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

This is the first of what will be periodic reminders that the guy who was the manager of the successful 2016 campaign for President of the United States is now in fcking jail for tampering with witnesses in the investigation of his having committed “crimes against the United States.” To which the President* of the United States replied, via the electric Twitter machine:

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Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2018

And this is what the lawyer for the president* of the United States said on the electric TV machine, via The New York Daily News:

“When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons.”

The guy is in jail. He couldn’t go six months without committing more crimes, at least in the eyes of the court. Keep this in mind.

Thank you.

Our old friends from TransCanada, the energy behemoth behind the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel, recently have discovered once again that physics and chemistry are not with the marketing program.

Pipelines leak. The companies that own them lie about the leaks. However, sometimes pipelines explode, too. From WTAE in Pittsburgh:



News outlets report the explosion was contained by 6 a.m. Thursday, less than two hours after the TransCanada Columbia Gas Transmission System pipeline blew up in a remote area of Moundsville. Roberts Ridge Volunteer Fire Department Robert Jones says the explosion "brought me straight out of bed and highlighted my whole window." TransCanada says in a statement the cause of the explosion is undetermined.

TransCanada talked big about this particular pipeline—calling it the “best-in-class.” The good people at DeSmog Blog took note of that at the time, and they were not dilatory about reminding us all.

The Leach XPress pipeline is just six months old, having been put into service on January 1, 2018.At the time, TransCanada emphasized that it was built quickly — but safely. “Leach XPress was done in less than a year,” Scott Castleman, manager of U.S. Gas Communications for TransCanada, said in a January statement. “We’re looking forward to generations of safe operations,” he added. “This is truly a best-in-class pipeline and we look forward to many years of safe, reliable, and efficient operation on behalf of our customers.” Leach XPress is the first in a series of major TransCanada pipeline construction projects — and part of a larger sprint to build out oil and gas pipelines nationwide, spurred by an urgent push to get shale gas and oil to market. “This is our first major pipeline in our growth portfolio,” Castleman said in January. “There’s currently about 8 and a half billion dollars in pipeline projects in the works for the U.S. and TransCanada.”

I’m very reassured by this.

And speaking of misery and profiteering, The Daily Beast has an anger-inducing report about people who have found a way to turn a buck on weeping children.

Those contractors—including one with a history of scandals—have advertised a flurry of jobs in recent weeks to support the infrastructure surrounding undocumented children whom the Trump administration has taken from their families.

And one of the companies under consideration to construct concentration camps has proven to be fairly awful at the job.

In 2008, MVM lost a lucrative contract with the Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq for, The Wall Street Journal reported, “failing to provide enough armed guards.” It also faced internal allegations that its guards in Iraq, which worked for both the CIA and the National Security Agency, “were procuring and possessing unauthorized weapons and explosives,” according to a since-dismissed lawsuit from an Army Special Forces veteran employee who unsuccessfully claimed wrongful termination after blowing the whistle.

This government turns everyone it touches into a parasite.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Over In The Gloryland” (Leroy Jones): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s the Orient Express, arriving in Paris on its last trip on 1961. I think all the passengers survived the trip. History is so cool.

Daycare is a thankless job. From the WaPo:

After arriving in Singapore on Sunday, an antsy and bored Trump urged his aides to demand that the meeting with Kim be pushed up by a day — to Monday — and had to be talked out of altering the long-planned and carefully negotiated summit date on the fly, according to two people familiar with preparations for the event. “We’re here now,” the president said, according to the people. “Why can’t we just do it?”

Trump’s impatience, coupled with a tense staff-level meeting between the two sides on Sunday, left some aides fearful that the entire summit might be in peril. Ultimately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders persuaded Trump to stick with the original plan, arguing that the president and his team could use the time to prepare, people familiar with the talks said. They also warned him that he might sacrifice wall-to-wall television coverage of his summit if he abruptly moved the long-planned date to Monday in Singapore, which would be Sunday night in the United States.

Congratulations to the president*’s keepers on their deft use of the TV card.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Reuters? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!



A team of paleontologists from the Desert Museum in Coahuila found the dinosaur—which has been named Acantholipan gonzalezi—in the arid Ocampo region, Reuters reported. The team has been analyzing the fossil for more than eight years and have now revealed that it represents a new genus, or group of species, of nodosauridae—a family of heavily armed dinosaurs, which roamed the Earth between the Late Jurassic period (roughly 163 to 145 million years ago) to the Late Cretaceous (around 100 to 66 million years ago).

“There was no land in Coahuila. That is why we had not found any dinosaurs, from this period or before then,” Hector Rivera, a paleontologist from the museum, told reporters at a press conference. “It’s a marine animal. The obvious question is, how a terrestrial dinosaur was found on land that used to be a seabed.”

Maybe it sank? It sank then to make us happy now.

The Committee was watching futbol. All you Top Commenters are Top Commenters Of The Week.

I’m in Des Moines this weekend, where both parties are holding state conventions. I’ll be back on Monday with whatever happens. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or Paul Manafort will call you from jail.

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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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