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

The Great State O'Maine has one great senator, and it's not Susan Collins. It's independent Angus King, who was fed up with the nomination process afforded Brett Kavanaugh weeks before everyone else was. He thought the nomination ill-conceived and the process ludicrously hasty, and that was before boofing had become part of our national political conversation. After his colleague, Susan Collins, gave up the store on Friday, King—aka The Mustache Of Righteousness—took to the floor of the Senate and delivered his own verdict.

Let's just say that the Maine delegation in the United States Senate is not unified on the subject of Brett Kavanaugh.

The FBI report that I reviewed today does not confirm or contradict Judge Kavanaugh’s statements, nor does it undermine the credible testimony of Dr. Ford. For me, my decision is based on Judge Kavanaugh’s record, which indicates an overly rigid judicial philosophy that would threaten protections for healthcare, personal liberty and a women’s right to choose, the environment, and campaign finance laws; it is based on his refusal to recuse himself from any cases that may come before the court involving presidential power as it applies to the President who nominated him for the seat; it is based on his partisan behavior during last week’s hearing, which does not match the temperament and impartiality needed to serve on our nation’s highest court; and it is based on the voices of Maine women who in recent weeks have shared with me their deep concern about this nomination. Based upon what I’ve seen, read, and witnessed, I remain a no vote on his confirmation.

Collins's speech is going to go down as a landmark in the annals of congressional smarm. It was too long. It was badly delivered. It made little or no coherent sense. Beyond the aesthetic, it was a suicide note delivered on behalf of her entire political identity.



This was perhaps my favorite passage—and by "favorite," I mean, "completely detached from any possible empirical reality on any plane of existence in this particular universe."

My fervent hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions.

My fervent hope is that I will awaken tomorrow with six pounds of gold in each of my shoes, but I'm not counting on leprechauns.

Pool Getty Images

The only people who acquitted themselves well in this prairie dog town were Heidi Heitkamp and Lisa Murkowski, who looked at the same evidence King did and came to the same conclusion—that even if you ignore the what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward to tell the Senate, this is a guy who by temperament alone doesn't deserve the promotion he now apparently will get, and that even if you ignore the privilege-fueled tantrum he directed at the Senate Judiciary Committee, this is a guy whose judicial philosophy was not nurtured in academia or in the actual practice of the law, but in the rage-furnaces of modern conservative Mordor, and that these, taken in tandem, make him somebody who shouldn't be allowed within five blocks of the Supreme Court.

Moreover, and this is just what we all need, no matter whether he's confirmed or not, the stories about him are going to keep piling up, which in turn will make the FBI's perfunctory seven-day "investigation" look ever more like at best inadequate, and at worst, a deliberate cover-up. For example, from The New York Times:

White House officials insisted that neither Mr. McGahn nor any other West Wing lawyer prohibited the F.B.I. from interviewing them. But some former law enforcement experts said it was an odd decision not to include the two people at the center of the controversy. Robert Cromwell, a former F.B.I. agent who oversaw sensitive background investigations of political appointees, doubted that agents decided not to interview Dr. Blasey and Mr. Kavanaugh on their own. “I don’t think that it was in the parameters of the request,” he said. “That’s what I would assume. It would be frustrating as an investigator. The nature of investigators is to get to the bottom line. You’d want to talk to both of them.”

Alex Wong Getty Images

Or, from NBC News:

Jen Klaus, the former roommate, told NBC News that committee staff members called her at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, put her on speakerphone and asked about Ramirez’s drinking habits, whether there was a Yale student known for dropping his pants and the party culture at Yale. She says they suggested the allegation was a case of mistaken identity. “It just gave me the impression they were suggesting perhaps it was (another classmate) who threw his penis in her face instead of Brett. Why would they be asking me this?” said Klaus, who now resides in Brookline, Massachusetts...Two former Yale classmates say they have made several attempts to share text messages raising questions about whether Kavanaugh tried to squash the New Yorker story that made Ramirez's accusations public — and say the FBI did not respond to their calls and written submissions to its web portal. The text messages involve one potential eyewitness to the incident and the wife of another potential eyewitness.

