FDIC Sues 16 Big Banks Saying LIBOR Rigging Hurt 38 US Banks Which Eventually Failed

CNBC reports here:

The FDIC said the defendants' conduct caused substantial losses to 38 banks that the U.S. regulator had taken into receivership since 2008, including Washington Mutual Bank and IndyMac Bank.

Among the banks named as defendants include Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings, JPMorgan Chase, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS.

Sink Sunk In FL 13 By Libertarian Spoiler In Low Turnout Special Election Where Fixing ObamaCare Got No Traction

Flashback to November 2010 when Eric Cantor already said he wanted to keep the good parts of ObamaCare and not repeal the thing outright. Eric Cantor never saw the Republican blowout in 2010 as a resounding verdict against ObamaCare, even though the Republican sweep of the House was history making. Newsmax reported Cantor's remarks here.

Today, repeal of ObamaCare is much more appealing than keeping it as is, by almost 2:1 in December polling by Gallup, here. Those who want to scale it back or expand it somehow to fix it are evenly divided in the polling data and together represent 40% of those polled. The polling overall, however, is negative on ObamaCare by 52% to 37%.

The narrowly won Florida 13 District seat this week by a Republican was a test of the Democrat strategy of running on a platform of fixing ObamaCare. It didn't work.

Politico reports here:

Democrats had hoped that defeating Jolly would show that they could beat the GOP’s anti-Obamacare offensive. Sink had embraced the national Democratic Party’s “fix it, don’t repeal it” mantra, which candidates across the country are expected to adopt this year.

Election results at 10 News WTSP here show that a libertarian spoiled the race for the Democrat Alex Sink. Usually libertarians ruin elections for Republicans, not Democrats. The libertarian strongly supported marriage equality and liberalization of marijuana laws.

Turnout was low in the narrowly Republican majority district where older voters weren't particularly engaged by ObamaCare, as reported separately, here.

San Fran Gay Rights Activist Sentenced For Child Porn

Just remember people, homosexuality is completely unrelated to child sexual abuse. Completely.

Vivian Ho of The San Francisco Chronicle reports here:

Veteran gay rights advocate and former San Francisco Human Rights Commission staff member Larry Brinkin was sentenced to one year in county jail Wednesday for possessing child pornography. ... Brinkin, who worked as a senior contract compliance officer with the rights commission until his 2010 retirement, was arrested in June 2012 after e-mail attachments were found on his AOL subscriber's account that contained images of toddlers engaged in sex acts with men.

h/t Savage

Here come the Chinese industrial bankruptcies: Officials to respond with a mixture of capitalism and Keynes

The Chinese premier's comments are discussed here in The UK Guardian:

Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead. ... Li's warning followed the failure of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy to make a payment on a 1bn yuan (£118m) bond last week. The default was the first of its kind for China and widely seen as pointing to the end of 11th-hour government bailouts for troubled enterprises. Some analysts said the decision to let some indebted firms collapse was a sign the authorities had learned from the Japanese boom and bust experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tokyo was plunged into two "lost" decades of stagnation after it prevented zombie companies from declaring bankruptcy – even blocking petitions from bondholders in the courts - when a property collapse exposed debts many times the value of their businesses.

------------------------------------------

If only we could get Americans to practice some similar capitalism by letting companies and banks fail instead of bailing them out.

China can afford the Keynesian stimulus, however, unlike the US. They've got the savings Keynes prescribed, in the form of massive foreign reserves.

Too bad America has no such savings.

Malaysia Still Can't Find Boeing 777 Missing For 5 Days

Amazing. Maybe they should start looking on the ground, like in Pakistan.

FERC Study Warns Sabotage Vs. 0.01% Of Electrical Grid Could Blackout The Nation For Months

Reported here:

A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission raises concerns about the seriousness of electricity grid vulnerability, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The study found that if saboteurs attacked just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations, the country's power network would collapse. An ensuing nationwide blackout could last weeks or even months, the newspaper said.

Uh Oh, A Lot More Than The 1% DON'T Worry About The Economy

Gallup, here.

Incidentally, precisely 59% of American wage earners in 2012 made less than $35,000 per year. You need to make about $80,000 to reach the top 11%.

