Weigel

The "fiscal cliff" parachute has lifted, and now might be a good time to read what was in it. The combination of tax cuts and almost no spending cuts -- a 41-1 candy to arsenic ratio -- costs around $4 trillion over 10 years.

Welcome to the new era of bipartisanship.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

The irony? The deal passed because Boehner threw up his hands and let the bill pass despite majority opposition from Republicans.

Which brings us to some excellent rumor-mongering from Matthew Boyle.

American Majority Action spokesman Ron Meyer told Breitbart News late Tuesday that enough House Republicans have banded together in an effort to unseat House Speaker John Boehner from his position--they just need a leader to take up the mantle.

“At least 20 House Republican members have gotten together, discussed this and want to unseat Speaker Boehner--and are willing to do what it takes to do it,” Meyer said.

When the new House meets on Thursday, Republicans will have 234 seats, so -- purely theoretically -- 17 Republicans could deny Boehner the votes to become Speaker. But there's nothing stopping Democrats from voting for Boehner. My favorite, unlikely scenario has Boehner losing support as the roll call proceeds, and Democrats bolstering the guy they now know they can deal with, creating a sort of de facto Kadima speakership. Won't happen.

Geoffrey Stone pushes around George Will, who's already pre-deriding possible Obama SCOTUS picks.

Jim Tankersley explains why the deal doesn't meet any of the economic tests Washington has jawed about for years.

Human Events asks whether Obama should be impeached over "the Benghazi tragedy."

John Boehner was one of the first to vote. Shortly after the roll opened on the fiscal cliff compromise bill, a green "Y" appeared next to the speaker's name in the electronic vote-counter that splashes on the wall behind the speaker's chair. Reporters craned their necks to see how the rest of the leadership would vote. They took their time. Then:

Majority Leader Eric Cantor: No
Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy: No
Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rogers: Aye
Budget Chairman Paul Ryan: Aye

There were only 85 Republican ayes, to 151 nays -- a nearly 2-1 vote against the speaker's postion. And it wasn't exactly broadcast in the run-up to the vote. At 5:01 p.m., after a bunch of reporters (including me) had confirmed that Cantor opposed the bill in conference, Cantor spokesman Doug Heye tweeted: "Majority Leader Cantor stands with @SpeakerBoehner. Speculation otherwise is silly, non-productive and untrue." But Cantor and McCarthy held their votes until the bill cleared the threshold, then gave the thumbs down.

The roll call vote is here. I'll update a bit later about the trends and patterns.

When they meet as a conference, House Republicans file into a basement room in the Capitol. It's a short three minute walk from the House floor, accessible from a few points, all of them crowded with reporters.

This creates a sort of knowledge problem. The talkiest members are not the ones actually hammering out hard details. Not usually. The talkiest ones are the ones who want to talk. And so you have Rep. Tom Cole, a Boehner loyalist whose hope for a deal has bordered on Pollyana-ish, stopping for nine minutes to report that all is well.

"We have to recognize, we don’t have the White House," he said. "We don’t have the Senate. All things considered, this is as good an outcome as we could have expected, and we can move forward to issues that are more to our advantage."

But the vast majority of members rushed past reporters, refusing to comment, even on background. Rep. Bill Huizenga looked at the assembled and said "I feel like I should apologize." Then he added: "It's the Senate's fault," which sort of canceled out the apology. Rep. Allen West, who lost re-election and leaves in two days, walked slowly enough to allow reporters to ask him questions, dispensing pithy wisdom like "the system is broken."

Two members dodged the press by warning them of better game: "Paul Ryan's coming behind us!" And there he was, the defeated veep candidate, rushing into the room with an iPod headset still plugged into one year. One reporter asked Ryan whether Marco Rubio's "no" on the deal would influence his break. "Give me a break," laughed Ryan. "Happy New Year!" A few hours later, when Ryan left the second Republican meeting, he dodged a question about his vote by saying "I'm just looking for the score!" Confused reporters wondered what he meant -- the CBO had scored the deal hours earlier. But he was talking about the Rose Bowl, in which the University of Wisconsin was playing.

I'm back at work, slightly more tanned and much more pessimisic than ever before. Later today I'll have a longer update on the progress of fiscal cliff deal-making and vote-taking. For now, you should know that reports of "Washington averting the cliff" were wildly exagerrated by people -- possibly alreading deep into the New Years Brut -- who forgot that the House of Representatives needs to vote on a final deal.

From 1 to 3, Republicans met to air their grievances over the deal being forced upon them. At 5:15, Republicans will meet again to get the latest from Boehner about the best possible deal, and take a quick vote (or a show of hands) to see how much support it has. The goal, according to two Republican members, is to get 218 votes. Of Republicans. When they couldn't get that many votes for "Plan B."

My story about today's NRA presser is here; my story about the House GOP meltdown is here.

And with this, I start a sort of vacation. I'll have a few items on the site over the next few days, but for much of the next week I'll be in our 52nd state, Puerto Rico.

Charlotte Allen responds at length to her critics, taking the care to place me, Alex Pareene and Jessica Valenti into a liberal Holy Trinity. This seems to be equal parts incorrect and sacreligious, but 'tis the season. More importantly, Allen acknowledges my point that two men were on Sandy Hook's staff, and not, as she wrote, zero.

He’s right, and I stand corrected. This does help prove my point, though: just two adult men in a building containing 500 people — and it’s not clear that both of them were at work that day. Indeed, a visit to Sandy Hook’s staff website is a depressing experience, the sea of women’s names. Why aren’t there more men? Perhaps not enough want the job? But why? Because they are tacitly discouraged from careers in elementary education? It’s certainly not the money, because union rules typically require kindergarten teachers and high-school chemistry teachers to be paid on exactly the same salary scale. Another depressing page on the Sandy Hook website is the “Safe Schools Climate” page. It’s a page of links to “anti-bullying” resources. Yes, the Sandy Hook staff’s idea of a “safe school” was a school where kids didn’t say mean things about each other on Facebook!

