Wet and quiet this morning on California’s northern coast — the damp due to heavy fog during the night, which left the air a bit more warm than usual.

A way-different story to the way-east as some bad shit is about to hit the fan hard — the US mid-Atlantic seaboard is bracing itself up for the impending crash of Hurricane Sandy, though, only a Category 1 storm, she punches hefty with a lot of water.
And beyond the environmental terror, there’s the presidential bullshit shut-down: Speculation aside, there’s one thing that Hurricane Sandy has already done — and will continue to do for at least the early part of this week: freeze the race in place.
Which in itself might be a good thing, but then it only prolongs this depressing election cycle.

(Illustration found here).

Just one item on a crud list of political scum news:

On the heels of a sex scandal involving a female patient, another woman has acknowledged having a sexual relationship with physician and U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais while she was under his medical care.
The second woman described DesJarlais as “the nicest guy” and said he cooked dinner for her at their first get-together in 2000.
But she also said they smoked marijuana during their relationship and remembered DesJarlais prescribing her pain medication on dates at his home.
“His biggest thing that’s completely unethical is him just picking up women while he’s a doctor,” the woman said in an interview last week.
“I mean, seriously, that’s his big no-no. … He’s just a hound.”

DesJarlais is a Republican seeking re-election in Tennessee’s 4th District.
The Republican Party has become nothing more than a bunch of assholes, liars and hypocrites.
However, all that shit doesn’t apparently count for shit — US peoples are nuts.
Via ABC News: Support for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney has averaged 48-48 percent since September, the closest in ABC/Post polls, or Gallup polls before them, in comparable periods dating back 76 years. It’s also the first contest since 1960 in which neither candidate, in this period, has exceeded 50 percent support (adjusting for third-party vote where applicable).
All you Right Coasters, as a climate-change-induced supper storm bears down on your very life, just try and remember what GOPers would do if they got the the power: Last year, after a major tornado and flood struck the United States, Romney was asked in a debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney not only suggested shuttering FEMA and sending responsibility for disaster relief “back to the private sector,” but also said it would be “immoral” for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere. “It makes no sense at all,” Romney concluded.
They just don’t give a fat-rat’s ass.

And the weather is just getting worse, and will continue to worsen nearly day-by-day — last week, a paper published in Nature Climate Change concluded the earth is beyond the tipping point, and it’s shitsville from here on out (via ABC News): “At present, governments’ attempts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions through carbon cap-and-trade schemes and to promote renewable and sustainable energy sources are probably too late to arrest the inevitable trend of global warming,” Jasper Knight of Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Stephan Harrison of the University of Exeter in England argue in their study. Those efforts, they continue, “have little relationship to the real world.”
(h/t Skeptical Science).

In denial still?
Contrast the above with this snip from a New York City taxi driver this morning (via the Guardian):

“It’s very strange.
I get the feeling that I’m living in a science fiction movie.
Look, I’m a street person; I know New York city.
I’ve lived in New York all my life… but I’ve never seen anything like this.
Nobody else has either.
This is not Key West Florida; this is New York city, eight-and-a-half million people in the five boroughs, 35 million in the greater New York city area, and right now, while I’m talking to you, if you said to me ‘Hey Pete, let’s go out and get a sandwich’, I’d say ‘Where? What?’
There is no subway, no buses, no trains.”

The New York Times has a webcam with a city view from the top of its building — right now just lonely and way-dismal looking.

Upping the stakes Sunday in the run-up to Sandy hitting the beach, the National Weather Service issued a strong warning to residents of New Jersey — are these just hard-headed, or what?
Along with the standard bad-weather was this (via BuzzFeed):

IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT, THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES, THINK ABOUT THE EMERGENCY RESPONDERS WHO WILL BE UNABLE TO REACH YOU WHEN YOU MAKE THE PANICKED PHONE CALL TO BE RESCUED, THINK ABOUT THE RESCUE/RECOVERY TEAMS WHO WILL RESCUE YOU IF YOU ARE INJURED OR RECOVER YOUR REMAINS IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE.

And if you do survive, remember Morpheus and his first words to Neo: “Welcome to the real world…”

But this ain’t no science-fiction movie…