deadissue.com

Good medicine may not always be good for GDP
Especially with breast and prostate cancer it seems like there are many incentives to over treat and certainly no financial incentives to just help the patient. I would be curious to hear from the free market worshippers about this, although their excuse will probably involve something about returning to a barter economy.

I am in Nevada today home of Sue Lowden the chicken for check-ups lady and she is not favored to win at least according to the local new here in Mesquite. Maybe this is a sign that the silly tea bagger policies don’t pass anybodies smell test. Of course the real test will be in November but I don’t think the country can take too many more know nothings in politics, eight years of Bush was enough.

One thing that the debacle in the Gulf of mexico has made clear is that private industry can’t do much to fix problems, even ones of their own creation. It might be time to just admit that with large scale projects the government either needs to be in charge or perhaps partnered with a very tightly regulated public utility; but it is pretty clear after the financial meltdown and now the eviromental meltdown private industry is not able or willing to look out for both public interest and there own profit interests.

I was reading this article on the demise of the middle class and what can be done to stop it, the consenus seems to be that a better educated workforce could compete better and thus stay in the middle class. I am not really sure that is correct, as long as people keep having larger families the living conditions are ging to coninue to decline.

What do most third-world countries have in common? Too many people and no access to family planning. The middle class in the U.S is going to overpopulate itself out of existence with or without a good education.

This is probably the first Memorial day I have had off in my adult life, gotta say it is great. Just got back from a long bike ride, I wish every day was a holiday.

I hope everyone is having as good of a day as I am.

Steve Benen asks when people will stop covering Sarah Palin’s hateful vile missives:

Former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R), who seems unfulfilled unless she’s engaged in some kind of pointless feud, has decided to lash out wildly at an investigative journalist. The details aren’t especially interesting….Newt Gingrich is mad as a hatter, but the political establishment still takes him seriously and showers him with the attention he craves — but the larger observation is compelling and persuasive. Palin just keeps getting more ridiculous, and there appears to be no breaking point. No matter how far she goes, there is no threshold to cross.

Part of the thing with Granny Palin and her clan is that they are sort of entertaining, and like any group of reality show stars they are pretty much a trainwreck, almost everyday Bristol Palin starts to look more like Snooky from Jersey Shores. Palin’s fans don’t realize that she is a joke and unfortunately they probably never will.

This is a bit old, but it’s worth commenting on regardless. Nick Kristof — an otherwise admirable guy — thinks it’s appropriate to chastise poor Africans for their consumption choices in the pages of the New York Times:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

Kristof comments that this “probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous” and well, it does. Kristof comes dangerously close to sounding like the domestic commentators who blame the problems of inner-city African-Americans on a lack of personal responsibility and some kind of unique black “pathology.” These are the folks that chastise poor blacks for owning cell phones or drinking alcohol, as if that — and not broader systemic problems — is to blame for their poverty. Indeed, I’ll go ahead and quote South African blogger Sean Jacob’s charge that Kristof all but endorses “19th century views in which Westerners, and particularly white Westerners, decide whats good for poor, third world, mostly black, particularly black people.”

I had a similar reaction to a lot of what Kristof wrote while he was in Africa, I don’t doubt he cares but he seems to have a bit of the “great white hunter attitude”; although I think that is the attitude of most the groups over there who claim they are trying to help.

A lot is being made of the Rand Paul implosion:

It’s basically this — all the stuff Paul is getting in trouble for now are things that would just be really tough to use against a candidate in a GOP primary in Kentucky, or frankly most red states, especially in 2010.

One of the things we rely on in politics is an adversary system to weed out bad apples. We don’t just rely on the press. We rely on the self-interest of the candidates themselves to ferret out weaknesses and warning signs in their opponents. In this case, though, was Trey Grayson going to go after Paul for his archaic and troubling views on civil rights? In a GOP primary in Kentucky in 2010? I doubt it. And pretty much the same for thinking there shouldn’t be a minimum wage or that Mexico and Canada are going to take away our liberty or that there shouldn’t be an Americans with Disabilities Act or all the rest.