January Margin Debt Was 5th Record High In A Row

Reported here:

Margin debt hit record levels at the end of January, according to New York Stock Exchange data. Margin debt at the end of January reached $451.3 billion, its fifth record month in a row. Margin debt returned and surpassed record levels set in July 2007 back in April when it topped $384.37 billion.

Senate Dems Pull All-Nighter Talking Global Warming As Lake Michigan Posts All-Time High Ice Cover

The Christian Science Monitor reports here:

Twenty-eight Democrats and two left-leaning Independents, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and his top lieutenants, are scheduled to speak in shifts until about 9 a.m. Tuesday. The event is not a filibuster, nor is it related to any legislation. The intent is to urge a divided Congress and nation to “wake up” on this issue.

Meanwhile Lake Michigan broke a record on Saturday for ice coverage at 93.29%, as reported here:

The National Weather Service says more than 93-percent of the lake was covered in ice on Saturday. A rapid build-up of ice came with a stretch of cold weather from late February into the first week of March. The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory measured the ice cover at 93.29 percent. That's the most since record keeping started in 1973, breaking the record of 93.1 set in 1977.

NR's Libertarian Kevin Williamson Helpfully Informs Us The Koch Bros. Support Sodomy

Kevin Williamson of National Review obviously has no imagination when he says "There is no CPAC of the Left" right after almost busting his buttons informing us that Gov. Rick Perry at CPAC and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz in the US Senate all support reductions of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

Of course there's a CPAC of the Left. It's called CPAC.

But this was helpful here:

Senator Reid’s recent obsession with denouncing Charles and David Koch from his congressional perch is of a piece with that: Never mind the merits of the things the Kochs endorse politically — from liberalizing energy markets to gay marriage — they are a handy bogeyman. And, given the politics of the situation, Senator Reid surely would prefer to talk about the Koch brothers’ allegedly nefarious plans for world domination (the great “libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and leave you the hell alone”) than about Democrats’ recent meandering energy policies, which would hold hostage U.S. producers in order to appease the Birkenstocks-and-white-boy-dreadlocks set.

Tyranny Of The Legislative: The Worst Congress(es) Ever Because Of ObamaCare

Discussed here:

David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale University, pointed to the debates over ObamaCare as one cause of [Congressional] inaction.

“The subject has been dominating the domestic politics for several years and nobody can get over it. It’s really quite unusual. It’s bogging them down,” he said.

All The Republicans, Especially CPACers, Will Sell Out On Immigration

Louis Woodhill: Premature Signifi-ca-tion

not seasonally adjusted civilian labor force February 2008 to February 2014

Louis Woodhill, here, evidently referring loosely to the seasonally adjusted measure of the civilian labor force level, which is up 523,000 on January 1 and 264,000 on February 1 to 155,724,000:

It was extremely significant that labor force participation continued to move up during February, after its big surge in January. This confirmed that allowing extended unemployment benefits to expire in late December was the right thing to do.

Progressives predicted that limiting unemployment benefits would cause people to drop out of the labor force, but the exact opposite occurred. It turns out that people respond to incentives. Who knew?

Otherwise, I don't know what he's talking about.

The not seasonally adjusted figure was down January 1 and up February 1, more on which below. The seasonally adjusted participation rate was up slightly on January 1 and flat on February 1. Not seasonally adjusted the rate was down Jan. 1 and up February 1.

In the key 25-54 age group, the labor force level is up both seasonally and not seasonally adjusted two months straight: 607,000 and 402,000. That's important because this measure of the vital core of the workforce has been in freefall from the 105 million level reached before the Great Recession. But as it is, the members of this group are still struggling to pop back above 101 million. The deficit in the level of this group's participation is key to a jobs recovery: 4 million people. It's hard to tell why they are back in the labor force in the last two months. It could be their unemployment benefits ended, as Woodhill says. It could also be they've finished new degrees and certifications and have reentered the fray. It could be both of these things, and more.

Not seasonally adjusted, unfortunately, the civilian labor force level still looks troubled to me. Since the beginning of 2011 the level has made three consecutive new highs and two consecutive higher lows, until January 1, 2014 when the low at 154,381,000 fell below the March 1, 2013 nadir of 154,512,000. That broke the pattern of higher lows. At least the level went up on February 1.

The real test is if we make a new high in the summer of 2014 above 157,196,000, the last high and the all time high on July 1, 2013.

Arguably had the Great Recession not intervened, we'd be talking about levels more like 164 million by now. That's how far we still have to go.

