The Senate in action today. Dream Act has failed on the cloture vote. DADT is succeeds on cloture vote. Passage of DADT Repeal is now virtually assured.

Ezra Klein writes:

[A WaPo poll a]sked whether Obama and the Republicans were sincere in their desire to reduce the budget deficit, Obama beat the Republicans by a wide margin[.]

Ezra thinks this is good news. I think it is terrible news. Now that the Bush/Obama tax cuts have passed, the race to prove "quien es mas macho" about cutting government spending has begun. Howard Fineman writes:

David Dayen:

This was the trade made in the Senate last night; the Dems will get legislative repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a couple judges, and probably the new START Treaty, and the Republicans will get the chance to massively cut spending early in the 112th Congress. If I’m a Republican, I take that trade.

This all came about last night, when [. . .] Senate Republicans [. . .] informed Harry Reid that they would renege on their support of the $1.1 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill[. . . .] Reid suddenly didn’t have the votes for anything but a short-term continuing resolution, probably for two months until February 18.

Say what you will about the GOP, they do understand The Madman Theory of Political Bargaining and also know when they have chumps at the other side of the table.

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias wrote:

I’m surprised so many liberals are being so stinty in their praise of the recent tax deal.

I explained why in this post. Today, Yglesias writes:

I’m a tax enthusiast, [. . .] you help the poor by raising taxes and handing money over to poor people[.]

Krugman:

[S]upply-side economics should have been killed by the Clinton years: he raised taxes on the rich, everyone on the right predicted catastrophe, and what followed was 8 years of rapid growth and surging revenues, with the budget actually moving into surplus for the first time in three decades. But no: the right interpreted all the good stuff as a lagged effect of the 1981 tax cut[.]

The "most progressive Administration in a generation" and its Beltway supporters are now the leading purveyors of this Zombie Lie.

David Dayen:

John Boehner’s statement[. . .]:

Stopping all the tax hikes is a good first step [. . .] but much more needs to be done, including cutting spending, permanently eliminating the threat of job-killing tax hikes, and repealing the job-killing health care law[.]

This is one step along the road to the Norquistian dream of endless low taxes, starving the government of revenue, and the necessary reaction to that of cutting services[.]

Laissez les bons temps rouler.

The Change:

Congress at midnight Thursday approved an $801 billion package of tax cuts and $57 billion for extended unemployment insurance. The vote sealed the first major deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans[. . .] to prevent an across-the-board tax increase that was set to occur if the rates enacted under President George W. Bush had expired, as scheduled, at the end of the month.

Booman says:

What's going on in your world today?

It looks like the tax bill will pass the House sometime tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Update: The appeals court decided in favor of Julian Assange and he will be released on bail.

Update: Julian Assange's statement upon being released from jail.

The Guardian is live-blogging the appeal hearing of Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange. [More...]

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent expose on the cruel and inhumane conditions of Pvt. Bradley Manning's pretrial detention. Manning is accused of leaking the State Department cables to Wikileaks. He's being held in solitary confinement at the military brig at Quantico.

For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).

Here's the website for the Marine Corps Base Quantico which includes the Brig. Manning is thought to be in Special Quarters 2. [More...]

Prohibition was a failure. The War on Drugs is a failure. Maybe it's time to try a new approach.

Former UK Defense Minister Bob Ainsworth says it's time to legalize drugs. The methods of the past, including prohibition, don't work. They fail to keep the public safe.

The war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster" and it is time to study other options, including decriminalising possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply. "We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."

[More...]

More bad news for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The grand jury has returned an 89 page racketeering Indictment charging Kwame, his father, Bernard Kilpatrick and others with "13 alleged fraudulent schemes in the awarding of contracts in the city's Department of Water and Sewerage." The Indictment is the result of a six year investigation into Kwame's actions while serving as a Michigan legislator and later as Mayor of Detroit.

He resigned as mayor in 2008 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in state court. He's now in prison for violating probation in that case and is awaiting trial in federal court on tax and fraud charges related to how he spent money from a nonprofit fund.

Lawyers for both Kwame and his father promise a vigorous defense. And the FBI says the investigation is ongoing. ""It's not going to be done until we say it's done."