I think the Libertarian implosion may have started with Sue Lowden and her “chickens for check-ups debacle. Libertarian/Conservative ideas don’t work. If you want to see them in practice go to Somalia or Haiti; this becomes obvious when they are even challenged a little bit, hopefully obvious enough that these idiots wont get elected.

Bike racing is starting to look a lot like Baseball, only bike racing is still cooler:

The cycling community gathered in this farming town for Thursday’s start of Stage 5 of the Tour of California was left stunned by allegations made by cyclist Floyd Landis that seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and other top American riders were involved in blood doping before 2006.

Landis, who lost his own 2006 Tour de France title because of a failed doping test and was subsequently banned for two years despite years of denials, not only has admitted his own use of performance enhancing drugs during races but also reportedly sent e-mails to cycling and anti-doping officials detailing how Armstrong, George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer and Dave Zabriskie schemed to engage in blood doping. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the allegations on their web site late Wednesday night.

All the accused riders are in the Amgen Tour of California, which starts at 10:45 a.m. and travels to south to Bakersfield.

A spokesman for Team RadioShack said team manager Johan Bruyneel, whom Landis accused of teaching him the ins and outs of blood doping, Armstrong and Leipheimer will speak to reporters before Thursday’s stage gets underway. Armstrong, however, briefly told reporters Thursday morning that the allegations are not based in fact and denied ever being involved in doping or using performance enhancing drugs.

This isn’t news to people who follow the sport but I guess it is a shock to some people.

I caught a little bit of Ran Paul on the Racheal Maddow show last night, and the guy seemed unable to answer a simple questions. Maddow kept asking him if he supported the Civil Rights Act and he kept trying to make some sort of vague argument about guns in church; which I think is part of the problem with libertarians as a whole, there ideas sound great in a philosophy paper but fall apart pretty quickly in practice. In fact I think you can probably say that about the entire conservative movement.

Obvioussly in the case of Rand Paul he knows that he would offend his followers if he said he supported the civil rights act, but he would offend the rest the country if he came out against the civil rights act, so instead he talked about guns in church.

For a better discussion of this see Pandagon

From Andrew Sullivan:

I’m a college student (should be writing my final paper right now, in fact), so there isn’t any real stigma regarding smoking marijuana, but I do it for a much different reason than most of my friends. I’m 21 and I have rather severe Attention Deficit Disorder, something I’ve struggled with my entire life. The only medication that works for me at all is Adderall, which I think of as meth for rich people. However, while taking 25mg a day allows me to function normally as a student, it also makes me miserable. My medication suppresses my appetite to the point where I can’t smell food without feeling nauseous, makes me panicky and paranoid, exacerbates my already bothersome insomnia and migraines, and (perhaps worst of all) destroys my sex drive. My doctor’s response to these terrible side effects was more medication, mostly sedatives that make me feel like I’m walking on the bottom of the ocean and put me into an uncomfortable, dreamless sleep-coma.

I hated my life. I almost dropped out of college after my first semester because the idea of spending four years jacked up on Adderall, not sleeping, barely eating, and uninterested in the beautiful college girls all around me, was completely unbearable.

Andrew, weed is nothing short of a miracle for me.

I had smoked it before and enjoyed it, but never while I was taking my medication. A couple tokes and my headaches disappear, my appetite comes back with a vengeance, and my panicked paranoia melts into comparatively blissful relaxation. A couple more, and I can get a full night of deep, restful sleep, something I have trouble with even without amphetamines in my system. Even when I’m not taking Adderall, marijuana helps: my ADD causes my thoughts to jump constantly from topic to topic, my hands get restless if they’re not continuously occupied and I’m always twitchy (which is exhausting when you do it all day) – all of this is much better when I’m stoned. Plus, it’s fun! I can stare at the wall forever if I want to! Maybe that’s not such a novelty to you, but for me, it’s like having a superpower.

Because of weed, I don’t have to choose between being functional and feeling good. I don’t like having to break the law, but as a well-off, clean-cut white college student in a state with relatively relaxed cannabis laws, the risk for me is minuscule, and well worth the reward. In every other aspect of my life, I am a model citizen – there’s not so much as a parking ticket on my record. I’m careful and responsible about my drug usage, and try to buy from people who grow it themselves and aren’t using my money to fund violent gangs. That billions of dollars are wasted in this disastrous War on Drugs and thousands of lives are ruined, all in the name of protecting me from something that makes my quality of life significantly better, is a national outrage.