The texts are a conversation between Kathy Charlton and a mutual friend of Kavanaugh's who, NBC has confirmed, was identified to the FBI by Ramirez as an eyewitness to the incident. NBC News has received no response to multiple attempts to reach the alleged eyewitness for comment. The story detailing Ramirez’s accusation was published in The New Yorker on Sept. 23. Charlton told NBC News that, in a phone conversation three days earlier, the former classmate told her Kavanaugh had called him and advised him not to say anything "bad" if the press were to call. Then on September 21, according to the texts, that same person sent Charlton a text accusing her of disclosing their conversation to a reporter. “Hellllllooooo. Don’t F****** TELL PEOPLE BRETT GOT IN TOUCH WITH ME!!! I TOLD YOU AT THE TIME THAT WAS IN CONFIDENCE!!!”

That's one of the aspects of this story that has gone curiously unexplored—what, if anything, did the nominee have to do with the apparent campaign to squash the Ramirez allegation, and with the bizarre theory promulgated by Ed Whelan—and now, apparently, adopted at least sotto voce, by almost every Republican in the Senate—that someone else assaulted Dr. Ford? Given Kavanaugh's previous career as a conservative political activist, it is not idle speculation that he might have been part of that exercise in some way.

And then there is this piquant detail from the electric Twitter machine account of Jamie Roche, Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale who already has accused the nominee of lying to the Congress about his boozing.

Kavanaugh and games of chance was another topic around which the Senate Judiciary Committee did a delicate little dance. It was intimated that the sporting life had something to do with the massive debt load that Kavanaugh was carrying before, somehow, it was wiped out before his nomination. Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has been tracing this tangled strand, and Campos has done a good job at explaining that Kavanaugh's explanation for this sudden improvement in his financial fortunes doesn't make a lick of sense.

First, how does buying four season tickets per year for twelve years (2005-2016) result in at least $60,000 of current credit card debt as of 2016, especially since, per Kavanaugh’s account, he’s only supposed to be paying for a small part of the cost of these tickets, since they are being split via a ticket draft?

Second, Kavanaugh’s explanation for the sudden disappearance of his credit card debt in 2017 is that his friends paid him back. Paid him back for what? For their share of the cost of the tickets that Kavanaugh had been charging to his credit cards since 2005? Again, that’s just preposterous on its face. If you’re in this kind of ticket sharing arrangement, you’re going to be expected to cover your share of the costs up front, not up to twelve years later!

Third, who exactly are these “friends?” Do they perchance have names, current addresses, and functioning phone numbers? Are any of them lawyers? And/or people who belong to organizations that had legal business before the DC Court of Appeals between 2005 and 2016? And are they going to confirm — under oath naturally — Kavanaugh’s remarkable story about how he loaned them tens of thousands of dollars for years, before they all suddenly decided to pay him back at the same time?

Make no mistake: The Many Lives of Brett Kavanaugh is now an ongoing series, a beat, as we used to say in newspapers. Because of the rushed nature of his confirmation, and because so much of the material about his life was held in some form of secrecy or another, journalistic curiosity has gone unslaked for far too long. In addition, by not interviewing witnesses who were virtually begging to talk to its gumshoes, the FBI has guaranteed that these witnesses will tell their stories somewhere.

It's already started. And it's going to continue, even when he's sitting on the Court, which will do wonders for that institution's credibility, and while he's hearing appeals brought by all the groups he's already told us were conspiring against him. So, no, I don't think Susan Collins's fond wish for a conciliator is going to be answered. What a godawful chewy cluster of fck this thing has been.

The conviction of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of 17-year old Laquan McDonald was the only spot of unalloyed justice in a week where any kind of justice was terribly hard to find. Van Dyke is the first Chicago cop convicted of murder in half-a-century. His lawyers finagled a jury with one African-American on it. Yet the jury stepped up and did the right thing. One of the most chilling moments came when Van Dyke's convictions for aggravated assault were read out. He was convicted of aggravated assault on each one of the 16 shots he fired into McDonald one night almost four years ago. It was as sad a public litany as can be imagined—"Shot One: Guilty, Shot Two, Guilty..."—and it seemed like the pain was being carefully measured out and that each wound in the public heart was being cauterized in turn.

Of course, Van Dyke likely would have skated had there not been a dashcam video of him pumping bullets into McDonald, and we wouldn't have seen the video at all if the Chicago police department had had its way. Two former officers and a former detective are awaiting trial on charges that they conspired to cover up Van Dyke's crime in the old familiar way. From The Chicago Tribune:

Officer Thomas Gaffney, former Detective David March and ex-Officer Joseph Walsh are charged with conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice in connection with their involvement in the McDonald investigation. Prosecutors allege the three officers lied in reports about the threat posed by McDonald, 17, before he was shot to death Oct. 20, 2014.

