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

On Friday, the scandals undermining this administration* and this presidency* like one of those thousand-acre mushrooms in Michigan finally produced a hero whose name we now know. Up until this point, the heroes have been anonymous: "sources close" to whatever the atrocity of the day was, whistleblowers, leakers, and other figures in the shadows. Now, though, there is Marie Yovanovitch, and she was once the United States ambassador to Ukraine, until she wasn't, and she didn't come to Washington on Friday to fck around. From CNN:



Yovanovitch told lawmakers at a closed-door deposition that she was informed by Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan there had been "a concerted campaign against me" and that Trump had lost confidence in her, adding that the State Department had "been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018."

Yovanovitch said she believed she had been removed because of "unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives," a reference to the effort led by Trump's personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his associates to remove her as ambassador.

Yovanovitch appeared Friday after the White House and State Department had directed her not to attend, according to a statement from the three Democratic committee chairmen leading the impeachment inquiry. In response, the chairmen issued a subpoena to compel her testimony.



She was a hero even before she hit the hearing room. She told them to stuff their directives, she would answer a congressional subpoena like a citizen is supposed to do. And she didn't sneak in through the basement. She walked into the Capitol through the front doors, and she didn't do so to fck around.



Her deposition is a key part of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry into the President and Ukraine, which has been fueled by a whistleblower complaint alleging the President sought help from Ukraine to investigate his political rival and the White House tried to cover it up. Yovanovitch suggested some of those associates had financial motivations for pushing her out.

"With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him -- a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue," she said, according to her prepared statement. "I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine."

She was unexpectedly pulled from her position in the spring, and her ousting was cited in the whistleblower's complaint as having raised red flags about whether the President was abusing his office by soliciting foreign interference in the election to help find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The crooks and the grifters with their hands on the country's throat did not scare Marie Yovanovitch. She saw through the bluster and the fog and the empty threat gestures that are nothing more than another count on the eventual indictments and articles of impeachment. She shone a light through it all, and she showed the way as well. If anyone has the guts to follow, we're going to have to see.

Getty

Hotty totty, Shep Smith. This day had to come. From The New York Times:



“Recently, I asked the company to allow me to leave Fox News,” Mr. Smith told viewers at the close of his regular broadcast. “After requesting that I stay, they obliged.” A fixture of Fox News, Mr. Smith joined the network as a correspondent at its start in 1996 and became one of its most visible journalists. He is leaving in the middle of his current contract, a rarity in the cutthroat television business, and he told viewers on Friday that under his exit agreement, “I won’t be reporting elsewhere at least in the near future.”



Perhaps the last person at Fox News with a shred of integrity, and he has far more than that, Shep Smith simply seems to have become fed up with the whorehouse in which he was the only competent and honest piano player. Those of us of a conspiratorial bent might note that Smith's departure coincides roughly with Attorney General Bill Barr's having had a chat with Rupert Murdoch. What is certain is that Chris Wallace is the only one left in that shop with enough of a conscience to cover honestly the gotterdammerung that seems to be descending on Camp Runamuck. The whorehouse is going to be using recorded music now, and we've all heard too much of it before.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Wolfbane" (Wallace Roney): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Let's take visit to a collective farm in Crimea in 1939. Look at all the happy farmers. Listen to the British narrator. How happy he is. After all, the genocidal starvation had hit its peak five years earlier. History is so cool.

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

Researchers from Nakhon Ratchasima Rajabhat University (NRRU), Thailand, and Fukui Prefectural University (FPU), Japan, believe the dinosaur, which they have named Siamraptor suwati, was a top predator around 115 million years ago. It is thought to have been at least 8 meters long. Their study, which is part of the Japan-Thailand Dinosaur Project, was published in the open-access PLOS ONE journal. Soki Hattori, a paleontologist at FPU, was quoted by Reuters as saying: "Siamraptor is the largest predator in the environment and thus could be an apex predator at that point in time."

Commenting on the appearance of the dinosaur family, Hattori said: "The teeth of carcharodontosaurs, including Carcharodontosaurus, exhibit characteristic undulations of the surface along the margin of the thin, blade-like 'shark-tooth.' "This feature is also observed in Siamraptor's teeth," the paleontologist added, according to Reuters.

An eight-meter carnivore with shark teeth? That indeed sounds pretty apex-y to me. Sometimes it's hard to believe that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now. But they did.

The Committee had a feeling that the sad story of me and my penmanship would result in some solid contenders, but little did we know that Top Commenter Randy Jonas would come through with only eight words to sum it all up.



My kids call cursive old people's secret code.

And I never was able to break it. Anyway, write your own ticket with these 77.11 Beckhams.

I'll be back on Monday, or earlier, depending on what fresh hell erupts. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and spare a thought for good Shep Smith. He has tunneled out of Mordor and into the light of day.

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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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