Clear and a bit chilly this Friday morning on California’s north coast — the bright, disk-like moon hangs to the south, creeping westward toward the Pacific Ocean.
And a surprise yesterday afternoon — rain. Although an overall light shower, on occasion I could hear the raindrops popping all over the place.
No more wet in the forecast until the middle of next week.

We now know why the current US Congress is such a bunch of jack-off assholes — courtesy of Larry Flynt for the last three decades:

The dirty mag comes in a plain manila envelope, fairly undetectable to the poor intern or staffer tasked with opening the mail.
And every month, there it is: Hustler, featuring dozens of naked or scantly dressed women, vulgar comics, and articles, some satirical, on politics, society, and sex.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Musician, Dancer, Goat & Bird‘ found here).

Even more from the National Journal:

It’s not like members of Congress haven’t tried to stop the magazines from coming.
They just can’t stop it legally.
Following the complaints from 264 congressional offices in 1984, the U.S. Postal Service asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the mailings.
But that request failed when the court ruled two years later that the delivery of the magazine could not be stopped. The court wrote:

“Receiving Hustler once each month would not unduly burden a Member of Congress.
Members are not forced to read the magazine or other of the mail they receive in volume.
We cannot imagine that Congressional offices all lack wastebaskets.”

For Hustler, it was a First Amendment issue.
This was Flynt’s right to petition the government, he argued, and the court agreed.
Or as Flynt told The Hill in 2011, “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics.”
Thirty years later, the congressional subscription count remains the same: 535. The magazine is not sent to members of the executive branch, though.

One way Congressional staffers handled the ‘free’ delivery: For a while, the interns, after their initial shock and befuddlement, were directed to save the Hustlers. We eventually gave a coworker the whole year’s supply for Secret Santa and then she would mail them to her boyfriend in Iraq. Certainly one of the least-heralded ways the office supported our troops.

Due to the huge-amount, not to mention the diversity of porn-shit on the InterWebs, I figured hand-carried magazines like Hustler were history — but nooooo!
Maybe GOP Rep. Vance McAllister of Louisiana was just role-playing a Hustler advice point, or maybe Anthony Weiner just held his plain, vanilla envelope too tightly. Who knows?
In an interview with The Hill two years ago, Flynt struck the nerve note:

You know, it’s depressing, I don’t even like to think about it … What the average American doesn’t realize is Congress doesn’t make the laws anymore.
Who makes them is the Supreme Court.
Congress has shrugged their legislative responsibility and left it up to the courts to do the legislating.
And that’s dividing our country; the rich keep getting richer and the poor just get poorer; there’s nothing more true than that is today.
And I don’t want to sound cold and bitter when I say that Republicans are mean, but they just are.
They are downright mean, and it’s all about them.
And I think we’re obligated to help take care of the less fortunate among us.

Correct-a-mendo.

The way America is now is well beyond the ordinary, groping, sweat-grabbing porn — the rule of the rich is political porn. Nasty, cruel and ignorant.