Cloudy and rainy this Saturday morning on California’s north coast, creating an Old Testament-gothic-like feeling of sadness and depression.
Except — just now seen from my back patio, a small hole opening in the thick-cloud layer, sun streams pouring through in awesome Cecil D. Demille fashion, dramatic and soul stirring, even beautiful.

Reality, however, burns the eyeballs: Those at the top are seeing their wages rebound quite strongly in the recovery. Following a 15.6 percent decline from 2007 to 2009, real annual wages of the top 1.0 percent of earners grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011.
The real annual wages of the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011 (h/t Digby).

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Frugal Meal’ found here).

In the three weeks since the New Year, the new boss is same as the old boss. This could a disastrous period, mainly because the powers-that-be are still playing the same-old-silly games.
Harry Reid should be run out of town on a cactus rail, and Republican pure-asshole Ronald Johnson should never, ever be allowed to be seen in public again, much less open that hole in his freakish face. (And, too, Johnson is a giant, nuclear-powered cry baby).
And this the pot calling the kettle black — from prissy-like ass-head Bobby Jindal: “We must stop being the stupid party.”
The GOP isn’t stupid, they’re just bat-shit crazy, nasty-faced without an ounce of compassion.
Insane insight has not only stalled the Hurricane Sandy relief package in the US Senate, but the newer, so-called stream-lined version has also stripped more than $180 million from it intended for help in last September’s Hurricane Isaac.
Stupid as more stupid.
And even mean-spirited bonkers (via Raw Story): New Mexico state Rep. Cathrynn Brown proved that this week by introducing a bill aimed at throwing rape victims in jail if they refuse to honor their rapist’s right to control their body by carrying his child. This sort of insult to rapists will not stand, so Brown, standing up bravely for rapists who want the suffering they’ve inflicted to carry on and on for their victims, has proposed banning abortion for rape victims on the phony grounds that it’s “tampering with evidence.”
Rape has gone beyond just ‘rape.’  Take time to read Rebecca Solnit’s piece at Tomdispatch  — horrible in this apparent not-so-enlightened era.

And in an age like ours right now, this is the dumb-ass shits — via USAToday:

Even as the U.S. Embassy warns about Beijing’s smog, federal weather officials here are proposing to cut the nation’s two-day ozone and smog forecasts, ones behind local warnings to the sick and elderly about “Code Red” days for air pollution.
The proposal to shelve the $5.4 million “National Air Quality Forecast Capability” forecasts in March has drawn protests from public health officials in 22 states, the cities of Philadelphia, Jacksonville and Denver, as well as Midwestern officials of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Public health officials from coast to coast rely on the National Weather Service forecasts to warn asthma and respiratory illness patients about poor air quality and to meet Clean Air Act responsibilities to reduce smog.

Last year, Congress cut more than $150 million from NOAA’s satellite program, the very-most-important sector needed in this time of extreme weather events, and the back-stabbing cuts came from the GOP bowels.
From Climate Progress last October:

In congressional Republicans’ mindless crusade against all government spending, they have forgotten that there are some things the government actually does well and the private sector cannot provide.
A few years ago, one GOP congressman famously asked then NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, “why are we building meteorological satellites when we have The Weather Channel?”
Where do you suppose he thought the Weather Channel gets its data?
That’s right, kids!
NOAA’s meteorological satellites!

And those swirling objects high up yonder really, really help with shit like this:

What is currently a relatively innocuous weather system spreading light snow, freezing rain, and rain across the eastern U.S. is forecast to explode, through a process known to meteorologists as “bombogenesis,” into a ferocious storm once it emerges over the North Atlantic.
Computer models indicate that the storm may intensify so significantly that it will have a minimum central pressure that is lower than what was recorded during Hurricane Sandy.
That storm devastated the northern Mid-Atlantic coast in late October and the lowest pressure recorded during it was 940 millibars (mb).

Although President Obama expressed strong thoughts on climate change in his inauguration speech last week, the infamous, climate-f*cking Keystone XL pipeline will most-likely be okayed.
And the source of the shit in the pipeline?
Via the Christian Science Monitor: Lakes as far as 56 miles away from production facilities near Fort McMurray, Alberta, show unnaturally high levels of substances linked to cancer. Researchers say they are the result of roughly half a century of development at the Athabasca oil sands.

What can be said for mankind’s arrogance?
Maybe a clue from the Titanic: “Come at once. We have struck a berg. It’s a CQD, old man,” the Titanic called to another ship, the Carpathia. “We have struck an iceberg and sinking by the head,” she told a German ship, the Frankfurt.
“CQ” was the catch-letters to stop talking and pay fucking attention. The “D” was added to signal distress.

Nowadays, we might want to add an extra ‘D’ to signal huge, near-insurmountable distress.
CQD was the old SOS — in with the old…