Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Have Time For It

The good news:  Joe F'ckin Lieberman may have actually come through on wrangling the votes for repealing DADT. 

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is backing the standalone Don't Ask, Don't Tell bill in the Senate, ABC News reports. Brown's vote puts the number of Senators publicly supporting the repeal bill at 61, enough to secure cloture on the bill and move it to almost-assured passage in the full Senate.

Brown joins Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Olympia Snowe (ME) in publicly supporting the measure. ABC News reports Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is also on board.

The bad news:  The Senate may not have time to vote on the measure because the rest of the homophobic GOP will simply run out the clock rather than give in to 70%+ of America who wants to see this repealed.

As for timing, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that's in the hands of the Republicans. In a strongly-worded statement released last night after the standalone vote, Reid expressed strong support for the standalone repeal measure (he's a co-sponsor) but also said that with Republicans threatening scheduling shenanigans to focus public attention on spending bills, he just can't be sure if there will be time for the Senate to take up DADT repeal again.

"We are very quickly running out of days in this Congress. The time for week-long negotiations on amendments and requests for days of debate is over," Reid said, referring to the protracted negotiations with Collins before the failed cloture vote on the defense authorization bill last week, which was the first time the Senate took up DADT repeal.

"Republican Senators who favor repealing this discriminatory policy need to join with us now to stand against those who are trying to run out the clock on this Congress," Reid said.

It may honestly already be too late for DADT repeal, which of course was the entire point of these same GOP senators refusing to vote for it last week when it was part of the defense spending measure.  They were never going to let it happen, and now they are off the hook.  Now they can say "We wanted to vote for it but there wasn't time.  We're not homophobic.  We'll bring it up next year."

Which with a GOP House will never happen.  Ever.

To recap:  Washington Republicans are gay-hating bigots and they always will be.  I refuse to get my hopes up that they will allow this farce to end.  Yes, Clinton created this mess.  It was the Republicans who then made it permanent law by passing it in Congress.  The Democrats are trying to end it.  It's the Republicans who are stopping them.

Period.  Either end it or don't.  But stop lying about wanting to end it then refusing to vote that way.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 49

Things are getting disastrous for the housing market.  It's looking like another housing price drop cliff is ahead because of a combination of two factors.  First, Foreclosuregate has all but stalled out sales of both first-time homebuyers and especially "move-up" homebuyers.

Robo-signing exposed sloppy industry practices that critics charged violated state laws and regulations. Some lenders froze the foreclosure process for all their loans until they could check whether their procedures were flawed and make any needed corrections.

The robo-signing moratoriums were responsible for the lion's share of the decrease in November filings, said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac.

"I wish the report was actually good news," he said. "But it's just an artificial drop. For most borrowers in foreclosure, it will be a temporary reprieve."

As evidence, Sharga pointed out that in judicial foreclosure states, ones where courts are involved and where banks are most vulnerable to scrutiny over their foreclosure practices, filings dropped substantially more than in states where courts do not usually participate in foreclosure actions.

There were 34% fewer auctions scheduled in judicial states, month-over-month, compared with a 7% decline in non-judicial states. Even that small drop was probably driven by an excess of caution among the banks, Sharga said.

Banks are going to restart foreclosure proceedings next month, but the uncertainty of who owns the note means that those proceedings are going to be very slow, challenged in courts, and will be lowered by buyers scared off by the reports of fraud.  It's not helping that people who have the legal right to ask where their note is before buying or selling their home are being retaliated against by banks dinging people's credit scores arbitrarily.  This too will only drive prices down and sales dry up.

That's going to cause tremendous downward pressure on prices in 2011.  The other problem:  the tax cut deal has pissed off the bond guys, and treasury rates are going up, pushing up mortgage rates in turn.

The negative convexity loop in mortgages is starting to see casualties left and right. The most recent read on the 30 Year Cash Fannie Mortgage rose by 11 bps overnight, and by a stunning 1% in the last month. At 4.703% the prevailing wholesale mortgage rate is back to the highest it has been since May 2010. And while some have speculated that this inflection in rates would have been sufficient to get Americans to jump on refinancing their mortgages, attempting to catch low rates while they can, the jump has been so powerful that to many the now incremental 10% loss in purchasing power does not make a purchase equitable any more. As a result, ceteris paribus, home prices will have to decline by about 10% to compensate for the pick up in rates in just the last month. And since the jump in rates on a duration adjusted basis is even more painful, there will be increase selling of comparable securities as managers look to shed a sudden surge in duration, leading to a further spike in yields, and so forth.

