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

As its first act in the new Congress, the equally new Democratic majority passed something called House Resolution 1. It was a massive anti-corruption measure aimed at restoring the credibility of American elections and safeguarding the franchises for those whose right to vote had been assaulted by 30 years of conservative mischief, both in Washington and in the states. It advocated a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United. It proposed making federal Election Day a federal holiday, and it forbade both partisan gerrymandering and voter purges. It also mandated that the president and vice president reveal the previous ten years of tax returns. (Can't imagine what gave them that idea.) All in all, it was a clear declaration of support for the right of all eligible citizens to vote, and for their votes to have meaning.

On the op-ed page of the Washington Post—Jesus, Hiatt. Really?—Mitch McConnell called it "a power grab."

It would also empower that newly partisan FEC to track and catalogue more of what you say. It would broaden the type of speech the commission can define as “campaign-related” and thus regulate. Many more Americans would have to notify the feds when spending even small amounts of money on speech or else be penalized. That partisan FEC would also get wide latitude to determine when a nonprofit’s speech has crossed that fuzzy “campaign-related” line and then forcibly publicize the group’s private supporters.

Apparently the Democrats define “democracy” as giving Washington a clearer view of whom to intimidate and leaving citizens more vulnerable to public harassment over private views. Under this bill, you’d keep your right to free association as long as your private associations were broadcast to everyone. You’d keep your right to speak freely so long as you notified a distant bureaucracy likely run by the same people you criticized. The bill goes so far as to suggest that the Constitution needs an amendment to override First Amendment protections.

That's bad enough, but here comes the line that, if the WaPo opinion editors had any guts, they would have either cut from the piece, or killed it entirely.

I’m as firm a supporter as anyone of vigorous debate and a vibrant political discourse — but I don’t think Americans see an urgent need for their tax dollars to be used to bankroll robocalls and attack ads, including for candidates they dislike.

Jesus, Hiatt. Seriously? Let's ask Elizabeth Warren how firm McConnell's support for vigorous debate is. Hell, let's ask Merrick Garland how much he enjoyed Mitch McConnell's vibrant political discourse.

Alex Wong Getty Images

There simply is no more loathsome creature walking the political landscape than the Majority Leader of the United States Senate. You have to go back to McCarthy or McCarran to find a Senate leader who did so much damage to democratic norms and principles than this yokel from Kentucky. Trump is bad enough, but he's just a jumped-up real-estate crook who's in over his head. McConnell is a career politician who knows full well what he's doing to democratic government and is doing it anyway because it gives him power, and it gives the rest of us a wingnut federal judiciary for the next 30 years. There is nothing that this president* can do that threatens McConnell's power as much as it threatens the survival of the republic, and that's where we are.

McConnell declared himself in opposition to Barack Obama right from the first day in office. There's even video. Most noxiously, in reference to our present moment, when Obama came to him and asked him to present a united front against the Russian ratfcking that was enabling El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, McConnell turned him down, flat. Moreover, he told Obama that, if Obama went public, McConnell would use it as a political hammer on Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Obama should have done it anyway, god knows.) McConnell issued a watery denial of these charges, but there's no good goddamn reason to believe him.

He doesn't have the essential patriotism god gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He's selling out his country, and he's doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were. Mitch McConnell is the the thief of the nation's soul.





Boston Globe Getty Images

Long ago, when I was working for The Boston Phoenix in an old, abandoned candy factory at the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Back Bay, our second home was the Eliot Lounge, a dark, dowager bar in what was then largely a residential hotel. It was also our second newsroom. Stories were edited—and, on occasion, rewritten—at the bar. Proofs were read. On my first day at the Phoenix, I walked into the Eliot and spotted the late George Kimball, his head resting comfortably on the bar. I introduced myself.

"Hey," said Kimball. "Got any speed?"

