Sunshine and warmth this nearly-noon Friday on California’s north coast, another work week gone, the weekend ahead.
A fairly-brisk ocean breeze, however, keeps us from actually reaching any stage of ‘hot.’

‘Calefaction‘ in American politics nowadays resembles Pablo Picasso’s ‘Harlequin Head,’ shown at right (and found here), especially the commentary-background for the artist with the art, ‘“...Picasso has always delighted in transforming reality itself into a theatrical event, in which he plays a definite role and often wears a mask or costume improvised for the occasion,”‘ — the disguise can’t mask the asshole-idiot, though

Due nearly 100 percent to the mouth. No matter the costume, the facial cloak or the masquerade parade, the oral presentations reveal the stinky-shit buried way-down in the bowels. And so shines the reality of the asshole-idiot, which in the end allows the public to witness the empty, usually vulgar remains collected within the brain pan.
All gibbering nonsense if there was no Republican party.

The GOP run for the 2016 gate is one of those thingys that’s both gross and hilarious — and a dismay at America. Of course, the parameters for Republicans has been turding-down for years, but really starting to enter the arrogant-ignorance stage in 2008 when the arrival of the queen of idiots, Sarah Palin. Since then, real-good sense doesn’t mean shit to the right side of the parlor. And in the ensuing time, only way-worse.
And the setting for The Donald is right on time — all mouth, no substance at all. In the same vein as Obamacare repeal, but absolutely-nothing to replace it — fucking over people just for the sake of fuckin’ ’em over.

One of the best at journalism nowadays, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, takes a look at the 2016 horror show that’s the Republican stampede to the presidency:

In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination sure seems funny.
The event known around the world as hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic, monumental, heinous and disgusting.
It’s like watching 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England.
You can’t tear your eyes away from it.
It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived.
The concept is ingenious.
Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president.
Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake.
It’s Western civilization’s very own car wreck.
Even if you don’t want to watch it, you will.
It’s that awesome of a spectacle.
…
Two factors have combined to make this maybe the most unlikely political story of our times.
The first is the campaign’s extraordinary number of entrants.
As The Washington Post noted last fall, this is the first time in recent memory that there is no heir-apparent candidate (like a Bob Dole).
For some reason, during the last years of the Obama presidency, the national Republican Party chose not to throw its weight behind anyone, leading a monstrous field of has-beens and never-weres to believe that they had a real shot at winning the nomination.
So throughout this spring and summer, a new Human Punchline seemingly jumped into the race every week.
There were so many of these jokers, coming so fast, that news commentators quickly latched onto the image of a parade of clowns emerging from a political Volkswagen, giving birth to the “clown car” theme.
But the more important factor has been the astounding presence of Donald Trump as the front-runner.
The orangutan-haired real estate magnate entered the race in mid-June and immediately blew up cable and Twitter by denouncing Mexicans as rapists and ripping 2008 nominee John McCain for having been captured in war.
…
In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration.
Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness.
There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.
…
Politics used to be a simple, predictable con.
Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.
…
In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process.
He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media.
Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.
The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole.
It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.
America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show.
And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.

And politics as theater of the absurd…