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

They have to be kidding now. From the Washington Post:

President Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin by phone for more than an hour Friday about topics including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation but that he did not confront Putin about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the two leaders devoted only a brief part of their conversation to what Trump characterized as a finding of “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia.

“I sort of smiled when he said something to the effect that it started off as a mountain and ended up as a mouse,” Trump said. Pressed by a reporter on whether he had confronted Putin on Russian interference in the election, Trump said: “We didn’t discuss that.”

All "checking in with the home office" japery aside, the President* of the United States was on the line with the Russian president whose people ratfcked the 2016 presidential election and already may have started ratfcking the next one, and neither of those events even came up? This is like JFK's getting on the teletype with Khrushchev in October of 1962 and discussing the weather in Havana.

And this had escaped my notice.

Putin has echoed some of Trump’s talking points in ridiculing the Mueller probe. Russian state television described it as a witch hunt orchestrated by the U.S. political establishment to punish Trump for seeking to improve ties with Russia. Putin has denied that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. “We knew a mountain was being made out of a molehill, so to speak, because we knew how it would end beforehand,” Putin said last month. “Now it has come to pass, but it did not make the domestic political situation in the U.S. any easier. Now new excuses are being sought to attack President Trump.”

Explain to me how this entire presidency* isn't a national-security crisis. Jesus, Lord, somebody throw the emergency brake, or hand out parachutes.

Beto O’Rourke speaks at the National Forum on Wages and Working People: Creating an Economy That Works for All on April 27, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ethan Miller Getty Images

'Fi were king of the forest...the following things would happen.

Beto O'Rourke—or Joaquin Castro—would be running for the Senate in Texas, and Stacey Abrams would be running for the Senate in Georgia, and Steve Bullock would be running for the Senate in Montana. Michael Bennet would stay in the Senate to torment Ted Cruz further—a worthy goal for any right-thinking American. Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan would be running for re-election to the House, and Bill DeBlasio would be back in New York, trying to get the subways to run on time.

Nobody who watched William Barr's performance before a Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee this past week can sensibly deny that, as long as the Senate remains in the hands of the Republican Party, it doesn't matter what happens in the 2020 presidential election. If the incumbent* wins, there will be four more years of enabled destruction of our political institutions. If one of the Democrats wins, and the Senate stays Republican, the Democratic president simply will not be allowed to govern. Not as a Democrat, anyway.

And this didn't start with El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, either. The record shows that, upon Bill Clinton's election, good ol' Bob Dole announced that he was there to represent everyone who didn't vote for the winner. The Florida burglary in 2000 was in part a refusal to allow another Democrat to succeed Clinton, and the upper echelons of the Republican Party in Congress decided to obstruct Barack Obama at a dinner on the night of Obama's inauguration. If the Democratic Party can't get its senatorial campaigns together, they're chasing a fool's errand for which no fool would volunteer.

Thus, one of the most important Democratic politicians in the country is a woman named M.J. Reger, an Afghanistan vet and the favorite to win the Democratic nomination in Texas for a chance to relieve the Congress of the presence of John Cornyn. Outside of the presidential contest, that's the most critical election of them all.

The United States Senate could use Stacey Abrams. Jessica McGowan Getty Images

WWOZ Pick To Click: Once again, the mighty, mighty 'OZ was doing some broadcasting from Jazz Fest this week. Anyway, "Downtown Soulsville" (Chuck Edwards): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's a British guy in a motorized bathtub. Nice that they gave him a license plate. I don't know why I felt like including this but history is pretty cool.

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

An early winged dinosaur couldn’t fly, but it could run. Now, with assists from a robotic dino and young ostriches wearing artificial wings, a study suggests that the dinosaur’s running gait caused its wings to flap, in what may have been an evolutionary precursor to flight.

Caudipteryx was a peacock-sized dinosaur with feathered and winglike forelimbs that lived about 125 million years ago. Running at speeds of about 2.5 to 5.8 meters per second sent vibrations through its body, causing its wings to flap vigorously, scientists report online May 2 in PLOS Computational Biology. If true, the results suggest that some dinosaurs had to run before they could fly — adding a new wrinkle to a long-standing debate over whether the earliest fliers were flappers or gliders.

The vision of dozens of these poor beasts flapping their way across the savanna in futile attempts to get airborne is truly heartbreaking, even if does bring to mind a very famous skit from the Pythons.

In particular, Zhao and his colleagues wanted to see how Caudipteryx’s running gait might have jostled its forelimbs, perhaps causing them to flap involuntarily. Hypothetically, with strong enough vibrations — and if the wings were large and strong enough — such flapping could generate enough lift to leave the ground.

Imagine being the first dinosaur to find itself flying by accident. That seriously could screw you up. But the vision of all those plucky dinosaurs trying to conquer the air is enough to be glad they lived them to make us happy now.

The Committee was very impressed with Top Commenter Carol Nicklaus and her ability to use various variations of words beginning with "pend--" while resisting the temptation to employ the word, "pendejo" which in our current circumstances can be an overwhelming one.

As for any "pendency" inhibiting the president*'s ability to perform any "governance," I think that would be the "pendency" of his twitter device perpetually "pendent" from his fingers...

Pending delivery, you will have 80.11 Beckhams on the house.

I'll be back on Monday with the results of my borscht taste-testing, which is part of Making American Kiev Again. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don't give up trying to fly. A few million years from now, who knows?

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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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