But big Pharma isn’t making any money from pot

After I read stuff like this I am amazed that people still think we can breed our way out of the financial crisis:

Alison Schrager reports “The paper finds the cost of adopting a black baby needs to be $38,000 lower than the cost of a white baby, in order to make parents indifferent to race. Boys will need to cost $16,000 less than girls.”

Ross Duochethat did a column on another aspect of this a few days ago as well:

A] lot of the differences between “red” and “blue” family structures, as sketched in Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s recent book, are driven by higher abortion rates in liberal states. And it really is striking, when you dig into the data, how much of the blue-state advantage in preventing teen births is made possible by abortion. Rhode Island’s teen pregnancy rate is identical to West Virginia’s, but West Virginia’s teen birth rate is 33 percent higher. California’s teen pregnancy rate is higher than Alabama’s, but California’s teen birth rate is 20 percent lower. Kentucky and Maryland have the same teen pregnancy rates, but Kentucky has almost 60 percent more teenage births. And so on

And yes I know I misspelled Douchehats name, for some reason I just can’t seem to spell it without the word “douche” in it.

From Mathew Yglesias:

Suppose we have 100 mortgages that pay $1 or $0. The probability of default is 0.05. We pool the mortgages and then prioritize them into tranches such that tranche 1 pays out $1 if no mortgage defaults and $0 otherwise, tranche 2 pays out $1 if 1 or fewer mortgages defaults, $0 otherwise. Tranche 10 then pays out $1 if 9 or fewer mortgages default and $0 otherwise. Tranche 10 has a probability of defaulting of 2.82 percent. A fortiori tranches 11 and higher all have lower probabilities of defaulting. Thus, we have transformed 100 securities each with a default of 5% into 9 with probabilities of default greater than 5% and 91 with probabilities of default less than 5%.

Now let’s try this trick again. Suppose we take 100 of these type-10 tranches and suppose we now pool and prioritize these into tranches creating 100 new securities. Now tranche 10 of what is in effect a CDO will have a probability of default of just 0.05 percent, i.e. p=.000543895 to be exact. We have now created some “super safe,” securities which can be very profitable if there are a lot of investors demanding triple AAA.
Suppose that we misspecified the underlying probability of mortgage default and we later discover the true probability is not .05 but .06. In terms of our original mortgages the true default rate is 20 percent higher than we thought–not good but not deadly either. However, with this small error, the probability of default in the 10 tranche jumps from p=.0282 to p=.0775, a 175% increase. Moreover, the probability of default of the CDO jumps from p=.0005 to p=.247, a 45,000% increase!

Now I understand the entire mortgage mess; People tried to apply the laws of physics to finance and it didn’t work.

Politics in Florida is always interesting:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist spent most of 2010 a pitiful figure, falling behind an upstart Tea Party opponent and struggling to remain competitive in a senate primary when only two years before he was a presidential kingmaker and widely viewed as a future vice presidential or even presidential contender. But now he seems to be having if not the last laugh than at least biggest current one. Another poll is out showing Crist not just ahead in a three-way race for Senate but by a significant margin — six points over Marco Rubio and 19 points ahead of Democrat Kendrick Meek. And now Sen. Reid’s office is calling Crist’s office to chat.

I wonder if this isn’t the start of an independant caucus, which might make sense, right now the indepandants are established political figures but someone might be able to run on a platform of being smarter and more realistic than a tea-bagger, and less of a wimp than a Democrat and perhaps win.

This is pretty funny:

Last night, Stephen Colbert named George Rekers, a leader in the ex-gay movement and a co-founder of the Family Research Council, his “Alpha Dog of The Week” after Rekers was caught coming back from Europe with a male prostitute, hired from RentBoy.com.

Colbert owned up to hiring a lot of his own crew from RentBoy.com, including his new (and quite muscular) cameraman, Julian.

He also noted: “Jesus spent time with prostitutes. That’s why good Christians should always ask themselves ‘WBWJR — What Boy Would Jesus Rent?'”

