Senate Budget
The 1974 Budget Act requires both houses to pass a budget every year. The senate is four years in arrears.
House Republicans hatched a plan on Friday to raise the debt ceiling, but only if each chamber passes a budget. If senators don’t pass a budget, they don’t get paid.
This sounds suspiciously similar to Charles Krauthammer’s Friday pitch in his Washington Post column, though he didn’t mention the pay part.
Kimberley Strassel, in the WSJ, details how Harry Reid’s rope-a-dope tactics “hide the party’s spending ambitions” and “casts the Republicans as the cause of every legislative crises”.
Gun Props
The president used children as props while he signed 23 executive orders aimed at controlling guns.
Meanwhile, the NRA ran an ad questioning why the president’s daughters are protected from shooters while other school children are not. Obviously, the president’s family deserves special protection but White House spokesman Carney took offense that the Obama girls were being “used as pawns in a political fight”.
That’s a job for somebody else’s children. Each of whom has a $50,000 share of the national debt.
Lance and Manti
In the Weird Weird World of sports, Lance Armstrong’s doping confession to Oprah Winfrey was upstaged by news of Notre Dame star Manti Te’o’s cyber girlfriend. The fake girlfriend didn’t make Manti run faster but she played the media sob story machine like a fiddle. Lesson: trust somebody you can touch without a keyboard.
Here’s a good piece by John Kass reminding ESPN, Sports Illustrated, etc. that “if you mother tells you she loves you, check it out”.
Deadbeat Nation
In the final press conference of his first term, the president explained what he will and will not do. He might take executive action against guns and he won’t be negotiating the debt ceiling with a gun to the head of the American people .
We are not a deadbeat nation and the full faith and credit of the United States is not a bargaining chip. Except when it is.
Al Gore Jazeera
Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera last week. Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar, an oil kingdom flush with black gold.
Global Warming believers are fond of accusing deniers of being funded by the oil industry. So when the believers’ true prophet, Al Gore, took a $100 million profit on the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera it made for an easy cartoon lay-up.
