Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

After roe, women are no longer free.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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

I was promised a recession.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Bark louder, little dog.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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And Yet, No One is In Jail

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Best and the brightest:

It was like a hidden passage on Wall Street, a secret channel that enabled billions of dollars to flow through Lehman Brothers.

In the years before its collapse, Lehman used a small company — its “alter ego,” in the words of a former Lehman trader — to shift investments off its books.

The firm, called Hudson Castle, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role at Lehman, according to an internal Lehman document and interviews with former employees. The relationship raises new questions about the extent to which Lehman obscured its financial condition before it plunged into bankruptcy.

While Hudson Castle appeared to be an independent business, it was deeply entwined with Lehman. For years, its board was controlled by Lehman, which owned a quarter of the firm. It was also stocked with former Lehman employees.

None of this was disclosed by Lehman, however.

Look- I know I’m just a layman, but this sounds like EXACTLY what Andrew Fastow, the Chief Financial Officer at Enron, did for years before Enron finally crashed and burned. He’s in jail.

But these guys raped everyone, walked away with millions, and are probably thick as thieves with a new crowd in some other organization where we are told it would be Stalinesque to tax their bonuses.

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Working as Intended

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Your latest entry into the “hoocoodanode” files:

In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were falling. Investors began to balk at buying complex mortgage securities. The housing bubble, which had propelled a historic growth in home prices, seemed poised to deflate. And if it had, the great financial crisis of 2008, which produced the Great Recession of 2008-09, might have come sooner and been less severe.

At just that moment, a few savvy financial engineers at a suburban Chicago hedge fund [1] helped revive the Wall Street money machine, spawning billions of dollars of securities ultimately backed by home mortgages.

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How Magnetar pulled this off is one of the untold stories of the meltdown. Only a small group of Wall Street insiders was privy to what became known as the Magnetar Trade [2]. Nearly all of those approached by ProPublica declined to talk on the record, fearing their careers would be hurt if they spoke publicly. But interviews with participants, e-mails [3], thousands of pages of documents and details about the securities that until now have not been publicly disclosed shed light on an arcane, secretive corner of Wall Street.

According to bankers and others involved, the Magnetar Trade worked this way: The hedge fund bought the riskiest portion of a kind of securities known as collateralized debt obligations — CDOs. If housing prices kept rising, this would provide a solid return for many years. But that’s not what hedge funds are after. They want outsized gains, the sooner the better, and Magnetar set itself up for a huge win: It placed bets that portions of its own deals would fail.

Along the way, it did something to enhance the chances of that happening, according to several people with direct knowledge of the deals. They say Magnetar pressed to include riskier assets in their CDOs that would make the investments more vulnerable to failure. The hedge fund acknowledges it bet against its own deals but says the majority of its short positions, as they are known on Wall Street, involved similar CDOs that it did not own. Magnetar says it never selected the assets that went into its CDOs.

They knew.

Once again, can you imagine how devastating it would be for this country if these bastards would please just go Galt?

(via, who you should read for more info on this trade.)

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What is the Point?

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Why do we even bother with this nonsense:

Almost three years after Citigroup started to teeter, two of the executives who guided the bank into the center of the financial storm offered their regrets on Thursday to a federal committee examining the crisis and came under withering criticism from panel members.

Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s former chairman and chief executive, apologized for the billions of dollars of losses that caused the company he helped build to nearly collapse. Instead, the bank required three government rescues and some $45 billion in taxpayer aid.

“I’m sorry the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact for our country,” Mr. Prince told the commission. “I’m sorry about the millions of people, average Americans, who lost their homes. And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”

Robert E. Rubin, an influential Citigroup board member and adviser, also showed some contritionbut stopped short of accepting personal responsibility for the bank’s woes.

“We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that,” Mr. Rubin said.

The congresscritters all act pissed off, the banksters act mostly contrite, and then we all agree that “mistakes were made” and “no one could have predicted,” while the same pricks are handing each other buckets of cash behind the scenes to avoid any regulation and the people who did predict this stuff aren’t invited to the hearings.

Congressional oversight hearings are like a show trial where everyone agrees all parties are guilty but no one ever gets executed. WTF is the point?

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See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Make a Shitload of Money

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Via Jim Henley, this charming story about one of my favorite issues:

As the bottom fell out of the housing market and complex mortgage-backed securities began tanking in 2007, a strange thing happened at Moody’s Investors Service, one of the largest firms that rate bonds for the risks they pose to investors.

