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

I keep hearing about how the president* is winning the “messaging” and/or the “political” battle against Robert Mueller and the forces investigating the president* and the bounders and thieves with whom he has conspired and colluded his entire adult life. The problem with this, of course, is that the president* doesn’t have the guts to arrange for Mueller’s dismissal and, all messaging and politics aside, there’s only one of them who can indict people.

There’s only one of them who can indict people twice. From CNN:

The indictment includes two new charges against both Manafort and Kilimnik: a count of obstruction of justice and a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, meaning the two allegedly worked together to tamper with witnesses. Kilimnik, 48, of Moscow, is the 20th person to face charges in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. So far, 20 people and three companies have been charged. Earlier this week, Mueller's office accused Manafort of attempting to get witnesses to lie for him in court. A witness told investigators recently that Manafort wanted them to commit perjury about a lobbying effort they worked on for him in the US, a filing in DC District Court said. Manafort is currently out on house arrest and a $10 million unsecured bail. He awaits a trial in Virginia that is scheduled for late July and a trial in DC scheduled to begin in September. He has pleaded not guilty to charges related to his failure to disclose his US lobbying work for a foreign government and to bank fraud and other financial crimes.

I’m not sure how much all this talk about “messaging” and the political ramifications really matters. Certainly, Mueller doesn’t have any illusions about the president*’s supine supporters in the Congress. He’s not waiting for any political institution to assert itself against the president*, because he must know by now how futile that would be.

Instead, he keeps doing what prosecutors do: shaking witnesses and building cases and getting indictments when he’s sure he can get them. Manafort’s turning on a spit right now, and what Sean Hannity thinks of that, or what Paul Ryan thinks of it, doesn’t matter either to Manafort or to the guy operating the rotisserie. At the end of things, people will go to prison, and the country will have a detailed accounting of what it did to itself when it installed this low-rent crew in control of the government. We’ve all been under indictment for that for going on three years now.

This one can’t wait until next week’s semi-regular weekly survey of the laboratories of democracy. Down in Georgia, the governor’s race just went completely off the trolley. Clay Tippins, one of the losing candidates in the recent GOP gubernatorial primary, sat down for a conversation with Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle. Tippins thoughtfully remembered to record the conversation on his phone, which was in his pocket.

In the interest of keeping money from a SuperPac away from one of his opponents, Cagle had sold out Tippins’ uncle, a state senator. And the recording is simply awesome. From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:



Cagle: Absolutely. And we know that we’ve got to move the ball. Public education, he and I — I wouldn’t say we are completely in agreement with everything, but I would say 95-plus percent.

Tippins: Which is a lot, if you agree 95 percent of the time.

Cagle: And listen, Lindsey — there’s a reason I put him as education chair. Because it is my biggest issue, and it’s the issue that I’m the most passionate about, that I care the most, it’s where I focus my efforts. And Lindsey is the guy I can trust to get it done. So, I just told Lindsey point-blank. I said, ‘Lindsey, the SSO bill, I’ve got to have it.’

Tippins: Why did you have to have it? I know you rely upon him, and he felt — he knows his (expletive). I know you trust his judgment on education, and he knows his (expletive). Why did you have to have that so bad? Because I love him, and I can see the pain on him …

Cagle: It was bad, it was bad.

Tippins: Why? You turned on him. And there are reasons for that. Why did you have to have it?

Cagle: Exactly the reason I told Lindsey, that you need to listen to: It ain’t about public policy. It’s about (expletive) politics. There’s a group that was getting ready to put $3 million behind Hunter Hill. Mr. Pro-Choice. I mean, Mr. Pro-Charters, Vouchers. …

Cagle: Back to Lindsey … I said, ‘Lindsey, I’ve got to have it. … This is not about policy. This is about politics.’ And he said, ‘Let me just resign so you can do what you want to do.’…

Tippins: I think that’s what hurt him. He actually thought you were going to back him on it. …

Cagle: He’s upset with me. And I talked to him today. … This is the deal: I said, Lindsey, ‘I’ve got to have it. I’ve got to have that bill out of committee. Either you’re going to give me that bill out of committee, or I’m going to have to work around you. Because this is not about policy, this is about politics.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to let you resign, because you’re too good a friend. And I don’t want this thing blowing up on you and I on this. But what I really want you to do is give me a bill that you can live with and that I can live with. And I gave him some parameters he could never get comfortable with. I said: ‘Lindsey, you need to understand this bill is going to happen. It’s going to happen.’

Tippins: Because it had to, to keep the money away from Hunter?

Cagle: Yeah. I mean, I was playing defense. I’m being honest with you.

