Rep. Steve Daines (R–MT) smiles with the mouth part of the face.

Last week, the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray, paving the way for Congress to pass its first budget since early 2009. Ezra Klein disagrees, but pundits hailed the compromise as a step back to functional two-party government in Washington. Ryan-Murray passed the house 332 to 94, and Montana’s own Steve Daines was one of the 94 against. In a statement, he said that the budget didn’t cut spending enough, and Congress needed to come up with “real solutions” to its debt problems. “Real solutions” turns out to be a phrase Daines uses consistently to talk about imagined alternatives to an existing piece of legislation. You can read all about it in my latest column for the Missoula Independent. If you don’t like politics but are somehow still reading this, you could also peruse this arts feature about my attitude toward Christmas music. It contains a made-up anecdote involving my mother, for license. Sorry Mom. In addition to all this journalism, I also turned in a 19-page story for Write Club this week, and I did a bunch of commercial work, and I threw up out my nose. It’s the busy season. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

A band called Dead Ghosts

I Googled the phrase “dead ghost,” hoping to find an image that would express my physiological state, and I got this amazing blog post. That first sentence resists me, either because it is difficult to understand or because my cognition has been impaired by bacterial meningitis. My god, the things that come out of me. I can’t go five minutes without some loud biological emission, and my head feels like I’ve been chewing a tongue depressor. I am sick. My eyes don’t work right. The wheels are coming off and, as usual, the blog is the first to suffer. There is no blog today but my lament. I am like Job, only instead of patiently suffering I curse whatever force is behind this illness, be it God or that girl at the burrito place who looked like she had a cold. Pity me from afar.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjkqeRyfqSs

There is no Combat! blog today, so that I can make deadlines for paying work. If you guys wanted reliable Monday-morning posts, you should have sent me a bunch of Bitcoins or, better yet, hunks of gold. Precious, precious gold—but I digress. The point is that I need to do work, son, and nothing I write could surpass the thrilling mendacity of what’s already out there, anyway. For example, in the video above, Megyn Kelly assures us all that she was just joking when she insisted Santa was white. Her original declaration had all the hallmarks of humor: she said it with a straight face, no one on the panel laughed, and—the sure sign of a joke—it was about black people when none was around. But everyone attacked her for it, which just shows how society still has a pervasive bias against Fox News. Fox News can’t even get a cab at night, and has there been a Fox News president? Again I digress. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what Megyn Kelly thinks about Santa. He’s still going to come to my house, drink the grape soda and Chili Cheese Fritos I set out for him, and leave me a bunch of wool socks. Maybe, if you’re good, he’ll leave you a Combat! blog tomorrow morning.