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

DES MOINES—Just what the last weekend before actual voting needed—another homecooked nothingburger about Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent. Mrs Clinton's use of a personal email as secretary of state has become an issue in her presidential campaign. This is the first time her emails have been labelled classified at any level. Messages were marked "top secret" because they would cause "exceptionally grave" damage to national security if disclosed, the State Department said. Intelligence officials told the Associated Press that the 37 pages being withheld concerned so-called "special access programmes"—clandestine projects like drone strikes or government eavesdropping. Hillary Clinton's campaign said the emails were not marked classified when they were sent and should not be withheld.

Again, all of these e-mails were marked classified ex post facto, and they were withheld at the behest of someone in the intelligence community and not at the behest of either HRC or her campaign. So, instead, we get the really great headline—Classified Information In The E-Mails!—to chew over all weekend, which may be the entire point. Right at this moment, at 5:31 EST on MSNBC, there's a very tiny live picture of HRC giving a speech while, on the full-screen, they're talking about what a political miracle He, Trump is. I dread the Sunday gobshitery with a dread that is fathomless.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post continues its very strange crusade to convince America that Bernie Sanders will arrange that the Tsar and his family are murdered deep in the Urals, or, at least, that his pie has gone far aloft.

In fact, we would love that—and we were heartened that Mr. Sanders chose to engage with our editorial. Yet our disagreements with Mr. Sanders are not as he portrayed them; they do not concern the problems he chooses to address or the boldness with which he proposes to address them. The nation could use big measures to take on climate change, advance public health, tackle poverty, shore up entitlement programs, boost education, improve our democracy and do all sorts of other things that Mr. Sanders cares about. We argue for policies such as a carbon tax and public campaign financing, even though they are subject to massive and possibly insurmountable political opposition, because they would lead to large and needed changes. What concerns us is not that Mr. Sanders' program to tackle these issues is "radical," as he put it, but that it is not very well thought out.

If you're keeping score at home, this editorial is in response to Sanders' response to an earlier editorial that we discussed here in the shebeen on Thursday. And it behooves us to remind us that this charge that Sanders is dealing in half-baked ideas that are "not very well thought-out" is presided over by a guy who went all in on C-Plus Augustus obviously fully baked plan to turn Iraq into Westchester County, and who regularly trafficks in nonsense about Social Security and Medicare, and who fell all over himself to hire hacks from the worst administration in the country's history. He also drapes his prose in a kind of fairy-tale "centrism" that is far more fanciful than any idea Bernie Sanders ever has had.

Just now on MSNBC, Marc Caputo, who works in Florida for Tiger Beat On The Potomac, was talking about Marco Rubio's days as speaker of the Florida House and argued that, unlike in Washington, various state constitutions mandating a balanced budget mean that the people in the state legislatures are "forced to work together." I think kindly Doc Maddow's work in Flint is rather a good argument against that, as are the state governments in Wisconsin, North Carolina, etc. etc. etc. God, Sunday is going to be awful.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "If My Shoes Hold Out" (Alvin Tyler): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's a coup d'etat in Greece from 1935. And en francais, no less. History is so cool.

Rick Snyder is well on his way to joining Dick Nixon as history's yard waste.

Emails released by the office of Gov. Rick Snyder last week referred to a resident who said she was told by a state nurse in January 2015, regarding her son's elevated blood lead level, "It is just a few IQ points. … It is not the end of the world."

It's just five years in prison, Rick. It's not the end of the world.

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

Remains of the world's newest known dinosaur, Eotrochodon orientalis, were discovered in a creekbank in Montgomery County in 2007. The roughly 83 million-year-old skeleton is 12-13 feet long and is on display at McWane Science Center in Birmingham. Earlier this month, after years of excavation and research, the dinosaur was named by the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, effectively legitimizing the discovery and making history in the state of Alabama and the United States. "This is like a Mona Lisa here," said Jun Ebersole, the director of collections at McWane Science Center and one of the paleontologists who studied the bones. "More people have been struck by lightning than have named new dinosaurs. There's probably 900 or less dinosaurs, and most of them were named a couple hundred years ago. It's just unbelievably rare."

There is no truth to the rumor that the beast was found wearing an ancient houndstooth hat.

And it's an extra good day for general paleontological news!

Construction crews digging in the north end zone in Reser Stadium on Monday uncovered a large femur bone, likely from a mammoth, OSU announced. Further digging revealed more bones from several extinct mammals.

At least two of them were found with letters-of-intent in their teeth.

Obviously, I will be blogging all weekend from old Ioway. (Hell, my man Chuck Todd just told us that we're going to have special editions of MTP all weekend.) But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be well and play nice. Stay above the snakeline, or I may just buy a house in Waukee and never return.

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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