Clear and chilly again this way-early Wednesday on California’s north coast, the moon hanging like a bright fingernail in the eastern sky.

This morning some ugly from DC — both came yesterday via the heavens.

First, the first Pakistani victims of a US drone strike testified in Congress. Rafiq Rehman and his two children, Zubair, 13, and Nabila, 9, told how their grandmother was killed while picking okra.
Their testimony is bad, but this is the shits: Ultimately, only five members of Congress arrived at the briefing to hear their testimony Tuesday morning: Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, who organized the briefing, along with Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Rush Holt, D-N.J., John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rick Nolan, D-Minn.

Grayson added this: “The appropriate committees generally are staffed by people, if I may say this, who are friends of the military industrial complex, not even enemies, or even skeptics of it”
And these killings will continue:

On Friday, Pakistan reported that about 2,200 people were killed in about 330 drone attacks since 2004, and at least 400 of the victims were civilians, in addition to about 200 others who were “probable non-combatants,” according to a U.N. official.
The LA Times reported that White House officials declined to respond to allegations made by the two reports except to point to Obama’s speech in May, when the president declared tighter standards for strikes, including “a near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.”

Yeah, right.

And the second pile of shitty rubbish came from Capitol Hill also where Keith Alexander and James Clapper, the two-headed assholes from the NSA, testified before Congress on all those European spying reports this past week. The clowns said all those documents are “false.”
This from the Guardian:

General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, speaking “from the heart” before a Tuesday hearing of the House intelligence committee, said the NSA would prefer to “take the beatings” from the public and in the media “than to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.”
…
Addressing an international row over NSA spying on the US European allies over the past week, Alexander forcefully argued that reports of the agency collecting millions of phone calls were “absolutely false”.
He said: “Those screenshots that show or at least lead people to believe that we, NSA, or the US, collected that information is false – and it is false that it was collected on European citizens.
It was neither.”

These two shitheads should be at minimum need to be fired immediately, and then investigated for being lying assholes and jailed.

Shame, though — nothing will come of it.
Even in the sad refrain of 13-year-old Zubair: “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”