Priests claim they live like Jesus, and we all can see how that works out for them, so maybe there is something to Jesus renting boys. Although my guess is that if Jesus really existed he was more like a rock star with plenty of female groupies to choose from.

I have tried to get my mond around this for awhile, I have always assumed that conservatives just have an irrational fear of wildlife but maybe the urge to destroy wild animals and the places they live is more ingrained than just fear:

Whatever the ostensible excuse the Taliban had for destroying the Buddhas, outsiders can clearly see that they’re motivated mainly be a petulant unwillingness to engage or regard anything that makes them feel smaller or less important. Pleasure and beauty offend fundamentalists, because these things are out of their control and present a threat to their death grip on power. Art reminds people that there’s something more than the tightly controlled, colorless existence offered by fundamentalism, and so the fundamentalists are wary of it. In Afghanistan, they just destroy amazing pieces of art that remind you of the long history and imagination and diversity of humanity. Here, Christian fundamentalists fight against pop culture by replacing it with weak replicas that are meant to satisfy the urge without giving too much of that dangerous pleasure.

The struggle between environmentalists and wingnuts has a similar flavor to it. Wingnuts mock and deride environmentalists for their awe at the grandeur of nature, for their desire to let it exist uncontrolled and unexploited by humans. Nature can quickly make a person feel small and mortal. You look over vast ecosystems clipping along doing their own thing indifferent to you, and you realize that this was all here before you were, and will all be here when you leave. Unless, of course, you level it, take all the resources, and leave a wake of destruction in your path. A lot of environmentalists use rape metaphors when describing what polluters do to nature, and a lot of feminists criticize them for it. But it’s hard not to think of it in those terms when the pro-pollution side glories in the same kind of metaphors.

I think conservatives really do hate the idea that the earth existed without them, hence they insist the earth is only 6000 years-old and only the creatures we see today ever existed. The earth was probably a pretty cool place without people and it will probably be a pretty cool place after we are gone; I don’t get why that bothers some people.

The Wall Stree Journal has an article up about what might have prevented the Oil-Spill in Louisiana. The interesting part is that the safety device, that would have cost about $500,000 was not required thanks to Dick Cheney’s energy commission. This makes me think that Cheney was so effective at gutting enviromental regulations that we probably cannot trust the oil industry to drill safely in the U.S anymore. It may be time to end oil production in the U.S before the country becomes uninhabitable.

This is perhaps the worst man made dissaster ever:

Ten days ago, after an explosion occurred on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig off the Gulf Coast, the initial word from the Coast Guard was that there was no oil spill. That soon changed as the government announced that 1,000 barrels of thick oil per day were spilling into the ocean.

Then, in a dramatic shift on Wednesday evening, the government changed its 1,000 barrels estimate to 5,000 barrels per day. BP initially rejected the new estimate about the spill, which experts now believe could be worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

We’re sure to learn more in the coming months and years about what the government and BP knew about the scope of the disaster, when they knew it, and whether they responded appropriately.

The only “appropriate” response to this would be a ban on off-shore drilling, it obviously cannot be done in a safe manner.

Hopefully this will make the “drill baby drill” crowd, including our president re-think offshore drilling.

Coast Guard officials said Monday afternoon that the oil spill near Louisiana was now covering an area in the Gulf of Mexico of 48 miles by 39 miles at its widest points, and they have been unable to engage a mechanism that could shut off the well thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The response team was trying three tacks to address a spill caused by an explosion on an oil rig last week: one that could stop the leaks within hours, one that would take months, and one that would not stop the leaks but would capture the oil and deliver it to the surface while permanent measures were pursued

Thomas Friedman thinks the tea baggers can be useful and Steve Benen disagrees:

Thomas Friedman has a column today suggesting Tea Partiers strive to “become something more than just entertainment for Fox News.” Specifically, the columnist recommends that these activists start taking energy policy seriously and endorse “a $10 ‘Patriot Fee’ on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

To Friedman, such an approach seems consistent with the Tea Party’s purported goals — taking a progressive approach to energy policy would help lessen our dependence on the Middle East, lower the deficit, improve our security goals, leave future generations with a better environment, etc.

