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



I've been thinking a lot about mobs recently. The word's been getting tossed around a lot these days, mostly by Republicans, who were inconvenienced over one weekend in their attempt to put a credible accused sex offender, and the Edward Scissorhands of the topiary of the truth, on the Supreme Court. The word is being tossed around even by the president*, who's been entertaining mobs ever since he rode down the golden escalator in 2015, and by his mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, who once ginned up a police mob to intimidate the sitting mayor of New York City.

An endless stream of Republican coat holders, hangers-on, cabana boys, and congressmen, but I repeat myself, have shown up on TV and in back of podiums talking about the angry mobs of women that made it hard for them to get to the cafeteria. And I was thinking how similar it was to this earlier exercise of mob rule.

Once, there was a legislative body that was equally divided on an important political question. One side had a slim and shaky majority. The other side decided that the best strategy was to have a couple of their members not show up in the chamber, thereby denying the majority a quorum. This was a venerable parliamentary tactic, and you may recall a few years ago with Democratic legislators in Wisconsin tried the same thing, hiding out in Illinois.

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Anyway, here is an account of what happened next.

Two members who had been lingering... suddenly appeared in the room where the legislature met. They had been forcibly seized and dragged to the state house by the sergeant-at-arms and three men…[One] protested that he had been 'forcibly brought into the assembly room, contrary to his wishes,' and 'begged that he might be dismissed from the House…When [he] tried to flee, spectators in the gallery 'cried out stop him' and a crowd at the door forced him to return to his place…

And that, dear friends, was how the Pennsylvania convention to discuss the ratification of the United States Constitution was able to open on schedule on November 20, 1787.

Was the crowd that grabbed these two poor bastards a "mob"? I guess so. Certainly, the crowd that blocked the door was. But was there endless forelock tugging about how the quorum finally was achieved? Did the newspapers of the day—blatantly partisan, most of them—maunder forever about civility in the politics of the time? Hell, no. They had more important questions to settle. The opponents of the Constitution—who included James McCalmont and Jacob Miley, the two delegates who were grabbed up—mustered a strong defense of their position, but they were outvoted, 46-23. And that was the way things were.

And, as the late Pauline Maier points out in her brilliant study of the time, Ratification, Pennsylvania's vote in favor of the new Constitution was vital to its eventual adoption. But the notion that large and emotional political crowds are necessarily to be distrusted because they are large and emotional has a very short history in this country and, unfortunately, a lot of influential people seem to be attached to it—so much so that, one day, they wake up blinking in the sunshine and wonder how all that damn tea got in the harbor.

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White House chief of staff John Kelly has had quite a week, revelations-wise. We learned that he regularly ignores the president*'s attempts to fire him, that he feels he has been unforgivably insulted by the Chinese, and that his mistreatment was something up with which he would not put. From The Daily Beast:

After getting into a physical altercation last fall with a Chinese official over the White House’s “nuclear football,” Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly said that he will only accept an apology if a senior Beijing official travels to Washington and expresses contrition while standing under a U.S. flag, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Wow. Who the hell is he when he's at home.

In addition, we learned that Kelly doesn't like Senator Professor Warren much. From The Hill:

“Absolutely most insulting conversation I have ever had with anyone,” wrote Kelly in the email obtained by BuzzFeed News. "What an impolite arrogant woman. She immediately began insulting our people accusing them of not following the court order, insulting and abusive behavior towards those covered by the pause, blah blah blah," he added, apparently mocking Warren's concerns.

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Within hours, SPW came out raising money off Kelly's tantrum, and explaining her side of it.

When I finally did get on the phone with John Kelly, I asked if he had an office number that I could use in the future to get in touch more quickly. He brushed me off, directing me to the main line listed on the Department of Homeland Security’s website (really). Even worse, he bizarrely insisted that I’d made the whole thing up and we’d never tried to reach him in the first place. I happened to be looking at all the emails between his staff and my staff when he said this, so I started reading them to him. He accused me again of making it all up. My policy staffers were in the room. And to this day, I’ve never seen so many jaws drop in unison. It was one of the first times we saw “alternative facts” so up close and personal. And one of the first times we saw how truly dysfunctional the executive branch had become - and how quickly.

So what happened next? You guessed it – I persisted. I asked again for his number. He hemmed and hawwed, and he again tried to give me the Department’s main line. Let’s just say that’s when the conversation really started getting awkward – and that I persisted longer than he did. Eventually, he didn’t just give me his office number – he gave me his cell number. Before we got off the phone, I gave him something back for his troubles – a message on behalf of the American people that it was time to follow the court order and allow people stranded abroad to board planes into Logan International Airport.

Just my opinion, but I think he'd have better luck with the Chinese.

