So the alternate engine for the JSF is funded through March.
Some people see this as meaningless pork, but I remember the issues with Pratt and Whitney as the soul source supplier for F-15s and F-16s in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it was ugly, so I am inclined to support the engine as a 2nd best alternative, with the first best alternative to be cancellation of the JSF.
The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was signed into law, the Senate passed the START arms control treaty, and a new food safety bill that gives the FDA the power to order recalls passed the house and is heading to the President’s desk.
I still don’t see any gazillion dimensional chess here, but it’s a good day.
BTW, since the bill gives the military fairly broad discretion in how the ban is phased in, I would take even money that separations from the military will be continuing into 2012, because Obama won’t push the military on this.
The Congress has finally passed a bill allowing for low power community radio, the Local Community Radio Act, which will allow for expended low power, sub 100 watt, radio stations.
Until the late 1970s, legally licensed low power non commercial radio was a fairly common thing, but then NPR successfully lobbied the FCC to terminate those licenses to eliminate the competition and to open up airwaves for their expansion.
Hopefully, this will allow for a far greater diversity in radio.
That you will run against him in the primaries unless he drops his idea to cut social security:
The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.
The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.
This is bad policy, it’s bad politics.
You could call it political Seppuku, but I think that is more accurately the deliberate and premeditated murder of the New Deal, and the marginalization of the Democratic Party for at least a generation.
I can no longer attribute this to incompetence or cowardice. This is deliberate malice:
This is very good news, but understand that this bill does not set the speed or manner by which the military will end this policy, which means that I expect to see them slow walking this, with separations continuing for some tome, and with the Obama administration doing nothing to ensure that discrimination does not remain the policy of the Pentagon.
His, “Make the Democrats a generational party for a generation” tax plan passes the house 277-148.
Bummer.
So much for his promise to be a “Fierce advocate” for the LGBT:
Sources on the Hill are telling me a big reason DADT repeal isn’t moving faster comes right from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Despite President Obama’s public support for repeal, with DADT stacked up against the START nuclear arms reduction treaty that Obama carefully brokered with the Russians earlier this year, the White House is putting its legislative push behind START.
At this point, with more than the 60 votes secured to invoke cloture on a repeal bill in the Senate, obstacles to repealing DADT legislatively are a simple combination of time and priorities. Time is short in the lame duck session, and DADT repeal is just one of many items the Senate would like to address before it adjourns. Where repeal slots into the remaining legislative calendar, and how much time is left in that calendar when it does pop up, will make the difference between repealing the ban and keeping the status quo.
I strongly disagree with the next paragraph though:
No one questions that Obama wants to see DADT end, or that he wants to see it end this year. The concern is over the priorities: Obama, it seems, wants START to come first. And with the White House pushing START (in daily phone calls from top White House officials, according to one source on the Hill), Obama could end up standing in the way of DADT getting done.
Truth be told, Barack Obama’s excuses for not supporting LGBT civil rights, whether it’s his slow-walking DADT, or aggressively defending it in court, or ignoring judges orders to recognize gay marriages where they are legal, etc. rivals John McCain’s flip flops on gay rights for their mendacity.
The House of representatives passes a stand alone bill to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
After impassioned debate both for and against the measure, the House of Representatives today passed a standalone bill to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The measure passed by a vote of 250 to 175, and the House broke into applause at the announcement of the final vote.
The measure was introduced Tuesday, in the final days of the Democratic-led 111th Congress, after the Senate last week failed to pass a defense authorization bill that included a repeal of the policy. “Don’t ask,” which has been in effect since 1993, prohibits gays from serving openly in the military.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today that repealing the law would fix a “fundamental unfairness in our nation” and “honor the service and sacrifice of all who dedicated their lives to protecting the American people.”
Considering the relatively efficiencies of the House and the Senate, I am thinking that the “World’s greatest deliberative body”, i.e. the Senate, is nothing more than growth media for sociopathic narcissists.
Otherwise known as the kiss the asses of rich Republicans tax bill.
It passed 81-19.
Seriously, that’s kind of pathetic.
