(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Yeah, it was just about as bad as you imagined it would be.

This president*, after a week of calamitous news regarding his alleged relationship with an adult-movie actress, and in desperate need of both a distraction and a friendly audience, goes to Dallas to address…the national convention of the NRA. It’s like the boob-bait-a-lanche of all time.

"Thanks to your activism and dedication, you have an administration fighting to protect your Second Amendment and we will protect your Second Amendment. Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never ever be under siege as long as I am your president."

You just said they were already under siege, Knocko.

"Kanye West must have some power, because you probably saw, I doubled my African-American poll numbers. We went from 11 to 22 in one week, thank you, Kanye. When I saw the numbers I said that must be a mistake, how did that happen?"

If Kanye West showed up unannounced on their lawns, most of this audience would call the police.



“Senate Democrats like Jon Tester, you saw what happened there, what he did to one of the finest people in our country, what he did to the admiral? What he did was a disgrace."

That cinches it. Jon Tester has no chance of being re-elected to the Senate from Texas.

Sometimes, I think Lewandowski’s job is to pull the string in the back of the president*’s neck so he can speak.

I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but, given the track record of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, I’m fairly sure that, at some level of the government, there’s some penny-ante graft afoot. From the WaPo:



And to independent economists, it's a mystifying piece of tax policy that has no clear long-term economic purpose and few, if any, recent comparable examples, given that tax breaks are traditionally incorporated for tax filing season — not in the months before an election. “This is really weird. I have never heard of anything like this,” said Richard Auxier, who tracks state tax policy for the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Scott Drenkard, a tax expert at the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, was also puzzled. “This is definitely odd and unique. I haven’t seen anything like it before," he said. "It’s political catnip, but it’s hard to see how it improves economic outcomes.”

“It's literally a guy saying, 'I'm Scott Walker running for reelection, have some money!'" said Mandela Barnes, a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in Wisconsin. “Everyone I've talked to sees it as a blatant payoff.”

Well, yeah. And your point is?

Getty Images

Major kudos to Nancy Kaffer of The Detroit Free Press for catching Michigan’s government at some serious finagling regarding the state’s proposed work requirement for Medicaid. They have managed to find a way to knuckle poor minority citizens while appearing to be generous.

Because although HB 897 threatens to end Medicaid benefits for hundreds of thousands living elsewhere in the state, it includes exemptions for people who live in counties with an unemployment rate of more than 8.5%, like the ones Schmidt represents. Live in Detroit? You're out of luck. The city's unemployment rate is higher than 8.5%, but the unemployment rate in surrounding Wayne County is just 5.5% — meaning Detroiters living in poverty, with a dysfunctional transit system that makes it harder to reach good-paying jobs, won't qualify for that exemption. The same is true in Flint and the state's other struggling cities. Get that? Rural residents of up-north counties with high unemployment are protected; urban Michiganders who live in high-unemployment cities in more prosperous counties are left to twist.

What’s the most obvious difference between the people in rural, up-north Michigan and the citizens of Detroit? Hmmm, lemme get back to you on that.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Fine Brown Frame" (Nellie Lutcher): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s something from the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954, and a look at the man who was going to bring peace to Indo-China. Here he is meeting with John Foster Dulles, to allay our fears that “France was going to give way to the Reds too easily.” This video did not age well, but history is so cool, anyway.

If you read nothing else this weekend, read Jamelle Bouie’s moving account of the recent opening of the National Memorial For Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The guy behind the memorial, which attempts to honor all those who were killed through extrajudicial murder, is Bryan Stevenson, who has done more of god’s work in this country than any three other people you can name. We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in a lot of areas in this country, but we’re never going to get one because, you know, Exceptionalism.

But, as Jamelle points out so eloquently in Slate, maybe this quiet place is what we’ll have to pass for one.

Why dwell on this painful period of American history? Why fight to bring this unspeakable violence into the national consciousness? And why work to integrate it into public memory when lynching remains an incredibly fraught metaphor for racial conflict, with heavy symbolic baggage that weighs on any conversation around the subject?

The answer is straightforward. We live in a moment when racism—explicit and unapologetic—has returned to a prominent place in American politics, both endorsed by and propagated through the Oval Office. And in that environment, a memorial to racial terrorism—one which indicts perpetrators as much as it honors victims—is the kind of provocation that we need, a vital and powerful statement against our national tendency to willful amnesia. The victims of lynching and racial terrorism deserve a memorial that makes plain the scale of the offense and the magnitude of the crime. The communities in question deserve a chance to reckon with the weight of their history. And Americans writ large need an opportunity to grapple with this period as we struggle to understand a present that contains disturbing echoes of our not-too-distant past.

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

Thought to have lived between 66 and 100m years ago the gull-like bird, known as Ichthyornis dispar, was first written about in the 19th century by American palaeontologist Othniel Marsh after fossil remains were unearthed in the US. These revealed that the animal’s body was similar to modern birds in many respects. But there was a startling difference: it had jaws which housed sharp teeth. The findings astonished experts who recognised that the creature offered crucial insights into how today’s birds came to be. However, the skull was far from complete.

“It was flying around eating probably fish, shellfish and other things, plucking them out of the water with its abbreviated little pincer-tip beak and then tossing them back into its mouth and crunching down on them with its powerful dinosaur-like jaws,” said Bhullar. The animal’s brain meanwhile was relatively large compared to its body size, a feature found in birds today. That, said Bhullar, scotches the idea that a large brain evolved at the expense of space for jaw muscles. “I think the reason the bird brain is large basically is to deal with the demands of flight,” he said.

Anybody who’s ever stumbled into Joe’s Crab Shack has seen allegedly evolved humans eating shellfish in much the same way—a vestigial reminder that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee had no doubt that this week’s Top Commenter of the Week would come from the post about Willard Romney’s most recent tussle with human speech. And Top Commenter Dan Gauss, who is only pawn in game of life, did not disappoint, drawing inspiration from a cinema classic:

…him love hot dog and Sheriff Bart

A laurel and hardy handshake, and 81 Beckhams to you, Hedy.

I’ll be back on Monday to see whether Rudy Giuliani has finalized arrangements for the president* to begin serving his sentence. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or I’m sending you for BBQ with Willard.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

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