The Committee was impressed by Top Commenter Fran Fried's design criticism of Deutsche Bank's logo.

Fran Fried A megabank like Deutsche Bank, with billions to spend, and that's the best logo they can come up with? It's a logo with a message, and that message is "We left the 7-pin on the first ball."

The Committee members are always suckers for bowling references. That will be an autographed Dick Weber beer tab and 73.99 Beckhams to our winner.

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

In case you haven’t noticed, the entire investigatory apparatus of the federal government has turned into a Breitbart comment thread and, fairly soon, the glory days of Benghazi, Benghazi!, Benghazi! are going to seem like a golden era of good government. The Republican majorities in Congress—and, most recently, the Department of Justice, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, proprietor—have decided to give the reality-starved shut-ins of the Republican base performance pieces depicting all their favorite fantasies.

There are at least three congressional investigations touching on the completely fraudulent Uranium One “scandal.” JeffBo reportedly is “considering” appointing a second special counsel to look into everything congressional Republicans have gleaned from binge-watching Hannity. But it doesn’t stop there. Inevitably, we have come around to the completely truthless—and comically inept—fable of how Planned Parenthood sold off aborted fetuses for parts. From The Daily Beast:

The head of Justice’s office of legislative affairs has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee asking for documents from its investigation of Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue practices. The Daily Beast reviewed the letter, which says the requested documents are “for investigative use.” The head of Justice’s office of legislative affairs has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee asking for documents from its investigation of Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue practices. The Daily Beast reviewed the letter, which says the requested documents are “for investigative use.”

There will be nothing discovered in any of these exercises because there was nothing to all these things in the first place. All of them have been debunked, one way or another, several times. But that debunking took place in another universe of American politics, and that universe is not the one driving the American government right now. The conservative movement has given itself over utterly to an elaborate fantasy role-playing game, with demons and heroes.

Getty Images

The Planned Parenthood business began with skeevy covert video-taping. This week, in Donald Trump’s Washington hotel, Virginia Thomas gave an award to James O’Keefe, the patron saint of video ratfckers everywhere. So, if you’re keeping score at home, in a hotel bearing the name of a credibly accused sexual harasser who lives in the White House, the wife of a credibly accused sexual harasser who works on the Supreme Court gave an award to a dirty-tricks artist who last week was humiliated by The Washington Post for trying to frame the paper’s reporters on behalf of an accused child molester in Alabama.

That’s the summation of the universe in which the policies of our government are being made.

There may be a bit of a snag in the attempt out in Wisconsin to bring to that state a massive facility for a tech giant called Foxconn, which is based in China. This has been reckoned to be a signature triumph for Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage that particular Midwest subsidiary. But Walker’s big deal may get hung up because of events across the state in Eau Claire. From Madison.com:



At issue is whether local economic incentives can result in cash payments to a private developer or company — which in the Eau Claire case include $1.5 million, but in the Foxconn case total $100 million. The state is seeking to intervene in support of the Eau Claire project in a lawsuit brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of local taxpayers who say Eau Claire abused Wisconsin’s tax incremental financing (TIF) law. The case, Voters with Facts v. City of Eau Claire, is now before the state Supreme Court after both the district court and an appellate court ruled in favor of the city. In a court filing this week, state Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin warned that the plaintiffs in the Eau Claire case seek to invalidate “a common feature” of Wisconsin’s TIF law: “cash grants paid to developers to help finance projects that promote economic development.”

“If this Court were to accept Plaintiffs’ unprecedented attack on these grants, this would imperil numerous projects critical to Wisconsin’s economic growth, including the Village of Mount Pleasant’s recent agreement with Foxconn Technology Group,” Tseytlin wrote.

The fight is completely intramural, one set of Wisconsin conservatives against another, but it also is a further indication of how ungainly was the state’s scramble after Foxconn. There is going to be work for reporters on this deal for decades, and it’s not going to be the only one of these, if the pursuit of the Amazon project is any indication.



Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Hindustan” (Dr. Michael White): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s a story about a scandal of which I’d never heard—the Horsemeat Scandal of 1948. Apparently, a couple million Brits ate horsemeat without knowing it, a severe defeat for British cuisine that echoes to this day, and an even more disgusting scandal than any of the ones we’re living through at the moment. History is so cool.

Apparently, the very strange story of Congressman Trent Franks’s sudden resignation from the Congress was a little more run of the mill than it was originally supposed to be. If you recall, the first iteration had Franks asking two of his aides to function as surrogate mothers for Franks and his wife. However, after Franks formally resigned on Friday, the essentially mundane and fundamentally icky reasserted itself. From Politico:

The sources said Franks approached two female staffers about acting as a potential surrogate for him and his wife, who has struggled with fertility issues for years. But the aides were concerned that Franks was asking to have sexual relations with them. It was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks opposes abortion rights as well as procedures that discard embryos. A former staffer also alleged that Franks tried to persuade a female aide that they were in love by having her read an article that described how a person knows they’re in love with someone, the sources said. One woman believed she was the subject of retribution after rebuffing Franks. While she enjoyed access to the congressman before the incident, that access was revoked afterward, she told Republican leaders.

Please, god, more horsemeat scandals.

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

The creature was clearly a small predator, much like Velociraptor. Its feet even had the distinctive sickle-shaped claws that clinked across the kitchen floor in Jurassic Park. But its long neck and tapering snout resembled those of a swan. Its arms and hands also had unusual proportions—something halfway between the grasping limbs of other raptors and the flattened flippers of modern penguins. It looked like a Velociraptor that had adapted for life in the water—that is, if it was even an actual dinosaur. “It was so strange that we suspected that it might have been a chimera—a mix of different skeletons glued together. It wouldn’t be the first time,” says Andrea Cau from the University of Bologna, who joined Godefroit’s investigation. “We had to be sure that it was a real dinosaur and not a fake.”

This swan-necked, duck-snouted, almost-paddle-limbed, sickle-clawed creature was assuredly weird—but it was a real dinosaur…Halszkaraptor is one of the theropods—a group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs that count Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor among their ranks. But unlike its kin, Halszkaraptor’s odd features suggest it was a strong swimmer that perhaps chased fish underwater, much like modern cormorants do. Outside of birds, “this is the first time we see that in a dinosaur,” says Cau.

A swimming velociraptor? This planet was a tough room, even if dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee was impressed by Top Commenter Fran Fried's design criticism of Deutsche Bank's logo.

Fran Fried A megabank like Deutsche Bank, with billions to spend, and that's the best logo they can come up with? It's a logo with a message, and that message is "We left the 7-pin on the first ball."

The Committee members are always suckers for bowling references. That will be an autographed Dick Weber beer tab and 73.99 Beckhams to our winner.

I’m off to Alabama to watch the stretch drive for the U.S. Senate seat. I have no idea what I will find there, but I hope I arrive before Roy Moore decides to bleed the electorate with leeches. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and respect swans the next time you see them. Once, they could have eaten you.

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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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