I understand the reluctance of Democrats to vote against their own President, but the fact that after this bad a deal was cut that you can’t even muster enough votes against it to keep the total below 70?
Pathetic.
The Senate voted for cloture on the Republican wet dream tax bill.
Notwithstanding the “nonbinding” vote in the House Democratic Caucus last week, I expect it to pass the house largely unchanged.
I simply do not think that there is enough guts in the house to push back in a meaningful way against this.
Point 2: he is now arguing that Democratic Party support of Obama’s awful tax deal is essential to the survival of the party.
Taking political advice from Mark Penn is like taking investment advice from Jim Cramer.
First, it appears that the Republicans have structured the deal to force states into bankruptcy in order to destroy the public employee unions:
Congressional Republicans appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011.That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program. BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31. And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.”
This is juxtaposed with proposals mooted among the Conservative Nomenklatura, most notably in The Weekly Standard, that Congress enact laws allowing states to declare bankruptcy, which in turn would allow them to unilaterally break union contracts.
Additionally, you have the withholding tax holiday, which legitimizes schemes to defund Social Security as a prelude to gutting it, as Nancy Altman, co-director of Social Security Works, so ably notes:
Given that unwillingness to raise taxes by less than a nickel on every dollar earned over $1 million, I find it unfathomable that a more conservative Congress, in two years, in an election year, will increase the payroll tax by 2 percent on the very first dollar, and every other dollar up to the cap, earned by virtually every single worker in the country. Consequently, I think we have to assume that the payroll tax holiday will be extended beyond the two years the president is proposing and quite likely could become permanent.
That means that the federal government will have to continue to transfer $120 billion to the Social Security trust funds each and every year even as it has to transfer more and more interest payments as the trust funds continue to grow and as interest rates return to more normal levels. Unless Congress acts to restore Social Security to solvency, the Treasury bonds held in trust will have to be redeemed, again on top of that new $120 billion transfer from the general fund, starting fifteen years from now, assuming Congress even continues to make the $120 billion every year before that point. These dollars will be competing with dollars for defense, environmental protection, education, school lunches, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, Pell grants for low income college students, and every other good and service financed by the federal government.
A permanent two percent cut in Social Security contributions doubles the 75 year projected shortfall. Scrapping the cap (eliminating the $106,800 maximum on earnings), tonally eliminates the shortfall today. If FICA is cut by 2 percent, scrapping the cap gets Social Security only halfway there.
I’m a cynic, and I believe that this is a feature, and not a bug.
On labor, the Obama administration has pointedly sat on its hands with regard to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), and the Obama Department of Education is more virulently anti-union than Bush’s Education Department ever was, as mind boggling as it sounds.
As to Social Security, anyone who appoints Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to a “deficit reduction” (catfood) commission, clearly wants to gut that gem in the crown of the New Deal.
These flaws in the “compromise” are features, not bugs.
After seeing this happen repeatedly, I think that actual intent is a more coherent explanation than simple incompetence.
Obama wants these things to happen.
H/t Yves Smith for the first link.
Interest rates on Treasuries have surged in the wake of the tax cut capitulation:
Treasury prices dropped Tuesday, pushing 10-year yields up by the most since June 2009, after Congress and the White House compromised on a tax package that is expected to raise the deficit and increase the government’s borrowing needs.
The drop in prices, which move inversely to yields, extended further after the government’s first of three auctions this week drew tepid demand from investors.
Go figure. Barack Obama has managed to capitulated his way into pushing interest rates up.
That will help the economy.
Well, the White House completely caved on tax breaks.
What the Republicans got:
What Obama got:
It’s a remarkably one sided agreement, and Barack Obama followed this up with a lie:
Mr. Obama said he was insisting on a temporary deal on the tax rates for high earners and wealthy estates on the belief that he would ultimately prevail.
“I’m confident,” Mr. Obama said, “that as we make tough choices about bringing our deficit down, as I engage in a conversation with the American people about the hard choices we’re going to have to make to secure our future and our children’s future and our grandchildren’s future, it will become apparent that we cannot afford to extend those tax cuts any longer.”
Let’s be clear, Barack Obama has no intention whatsoever to raise taxes on the rich or on the inheritance of drooling rich heirs.