Hey, New York Times. It's been a while since we checked in with our old friend, the F-35 strike fighter, a.k.a. The Flying Swiss Army Knife, a.k.a. The Great Money Pit In The Sky. How're things going anyway?

Oh.

The decision to halt F-35 flights stems from what the military suspects is a faulty fuel tube installed in some of the aircraft, according to a Pentagon statement. Some of the jets are already aboard a Navy ship and have carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan. Israel, Britain and other allies who have bought the F-35 from American manufacturers must also ground and inspect the fuel tubes in the jets, the statement said. There are roughly 220 F-35s in the American inventory, purchased from defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

In the investigation of the F-35 crash near Beaufort, S. C., military officials gathered “initial data” that pointed to problems with the fuel tubes — and ultimately could have contributed to the Sept. 28 accident.

One military official familiar with the investigation said the fuel tube has been a recurring concern with the F-35 fleet. The official said investigators were also focused on a potential fault with a spinning blade in the aircraft that is supposed to stop debris from flying into the engine.

One hundred million apiece. Your tax dollars in flames.

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Well, this is an outrage. From the L.A. Times:

The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has placed veteran teacher Nikki Fiske on “home assignment” while it decides what to do, if anything, about disclosures she made about a young Stephen Miller.

Miller, 33, has grown up to be a senior advisor to Trump. But his prospects did not appear so promising to Fiske when Miller was a student in her classroom at Franklin Elementary School. “Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8,” Fiske recounted in an article posted Wednesday by the Hollywood Reporter. “I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there.” And there was a problem with glue. “He would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it,” she said. “He was a strange dude.”

Ms. Fiske is in her 70s. If she remembers you as a glue-eating weird dude, you must have been some kind of glue-eating weird dude.

The school district’s concern is “about her release of student information, including allegations that the release may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies,” said district spokeswoman Gail Pinsker. “This has been picked up by other digital publications and blogs, and some issues have been raised,” Pinsker said.

Yeah, OK, I get that. And I agree completely with the policy, and Ms. Fiske probably shouldn't have said what she said. But Miller is the deep id of the president*'s deepest id. I'll feel bad about the public revelation that he ate glue when he was 8 when all the kids currently living in cages, or being shipped out to American families, are reunited with their parents. Until then, the Elmer's is on me.

Not literally.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "The Alchemist" (Bon Bon Vivant): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1938, is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in London and not arranging murders. Apparently, he saved his pops from an assassin. Those were the days. History is so cool.

Science now tells us that moons have moons. And what are they called?

Moonmoons.

From New Scientist:

Juna Kollmeier at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and Sean Raymond at the University of Bordeaux, France calculated whether a moon orbiting a planet could have a moon of its own. A moon of a moon has no formal name, perhaps because we have never spotted one, but both submoon and moonmoon have been suggested.

Also, evidently in the running are "moonettes," "moonitos," and "moooons." I prefer any word that doesn't make me sound like a cow, and "moonitos" sounds like something you order at the bar while you're waiting for your table at a Brazilian steakhouse. A moonette sounds like it should come with free WiFi and a complimentary breakfast in the dining car. I'm all in on moonmoons. One word. I await the discover of moonmoonmoons.

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

Now, researchers have freed this potentially record-setting dinosaur from its stony slumber. After uncovering the remains, the scientists published a study Thursday in Scientific Reports, in which they argue that the skull is the smallest yet found from a group of long-necked dinosaurs called diplodocids. The little fellow even has a nickname: Andrew, after the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded paleontology research and has a diplodocid species named after him.

With its skull just 10 inches across, researchers’ best guess is that Andrew was a juvenile Diplodocus—an especially rare find. While more than a hundred Diplodocus specimens have been discovered, their skulls are much rarer. Fewer than a dozen have been dug up to date. If the researchers' reconstruction is correct, Andrew’s skull could be the smallest and least mature Diplodocus skull ever found, potentially providing insights into the dinosaur's development.

It's really hard to keep kids out of trouble. Once in with the wrong crowd and, soon or later, a huge mudslide comes along and you never see them again. But, one day, a few million years down the line, someone adopts your kid and names him "Andrew," for god's sake. But you go on in your grief, munching plants, waiting for the meteor, and living then to make us happy now.

As soon as Kanye West showed up in the Oval Office, The Committee knew it was going to be an easy week, and it was, thanks to Top Commenter Kilgore Trautmann, who greeted this unique event with a quatrain worthy of what it was celebrating.

Yada yada, bing bing bing! Burp! Later they renamed Trump's desk 'ol dissolute! Partaaay!!

Hell to the yeah, as the kids say, and 77.67 Beckhams to you, good sir.

I'll be back on Monday with some more barely coherent thoughts on our utterly incoherent politics. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line and keep your fuel tubes clear, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

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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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