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

At this moment, let us bow our heads and once again pay homage to the deathless wisdom of Justice Anthony Kennedy: "I quid pro quo corruption." They do, however, have the ability to turn self-government into a shabby mummer's parade.

Consider the latest prime example of fudge from the campaign of Carly Fiorina. As you know, presidential campaigns are forbidden by what's left of our campaign finance law from "coordinating" their operations with the Super PACs that also are dedicated to the election of the same candidate. This is a rule that everybody knows but to which very few people pay attention. That's why most of them have names like American Heartland Jesus Highway or something.

Anyway, down at the Federal Election Commission, somebody came out of their klonopin coma long enough to notice that Fiorina's SuperPac was called "Carly For America." This person also noticed that Fiorina's campaign seemed to be doing no actual campaigning, but that the SuperPac was doing a lot of the nuts-and-bolts that a campaign usually does. Hey, said the person from the FEC, this doesn't look right, speaking softly so as not to awaken the other watchdogs.

No, he was told. Carly For America and the Fiorina campaign were separate things. (You got your SuperPac in my campaign! No, you got your campaign on my SuperPac!) The way that you know this is that, in the SuperPac's name, "Carly" stood for "Con­ser­vat­ive, Au­then­t­ic, Re­spons­ive Lead­er­ship For You."

This dif­fer­en­ti­ation between in-kind and in­de­pend­ent ex­pendit­ures can lead to some con­fus­ing op­tics. It was Fior­ina's birth­day on Sunday, and at a cam­paign stop in New Hamp­shire she was presen­ted with a birth­day cake. The cake was dec­or­ated not with her cam­paign's logo, but the su­per PAC's logo. At a Labor Day parade the next day, a video sent out by Fior­ina's of­fi­cial Twit­ter ac­count shows the can­did­ate walk­ing down the street, sur­roun­ded by sup­port­ers in CARLY T-shirts, wav­ing CARLY signs. There was no vis­ible cam­paign swag from Fior­ina's pres­id­en­tial cam­paign, so a cas­u­al ob­serv­er could reas­on­ably as­sume that the paraphernalia was com­ing from the cam­paign it­self. Sarah Is­gur Flores, Fior­ina's deputy cam­paign man­ager, ac­know­ledged that the cam­paign does not do as much mer­chand­ising at events as CARLY For Amer­ica does, but said the su­per PAC's ad­vance work does not con­sti­tute an in-kind con­tri­bu­tion be­cause it is not co­ordin­at­ing with the cam­paign.

And we're supposed to believe this nonsense. It's our new responsibility as citizens to accept the fact that our politics are mere dumbshow for an increasingly irrelevant audience. Gullibility is the new civic duty. The actual power of self-government has been leached away into fewer and fewer hands while we sit back at home and enjoy the show, committing democratic suicide by acronym.

Is there any doubt any more that Bill Belichick has set up housekeeping in a lovely five-room condo located inside the heads of everybody else in the National Football League? No sooner had Thursday night's game between Pittsburgh and Belichick's New England Patriots begun than something seemed to go haywire with the on-field communications network employed by the Steelers. Somehow, the New England radio play-by-play got channeled into the Pittsburgh headsets, drowning out the links between the coaching booth and the sidelines, and between the sidelines and Ben Roethlisberger out on the field. This was probably a function of the inclement weather that sat in over Foxboro – although, to be fair, who knows? – but there's no question that it screwed up Steeler coach Mike Tomlin so badly that he was still complaining after the game. Me? I think a malfunctioning headset would have been the best thing to happen to the Pittsburgh offense because Tomlin play-calling throughout the game owed a great deal to the scientific method as demonstrated by Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.

Pittsburgh already are talking about bringing an official complaint to the league office – which always works out well – where Roger Goodell still works, like mad Denethor on the throne of Gondor. Meanwhile, Roethlisberger has his own complaints about New England's trickeration in its goal-line defense. And this is only the first game. This might be the greatest season in NFL history.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Leavin' Kind" (Samantha Fish): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's how those goofy colonials make what they call their footballs. And have we explained to you about how we inflate them? Hello? Hello?

Now that "Bobby" Jindal, absentee landlor…er…governor of Louisiana has decided to muster up every one of the single digits of Republicans who would still vote for him in an attempt to save the Republic from Donald Trump, let's see what's going on with "Bobby"'s day job, shall we?

Oh, look. Louisiana doesn't seem to have a state budget. An actual functioning one, anyway.

Jindal put the state in such a deep hole that this past spring he had to resort to Orwellian doublespeak by forcing lawmakers to pass the so-called SAVE Act, which purportedly let him claim that he balanced the budget without a tax increase. Only in Jindal's mind and La-La Land is that the case. In truth, Jindal and lawmakers raised taxes and fees by $767 million. Louisiana voters aren't fooled — nor are those in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Jindal's delusional presidential campaign remains stuck below 2 percent. Meanwhile, we recently learned that $767 million in tax and fee hikes still won't get Louisiana through the first half of the current fiscal year. Already the Jindal administration has had to recommend $4.6 million in mid-year budget cuts, most of which fell on public higher education. More mid-year cuts are likely as the price of oil hovers near $40 a barrel. The Jindal budget pegged oil at $62 a barrel. It gets worse. Louisiana's popular TOPS college scholarship program is $19 million short, and the state's Medicaid program has a whopping $335 million budget gap — because Jindal's budget didn't account for increased spending across various programs. Team Jindal's official response to all this bad news is to hope that state revenue forecasts improve. They won't. In fact, in future years Louisiana's structural deficit will grow exponentially. It is forecast to exceed $700 million in Fiscal Year 2017 (which begins July 1, 2016), and by FY2019 it's expected to reach $1.9 billion.

Not that I believe in vigilantism or anything, but the poor suckers in the Louisiana legislature should deputize some Cajun bad-asses to go to Iowa and drag Jindal's sorry ass home so he can at least try to repair the damage he's done.

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

In the case of a skeleton recently uncovered in the Cretaceous rock of Australia's Lightning Ridge, the bones of a very sharp dinosaur has come down to us as a set of natural casts of opal.The dinosaur, described by paleontologist Phil Bell and colleagues, doesn't have a scientific name. There's too little of the skeleton to raise the banner of a new genus or species just yet. But there's enough of the fossil to tell that the dinosaur was one of the megaraptorids – large, predatory dinosaurs that bore extra-long claws on their hands. Megaraptors are still mystery dinosaurs. No one's quite sure what group of theropod dinosaur they group most closely to. But, as far as Australia goes, the "Lightning Claw" was found in rock about 12 million years older than the next megaraptor found in the country. It likely represents something new, making the fact that some of its skeleton might have been lost during opal-mining operations all the more frustrating.

I didn't know that the bones of a dinosaur could come down in natural casts of opal. That sounds gorgeous. And it is quite clear that Lightning Claw was a charter member of the Cretaceous period's Legion Of Super Heroes. I expect a graphic novel to that effect to come out before Christmas, and a summer blockbuster by the Fourth of July because, as we know, dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back Monday with some debate-prep gobshitery. (I'll be watching this one from the couch, by the way. Liveblogging will ensue). Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line or I'm telling Belichick, and you know how that will turn out.

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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