He’s a pimps harder for the well off than Bill Clinton ever did, and it should be noted that Clinton did it before the rich ratf%$#s on Wall Street blew up our economy.
When one looks at what Obama has done, one can only conclude that we got sold a bill of goods by a Blue Dog.
If he had even the smallest bit of a progressive bent, he would have bent.
He sells out to Republicans because he supports most of their policies.
Yes, the sanctimonious rat-fink is saying that the Senate should postpone its adjournment to make sure that there is time to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell:
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) wants the Senate to stay in session until it’s passed legislation to do away with the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Lieberman, a key Senate proponent of repealing the military’s ban on openly gay or lesbian members, doesn’t want the chamber to adjourn until it’s acted on a defense authorization bill that contains a provision to do away with the policy.
Note that Lieberman has been a stronger advocate of repeal than either Barack “Fierce Advocate” Obama or Harry Reid.
For once, we have a bunch of wankers in the room, and Lieberman isn’t one.
Barack “I suck up to Wall Street Like 1000 Hoover vacuum cleaners” Obama is not folding on tax cuts for the hyper-rich, he wanted them to keep their tax cuts all along:
It’s been clear for some time that President Obama made the political calculation that he does not want any of the Bush tax cuts to expire. He doesn’t want to be the guy in 2012 running for President on having “raised taxes during a time of recession.”But the President also doesn’t want the political blowback of angering people who cheered him on the campaign trail when he promised to let the tax cuts expire. And so rather than just come out and just say that, he’s been actively trying to kill a Chuck Schumer deal to keep them from expiring on income of more than $1 million a year. It was a plan that put the GOP in an awkward position, and had thrown them off message in recent days — hard to be the people fighting for the 315,000 families who fall into that category over the 2 million set to lose their unemployment benefits by the end of the year.The President argued against the Schumer deal, we are told, because he was concerned about “the cost [to the deficit] and the risk of redefining the middle class as those making over [should read under] one million.”
The President’s argument is, of course, pure crap.
I think that when we look at Barack Obama’s performance on issues of real reform, it’s clear that he falls short of his rhetoric because he does not want real reform.
Financial reform was mostly smoke and mirrors, with small steps, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, being driven by a need to avoid totally alienating his base in 2012.
The same goes for taxes, or for the give-away to health insurers that is laughably called healthcare reform.
Go read the rest.
The House just passed the “Democratic version” of the tax cut extension, with the support of only 3 Republicans, and the opposition of of 20 mostly Blue Dog and mostly lame duck Democrats.
I don’t expect to make it through the Senate, but this is both good politics and good policy.
What is interesting is the parliamentary maneuver used to get it passed by a simple majority.
Normally, you need a ⅔ majority vote in the House to pass the bill without the possibility of a motion to recommit, basically a motion to amend and send back to the originating committee, and the Republicans always come up with stuff that will make weak kneed Democrats vote with them, typically having to do with sex offenders, or in this case, Wall Street tax cuts to make the Blue Dog/New Dem squishes tremble.
Well, Nancy Pelosi found a work around:
Brace yourself for some procedural jargon: Dems once believed they were faced with two mixed options for holding this vote. The first was to hold an up-or-down vote under the normal rules. But that would give Republicans the opportunity to introduce what’s known as a motion to recommit — a procedural right of the minority that would have allowed them to tack an extension of tax cuts for high-income earners on to the legislation.
The second option — suspending the rules — would have foreclosed on that right, but would have required a two-thirds majority of the House for passage: 290 votes, an impossible hurdle.
But Democrats figured out a way to avoid this. They’re attaching their tax cut plan as an amendment to a separate bill [the Airport and Airway Extension Act, to wit]. That legislation already passed the House, and has just been returned from the Senate. The rules say it can’t be recommitted. So the GOP’s hands are tied.
You can blame Obama for the election debacle. You can blame Harry Reid. Don’t blame Nancy Pelosi.
She knows what she has to do, and she does it.
Democrats were savaged because they were perceived as being unable to deliver, but Nancy Pelosi was not a part of that problem, she was just the victim.
