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

You just had to know it somehow would come around to tapes.

When the president* decided to play two-bit loan shark with James Comey on Friday morning, it was the final plot twist that sent the saga sailing off into Nixonland. And you knew that, once people started talking about tapes, there was going to be a press secretary twisting slowly in the wind. From NBC News:

"The president has nothing further to add on that," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said at the daily briefing when asked several times by reporters about the president's tweet…

It might just be a diversion. Say "tapes" and everybody goes 1973 all over. But does anybody doubt that this president* would do it? People who've worked for the guy wouldn't be surprised. He's certainly paranoid enough to do it. He's also paranoid enough to have asked Comey three times about whether or not he was under investigation. You could hardly hear Spicer today over the sound of the cock crowing.

You always knew it was going to come around some way to tapes. Alexander Butterfield, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Or, as the Blog's favourite living Canadian once put it:

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Some of the real damage that can be done while we're all chasing shiny nuggets of mendacity all over the Beltway is being done to the environment, where the extraction industries and assorted parasites are having a field day on the fields and prairies, lakes and mountains. They're not going to be satisfied until they dig out all the vowels from "American the Beautiful," as the Center for American Progress crew illustrates.

The latest threat to public interest safeguards is the Senate version of the Regulatory Accountability Act. This bill is a pernicious assault on public health and safety cloaked in vague language about arcane procedures and assessments, which is what makes it so dangerous. One's eyes can glaze over when reading the 58-page bill, but the bill's effects are alarming: It would shut down any efforts by federal agencies—such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Environmental Protection Agency—to issue new safeguards that industry dislikes. Among its most egregious provisions, the RAA sets an impossibly high burden of proof that agencies would have to meet before finalizing and implementing a new rule, such as a new air quality or food safety standard. The bill also requires agencies to conduct several rounds of cost-benefit analyses that give more weight to the compliance costs to industry than the benefits to Americans. Taken together, these provisions and others in the bill could lead to total gridlock in the agencies charged with protecting the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe; ensuring that products are safe before they enter the market; and reining in the worst financial market abuses.

Case in point: the Pebble Mine in Alaska is back on the rails. The Pebble Mine is a gluttonous and massive project that has been the bane of environmentalists for over a decade. It has arrayed the usual suspects against local fishermen, indigenous people, and everybody else who would rather not eat salmon that's 85 percent mining product. (Also, being 85 percent sediment makes it very hard for the salmon to swim upstream.) The previous administration put the kibosh on this sprawling catastrophe, but now, under new EPA administrator Scott (Dig, Baby, Dig) Pruitt, it's full speed ahead. From The Washington Post:

A coalition of fishing operators, native Alaskans, environmentalists and local businesses have fought the mine proposal for more than a decade, ever since Northern Dynasty Minerals began exploring for minerals in 2004. While this area in southwestern Alaska contains a reservoir of gold worth an estimated $120 billion, its pockmarked lakes and tributaries feed into the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to a fishery that generates $500 million a year. In 2014 the EPA invoked a rarely used clause of the Clean Water Act, 404(c), to issue a proposed determination that the company could not apply to the Army Corps of Engineers for any permits because a massive mine could have "significant" and potentially "catastrophic" impacts on the region.

A lot of really bad stuff is happening, and the scope of our radar is disturbingly narrow right now.

It's not just that they're a bunch of prevaricating authoritarian thooleramawns. It's just that they're so hilariously goddamn bad at it. From CBS News:

President Donald Trump's lawyers say a review of his last 10 years of tax returns do not reflect "any income of any type from Russian sources," with some exceptions.

Presumably, this is the top law firm that the president* referred to during his chat with Lester Holt. Wait, Morgan Lewis, you say? Tell us, Fortune.

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, the law firm advising President-elect Donald Trump on handling his business conflicts, won the Russia Law Firm of the Year award in 2016. The law firm announced the award in a press release last May, noting it was recognized in the Chambers & Partners' 2016 Chambers Europe guide. According to Morgan Lewis' website, the firm's Moscow office staffs more than 40 lawyers who are well known in the Russian market and "have deep familiarity with the local legislation, practices and key players."

And then there's the bafflement by so many as to why the Republican leadership has been scared Shih Tzu into lapdog mode as to its responsibility to be some sort of a check on a national executive that's gone to the zoo. Most of these people have forgotten a neat little Christmas present we all got from The New York Times.

But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers…Why the Russian government might care about these unglamorous House races is a source of bafflement for some of the lawmakers who were targeted. But if the goal of Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, was to make American democracy a less attractive model to his own citizens and to Russia's neighbors, then entangling congressional races in accusations of leaks and subterfuge was a step in the right direction. The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee. The document dump's effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States.

Any honest investigation into the involvement of the Russian government in our recent elections needs to include these House races, too. It would be nice to have under oath Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, to find out exactly how much of the foundation of his majority is built on borscht.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Blow, Blow, Tenor" (The Yokomo All Stars): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here's some G-men in training from 1935. The one target falling off the wall is a nice touch, and we don't make nice death masks any more. It was a lot easier when the FBI was chasing Russians instead of being tackled in the pursuit by presidents. History is so cool.

Hey, Popular Mechanics, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

The new species is thought to be the largest known creature to roost by sitting on its nest to care for its unhatched young. The new species of oversized oviraptorosaur, a giant bird-like dinosaur named Beibeilong sinensis ("baby dragon"), was discovered by a joint team of Chinese, Canadian, and Slovak paleontologists. The enormous creatures lived between 89 and 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

Not only that, but the egg piled up quite a saga on its way to its current fame.

As China's economy began to grow in the 1990s, a market developed for dinosaur eggs, which were commonplace in Henan and Hubei provinces. Eggs were everywhere. A paleontologist told National Geographic at the time: "My first reaction was that they must be rocks, not eggs, because there were just too many of them." The Chinese government was straining to keep a control of dinosaur egg exports…It had been taken out of China through illegal smuggling and landed in the hands of private buyers. It eventually was purchased by the Indianapolis Children's Museum in 2001 with the intent of returning it to China, and in 2013 finally made its way back to the Henan Geological Museum where study could finally commence.

Smugglers! International intrigue! This is how dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee was struck by the homely country wisdom of Top Commenter Ned Wood, who was overcome by nostalgia for his huckleberry boyhood while reading our post about the flying pig shit of North Carolina.

I lived in the Badger state for many years, and when the farmers were spraying manure on the fields, my friend Ed Nellesen used to say "Ah, Wisconsin! Smell that dairy air!"

And 78.95 Beckhams to you, my good man, for reminding us all of good country people and what they smell.

I'll be back on Monday with whatever the hell cuts loose from Camp Runamuck over the weekend. No, I don't like to think about it, either. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and I have nothing further on that.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io