Friedman isn’t entirely naive. He concedes, “Yes, I know, dream on. The Tea Party is heading to the hard libertarian right and would never support an energy bill that puts a fee on carbon.” And to be sure, on a substantive level, his suggestion has merit.

But I think Friedman, like many establishment observers, doesn’t fully appreciate how ridiculous the Tea Party effort really is. John Cole summarizes the situation nicely.

They don’t care about the deficit. They care that a Democrat (and a black “Muslim,” to boot), is in the White House. They don’t care about fiscal restraint, they care that a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t, as some foolishly pretend, care about the Wall Street excesses. Certainly Cenk Uyger is not the only one who has noticed that the tea party bubbas could all be shipped to protest HCR, but the big money boys aren’t running the buses to protest Wall Street. They care that there is a Democrat in the White House.

This is the point I keep trying to make about Nicholas Kristof and the religous groups in Africa, they don’t want to stop the suffereing as people who are in pain are easier to convert, and it is easier to take natural resources from desperate people, but they can’t admit that, so they pretend to help when in reality the religous groups in Africa are happy to see AIDS orphans.

Matt Yglesias might be missing the point on what makes a good conservative while discussing David Frum:

What makes him a reasonable interlocutor with things worth saying on a variety of topics is precisely that he does care. Conservatives who care about the issues—whichever issues it is they care about, and whatever their substantive views on those issues—aren’t going to spend their time on nonsense inquiries into the nature of Obama’s plot to throw grandma in the Gulag or on fantasizing about the idea that Sarah Palin would make an effective president or state-by-state efforts to ban big government microchip

The country is better off if the leaders of the conservative movement focus on making money for themselves, like Sarah Palin, and saying things to be popular on FOX news, rather trying to enact real conservative policies like invading every country because they might might attack the U.S one day.

I found this post when I was looking for something else, but OMG what a sad women:

My daughter and I almost made it through Mother’s Day without screaming at each other. Unfortunately, as I was driving Katie back to her Dad’s house to pick up some homework, she refused to put on any shoes. (Not even her flip flops…!)

I lost my temper. “You’ll step on glass!” I yelled. “You’ll make the carpet dirty! You’ll get pin worms!” Needless to say, Katie screamed her dislike of me right back into my face, and we had a lousy Mother’s Day moment.

Now, you may be thinking, who cares if children wear shoes all the time? Let them go barefoot. (After all, my children live in Florida with their Dad.) Or, perhaps it should appear obvious to me that Katie was trying to initiate a conflict with her mother because she is a teenager and seeking her own authority? Or, maybe you understand that Katie’s 13 year-old brain is drowning in hormones, so rational behavior is not something that I should expect on a consistent basis?

And then there is this gem:

It’s this last question that I want to address. Recently, I took Katie to get a thyroid test from her pediatrician to rule out the possibility of unstable thyroid levels explaining her exhausted, moody behavior. (Her thyroid was normal.) My pediatrician, who has a 15 year-old daughter, seemed to understand my anxiety. She just rolled her eyes toward heaven when I raised the question about what quantity of mood changes are ‘normal’ for teenagers.

It never occurs to this women that maybe she needs to pick her battles, or just let some things go, she just assumes everyone around her has mental problems.
She ends with this: “Next time Katie goes barefoot, I’ll pack the tweezers…” in other words she is hoping her daughter steps on glass so that she(the mom) can right. I am not sure what this proves in the bigger picture but I really feel sorry for this ladies kids.

I know I haven’t talked about this before, but I am assuming everyone has heard about the latest big republican health care idea, which is to go back to a barter economy. Paul Krugman explains why that won’t work:

Everyone’s having fun with the chickens for checkups story, in which Sue Lowden, the leading Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, expressed a desire to return to the good old days in which people who wanted a checkup from their doctor would offer a chicken in exchange. And she’s not backing down!

But I think even the mocking critics are missing the main point. Sure, it’s funny to see a 21st-century political candidate pining for the days of a barter economy. But her remarks would have been breathtakingly ignorant even if she had called for payments in cash.

The key fact about health care — the central issue in health care economics — is that it’s all about the big-ticket items. Checkups don’t cost much; neither does the treatment of minor illnesses. The money that matters goes to bypasses and dialysis — costs that are highly unpredictable, and that almost nobody can afford to pay out of pocket. Modern health care, if it’s going to be provided at all, has to be paid for mainly out of insurance.

