Overcast with pretty-heavy fog this early Friday on California’s north coast, but at least according to NWS radar, most of the thick stuff is south of Eureka, well away from us. Supposedly, we’re scheduled for a ‘partly sunny‘ day with no rain in sight until early next week.
Yesterday afternoon was a rare pearl, though, at least for around here — sunshine without much wind, which makes for warm and nice. So fine in fact, I finally felt the urge to clear winter weeds from my small patch of earth beyond the back patio of my apartment.

Yet far to the east yesterday afternoon, once again Republicans proved they are a major hindrance to a polite and humanitarian society — only assholes can speak shit with a straight face: ‘“It is, at its heart, an immoral tax,” said Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican.’

(Illustration found here).

Brady was babbling about the federal estate tax, which the US House voted to repeal, strictly along party lines, immoral and otherwise, and although for right now that’s as far as this line of shit goes — there’s not enough nefarious votes in the Senate and President Obama has threatened to veto — supposedly in 2017 there’s another shot at being poor in the USA.
Versus the wealthy — of that nearly 3 million Americans who die every year, only about two-tenths of 1 percent have enough assets to even qualify as your financial legacy for heirs must be at least $5.4 million ($10.8 million for a couple) in ‘qualify‘ for estate taxes.
Despite never making it out of Congress, the move is just a show put on by GOP assholes/shitbags for their rich donors.

In a nutshell, the reality of the estate tax clown-show via the MaddowBlog at MSNBC:

Even by contemporary GOP standards, today’s vote is pretty obscene.
At a time of rising economic inequality, House Republicans have prioritized a bill to make economic inequality worse on purpose.
At a time in which much of Congress wants to make the deficit smaller, House Republicans have prioritized a bill to make the deficit much larger.

Hence, a generational fuck — ‘killing off the estate tax would increase the deficit by $269 billion over a decade.’
Kicking the can onto the backs of poor children to come.

Beyond the paltry tax, the GOP biggest harm to humanity is in science, especially in handling climate change, and in a kind of pseudo-reversal last night in the Senate, Republicans seemingly opened a dribble hole in taking action on global warming — the Senate passed a non-binding motion to instruct future budget negotiators to “insist” that the final spending bill include measures to address human-caused climate change (‘According to a Center for American Progress analysis, a whopping 70 percent of Senate Republicans do not accept the science that states greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming‘).
Despite the apparent slack in bullshit, reality bites (via Think Progress):

Another possible reason the motion passed, though, is that it was done by voice vote — meaning there was no roll call taken.
So if a Republican Senator wanted to vote for the measure to include climate funding in the budget, no one would know.
No one would be held politically responsible for voting for or against it.

Different tale to be told in the daylight…woe be unto us…