Two Top Conservative Groups Tell GOP Representatives to Vote No on Plan B

“Shortly after Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform gave Republicans the go-ahead to vote for House Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B,” two top conservative groups urged GOP representatives to vote “no” on the measure.

While ATR gave Boehner some cover, Heritage Action and Club for Growth came out against Boehner’s new plan, which would see taxes revert to higher rates on incomes above $1 million per year or more while permanently preserving the cuts for anything less. It’s a plan that once was rather unthinkable to Republicans because of its tax increases, and one that conservative groups signaled they will continue to oppose.

Heritage accused Boehner of embracing “the other side’s political gimmick, as is the case with the Schumer-Pelosi tax plan.” The Club for Growth, meanwhile, said it wouldn’t “buy into Washington-speak, suggesting that these are actually tax cuts.” Some conservatives believe Norquist’s group is looking for political cover from its all-or-nothing pledge.

All of the groups’ sentiments are significant as Boehner looks to secure the votes needed to pass “Plan B.” There are 241 Republicans currently in the House. If no Democrats vote for the plan, Boehner can only afford to lose a maximum of 23 members of his own party…”

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“……….Leading the pack is Suntech, up 16 percent, followed by LDK up 12 percent. Yingli and Trina are both up 8 percent.

Ma reports China’s State Council (or cabinet) issued a statement pledging to reform the industry by encouraging mergers and acquisitions and banning local governments from supporting failing companies.”

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“In one of the strangest moments of the fiscal cliff debate so far, House Speaker John Boehner delivered an abrupt statement Wednesday, warning President Barack Obama to “get serious” about negotiations.
The 50-second “press conference” was in response to Obama’s criticism over Boehner’s “Plan B” option, which would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone making under $1 million — far above the $250,000 income threshold demanded by President Barack Obama.
“Tomorrow, the House will pass legislation to make permanent tax relief for every American,” Boehner said. “Then the president will have a decision to make. He can call on Senate Democrats to pass that bill. Or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”
Then he stormed off stage….”
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“Herbalife’s CEO Michael Johnson is responding to Bill Ackman’s short position on Herbalife.

CNBC’s Kate Kelly first reported that Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, is shorting Herbalife calling it a “pyramid scheme.”

Johnson sounded angry calling it a “bogus accusation” and “blatant market manipulation.” ”

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With President Barack Obama endorsing sweeping gun restrictions in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, prices for handgun magazines are surging on EBay (EBAY) and semi-automatic rifles are sold out at many Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) locations.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, said yesterday that it would continue to sell guns, including rifles like the one used at Newtown, where 26 people, most of them children, were killed on Dec. 14. By contrast, Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. (DKS) suspended sales of similar guns at its more than 500 stores.

Searches of five kinds of semi-automatic rifles on Wal- Mart’s website showed them to be out of stock at stores in five states, including Pennsylvania, Kansas and Alabama. Wal-Mart doesn’t sell guns online, instead asking customers to input a zip code to see if their local store carries a specific weapon.

“We remain dedicated to the safe and responsible sale of firearms in areas of the country where they are sold,” David Tovar, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said yesterday. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.

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Trading has been halted due to circuit breakers. Talks of pyramid scheme arise again. More details to be released…

Crazy stuff this 3 d printing is. While this was just a jaw bone i have read about taking much, much further.

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“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

The world makes less sense every day. Little children are randomly slaughtered in their schoolrooms. Predator drones roam the skies over foreign countries exterminating bad guys, along with innocent women and children (collateral damage when it occurs in a foreign country). Drugged up mentally ill kids with no hope and no future live lives of secluded quiet desperation until they snap. Ignorant, government educated, welfare dependent drones with no self respect or respect for others, assault, kill and rob within their government created urban jungles.

Sociopathic criminals who committed the largest financial crime in world history walk free and continue to occupy executive suites in luxury office towers in downtown NYC, collecting millions in bonuses as compensation for crushing the American middle class.  Academics, whose theories have been thoroughly disproven, continue to steer our economy into an iceberg while accelerating the money printing and debt issuance that will sink our ship of state. Corrupt, bought off politicians pander to the lowest common denominator as their votes are only dependent upon who contributed the most to their election campaigns, which never end. Delusional, materialistic, egocentric, math challenged consumers (formerly known as citizens) live for today, enslave themselves in debt, vote themselves more entitlements, and care not for future generations. The alienation and isolation created by our sprawling, automobile dependent, technology obsessed, government controlled, debt financed society has spread like a cancerous tumor, slowly killing our country.

