Drizzling rain this morning along California’s northern coast, with a slight touch of some ground fog, but the air feels warm — which is what really counts.
Wet and cold don’t mix.

This morning’s storm has apparently ended its series run on a quieter note: “The winds will be much lighter than over the weekend. The rainfall amounts will also be lower,” meteorologist Holly Osbourne said. She called the latest storm a warm system, meaning snow levels will be relatively high at around 8,000 to 9,000 feet.
And allow the ground to soak up the water for awhile.
Four big weather bursts since last Thursday has been enough, leaving a lot of drowned roads, fallen trees and power outages across the north part of the state to keep all of us saturated until the next volley — it’s winter and more is to come.

Meanwhile, politics still rains down like bullshit.
(Illustration found here).

The nastiest horse on the bullshit cart is the made-up ‘fiscal cliff‘ crisis of intelligence which has the DC assholes throwing nonsense around like it was candy, and although the GOP tried to wash away the political bad taste by supplying their own ‘plan’ — it was a solid no-go.
On Monday, House Speaker John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner offered up the stale shit-points of yesteryear: no new taxes on millionaires, raise the payroll tax, etc., etc., all with guidelines similar to the detail-free ideas of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The White House quickly shot the whole plan down, telling Republicans to please just “get serious.”
Even GOPers hated it — Jim DeMint, a humongous asshole in his own right, blubbered The Boner’s proposal would “…destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more.”
Nasty-faced Mitch McConnell couldn’t cough-up a yay or a nay: “I’m not prepared to come out and embrace it or support it, but simply at this point to say I think it is a good-faith effort.”

And this ‘cliff‘ impasse has reached the collar of The Boner‘s pull chain.
Monday night he was too cool for school — no talk, and most-certainly no pictures, pleze!

The president hosted members of Congress for the black tie Congressional Ball at the White House amid the ongoing fiscal cliff standoff and posed with lawmakers in a receiving line, as is typical for these events.
But the speaker was not among those to stand beside the president.
One Republican aide said it would be a mistake to read that as a snub, explaining the speaker spent the night socializing at a social event.

A revealing look how petty the US governing bodies have become — so full of themselves, which is to say, full of shit.
The Daily Beast examines The Boner‘s entrails:

Of course, it also stands as proof that the speaker is no idiot and that he knows all too well that, should a merry grip-and-grin of him and Obama somehow make its way into the public eye during these oh-so-tense fiscal-cliff negotiations, the GOP’s right flank would be all over his perma-tanned hide like a duck on a june bug.

“Next thing you know, people in his caucus would be grumbling, ‘He’s just not a believer like us. He’s over there yukking it up with President Obama! Did you see that picture of him and Obama together!’ I’m sure that went through his mind,” chuckles Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Sabato has a hard time talking about the Boehner-Obama public tango without bursting into laughter.
“Pettiness is the lifeblood of politics,” he observes.
“It inflates the ego,” which in turn opens up endless opportunity for slights both real and perceived.
“How many times have we read over the past four years that the greatest outrage in America today is that so many of these congressmen, especially Democrats, have not been invited to a cocktail party inside the White House?” gasps Sabato, seized by another laughing fit.
“The horror! The horror! It’s almost unbearable!”
…
“I don’t take a lot of that stuff terribly seriously,” says AEI think-tanker Norman Ornstein, co-author of the 2012 book on congressional dysfunction It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
Boehner and Obama and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are all “experienced negotiators and politicians,” he observes.
“They do what is in the hard-nosed interests of themselves and their parties.
And if that means having to make a few concessions and cut a deal with somebody they don’t much like and are really pissed at, they’ll go ahead and do it.”
Besides, says Ornstein, far from being a heartfelt expression of Boehner’s antipathy toward Obama, the decision to skip the photo line was more likely a carefully calculated political maneuver.
“That doesn’t mean Boehner can’t be pissed off at the president at the same time.
But believe me, if he were supremely pissed off but thought it would give him more leverage either with the president or his own restive troops, he’d be down on his hands and knees kissing Obama’s rear end.”

Well, The Boner can sure-enough kiss my sorry ass.