So I can’t sleep and roll out of bed at 2:30 a.m. and happen to flip on PCN (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) and there’s the House-Senate conference committee. I watch a half hour. And I come to the conclusion that Pennsylvania is no closer to having a budget that it was on June 30. Seriously. The Allentown Morning-Call’s John Micek has a good recap of the first mind-numbing minutes. It was all I could do to not throw something at the TV.

… the opening 45 minutes of yesterday’s conference committee meeting were about as surreal display as we’ve seen in our 17 years of writing about government. The opening rounds of yesterday’s committee meeting were not spent, as one would expect, trying to reach a settlement on the state budget.

Rather, most of yesterday’s meeting was devoted to partisan jockeying for position and more Alpha-Male nonsense than you’d see watching an entire week of the Animal Planet Network. Need an example? How about the 20 minutes Republicans and Democrats spent bickering over which of them would get to run the meeting.

The nightmare began when House Appropriations Chairman Dwight Evans pulled in a staff attorney to read off some proposed rules of engagement. That lasted all of about 15 seconds when Senate GOP Leader Dominic Pileggi, putting on his trial lawyer hat, broke in and said he wanted to address each rule in turn:

“We’re going to be at this for a while, and it’s important to spend some time at the beginning on ground rules,” Pileggi said before going on to explain to Evans that the conference committee is really TWO committees and no one guy (that’d be you, Dwight) would get to run the proceedings.

Ground rules. Right.