Conservatives don’t like this; if few of them propose paying in chickens, there is nonetheless a constant refrain of calls for making the market for health care more like the market for bread, with consumers paying out of medical accounts and engaging in comparison shopping. There is, for example, vast romanticizing of things like Lasik and cosmetic surgery, which are held up as models for health care as a whole — even though they’re actually very poor models. (They’re discretionary and fairly cheap — not at all like the procedures that dominate health costs in the real world.)

Why this preference for cash? Because even conservatives know in their hearts that insurance markets are deeply imperfect, which means that standard free-market arguments become very weak once insurers are involved. And so they pretend that we don’t really need all that insurance.

The business with the chickens adds an additional level of absurdity. But Ms. Lowden’s perspective is ludicrous even without the feathers.

Looks like Goldman Sachs knew the mprtgage market was going down and positioned themselves to make some money out of it, I guess the issue is whether or not they misled investors as to what they believed was going to happen. I am stillof the opinion that betting against the mortgage market was not a complete no-brainer when they did it and really was a gutsy move. Sure it should have seemed obvious that housing prices had to come down but apparentely it wasn’t obvious to the “smart” people that run investment banks. As these e-mails show Goldman thought they were going to make some money:

Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts,” Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said in an e-mail dating from November 2007.

“Sounds like we will make some serious money,” said Goldman Sachs executive Donald Mullen in a separate series of e-mails from October 2007 about the performance of deteriorating second-lien positions in a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO

I think the issue might have more to do with how out of touch most investment bankers are with what goes on with the money they manage and less to do with Goldman Sachs actually having a little bit of a clue.

I just listened to the Tim Tebow press conference, here in Denver it is all Tebow all the time. A reporter asked him why he thought he was picked so late? His response was that he felt people held his beliefs against him.
Could it maybe have something to do with his performance in the senior bowl? Maybe his bad mechanics, that until a few weeks ago he said were fine? No people avoided him because he has bust written all over him. The only reason he was picked at all was his beliefs, if he wasn’t a very vocal Christian I doubt he would have been picked until much later. Although perhaps if he wasn’t a Christian he might have spent more time becoming a NFL caliber quarterback and less time making bad commercials.
I wonder what is going on with Colt McCoy who seems to be falling really far in the draft. My guess is that he is sort of Micheal Vick without the talent. I am basing this opinion on an interview he did with Mike and Mike on ESPN where he talked about how much he enjoyed shooting dogs. McCoy called it “spotlighting” I call it messed up.

Obama hits on the real issue with republican obstructionism:

In this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess, it’s been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines,” Obama declared. “It was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out, and asked you: ‘Why didn’t you do it faster — and why do I have that scratch on the fender?’ And you want to say: ‘Why don’t you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push?’ That’s what we need, is some help.”

My guess is most republicans are scared to get their evening gowns dirty and worry that their high-heels will get stuck in the mud.

I really am starting to think the case against Goldman Sachs is kind of weak:

The SEC’s complaint against Goldman Sachs alleges that it defrauded clients by conspiring with hedge-fund manager John Paulson to create collateralized debt obligations on subprime mortgage bonds that were almost certain to go bad. Paulson made $1 billion shorting these toxic assets. And who was foolish enough to buy them? The German state-owned bank IKB was one major victim, promptly losing $150 million, according to the SEC. The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel calls IKB “hapless.” Apparently nobody ever thought “Achtung!”

At the time no one thought house prices would collapse, so these securities probably didn’t look so bad. In some ways this suit seems like an attempt to cover for a market failure, after all the masters of the universe who run Wall Street could never be wrong, unless of course someone defrauded them.

The case against Goldman doesn’t seem totally open and shut.

But in 2006, some inside Goldman began to worry about the fragile state of housing. Daniel L. Sparks, the Texan who ran the mortgage unit, sided with those who believed the market was safe. Two of his traders, Joshua S. Birnbaum and Michael J. Swenson, had placed a big bet that mortgage bonds would rise in value.

