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

It was a great week for people to pretend to be astonished that there is a downside to electing a vulgar talking yam to the presidency simply because people liked how vulgarly he talked. On Friday, he managed to make the Rob Porter situation worse while everyone else was stunned at the fact that he doesn’t read his daily intelligence briefing. (That’s a lot of maladministration in one morning, let alone a single sentence.) But, this, from The Washington Post, smacked the ol’ gob into the cheap seats.

Dozens of White House employees are awaiting permanent security clearances and have been working for months with temporary approvals to handle sensitive information while the FBI continues to probe their backgrounds, according to U.S. officials. People familiar with the security-clearance process said one of those White House officials with an interim approval is Jared Kushner — the president’s son-in-law and one of his most influential advisers.

Oh.

Any other administration, I might buy this explanation. But this is not any administration*. It’s had a massive amount of turnover in little more than a year. There’s a special counsel closing in on a whole bushel of White House apparatchiks. And there is the comedy of dunces involving who knew what about Rob Porter, who was denied a security clearance by the FBI for reasons that probably became clear this week.

And, anyway, wasn’t the predominant issue in the last election the allegedly careless handling of classified material on a private email server down in the root cellars of Chappaqua? Now, we’ve got a White House that seems full to the window ledges with people who haven’t yet—or, perhaps, can’t—pass an FBI background check. Someone should check into this.

The electric Twitter machine occasionally—very occasionally—is like having a wire service in the palm of your hand. (It also can be like having a tropical skin fungus in the palm of your hand, but never mind.) On Thursday, it brought us the story of a guynamed Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts, who left his job with the Montana Department of Labor because he didn’t want to be part of the immigration enforcement machine that presently is running amuck all over the country. From The Helena Independent-Record:



Dyrdahl-Roberts is quitting his job over what it would have required him to do: respond to subpoenas from ICE about Montana employers and their workers… On Tuesday, one of the attorneys he works with said he should expect to work on some ICE subpoenas soon. It was the end of the day, Dyrdahl-Roberts said, so “the only words my brain picked up were ‘subpoenas coming.’” Wednesday morning when he went into work he clarified that the subpoenas were from ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. “I immediately said, ‘I don’t think I can help with that,’” Dyrdahl-Roberts said. “I began talking with management about what the deal was, but I pretty much understood at that point.” He quickly called his wife and told her about the situation. “I said I don’t think I can be the one to assist (the department) with the subpoenas,” he said. “She said, without hesitation, she said OK.”

See, Kim Davis? And all you pharmacists who don’t want to hand out ladyparts medicine? This is how you do it. You don’t presume that you have a right to keep your job while refusing to do your job. If your job runs up against your deeply held ethical beliefs, and you can’t get satisfaction from your superiors, you leave the job. You don’t bring in an army of television preachers so you can become a star and keep all your bennies besides.

As his 4-year-old child played in the background Thursday, Dyrdahl-Roberts said he understands the department’s legal obligation to comply with a court-ordered subpoena, but said he has a moral obligation not to. “The conversation was, ‘You understand this is part of your duties, and if you can’t execute your duties you have to quit or be fired.’ I put in my two week’s notice.”

The electric Twitter machine has helped him raise money to tide him over while he looks for another job. This is the way that’s supposed to work, too.

The Winter Olympics are always full of mystery and wonder. For example, I didn’t know that team figure skating was a thing. (We used to call that the Ice Capades back in my day.) There is the quadrennial love affair we develop with exotic gelid sports that appear for a couple of weeks and then disappear again like snow in an early thaw. Once again, I heartily approve of the honest way the curling play-by-play guys do business. They do not condescend to the casual fan. You either pick up the lingo or you don’t. They don’t care. They’re going to talk curling. Period. My own two favorites are short-track speed skating, especially those races where everybody falls down except for the guy in eighth place, who wins the gold medal, and snowboard racing, which is utterly insane. In both of these, the NASCAR factor is very high.



Getty Images

I’d also advise any judges in whose event a Norwegian is competing to give the Norwegian a fair call. The team from Norway ordered 1,500 eggs and got 15,000. They have to do something with the extra 13,500 potential projectiles. The Norwegians do not lack for guts; once again, they have outfitted their curling team with outstanding pants. It’s these venerable traditions that make the Olympics what they are.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Who Drank My Beer?” (Dave Bartholomew): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s a sport not yet included in the Winter Olympics: dressage on ice from 1960. They will get around to it, I’m sure. There also seem to be a lot of dogs in attendance, including a couple of very bored St. Bernard’s. History is so cool.

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

The discovery adds to a remarkable collection of Cretaceous-period fossils from the amber deposits in northern Myanmar’s Hukawng Valley. In the past few years, the region has also yielded several beautiful bird wings, the spectacular feathered tail of a small carnivorous dinosaur, and the outline of an entire hatchling bird. In December, researchers even revealed ticks in amber that may have feasted on dinosaurs. “This Myanmar fossil deposit is clearly game-changing. It’s arguably the more important breakthrough for understanding bird evolution right now,” says Julia Clarke, an expert on the evolution of birds and flight at the University of Texas at Austin. “We used to think we’d never have a whole bird in Cretaceous amber, but now we have multiple examples.”

Not only are dinosaurs beautiful, but they now come in beautiful natural packaging, too, because they lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee is composed of people who are suckers for Crayolas, at least since they all stopped eating them in kindergarten. Therefore, when Top Commenter Chris Caswell brought out the rainbow coalition in response to the Republican “REDMAP” redistricting project, he had this week’s award in the bag.

It's also abundantly clear that the maps were drawn specifically using the R's Peach and Carnation crayolas to minimize the need for any of the less opaque ones. They need to save those for coloring in their war fantasy and heroic Southern ancestor graphic novels.

That really burns my sienna that I didn’t think of it first, but here are 81.22 Beckhams for painting a fine word picture.

I’ll be back on Monday with some how-do-we-blame-Democrats-too? gobshitery from the top of my profession. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don’t lie to the FBI. It’s really dumb.

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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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