Michael Sutton, one of two California state Fish and Game Commissioners at the meeting, called for a consideration of a seasonal closure during spawning season to allow the two species to repopulate. “Fishing spawning aggregations is a really dangerous practice,” he said. “If a seasonal closure would alleviate that, we need to consider that. A seasonal closure would have a significant impact on the industry, but so would a ban of fishing these species for several years.”

No one else at the hearing backed Sutton's idea, as far as I could tell, though it appears to be the idea that most likely to allow the beloved barred sand bass to repopulate. Here's a Fish and Game chart of where the barred sand bass are caught off the SoCal coast: "hotspots" (spawning grounds) in red:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Amazing more people weren't killed. Some of the survivors intend to move away from tornado country, just months after the last visited by record-setting storms, the likes of which destroyed Joplin.

In eastern Alabama, a suspected twister splintered trees and demolished mobile homes at a pair of housing parks near the Auburn University campus. Less than seven months ago, a massive tornado roared past the campus of archrival University of Alabama in the western part of the state. It was the worst bout of weather for the state since about 250 people were killed during the tornado outbreak in April. Both campuses were spared major damage this time.

Jeff Masters: The calendar says it's the coldest month of winter, but today's weather is more typical of March, as a vigorous spring-like storm system has spawned a rare and deadly January tornado outbreak

No small storm system, that -- almost looks to deserve a name. 

Willard Romney lost it. 

Newt Gingrich will deny it, but the South Carolina vote was really a referendum on Romney. He lost it because he is slipping in the area that was previously his one selling point: electability. The Bain mess and his absent tax returns were compounded by the overturning of his “victory” in Iowa. Without the illusion of being unbeatable, there is no reason for conservatives to vote for Romney. Crucially, they told exit pollers that they now believe Newt is more likely to win against Obama than Mitt in November. That’s an illusion, too. But when you hate someone as much as some sections of the Tea Party hate Romney, you don’t see them as they really are. Poor Romney has become, unfairly, a stand in for all the elitism and bad faith of the Republican establishment. He has a tough fight ahead.

What can Romney do? How can he connect with the public? Election experts agree that he remains the best-funded, least offensive, and most-likely-to-succeed candidate for the GOP.

But like Richard Nixon, no one seems to actually like the guy. He needs to show something human that people can latch on to and trust emotionally. Hell, even Richard Nixon had to do that. 

Won't be easy. The joke on Romney is that he's either just boring (SNL) or actually a robot (from Rall, Drum, and others).

The Romneytron 9000 as Kevin Drum put it. 

In the South Carolina debates, Gingrich successfully turned attacks on his character into attacks on the press,  and more importantly, in doing so connected with the audience. They thrilled at his fiery attack on "elites" -- meaning the likes of handsome, well-paid, well-educated, intelligent questioner John King. 

(Curiously, in his looks John King is almost exactly as stolid and Ken-like as Mitt Romney.In a dramatic sense, they are worthy if slow-moving opponents, in an Megatron vs. Optimus Prime sort of way. And as mentioned below, Prime got a terrific shot in on Megatron in the last battle over Megatron's income tax returns.)

Richard Nixon had a somewhat similar problem, when he was running for Governor of California in the early 60's. People just didn't like him. After a bad loss, he lashed out at his famous "last press conference." In true bitterness he said: 

"You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentleman, this is my last press conference." 

In a practised, familiar, move, Newt Gingrich turned his negative into a positive, by blaming the press for his situation. Will Romney try something similar? 

Surely it's too late to play "me too" -- Newt's all but patented that move.

Maybe he'll find a way to tug at the heartstrings, such as Richard Nixon's infamous Checkers speech?

No -- no one can pity the billionaire unable to buy his wife the coat she wants.

Romney has been accused of being Nixonian -- by his neighbors, in fact. According to a story in the New York Review of Books:

When I ask locals about their impressions of Mitt, I get a recurring response: Nixonian. “The overriding passion of his life seems to be to become president,” a conservative economics professor tells me. “I can’t think of a single issue over which Romney would risk reelection in order to stick to a principle.” A University of Massachusetts journalism professor puts it more positively: “He can be as cagey as Nixon, and he can be almost as smarmy, but he is also able to think strategically.”

Romney may be able to think strategically, but can he act strategically?

That appears to be his challenge. Can he pick up the mantle of Reagan -- or at least, Nixon -- and make some sort of emotional connection with the electorate? 

What are the chances? Hasn't managed it yet, near as I can tell.   

Dreamed in the sunbeams, when the sheep were calm, the plan of a hermitage: walls of pure white quartz, doors and windows edged with quartz crystals, windows of thin smooth sheets of water with ruffling apparatus to answer for curtains. The door a slate falke with brown and purple and yellow lichens. And oh, could not I find furniture! My table would be a grooved and shining slab of granite from the bed of the old mountain glaciers, my stool a mossy stump or tree bracket of the big dry, stout kind, and a bed of the spicy boughs of the spruce, etc., ad infinitum. 

John Muir, January 21, 1869 [from John of the Mountains]

[Robinson] Jeffers celebrated the "transhuman magnificence" of nature, the beautiful things both vast and near that can provide even a 21st century reader with solace, even if we are often a muddled, ugly species and even if all things, as they do, fade away. 

Don't often hear poets extolled on the editorial pages of a major newspaper. At the heart of the essay is a quote from a poem written late in Jeffers' life, after he had suffered many grevious losses:

Cokinos writes:

Jeffers goes on, considering what is gone (his beloved wife) and what remains (trees that herons nest in, the material universe as a kind of divinity). He still "can feel the beautiful secret/In places and stars and stones.../I wish that all human creatures might feel it./That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler — as a handful of wildflowers."

