A clear, beautiful early Wednesday morning here on California’s north coast, and as the half-moon hangs in the southern sky, the sound of the peaceful Pacific can be heard raging in the distance — only a couple of miles.
A scene of ease and tranquility.

Maybe in the mind, buddy.
Mark Twain, ever the delightful pundit: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Desired dysfunction the key words.

(Illustration found here).

And our current media folks have a lot to do with the bullshit. Two dangerous stories this week that barely made it to the A-list, but should have out-ranked them all. One was the news of our planet reaching 400 ppm of CO2 — a major-major milestone (I wrote about it yesterday), but many news outlets didn’t carry it at all, or if they did, panned it downward in the pile. Of course, the climate/environment sites did feature it way up, but still.
And the second was this: Hurricane Sandy dumped about 11 billion gallons of raw and untreated sewage into waterways from Washington DC to Connecticut, the science journalism group Climate Central said on Tuesday. That’s or enough human waste to cover New York’s Central Park in 41 feet of sewage, or fill 17,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, scientists told a conference call with reporters.
Climate change may be on the news-back burner, but shit, while doing that, the whole stove is burning up.

And the US Congress — not worth a flying shit.
First, in that terrible week of the Boston bombings the Senate gunned down a proposal wanted by 90 percent of Americans, and then last Friday, they un-sequestered funds for the FAA and let air travelers move more easily — the rich respond when it affects/effects them.
John Dickerson at Slate nails it: It’s worth pausing for a moment to evaluate how the sequester virus has mutated during its short life. What started as a tool to focus Congress on long-term solutions to that part of the budget that needs the most attention, is now pushing Congress even further into obsessing about short-term fixes in that portion of the budget that doesn’t need the attention.
And adds the asshole of it: Meanwhile, the long-term problems still aren’t being addressed and the people without lobbyists who depend on government won’t get heard. So Medicare patients are not receiving chemotherapy and fewer elderly recipients of Meals on Wheels are getting food.
Jon Stewart did it up right.

All this just makes people sad, and disheartened. From the msnbc’s maddowblog, the point of it all: It’s an amazing perspective, isn’t it? Cynicism isn’t an unfortunate byproduct; it’s simply “the right thing” to do. Can there a more transparent example of the post-policy thesis? As Greg Sargent added, “[W]hat you’re seeing clearly demonstrated here is a kind of policy nihilism on the part of the GOP that helps explain why addressing the country’s problems has become all but impossible.”

The future is through our children — or so they say, whoever ‘they‘ are. Young US people are getting more and more fed up with the current system, and think in the long run, we be fucked.
Via the Christian Science Monitor:

Among Americans age 18 to 29, 48 percent think their vote will not make a real difference, up dramatically from 29 percent in 2012, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
…
Trust that the nation’s major institutions — the US Supreme Court, president, Congress, Wall Street, and even the media — will “do the right thing” all or most of the time has declined among Millennials since 2010.
“Nearly half of all Americans under 30 believe that the politics of today are not able to meet the challenges our country is facing. We have been warned,” said John Della Volpe, polling director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, in a statement.
…
“At no time since President Obama was elected in 2008 have we reported less trust, more cynicism and more partisanship among our nation’s youngest voters,” Della Volpe wrote in the report’s conclusion.
“Young voters, like older Americans, are becoming more partisan by the day.”

And who can really blame these kids? Obama is by way-far is the most disappointing president in US history, or at least in this modern era, and way-for-sure in my lifetime. In 2008, the hope was a high mark, but Obama has proven to be slick willy instead of the great way forward.
After an initial strong expectation in 2007-early 2008, this incident set off alarm bells for me about Obama — that three-pointer basketball shot in Kuwait. And for some reason, from then on there was a little twitch in my political nervous system about Obama’s reality.
Of course, when he named financial-footed assholes Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as part of his team in December 2008, the alarm bells became intimate-immediate danger sirens — WTF!
Obama seems to sense the let down. In a press conference, he tried to joke-off the disappointment shit:

In a hastily called press conference Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama laughed at a reporter’s suggestion that he may not have the “juice” to get the rest of his agenda through a divided Congress, after the defeat of a gun-control measure that had strong public backing and the president’s vocal support.
“Maybe I should just pack up and go home,” the president joked, speaking in the White House briefing room.
“As Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.”

Twain, though, wasn’t ruler of the free world.

Guns are guns and people who pull the triggers can be anybody — no shit, NRA.
Via the Guardian:

Under current laws, individuals can still buy weapons at gun shops even though a requisite FBI background check reveals that their name is stored on a central database of potential terrorists.
There are nine disqualifying factors that block anyone seeking to buy a firearm – such as mental instability and drug convictions – but they do not include suspected terrorism.
Shortly before the Boston bombings, Frank Lautenberg, the Democratic US senator for New Jersey, reintroduced a bill that he first drafted in 2007, designed to close the “terror gap”.
The bill would add known or suspected terrorists to the list of those disqualified from purchasing guns.
But all attempts to close the loophole have been vigorously opposed by the main gun lobbying group, the National Rifle Association.
The NRA argues that Lautenberg’s bill would take away people’s second-amendment rights to bear arms and hit law-abiding American gun owners.
…
A survey by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that in 2010 some 272 people on suspected terrorist watch lists tried to buy a gun.
Of that number, 247 underwent background checks and were allowed to proceed, while only 25 were barred because they fell foul of other prohibitions.
Between 2004 and 2010, the research showed, 1,453 people on potential terrorist watch lists tried to buy guns and explosives and of those 1,321 – 91% – succeeded, with the federal authorities powerless to stop them as a result of lapse gun regulations.

A worse tomorrow, tomorrow.