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

Well, the getaway plane is on its way. And just in time, too. From The New York Times:

"I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job," Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off." Mr. Trump added, "I'm not under investigation." The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau's investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

And, from The Washington Post:

The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official. The revelation comes as the investigation also appears to be entering a more overtly active phase, with investigators shifting from work that has remained largely hidden from the public to conducting interviews and using a grand jury to issue subpoenas. The intensity of the probe is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, the people said. The sources emphasized that investigators remain keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

For a long while, I've resisted the notion of removing a president through the 25th amendment, which is a ghastly jerry-rigged thing open to all kinds of political abuses and usurpations, to borrow Mr. Jefferson's phrase. But with half of Washington leaking to the other half, and with nobody in town including the president* able to keep their yaps shut, the whole government is throwing rods and leaking oil. The system can't possibly sustain itself with all of this going on. Something's going to break unless a whole lot of somebodies do their jobs.

If it's not one damn thing, it's another, ain't it, Popular Mechanics?

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a collection of almost a million seed packets containing every variety of crop in the world, embedded within a mountain beneath the Arctic permafrost in a container designed to last forever. Or at least, that was the plan. The exceedingly warm weather over the past several months actually melted enough of the permafrost to cause flooding inside the vault. The soaring temperatures led to heavy rains and flooding in a section of the entrance. Fortunately none of the seeds were compromised. To prevent something like this from happening again, the vault's managers are taking steps to flood-proof it. They're digging drainage tunnels, removing some excess electrical equipment, and installed pumps just in case. Still, the vault is supposed to be able to survive without any human intervention. This sort of flooding could happen again, and next time there might not be any humans around to fix it. If we want our doomsday safeguard to survive for the next few centuries, we'll need to either reverse global warming completely or come up with some way for our seeds—and maybe ourselves—to survive it.

Getty Images

I've always thought that the seed vault was one of the best ideas anyone ever had. Naturally, now we're screwing that up now.

The seed vault is well-protected against a nuclear apocalypse, for instance, but is vulnerable to the less flashy crisis of climate change.

The polar bears should just come down and eat us all now.

What's going to be highly entertaining, if it ever comes to pass, is the spectacle of Weepin' Joe Lieberman facing a passel of skeptical Democratic congressmen during the confirmation process to become the new FBI director. Removing Lieberman from the equation, slapping a septuagenarian politician with no experience in law enforcement into that snakepit is a bad idea on the merits. Congressman Elijah Cummings can explain the stakes to you.

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Powerful final message from Elijah Cummings: “This is about the fight for the soul of our democracy. We cannot afford to lose this one.” pic.twitter.com/44s3KiaHn9 — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 19, 2017

But putting Lieberman in there is hilariously awful. He was last seen vouching before a Senate committee on behalf of the execrable Betsy DeVos. You can add this to the vast rack of coats he's turned that includes waxing sententiously about Bill Clinton's sins of the flesh, hamstringing Al Gore during the Florida recount process, ignoring the will of the Democratic primary voters in Connecticut and using Karl Rove's money to do it, appearing on behalf of John McCain at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and damned near being McCain's running mate, and sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. Please, god, let this happen. It ain't 1998 any more, Joe. You can finally stand for all the damage you did.

It seems that Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin got a bit crossways with Senator Professor Warren the other day when he tried to pretend that he's really opposed to unregulated big banks. He kept talking about "a 21st Century Glass-Steagall" law. As Stephanie Ruhle and Ali Velshi pointed out Friday morning on MSNBC, this is a meaningless phrase. Glass-Steagall means separating investment banks from commercial banks, so that the former can't play in the Big Casino with depositors' money. Period. Any bill that does not achieve that separation, no matter what century you hang on it, isn't a Glass-Steagall anything. Mnuchin tried to double-talk this codswallop past SPW. It did not go well.