Moody’s blue-ribbon board of directors stopped receiving key information from an internal committee that was supposed to keep the board informed of risks to the company, a McClatchy investigation has found.

Instead, the ad hoc risk-management committee suddenly disappeared, precisely at the time when the board and management should have been shifting to higher alert as the financial world began quaking.

***

The findings of the new McClatchy investigation not only call into question the value of the new regulatory approach lawmakers are drafting; they also help underscore the widespread criticism that many corporate boards practice crony capitalism rather than independence.

I’m doing breathing exercises right now. Until the way the ratings agencies work and are funded fundamentally changes, this shit will keep on going on. And if you read the article, none of the proposed financial reform changes address this problem.

It still amazes me how little scrutiny the ratings agencies have gotten in all this.

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A Real Scoop

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Debbie Schlussel’s report that Sean Hannity’s charity is a scam — it donated less than 4% of its take to the wounded vets it purports to support — is being picked up by “reasonable” conservatives.  Frum, for example, wonders if other conservatives will even mention that Sean likes to fly to those events in private jets, and charters a fleet of luxury SUVs for transporting his entourage.   Sully calls that “a poignant question”.

I’ve got a touching question, one which may be a bit unreasonable, given the ruthless self-examination on display here:

Where the fuck were these guys when a Kos diarist outed Hannity’s charity, or when the Washington Post reported that most of these charities were scams, in 2007?

Update: The head of the foundation, Ollie North, issued a press release [pdf], denying everything.  The Post story is based on a 2007 report by the American Institute for Philanthropy.  They gave Freedom Alliance, the charity Hannity was pimping, an “F”.   AIP is a membership-only organization that charges for its guide, so I can’t see what it was rated more recently.

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This Sounds Like An Excellent Plan!

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I see no potential problems with this strategy:

States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement.

Companies are quietly and gradually moving their pension funds out of stocks. They want to reduce their investment risk and are buying more long-term bonds.

But states and other bodies of government are seeking higher returns for their pension funds, to make up for ground lost in the last couple of years and to pay all the benefits promised to present and future retirees. Higher returns come with more risk.

It would be nice if our legislators were smart enough to point out that regulatory reform might not be such a bad thing, considering your pension might be at stake. Since that will never happen and spring is around the corner, I’m just going to recommend a little practice gardening, canning, fishing, and learning how to make your own soap.

It’s like Atrios accurately predicted the future and his reward is that now he is damned to live it.

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“If Obama’s A Socialist, He’s Dyslexic”

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John Cook at Gawker has a point-by-point teardown of Fox News’ “fair and balanced” editing of the underwhelming-on-the-air “faceoff” between Jon Stewart and Lord Falafel. “I’m Not Saying Your Mother’s A Whore: How Fox News Censored Jon Stewart vs. Bill O’Reilly” :
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Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!
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Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped “faceoff” between O’Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O’Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was “a fair cut” and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: “Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, ‘O’Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look’—OK, all of that is bull. It’s a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you’ll see it.”
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So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by “fair cut” O’Reilly means “cut in a manner that left some of Stewart’s best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience,” then he’s absolutely right…
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And to watch the Fox News cut of this exchange, you’d think O’Reilly scored a minor point by mocking Stewart’s repeated use of the word “cyclonic”
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O’REILLY: Cavuto sane?
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STEWART: Being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual…
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O’REILLY: We’re back to the cyclonic.
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STEWART: Their cyclonic perpetual emotion machine that is a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week. They’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network?

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Here’s what Stewart really said about Neil Cavuto’s practice of raising “Is Obama a Stalinist?”-style questions:
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I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it’s the same thing: “I’m not saying your mother’s a whore. I’m just saying she has sex for money. With people.” [F]ox News used to be all about, you don’t criticize a president during wartime. It’s unacceptable, it’s treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, “Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country.”

Ah yes — the Cavuto Mark in all its glory!

Read the whole thing. The Gawker staff deserves great credit for, as the saying goes, watching these idiots so we don’t have to, and for exploring Fox’s bad-faith chop job at length. Comments are well worth reading, too — including, I suppose, the Fox apologist who whines “The rife condescension in this thread is exactly why more people watch Fox than the Big Three. Obviously, the bulk of Fox’s viewers don’t really sweat the fact it’s a right-leaning outlet, just like the Big Three viewers don’t sweat the left-of-center bias. Fox’s viewers watch Fox because it’s the one place in the MSM they don’t get called stupid all day long.”

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