Van Dyke after his conviction Antonio Perez Getty Images

In the case against the three officers, “The state’s evidence will show that the object of the conspiracy was to conceal the true facts of the events surrounding the killing of Laquan McDonald by Officer Individual A, (Officer Van Dyke),” the filing reads...An unidentified officer is expected to testify that March — the lead detective on the case — told her to report falsely that Van Dyke was injured by McDonald, according to the filing. One of March’s reports contained purported statements from that officer about McDonald raising his arm and facing Van Dyke, but that officer is “expected to testify that she did not make those statements and that those statements are false,” according to the filing.

In this, the Chicago police were aided immeasurably by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who fairly well cemented his reputation as one of the least excusable political figures of the past quarter-century. Emanuel tried to bury the events, and especially the damning dashcam video, because he wanted to run for re-election and Ferguson, Missouri had exploded, and he didn't want that to derail his campaign. It took a brave freelancer named Brandon Smith to pry the video loose with a lawsuit.

A lot of people did the right thing in this case. The only right thing Rahm Emanuel did was to drop out of public life, which was too little and a decade or so too late. Even a small moment of justice glows like a star these days.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Walk of Shame" (Truckstop Honeymoon): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans. (And, yes, I picked this partly because I absolutely adore the name of this group, and they've got quite the saga behind them, too.)

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, campaigning in New Hampshire ahead of the 1964 Republican primary there. I don't know why I needed a video of a principled woman senator from Maine today. Must be something in the air. History is so cool.

What the hell is wrong with Houston anyway? Why do they hate technological progress and the American entrepreneurial spirit? I thought Texas had such a business-friendly environment that it could absorb the occasional fertilizer plant explosion that takes out a whole town? From The Houston Chronicle:

Toronto-based KinkySdollS had planned to open a Houston branch where it would sell “adult love dolls” constructed of synthetic skin and highly articulated skeletons. The company intended to sell the human-like dolls, and rent them out so customers could use them in private rooms at the location.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the council expanded its definition of an “arcade device” — which is used to view adult content — to include an “anthropomorphic device,” or one with human characteristics...Mayor Sylvester Turner said the amendments are intended to update “loopholes to make the ordinance more current,” specifically in dealing with changing technology. “I think the change in the ordinance will certainly capture businesses of this kind and would prevent businesses from operating in the way that this one has been described,” Turner told reporters.

Actually, this is the creepiest damned thing I've ever heard of. I would support a resolution that would mandate that the knowledge that this exists be washed from my memory forever.

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

The 83-million-year-old fossil, found in 2014 at a paleontological site in Alabama, adds to growing evidence that these weird wonders on wings were sometimes snacks for dinosaurs, prehistoric crocodile relatives, and large fish. After all, pterosaurs were not just bags of bones and leathery skin, as people might assume. “Pterosaurs actually had a lot of meat on their skeletons,” says Michael Habib, a pterosaur expert at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the latest find. “They were not the skinny animals often depicted in films and art. The flight muscles in particular would have made a great meal.”

Alabama apparently has been serving up the good BBQ for millennia.

The chewed-up wing bone of this particular pterosaur, a Pteranodon, suggests that it had a 15-foot wingspan. But the animal may have weighed just 60 to 90 pounds, which would have made it easy prey for a large bony fish or a Squalicorax, an extinct shark that reached up to about 15 feet in length.

I love wings. I eat them slowly as I ruminate on how dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee loves itself some new knowledge. In fact, it yearns for it. So when Top Commenter Walter Lipman dropped The Plumber's Credo into one of the Kavanaugh threads, zing went the strings of The Committee's heart.

I prefer the Plumbers' Credo:

Hot's on the left.

Cold's on the right.

Water flows downhill.

Wash your hands before lunch.

Payday's on Thursday.

Volleyed and thundered! And 92.20 Beckhams to you, good sir.

I'll be in The Good Land all weekend and into next week for some Wisconsin midterm goodness. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and, for the love of god, don't come home a'drinkin' with Kavanaugh on your mind.

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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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