Pink Floyd released The Wall 33 years ago. It was a concept rock opera album that explored the issues of ababdonment, isolation, alienation, authoritarianism, the brutality of war, a tyrannical conformist educational system, and the walls individuals and society build to protect themselves from having to confront reality and deal with the consequences of their actions. I attended the Roger Waters Wall Concert this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with my three sons. Three decades later, the message is more powerful than ever. The government oppression and never ending wars waged by the American Empire around the world have created a society built upon fear and loathing. Roger Waters’ vision is colored by Orwell’s 1984 dystopian nightmare of lies, misinformation, propaganda and brutality. The missing piece, which Waters didn’t see coming in 1979, was the ability of the oligarchs to use their control of the credit system to entrap the masses by convincing them to love their servitude and become so consumed with material possessions and the love of money that they would become nothing more than passive egotistical consumers….”

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“US President Barack Obama supports a proposal from Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) that would reinstate a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the United States.

Sen. Feinstein announced on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend that she helped craft new legislation that was aimed at once again eliminating high-powered firearms from gun stores in the States. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Pres. Obama will support the act.

“He is actively supportive of, for example, Sen. Feinstein’s stated intent to revive a piece of legislation that would reinstate the assault weapons ban,” Carney told reporters during his daily briefing from the White House on Tuesday, according to POLITICO.

Feinstein, who currently chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, championed an earlier ban passed by Congress in 1994, but that bill expired only a decade later. On Sunday, the senator said new legislation in the works would perfect that earlier bill.

“It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation, and the possession. Not retroactively, but prospectively. It will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets,” she told NBC. “There will be a bill.”

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“The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its weekly petroleum status report this morning. US commercial crude inventories decreased by 1 million barrels last week, bringing the total US commercial crude inventory to 371.6 million barrels, still well above the upper limit of the five-year range for this time of the year.

U.S. equities opened flat and has remained so until now. Despite a flat market technology managed to shine thanks to $ORCL earnings last night and as window dressing is probably underway.

The dollar remains weak with the Yen and Euro adding to earlier gains. Gold pared earlier losses and WTI was up $1.94. WTI is now up $1.10 as Oil Vol is down 1%.

Europe ripped into the close.

The bulls should be quite happy with digestion after a few days of triple digit rallies….

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Market update

World indices

3D heat map

“DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeff Gundlach told Bloomberg Television’s Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on “Market Makers” today that “investors should be holding cash” in this environment.  See the full video here.

Gundlach said that risk assets have “diminishing returns” on each round of QE and “it’s almost like a half-life of a radioactive particle.”  Investors shouldn’t turn to risky assets as a “Pavlovian response.”  Gundlach also said that, “I don’t see a lot of value in the U.S. stock market and I think you have to play it safe in the U.S. bond market.”

Gundlach on how to invest in this environment:

“One thing is clear that this is the beginning of an attempt to bring the fiscal deficit under control or at least start to address it. When you raise taxes and when you cut spending, whatever the combination is going to be, you will have headwinds for the economy. The economy is really being supported–this isn’t just in the United States, it’s in Japan, the ECB and Britain–the economy is being supported by quantitative easing that is allowing for a massive budget deficit and money printing exercises to go on…As you address the fiscal problems, you are going to have weak economic growth. What that means is that you are in an environment that is going to have further trouble in terms of investment returns that are in areas that are based on economic growth and areas that do relatively well like bonds…Broadly speaking, I think that investors should be looking for lower prices on most risk assets in these developed countries with the exception of Japan…Investors should be looking for the potential inflationary consequences of all this money printing exercise and the place to look for that is Japan…”

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“One of the “side effects” of the Fed’s monetary expansion is all the capital flowing into spread products, particularly corporate credit. Corporate bond yields are hitting record lows across the ratings spectrum. An average junk bond in the Merrill HY index now yields some 6.3%….”

Full article and charts 

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) announced that its CEO is stepping down after less than a year on the job, sending shares tumbling to a multiyear low.

The company is now setting out to find a replacement for Lisa Gersh, who will leave the company after an unspecified transition period.

Gersh was hired in May 2011 as president and COO and she replaced Charles Koppelman as CEO in July 2012.

The shakeup comes as the company, founded by lifestyle and home guru Martha Stewart, struggles to boost profits at its publishing and broadcast divisions and improve merchandising revenue.

The company said last month that it would downsize its magazines, and cut publishing jobs to focus on online video and other digital content. Martha Stewart will stop putting out its monthly Everyday Food magazine as a stand-alone publication, instead periodically wrapping it into the company’s flagship Martha Stewart Living magazine. It will make Everyday Food content available on the company’s website, a YouTube channel and through a daily video newsletter…”

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“The uproar over Instagram’s new privacy and service terms drew a quick reaction from Facebook Inc.’s photo sharing unit Tuesday afternoon.