The beautiful secret...  

As Romney failed to live up to his father's example, the crowd actually turned against him.  

Romney had to know the question was coming, but could not have expected that King would so artfully juxtapose Mitt's furtive secrecy against his father George Romney's open disclosure. As Andrew Sullivan said -- brilliant. 

Willard got terrible reviews for his evasive answer from across the political spectrum, and now the Washington Post picks up the gauntlet and in an editorial repeats the reporter's question. 

THURSDAY NIGHT’S Republican presidential debate produced more equivocation from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney about when he would release his tax returns and how many he would release. He was asked by moderator John King if he would follow the standard set by his own father, George, the former Michigan governor who was the first presidential candidate to release his tax returns. He put out 12 years’ worth in November 1967, as he prepared to run for the White House in 1968 — a point also being made in a Democratic National Committee video. All Mr. Romney could muster was an awkward “Maybe.” Wait until April, he said.

More disclosure, sooner, would be better, as is already obvious even to such supporters of Mr. Romney as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

Give King credit for asking a great question (and doing Newt and us all a great favor). And wonder what is in those tax returns that the Mitt-bot is so reluctant to reveal. 

For a year now, courageous activists, Midwestern farmers, unions, and indigenous groups have rallied in an unprecedented display of public opposition to the destructive Keystone XL pipeline proposal. That grassroots movement pushed us to the brink of victory — and today, it seems, the GOP has pushed us over the line. Thanks to their belligerent insistence that the pipeline decision be made within 60 days, it appears likely the State Dept. is going to be forced to reject it.

We environmentalists would hereby extend our most heartfelt thanks to the GOP. Their tantrums are doing our work for us!

Republicans reportedly believe that forcing Obama to reject the pipeline will give them an election-year issue to demagogue. All we can say to that is: Bring it on. If they campaign as poorly as they legislate, Obama has nothing to worry about.

And he's just getting started:

Greens thought they had won a massive, historic victory by delaying the pipeline decision. Now it looks like the thing will be blocked once and for all. Unless I’m missing something, that is an epic win in the green column.

But there's a catch: Dave Roberts posted this almost a month ago, on Dec. 20. Long before the decision came down. 

Can greens stand it to win one, for crying out loud? 

The 200-page document included this gem of a flip-flop on climate change, as reported in the Boston Globe:

“At a clean-energyconference in Boston on Nov. 7, Romney sounded exuberant about the Northeast state [climate change] agreement, saying in his speech that it was ‘a great thing for the Commonwealth.’ ‘We can effectively create incentives to help stimulate asector of the economy and at the same time not kill jobs,’ he said.

Later that day, however, Romney outlined to reporters several fears he had about the proposed agreement.”

By Louie Schwartzberg, via the Smithsonian. 

Note the tense he employs -- the past.

Here's the drought forecast, in a graphic from NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration]:

More drought to come, looks like...and it's already killed an estimated half-billion trees in Texas.

Yes, that's 500 million trees, as reported last week in the Houston Chronicle. 

Here's a startling image from Jeff Masters' astounding Wunderblog, showing exactly how dry it's been in the country and virtually the entirety of California this past week.. 

The forecast concludes:

The latest GFS model forecast predicts that this unusually dry pattern will persist for at least the next ten days, with the possibility of it breaking down during the last week of January.

At least Texas got some rain,  thanks to "a highly abnormal jet stream pattern that is keeping the northern polar branch of the jet stream far to the north in Canada."

Hmmmm... 

My meager understanding of tuberculosis cannot be expected to grade the seriousness of the news that several new strains of the disease have been found in populations in India and Iran.

This sounds alarming, but after all, medical researchers have tricks up there sleeve as well. This may represent less a threat to you and me than simply the fact that this disease, once slated for eradication, seems to have slipped our medical net.

Yet even the experts at Chest magazine used precisely that word -- alarming -- to describe this development. . 

What am I talking about?

Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB)

From The Times of India:

MUMBAI: Tuberculosis, which kills around 1,000 people a day in India, has acquired a deadlier edge. A new entity-ominously called Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB )-has been isolated in the fluid samples of 12 TB patients in the past three months alone at Hinduja Hospital at Mahim . The hospital's laboratory has been certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) to test TB patients for drug resistance.

While Iran first reported TDRTB cases three years ago, India seems to be only the second country to report this deadly form of the disease. TDR-TB is the result of the latest mutation of the bacilli after Multi-Drug-Resistant TB (MDR-TB ) and Extremely Drug-Resistant TB (XDR-TB ) were diagnozed earlier.

This frank twist in our language occured because milder new variants on this old disease had already taken their places in the lexicon, complete with acronyms; such as the strain resistant to multiple drug therapies, (MDR-TB) and the strain extremely resistant (XDR-TB).

This new strain, TDR-TB, even Cipro can't kill. 

According to a WHO study from Iran:

The isolation of TDR strains from MDR-TB patients from different regional countries is alarming and underlines the possible dissemination of such strains in Asian countries. 

30% of those known known to have contracted this new form of TB in the study conducted in Tehran are immigrants from Afghanistan. 

Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria

Will he be a target-rich opportunity, as exemplified by the likes of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, or will he just be bland, like Dick Cheney? 

The truth is, he seems to be coming into focus slowly. The great Mike Lukovich highlights the blurriness around his eyes -- who is this man? 

Most of the attempts available from not well known artists do not impress, but there are surprises, such as this one from Adam Zyglis. 

Toles, as usual, tends to dominate, but today's sketch is particuarly rich. 

But to my eyes, the most evolved -- and dangerous -- characterization comes from Ted Rall. 

The Mitt-Bot.