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”.

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The president came to Washington, demanded shared sacrifice, got his fiscal cliff deal and returned to Hawaii. According to Bloomberg taxes will go up for 77.1 percent of American families. The Congressional Budget Office says the deal will cost $4 trillion over the next decade. Spending cuts? … Maybe later. Kevin O’brien has a nice rant about that here.

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Uncle Sam’s starting point for spending is a baseline of the previous year CBO projections for the coming year.

 ”The most absurd current example is Mr. Obama’s claim that his “$4 trillion” plan reduces the deficit by about $800 billion over 10 years by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those “savings,” as he calls them, are measured against a White House budget office spending baseline that is fictional. Those wars are already being unwound and everyone knows the money will never be spent. But they are called “savings” to gull the public and make the deficit reduction add up to a large-sounding $4 trillion.”

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 Robert Bork died late this year. He was a distinguished scholar. One of his many distinctions included having a last name as a verb form – “to bork”. The good judge was borked by Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy during senate hearings on his nomination to the supreme court.

The late senator from Chappaquiddick claimed,  ”Robert Bork’s America” was a place where “women would be forced into back alley abortions and blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.” A more circumspect Biden would wait 25 years before claiming they would be seated in chains.

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Civility is one of the most absurdly abused of our political values. It is always centrally important to our functioning as a democracy — right up until the time someone proposes crossing the unions. Then, it goes from “can’t we all get along?” to “nothing to see here.”

-Rich Lowry in Politico

“Moreover, it is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus while denying it for such matters as choosing your child’s school or joining a union.”

-Krauthammer in the Washington Post

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In addition to raising 1.6 trillion in new taxes, and 50 billion in new stimulus, the president wants Congress to turn over the right to raise the debt ceiling.

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Mitt Romney dropped by the White House for lunch last week. Later the president hit the campaign trail to promote tax hikes on the rich.  During a rally at the Rodon Group plant in Hatfield Pennsylvania, Obama announced he was keeping a list of naughty and nice congressmen. The Naughty or Nice List isn’t to be confused with the his Enemies List of Republican campaign donors, or his Kill List.

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Politico has a good timeline on the Petraeus scandal. His affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, began last November.

The story broke because Jill Kelley, a Tampa event planner, plugged into the MacDill Air Force Base social scene, received “harassing” emails last May and notified the FBI. The emails were traced to Broadwell from a joint account she held with Petraeus. Broadwell and Petraeus communicated with each other through the drafts folder in the account.

While there was no breach of national security, the information was passed on to AG Eric Holder, who sat on it until the day after the election. Obama accepted Petraeus’ resignation on Friday Nov 8.

Krauthammer believes Petraeus thought he would keep his job by supporting the administration’s Benghazi storyline.

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Here’s Biden’s surprisingly pithy remark. And here’s Hillary saying of Libyan dictator Gadhafi, “We came. We saw. He died.”

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