And this just turns into a vicious cycle.  I'm seeing the potential for a nasty drop in home values again in 2011.  That of course will only continue to wreck the economy.

No end in sight to the Great Recession.

If It's Thursday...

New jobless claims down a smidge, but that lowering was eaten up by the inevitable adjustment upwards in the estimate.  Tyler Durden shows us the real numbers in people seeking government assistance:



Up nearly 900K across all programs. Not good news at all.

Epic Better Bacon Through Technology Win

Japanese robots can process meat about twice as fast as a skilled worker can, meaning twice the delicious bacon.  Meet Hamdesu!



EPIC WIN.

Shutdown Countdown, Part 6

I've been warning that the GOP may force a government shutdown as early as this month, and it looks like we're headed there pretty quickly.  Brian Beutler:

Before the midterms, conservative leaders were warning that they'd force a showdown over federal spending much earlier than expected: in the lame duck session, before the newly elected Republicans come to Washington.

They weren't joking. Republican and Democratic leaders are now engaged in a brinksmanship that could result in a temporary shutdown of the federal government. After the election, Republicans voted among themselves to eschew all earmarks for two years, and now they have to make good on their pledge.

Yesterday, Democrats' chief appropriator, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) unveiled what's known as an omnibus spending bill -- a bundled up package of appropriations legislation, earmarks, and other measures -- which would keep the government running for a year.

In response, most Republicans -- even those whose multimillion dollar earmark requests are included in the legislation -- are saying, "Hell no you can't!"

That puts them all in an awkward position. At a press conference this morning, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Thune (R-SD) were at pains to explain away why they requested earmarks that appear in the bill they're now railing against. But it also sets the two parties up for a standoff -- and one side must blink by this weekend, or the lights will start going out in the federal government.

Democrats will try to use the impending deadline to pass the omnibus. If it fails, they can take up a piece of legislation passed by the House known as a "continuing resolution," which will keep the government funded at current levels through next year.

Republican leaders reject both plans. They're demanding that Congress pass a short-term funding measure, which would expire early next year and give the incoming Republicans the power to cut spending significantly.

Republicans say the Democrats have forfeited the right to make a budget as they never got around to actually presenting one in 2010.  They also say they will accept nothing less than total capitulation, that they have no problem shutting the government down over Christmas and into the New Year, and that their first act in the new House in January would be to introduce a budget with significant spending cuts that they expect to be immediately approved...or they'll simply keep the government shut down until they get what they want.

Yes, it's Hostage Taking 101.  But you know what?  Democrats have folded on this kind of tactic before, and I expect them to do so again over the next month or so.  Republicans will be able to make their significant spending cuts into this recession, and of course when the economy and unemployment get worse in 2011, it'll be Obama's fault, because Republicans will abandon the "power of the purse" argument they've been using for the last four years.

Only question left is whether or not this will be repeated in March with the debt ceiling.  I don't think it will, but given the action in the bond market this month it may be a moot point.

StupidiNews!

• Yet another failure in a US missile defense system brings this year's misses to two.
• After last week's marches by students protesting the tripling of university tuition, London's top cop wants to ban student marches.
• The Obama administration's report on Afghanistan and Pakistan says progress is "fragile" but on track for next year's planned withdrawal.
• Wal-Mart admits it has ended November discounts on toys and has raised prices in order to increase holiday profits.
• Older Americans are now catching up to the Millenials in computer use, especially in social networking.

Last Call

With the House passing a stand-alone version of DADT repeal today, it's now up to Senate Republican moderates to toy with America before voting as homophobic assholes again make up for their failure earlier in the week and be attention whores for a couple news cycles discuss their support for the measure, which in theory only needs one more vote to pass a filibuster.  Naturally all eyes are on the Snowe Queen.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) pledged her support for the standalone bill to repeal the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy this afternoon. Cloture to pass a repeal as part of the defense authorization failed by a mere 3 votes last week.

