Sparkling starlight this way-early Wednesday on California’s north coast, and a bit on the chilly side, too.
We’ve been forecast for some frost in the internal valleys this morning, but out here next to the Pacific Ocean, it’ll be cool but way-pleasant.

And as the incompetent, self-serving assholes in DC continue attempts to destroy what’s left with America, this is just plain shitty: Almost 1-in-4 U.S. children lived in poverty in 2012, not statistically different from 2011 despite improvements in the economy, researchers say…Nationwide, 16.4 million children live in poverty; 6 million are age 6 and younger. In 2007, before the toll of the Great Recession, 13.1 million children, or 18 percent were living in poverty nationally.

Only place to go from here is…down even further.

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

Smoking a cigarette out back just now — in distance, a rooster is crowing, though, still a couple of hours from sunrise. A lonely, faraway sound…
And the noise we now hear in our nation’s HQ is silence, and feline purrs. In the US House nothing but cat litter — these clowns attempted yesterday to put together a deal  that included a short-term stopgap funding bill through Dec. 15, and a suspension of the debt limit until Feb. 7, but alas it was scuttled, basically because of the same refrain, it “will do nothing to stop Obamacare’s massive new entitlements from taking root.”
Speaker John Boehner couldn’t get his pack of wild asses to support it. Now back to the Senate, and square one.

From the New York Times:

While his colleagues sang about how what once was lost had now been found, Mr. Boehner did not tell them a more dispiriting truth: With less than 48 hours left before the nation is set to exhaust its authority to borrow money, he and his lieutenants were running out of ideas — a fact made starkly evident by the mad and fruitless scramble on Tuesday to come up with a measure that could win enough support from his members.
Around 7 p.m., he sent the House home and canceled all votes for the day.
“He’s herding cats,” said Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia.
…
A major source of Mr. Boehner’s limitations as speaker is simple math.
Republicans control 232 seats, and 218 are required for a majority when there are no vacancies, meaning that in most instances, he can afford to lose only 14 Republican votes.
For much of the 113th Congress, that has meant that the only bills guaranteed to pass are simple, nonpartisan matters like renaming a federal building or ones that strongly reflect conservative policies like the ban on abortion 20 weeks after fertilization.

In other words, nothing.
And which, of course, is piled high on the plates of a shameful chunk of Americans, despite this being a so-called “rich” country and full of big-hearted sonofabitches: With the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percentage of kids in poverty than America. Similarly, America also has a remarkably high percentage of people living in what is called “deep poverty,” at less than half the official poverty rate.
According to the Population Survey last month, 15 percent of Americans, or about 46.5 million people, live at or below the poverty line — and for the most part, we ignore the screams because the GOP yells louder.
From Salon:

This is a key concept that gets glossed over in the obfuscatory partisan rhetoric of Washington, so I’m going to say it again in a slightly different way: The contemporary hard-right core of the Republican Party only represents the wealthiest people in our society, especially the executives and major shareholders at big corporations.
Those people do not actually want to create a more generally affluent society or grow the middle class or any such nonsense.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that the more astute econo-wonks on the right have concluded that America’s three decades or so of postwar affluence had undesirable social effects (i.e., the 1960s), and cannot or should not be resurrected.
Their vision of social peace is entirely different: The vast majority of the population laboring constantly for flat or declining wages and minimal social benefits, masked somewhat by falling prices for food, clothing and electronic gizmos, and buoyed up by the mythological notion that any one of them, at any time, may suddenly ascend to the empyrean heights of the glittering 1 percent.

But that’s all bullshit — the heart-flame has gone out.

Compassionate conservatism assumed that we could take care of ourselves so we did not need to take care of each other.
It was an attractive concept, simultaneously exalting the successes of America while relieving the individual of responsibility for those whom it failed.
Many good people believed in it.
Today the attack on the poor is no longer cloaked in ideology – it is ideology itself.
This ideology is not shared by most Americans, but by those seeking to transform the Republican Party into, as former GOP operative Mike Lofgren describes it, “an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”
These are the people who have decided that poor children should be denied food as a result of elected officials wanting poor people to have healthcare.
The government shutdown only formalises the dysfunction that has been hurting ordinary Americans for decades.
It is not a political shutdown but a social breakdown.
Fixing it requires a reassessment of value – and values.
When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character.
This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor.
But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw.
Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.

In the meantime, no one is sitting in the cat bird’s seat.