(Illustration: Artwork by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, found here).

Wet and chilly this late-afternoon Wednesday on California’s north coast — tomorrow expected to be sunny and Friday not-so-bad either.
Big rain scheduled (penciled in, of course) for next weekend.

An excellent point on the badly-written T-Rump saga came this afternoon from Amanda Marcotte at Salon — Republicans have schemed for a generation to fuck America. High-notes:

The key to Trump’s defense with his base, I would argue, is not that he tries to convince them he’s innocent, at least not in the traditional sense of “someone who didn’t do the crimes he’s suspected of.”
Instead, the strategy is to suggest that all politicians are corrupt, everyone is complicit and therefore all investigations are just bad-faith power grabs conducted for purely partisan reasons.
That strategy is working with Trump’s base because that’s exactly the message Republicans have been instilling in their voters for decades.
First, Republicans normalized the idea that all politicians are corrupt by electing a series of deeply corrupt politicians themselves.
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all been warm-up acts to Trump.
Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion: Every one of those presidents helped train their voters to defend political corruption if it was conducted for supposedly meritorious ends.
…
Second, Republican politicians trained their base to think of investigations as bad-faith political power grabs by themselves using investigations primarily, if not solely, for this purpose.
Ever since the Bill Clinton presidency, Republicans have invented a steady stream of Democratic “scandals” to gin up fake umbrage, from Whitewater and Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky to whatever the hell was supposed to be scandalous about “Benghazi.”

And the voting booth: ‘That’s why polls that measure whether Republican voters “believe” Trump is telling the truth are somewhat beside the point. The real problem is that they don’t believe it matters whether Trump is a criminal, and even the proverbial “smoking gun” wouldn’t shake them from that belief.’
Main thrust, though, T-Rump supporters are a lot like the T-Rump — racist, mean-spirited assholes.
And those ‘corrupt,’ nasty-ass GOP politicians/officials/flunkies are also way-dangerous as living shit — as case in point is climate change and this nuts panel the T-Rump just okayed ‘dedicated to determining whether or not climate change poses a national security threat’ (TheWeek):

It turns out that William Happer, President Trump’s top choice to lead the panel, is quite fond of carbon emissions.
So much so, in fact, that he said that people deserve to learn “the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth” rather than a pollutant.
In a 2014 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Happer told host Andrew Ross Sorkin the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

And, of course: ‘Happer is a renowned physicist known for his work on laser technology used in missile defense and the interaction between light and atoms, but does not have a formal background in climate studies or history.’

Exactly…

Even, even as environmental shit gets bad: ‘The number of hate groups operating in the United States rose 7 percent to an all-time high last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center said on Wednesday, attributing the increase largely to anti-immigrant rhetoric from President Donald Trump.’

Bizarre times, maybe, of all times…