Cold and rainy this early Friday morning up here along California’s northern coast — the first taste of winter a-coming, though, due to an elusive El Nino, the the NOAA has reported our region could be about 40 percent drier for the next three months.
Weather, however, lives by natural rules, not slides and charts — still must keep my rain-proof hoodie close at hand.

Mornings are wonderful, especially way-early ones — a time which allows me to digest Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
And success will follow.

(Illustration found here).

Don’t know much about frogs as such, but a shitload of GOPers are eating crow this morning, and will be trying to digest that bird for a while to come — or maybe not.
Near-moron Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin blamed it on dumb-ass voters: “If you aren’t properly informed, if you don’t understand the problems facing this nation, you are that much more prone to falling prey to demagoguing solutions. And the problem with demagoguing solutions is they don’t work,” Johnson said. “I am concerned about people who don’t fully understand the very ugly math we are facing in this country.”

What a two-faced asshole.
Johnson really doesn’t understand the purest of irony behind all his bullshit — if one lives within a dream-like bubble, one must be always-aware that bubble will eventually blow-way-UP:

“There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re going to win, and you don’t,” said another adviser.
“It was like a sucker punch.”
Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.
Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim.
They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened.
“He was shellshocked,” one adviser said of Romney.

The reason was all that “very ugly math” — numbers cherry-picked into delusion:

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed — they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm.
They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney.
That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.
Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks.
Those assessments were wrong.

Wrong as Romney.
And the GOP as it appears in 2012, an entire class of way-nasty people, doesn’t pull its collective head out of its ass, they have gone bye-bye as a national political group.

Love that word: ‘skewed‘ — bad data can really way-f*ck-up anything.
Mankind should take a lesson from those dumb-ass Republicans.
Now that he’s safely back on the cat bird’s seat, President Obama should make a massive attack on climate change — the real elephant in the living room.
And this from 2009: “What have we learned since the fourth assessment? We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought.”
One thing I’ve realized from all these new and emerging climate-related studies and research papers was the phrase, worded differently, but all the same, that shit will be worse than previously predicted.
Hence, a new report on this whole scenario published yesterday via the UK’s Guardian:

Climate change is likely to be more severe than some models have implied, according to a new study which ratchets up the possible temperature rises and subsequent climatic impacts.
The analysis by the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that climate model projections showing a greater rise in global temperature were likely to be more accurate than those showing a smaller rise.
This means not only a higher level of warming, but also that the resulting problems — including floods, droughts, sea level rise and fiercer storms and other extreme weather — would be correspondingly more severe and would come sooner than expected.
…
The International Energy Agency warned earlier this year that on current emissions trends the world would be in for 6C of warming — a level scientists warn would lead to chaos.
Scientists have put the safety limit at 2C, beyond which warming is likely to become irreversible.

Reports like this make it seem impossible that humanity could get a “sucker punch” from our only environment, though, no one will be around to feel “shellshocked.”
I’m gonna need more than a freakin’ hoodie.