Drizzling rain through a thick ground fog — this early Friday weather along California’s northern coast as we begin the weekend outlook with a throat slashing.
Today starts the infamous sequester — run for the hills!

Or run somewhere. Due to incompetence and nasty indifference, the US Congress along with President Obama are letting the steam build in the sails of chaos before any remedy is furnished, whatever that remedy, who knows?

(Illustration found here).

The big day is here — cut to black.
The useless bunch in DC is again putting the horse out to pasture while the cart sits alone on the train crossing, and GOPers are quick to blame Obama. He is supposed to meet with big-top Republicans this morning at the White House, and nobody, but nobody is expecting anything to come of it.
Chief asshole Mitch McConnell: “This week, he finally invited Speaker Boehner and me to discuss the sequester – tomorrow, the day it takes effect,” McConnell said.
Any opportunity for a compromise is so low, the House took off work last night for a three-day weekend and all the rest of those bullshit guys is bullshitting for show.

WTF is going on? Whose on first?
We need help from those two wild and crazy guys — Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein — and they light into the sequester bullshit. If you remember, Mann and Ornstein pointed straight and narrow fingers last year at Republicans for creating a huge chunk of this country’s current misery, and this morning they take a look at the latest clusterf*ck.
From the Washington Post:

In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts.
After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
If the supercommittee didn’t broker a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade — the sequester — would go into effect.
The sequester was designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it.
…
It seems like 2.3 percent of savings can be found without inflicting harm.
But that 2.3 percent is applied to only a small part of the budget.
And seven months, not 12, remain in this fiscal year to make the cuts.
With little discretion about trimming areas such as aviation and food safety, layoffs and furloughs will interrupt services vital to the economy and public health.
As disruptive as the first year of the sequester would be, imagine what a decade of automatic cuts would produce.
…
The administration has released state-by-state estimates of the sequester and highlighted the cutbacks most likely to harm or inconvenience the public.
The reality is not so immediate or dramatic.
The damage will accumulate in less visible ways, as irrational reductions in public spending impede economic growth and job creation; reduce investments in education, infrastructure and scientific research; and further disrupt the routines of a modern democracy.
The longer the sequester remains in place, the more harm is inflicted.
…
The insistence on deep discretionary-spending reductions while calling for even deeper tax cuts shows that the sequester is not about money but about taking a meat ax to government as we know it.

Pretty much sums up the smell test for this potent bullshit. And can you imagine anyone with any sense and compassion agreeing to anything that’s inherently ‘designed to be so potentially destructive‘ sane people wouldn’t let it happen?
Well, well…

And if you feel like the shit is about to explode, you right, and you’re healthier for it. We’re doomed! And I’m a better person for screaming that — via the the Smithsonian:

Older people who have low expectations for a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
“Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade,” said lead author Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.
“Pessimism about the future may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions.”

HaHaHaHaHa — I don’t feel so good — need the crack.