NPR wants to show it will fire you not only for talking to Fox.  First Amendment martyr?  Hardly.  Just in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Also, anyone who listens to Conor F. is just dumb. 

Conor; one N and zero life experience or common sense.

Yes, yes. That’s “our” Conor.

So what you are saying is that Conor is not really an abject idiot, but really, and in actuality a super secret false flag double agent merely pretending to be a moby in order to discredit and destroy progressivism one idiot at a time.

Taking advice from Conor Friesdorsf will get your unemployment bennies pulled.  It’s a little-known clause in Obamacare, right behind the one that gives the Surgeon General the authority to raise 300,000 troops.

It’s truly amazing how he speaks with such clear diction with his head so far up his ass, isn’t it?

Must be a riot at parties.

Yeah, but the next thing a redneck will say after the smoke clears is, “Well, that didn’t turn out so good…”

The next thing a lefty says before trying the same damn thing all over again is, “It’s never been tried PROPERLY yet!”

Lefties.  Slower to learn than a drunken redneck.

“Conor Friedersdorf” is another name I mostly read about on this blog.  So I can’t offer any opinion about him, but I’ll take RSM at his word.

However, the text of her sign is, in fact, a great illustration of OWS, and apparently a quote from the CF piece:

Much easier to decide that it’s wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn’t aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon.

I think this is accurate as far as it goes.  Of course, it omits the incentives for just this behavior created by the government.  It’s just the sort of skimming the surface type of analysis that progs reliably spout.  Yes, I’m sure many of the private sector people involved knew what would happen if the bubble burst.  But when there’s profit to be made, someone will make it.  

The real scandal is that it was all legal and exactly what the government wanted them to do!

The statement quoted seems to cover the general practice of reducing down payments, credit requirements, etc, then packaging them up and selling them off to be backed with assurances from the US Government.
Yes, the Abacus thing was actually illegal.  And people actually got in trouble for it.  And it’s pretty much peanuts (“Investors in the liabilities of ABACUS are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion”), anyways compared to all of the legal stuff that was done.

I didn’t see anything in your article explicitly talking about the Abacus stuff in your column or hers.  This comment of yours now either shows that you’re a terrible writer (to not mention the actual subject of an article in the article!) or trying to rewrite history.

But, to paraphrase you, please don’t let a sense of proportion or reality get in the way of an ignorant snark on a blog comment.  Also, thanks for confirming RSM’s evaluation.

So does this mean Ezra Klein is wiser than Conor, or less wise?

Notice how Conor (with one N) picked on the only person who claimed to have no familiarity with him. I guess Conor (with one N) figured he’d be easy meat as those of us in the know, know Conor (with one N) is a know nothing liberal pushover.

To scarymatt; to sum up Conor (with one N), he works for the same rag (The Atlantic) as Andrew Sullivan and he lives in Venice Beach CA. (a well known alt culture/hippie/surfer hangout South of Santa Monica). Get it? IYKWIMAITTYD

He writes ABOUT conservatives. He isn’t one though.

“We printed them [the quote] out, taped them to poster board, and headed to the
Occupy Wall Street march in Times Square, on October 15. The plan was
for Will to hold the sign, and for me to observe what happened and post
reports to my personal Twitter account…”

How can she not see this to be a fireable offense for a journalist? She’s become an activist and is planting a story to advance it. That is not journalism. Maybe she could say she was running a sting and would’ve disclosed it as some sort of investigative journalism when she aired the story. However, she wasn’t stinging to expose corruption in the movement; she was using a plant as advocacy.

With the special privilege she gets by grabbing a “journalist” title, she completely ignored the concomitant responsibility that goes along with it. WNYC was pretty much left with only one option, and they took it. They had to. Their credibility is at stake, too.

This is like asking whether a bag of hammers or a sack of donut holes is the smarter.

Well, yeah – people steal ideas all the time, but most – like this one – was a general and obvious enough one that there couldn’t even be any moral claim of intellectual property, so to mention she stole it from a guy who fraternizes with known conservatives was stupid, even he if does get his testicles waxed at the same salon as her boss.

“Oh, you were just mindlessly trolling? I guess that’s what the folks come here for.”

and here you are…

your article sucked.  you should have said-
‘the protestors have no idea what they are doing’.

instead, you talked in circles, where ‘big decisions’ are simply big ‘questions’, yadda yadda…

you should defend work you are proud of, conor.  this ‘work’ is souless and empty.

What’s unethical about this? Assuming the whole situation is revealed to the audience, what’s wrong with it? I don’t get it.

Actually, you are wrong. Goldman settled, and did not admit guilt.

Further, there was no allegation that the buyer (a German bank) were misled about the nature or contents of the security.

It was that they did not tell the the buyer, that a well known short had suggested the contents to the third party that made the selections. Whether that it is material was the legal question. Personally, I doubt that a trier of fact would have found in favor of the Buyer. But that was not relevant.

The action was commenced because the SEC, which had made a miserable botch of the whole ABS fiasco, and of the Madoff ponzi scheme, was trying to suck up to its elders and betters who needed ritual sacrifice to sell the ironically named Dodd-Frank bill. It was settled, after DF was enacted because the SEC knew it had a weak case, and Goldman wanted the beating to stop.

Further you are wrong about the nature of “Wall Street” (most of the banks are uptown now) and its relationship to free enterprise.

The Banking business was created to finance the operation of the Federal government. It was not as the Hayekian’s say an emergent process. The Federal government created the national banking system during the Civil War to do just that, the federal reserve, the New Deal laws, and other changes through and including DF, are further attempts to keep it upright.

The system must and will stay the way it is unless and until the world’s largest debtor (USA) has paid its debts.

BTW, did you know that all of the major financial corporations had Federal examiners in their offices monitoring their well being at all times in 2008?

“Inconsolably angry” “?????     WTF?   To be inconsolable is to be so grief-stricken as to be beyond consoling.

What he hell does that have to do with being angry?

When it comes to English, it seems our lady journo  “don’t speaka da lang”

I think the fallacy here is CF’s statement that mortage backed securities were created based on loans that lenders knew would fail.  The whole idea of MBS traunches was to reduce the likelihood for failure by bundling loans.  Based on the statistics that a small number of mortgage loans default, such bundling appeared to be reducing the overall default risk.  

Incidents like the Abacus scandal were a mere drop in the bucket and did not cause the 2008 financial collapse.  The banks were over-leveraged, lending out up to 30 times their securities assets.   Even with good loans backing the lending, banks that lend far more then their assets are vulnerable when the economy deflates.

She seriously thought her job was to provoke an honest discussion of just WTF these people thought they were trying to accomplish.

 You never ask a question when you don’t already know what the answer will be.  At least not from a lefty to a lefty – that’s not a faux pas, it’s a hanging offense.