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

Lawrence O’Donnell pointed this out a while back but, if you’re wondering what drove those folks in Boston to throw rocks at schoolchildren back in the mid-1970s, have a look at White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. He’s the educated, military face of those people.

It’s been a tough few days for The Stabilizing Force. He gave a preposterous interview about immigration to NPR that was highlighted by Kelly’s obvious ignorance of why the hell most of the Irish came to this country, to name only one immigrant group about which he was wrong.

The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13 ... but they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. ... They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.

Apparently, Kelly believes all those people who stumbled off the coffin ships were already housekeepers, and firemen, and cops, and mayors when they got here, instead of peasant farmers for whom it was ship out or starve, or occasionally, both. Then there was Kelly’s attitude towards the families that are being wrenched apart at the border—the process that has managed to misplace 1,500 children somewhere in the United States.

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

Wish your Whatever a happy Whatever’s Day Sunday.

Getty Images

And, through all of that, nothing has happened to the White House staffer who sniped at the fact that John McCain was dying and, therefore, wouldn’t be around much longer to yell about how Kelly and Kelly’s boss are wrecking the country. This enabled SarahHuck, who also nominally works under Kelly, to embarrass herself further at Friday’s gaggle. She was asked about the staffer’s remarks. This is what she said in what was alleged to be human speech.

"I’m not going to comment on an internal staff meeting.”

These really are the fcking mole people.

One thing I did not expect to happen in the ongoing saga of the Trump Administration* and the Volga Bagmen was a flashback to the most recent golden era of New York tabloids. I did not expect to see the name of Australian Wildman journo Steve Dunleavy pop into our current narrative. From Bloomberg:



In a letter to the judge, attorney Peter J. Gleason asserted Trump and Cohen knew about the old abuse allegations. He argued that information about the women might be found in files the FBI seized last month from Cohen and should be kept under seal to protect the women’s privacy. Later Friday, the judge said Gleason must submit a formal memo in support of his letter or pull it. In his letter to the judge, Gleason said one woman came to him in 2012 and another the next year with complaints that Schneiderman “sexually victimized” them. Counseling against reporting the allegations to Manhattan’s district attorney -- which at the time was Cy Vance Jr. -- based on his past experiences with political corruption cases, Gleason wrote, he discussed the women’s allegations with a retired New York Post journalist, Steve Dunleavy. Dunleavy then offered to discuss the matter with Trump. “Mr. Dunleavy did indeed discuss this very matter with Mr. Trump as evidenced by a phone call I received from attorney Michael Cohen,” Gleason, a lawyer in Mahopac, New York, wrote. “During my communications with Mr. Cohen I shared with him certain details of Schneiderman’s vile attacks on these two women.”

(Props on the electric Twitter machine to Chris Smith, who offered the sucker bet of all time—that the conversation between Gleason and Dunleavy took place in Langan’s, the legendary, and now-closed, News Corp and Broadway saloon, and also to Mountaineer Mike Tomasky, who added that the two of them probably went off to the nearest OTB parlor to tell Ray Kerrison what was going on.)

As the Bloomberg story reminds us, Schneiderman was in the president*’s electric Twitter crosshairs five years ago.

Trump took aim at Schneiderman in a tweet on Sept. 11, 2013, that also referred to New York politicians who’d resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer. “Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone -- next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner,” Trump tweeted. In late 2016, after he was elected president, Trump settled the Trump University case with Schneiderman for $25 million.

No story touching this presidency* ever ends. They all just get stranger.

Oliver North still needs a long nap in a room with soft walls. From The Guardian:



The former Reagan-era security adviser, who was once convicted on charges related to the Iran-Contra affair, also claimed the NRA was the target of a “cyberwar”. “They’re not activists – this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” Oliver North told the Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things – even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

I’m sure that makes sense in some parallel univer…nope, I got nothing.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Cochon de lait” (Cedric Watson): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit to the Pathe Archives: Here are North Korea and Chile, playing to a 1-1 draw in the 1966 World Cup. North Korean fans apparently don’t travel well. History is so cool.

Speaking of the World Cup, which will be contested in Russia this summer, and since neither the U.S. nor the Motherland qualified, the shebeen again has adopted the mighty smiters of Iceland as its team. We will take our regular updates from the indomitable Reykjavik Grapevine. This, by the way, is how you introduce your World Cup team. Let there be elk haunches and flagons of mead all around!

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

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

People are idiots.

While this has been an ongoing problem for many years, officials say the damaging behaviour has increased dramatically in the last six months. The dinosaur tracks are one of the biggest draws to Red Fleet State Park and many have been irrevocably damaged. Visitors have been throwing the tracks around as if they were merely rocks.

Is there any disgusting human impulse that the last presidential election didn’t unleash? Stop throwing dinosaur tracks into the lake, you morons. Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee is taking this week off. You’re all Top Commenters anyway.

I’ll be back on Monday when the United States Embassy in Israel will be moved to Jerusalem, providing Sheldon Adelson with his semi-annual woody. This should really be fun. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or someone might throw you into a lake.

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