A gentle spring rain this morning on California’s north coast, quiet and soft like a baby’s bottom — warm, too, like a full diaper.
If this was the weekend, good sleeping weather. But it’s only Thursday and it’s just wet.

And because of last night, I will face the horror before the weekend: A jackpot of $475 million ranks as the second largest in Powerball history and third biggest overall.
No one came up with the winning numbers, so everybody and his idiot brother will be out in force, dreaming of tons of cash and the paradise it will bring. A situation like this brings out the worse form of modern humanity — a delusional quest to make life better. In the public domain, the lootery (sorry, the lottery) creates something so horrible, so repugnant anyone with any form of sane sense is forced to avert their eyes from the carnage.
As manager of a liquor store, we also sell lottery tickets, and assholes of every description will now slither off woodwork and from under rocks to throw away money on the chance an unicorn will shit on their collective faces.

(Illustration found here).

A scandal, I tell you, a scandal — more telling than the reality of DC.
And with the last couple of weeks, in this pathetic nation’s capitol, you might just have to pick a number, or a series of numbers, to figure out what the bullshit is going on — and the jackpot is an empty wallet (like the lottery!).
The months-long, dumb-ass Benghazi hullabaloo of empty promises has been pushed back by two bigger piles of shit — the IRS checking up on Tea Party financial shenanigans, and the US DOJ secretly snagging phone records of Associated Press reporters.
And both of these two newbies has what Benghazi didn’t have — staying power with a public interest.
President Obama’s second term for most-likely for all intend and purposes, is probably over, and the next couple of years will be a shouting match between Democrats and Republicans.
Much the same, but worse, as it’s been the last six years.

Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic claims Obama was already fucked before the new shit hit the pipeline:

Most of what a president can accomplish takes place early in a term.
But as Republican communications pros are fond of reminding reporters, Obama’s second term was already off to a rocky start.
The major reason the Toomey-Manchin bill to expand background checks failed was distrust of the federal government.
That’s not going to change.
The IRS and AP scandals will no doubt worsen distrust of the federal government, especially in circles already prone to such sentiments and make it harder for members of Congress to withstand gun-lobby pressure.
But the important thing to remember is that every major gun proposal before the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate already failed at a time when the political winds were as favorable to such reforms as they have been in more than a decade.
And none of those proposals ever had a shot in the U.S. House.
…
Even in the wake of a decisive reelection and while riding a crest of positive national sentiment, the president was unable to come to a grand bargain on revenues and spending with Republican leaders, and so instead we have the sequester, and no sign that Congress is eager to revisit the issue or reverse it.
Republican willingness to negotiate with the president was always low, and what remained at the end of his first term seemed to evaporate early in the new year—that is, well before the current scandals.
…
But after the successful Republican opposition to the idea of a Susan Rice nomination to the State Department and the GOP’s pre-scandal efforts to thwart or delay the seating of Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary and Gina McCarthy as EPA Administrator, it will be hard to tell the difference if that’s the case.
The appointments process under Obama has been broken since 2009.
As for the matter of whether the AP scandal will lead to calls for Eric Holder’s head, it’s worth recalling that the chairman of the Republican National Committee already called for him to resign in December 2011 over the Fast and Furious program, releasing a web ad accusing him of a “cover-up.”
There may be more calls, but they won’t be the first ones.
…
In short, those who wondered why Obama seemed so singularly unenthusiastic about the prospect of a second term while in the midst of running for it now have their answer. Because it looks like this. Because despite optimistic rhetoric about how the 113th Congress would be different from the 112th, which was the least productive Congress since the 1940s, the likelihood was that it was always going to look like this.

Including in that ugly wad of presidential debris is the Obamacare sideshow coming up and the negative impasse of attempting any form of immigration reform anytime soon — in other words, Obama was in deep, scalding water before the stove was even ignited.
The major problem is the GOP — they’re nasty, lying assholes without a dab of compassion about this country. They’re tied in with big money and the frantic silliness of the Tea Party and no matter what Obama says or does, Republicans will bluster-talk right through it.
Even just plain old stupid, enlarged by a diarrhea mouth, like the asshole, Louie Gohmert.
Via Raw Story:

Gohmert criticized the FBI over its handling of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The congressman alleged the government was more aggressive towards Christian evangelist Franklin Graham than radical Islamic terrorists, and that Americans were more concerned about “being blown up by terrorists” than religious profiling.
But Holder noted Gohmert had no way of knowing how the FBI handled the situation, since he had no access to the FBI files.
“You don’t know what the FBI did,” he said.
“You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians.
You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to.
You simply do not know that.
And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough, or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough.
I know what the FBI did.
You cannot know what I know.
That is all.”
The congressman was not pleased with the rebuke.
Repeatedly clashing with the hearing’s chairman, Gohmert accused Holder of challenging his character.
The congressman insisted everything he said was true.

Despite it being a made-up lie.

A good-read essay on scandals comes from a long-time insider, Suzanne Garment, wife of Leonard Garment, special counsel to Dick Nixon during the Watergate era. She says the ‘scandals’ eating at Obama right now is near child’s play and ain’t nothing like the good, old days — “Come on, people. Get a grip.”
From Reuters and some highlights:

Watergate was about hubris, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the culture wars and the darkest of angers — both within Nixon and against him.
The current agglomeration is about bureaucracies, the zeitgeist and garden variety political calculation.
…
It is tempting to smile condescendingly at the White House reporters who are now coming forward — courageously and righteously, they think — to challenge the administration’s account of the preparation of the talking points.
These young reporters are to the Watergate press corps, at least the press corps once it was liberated by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as ducklings are to tarantulas.
But this is the scandal that has the fingerprints of the White House on it.
It is the one that raises the specter of the White House lying for political advantage.
Moreover, though the people who died at Benghazi were cold by the time the talking points came under discussion, their death haunts this issue.
This scandal, unlike the AP or the IRS scandal, could be fundamentally corrosive.
…
Benghazi, however, remains the central ring of this circus.
It has not yet risen to anything comparable to Watergate.
If the children in the car ask, “Are we almost there yet?” the answer is, “Not even close.”
If the question is, “Are we maybe getting into the neighborhood of almost there yet?” the answer is not so certain.

And if the circus comes to town, hide your loved ones — or just except the piss as rain.