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

On Friday, we saw (again) that the Democratic caucus in the United States Senate senses a little blood in the water. First, every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary signed a letter to chairman Chuck Grassley demanding that the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh be put on hold, at least until we know whether or not the president* will have to be furloughed to attend. From The Hill:

"Given the possibility of criminal wrongdoing by the President, doubts that Judge Kavanaugh believes a president can even be investigated, and the unprecedented lack of transparency regarding this nominee’s record, we should not move forward with hearings on September 4th," the Democratic senators wrote.

Moreover, Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, who defeated Roy Moore, the Gadsden Mall Creeper, and is the unlikeliest Democratic senator of them all, told Ali Velshi on MSNBC that he wants to "push the pause button" on the nomination until he sees more documents, and because the president*'s corruption is more obvious by the day.

Granted, this scenario still requires Susan Collins to stop being obtuse, and Lisa Murkowski to stop being a Republican, but the more revelations there are about the swamp flowing through Trump Tower, the sharper grows the criticism that a corrupt president* shouldn't be making lifetime Supreme Court appointments. They can't do much, but they're doing all they can.

Things I Didn't Know About Congress, Part The Infinity: In this month's Boston College alumni magazine, which I get because one of the kids works there—and please don't tell any of his deceased Holy Cross relations about that—there's a story about a guy named Jaime Martinez who spent the summer as a congressional intern. Contained in the story is an anecdote that stopped me in my tracks.

After a quick lunch in the basement cafeteria, Martinez watches a few minutes of the Australia-Peru World Cup soccer match at the press assistant’s desk. He sorts through the day’s foot-thick bundle of mail (which has been screened for poison), and throws away an issue of Hustler. “The publisher [Larry Flynt] has mailed every issue to every member of Congress since the 1980s,” says the press assistant.

I know that more than a few people working on the Hill pop into the shebeen from time to time, so I have to ask, is this utterly amazing fact true? Every congressional office? Every month? For 30-odd years? And how much would I pay to know who dumps the issue immediately and who keeps it around for private time? Many, many dollars.

Florida's holding its primary elections next Tuesday. One of the open congressional races is the seat being vacated by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Florida's 23rd Congressional District. Like many newspapers, and I'll never understand why, the Miami Herald endorses candidates from each party before the primary. Usually, I just blow by these, but the endorsement for the Republican candidate in the 23rd caught my eye, as did the Herald's explanation for it. The endorsement went to a woman named Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, who used to be a member of the Doral city council and who is now a successful owner of her own business. Then I came to this.

We realize that Rodriguez Aguilera is an unusual candidate. Last year, she told the Miami Herald—and several Spanish-language media outlets—that she believes in extra-terrestrials. She says when she was 7, she was taken aboard a spaceship and, throughout her life, she has communicated telepathically with the beings, which remind her of the concrete Christ in Brazil. There you have it. “This is a non-issue,” she told the Board. We agree.

What the ever-loving fck? How is this "a non-issue"? I don't care for how many people for whom this woman has found a job. She thinks that she's in telepathic contact with Beings From Beyond who look like a Brazilian statue. This isn't, "I believe in life elsewhere." This is, "I know there's life elsewhere because I've been there and we still chat from time to time." Whatever else it is, that's an issue, or ought to be, anyway. If she offered it in court, she'd probably get off on a lesser charge.

Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera. Roberto Koltun/Newscom

I will grant you that the Congress could use a few alien abductees so that we would know who they are, instead of having to guess, the way we do now. But the Herald seems awfully blithe here, no? She would be the strangest member of Congress since the departure of my main man, Ignatius Donnelly, except not even Donnelly said he actually had been to Atlantis.

Some people find it easy to dismiss the Russian ratfcking as simply more sophisticated electioneering with an unfortunate outcome. But there's evidence that the Russian ratfckers have determined that they can cause chaos in America at every level of the society. From statnews.com:

An analysis of Twitter accounts previously identified as having been operated by Russian bots and trolls found they dove into the vaccine debate as early as January 2015, the researchers reported. They did not take one side or the other, but seemed to tweet pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages in roughly equal measure. On a variety of issues, the overall aim of the Russian campaign appeared to be to erode social cohesion and generate confusion by amplifying the number of voices taking part in these debates on social media. But in the case of vaccines, that could have increased the misperception that the science on their safety and effectiveness isn’t settled—as is the case—but rather that it is still subject to debate.

There are currently measles outbreaks all over the world, including the United States. Punchline?

The cases have been in Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. Most of the people who got measles weren't vaccinated.