I sincerely appreciate the correction. Here's why I asked for it: Allen's argument assumed facts to coordinate with her gut feeling. She assumed that there were no men at the school, because a total lack of XY chromosomes fit snugly into her thesis. For her purposes, now, even a small number of men allow her to make her point: The school didn't employ enough men who could overpower a deranged shooter. And my point was that similiar situations, with men on hand, ended the same way. The guy with the most bullets, and the element of surprise, managed to kill a lot of people.

There are pundits arguing that the "one guard per school" idea is de facto crazy. I'm not convinced, and think you need to approach this holistically. Why are "guards in schools" and "limits on assault weapons/magazines" mutually exclusive propositions? If it's easier to buy extended magazines legally, the guard at the school will remain at a disadvantage unless, he, too, has an extended magazine. If it's harder for the killer to obtain the most dangerous weapons, then his potential victims have more chances to stop him. There are, sadly, dozens of cases to draw from. So let's start with the facts of those cases, then come back with the theories.

Paging back through transcripts of old talk shows today, finding old appearances by Wayne LaPierre after Columbine, I saw the first references to the work of John Lott. The author of the then-new More Guns, Less Crime was frequently cited for evidence that... I don't think I need to explain, really, for what evidence.

But today I notice Lott pooh-poohing the NRA's big arm-the-schools idea.

Identifiable guards are of very limited use in these cases. They will be the first person killed. Costly & not effec[tive].

It's not an unpopular idea, though! In the latest Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans were in favor of one person, at least, at every school having a gun. There is real legislative interest in the idea. Michigan came within one news cycle of getting guns in schools (the bill was passed, then Sandy Hook happened), and reliable Virginia right-winger Bob Marshall is introducing a guns-in-school bill soon.

There will be more to say later about the NRA's "press conference" in Washington—a staged event with no question-and-answer period. For now, I can show you the strange set-up, which put NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and other speakers far from the press, separated by a velvet-covered partition.

There was a point. After some meandering around about video-game violence, LaPierre proposed a national initiative—funded by your tax dollars—to put armed guards in schools. "With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?" he asked. "I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school—and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January."

But this isn't an entirely new idea. You probably don't remember the name of Neil Gardner, a sheriff's deputy in Jefferson County, Colo. He was the armed guard assigned to watch Columbine High School who usually ate lunch with the students, so he could be in the school.

People have been joking about a Scott Brown comeback ever since he started lagging Elizabeth Warren in the polls. If Barack Obama won again, then, voila -- there'd be a special election to replace Secretary of State John Kerry! Popular former Sen. Scott Brown would be teed up for a comeback versus any Democratic comer!

And here we go.

I will leave the analysis of Kerry's foreign policy to colleagues like Fred Kaplan. The Secretary doesn't freelance much further than the administration wants him too, but Kerry's used his perch in the Senate to push for climate control legislation. I intend to remain a skeptic about that until and unless the skepticism becomes logically impossible. Brown polls far ahead of his possible, less-known Democratic foes? Sounds like 2011, when Brown polled far ahead of his possible, less-known Democratic foes, and 2009, when popular Attorney General Martha Coakley polled far ahead of her possible Republican foes.

But I wonder why Democrats didn't take another opportunity to play with the law and cancel a special election this year. Massachusetts used to give the governor the power of senatorial appointment, allowing a candidate of his choice to fill out however much of a term remained until the next general election. (In 1961, Democrats chose a placeholder for JFK's seat. Ted Kennedy won it in the 1962 general election, then had to win it again in 1964, the start of the next term.) In 2004, anticipating a possible Kerry presidency, state Democrats quickly passed a law taking this power away from the governor -- a guy named "Mitt Romney" -- and calling for a quick special election. In 2009, Democrats belatedly realized how they'd be screwed if the late Ted Kennedy's seat remained open for months. No senator, no ability to break filibusters. So they changed the law again, allowing the governor to pick an interim senator again, until voters got to the special.

There might have been a window for this stuff in November. Now, with Kerry going to State, it would probably be gauche to change the law. And it would deny the GOP the only possible upside of helping elevate this guy.

Jonathan Weisman's piece on the great GOP fail last night is the one you need to read. National Journal has more pathos and color, so read that one too.

In the wake of the disaster, Roy Blunt writes that it would be nice to extend those tax rates for income under $250,000. This was obviously written before the debacle, but it represents a continuing shrug.

Noam Scheiber profiles Maya MacGuineas, deathless paladin of the deficit scolds.

During the House Republicans’ experiment with refusing to raise the debt ceiling last year, MacGuineas issued a press release stating that “[t]hreatening to blow up the nation’s credit rating and potentially the economy should not be seen as a legitimate negotiating strategy.” She then added: “At the same time, failing to use this debt ceiling ‘hammer’ to force serious fiscal reforms would be a dangerous lost opportunity.” It was a bit like condemning hostage-taking in the strongest terms, then warning that failing to use hostages to, say, secure a Palestinian state would be downright irresponsible.

Tim Murphy investigates the survivalism industry.

David Greenberg pages back through actual history to debunk the silly idea that Robert Bork was the first Supreme Court nominee to be rejected for ideological or political reasons.

And Pitchfork is out with its 50 best albums of 2012. Despite being old and uncool, I own or have listened to 32 of them.