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

WASHINGTON—On Saturday, to the great relief of many Republican senators, the president*’s lawyers will begin their defense against the articles of impeachment. “They’re squirming,” said one Democratic senator. “Some of them are masking it by smirking or by pretending it doesn’t matter. But they’re not comfortable.” But the defense team spent much of Friday previewing their case. Expect to hear a lot about the Steele Dossier, the Bidens, Burisma, and about how the president* has the perfect right to do everything the House managers said he’s done.

And then, if Lindsey Graham has his way, they’ll get down to business on the real scandal.

The president believes there is a double standard. I think the president believes he went through holy hell and I believe the same thing...What he wants to do is get to the truth. Can you imagine if a Republican had done this? You need to ask yourself the question. The media as an institution, would you not have people on the ground wanting to know what his son did when he contacted the State Department? The president is frustrated and I am frustrated that we live in a country where only one side gets looked at and I am telling you now that I am going to look at this if nobody else does. That doesn't make me a Russian agent.

The idea that there is a record here and not one scintilla of evidence that Hunter Biden did anything wrong when you stop the House from calling Hunter Biden. That is having your head in the sand but here is the thing. I don't want to call Hunter Biden. I don't want to call Joe Biden. I want somebody to look at that when this was done. I've got a from the public record to believe their assertion there is no there there falls short.

There simply is no defense against what the president* actually did. There are only two possible defenses: 1) he did it, but it’s not impeachable, and let’s all get this out of the way so we can all enjoy the Super Bowl and let the Electoral College decide things next November; and 2) crank up the old smoke machine and see how much of the truth you can obscure. I think the first one will get a workout over the weekend and at the beginning of next week. The smoke machine is uncrated and waiting until after the final vote. You can hear it warming up. It’s all they have left.

While we all were watching the show here, the Florida Supreme Court made it easier for that state to kill people. From the Tampa Bay Times:

Florida law used to only require that a majority of the jury make a recommendation to the judge on whether to sentence a defendant to die. The judge then issues a final ruling based on that recommendation. But after a decision by the Florida Supreme Court in 2016 struck down that model in a case called Hurst vs. State, the Legislature changed its law to mandate a unanimous jury...“It is no small matter for one Court to conclude that a predecessor Court has clearly erred,” the majority opinion of four justices states. But, “in this case we cannot escape the conclusion that ... our Court in Hurst vs. State got it wrong.”

What does this decision mean? For one, it means the man, Mark Anthony Poole, who brought this case to the Supreme Court after he was sentenced to death with only the majority of a jury, will once again get the death penalty, after his sentence was previously vacated. He has been convicted of first degree murder, attempted first degree murder, sexual battery, armed burglary and armed robbery.

If you got convicted under the old rules, I’m sorry, but you lose. You can die again.

“It is flatly unconstitutional to say we have given somebody the right to have a unanimous jury determine their sentence — and if they didn’t have it, their death sentence is overturned — and now pull that rug out from under them,” Dunham said. “If the Florida Supreme Court intends to execute individuals whose entitlement to a new sentencing hearing had previously been established by the law then this court has just abandoned the rule of law.”

Fitting the death penalty into our conception of a system of justice, with all those pesky amendments to that pesky Constitution, remains like trying to fit an elephant into a phone booth.

The New Orleans Saints have some new trouble. Chris Graythen Getty Images

I thought I’d seen every twist and turn in the saga of how the institutional Roman Catholic Church had been turned into an international conspiracy to obstruct justice, but I did not anticipate the involvement of an NFL franchise. From. the AP, via NOLA.com:

Attorneys for about two dozen men suing the church say in court filings that the 276 documents they obtained through discovery show that the NFL team, whose owner is devoutly Catholic, aided the Archdiocese of New Orleans in its “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.”

“Obviously, the Saints should not be in the business of assisting the Archdiocese, and the Saints' public relations team is not in the business of managing the public relations of criminals engaged in pedophilia," the attorneys wrote in a court filing. "The Saints realize that if the documents at issue are made public, this professional sports organization also will be smearing itself.”

Saints attorneys, in court papers, disputed any suggestion that the team helped the church cover up crimes, calling such claims “outrageous.” They further said that the emails, exchanged in 2018 and 2019, were intended to be private and should not be “fodder for the public.” The archdiocese is also fighting the release of the emails.

Yes, the Saints.

Sometimes Providence is just a literary artist, I tell you.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Hey Pocky Way”—The Neville Brothers. Happy Birthday to the remarkable Aaron Neville, and yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s a visit to a collective farm in Crimea from 1939. I’m not real sure about that weird, backward-moving planting contraption but I am glad that the narrator assured us that the children “can’t help being little Tatars, but in Tatar country, that isn’t surprising.” I believe it was a mistake to get the narrator out of the pub. Five years later, of course, Stalin deported all the Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Thousands of them died.

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

The name directly translates to "Jim Madsen's different reptile," for the paleontologist who found the first of two complete skeletons. It weighed over 4,000 pounds, stretched out to a massive 26 to 29 feet in length, and featured a decorative crest stretching from just in front of the eyes to the nose. It was a two-legged beast with long forelimbs and curved claws for snatching prey. It had a full grin of 80 sharp teeth and was the most common carnivore in its ecosystem by volume.

"Bones are radioactive and so you could pick it up with a geiger counter," Loewen says. He explains that the researchers had a custom portable radiation detector built on wheels. They rolled it out near the dig site and located a hotspot that was just four feet away from where the skeleton was found. It was 1996 and they had finally, finally found the skull.

Radioactive bones! An actual Godzilla. Tell me again that they didn’t live then to make us happy now.

Busy week, so The Committee declares you all Top Commenters of the Week. Have some Beckhams on us!

There will be at least one Very Special Weekend Edition here at the shebeen as the president*’s lawyers kick off their case on Saturday. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and watch out for them radioactive bones.

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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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