Awaiting the clouds to roll away this mid-day Thursday here in California’s Central Valley, in a move that hopefully will spark some supposed sunshine this afternoon — no rain forecast until next week.
Weathering the non-weather is key.

One shitty non-weather thing Republicans continually do (among a buttload of things) is downplay or deny something and then change their attitude when it suits them. Hypocrisy is embedded into their souls. Rand Paul is an upfront-total asshole example. Horrible shit-twit Paul Gosar is another.
Not only do they have no legislative agenda at all, they oppose everything all the time, and then grab glory out of thin, lying air. It’s a pisser and way-more than a little bizarre the way-obvious antics of the entire Republican party haven’t caused them to lose all their shit. Instead, the lies and bullshit seem to only make them stronger. WTF!

Out in the open — GQPers aren’t only grifters and crooks, but hugely-incompetent:

"Remarkably, if you look at how the federal budget affects U.S. regions, there's a consistent pattern in which conservative states that preach the importance of self-reliance are in fact heavily subsidized by liberal states, especially in the Northeast." https://t.co/HnIfhljhnt

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 16, 2021

Paul Krugman at The New York Times on Tuesday took a look at Republican shitty behavior patterns, starting with Rand Paul’s home turf — some snips:

Observers couldn’t help noticing, however, that some of the Kentucky politicians asking for aid — notably Senator Rand Paul — had in the past not only opposed aid for other disaster-struck states but sneered at their pleas.
What should we make of this hypocrisy?

The truth is that it runs deeper than “aid for me but not for thee.”
Remarkably, if you look at how the federal budget affects U.S. regions, there’s a consistent pattern in which conservative states that preach the importance of self-reliance are in fact heavily subsidized by liberal states, especially in the Northeast.

The Rockefeller Institute publishes regular estimates of states’ “federal balance of payments” — the difference between the amount the feds spend in a state and the amount they collect in taxes.
In Virginia and Maryland a lot of federal spending consists of the salaries of government workers.
Elsewhere, however, it’s mainly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus some military spending.
…
Topping the list of net beneficiaries was, yes, Kentucky, where residents received an average of $14,000 more from Washington than they paid in taxes.
To put this in perspective, Kentucky’s 2019 net inflow of federal funds — $63 billion — was roughly 30-percent of the state’s G.D.P. that year.

Economic geographers often interpret regional economies using the “base-multiplier model.” The idea is that what drives a local economy is its “export base,” the stuff it sells to other places; the income generated by that export sector in turn supports jobs in local services, from health care to restaurants.
The economy of New York City, for example, is largely driven by the financial industry; the money earned there directly or indirectly supports most of the city’s other jobs.

So what is Kentucky’s export base? Not the traditional industries: In 2019, the state, which has more than four million residents, had fewer than 6,000 coal miners, while the distilling industry — which, to be fair, has been growing — employed only about 5,000 people.
On the other hand, more than 250,000 Kentuckians worked in health care and social assistance — and who do you think paid for a lot of that?
So, in a real sense, Kentucky’s economy lives on federal dollars.

Why I’ve always appreciated Krugman:

I mean, it’s amazing that we’re still doing the thing where small towns and rural areas are held up as the “real America,” where politicians from, say, Montana are still lecturing urbanites that they need to get out of the big cities.
Yes, it would probably be a good thing if more New Yorkers had a sense of what life is like in Montana. But how many Montanans have a good sense of what life is like in Queens — which happens to have twice Montana’s population?

Not that Queens is the real America — or at least no more than anywhere else in this nation.
We should see ourselves as one nation.
And it would be nice if people in places like Kentucky both accepted that and acknowledged how much they benefit from being part of a greater whole.

Yet all Republicans do is divide. Sow chaos where there’s none.
Joe Biden last May hit ’em in the righteous spot:

“…something they voted against, and back in their districts they’re bragging about…”

And here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front: ‘National Buffoons,’ by Daryl Cagle, found here).