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

Things went so well for the Republicans in Thursday's Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! snipe hunt that departing Speaker John Boehner, who may just be pranking the bastards at this point, on Friday announced the members of the next Special Committee For Expanded Ratfcking. This one will look into the fictitious sale of baby parts by Planned Parenthood. Here are your dogged GOP inquisitors tasked with "investigating" "evidence" produced by phony videotapes:

Marsha Blackburn, Chairman (R-TN); Joe Pitts (R-PA); Diane Black (R-TN); Larry Bucshon (R-IN); Sean Duffy (R-WI); Andy Harris (R-MD); Vicki Hartzler (-MO); Mia Love (R-UT).

A real pack o'pips, this one. Blackburn is a thoroughgoing nut. Her Tennessee colleague, Diane Black, is no fan of the 14th Amendment, and hires people with interesting views about our African American president. Duffy's the former Real World contestant who complained that he can't make it on the nearly 200-large he gets for being a congresscritter, and who also put words in the Pope's mouth and is therefore going to hell. Bucshon has visited the shebeen before; here's another science-denying wingnut physician. He is joined on Grand Rounds in the nervous ward by Harris, another doctor who doesn't know fck-all about his day job. Mia Love is the perpetually rising Republican star from Utah, and Vicki Hartzler is just flat-out freaking amazing. She's standing tall against the Chinese, who are spying on her through her toasters. Put this bunch on TV, too, primetime. Yeah, this oughta work.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Redbone" (Cassandra Wilson): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's Frank Costello in front of the Senate Rackets Committee, not doing as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton did on Thursday. Never served in the military, but "Paid my tax!" Frank Costello died too soon to be a Tea Party congressman.

I know there was a lot of news this week, but doesn't this seem like something that should have gotten a little more run on the news than it did?

The strange pattern of light suggests a large mass of matter is circling KIC 8462852. So far, scientists have hypothesized that everything from a mass of comets to bad data or alien structures could be to blame for the unusual light curve. "There are a hundred ways in which you could block the light from the star and almost all of them involve natural phenomenon: clouds of dust, rocks, asteroids. History tells us that when you see something unusual it's natural tendency to think aliens (...) but chances are it's not," Shostak said.

It's the old Gohmert homestead. I'm sure of it.

I miss Vince Wilfork. I wish he (and his formidable wife, Bianca) were still around the Patriots. He is a remarkable story, and a remarkable athlete, and he never has failed to step up when he needed to be counted.

It's a tough situation to be in, especially for the immediate family. But at the same time, everything has consequences. We're working now hard to figure things out. We're going to continue to get justice and that's how it is right now. I think sometimes we have a platform we can use for a certain purpose. This week, this is my purpose. To have the platform I have to speak about it, that's what it's all about. I'm going to go down there and see them, visit his family. He is family to me, but he has immediate family down there. At this point, it means a lot for them, for everybody to come together and just be with one another and pray about the whole situation. That's where we're at right now, so hopefully we can get it situated and justice can be served. Well, when we can do this, I think that's the main thing. I think so far everything is nationwide, it's been across the world this story. The crazy thing is it's not the first time this has happened. We've seen a lot of this going on in society, but especially when it affects you personally, when it's your own family, that's for me to be in the spot that I'm in, it just gives me an opportunity to speak about it. I'm not bashful about speaking about it. I have tons of respect for law enforcement. I have friends that are police officers and cops, so I have nothing against them. But at the same time, we're dealing with somebody that was shot dead. We have to figure it out as a society. Not just this case, but the cases that have been going on for a while now. We have to try and figure out a solution. I think everybody needs to be held accountable, plain and simple."

Good on you, Vince.

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

A fossil of the strange animal was first discovered in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by scientists from the state's natural history museum. The bones, under study by Lively during master's work at the University of Utah, suggest a two-foot-long creature with a feature never before seen in a turtle: two bony nasal openings. Every other known turtle has just one nasal opening in its skull, the discrete nostrils created by a fleshy division. The turtle -- dubbed Arvinachelys goldeni -- lived during the Cretaceous, among tyrannosaurs, armored ankylosaurs, and other dinosaurs in a southern "Utah" that would more closely have resembled the wet, hot landscape of bayous and rivers of present-day Louisiana.

That's rather a classy Latinate for a pig-nosed turtle, not that there's anything wrong with being a pig-nosed turtle. I am storing "pig-nosed turtle" away for future use, however.

Off to Ioway this weekend. I'll be back on Monday to take stock of how the gobshites spun HRC's bravura takedown of Trey Gowdy's Merry Band Of Incompetents into a demonstration of how Both Sides Do It. (I sure hope Elijah Cummings is getting some rest this weekend.) Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or someone may call you a pig-nosed turtle, or Trey Gowdy, or both.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io