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

WASHINGTON—Late Friday afternoon, there was a potentially ominous announcement from the Supreme Court of the United States. From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court once again will take up unresolved constitutional questions about partisan gerrymandering, agreeing Friday to consider rulings from two lower courts that found congressional maps in North Carolina and Maryland so extreme that they violated the rights of voters. The North Carolina map was drawn by Republicans, the Maryland districts by the state’s dominant Democrats...

The Supreme Court has never found a state’s redistricting map so infected with politics that it violates the Constitution. It passed up the chance last term to settle the issue of whether courts have a role in policing partisan gerrymandering, sending back on technical rulings challenges to a Republican-drawn plan in Wisconsin, and the challenged Maryland map.

So, what's so ominous, you may ask. Well, among other things, that old running buddy of PJ and Squi is on the court now.

But there will be a new set of justices considering the issue. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who had held out the belief that some gerrymandering could be so political as to be unconstitutional, has been replaced with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who may have a more conservative view on the issue.

Kavanaugh has no judicial record on the subject, so who knows what he may do, but I feel fairly certain that he will not be even as open as Kennedy was.

MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

Back during the previous term, the Court ducked the issue, but several justices made it plain that the Wisconsin map in particular was so egregious that the Court might have to step in. Now, though, we have one Republican and one Democratic map, and, if you believe that, through the Kavanaugh nomination, the Court is utterly politicized, you can't feel comfortable dismissing the possibility that, somehow, the Republican North Carolina map would be found to be constitutional while the Democratic map from Maryland would not.

Remember that the court that threw out the North Carolina map did so because it found that the state legislators had targeted African American voters "with almost surgical precision." Remember, also, that Chief Justice Roberts already has declared the Day of Jubilee. Remember those things in March, when the Supreme Court looks into this again.

The other day, the president* took to the electric Twitter machine to boast that he had won "the greatest election ever." Now, a narrow electoral college win in an election where three million other citizens voted the other way may not qualify as the Greatest Ever by your standards, but we all have our crochets. But it does open the question of what actually was the greatest election ever.

Limiting it to this country, and to presidential elections, I think you have to go with Abraham Lincoln's having been re-elected in 1864, in the middle of the Civil War. As late as midsummer of that year, even Lincoln thought his cause was doomed. One of his own Cabinet officials, Salmon B. Chase, was intriguing to hijack the Republican nomination. But successes on the battlefield, and the support of the soldiers in the Union Army who went home to vote, pushed him to another term, and made possible the greatest speech ever given by an American president. He also won both the electoral and popular vote.



Secretary Wilkie TASOS KATOPODIS Getty Images

Speaking of the Civil War, how does this administration find so many re-enactors? From CNN:

CNN's KFile reported in December that [Robert] Wilkie, who was confirmed by the Senate as VA secretary in July 2018, gave a speech to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2009 and, in 1995, praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a speech at the US Capitol. Wilkie was also at one point a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, The Washington Post previously reported...

Wilkie attended events honoring the legacy of Robert E. Lee and service of Confederate veterans as recently as 2009. In a section on public statements, Wilkie was asked for "any speeches or talks delivered by you, including commencement speeches, remarks, lectures, panel discussions, conferences, political speeches, and question-and answer sessions. Include the dates and places where such speeches or talks were given."

Wilkie provided general answers, writing, "Multiple remarks, panel discussions and speeches as a congressional staffer and as Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel & Readiness." He did not give details of any of his specific speeches. Wilkie delivered two speeches on Robert E. Lee in 2009, one to a branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the DC area and one at Arlington National Cemetery.



His speech on Davis took place in the US Capitol in 1995.

Oh, OK. Now I know. We gave these clowns too much leash for much too long.



Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Balls of Butter" (Little Freddie King and Joe Cabral and the Goldsworthys). Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's the opening of the Congress in 1930, featuring Speaker John Nance (Bucket of Warm Piss). Who the other congresscritter speaking on film is has been lost to history. The minority leader was a Republican named Bertrand Snell, but it doesn't look like him, and neither does it look like the previous Speaker, Nicholas Longworth. Our lines are open.







Boston Globe Getty Images

Senator Professor Warren is making her first grand tour of Pizza Ranches out in Ioway this weekend, and a great number of people from the Capitol press corps are following along. You will be surprised to know that, here in January of 2019, this trip is already being billed as something of a comeback attempt. There will be nonsense. Oh, yes, there will be that.

Anyway, first stop...Council Bluffs!



Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Treehugger.com? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

A team of researchers recently examined two pterosaurs found in China. Pterosaurs were flying creatures that shared a common ancestor with dinosaurs. Some were as tall as giraffes. Scientists had always assumed pterosaurs had no feathers. But to their shock, they found evidence for ... you guessed it ... feathers. This was the first time anyone had ever found feathers on something other than a bird or dinosaur. So if pterosaurs had feathers, and dinosaurs had feathers, that means their common ancestor likely also had feathers. Which means there was a feathered creature walking around before dinosaurs even existed. That means feathers may be 70 million years older than we thought, older even than dinosaurs.

Not everyone's convinced, and scientists plan on finding more specimens to decide for sure what to think about dinosaurs and feathers. But if these interpretations are correct, it means dinosaurs and birds shared an ancient feathery ancestor. “The feather has deeper origins, not of a bird but maybe from the ancestors of birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs,” explained Baoyu Jiang, a researcher at Nanjing University in China.

Pterosaurs were a thing with feathers/That perches in antiquity/and lived then to make us happy now.

Top Commenter Allen Murray was watching the president* have his episode in the Rose Garden on Friday.

When you are famous you can grab them by the irony. God save us.

Yeah, that's a winner. Have 81.11 Beckhams, good sir.



I'll be back on Monday with more about how loudly the warning sirens are blaring. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and remember, we are in the Day of Jubilee, god help us.

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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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