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

The White House got rolled on Friday by Nancy Pelosi, to be sure. But it also got rolled by TSA agents, and air-traffic controllers, government employees standing at food co-ops and pantries, as well as thousands of inconvenienced ordinary Americans standing in line at airports. This is more important than the fact that the president* got beaten again by the new-slash-old Speaker of the House.

It was said by more than a few people that the shutdown would prove to be an alpha test for small government. Instead, it became a demonstration that 40 years of that kind of thinking may finally have run out of energy. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans made the opposite case by standing in all those lines. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans decided that government was the solution, and not the problem, at least as far as getting from the ticket counter to the jetway.

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I'm stressing the whole air-traffic business because that's where the long slide toward Trumpism began. When Ronald Reagan broke the controllers' union, he signaled that the federal government was a) open for business, and b) on the side of management, and therefore on the side of capital and not labor, and the Republican Party committed itself to that equation as a matter of faith. Simultaneously, it adopted supply-side economics as its only real policy in that area. And that's where it's been since 1981. Until, I suspect, maybe, now.

This particular moment can go either way. It is tenuous and there still are pretty good odds that it may be an evanescent one. It may even be a kind of mirage created by a preposterous president* who seems bound and determined to bring the temple down on his own head. Or he may be the inadvertent catalyst for a renewed faith in our political commonwealth. It's not often in our history that we have had this kind of chance to see what we shouldn't ever be. (The last one may well have been the Confederate States of America.) A teachable moment, as it were.

KENA BETANCUR Getty Images

Good god, what does it take? A silver bullet. The Iran-Contra scandal is just never going to leave me alone. From Politico:

Abrams’ appointment, announced Friday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is something of a surprise — President Donald Trump nixed his 2017 bid to be deputy secretary of state after learning that Abrams had criticized him.

Yeah, that's the problem with handing what already is a misbegotten foreign policy adventure over to a guy who used to cover up massacres in nearby countries.

Abrams will now be one of several special envoys Pompeo has brought on board to tackle thorny issues. He takes on his role at an unusually volatile time in U.S.-Venezuelan relations. Earlier this week, Trump announced he no longer recognized the legitimacy of the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro and said the U.S. now considers opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s “Interim president.” But Maduro is refusing to leave power and has declared that Venezuela will cut off diplomatic ties with the United States. “This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous, and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” Abrams said in brief remarks to reporters.

I guarantee you that the Venezuelans can wait for that. I know they can live without it.

Elliot Abrams JIM WATSON Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "It Ain't Your Ladder" (Willie Walker and the Butanes): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: While we're on the topic of Speakers of the House, here's Sam Rayburn's funeral from 1961. I don't know about you, but I think LBJ looked pretty good in a bow-tie. History is so cool.

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

The world of the dinosaurs just got a bit more bizarre with a newly discovered species of freshwater shark whose tiny teeth resemble the alien ships from the popular 1980s video game Galaga.

We have a generation of scientists who grew up with video games, so we're going to have to live with the analogies, I guess. And, apparently, we may have dinosaurs named after Defender, Asteroids, and, who knows, maybe even a Pong-o-saurus.

Unlike its gargantuan cousin the megalodon, Galagadon nordquistae was a small shark (approximately 12 to 18 inches long), related to modern-day carpet sharks such as the "whiskered" wobbegong. Galagadon once swam in the Cretaceous rivers of what is now South Dakota, and its remains were uncovered beside "Sue," the world's most famous T. rex fossil. "The more we discover about the Cretaceous period just before the non-bird dinosaurs went extinct, the more fantastic that world becomes," says Terry Gates, lecturer at North Carolina State University and research affiliate with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Gates is lead author of a paper describing the new species along with colleagues Eric Gorscak and Peter J. Makovicky of the Field Museum of Natural History. "It may seem odd today, but about 67 million years ago, what is now South Dakota was covered in forests, swamps and winding rivers," Gates says. "Galagadon was not swooping in to prey on T. rex, Triceratops, or any other dinosaurs that happened into its streams. This shark had teeth that were good for catching small fish or crushing snails and crawdads."

Freshwater sharks seem to have been sharks on a rather honorary basis, but they, too, lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday to see if Speaker Pelosi has left the president* wearing nothing but a barrel. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and watch the churn, because the churn is getting good.

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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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