Ground fog, but clear skies this early Friday morning along California’s northern coast, and it feels like it’s a warmer, too. buffoon
Should be a good weekend up here, but back eastward it’s way-Arctic-cold for the upcoming holiday weekend and President Obama’s double-billed second inauguration — he takes the oath of office on Sunday in a private ceremony at the White House, and the public ceremony Monday on the Capitol steps will be a bit of theater — and then we begin a second round of hostilities.

In that, of course, meaning the ignorant, nasty and belligerent GOP.
I.e., something like this — Marina Ein, a PR lady handling ‘crisis communications‘ and Republicans’ idiot-problem with the ladies: “It all boils down to whether or not the Republican Party thinks this is a problem,” she said. “If they want to make inroads with women, then they need to subject every one of their candidates to sensitivity training — not to mention reality training.”

(Illustration found here).

Not only does the US — and the world — face some really bad problems (climate change, financial instability, just to name a couple), but any attempt to develop workable strategies to handle these huge issues gets back-stabbed by the immoral GOP. The ‘reality training‘ won’t do any good if there’s no understanding of the word, ‘reality.’
In this case, the Republican party is riddled with way-delusional ignoramuses — a new study from Fairleigh Dickinson University has some asshole numbers: Sixty four percent of Republicans polled by the university’s PublicMind project said that it was “probably true” that Obama is hiding details of his personal history, including possibly his birth place.
Sixty-four-fuckin’ percent! Based on my math skills, that’s way-over half of them — ‘birthers‘ since birth.
And the so-called business-oriented GOP cries against Obama, but yet corporate profits have grown by 171 percent the last four years, the biggest leap since WWII.
WTF!

Apparently, Republicans don’t have a sense of not only reality, but the history behind reality. GOP assholes are either in a way-real need for a good PR fix, or just don’t give a shit.
From the wondrous Editrix at The Wonkette:

Thank you Robert Costa, of the National Review Online, making our morning.
“Source shows me sched, shakes head: ’10:15 am, Friday, Burwell Plantation, Coalitions-Discussion on Successful Comms w/ Minorities & Women.’”
So that makes TWO Republicans who realize there could be a problem with “optics” when the GOP holds a panel on “successful communications” with minorities, at a plantation.
Congratulations Robert Costa and “source”!
Here, if you would care to peruse it, is a kooky list of Burwells’slaves.
But we feel like the organizers of the GOP retreat at Williamsburg, which includes this happy-fun-time field trip, might have missed some opportunities?
NOPE.
This is where a list of other incredibly thoughtful and smart “outreaches” the GOP could make to other groups would go, if anything could possibly be smarter than having a panel on communicating with minorities at a former plantation.
You have bested us, GOP.

They have unleashed the chained django unchained.
Jonathan Chait at New York magazine says the GOP is deliberately shitting in their own mess kit:

Now why, you might ask, would Republicans tolerate the passage of a bill they overwhelmingly oppose?
They didn’t have to pass it — they could have kept it off the floor and only brought a bill that had their party’s support, or possibly no bill at all.
It appears they decided the negative publicity, and the damage to the party’s brand, outweighed their own preferences.
House Republicans wanted to vote no so they could signal opposition to their own base, and protect themselves against a possible primary challenge, but they didn’t care enough to actually stop the bill.
The unanswered question here is whether they care at all, or how much they really care.
If it’s all for show, Republicans can keep going on this way, using Democrats to pass bills they want to pass (or can’t afford the consequences of blocking) but don’t want to go on record supporting.
On the other hand, it may just be a temporary balm.
Perhaps Republicans have been told they can’t afford to drive the party into a public confrontation, so they quietly accede to compromises, while frustration builds beneath the surface.

And this just for dumb-ass giggles
Lawyers can be lawyers — from The National Law Journal:

McTeer, 40, was arrested in 2011 for helping her boyfriend, a former client, escape from a correctional facility where he was being held for possession of methamphetamine while on probation.
The two were taken into custody after police found them having lunch in a downtown Oklahoma City restaurant, a few hours after she had uploaded post-escape photos of them onto her Facebook page, according to local news reports at the time.
Police said they found the boyfriend’s prison uniform in McTeer’s home.

Intentional buffoons or just freakin’ nuts?