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

And, in the end, they all folded like cheap suits because empty suits are the easiest to fold. Friend of the kids Marco Rubio took a dive, and deficit hawk Bob Corker followed him into the tank. The vastly unpopular—and economically disastrous—tax bill likely will pass the Senate because senators come pretty cheaply these days, and accommodations are easily made when you know the only constituency worth your time is your donors, and when you know all the math in the monstrosity is 90 percent fudge anyway. From The New York Times:

The unexpected support from Mr. Corker, who had opposed the initial Senate legislation over concerns about its impact on the deficit, put the Republicans on the one-yard line in the final seconds of the tax bill debate. Lawmakers plan to vote next week with the aim of getting a bill to President Trump by Christmas. On Friday, as details emerged about the final bill, it became clear that the agreement would provide slightly more generous tax breaks to low- and middle-income Americans by reducing some benefits for higher earners, one of several tweaks intended to solve the budget problems standing between the bill’s passage and President Trump’s desk, according to people briefed on the final plan. With the finish line to their first legislative victory in sight, Republican negotiators agreed to provide a more generous child tax credit in the final bill to shore up support from Mr. Rubio, who said he would not vote for the legislation unless it provided more help to lower-income Americans.

It’s a sham and a con, and it was a sham and a con when Rubio and Corker were pretending to be so very bothered about what a sham and a con it is. There has been some tinkering, because senators come cheaply these days, but it’s still a vaporous collection of unmoored nostrums in search of a magic asterisk. I mean, listen to Corker. A Swiss Army Knife looks less like a tool.

Mr. Corker, a longtime deficit hawk, said he was swayed to support the bill as the result of “many conversations over the past several days with individuals from both sides of the aisle across Tennessee and around the country.” Mr. Corker said the bill “is far from perfect, and left to my own accord, we would have reached bipartisan consensus on legislation that avoided any chance of adding to the deficit and far less would have been done on the individual side with items that do not generate economic growth.”

Shut up. Just shut up. You know that “bipartisan consensus” always was impossible on this dog’s breakfast and you know why, too. Your party and its owners didn’t want any part of it. Go back to Tennessee and explain to your former constituents where their healthcare went.

New details from the text, shared with The New York Times on Friday, reveal that lawmakers offset other last-minute changes to the bill — such as eliminating the corporate alternative minimum tax and lowering the top individual tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent today — through slight adjustments, not sweeping changes. And it was still unclear how they were going to pay for the entire package, which can add no more than $1.5 trillion to the deficit if it is to pass without Democrat support.

Christamighty, they’re not even trying hard any more. Just get a big truck and deliver the cash on pallets to the only people in this country who really matter to you. If you’re lucky, they won’t make you use the servant’s entrance. But get it while you can, fellas. Beggar’s Day is coming, and right soon.

Another week, another story about financial deceit and brigandage on the part of Wells Fargo. This time, our scene is set among the Navajo people in Arizona. From WPIX News:



The tribe alleges employees at Wells Fargo branches on the vast reservation "routinely misled customers into opening unnecessary accounts and obtained debit and credit cards without customers' consent." They also allege Navajo elders "were purposely confused and deceived into purchasing products to help employees meet banking quotas." The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New Mexico, said "since at least 2009 and continuing through 2016, Wells Fargo employees at branches on the Navajo Nation routinely opened unauthorized savings and credit accounts, misled customers into opening unnecessary accounts, obtained debit cards without customers' consent, and enrolled customers in online banking without proper consent." The suit alleges Wells Fargo employees told elderly Navajo citizens who didn't speak English that in order to have their checks cashed, they needed to sign up for savings accounts they neither needed nor understood. The tribe also alleges Wells Fargo representatives stalked basketball games and flea markets to sign up consumers for unnecessary accounts and "opened accounts for underage Navajo citizens, going so far as to falsify birthdates to avoid obtaining necessary parental consent."

All of these allegations sound like business as usual for Wells Fargo, which seems to have a vulture’s instinct for other people’s money and the ethics of your basic Gaboon viper. The L.A. Times got a quote from the consigliere of this particular entity.

Wells Fargo spokesman Jim Seitz said in a statement that the bank could not comment on ongoing litigation, but he reiterated steps the bank has taken to compensate consumers and change practices in the wake of last year’s accounts scandal. “Over the past year we have taken significant steps to make things right for our customers, including members of the Navajo Nation, who may have been affected by unacceptable retail sales practices,” he said.

Why is this company still in business? I mean, I know why, but still…

As happy as I am that Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Nina Simone made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducting The Cars before the J. Geils Band is an insult to every rock and roll fan inside the Route 128 corridor. Live performance has to count for something. But that’s just me being unacceptably provincial. But what I still do not get is why Little Feat, Link Wray, and Warren Zevon get stiffed, year after year. Did Lowell George once refuse to pose for Annie Leibovich? Did Zevon eat Jann Wenner’s puppy? None of this makes sense.



Link Wray.

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Little Feat.

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Zevon.

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Come on. This ain’t right.

Yes, I saw it. Yes, it’s good. Yes, you should see it. (The Porgs are just tiny, wet-eyed, uninteresting Tribbles, though.) I’m more interested in this new Spielberg about The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers. I may be wrong but, if you’re going to make a movie about a newspaper and the Pentagon Papers, it really ought to be The New York Times, no? (Apparently, this has occurred to some NYT vets, too.) It has been explained to me that this is really a character study of Katherine Graham. (Meryl!) If so, I hope it ends with her famous warning to the press not to get too nosy about government secrets, because that would be bad.



The redoubtable Dave Neiwert has finally finished his magnum opus about the alt-right and the rise of modern neo-fascism. I’m about a third of the way into it, and it’s quite typical of Dave’s work: lucid, impeccably researched, and damn scary. It’s an important book because, I think, all hell is going to break loose next year and it would be nice to know as much as possible about the people who opened the door for hell to break loose.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Savannah Mama” (Blind Willie McTell): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some Finns having fun in the 1920s. Let’s all do the Greasy Pole Dance. Not so fast there, Farenthold! History is so cool.

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

Fossils from New Zealand have revealed a giant penguin that was as big as a grown man, roughly the size of the captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The creature was slightly shorter in length and about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) heavier than the official stats for hockey star Sidney Crosby. It measured nearly 5 feet, 10 inches (1.77 meters) long when swimming and weighed in at 223 pounds (101 kilograms)… The newly found bird is about 7 inches (18 centimeters) longer than any other ancient penguin that has left a substantial portion of a skeleton, said Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. A potentially bigger rival is known only from a fragment of leg bone, making a size estimate difficult.

I think measuring prehistoric fauna by units of hockey player goes a long way to explaining things to the uninitiated, and is another way that dinosaurs lived then to make Sidney Crosby, and us, happy now.

(Yes, I know it’s not technically a dinosaur. Shut up, he explained.)

The Committee was impressed by Top Commenter Nathaire Carcossa’s question for the stubbornly loony ol’ Jedge Roy Moore.

Any word on whether Moore has decided to concede to General Grant's terms?

Sometimes, I am completely convinced that those terms were far too generous. Anyway, well-asked, and 80.17 Beckhams to you.

I’ll be back on Monday after a weekend in which I am sure there will be some GOP’s Big Win gobshitery flying through the air. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or off the greasy pole you go.

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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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