Changes in Instagram’s service terms announced this week sparked outrage onlineas users took them to mean Instagram was claiming ownnership and usage rights for any pictures on the service.

In a blog statement Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Systrom co-founder of Instagram, said the company would withdraw some of the new service terms, and sought to clarify other items.

“Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

“SINGAPORE–Asian central banks should closely monitor capital flows, following additional easing measures in major economies, the World Bank said Wednesday, as it tipped the region’s economies to continue growing robustly ahead, albeit at a weaker pace than in recent years.

The World Bank forecast growth in East Asia Pacific to pick up to 6.6% in 2013 and 2014, from 5.8% in 2012. Its projections for 2012 and 2013 were revised down by 0.5 percentage point and 0.4 point, respectively, from its view in May. Developing Asia Pacific was tipped to expand 7.5% in 2012, 7.9% in 2013 and 7.6% in 2014. China is expected to grow 7.9% in 2012, 8.4% in 2013 and 8.0% in 2014…”

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“California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said he’ll propose that the state’s public pension funds, the two largest in the U.S., sell off investments in firearm manufacturers that make guns prohibited under state law.

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, known as Calstrs, with $155 billion of assets, has a stake in Cerberus Capital Management LP, a private equity firm that owns Freedom Group, the maker of the Bushmaster .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle that police said was the primary weapon in the Dec. 14 shootings that killed 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut.

“Our investment branch is examining the Cerberus investment to determine how best to move forward given the tragic events,” a spokesman for the fund, Ricardo Duran, said in a statement…”
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“We are far from global ubiquity for LTE and other 4G networks, but carriers in markets that have implemented the faster mobile data standard are seeing a boom in growth. Figures out today fromStrategy Analytics predict that shipments of LTE devices will hit 275 million units in 2013, a three-fold rise from the 90.9 million that have been shipped this year. And while a lot of this is being driven by strong competition among handset makers and carriers, Strategy Analytics predicts that the rise of 4G will bring something else to light: new entrants like Amazon and Mozilla also trying their hands at LTE devices.

“We expect Amazon to launch an LTE smartphone for the U.S. market around the middle of 2013. We think Amazon will want to get a ‘mobile shopping card’ into the hands of more consumers because the retailer wars are increasingly moving from the store, PC and laptop to the smartphone,”  Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics, told TechCrunch.

However, the analysts also emphasize that it will be a challenge for anyone to break the stronghold that Apple and Samsung have on smartphones at the moment. “Apple and Samsung will dominate the global LTE smartphone market in 2013,” Mawston added. “Like the 3G market this year, 4G will be a two-horse race next year. Most LTE smartphone rivals, such as HTC or Blackberry, have a lot of catching-up to do.”

The analysts stop short of predicting whether one single hardware maker will reap the biggest rewards, giving equal weight to the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3 as two “popular models.” At the moment, Samsung is the world’s biggest smartphone maker, and largest mobile handset maker overall in terms of shipments.

Other handset makers that have invested in 4G models include LG, Nokia, HTC, Motorola, Blackberry, Huawei, ZTE and Pantech.

With LTE services slowly being rolled out both in developed and emerging markets (comprehensive list here), Strategy Analytics says it will be a mix of both developed and emerging will be driving the rise in  shipment. U.S., UK, Japan, China and South Korea — where operators are “aggressively expanding” their LTE networks in fierce competition with other national carriers….”

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“Much has been said about a potential Apple TV set in the past few years, but it would appear that a source out of Foxconn has said that testing is already underway on Apple’s HDTV. The source, speaking under the condition of anonymity, explained that Apple is using LCD panels ranging between 46 inches and 55 inches.

However, don’t get too excited just yet. According to FocusTaiwan, which spoke directly to the source, a 2013 launch is less than likely.

Rumors of an Apple TV set have been flying around for years, despite the company calling it more of a “hobby.” Since, Tim Cook hinted publicly that Apple certainly has plans for a TV set, but didn’t go into too much further detail…”

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Mark Sanchez is benched. That’s not a shock. Fifty turnovers in two seasons will do that. What is a shock is that Tim Tebow didn’t get the start and I’m told he isn’t happy about it at all.

[Jets to start McElroy at QB Sunday]

Greg McElroy will quarterback the team Sunday, but let’s back up for a moment. When the Jets traded for Tebow, he was informed that he would get a chance to start should something happen to Sanchez (either due to injury or benching). But that hasn’t truly happened and I’m told Tebow feels like the Jets misled him.

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