And the icing on the cake is reading reports uncritically telling us the White House is, gosh darn it, really upset that Peter Orszag would embarrass the Administration by walking through those million dollar revolving doors at CitiGroup.

Good grief. You’d think this Administration had a stringent policy of not hiring people from Wall Street or allowing those steeped in its ethics from running the economy or defining the limits of financial “reform” and the purpose of HAMP. Please.

The votes for cloture exist. It’s just a matter of finding the time on the Senate calendar, where DADT repeal competes with the START treaty and a host of other bills. The wrangling over the omnibus or some other government funding measure will loom large as well.

And one-third of American workers (the lowest-paid third, but still!) will see right away that we’ve been lied to by President Obama and the GOPs with whom he made this deal. Why aren’t Democratic Congresspersons making a bigger deal about this?

Harry Reid spoke about votes expected in the remainder of the lame duck session. He cited START, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the DREAM Act, the 9-11 health care bill and possibly votes on judicial nominations if an agreement wasn’t reached to move them in a block. As for when, he simply committed to votes on those issues “before this Congress ends,” not before Christmas.

Bob Ainsworth, British MP, has served as both the Home Office drugs minster and the Secretary of State for Defence. Today, Ainsworth has come out for legalizing and regulating drugs, stating the “prohibition has failed to protect us,” and calling the war on drugs a failure.

The omnibus spending bill is rife with interesting backstories and competing agendas. It’s clear to me that Jim DeMint’s pressure to read the full omnibus, which stands at over 1,900 pages, has three parts: 1) to cement his standing with the Tea Party against “pork” and really spending in general; 2) to run out the clock not on the spending bill but the rest of the Senate’s agenda, especially START, the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; 3) to create another Waterloo for President Obama, and put him in the difficult situation of having to sign a bill with a bunch of earmarks in it.

Private Manning has never been tried for a crime. He has never been convicted of a crime. Yet he has spent the past five months in solitary confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, VA, and the preceding two months in prison in Kuwait. Call or email the White House if you think this is just plain wrong, just plain ugly, and just plain inhumane. Call the White House at 202-456-1111, or email the President at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact to register your protest against this inhumane treatment.

A surprising start to the tax cut debate in the House; the leadership had to pull the bill from the floor before voting began. By all indications, they did not have enough votes to move forward on the rule. This is more like a temporary setback than a collapse of the tax cut deal, but we’ll keep monitoring it.

This is what a dinosaur sounds like when it’s dying. “I think Assange will be a footnote five years from now,” [Time Managing Editor Richard] Stengel said. Stengel also pointed out that “there is no Julian Assange without Bradley Manning,” referring to the army private believed to be the leaker of hundreds of thousands of [...]

This feels like the Justice Department, having determined (or been given the directive) to convict WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is just testing legal theories. Obviously, criminal justice should work the other way around.