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

I am glad that I am in general good health—albeit sans gallbladder—because, were I really sick, what’s going on in Congress right now would probably kill me where I stand. In case you missed it, on Friday afternoon, John McCain announced that he would be standing up his BFF Lindsey Graham and the latter’s dog’s breakfast of a healthcare bill. If McCain is sincere, and who the hell knows at this point, then the Graham-Cassidy-Johnson-Heller-Pol-Pot healthcare bill is as dead as Kelsey’s nuts. From CNN:

"I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal," the Arizona Republican said in a statement. "I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will (affect) insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won't be available by the end of the month, we won't have reliable answers to any of those questions."

This also lets Lisa Murkowski off the hook, and it makes it more likely (for the moment) that a general flight away from the bill will occur. (What would be the point now of, say, Rob Portman’s voting for it? Of course, we said that the last time, too.) I wish I felt confident that this was the end of things for a while, but I’m not. I think even a bipartisan fix to the Affordable Care Act is likely to put people’s lives in peril. And since that’s been only a tangential concern to the congressional majorities in Washington, it’s unlikely that will change after they get their heads handed to them again.

OK, here’s the thing. Any regular at the shebeen knows how much fun we all have with Irish pejoratives and arcane English. So we were pretty happy when Kim Jong-un cracked open what apparently was a 1922 edition of the OED and called the president a “dotard.” Of course, we sometimes forget what we say in the shebeen and so it came as some surprise that we had gotten there back in May, long before young Kim dug it out.



He's not up to the job. This should be obvious by now. The most innocent explanation for the president*'s actions is that he's a blundering dotard who can't stop himself from destroying democratic institutions and from tripping over federal statutes.

I’m not going to push him on the west Asian rights to it. My old grandmother always said never to make trouble for chubby little men with bad haircuts, nerve gas, and nuclear weapons.

But if he calls the president* an omadhaun, he’s hearing from my lawyers.

WWOZ Pick to Click: “Alligator Crawl” (Freddie Keppard): Yeah, I still pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is North Korea, playing Chile to a 1-1 draw in the 1966 World Cup. The “deserved equalizer” was a real, well, rocket. Looks like it was a pretty good game, although the fans in Middleborough look like they had something better to do that day. History is so cool.

The discovery upon autopsy that Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots tight end who killed himself in his jail cell, had the symptoms of CTE is going to be more than simply a fountainhead of bad red hot sportz takez. His family is planning to sue just about every institution that hired him to play the game, and every institution tasked with overseeing them. I predict quick settlements because nobody wants this to proceed to discovery, but the teams and the governing bodies had better D up here, because, as the Hernandez case proves, CTE sufferers don’t exclusively kill themselves, and there are going to be hundreds more of them as the years go by.



Drip.



Also, drip, drip, drip. From USA Today:

According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. There's no evidence of votes changed. But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference prior to mid-term elections in November. Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can't be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s.

Good idea, except, in the highlighted section, the newspaper misspelled “obvious.”

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



But first…

Per usual, fossilized feces came to the rescue.

As we hope it will in Congress. But we continue.

See, it wasn’t just decayed plant matter that these paleontologists found—it was shellfish too. And that seemed a little weird, given that these animals were thought to be strict herbivores. It might also seem odd if you have a mental image of crustaceans as exclusively marine in nature. Were these ornithiscians harvesting mollusks from the sea floor? Were there bird-hipped diving dinos that sold their fishy goods in exchange for rotten wood snacks? Sadly, no. Ancient crustaceans also lived on land, often in or on decaying trees, where land-dwelling creatures were free to munch on them. It’s possible that these shellfish were only ingested accidentally, when the dinos tried to eat delicious old logs. It’s more likely, though, that it was intentional. These crustaceans weren’t tiny little buggers that could have been swallowed like a pill—each was somewhere between 20 and 60 percent of the width of an ornithiscian mouth. It would be hard to not notice something of that size. That fact, combined with the sheer number of poops found to contain crustacean shells, means that these dinos were probably going after the protein intentionally.

I am glad there are good people doing this work. I am glad I am not one of them. Dinosaurs lived then to make us—and them—happy now.

The Committee knew that the post about the interesting people with whom Camp Runamuck has staffed the Department of Agriculture would be a deep vein of prime USDA snark. Top Commenter Dona Sirk didn’t disappoint.

Wonder if he pass the USDA inspection? Ham bone, pork loin, Ground Round.

I’m giving you exactly 15 months to stop making meat jokes about Sam Clovis. I’m serious here but, in the meantime, here are 70.01 Beckhams to keep you company.

I’ll be down here all weekend. I should have some interesting things to report on Monday. I’m on this here panel on Sunday. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and don’t call anyone a dotard because Kim’s lawyers are on speed-dial and those stubby fingers can really move, folks.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.



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