Snowe was among several theoretical supporters of repeal who said she voted against cloture because of procedural issues: Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) objected to the time allotted to debate the underlying bill; and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said that the timing for repeal was, in his view, not quite right.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) said, on the other hand, that she'd missed the vote because of a dental appointment. So, with Snowe's support, repeal supporters are within 1 vote of cloture -- and a repeal of DADT.

Who knows what Joe Manchin will do.  As Booman reminds us, he's not exactly on the side of actual Democrats.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

John Carney, who has to be my new favorite CNBC pinata, asks:

Is it really so bad if an elite cabal of bankers meets once a month in midtown Manhattan to conspire about the rules governing derivatives trading? 

Well gosh, what could possibly go wrong by letting financial institutions police themselves with no oversight playing Big Casino games with derivatives?

Oh right.  The entire friggin multi-trillion dollar financial crisis and the current near-depression we're in as a result while the top executives at the banks that both participate in this cabal and took trillions in taxpayer money to stay afloat turn around and take home tens of million of taxpayer dollars as bonuses.

Why would any thinking American possibly object to that, Mr. Carney?

Entirely new fields of mathematics need to be discovered just to properly quantify how much of a complete douchebag John Carney is.  "Infini-douche" doesn't begin to cover it.  We're talking astounding new uses for adaptive quantum matrices taken to imaginary exponents or something here.

Perhaps Bachmathenomics must be involved.

Non-Hypocrite Senate Republican Located, Loch Ness Monster Next?

Maybe the Higgs Boson will be discovered too along with the Grand Unifying Theory and that place where socks go in the dryer.  In any case, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch for a brief, shining moment, was not a complete hypocrite.  They do exist, according to TPM's Brian Beutler:

Republican Senators whose earmark requests pepper the much-maligned omnibus spending bill are having a really hard time explaining how they went from requesting earmarks earlier this year to decrying the legislation... because of all the earmarks. But never let it be said that those requests were baked into the spending package before the anti-pork wave hit in November.

After the Republican caucus voted to impose an earmark moratorium last month, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) -- who's likely to face a primary challenge from the right in 2012 -- asked Senate appropriators to strip his earmarks from the omnibus.

"I did," Hatch confirmed to me this afternoon after a Senate vote, "because I decided I voted for the moratorium, and I thought 'well, I need to do that.'"

Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, a logical thought from a Republican in the Senate.  I voted against earmarks, therefore I should take my earmarks out of this spending bill.  Print this blog post up and frame it, kids.  You may never see its like again.

On Wednesday morning, in a tense exchange with reporters at a press conference, Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) swatted away tough questions about the tension between their positions on the bill, and the fact that the bill is loaded up with their earmark requests.

This afternoon, I asked Thune, a likely GOP presidential candidate, why he didn't do what Hatch did.

"I guess I hadn't thought about doing it," he confessed. "The resolution that we passed applied to the next two years, it didn't apply to this budget year [but] we are where we are now, the bill's on the floor, but I think that we have an opportunity to strip earmarks out on the floor, we will. And we may get that opportunity." 

See, that's normal for Senators in both parties, actually.  And here it's news that a Senate Republican is not a complete lying sack of horse manure.  America, breathe easier between your chronic bouts of despair.

Greek Fire, Part 24

Quite literal now with the Greek Fire part in Athens today.

Thousands of Greeks took to the streets of the capital on Wednesday for a protest against a fresh wave of austerity measures which was marred by violence as a general strike brought international travel and public services to a standstill.


The walkout — Greece’s seventh general strike this year — grounded flights, kept ferries in ports, halted train services and shut down government offices and schools while leaving hospitals to operate on emergency staffing and causing a news blackout as journalists joined the action. Public transport was operating for most of the day to enable Athenians to attend demonstrations in the city center.

Around 20,000 people answered the call of unions representing civil servants, private sector workers and the Communist Party for three separate demonstrations. The rallies were mostly peaceful until the early afternoon, when self-styled anarchists broke off from the crowd and attacked the police with firebombs and chunks of stone torn up from sidewalks.

Hundreds of youths clashed with the police outside Parliament and other central landmarks, smashing store facades, setting fire to garbage dumpsters and prompting officers to fire stun grenades and unleash thick clouds of tear gas that sent Athenians and tourists scurrying into side streets with their eyes streaming. 

