Good morning, everyone. While the east coast gets socked in (again) we also have our own nasty snow event to contend with. We handle such things by staying put. The weather may have caused us one inconvenience--our cable is screwed up. The only thing we can get is some damned infomercials and we noticed that the time hadn't been updated (and didn't change) through the hour and a half we were drinking our coffee. Looking outside we may have gotten the eight inches they were forecasting and the local weather reports now say the snow won't end till tomorrow. A couple of days ago, when the news was showing the scenes from Atlanta and other points south, Mom echoed my sentiments--we can't remember any time when so much of the country has been hit simultaneously with severe weather. CNN has this blog post that provides some back up for our conjecture on how odd this weather is.

Various news articles (like this one) say that one result of the Tucson shooting has been a significant surge in gun sales--especially of the Glock model the shooter used. I don't know which trend I find more offensive. The a##holes who demand that everyone be deprived of the right to own a gun because some other a##hole decides to use is irresponsibly and tragically; or the a##holes who respond to even the slightest threat to almost unlimited gun ownership by arming themselves to the teeth. Has everyone in the crazy world gone as insane as Loughner? Then there is the other phenomenon that is nauseating: those who have been most guilty of spewing violent, hate-filled imagery trying to excuse themselves of any complicity by claiming, as most ten-year-olds caught in bad behavior, that everyone does it or that, since the shooter is so obviously mentally deranged, they their vitriol isn't really culpable at all. But I don't have that much sympathy with the other side. Yes, the nasty, malicious, and violent spewing of people like Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh create a poisonous atmosphere but do they really need to create such a cocoon of saccharine niceness around all of us that even the most deranged won't get bad notions? Mark Morford at SFgate is in find form on this subject, as usual.

The floods in Queensland, Australia, have, finally, made it onto our national news. The scenes are horrific. I found this interesting set of pictures this morning. Depending on which report you get, the flooded area is either the size of Texas or the size of Germany and France together. And it still hasn't stopped raining. Evidently, the flood waters have reached Brisbane, the third largest city in Australia. I hope the Aussie government does a hell of a lot better job than ours did at rebuilding. MSNBC has this article this morning.