Number Of Words Actually Contributed By Sarah Palin To Dr. Seuss Send-Up At CPAC

                    crony

                  spying, man

               Oh

we're       we     there's

              reporters'

                      their

and we won't take

All the rest, not just a couple of lines as she said, predated her speech at CPAC by over 3.5 years. View them here.

Another New High For S&P500 On Friday, March 7, 2014

1878.04

Sarah Palin Hat Tipped The Internet For "A Couple Of Lines" Of Dr. Seuss Rewrite When 7 Were Verbatim Full Line Steals, The Other 7 Changed But 12 Words From The Original But Retained The Order

Full video here.

Politico here gave her a pass without checking the depth of the theft, which is almost 90% of the text and 100% of the structure:

Palin singled out Cruz for his marathon speech on the Senate floor last year during his push to defund Obamacare, when the freshman senator read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” to his young daughters watching at home. Palin brought her own version of the rhyme, crediting a couple lines of it to the Internet. “I do not like this Uncle Sam,” it began. “I do not like this health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks or how they lie and cook the books.” The crowd devoured it.

Martin Luther King Jr. lifts a bunch of material without attribution in his dissertation and gets ripped for it, correctly, but I dare say Sarah Palin won't get any blowback for this from the right, or the left . . . a sign she no longer matters.

Sarah Palin At CPAC Plagiarized US Submariner's August 2010 Rewrite Of Dr. Seuss, Changing Just 12% Of The Words

Sarah Palin claimed authorship of this at CPAC 3/14

Sean G. posted the original rewrite on his blog 8/10

Sarah Palin's Claim At CPAC That She Spiced Up Dr. Seuss A Little Bit Ala ObamaCare Is Plagiarism

Sarah Palin's claim at CPAC that she rewrote Dr. Seuss about ObamaCare is a lie. She didn't spice it up. She just lifted someone else's work and edited it a little bit. It's been up on the internet since August 2010, posted by one Sean G. at the toomuchliberty blog. Sarah Palin lifted whole lines, and edited a few others, and never gave the guy attribution. Pretty low.

Here's Palin's stolen version, posted here with video claiming authorship:

"I do not like this Uncle Sam.

I do not like his health care scam.

I do not like -- oh, just you wait --

I do not like these dirty crooks,

or how they lie and cook the books.

I do not like when Congress steals,

I do not like their crony deals.

I do not like this spying, man,

I do not like, 'Oh, Yes we can.'

I do not like this spending spree,

we're smart, we know there's nothing free.

I do not like reporters' smug replies

when I complain about their lies.

I do not like this kind of hope,

and we won't take it, nope, nope, nope."

Here's Sean G.'s original version, posted here August 3, 2010 as "A New Dr. Seuss":

I do not like this Uncle Sam,

I do not like his health care scam.

I do not like these dirty crooks,

or how they lie and cook the books.

I do not like when Congress steals,

I do not like their secret deals.

I do not like this speaker, Nan,

I do not like this 'YES WE CAN.'

I do not like this spending spree,

I'm smart, I know that nothing's free.

I do not like your smug replies,

when I complain about your lies.

I do not like this kind of hope.

I do not like it, nope, nope, nope!

I guess that communications degree with an emphasis in journalism wasn't worth much after all, even after six different whacks to finish it. So now Sarah Palin's stooping to stealing from obscure internet personages who were way ahead of her and Ted Cruz in the brains department about ObamaCare. Not only does she talk like she comes from the gutter, she acts like it too.

"Other" Beats Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Donald Trump and Rick Santorum In Drudge Poll During CPAC

The fight is between Ted Cruz and Rand Paul among the junkies.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker did not appear this year at CPAC, wisely having something else to do, like getting reelected in Wisconsin this year.

If Harry Reid Is Protesting Unlimited Money In Politics, You Know He Must Mean His Own

Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal, here:

Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about "unlimited money," by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics' list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million). Even factoring in undisclosed personal donations by the Koch brothers, they are a rounding error in union spending. ...

[I]n addition to a system in which organized labor spends "unlimited money" to "rig the system to benefit themselves" and "buy elections," (to quote Mr. Reid)[about the opposition], Mr. Obama's IRS has made sure to shut up anyone who might compete with unions or complain about them.

Democrats: The things they are for and against are the things they are against and for.