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

In case you missed it, White House blight Stephen Miller never ceases to be struck dumb by brainstorms, some of which he put in emails to Breitbart that were helpfully leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Miller discussed the subject of DACA as it relates to demographic replacement in a March 10, 2015, email while criticizing former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, then widely expected to be a top GOP candidate for president in 2016. Miller condemned his fellow Republicans on the subject of immigration and also birthright citizenship, which the 14th Amendment grants to those born or naturalized in the United States. Far-right extremists want to eliminate birthright citizenship outright.

“Demanding DREAMers be given citizenship because they ‘know no other home.’ That principle is an endorsement of perpetual birthright citizenship for the foreign-born,” Miller wrote in the email, using a term to describe DACA recipients. “Not only will the U.S.-born children of future illegal immigrants and guest workers be made automatic U.S. citizens, but their foreign-born children will too because, as [former Republican House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor said, ‘Our country was founded on the principle.’”

And how would we rectify this dire situation? Newsweek reports that Miller had some ideas on that, too. He would put them on trains. Deporting people on trains? What an innovative notion! Whoever would have thought of that?

Missouri has become an outpost of really bad ideas, and the latest is one that is going to throw the reading habits of every child into the warm embrace of a “Parental Advisory Board.” The ostensible purpose is said to be to keep kids from accessing porn on the public dime but, honestly, can anyone who’s watched what’s happened over the past two decades with so-called “Parental Advisory Boards” believe that this eventually won’t get around to a brawl over the ideas to which kids can be exposed? (Even elected school boards aren’t immune to talk-radio-inspired frenzies.) And Missouri has been a bit manic in recent years. Luckily, this little bit of heaven got light shone on it early. Librarians are not to be fcked with.

Everything Obama must be erased. NurPhoto Getty Images

Fairly soon, I suspect this administration* will file a bill removing one of the 'A's in Obama’s name. From the Washington Post:



On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them the ability to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Lipps said the changes will help address what he described as unintended issues that developed as a result of the regulations put in place during the Obama administration. For example, when schools were trying to implement innovative solutions such as grab-and-go breakfast off a cart or meals in the classroom, they were forced to give kids two bananas to meet minimum federal requirements.



These changes come on the heels of other controversial program alterations rolled out by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in 2019, weakening school nutrition standards for whole grain, nonfat milk and sodium, all of which had been tightened during the Obama administration. Perdue cited food waste and nonparticipation as key rationales for the shift. The rule was part of USDA’s Regulatory Reform Agenda, developed in response to President Trump’s executive order to eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens.



This dangerous idiocy is going to cause untold problems for kids and families down the line because an actual president made fun of a president* at a banquet years ago.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “The Girl Who Wept Stones” (Brother Dege): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are happy Ukrainian farmers singing “The Song of the Harvesters” from 1935, which is two years after the end of the engineered famine through which Stalin starved almost four million Ukrainians who didn’t live long enough to perform in disgraceful propaganda films. However, if things keep going the way they are in Washington today, we may all have to learn the lyrics, since Ukraine is providing such a rich harvest of evidence. History is so cool.

You may have missed it, but Robert Hyde, Lev Parnas’s text buddy and Republican candidate for Congress, blessed us all via the electric Twitter machine with his explanation for the major international events into which he staggered, and no, I got nothing. I hope this guy finds some help, legal and otherwise.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, EurekAlert? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The one-of-a-kind specimen offers a window into what the earth was like 120 million years ago. The fossil preserves feathers and bones that provide new information about how dinosaurs grew and how they differed from birds. "The new dinosaur fits in with an incredible radiation of feathered, winged animals that are closely related to the origin of birds," said Dr. Ashley Poust, who analyzed the specimens while he was a student at Montana State University and during his time as a Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley. Poust is now postdoctoral researcher at the San Diego Natural History Museum. "Studying specimens like this not only shows us the sometimes-surprising paths that ancient life has taken, but also allows us to test ideas about how important bird characteristics, including flight, arose in the distant past.”

It took me a long time to get with the notion that dinosaurs and birds were as closely connected on the evolutionary timeline as they have proven to be, although every time I see a heron or a Canada goose I wonder why it took people so long to tumble to it.

Larger than a common crow and smaller than a raven, but with a long, bony tail which would have doubled its length, Wulong bohaiensis had a narrow face filled with sharp teeth. Its bones were thin and small, and the animal was covered with feathers, including a wing-like array on both its arms and legs and two long plumes at the end of its tail. This animal is one of the earliest relatives of Velociraptor, the famous dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that lived approximately 75 million years ago. Wulong's closest well-known relative would have been Microraptor, a genus of small, four-winged paravian dinosaurs.

Sounds pretty homely, but it lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee is always up for good travel tips, and Top Commenter William Smith was happy to oblige, with a bonus Beetle Bailey shoutout.

Richmond. The best thing anybody ever said about that place is that it was "a hotbed of social rest". This is the place whose newspaper dropped the cartoon strip "Beetle Bailey" when Lieutenant Fuzz made his appearance in the early 1970’s.

The capital of the Confederacy has really become boring, thank god. And 78.11 Beckhams to you, good sir.

I’m off the convalescent couch and off to Washington on Monday, god willing, to see the constitutional hootenanny of all hootenannies. Hey, the impeachment of a president only comes along three times in a lifetime. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and read whatever you damn well please in your local public library.

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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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