Another Monday with clear skies this early morning along California’s northern coast, but that’s just a respite as storm systems keep on a-coming.
Today is also special for another reason, but I can’t really figure that one out…let’s see….

Oh, yeah, this: The world’s largest supplier of firearms on Thursday said that it had experienced “unprecedented” demand for AR-15 ammunition magazines after a similar weapon was used to slaughter 20 6-and-7-year-old children at a school in Connecticut.

(Illustration found here).

And it’s just not the ammunition, but them most-sacred of possessions:

It’s a good weekend to be a seller at a gun show.
Particularly for those hawking assault weapons.
As the last child killed in the Dec. 14 school massacre in Newtown, Conn. was laid to rest Saturday, gun enthusiasts across the country waited in long lines and thronged gun show booths in what many openly described as a rush to buy assault weapons out of fear that they could soon be outlawed.
Reuters reporters went to gun shows in Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Texas to confirm the trend that is also backed up by local news reports.
There was such a rush to get inside a Texas gun show Saturday morning that the Fort Worth Star Telegram says it prompted “comparisons to eager ‘Black Friday shoppers.’”

Why not?
The US right now is a freak show, sad, sorrowful and completely bat-shit crazy freak show.
A shitload of people are nasty and ugly-weird about it:

More than 31,400 people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the U.S. over his gun-control views.
Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.
Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his “Piers Morgan Tonight” show an “unbelievably stupid man.”
Now, gun-rights activists are fighting back.
A petition created Dec. 21 on the White House e-petition website by a user in Texas accuses Morgan of engaging in a “hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution” by targeting the Second Amendment and demands he be deported immediately.

Morgan, who is not one of my favorite TV critters, responded via Twitter: “If I do get deported from America for wanting fewer gun murders, are there any other countries that will have me?” he wrote.

And to top off the lunacy, we’re in the midst of the most-hypocritical, bullshit season of the year — fer instance, like Idaho Sen. Michael Crapo, a Mormon, a supposedly tee-totaler, was arrested yesterday for DUI with a blood alcohol content of .11 percent — you’re legally drunk in DC at .08 percent.
And some Twitters were having fun with the asshole’s last name:

Holy Crapo! bit.ly/V4fwpE
Crapo is in deep crap-o. #First
Reportedly, the name is pronounced, ‘Cray-Po’

Yesterday, NRA head asshole, Wayne LaPierre, continued the pure-crazed defense of guns, guns and more guns, telling David Gregory on NBC’s ‘Meet The Press ‘ that more people armed to the teeth is more safe: “If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre told NBC’s David Gregory. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe and the NRA is going try to do that.”
Wrong, there asshole — anyone with any sense and not filled with the aroma of cordite knows that arming everybody is pure nuts and more dangerous than a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag, or taking a shower with your toaster.
Mule-headed mean.

E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post says it’s the crazy-ass GOP:

The United States faces a crisis in our political system because the Republican Party, particularly in the House of Representatives, is no longer a normal, governing party.
…
In a democratic system with separated powers, two houses of Congress, split between the parties, a normal party accepts that compromise is the only way to legislate.
A normal party takes into account election results.
A normal party recognizes when the other side has made real concessions.
A normal party takes responsibility.
By all of these measures, the Republican majority that Speaker John Boehner purports to lead is abnormal.
That is the meaning of his catastrophic failure to gather the votes for his “Plan B” proposal on the “fiscal cliff.”
Many of his most radical members believe they have a right to use any means at their disposal to impose their views on the country, even if they are only a minority in Congress.
…
This unfortunate moment is a vindication of those like my colleagues Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have been arguing that today’s Republicans are fundamentally different from their forebears.
In their appropriately named book, “It’s Even Worse than It Looks,” Mann and Ornstein called the current GOP “an insurgent outlier in American politics,” and described the party this way: “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise . . . and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Irresponsible and crazy — tis the season.