Regarding the payroll tax cut deal, apparently the plan is for a straight up-or-down vote tonight on the measure. House Speaker John Boehner promised that the vote would fail. That creates another stalemate, and Boehner misled his Senate GOP colleagues who already voted for the Senate bill.

Today was supposed to be the final day of the Congressional session, as the House would return to finish off the payroll tax deal negotiated and passed through the Senate. But that blew up over the weekend. We now have a regular business day in the House, with votes in the afternoon. But it’s not clear exactly what they’ll do with the Senate’s payroll tax deal.

As is typical at the end of the year, Harry Reid attempted to clear out a backlog of uncontroversial Presidential appointments before the holiday break. But Mitch McConnell would not allow it. He wanted assurances, instead, that the President would not seek out any recess appointments during the break, and he objected to moving the outstanding nominees until that time.

This may come as a surprise, since throughout this year Republicans have been able to use pro forma sessions to never take Congress into recess, thereby blocking recess appointments. Indeed, that was the plan for this holiday break as well.

OK, they’re not outwardly advocating this. But that’s the practical effect of demanding that the provision on Keystone XL get included in any end of the year deal to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance.

Republicans have insisted that Congress will eventually come to an agreement on the pressing year-end issues, namely the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance, a “doc fix” to avoid a Medicare reimbursement cuts, and possibly some expiring tax breaks. But their version of “agreement” is predicated on the idea that the House will pass a bill with several objectionable features and everyone else will accept it. They essentially want to call the bluff of both Senate Democrats and the White House.

It looks like a blink. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday that “I think at the end of the day there’s a lot of sentiment in our conference, clearly a majority sentiment, for continuing the payroll tax relief that we enacted a year ago in these tough times.” But there are many hurdles to overcome before this comes to pass

Remember jobless persons, Louisville playing Kansas State, it’s what makes Mitch McConnell’s unique vision of America great.

Democrats have tweaked the pay-for on the American Jobs Act, making it a straight surtax on millionaires, rather than the other pay-fors on itemized deductions and closing the carried interest loophole. In other words, they altered a tax on the rich and turned it into another tax on the rich with a better slogan next to it.

I guess I’ve been remiss in writing about the American Jobs Act (AJA), but then I haven’t written anything about Libyan admission into the United Nations, either, which is a policy I’m sure somebody somewhere agrees with, but which also isn’t going to happen.

Darrell Issa is a happy man. After flailing around for a while, he finally thinks he has a product to push, an example of Obama corruption, with the Solyndra story. There’s even another piece of it that has popped up in the form of LightSquared, a wireless startup which, according to allegations, was the subject of unfavorable testimony to Congress by Air Force Gen. William Shelton until the White House intimidated him into changing his view. Issa is ready to widen his investigation. Loan guarantee programs for clean energy have actually migrated to the subject of a potential government shutdown, with Republicans trying to cancel a program for hybrid vehicles to pay for disaster relief.

Republicans definitely think they have a winning hand by criticizing corruption in the clean energy realm. It’s a tailor-made Glenn Beck conspiracist rant where the corruption lines up with a philosophical view against climate change and a lucrative view in support of wealthy oil and gas company contributors over the clean energy industry. The government, you see, cannot “pick winners and losers” in the energy space. Can’t do it.

Unless those winners happen to be in Republican districts and states.