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Enda Kenny, the current Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, announced this week that he would be stepping down as leader of the Fine Gael party prior to the next general election. This effectively ends his political career. Kenny's tenure as the country's prime minister, a job he's held since 2011, has its share of detractors. He managed to steer Ireland through the financial catastrophe of 2008, for which there were not many good answers and none that would please everyone. (He pushed to bail out Ireland's big banks, which did him no more political favors than bailing out the banks over here did for two consecutive presidents.) He was criticized heavily for being in thrall of the financial powers of the European Union. But, for me, from afar, what I will remember is how Kenny stepped up on what we would call the "social issues" over here. It was during his time as Taoiseach that Ireland passed its marriage equality amendment in 2015, a cause that Kenny championed. He also worked hard to repair the moral catastrophes that the institutional Roman Catholic Church had wrought on the Irish people through history.

He apologized on behalf of the nation for the horrors of the so-called Magdalene Laundries. And, after a 2011 report was published detailing the abuse of minors by 19 priests in the Diocese of Cloynes, Kenny got up before the Dail Eireann and delivered one of the most remarkable addresses ever made by an Irish politician, excoriating the institutional church for its historic disrespect for the institutions of secular government in Ireland. It was a defense of civic institutions against theocratic sabotage that can stand with James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments as a defense of secular law and secular government.

Thankfully for us, this is not Rome. Nor is it industrial school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane smothered conscience and humanity, or the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish Catholic world. This is the Republic of Ireland, 2011 – a republic of laws, of rights and responsibilities, of proper civic order where the delinquency and the arrogance of a particular form of morality will no longer be tolerated or ignored…I want to make it clear as Taoiseach that, when it comes to the protection of the children of this state, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself cannot and will not be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic.

He also got off a good one when he came to visit our new president* for the first time.

I'm not close enough to Irish politics to judge the nuances of the years he spent as Taoiseach but, will o'god, as my grandmother would say, Enda Kenny could rise to an occasion.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Gimme A Pigfoot" (Bessie Smith): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's President Kennedy meeting King Saud. They met in Palm Beach because the king was on the mend. No word on the video as to whether Kennedy insisted on his steak and ketchup. History is so cool.

I don't know what in the hell is going on with Lawrence O'Donnell and the panjandrums at NBC/MSNBC. What I do know is that, if he somehow loses its show, it won't be because of his ratings or his ad revenues, which are all that are supposed to matter in that business. Right now, MSNBC has a cable-news juggernaut between eight and 11 p.m so, naturally, the solution to this problem is to take one wheel off the juggernaut. I will never understand TV or the people in it. Swear to god, I won't.

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

The main attraction is a fossil from a new species of armoured dinosaur (known as nodosaur) discovered at the Suncor Millenium Mine near Fort McMurray in 2011, the museum said in a blog post about the exhibit. At approximately 112 million years old, it is the oldest known dinosaur ever found in Alberta. According to the museum, the fossil was found by a Suncor employee who "spotted something unusual" while excavating the mine. "Little did he know that this would turn out to be one of the most significant dinosaur discoveries in the world." Scientists found that a significant amount of the dinosaur fossil's skin and its "armour, complete from the snout to hips" was intact.

That dinosaur is so well-preserved it could sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. See? Dinosaurs lived then so we could make jokes and be happy today.

The post about the president*'s cancelling his visit to Masada because they wouldn't let him land his helicopters on the ruins atop the plateau brought out the best of the shebeen's Top Commenters. However, Top Commenter Patrick Fiegenbaum takes home the House Cup as Top Commenter for this little reference-heavy gem:

So he cancelled the whole appearance at Masada? And I was so looking forward to President Trump's warm reminiscences about the time Peter O'Toole and David Warner visited there on behalf of the Roman Empire – wonderful people, the Romans.

Summoning up a 1981 miniseries, back when they still had miniseries? That's the way you pick up 84.35 Beckhams, my good man.

I'll be back on Monday with whatever President Griswold does overseas, which at the moment, I don't want to think about very much. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and eat all the veggies you can, because nothing is forever.

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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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