Quittin’ time. Stop SOPA.

• The latest to jump ship on SOPA and PIPA is James Inhofe, making it 30 opposed by the most expansive Open Congress whip count. It cannot be denied that, while some Democrats are on the right side of this, the bulk of the politicians dumping SOPA today are Republicans, afraid of the Tea Party backlash. Far too many Democrats are standing with their entertainment mogul backers. Heck, the fact that Chris Dodd runs the MPAA now should tell you that.

• My votes for the most creative anti-SOPA sites today are McSweeney’s and The Oatmeal, but Ars Technica has the best rundown of this long history of waging war on the Internet from the anti-piracy sponsors. But hands down, the funniest outgrowth of the SOPA strike has been the tweets from student plagiarists who can’t do their homework without Wikipedia. I guess Wikipedia is still relevant.

• At the bottom of an article about Mitt Romney’s 15% tax rate, Reuters lets slip that Romney probably has a lot of money stashed offshore, too: “Bain funds in which Romney is invested are scattered from Delaware to the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, Ireland and Hong Kong.” This is typical of Romney’s career of using tax law to his advantage to get out of paying.

• Kathleen Falk, the Dane County executive, becomes the first Democratic candidate to announce for Governor in the recall of Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

• Speaking of the World Bank, their latest analysis of the global economy is a horror show, especially if Europe implodes.

• The US has consistently lost high-tech manufacturing jobs to Asia. High-tech manufacturing is supposed to be a domestic strong suit.

• The DCCC announced a large contingent of “Red to Blue” candidates today, as they seek to regain the majority in 2012. They sound pretty confident so far.

• Yes, violence is up in Iraq, but unless the plan was the permanent occupation of the country broken by invasion and sectarian strife, that was always going to happen regardless.

• New White House chief of staff Jacob Lew used to bust unions in his spare time.

• The cost of delaying the ask on the debt limit increase was that Treasury had to engage in more “extraordinary measures” to conserve cash, which actually costs the US money.

• This should be a bigger story: Israeli intelligence believes that Iran has not yet determined whether to build a nuclear weapon.

• British unemployment is at its highest level since 1996. Austerity wins again!

• The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the Volcker rule today, and Occupy the SEC delivered a letter on it that makes some very good points. Related: we want banks to rely less on trading for their profits.

• Obama’s campaign will test the waters with some ads in battleground states this week.

• Cheery story: “After reporting the sexual harassment in April 2009, (Balayla) Ahmad said she was approached by two university security directors who told her someone had made allegations against her and they threatened to call the FBI and have her arrested.” She was later expelled.

• Don’t know which way the assault on democracy in Hungary will go just yet.

• We will never end with the claims of Al Qaeda “on the move” somewhere.

• Is the nation’s waistline through expanding? I’m doing my part to help on this!

• So some Republican was already donating part of his salary to the government for debt reduction, so he took up Warren Buffett’s offer of a full match. And Buffett agreed to it.

• Mo Hinchey’s retirement ends a string of Republican retirements in the House.

• Remember the AIDS quilt? Now we have the foreclosure quilt.

• Can’t wait to see what Stephen Colbert and Herman Cain come up with this weekend.

• If I was in the room, I know I could have stopped the disaster that was this Mark Wahlberg interview.

Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, made some news today at the US Conference of Mayors, by saying that a foreclosure fraud settlement was imminent and that it would include principal write-downs for up to one million borrowers.

About one million American homeowners would get writedowns in the size of their mortgages under a proposed deal with banks over shady foreclosure practices, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said on Wednesday.

The deal, which could be struck within weeks, would mark the largest cut in the mortgage load since the start of the credit crisis in 2007 and could pressure the government-sponsored mortgage agencies to also reduce principal on underwater home loans.

“We’re very close to a settlement that would both fix the servicing problems, but also help over a million families around the country stay in their homes and get help,” Donovan said at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Washington.

A couple things here. First of all, there is $750 billion in negative equity in America, and the most expansive number I’ve seen for this settlement is $25 billion, or 3.3% of that. And all of that would not go to negative equity: there is reportedly money in the pipeline for wrongful foreclosures, legal aid, and penalty payments to states and the federal government. Further, there are 10.7 million properties in negative equity, and this alleged deal would help less than 10% of them.

