Nobody–not even members of the Republican Confederate Party–should try and celebrate Confederate History Month without reading Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Confederate History Month: 3 Wars, only 1 resolvedPost + Comments (60)
by Dennis G.| 60 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Good News For Conservatives
Nobody–not even members of the Republican Confederate Party–should try and celebrate Confederate History Month without reading Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Confederate History Month: 3 Wars, only 1 resolvedPost + Comments (60)
by DougJ| 52 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Good News For Conservatives
Commenter Steve sums up what Goldman did very succinctly:
What Goldman knew is that they had an investor (Paulson) who wanted to create an investment and take the short side of it, but that no one would want to buy it if they knew the component parts had been self-selected by the person on the other side of the bet. So they used ACA as a sham intermediary, and told investors that the component parts had been selected by this objective third party.
A little more Felix Salmon (who has this one wrapped like a mummy):
It makes a lot of sense here to do the old-fashioned thing and follow the money. Why was ACA so quiet about the fact that it wasn’t really picking the securities in the CDO it was nominally managing? Because it was being paid millions of dollars for its silence. And why was Goldman so happy to do Paulson’s bidding? Just look at the complaint.
The deal closed on April 26, 2007. Paulson paid GS&Co approximately $15 million for structuring and marketing ABACUS 2007-AC1.
Even by Goldman standards, that’s real money. But the fact is that the investors in the deal had every right to know who was paying the piper — and Goldman went to great lengths to keep that fact secret.
[…..]Goldman talks ad nauseam about how everything it does it does for its clients, and how any profits it ultimately ends up making are just a result of being “long-term greedy”. But if it attempts legalistic hair-splitting about how its behavior in the Abacus case was technically not illegal, it’s just going to end up looking even more culpable in the eyes of its clients. Goldman, if it was behaving honorably here, would have been open about the whole truth of what was going on.
This is bank-on-bank violence, so it’s not even clear that the Santellistas will defend Goldman.
Although this matter is somewhat separate from fin reg legislation, it will take a Herculean Luntzian effort to disentangle the two in the public’s mind. It should be awfully easy for Democrats to call Republicans the party of Goldman-Sachs as the fin reg debate rages on.
by DougJ| 71 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, General Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives
Reader JK sent me a link to an Atlantic Wire article about what various VSPs say they read (the link is for what Bobo reads because I can’t figure out how to link to the whole list). I was depressed to learn that Frank Rich loves reading McArdle and that Michael Lewis loves reading Bobo, but what bothered me most was the fixation with official publications. Everyone read the Atlantic bloggers, for example. And Instapundit and Drudge seem to count as official publications now, while TPM and Steve Benen (the best two sources of online political news/commentary, IMHO) are still just for unhinged hippies.
I found the feature oddly fascinating, though.
by DougJ| 60 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, General Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives
I’m trying to get a feel for the Goldman investigation. Felix Salmon takes a detailed look at the charges here and sums up:
The scandal here is not that Goldman was short the subprime market at the same time as marketing the Abacus deal. The scandal is that Goldman sold the contents of Abacus as being handpicked by managers at ACA when in fact it was handpicked by Paulson; and that it told ACA that Paulson had a long position in the deal when in fact he was entirely short.
(note: the Paulson here is not Hank, it is the hedge fund Paulson and Co.)
Essentially, Goldman was selling investors CDOs that Goldman thought were worthless and was lying about who assembled the CDOs along with what the actual assembler really thought of the CDOs’ contents. The former is legal, the latter may or may not be.
(Note: I’ve edited this post a lot for clarity, so I hope it makes sense now.)
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Politics, Good News For Conservatives
Well this is more great news for the Republican Confederate Party as they celebrate Confederate History Month.
All over the country they are trying to purge the Republican Party of squishes who just can not be counted on to fully support the capture of the GOP by the Confederate Party. A year ago, one of these unreliable squishes was way ahead in the 2010 Florida GOP primary for the Senate and the wingnut hero entering the race was way behind.
Talking Points Memo put up a chart tracking the current state of the race and now the positions are flipped. Not only that, the image of the poll clearly celebrates Confederate history month:
I wonder if this will inspire Crist to secede from the Party?
And somehow, this must also be good news for John McCain.
Cheers
dengre
The FL Senate Race Celebrates Confederate History MonthPost + Comments (136)
by Dennis G.| 75 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Good News For Conservatives
If the mention of how deeply Slavery is interwoven into the Confederacy is a buzzkill for members of the Republican Confederate Party as they celebrate Confederate History Month, just imagine what might happen if you bring up the Night Riders (AKA the KKK).
Talk about being a party pooper. And yet the Klan must be mentioned if any celebration of Confederate History Month is to be fully complete. I’m just trying to help out.
It is very hard to avoid the direct link between the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. Lee surrendered on April 9th. And a month later on May 9 one of his most radical Generals, Nathan Beford Forrest ‘surrendered’. He didn’t leave the field of battle for long. He went home to Tennessee and on December 24 in Pulaski Tennessee a group of Confederate Veterans met and formed the Ku Klux Klan. Whether or not Forester was at or involved with that meeting is lost to history, but by 1867 he was widely acknowledged as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By 1868 he was bragging to newspapers that the KKK had 40,000 members in Tennessee and 550,000 across the South (I imagine that most were former Confederate getting back together with their units for a little camaraderie and domestic terrorism on the side).
by DougJ| 74 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives, We Are All Mayans Now
I realize I shouldn’t continue to read the Kaplan opinion page, let alone link to it, but this Caddell-Schoen piece reads like a parody, from the multiple citations of Rasmussen polls to this:
To turn a corner, Democrats need to start embracing an agenda that speaks to the broad concerns of the American electorate. It should be somewhat familiar: It is the agenda that is driving the Tea Party movement and one that has the capacity to motivate a broadly based segment of the electorate.
Is FreedomWorks directly paying these guys? Seriously. What is going on here?