The defense authorization bill is gladly becoming a vehicle to pay back core supporters who have been frustrated about a lack of action in the Congress for the past 20 months. We already knew that a legislative repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was included in the defense authorization bill; Harry Reid said yesterday that would get a vote early next week. Now we learn that another key initiative will get included in the package: the DREAM Act, an immigration bill that would allow undocumented students brought to America as children to earn a path to citizenship through completion of higher education or military service.

While the White House continues to vacillate on Elizabeth Warren’s appointment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I wonder whether the roughly 525,000 homeowners who have lost their homes to foreclosure since the Financial Reform bill was signed think that there’s no urgency to having a consumer advocate at Treasury?

Today effectively marks the end of the primary election season and the true beginning of the general elections. It’s not only one of the last primary days but one of the biggest, including Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. [Ed. note: Jon will be liveblogging results all night. Delaware polls close at 8pm EDT, with a number of others closing at 9. Look for results and reaction at FDL's Elections page.]

I think it’s important to recognize that “the White House” is not a monolith. There are sometimes counteracting forces there, and one aide may not know what the other aide is pushing. Increasingly the internecine fights get aired out in public, though typically anonymously. That’s the best way to read this denial of the plan I mentioned yesterday, to make Elizabeth Warren the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

SEIU’s California State Council – arguably the leaders of the state’s most powerful union – announced the union’s support of California’s Proposition 19 for marijuana legalization. Not only does SEIU’s endorsement bring much needed political mainstream legitimacy, but as the Times notes, it also brings SEIU’s campaign infrastructure to Prop 19′s campaign.

Beck’s rambling defense of his paid 9/11 appearance with The Quitter is worth watching, because it shows just how much we got under his skin (starts around 3:00).

In recent posts, I have been examining various real estate transactions and IRS filings involving Dove Charismatic Ministries, Inc. and Terry Jones, pastor of the affiliated Dove World Outreach Center. As the organizer of various hate campaigns promoting Islamophobia or homophobia, Jones has actively focused significant attention on himself and his church. In this post, I will provide the details from an extensive search of public records relating to several of the business entities involving Jones and Dove World, assembling all of the information into a timeline such as those for which Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel is known.

The overall impression from the amassed data is that, at the very least, Jones and Dove World have been extremely sloppy in mixing the use of the Dove World site for the non-profit church activities and the for profit businesses. Jones has claimed that these businesses donate a portion of their proceeds back into the church to keep it operational. If keeping the church operational were the purpose of the private businesses, however, why aren’t those operations carried out under the non-profit structure of the church? If all of the properties had been purchased in the church’s name and all of the other business were also carried out by the church, with the cash flow clearly documented in up-to-date Form 990′s filed by Dove Charismatic Ministries, Inc., there would be no reason for suspicion. By mixing the church and private businesses, Jones has created an environment in which it appears that he and the other officers of the businesses can enrich themselves partly through the tax status and volunteer labor status conferred by the church.

Around 11am et, the Senate will begin a complicated series of votes on the small business bill. What’s their deal? They actually have to do with some reporting requirements passed in the Affordable Care Act. As a pay-for in the bill, the ACA mandated 1099 reporting for all businesses on certain transactions over $600. The idea here is that companies routinely don’t report such purchases, and summarily don’t pay taxes on them. So basically, the amendment from Johanns eliminates this requirement, and allows businesses to freely evade taxes again. The Nelson amendment would exempt small businesses with less than 25 workers from the requirement, and raise the threshold on transactions to $5,000.

Back in January, Dana Priest first revealed that Anwar al-Awlaki was on a JSOC kill list and was being considered for a CIA kill list. Now, eight months later, DOJ is considering charging him.

In a tough election with a busy calendar upcoming, it was unclear whether the Senate would finish off the defense appropriations bill including the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which the House has already passed.

Harry Reid announced yesterday that he would bring the bill to the Senate floor as early as next week, however.