This is a near perfect rat-fck and Cagle, who is facing a runoff for the Republican nomination with Brian Kemp, was the perfect sucker. Cagle is exposed as someone who would sell his grandmother to Somali pirates for three points in the next local TV poll. He’s also exposed as someone who can be induced easily into dangerous stupidity. The Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, can sit back and watch the entertaining cannibal feast on the other side. Classic.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Hot Sausage Rag” (New Orleans Joymakers): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are British and Canadian forces moving into Normandy in the week after D-Day. Remember when we all got along? The president* managed to blow up relations with the UK and Canada on the week of the 74th anniversary of the invasion. His timing is as good as his tact is.

Jamelle Bouie in Slate wrote a fascinating column about how the roots of our modern concepts of race and racism trace themselves back to the Enlightenment.



These weren’t incidental developments or the mere remnants of earlier prejudice. Race as we understand it—a biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of domination—is a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery. Those who claim the Enlightenment’s mantle now should grapple with that legacy and what it means for our understanding of the modern world.

And, oh, what a grappling there was. Bouie’s piece, which is both convincing and in line with a lot of current historical thinking about the Enlightenment, set off a firestorm on the electric Twitter machine. The grappling was not about what Bouie wrote but, rather, how did he have the gall to fit, say, John Locke for a white hood?

For Bernasconi and Mann, the Locke of the Two Treatises must be read in dialogue with the Locke of the The Fundamental Constitutions, and can’t be bracketed from his role as a colonial administrator and investor in the slave trade. This Locke, they argue, must be understood as concerned mainly “with the freedom and prosperity of Englishmen, and not troubled if they were gained at the expense of Africans.”

We were founded on an idea and a promise, that, at the time the idea was born and the promise made, did not apply to a huge number of people on this continent, including the original owners and the people who did not come here voluntarily. That idea and that promise was based on the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, which did not encompass those people, either. Why it’s so damn hard for us to make peace with those simple facts is evidence enough that Bouie is on to something here.

This is the best news of the week. From The Guardian:



In light of Donald Trump becoming US president and Jeremy Corbyn taking over as Labour leader, Linehan said he thought it “wouldn’t be too much of a stretch” for Father Ted to head up the Catholic church. “Obviously we’re pulling some shenanigans to get him into that position, but I think the shenanigans are entertaining enough that people won’t mind,” he told the BBC.

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A question we all ask every day. It has no answer.

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



The big noise in dino news this week was the sale of the skeleton of a heretofore unidentified species of Allosaurus to an anonymous bidder at an auction in France. The skeleton went for almost $2.5 million, and paleontologists are agog over the whole business.

The skeleton was found in Wyoming in 2013 and dates to between 151 million and 156 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. It measures 28.5 feet long and is approximately 70 percent complete. According to Colin Barras of Science, the dinosaur is likely a close relative of the Allosaurus fragilis, a Late Jurassic carnivore. In a catalogue promoting the recent sale, the French auction house Aguttes states that the specimen is the “sole representative of what is likely a new species of Allosaurid, or even a new genus altogether.”

The problem is that nobody knows who bought the thing, nobody knows who sold it, and nobody knows even who dug it up.

…the sale has sparked concerns among the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which wrote a letter to Aguttes last month urging the auction house to halt the sale. Chief among the organizations’ concerns is that keeping the skeleton in private hands will impede future scientific study—even if the owner allows researchers to access the remains.“Scientific practice demands that conclusions drawn from the fossils should be verifiable: scientists must be able to reexamine, re-measure, and reinterpret them (such reexamination can happen decades or even centuries after their discovery),” the SVP explains in its letter. “Fossil specimens that are sold into private hands are lost to science. Even if made accessible to scientists, information contained within privately owned specimens cannot be included in the scientific literature because the availability of the fossil material to other scientists cannot be guaranteed, and therefore verification of scientific claims (the essence of scientific progress) cannot be performed.”

So it’s a dinosaur mystery replete with international wealth and intrigue, and another venue in which dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee spent much of the week guffawing at the tale of Scott Pruitt and his hand lotion, which is why our post in the shebeen took the whole lotion-or-the-hose riff from Silence of the Lambs. But we did not reckon with Top Commenter Alfred McCloud, who managed a neat double-movie-serial-killer entrechat.

He's beginning to make Roger Stone look normal. P.S. The Lotion is for Mother,She's in the Basement. No Mother, God No!

Yes, Dr. Lecter. Your room here at the Bates Motel is ready any time. Superb Turner Classic snark. And 88.19 Beckhams to youse.

I’ll be back on Monday with some G6+1 gobshitery. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and, remember, the phone is always recording.

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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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