The Greek austerity plan is crumbling along with Greece itself.  No doubt our own ruling class is very, very nervous today as they continue to convince us that everything is just fine here in Exceptional America if the bottom 98% of us just tighten our belts a few more notches...and cut taxes for the top 2% some more.

Florida's School Of Hard Knocks

Incoming Florida GOP Governor Rick Scott ended up the state's chief executive despite a long and ugly history of fraud and ripping off billions.  He still bought himself the Governor's mansion, first crushing GOP candidate Bill McCollum in the primary under $50 million in attack ads and then doing much the same thing to Democrat Alex Sink in November.

Now Florida's about to get a taste of education reform, Rick Scott style.  From Mojo's excellent Stephanie Mencimer:

Conservatives have been plotting for years to blow up the public school system. Now, Florida's incoming governor Rick Scott is poised to light the fuse.

During his campaign, Scott pledged to overhaul the state's schools while simultaneously reducing school property taxes by $1.4 billion. How to accomplish both? Privatization, of course. His plan, which promotes online schooling along with other educational options, may actually pave the way for the elimination of such pesky budget busters as buses, cafeterias, teachers, and, well, school facilities themselves.

According to various news reports, Scott is cooking up an education proposal that would expand an existing voucher program designed for low-income and disabled kids, opening it to all students. The result would be that instead of public school funds filtering through the unionized public bureaucracy, it would go with the students, who could use the money to enroll in the school of their choice—public, private, charter, or virtual. If parents are wealthy enough to pay for their child's education with their own funds, they can use the voucher money for laptops or school supplies, or even sock it away in a college fund. The proposed voucher amount, about $5500, is only 85 percent of the annual cost of educating a child in Florida.

School vouchers for everyone in Florida, eh?  I wonder who's set up to take advantage of those billions?

Even so, Scott appears ready to liberate public school parents to take their money anywhere they like, especially to online schools—a new cause célèbre for Jeb Bush, who recently launched an advocacy project called Digital Learning Now! to lobby against barriers to online public schools.

One of the hallmarks of Scott's education reform plan is the idea that many kids don't need to go to school at all; they can learn everything they need to in virtual classrooms. Online schools offer many cost-saving advantages, but unfortunately many of them are so bad that even the military won't take people who graduate from them. Online schools also seem even more vulnerable to fraud than regular old charter schools.

In June, Bush spoke at a graduation ceremony at Electronic Classroom for Tomorrow, Ohio's largest online school, which enrolls nearly 10,000 kids but only graduates 35 percent of them. ECOT didn't get off to a stellar start, demonstrating some of the pitfalls of such schools. In its early years, the management company running the school overcharged the state $1.7 million in teaching hours it couldn't document, as well as $500,000 in computer equipment that disappeared with students who never came back.

Scott's education "reform" plan seems be less about actually making Florida's schools better and more about paying private companies to run bad ones. On his transition team are a couple of CEOs of for-profit charter school companies with questionable track records, including the head of Imagine Schools, which runs underperforming charter schools in Ohio, Arizona, and Florida. Five of the 11 schools the company runs in Ohio are on an academic emergency list and another three are on an academic watch list. The Imagine School in Florida is on probation for its second consecutive "F" rating and at risk of being closed by the state. Charter schools figure prominently into Scott's reform plans.

Ding ding ding!  Privatize the schools and rake in the cash when you cut corners.  Get rid of teachers, principals, classrooms and hell, even schools, and pocket the difference.  Who cares if the kids graduate?  Who cares if parents get ripped off?  It's their fault for not doing their homework before signing their kids up for the new frontier in free-market economics.  Talk about the new dot-com bubble.

Cutting taxes only puts that much more pressure for counties to go along with Scott's cut-rate online scheme.  "Want to balance your budget?  What if you didn't have schools to pay for?"

I wonder if Scott will put those disclaimers on the inevitable commercials.  "Warning:  your child may not actually receive an education or even graduate.  Please consult prospectus before enrolling.  Enrolling does not guarantee success."

