And If You Had Any Doubt the Radical Right Is Stark Raving Mad

House Republicans maintain that NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is a huge waste of money.   In fact it's such a huge waste of money they're planning to force through cuts that would trim NOAA's budget by 30%.

The agency is warning the cuts will leave it effectively blind and will destroy its ability to give 5-10 days advance information of approaching hurricanes.

The $1.2bn (£730m) of cuts will force NOAA to delay replacing ageing satellites – meaning that it could go for up to 18 months without an eye in the sky at some time in the next five years.

"Whether the gap is longer than that depends on whether we get the money in the next budget," Jane Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, told an audience in Denver earlier this month.

For a country that still hasn't recovered from hurricane Katrina and has just been blasted by hurricane Irene, blinding the one agency that furnishes advance warning of major storm events is utter madness.  This from a government that is still spending about $10 billion a month to wage a senseless, decadal war in Afghanistan.


Madness, Republican style.

California Republican Wants California to Secede - From California

The Republican clown car just never runs out of gas.   The latest RepubliJester is Scientology-backed Riverside County supervisor and lawn cutter Jeff Stone who wants southern California to secede from everything from Los Angeles north.

He's proposing a 51st state, "South California." It would include the counties of "Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego and Tulare" -- all of which have high concentrations of white pick-up trucks and meth heads.

Stone's not only mad as hell about illegal immigrants and fucking hippies running his state, but, as he told the Los Angeles Times, "Los Angeles just enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags. That put three or four manufacturers out of business." So, how will the state handle this growing right wing insurgency? Governor Jerry Brown's spokesman gave the LAT this gem of a quote: 

"It's a supremely ridiculous waste of everybody's time," said spokesman Gil Duran. "If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing laws, then there's a place called Arizona.''

The nice thing is that Jeff really only wants the shitty parts of the state.   I'm guessing the ruckus is because Jeff is really pissed at having been fined  $16,000 a few months back for failing to report some $84,500 in contributions to his failed,2010 campaign for the California senate.