But this camp clashed with Goldman sales staff who were working with hedge funds that wanted to bet against subprime mortgages. Mr. Birnbaum told the team to stop promoting bets against some mortgage investments since such trades were hurting the market and Goldman’s own position, according to two former Goldman employees.

But a few desks away, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Egol were quietly working on the Abacus deals.

They were, former colleagues say, something of an odd couple. A slight man with a flair for salesmanship, Mr. Tourre joined Goldman in 2001, after coming to the United States to study business operations at Stanford. At Goldman, he courted investors like European banks and big hedge funds.

I guess the question is whether or not anyone in the company knew what the other side was doing? Maybe someone who reads deadissue can explain this to me, but from my perspective it looks like Goldman Sachs simply made sure that they would profit whether the market went up or down and then sold both positions aggresively. I am pretty sure that is not a crime, but I am certainly open to arguments about this situation.

Update: Looks like some other people are wondering about this case as well:

I got a query earlier today as to whether I’d want to talk about the SEC’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. I averred that I’m always happy to play political pundit (the suit and the revelations it contains highlight the need for strong regulatory reform!) but that I don’t actually know anything about securities law or have any idea as to whether or not the SEC’s case has legal merit. For the record, the guy who writes the Economics of Contempt blog is a lawyer working in the relevant field and thinks the SEC’s case is weak and the only real issue is whether the PR cost of a long, nasty fight is higher than the cost of just settling.

Back with my pundit-hat on, I note simply that when it comes to fraud the real scandal is very often what’s legal. There are all kinds of nonsense non-financial scam products out there (I saw an add for this over the weekend) along with the various quick fix miracle cures and all the rest. A lot of this stuff, along with the tarot card readers and all the rest, is “fraud” in the ordinary-language sense but not necessarily the legal sense

Nicholas Kristof tours Africa and seems to get the wrong message, starting with this missive about everyone needing a helicopter:

We humans are suckers for certain kinds of wildlife, from lions to elephants. I hadn’t known I was a zebra fan until I drove my rented car into a traffic jam of zebras here. My heart fluttered.

As for rhinos, they’re so magnificent that they attract foreign aid. Women here in rural Zimbabwe routinely die in childbirth for lack of ambulances or other transport to hospitals, and they get no help. But rhinos in this park get a helicopter to track their movements.

I really don’t get what he is trying to say here, my guess is that in order to stop poaching the park rangers need to be able to track the Rhinos. One helicopter probably wouldn’t make much of a difference to the human population but it can make a huge difference to the Rhino population. He then comes up with this:

Then there are animals that don’t attract much empathy. Aardvarks. Newts. And, at the bottom tier, African wild dogs.

Wild dogs (which aren’t actually wild dogs, but never mind that for now) are a species that has become endangered without anyone raising an eyebrow. Until, that is, a globe-trotting adventurer named Greg Rasmussen began working with local villages to rebrand the dogs — and save them from extinction.

It’s a tale that offers some useful lessons for do-gooders around the world, in clever marketing and “branding,” and in giving local people a stake in conservation. For if it’s possible to rescue a despised species with a crummy name like “wild dogs,” any cause can have legs.

He has a point about giving local people a stake in the conservation but after that he has it completely backwards. You don’t need good marketing you need a true passion to help, and a clear idea of what will help. The wild dogs, or painted dogs, need habitat a food source, and protection from poaching, you give them those things and they will thrive.
The problem for the people of Africa is that none of the groups over there to “help” have any passion for the African people, the helpers mostly want to increase markets for western goods and services, perhaps exploit the natural resources of Africa, or save the souls of Africans, but they have no interest in what happens to the local human population. Some people can understand the intrisic value of wildlife(obviously not Mr Kristof) but there does not seem to be anyone that understands the intrisic value of the African human population and until that changes the plight of people in Africa will continue to worsen.

Nicholas Kristof is a smart man but I think he kind of misses the point when he talks about Catholic groups in Africa:

But there’s more to the picture than that. In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

The problem is that the good deeds and hard-work of one group promote the dogma and hatred of the other group; in the end all these good deeds only make-up for a small percentage of the damage done by the church in the third world, it is time for the people who claim to care about the third world to stop promoting the archaic and hateful religion that leads to most of the problems in places like Africa.