(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

One of the most odious arguments floating around the healthcare debate is the notion that people somehow are more "free" if their choices are so circumscribed by economic circumstances that they either can't afford insurance or decide to buy a policy in which the description of Homo sapiens is listed as a pre-existing condition down there in the fine print. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and not the most substantial waffle in the breakfast buffet, has been particularly energetic in slinging this hooey at the American people. From Vanity Fair:

On Thursday, Cornyn tweeted a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled "How Many Jobs Does Obamacare Kill?" What happened next is instructive. Mic editor Emily Singer highlighted the senator's tweet and added, "Apparently to Cornyn, he views 22 million people losing health care as a fair trade for maybe 250K jobs." Cornyn's response: "Not lose, choose. Apparently you believe freedom is optional."

Cornyn's not alone, either.

Other Republican lawmakers have used Cornyn's "freedom" argument, too. "If you're not going to force people to buy something they don't want, then they won't buy it," House Speaker Paul Ryan told Fox News. "So it's not that people are getting pushed off a plan. It's that people will choose not to buy something they don't like or want." Wyoming Senator John Barrasso told reporters that uninsured individuals "were not actually losing insurance." He added, "because it's a free country, they would choose, because we eliminate the individual mandate, to not buy insurance."

I would point out that this is not a choice any of these birds ever will have to make. Lurking behind this argument, of course, is the notion that some people—most of them poor, many of them black or Hispanic—are not worth saving. Let them cure their cancer with freedom, dammit.

Here's The Denver Post with a precise new measurement of how deeply we are screwed.

They have no leaders, no formal hierarchy and no enforced ideology, save a common quest for answers to questions about the stars. Their membership has slowly swelled in the past three years, though persecution and widespread public derision keep them mostly underground. Many use pseudonyms, or only give first names. "They just do not want to talk about it for fear of reprisals or ridicule from co-workers," says John Vnuk, the group's founder who lives in Fort Collins.

"Persecution"? Please to be stopping pulling my leg now.

At the Tuesday night meet-ups, dubbed "Flat Earth or Other Forbidden Topics," believers invite fellow adherents to open discussions in which the like-minded confirm one another's hunches and laugh at the folly of those still stuck in the Enlightenment. "There's so much evidence once you set aside your preprogrammed learning and begin to look at things objectively with a critical eye," says Bob Knodel, a Denver resident and featured guest at a recent Tuesday meeting. "You learn soon that what we're taught is mainly propaganda."

Everybody has to have a hobby, I guess. But, buried in this story, but not too deeply, is some of the serious dry rot that is attacking the essential national character. First, there is the distrust of the empirical in favor of what You Just Know. Then, there's the idea that any idea, no matter how loopy, must be treated with respect, lest you be accused of "persecuting" its adherents. Fact is what enough people believe and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

, truly.

My pal Mike Stanton in Providence, the great chronicler of the late Buddy Cianci, passed along this fairly amazing bit of permanent revenge. A woman from Yarmouthport on Cape Cod named Mary Dolenciec spent a lot of time feuding with her neighbors, according to The Cape Cod Times. They hated her cats, and the way she used to feed all the pigeons. She got hers back by shining lights in their windows at night. Mary died in 1985 but she wasn't through with the neighbors. She left some fire behind for them. Here's the tombstone.

"May eternal damnation be upon those in Whaling Port who, without knowing me, have maliciously vilified me. May the curse of God be upon them and theirs."

Moral: Watch out for the neighborhood cat person. They never really die.

There was bit of a tremor in The Force out in the First Congressional District in Wisconsin, where, last week, we stopped by for a while with Randy Bryce, the IronStache, a steelworker who wants a piece of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver, next time around. One of the other Democratic candidates was a guy named David Yankovich, a wealthy Ohioan who moved to the district specifically to run against Ryan. On Friday, Yankovich dropped out and endorsed Bryce. The only other remaining announced Democratic candidate is Cathy Meyers, a member of the school board in Ryan's hometown of Janesville. Yankovich began as the attention-grabbing outsider in the race, but Bryce subsequently usurped that distinction in spades.