Let’s for the sake of argument say that $20 billion will go to principal write-downs. Donovan is talking about 1 million borrowers getting help. That’s roughly $20,000 per borrower. It’s hard to figure out the average negative equity, but here’s a stab from CoreLogic:

Some interesting data on borrowers with and without home equity loans from CoreLogic: “Of the 10.7 million borrowers in negative equity, there are 6.3 million first liens without home equity loans that have an average mortgage balance of $222,000. They are underwater by an average of $52,000 which equates to an average LTV ratio of 131 percent. The negative equity share for the first lien-only borrowers was 18 percent, and 40 percent had an LTV of 80 percent or higher.

The remaining 4.4 million negative equity borrowers hold first liens and home equity loans with an average mortgage balance of $309,000. These borrowers are underwater by an average of $84,000 and have an average LTV of 137 percent.”

So a $20,000 write-down would be helpful, but on average would not get anyone back even half of the negative equity in their homes.

At this point I should say that Shaun Donovan has been predicting an “imminent” foreclosure fraud settlement for several months. Here he is from December. And here he is trying to get Eric Schneiderman to go along back in August. To Donovan, a deal is always right around the corner. He’s cried wolf enough that we should not accept these claims at face value. The settlement has missed at least a half-dozen deadlines, and is perpetually weeks away.

A better possibility would come from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac willingly offering principal reductions on loans it owns, which would require no settlement at all. House Democrats want to subpoena Ed DeMarco to answer questions on principal reductions:

FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco has long defended the agency’s policy of keeping Fannie and Freddie mortgage servicers from writing down principal. Allowing such an option would only forge more losses for the government-sponsored enterprises who already owe the Treasury Department roughly $151 billion in bailouts, he and both CEOs at Fannie and Freddie concluded [...]

In a November committee hearing, DeMarco said he would provide the lawmakers documents and analysis used for determining the principal reduction policy.

But despite numerous requests since, DeMarco has not sent the materials. Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and John Tierney, D-Mass., sent a letter to committee Chair Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Wednesday asking him to subpoena the agency.

“While Mr. DeMarco has failed to provide supporting documents demonstrating why a principal reduction program is not in the best interest of taxpayers, economists are increasingly announcing their support for such a program,” Cummings and Tierney wrote.

Heck, the Federal Reserve supported principal reductions in a recent white paper. You don’t need to indemnify banks for crimes they committed to get some policymakers in a position to make decisions to agree that principal write-downs would not only be beneficial for the economy, but a better deal for mortgage investors and lenders in the long run, rather than another surge of foreclosures.

More on the Donovan speech from the Wall Street Journal, who adds a new wrinkle, that regional banks have been included in the settlement talks. US Bancorp, for example, announced that they set aside money for a settlement in a recent financial statement. PNC Financial, SunTrust Bank and HSBC are also involved.

I’ll have to see an actual settlement at this point before I believe one is truly coming. The fact that over a dozen Attorneys General met recently in Washington to plot out an alternative suggests to me that nothing is happening at a national level.

The official rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from the President has some interesting framing:

“As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment,” said Obama. “As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree.”

Obama also sought to emphasize that he did not see the rejection as a definitive statement on the pipleine project itself. “This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” he said. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil.”

So there’s a lot of reassurances there that the oil will keep flowing, just not out of this particular pipeline. And indeed, the Obama Administration has presided over record growth in oil production, which has predictably had no discernible effect on oil prices.

A lot of this is blame-gaming, with Obama trying to blame Republicans for the arbitrary deadline before Republicans blame him for destroying jobs in the energy sector. But considering that TransCanada, under the terms of this rejection, can re-apply for a pipeline permit, the nature of this rejection does suggest that a future plan could get approval down the road, given the proper amount of time for environmental review and routing.

Whether TransCanada goes that route isn’t yet clear. I will say one thing in praise of the coalition that stopped this pipeline for now, however. Like SOPA and PIPA, most observers believed that this pipeline was a done deal not very long ago. The activists worked on this, and got the President to delay a review until after the election. At that point, Republicans wanted to make it a political issue – more than they wanted a pipeline – so they forced the 60-day timeline that led to today’s rejection. But the activists did play this well, forcing the confrontation that blew up the deal. So good for them.

UPDATE: Full statement here.