From a brief break to attend a wedding at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas. Here’s what we missed over the past four days:

• The budget went from worse to worser.

Sorry for the Paul Broun double post, but this is just too good to resist.

Boss Shumba, ever ready with a quip, made a reference to a cast member on the MTV reality show Jersey Shore while dissing President Obama’s efforts to include Republican ideas in his health care bill.

“Snooki, from the Jersey Shore, has more substance than President Obama’s offer,” he said.

Well, Snooki Polizzi fired back during an appearance at James Madison University, according to the school’s newspaper, The Breeze.

The night took a turn once Ester shared one of Wednesday’s headlines. In response to Obama’s health care bill, Rep. Paul Broun quipped that Polizzi contains “more substance than President Obama’s offer.”

By now, you’ve probably heard that Rep. Paul Broun, R-Darkest Africa, introduced a bill Thursday that would require congressmen to undergo ethics training.

“Ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse for accused criminals, and it cannot be an excuse for members of Congress,” he said in a news release. “The American people expect their Representatives to play by the same rules, but in order to do so, they must first learn them. The House rules already require senior staff to complete ethics training, it only makes sense that their bosses should too.”

The Washington newspaper Roll Call ran a feature today about the unusual décor – a stuffed lion, bear and other big game trophies – in Rep. Paul Broun’s office.

Broun makes a point of eating all of his kills. He says it is a way of showing respect for the animal in addition to having a great meal. The hunt doesn’t always translate to tasty eating, though. On a hunting trip to Zimbabwe a few years back, Broun shot, killed and, yes, ate the lion that now stands beside his desk.

“After eating this animal, the natives called me Boss Shumba, which means Boss Lion,” he says proudly. “They’d never seen a guy come and actually eat a lion. It’s not very good.” In fact, Broun says, lion meat was too chewy.

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun used his ”voodoo economics” quip – you’d have to be a zombie with no soul to believe President Obama’s economic policies – on the House floor Thursday night.

The left-wing watchdog group Media Matters posted the video:

Oh, wait, sorry. Wrong one. Here it is:

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun is live-blogging the health care summit on Thursday.

Team Broun announced the congressman “will hold a real-time interactive discussion” on his Facebook page from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Hear me now and understand me later. Tea partiers are a bunch of girly men!

Broun also took a swipe today at California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for saying the tea party movement will disappear because it can’t offer any solutions.

Says Broun, “I will crush my enemy, and see him driven before me, and hear the lamentations of the women.”

Not really. But he did say Schwarzenegger is out of touch.

I just finished an interview with Rep. Paul Broun about the effectiveness of the stimulus act. More on that later, but the quotable Broun had a quip about the Obama Administration’s economic policies: “Voodoo economics,” he called them.

The phrase was originally coined by George H.W. Bush in the 1980 primary to describe supply-sider Ronald Reagan's fuzzy math. Broun defined it a bit differently.

“You have to be a dead man walking around with no soul to believe the economic ideas they’re putting forward,” he said.

Kim Jong Ox?

The second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives is braving the legendary East Coast snowstorm that shut down Congress this week to accompany Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, to the 10th District.

Broun and special guest Minority Whip Eric Cantor have scheduled a $250-a-head fundraiser Friday in tony Greensboro hosted by, among others, two members of the Reynolds family (of Reynolds Plantation fame) and state Sen. Johnny Grant, R-Milledgeville. For the less well-to-do, $35 will get you a ticket to see Broun and Cantor at The Spotlight Theatre. Dress is business casual, and light hors d'ouvres will be served.

Unfortunately, the events are closed to the press, and we journalists don’t contribute to political campaigns, so paying my own way is out. But if you go, let us know if anything interesting is said.

Money woes

President Barack Obama’s meeting with House Republicans today quickly turned ugly, as Obama accused the GOP of obstructing and demonizing his policies, while Republicans insisted the president wasn’t listening to them.

“What happens is that you guys don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me,” Obama said, according to The Politico. "The fact of the matter is, many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable with your own base, with your own party because what you've been telling your constituents is, ‘This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.' ''

And who would say a thing like that? Maybe this guy.

A liberal group called Americans United for Change wants to know whether Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, still admires undercover ACORN investigator James O’Keefe now that the fake pimp is facing felony charges.

The FBI says it busted O’Keefe and his gang of roving conservative activists/pseudo-journalists in New Orleans earlier this week dressed up as repairmen trying to tamper with Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office phone.