Meanwhile, here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), Attorney General Maura Healey has been cracking down on the production and sale of copycat assault weapons. This has gotten her sued by the Gun Owners Action League, the firearm-fondling organization for people who are tired of the calm and reasoned approach favored by the Wayne LaPierre and the NRA. (GOAL was the brainchild of one Larry Pratt, and he was a real prize.) As it happens, Healey, who already has north of half a million in her campaign fund, may well run against our Republican governor, Charlie Baker, the next time around. Baker is somewhat hamstrung as a Republican because he can best be described as Not Insane.

Nonetheless, if he's going to face down the kind of challenge Healey can bring, he needs to shore up his right flank. So, on Thursday, he named a new state director of the state Department of Fish and Game. From The Boston Herald:

Baker picked Ronald Amidon, the president of the Gun Owners' Action League of Massachusetts, to be commissioner of the wildlife agency on Wednesday, even as the organization is actively suing Healey in U.S. District Court over a copycat assault weapons ban. The group filed the lawsuit after Healey began cracking down on guns that resemble assault rifles last summer as part of the state's assault weapon ban. They've also organized protests against Healey outside the State House.

Having a sportsman run Fish and Game is hardly unusual. But this also is the first shot fired in anger in the next Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. A Baker appointee is suing his chief prospective rival over guns. We still know how to have noisy elections here.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Hot Sausage Rag" (New Orleans Joymakers): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev, chatting it up at Andrews Air Force Base. I love how the Brit narrator gets snotty about both how Khrushchev dresses—Nice hat, Mr. K!—and how strange the usually rambunctious American colonials are about his visit. (The frozen mitt on a colossal scale!) History is so cool.

This week's game of the week comes to us from Semple Stadium in Thurles, where Cork and Clare will tee it up in this year's Munster hurling final on Sunday. Cork already has beaten the defending All-Ireland champions from Tipperary, while Clare hasn't won the provincial championship in almost 20 years. Somewhere, in your town, there is a pub that is short odds to carry this game.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Guardian? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Paleontologists say they discovered the bones during a routine visit to the site of the Wienerberger quarry in February. The first clues came when the team looked at rock that had been turned up by a bulldozer at the site and discovered a couple of tail vertebrae. Examining where the rock came from, the team struck gold. "We came across this big rock of the same colour and the same type, jutting out of the side of the slope and we saw a black-coloured bone sticking out, said Jamie Jordan, a self-taught palaeontologist and founder of Fossils Galore, a website and museum. "I looked to the left and I saw a big black bone sticking out of a bit of rock that had been chipped off by the bulldozers," he added.

Amateur paleontologists are my favorite kind. Kick over a rock and find a tooth. Also, I love the whole notion of Fossils Galore, which I believe was named after the love interest in a Cretaceous spy novel.

The dinosaur, dubbed Indie, is believed to be an Iguanodon: a plant-eating creature that reached about 10 metres in length and just under three metres in height. Jordan said the blocks in which the bones are resting have been removed from the site and are being investigated and cleaned in a specially designed preparation laboratory at the museum, where the public can see the process at work. "We haven't found the skull just yet, but how the animal is lying, it is in one of the blocks from the dig site," said Jordan. "We should come across it – we don't think there is much missing at all."

Dinosaurs are perpetual surprises because dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee found itself appalled by Top Commenter David Rosenbaum's disrespect for the office of the president. So much so that The Committee could do nothing else save name him Top Commenter Of The Week.

Putin sotto voce to Lavrov as Trump enters the room: "Watch. He'll let me grab him by the pussy."

Bad Top Commenter! Bad, bad Top Commenter. A palindromic 81.18 Beckhams to you, sir.

I'll be back Monday, if there is a Monday, with the weekend's post-summit gobshitery. I swear you're going to need a deep-core drilling rig to find the bar over which the president* will be said to have cleared this week. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. There are fossils galore up there.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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