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

In the annals of the administration* that hired All The Best People, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is going to need his own file cabinet. Not only has this administration decided to revoke the regulations put in place when the Deepwater Horizon damned near killed the Gulf of Mexico, but Pruitt also has a taste for clumsy cronyism that fits right into an administration* in which Jared Kushner still has a security clearance. Sharon Lerner of The Intercept brings us the latest one of All The Best People who have come to Washington.

In May, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fined Oklahoma banker Albert Kelly $125,000. According to a consent order, which The Intercept obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the FDIC had “reason to believe that [Kelly] violated a law or regulation, by entering into an agreement pertaining to a loan by the Bank without FDIC approval."

Two weeks later, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt appointed Kelly to lead an effort to streamline the Superfund program. In July, the FDIC went further, banning Kelly from banking for life. The “order of prohibition from further participation” explained that the FDIC had determined Kelly’s “unfitness to serve as a director, officer, person participating in the conduct of the affairs or as an institution-affiliated party of the Bank, any other insured depository institution.”

What’s worse, that this guy is manifestly unqualified for the job he has now, or that he was openly disqualified for the job at which he was supposed to be good in the first place? These are the questions of the new political age.

The appointment was notable in that Kelly would become a senior adviser in the federal environmental agency despite having no previous experience with environmental issues. A business major with a law degree and a 200-head cattle ranch, Kelly listed motivational speaking and political activity among the core competencies on his resume. The descendant of a long line of bankers and Republicans, Kelly had worked at his family’s bank for the previous 33 years.

As we saw during Hurricane Harvey in Texas, SuperFund sites are dangerous and vulnerable to disasters that have nothing to do with their inherent dangers. So why shouldn’t a failed banker and “motivational speaker” be in charge of keeping them safe, and keeping us safe from them? These are the questions of the new political age.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Blue Skies” (Dr. John): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans, and that is unlikely to change in the new year.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s New Year’s in Vietnam in 1949. There is dancing and singing and a halberdier. There are also a number of fortune tellers. I wonder how many of the fortune tellers—besides Graham Greene, of course—were so good at their jobs that, horrified at what they saw, they immediately got out of the business. History is so cool.

And history is going to be what we’re playing for over the next 12 months. The question of what kind of country we want to be was left rather open when the Avignon Presidency blew town and took Dick Cheney and his hench-people with it. Whatever its benefits, and they were considerable, the Obama Administration proved to be a marvelous anesthetic but it induced a kind of amnesia. The question never got answered, not fully, and now the question is blown wide open for good and, for a variety of factors, cowardice and greed chief among them, the mechanisms in the institutions through which we are supposed to answer that question have broken down utterly.

The citizens of the country–namely, us—are going to come up with the answer themselves—or they’re not going to, which will answer the question anyway. What we have seen since January cannot be sustainable. The assaults on democratic norms from the White House, and the complete abdication of constitutional obligations from a smash-and-grab Congress, are an unprecedented challenge to a lot that we’ve taken for granted. To paraphrase author Herman Wouk, either Trumpism is finished or this republic as we know it is.

Was it a good year for dinosaur news, Newsweek? It’s always a good year for dinosaur news! And it still is! From Newscom.au:



They were preparing to build a school in Jiangxi province when they discovered 20 black shells underneath the soil, reports The Sun. Experts claim they go back to the cretaceous period which dates between 145 million and 66 million years ago. Photos of the remarkable find appear to show the 2mm thick eggs to be in tact though further tests are needed. Construction was halted while scientists recovered the eggs to test their veracity.It comes just weeks after palaeontologists found a 100 million-year-old “Dracula” tick which could contain the DNA of extinct dinosaurs. The tick was gripping on to a dinosaur feather after 99 million years in a piece of fossilised tree resin from Myanmar.

Let us be clear. Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now. There is no great hurry to try and create dinosaurs who live now to make us lunch now.

Congratulations to the invaluable Greg Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times for his round-up of stories that can be filed under the simple rubric, Florida Man. And, yes, they are a pack o’doozies.

A Micanopy school was placed on lockdown when a man threatened parents in the car line with a gun and a dead possum. A St. Lucie County woman used a Christmas tree topper to hit her sister. A Vero Beach woman attacked a police officer with an electric toothbrush. Not all weapons functioned the way they were supposed to.

In Florida, people threaten each other with actual dead possums. In Washington, threatening someone with a dead possum is also called a Republican budget proposal.

The Committee is on its annual break, but, once again, the Top Commenter Of The Year award is shared with all of y’all. The shebeen has seen an awful lot of mopes come and go this year, and even more mopes who come and never freaking leave, but the regulars are the ones that keep the lights on. So let’s lift a pint to 2018 and batten everything down. It’s a sturdy place. I think we can ride it out, so long as we be well, play nice, and stay above the snake-line. See you all next year.

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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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