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

A long time ago, a beloved bartender in Dublin took a job at another pub, and all its regulars went with him, and one of the newspapers caught wind of the event and headlined its account, The Ship Is Deserting The Sinking Rats.

Keep that in mind.

Absent the current occupant of the White House, there is no good reason for Hurd to hang 'em up. He's a young, African-American Republican whose congressional district stretches for miles along the southern border. If there was anyone ready-made to build a career on the ruins of this presidency*, it would be someone like Hurd. Hurd is the third Texas Republican in the past two weeks to decide to spend more time with their families, and the sixth GOP member of the House to do so. There's a shambles on the horizon.

I don't expect that the president* has any clue, nor would he care very much if he had one. He's not interested in building a party, nor does he particularly care about the one he ostensibly leads. There are quite a few Republican members of Congress who are starting to feel a distinct chill. And they do so full in the knowledge that the re-election of this president* is the only priority of the their party, and of millions of people they all need to get re-elected. There's a shambles on the horizon, and the view is getting better and more ghastly.

It appears Lake Michigan has a bit of an issue. Raymond Boyd Getty Images

As we often point out, the sea doesn't care who wins the political argument over the climate crisis. It turns out that really big lakes don't care much, either. From the Chicago Tribune:

For the second straight month, according to preliminary records, Lake Michigan has crested to its highest mark in over three decades — each time 1 inch shy of record highs set in 1986. It takes roughly 780 billion gallons of water to raise Lake Michigan 1 inch. Since 2013, the lake has risen nearly 6 feet from record lows. And in Chicago, no part of the shoreline has come away unscathed. This year, the buoyant water has swallowed at least two Chicago beaches entirely and periodically closed others. It has swiped fishermen from piers, swimmers from beaches and submerged jetties, creating hazards for boaters. It has flooded heavily trafficked parts of lakefront bicycle and pedestrian pathways, leaving some stretches underwater and others crumbling. But perhaps the most worrisome aspect of this summer is that these perils have occurred while the lake has remained mostly calm.

Gary Feracota, president of the Chicago Harbor Safety Committee, said boaters who don’t have GPS devices should familiarize themselves with navigational charts provided by the U.S. Coast Guard. “The navigation risks are very, very high — the highest we’ve seen in a lot of years," Feracota said. "When you have high lake levels, these structures that are normally visible from the water are submerged — but not submerged enough not to hit. They’re just hidden by the water. So, if you don’t have your wits about you and you’re not attentive, you can certainly run into trouble.”

This is a lake, flooded by unprecedented rainfall all over the midwest. The ocean is just getting started.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Yes, I'm In The Barrel" (Louis Armstrong): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some people on a "moving sidewalk" in 1925. They don't seem to be going anywhere in particular, but they do seem to be having fun.

It’s over for Mr. Radcliffe of Texas. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS Getty Images

The comic opera that was the nomination of Rep. John Ratcliffe to be the next Director of National Intelligence is now over. But, according to The New York Times, the administration*'s floundering has cost them the possibility of actually doing the right thing.

The decision to circumvent Ms. Gordon, who has served as the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will probably upset Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. They have expressed doubts about Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, who is President Trump’s choice to be the next Senate-confirmed leader of the agency.

Mr. Trump did not allow Ms. Gordon to personally deliver a recent intelligence briefing after she arrived at the White House, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence, Amanda J. Schoch, said Ms. Gordon was not blocked from attending any recent briefing, but she declined to comment about what happened inside the Oval Office.

Opposition in the White House to letting her serve as acting director has raised the question of whether she will be ousted as part of a leadership shuffle at the intelligence director’s office that will be more to Mr. Trump’s liking.



This is not my area of expertise but it seems to me that, if your original terrible choice blew up in your face, you might want a competent placeholder there until the brain spasm passes and someone talks you back into reality for a minute or two. I've often mocked the "community" part of the phrase, "intelligence community." Now, though,"intelligence" has been rendered the real joke.

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

Just as we now know that dinosaurs had feathers and potentially had mating rituals similar to modern birds, it's very possible that dinosaurs sounded more like birds than we'd like to think. In a paper published in Evolution researchers raise the possibility that the sounds some birds make (coos, booms, and hoots) might have their roots in the vocalizations of their ancestors: dinosaurs. "To make any kind of sense of what nonavian dinosaurs sounded like, we need to understand how living birds vocalize," co-author of the paper Julia Clarke said. "This makes for a very different Jurassic world. Not only were dinosaurs feathered, but they may have had bulging necks and made booming, closed-mouth sounds."



OK, I've made my peace with the feathers and so on. But dinosaurs that coo? Song-dinos? Warbling dinos? That's going to take some time, I think, to come to grips with, but it does make me happy now that they sang then.



Top Commenter Randall Holbrook takes 76.11 Beckhams for summoning up the spirit of a great American while discussing the president*'s manic episode in Cincinnati on Thursday night.



I've come to the conclusion that Il Douche's speeches are the result of a late-night seance that is making a complete hash out of contacting the spirit of Tex Avery.



I'll be back on Monday, preparing to hit the Iowa State Fair at the end of next week. I'm getting into corndog shape in the meantime. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and we'll see yez around the sheep barn.

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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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