Anybody who believes that, to prop up his basket-case of a country, Vladmir Putin is not trying to pull everything down on his own head is as bad as the anti-vaxxers are. Ignorance is as contagious as the measles.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "How Could I Ever Help But Love You?" (Creole String Beans): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are the mobsters rounded up at the Apalachin Conference in upstate New York in 1957. Twenty-two of these high-priced murderous mooks were charges with deceiving a grand jury about the true nature of the meeting that had been busted. You get people on the charges you can get them on and then you let them stew. I have no idea why this particular clip came to mind. (Also huge props for NYDN reporters Howard Wantuch and Sidney Kline, for leaving us a lesson in great tabloid newspaper writing: "The bemusement of authorities was not lessened when large, shiny and expensive cars, most of them 1957 Cadillacs, began pouring into the area on Wednesday—and kept coming yesterday—from all parts of the country. The oldest car in the group was a '56 Caddy.") History is so cool.

Because of the efficiency with which the British Empire tried to stamp out the Irish language, cultural annihilation always has been an interest of mine. So I was struck by this effort from linguists to update and preserve the Lakota language against the tremendous and bloody efforts of past U.S. governments to stamp it out. One of their jobs is to create Native language phrases for things that were created, or which happened, in the years since the awful days of the late 19th Century. From The Outline:

Five years ago, a council of 12 to 20 fluent Lakota speakers began meeting each summer at Sitting Bull College in North Dakota to propose new phrases. (The meetings are run by the Lakota Language Consortium.) Hill, who participates in the meetings, recalled times when the group began with a list of 100 words they needed to create, and then three hours later, they’d have only finished two. Forming new words in Lakota means really getting to the root of what the word means in English, and vice versa. (Among the phrases recently proposed: yul’aya wayázaŋsú (cancer seed) for carcinogen; ziŋtkála bubúke (clumsy bird) for puffin; yapȟápȟapi othí, (place where they snack quickly) for delicatessen.



Developing neologisms is how languages survive, according to research by Ryan Denzer-King at the University of Montana. “If people are going to continue to use a language, they must be able to say what they want to say,” Denzer-King wrote in a 2008 paper. “A language with no word for ‘cell phone’ or ‘computer’ is less likely to be used by younger generations than one which innovates.” These new terms can reference tribal myths in wry ways. Among the Umatilla of Washington, there is a story of a black cloud that hovers over the coyote, foiling the coyote’s schemes by given away his location. Smartphone in Umatilla is thus “the black cloud that is always following.”

The Umatilla know what's what, I'll tell you that.



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

Both dinosaurs are alvarezsaurs, which began as meat-eaters that adapted to eat insects living in colonies, like anteaters. But they also had many similarities to birds, with bird-like skulls and hind limbs, the study said.



"Alvarezsaurs are weird animals," said Jonah Choiniere, study co-author and professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in a statement. "With their strong, clawed hands and weak jaws, they appear to be the dinosaurian analogue to today's aardvarks and anteaters." And when a dinosaur evolves from a meat-eater to an insect-eater, some pretty strange things can happen to their appearance.

And their cholesterol count goes down, too.

Early on, the dinosaurs were better equipped to be meat-eaters, with teeth and hands that could help them catch prey. But they evolved, losing teeth and developing shorter arms and a hand with one single huge claw. The claw could help them tear open rotting logs or anthills...The two new dinosaurs are Xiynykus, found in northwestern China, and Bannykus, found in north-central China. They are from the Early Cretaceous period, which stretched from 100 million to 146 million years ago. They help fill in a "ghost lineage" spanning 70 million years, falling right at the midpoint between the earliest and latest alvarezsaurs. The researchers said this helps cement that the dinosaurs began in Asia and moved on to other continents later as they evolved.

I have come to grips with the feathers thing, but having dinosaurs evolve into bug-eaters is going to take me some time to process. Nevertheless, they still lived then to make us happy now.

Rep. Duncan Hunter walks into the Federal Courthouse for an arraignment hearing on August 23 in San Diego. Sandy Huffaker Getty Images

The Committee knew that this week's Top Commenter of the Week was going to come from somewhere in the reaction to the amazing details of Rep. Duncan Hunter's indictment. (Six-hundred bucks to buy the family rabbit an airplane seat?) Top Commenter Mike Paganutti stepped up with a reference to the nearly $6000 of other people's money the Hunters spent at fast-food joints.

The judge should sentence the Hunters to 5 years of eating salads and other organic foods. No mercy for these crooks!

Excellent dietary advice, and 81.22 Beckhams to you, good sir. Keep them out of Panda Express, too.

I'll be back on Monday to report on whoever it is that's giving up the store to the Feds next. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and don't eat no bugs, and no using the Black Cloud, Always Following while you're driving.

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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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