An overcast, gray-damp Tuesday morning on California’s north coast, the shoreline fog just won’t go away — cool and moist here, but scorching-dry starting just a short distance inland.
We’re forecast to be ‘much warmer‘ than yesterday, but that wouldn’t take much, while-on-the-meanwhile, the middle of northern part of the state is wildly-crazy — Chico maybe 110-degrees today, Redding could reach 114-115 tomorrow. The NWS has put them on an ‘Excessive Heat Watch‘ with some deadly temperatures.

A lame-lead — the US Supreme Court, also seemingly on an ‘excessive heat watch,’ even in rejection: ‘Supreme Court intervention might have delayed Barbier’s pending ruling on a U.S. request for as much as $13.7 billion in civil fines from BP and more than $1 billion from Anadarko.’

In not hearing the appeal, SCOTUS lent the BP disaster some closure.

(Illustration found here).

In a decision/non-decision released yesterday, the high court let stand a ruling by New Orleans  U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier  that BP and Anadarko were automatically liable as co-owners of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and the penalties are forthcoming rightfully.
From Bloomberg:

“We’re pleased with the decision,” Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, said in an e-mail.
Geoff Morrell, a BP spokesman, and John Christiansen, Anadarko’s spokesman, declined to comment on Monday’s ruling.
A federal appeals court last year upheld Barbier’s conclusion about BP’s and Anadarko’s liability under the Clean Water Act.
The offshore explosion released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf, the largest spill in U.S. history.
…
Barbier ruled in September that BP was grossly negligent, subjecting the London-based oil company to larger penalties.
That finding wasn’t before the Supreme Court.
That law allows the government to seek fines of as much as $1,100 per barrel spilled on a finding of strict liability and as much as $4,300 a barrel for gross negligence.
His separate decision in January that 3.19 million barrels of oil were spilled into the Gulf left BP subject to a maximum fine of $13.7 billion.

Although the case will most-likely continue forever with tons of lawyers with tons of paper, at least it’s a small victory toward a penalty on BP and Anadarko  for being assholes. SCOTUS, though, has been on fire — good and bad.
Attention on the watershed issues of Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, the Supremes also still displayed the crazed right-wing bloat that’s the high court nowadays: ‘And the court’s decisions this week — striking down an important EPA regulation and sanctioning a lethal injection drug that has resulted in botched executions — only further undermined conservative claims that the court has become a source of liberal tyranny under Roberts.’

And opened the vile can of bat-shit crazy (via Rolling Stone):

Mike Huckabee kicked off a round of empty posturing about how conservatives are going to revolt.
“I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch,” he declared.
“We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.”
Likewise, Allen West threatened that the decision would lead to “civil war,” and Rod Dreher of the American Conservative wrote that “[i]t is time to confront this soberly but realistically, and prepare for the resistance.”
Bill Muehlenberg of BarbWire called for “massive civil disobedience and defiance of this homo-fascist decision.”
(Shout out to homo-fascist, as a concept.)

The whole thing mirrors just how supremely-fucked we be…