Bond-trading specialist Cantor Fitzgerald in March took over the management of sports betting at the M Resort, a new 390-room hotel and casino on the Strip’s southern edge.

“We wanted to turn gamblers into traders,” says Lee Amaitis, the 60-year-old Cantor executive who runs the gambling division, Cantor Gaming.

To do that, the company has transformed Las Vegas sports betting into something it thinks is akin to derivatives trading. By using financial-markets technology, Cantor allows bettors to wager not only on who might win the game or by how much, but also on whether a team can complete its next pass or make a field goal.

True story: A friend and I once ran some numbers to see if a hedge fund with a dedicated gambling strategy — example: pool capital and put all of it on red — could work. That was circa 2006, when the word “risk” perhaps meant something entirely different, and I think we just wanted something to talk about.

I have a lot of questions about all of this, which I apparently missed when it ran in The Wall Street Journal in February. How materially different it is than my awful idea, however, isn’t one of them.

Well this is rather surprising. Clusterstock editor John Carney has “people familiar with the matter” of the AIG demise on the record asserting that the company has basically been lying when it said it wasn’t deeply involved in the creation of the structured financial products that destroyed it.

He writes:

AIG was frequently involved right from the start of deals to securitize assets. It conducted its own due diligence on asset backed securities, sometimes going further than the banks that were actually buying the securities. Its financial professionals at times pitched deals AIG wanted insure to underwriters. It was an active participant in the market with a sophisticated, if risky, strategy for investing in the housing markets and infrastructure projects.

Until now, conventional wisdom said the massively mis-priced risk AIG FP, its financial products arm, held was either the fault of a small rogue group of traders or the other bankers who tried to replicate their trades, not a formal investment strategy, per se, pushed down to the FP group from higher up.

It also helps Goldman’s strange annual report disclosure about adverse publicity make a bit more sense. Goldman hasn’t received a lot of attention when claiming the profits it reaped from the taxpayer bailout of AIG were the result of deals that were initiated by that customer. Which seems to be the case, according to Carney’s reporting.

Full story after the jump.

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In a previous professional capacity, I wrote annual reports for public companies. Which is why news of an unusual disclosure in the Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) annual report that ran in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal raised an eyebrow.

In its annual report, the New York company said “adverse publicity” could have “a negative impact on our reputation and on the morale and performance of our employees, which could adversely affect our businesses and results of operations.”

The unusual disclosure in a 12-page section of “risk factors” ranging from rocky financial markets to natural disasters is the latest sign of Goldman’s whipping-boy status among rivals, lawmakers and angry Americans because of the firm’s giant profits.

I’ll get to the actual language, which is challenging to even take seriously, eventually. First, this is an unusual disclosure for a few other reasons.

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It’s real encouraging to know that this came out of the mouth of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R—SC):

I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value.

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Ibnale was one of a dozen people in San Francisco who had been given $100 by a startup charity that is trying to get strangers to start doing nice things for other strangers. It’s a novel concept. Most folks, it turns out, aren’t prepared for it. “What’s the catch?” a man asked.

No catch, replied Ibnale. Take an umbrella. You’re getting wet.

“No, thanks,” the man answered, and kept walking through the rain. Ibnale began keeping count. He asked 27 wet people if they would like to have an umbrella. Seventeen of them said no.

I dunno. The most puzzling part of this story about a new nonprofit that promotes random altruism is probably why people won’t take free umbrellas when they’re getting rained on in the first place.

Anyone who can stomach publicity stunts that make light of serious problems will probably appreciate this: Producers at The Rachel Maddow Show have taken the liberty to appropriately rename the policymaking nightmare known as the filibuster, the once-rare procedural move that stops popular legislation from being voted on and ultimately passed into law.

The viewer-submitted decision: The Tarantino. Because it kills bills. Et cetera, et cetera.

The stunt, of course, is meant to support the notion that the filibuster needs some serious reform. The Associated Press reported about the astounding pace Senate Republicans are using the filibuster, either in practice or by threat, to kill pending legislation that would otherwise become policy. The legislative logjam created by this increasing use might well have been the reason Sen. Evan Bayh (D—IN) said it’s not even worth his while to be a Senator anymore. House Democrats have began to lament they’ve passed 290 bills that are now sitting, motionless, in front of Senators.

Aside from using the budget reconciliation process, there are some easy-enough ways to get around the filibuster, but they are all generally risky in nature. Right now, the best-sounding option for Democrats is to move to start the next Congressional session with new ground rules for filibuster use because, somehow, there isn’t an organized campaign among Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster right now.

Which is why sorting out which lawmakers are for legislative efforts to kill The Tarantino, and which are against it, is pretty newsworthy. Unsurprisingly, Maddow is having a tough time getting straight answers. Video after the jump.

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It’s tough for me to understand a lot of things about the attack carried out by a domestic terrorist — or, if you read the Wall Street Journal’s reporting editorializing, a “tax protester” — on an IRS building in Austin, TX earlier this month. Included among them is why the story of Robin De Haven, the glass-company worker and Iraq war veteran who pulled people out of the flaming building, isn’t more prominent in mainstream reporting of the attack.

The Survivors Club has some details:

Robin De Haven was driving to work on Thursday morning when he witnessed the plane piloted by Joseph Andrew Stack slam into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, setting it on fire in an apparent act of suicide.

A former military man who served in Iraq twice, De Haven told CNN he immediately drove towards the burning building, where trapped people were screaming for help. With the help of other witnesses, he took a ladder off his truck and put it up to a window of a smoke-filled area, allowing five people to escape.

It’s easier to find sympathizers eager to call Stack a hero than it is to find reporting about De Haven’s actual heroism. Calling that unfortunate is a massive understatement.

Roehrig, left to answer for the US government, took the criticism in his stride and deflected suggestions that all it takes is a grant writer and a lobbyist to win funding.

I spend a lot of time agreeing with the administration in power, or at the very least giving them the benefit of the doubt. But when energy start-ups turn a public appearance into a forum to vent frustration about how they’re still having trouble securing funding, something has to give.

Republican lawmakers spend a lot of time talking about medical malpractice reform. And, indeed, Democrats in power agree on the general notion that tort reform in the area of medical malpractice needs to be a component of policy meant to reform the U.S. healthcare system.

Thus, this fun little exercise. Read the following policy analysis:

Instead of focusing on the few areas of intense disagreement, such as the possibility of mandating caps on the financial damages awarded to patients, we believe that the discussion should center on a more fundamental issue: the need to improve patient safety.

We all know the statistic from the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report that as many as 98,000 deaths in the United States each year result from medical errors. But the IOM also found that more than 90 percent of these deaths are the result of failed systems and procedures, not the negligence of physicians. Given this finding, we need to shift our response from placing blame on individual providers or health care organizations to developing systems for improving the quality of our patient-safety practices.

If it sounds like a reactionary response from Republicans meant to shift focus away from a progressive agenda, it shouldn’t. It’s from a paper co-authored in the New England Journal of Medicine by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And it’s from 2006. Obama supported tort reform years before he was able to do much at all to turn it into actual policy.

Naturally, tort reform of this nature is a part of both healthcare reform bills that went through Congress.

The full paper is after the jump. (Update: I should hat-tip Ezra Klein for the link. Wouldn’t have found it on my own.)

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