Presiding over this place was a smiling, elfin soul named Tommy Leonard, an orphan who'd grown up, joined the Marines, and developed a taste for Budweiser beer and long-distance running. The Eliot became world famous as the place to go before, after (and occasionally, during) the Boston Marathon, and Tommy became world-famous right along with it. And that was as it should be—hell, late one evening, he even talked me into running the Falmouth Road Race Course in an off-season benefit to help the family of a Falmouth policeman who'd died in the line. (I finished, too, and threw myself into the Atlantic in mid-November, which was a coaching error of the first magnitude.) But what I remember about Tommy is how he adopted all of us alternative journalists as part of his second family. He gave us a place to go, a genuine newspaper bar, and since we were all hopeless romantics about that sort of thing, we all fell in behind him.

To be honest, as a bartender, Tommy was a bit eccentric. Asking him to give you change for a $10 was something of a crapshoot. You could get back two five's, three five's. no five's, or your own $10 bill again. It all depended if Tommy was distracted by something or someone between you and the register. But what a circus it was, of which he was the ringmaster.



Boston Globe Getty Images

Where do I start? The night the horse came in? (None of the regulars batted an eye.) The night Tommy invited the entire Stanford University band in to play; they marched in playing, "Truckin'" and they marched out playing, "White Punks On Dope." The afternoon when an executive at WBCN—another lost bit of Boston, alas—talked the great saloon pianist Dave McKenna to come in and play an impromptu set on the Eliot's battered piano, which had been tuned that afternoon for the first time since VE-Day? This place was a home. Tommy was an orphan. He made sure nobody around him felt like one.

Tommy Leonard passed away this week on his beloved Cape Cod at the age of 85. He had a good run. An old friend from the Phoenix got in touch after she heard the news, and she recalled one of Tommy's favorite observations on the state of the world.

You notice how everything gotten really strange since they blew up the Madison Hotel?

You have no idea, TL. No idea at all.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Range In My Kitchen Blues" (Texas Alexander): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is someone, in 1965, building a brand-new luxury hotel in Moscow. That doesn't look so hard. Can't imagine what the trouble could be today. History is so cool.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, LiveScience? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

After showing the two opalized specimens to paleontologists in 2014, Poben learned that they were part of a previously unknown dog-size dinosaur species, a new study finds. This dino lived about 100 million years ago in Australia, back when the landscape was lush and dotted with lakes..."Weewarrasaurus was a gentle herbivore about the size of a kelpie dog [a type of Australian herding dog]," said study lead researcher Phil Bell, a senior lecturer of paleontology at the University of New England in Australia.

"They got around on two legs and had a long tail used for balance. Because they were small and didn't have horns or particularly sharp claws for defense, they were probably quite timid and would have traveled in small herds or family units for protection." In that sense, these dinosaurs were likely the kangaroos of Cretaceous Australia, Bell told Live Science. "I think I would have liked one as a pet...he finding is remarkable, and not just because Poben happened across the fossils in an opal-filled bucket. It's extremely rare to find opalized fossils in general, though "Lightning Ridge is the only place in the world where you find opalized dinosaurs," Bell said.

Opalized dinosaurs! Tell me again how they did not live then to make us happy now.

The Committee knew that this week's Top Commenter likely would come from the Top Comments responding to the post that included the news of human composting. Top Commenter Thomas Farrell did not disappoint.

What does your human composting kit do with the skeleton? When the process is done handling the organic matter, can you bring me back in the house & stick my bones in the rocking chair with my bony fingers curled around a glass of whiskey & Doc Maddow on the tv? . . . I'm assuming Doc still has a show when I've wandered off the stage. Otherwise give me reruns of The Apprentice & tell me I'm in hell.

There are some obvious flaws in the system that need to be worked out, but I think brother Farrell's solution will do for now, so he gets 79.11 Beckhams to hang around his desiccated feet as his loved ones runs their own private Cadaver Synod.

I'll be back on Monday with god alone knows what. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and, remember, when you're human compost, some day, they might find opals in your gullet.

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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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