Arizona Republican John Kyle has announced that he will not allow a vote on the START treaty unless the Democrats capitulate on tax cuts for people making more than $¼ million a year.
I am not disappointed by Kyle, I expect this behavior from post-Reagan Republicans. What does disappoint me is the behavior of Barack Obama, who continues to think that he can dazzle them with his awesomeness and reach across the aisle.
As my brother notes, “Since being ‘nice’ doesn’t work, a sane course might include not being nice….“
So they are out, they are voluminous, and I have neither the time nor the expertise to to review them all, I here is what I’ve seen in other people’s commentaries.
We see loans at absurdly low rates and self dealing, the Fed’s commercial paper program was dominated by European banks, and surprise, surprise, Goldman Sachs actually needed the aid that it claimed to only grudgingly accept.
The full Federal Reserve press release is after the break:
Press Release
Release Date: December 1, 2010
For immediate release
The Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday posted detailed information on its public website about more than 21,000 individual credit and other transactions conducted to stabilize markets during the recent financial crisis, restore the flow of credit to American families and businesses, and support economic recovery and job creation in the aftermath of the crisis.
Many of the transactions, conducted through a variety of broad-based lending facilities, provided liquidity to financial institutions and markets through fully secured, mostly short-term loans. Purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) supported mortgage and housing markets, lowered longer-term interest rates, and fostered economic growth. Dollar liquidity swap lines with foreign central banks helped stabilize dollar funding markets abroad, thus contributing to the restoration of stability in U.S. markets. Other transactions provided liquidity to particular institutions whose disorderly failure could have severely stressed an already fragile financial system.
As financial conditions have improved, the need for the broad-based facilities has dissipated, and most were closed earlier this year. The Federal Reserve followed sound risk-management practices in administering all of these programs, incurred no credit losses on programs that have been wound down, and expects to incur no credit losses on the few remaining programs. These facilities were open to participants that met clearly outlined eligibility criteria; participation in them reflected the severe market disruptions during the financial crisis and generally did not reflect participants’ financial weakness.
The Federal Reserve is committed to transparency and has previously provided extensive aggregate information on its facilities in weekly and monthly reports. As provided by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, transaction-level details now are posted from December 1, 2007, to July 21, 2010, in the following programs:
- Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (AMLF)
- Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF)
- Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)
- Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)
- Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)
- TSLF Options Program (TOP)
- Term Auction Facility (TAF)
- Agency MBS purchases
- Dollar liquidity swap lines with foreign central banks
- Assistance to Bear Stearns, including Maiden Lane
- Assistance to American International Group, including Maiden Lane II and III
Additionally, discount window and open market operation transactions after July 21, 2010, will be posted with a two-year lag.
The data made available Wednesday can be downloaded in multiple formats, including Excel, at www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_transaction.htm. The Excel files allow users to search, sort, and filter the data for each program in multiple categories. The site also provides explanations of each program as well as definitions for the data elements.
In the case of broad-based facilities, details provided include the name of the borrower, the amount borrowed, the date the credit was extended, the interest rate charged, information about collateral, and other relevant credit terms. Similar information is provided for the draws of foreign central banks on their dollar liquidity swap lines with the Federal Reserve. For agency MBS transactions, details include the name of the counterparty, the security purchased or sold, and the date, amount, and price of the transaction.
Never doubt the ability of Democrats to completely f%$# up the basic business of government. Remember the food safety bill that the Senate recently passed? Well it’s <a href=” />unconstitutional because it is a revenue bill that originated in the Senate, when the Constitution explicitly requires all revenue bills to originate in the house:
In what amounts to an epic constitutionality #fail, Senate Democrats may have blown their chances to see their food safety bill signed into law.
The U.S. constitution requires that any revenue-raising bill must originate in the House of Representatives. To honor this provision, the Senate often finds a discarded old House bill, strips it bare, and uses it as a “shell” and passes it back to the House.
They somehow forgot to do that this time.
Now House and Senate Democratic leaders are scrambling to figure out some procedural hocus-pocus that will allow them each to pass identical pieces of legislation before they leave for the holidays.
So our choice today is between the forces of evil and the gang that can’t shoot straight.