was stupid and pointless. You’re doing idiotic cherry picking in what I can only assume you intended to be a way that no one would pick up on. Here’s your comment that I objected to:

    $550M is about 7 trading days of profit for them.

    Pretty much everyone is going to assume that you meant average consecutive days. Most people who don’t know how to read an income statement are also going to assume that “trading days of profit” actually means profit, and not revenue. That you are trying to deceive everyone by actually meaning, “Trading revenue without subtracting expenses over the course of five days that I get to pick based exclusively upon the fact that they made more money than average each day,” isn’t really surprising, but flat out admitting is.

  58. 58.

    Corner Stone

    @That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): No you fucking moron. I was using an example to display that $550M wasn’t really a big deal.
    You’re the clown shoe who wants to make this about something that doesn’t matter. As usual you just can’t help yourself, a pedant to the bitter fucking end.
    That’s serving you well.

  59. 59.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)

    @Corner Stone: Yes, I realize that you wanted to say that it was no big deal. However, you tried to mislead people to make it. The number you cited, the way you cited it, is completely and totally meaningless in the way you’re trying to use it. It says absolutely nothing about how much $550 million is to Goldman Sachs. There are all sorts of ways you could have made your point, but you chose a dishonest one.

    We should all just keep in mind that you have no problem just making shit up to make your point.

  60. 60.

    Corner Stone

    @That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): How about you create a really detailed spreadsheet to display for everyone all the stretches of 7 trading days where they did not make more than $550M?
    You could include many columns and footnotes and discuss all the ways you could parse it out.
    Point remains, and it’s undisputed by actual facts, that GS had 131 trading days where they made $100M or more and actually averaged 4 out of 5 trading days at more than $50M.
    So if you want to satisfy some inner pedant and map out for us all the 7 day consecutive stretches where they didn’t trade for more than $550M, I’m sure we’d all love to see it.
    Or maybe you have something else better to do? No?

  61. 61.

    Steve

    @That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): The subterfuge wasn’t elaborate? They hired an entirely separate company just to conceal Paulson’s role!

    If the German bank didn’t care about Paulson’s involvement, why bother paying all that money to ACA to make it look like they’re the ones picking the component securities? Why go to the trouble?

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