Doesn't hurt that his incoming staff is larded up with private school executives looking to turn Florida into a gold mine.  You figure 3.5 million schoolkids in Florida times $5,500 a year in vouchers is nearly $20 billion a year up for grabs, and this scam would be totally legal, especially with Florida's GOP supermajority in the state legislature.  Scott and the GOP can get literally anything they want passed, including this crackpot scheme.

And Florida will soon start paying the price.  The laboratory of democracy is open for business, and business is good.

New tag, because I think I'm going to get a lot of use out of it over the next four years: Galtian Republic Of Rick Scott.

You're Still Watching The FOX Still Not News Channel!

They decide the news for you and report, you decide to believe them.

In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the "veracity of climate change data" and ordering the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

The directive, sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, was issued less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest [decade] on record." 

Bill Sammon is turning out to have sent more than a few memos on how the news should be reported at FOX.  I wonder what else will be uncovered.

Pesky liberal media.

Subordinate Clauses Meet The Elf-Destruct Sequence

This right here?  This should anger anyone with a heart left.

Santa Claus and his elves are seeing more heartbreaking letters this year as children cite their parents' economic troubles in their wish lists.

 

U.S. Postal Service workers who handle letters addressed to Santa at the North Pole say more letters ask for basics — coats, socks and shoes — rather than Barbie dolls, video games and computers.

At New York City's main post office, Head Elf Pete Fontana and 22 staff elves will sort 2 million letters in Operation Santa, which connects needy children with "Secret Santas" who answer their wishes.

Fontana, a customer relations coordinator for the Postal Service, has been head elf for 15 years.

"The need is greater this year than I've ever seen it," he says. "One little girl didn't want anything for herself. She wanted a winter coat for her mother."

Meanwhile, Congress is busy fighting over how much of a fraction of the top 1% of Americans should pay estate taxes on their seven-figure collections of wealth while the rest of us are told that "we can no longer sustain this way of life."  Awesome.

Congress has an approval rating of what, 4?  Here's why, guys.  Right here.  These are real people affected by your political posturing and your obstruction and your principles.

No wonder nobody trusts government.

Treading Water

Inflation numbers for November are in and they are just as flat as they have been for the last several months.

U.S. consumer prices rose slightly less than expected in November, while prices excluding food and energy edged up for the first time since July, according to a report on Wednesday that implied virtually no inflation pressures amid an anemic recovery.

The Labor Department said its Consumer Price Index nudged up 0.1 percent as energy prices rose by the smallest in five months, slowing from a 0.2 percent increase in October. Core CPI ticked up 0.1 percent as expected, after being flat for three straight months.

The fierce urgency of...nothing.

You'd think people in Washington would want to do something about the economy, but frankly nobody seems to give a damn one way or the other.

Commerce Clause For Alarm

Megan McArdle sees this week's ruling on the health insurance mandate as a victory for liberty, and has some questions about the Commerce Clause.

I have been reading a lot of well-meaning liberals who are befuddled by the notion that conservatives are going after the mandate, when that runs the risk of bringing on single payer.  Personally, I kind of doubt that, but this is completely beside the point.  On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?

This doesn't seem to be a question that interests progressives; they just aren't very excited about economic liberty beyond maybe the freedom to operate a food truck.  And so they seem genuinely bewildered by a reading of the commerce clause that narrows its scope, or an attempt to overturn the mandate even though this might lead us into a single payer system.  If you view this solely as tactical maneuvering, perhaps it really is preposterous.

And of course, for some conservatives, these operations are tactical, but for a lot, it's an actual horror at the ever-expanding assertion of government powers.  I'd like it if they'd get equally horrified about, say, the TSA and the drug laws, but there you are: neither side is as consistently supportive of liberty as I'd like.

While I agree with Megan that draconian TSA and drug law provisions are harsh, there are far worse things our government does now (up to and including assassination of US citizens without due process in the name of Warren Terrah).  A provision to buy health insurance is driving conservative-minded libertarians crazy, but the power to declare war, wiretap our citizens, turn our schools into joyless boxes where kids have no rights, causes nary a blip on the radar.

I'm supposed to believe that the Commerce Clause is the worst thing the government has ever done?  It's not even the worst thing the government has done this year.

Please, save your outrage for things that matter.  The government can already compel citizens to do anything it wants.  Equating the health insurance mandate with the far worse things done in our name is what's truly preposterous.