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

The following were questions asked of Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, by the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

What is your favorite Federalist Paper? (If Kavanaugh had answered, "Zig Zag," I'd have voted for him.)

Who among the Founders do you find the most interesting?

What have you learned from coaching girls basketball?

What makes a good judge? (At least two of them brought this fastball.)

Why does federalism matter?

Why is the First Amendment important to the American people?

Tell us about religious liberty. (These last several came rapid-fire from Tailgunner Ted Cruz.)

What did you tell your children about yesterday's hearing?

They treated Kavanaugh like he was made of delicate porcelain, and there was a reason for that, and it's not that they're all hacks in thrall to the madman in the White House—though they all are. It's because they knew Kavanaugh wasn't as slick or as quick on the draw as Neil Gorsuch was, and they also knew that he was skating on the very thin edge of perjury, just as he was in 2006, when he was confirmed to his present seat on the D.C. appeals court. (Pat Leahy, of course, clearly believes Kavanaugh skated over that line 12 years ago and, therefore, did it again when asked about it this past week.)

Drew Angerer Getty Images

The point is, at the very least, arguable, and it should have occurred to the Republicans to ask about it, too. But their guts are in escrow and their balls are in a Mason jar on a shelf in the East Room.

He went to all the right schools and the well-greased conservative judicial machine got him the right career path. But Brett Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court any more than Roger Stone does. He was not smart enough to pull off the cutesy evasions he apparently urged on other judicial nominees when he was working in the White House during the Avignon Presidency.

He slipped and called birth control pills, "abortion-inducing drugs," which not only is unscientific, but it is the jargon of the extreme anti-choice movement. (Remember, always, that, as important as Roe is, the target ultimately is Griswold and the right to privacy. Conservatives do not believe that right exists, and was itself about birth control.) Plus, as Irin Carmon pointed out, Kavanaugh wasn't even on the short list until he mucked around with the case of a 17-year-old who wanted an abortion and did everything right even under Texas law, while Kavanaugh hemmed and hawed and tried to run out the clock.

Drew Angerer Getty Images

He needed konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee of Utah to bail him out when Kamala Harris had him treed about the machinations behind his nomination. He needed John Cornyn to try and block Cory Booker for him. He has needed unprecedented outside help to shield him from the consequences of his own political writings and career. And still—still!—he managed to lie pretty plainly about his involvement with the nomination of William Pryor to a federal appeals court seat. In 2004, Kavanaugh denied having worked on Pryor's nomination. Contemporary e-mails, leaked now out of the present Senate Judiciary Committee, clearly show otherwise.

We know why he was chosen, and it wasn't because of his academic pedigree or his clock-management skills late in the fourth quarter. It's not that anyone with a brain wouldn't trust this guy as far as they could throw John Marshall. It's that all the wrong people trust him the way you'd trust any sure thing.

I remind everyone of the most important lesson we all learned this week: Never throw an ax at a moving train, not merely because it is a stupid idea in general, but also because the ax can bounce back off the train and hit you on the head.

Ouch. From KSAT in San Antonio:



Police said the man ran down Brady Boulevard and was found by emergency medical services lying on the ground. Jeff Degraff, director of media relations for Union Pacific, said the man later told Union Pacific investigators that he was actually standing on the railroad tracks swinging the ax when he was hit by the train.

Nobody has been as dogged on the subject of pension pillaging and other, similar forms of fiscal piracy than David Sirota, who now has found a home at CapitalandMain.com. Recently, he found a story that links Chris Christie, The National Enquirer, and the White House's attempts to squash the Mueller investigation.



Under Republican governors, New Jersey and Ohio committed at least $650 million of pension cash into Chatham Asset Management, a high-risk hedge fund that has taken control of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., which is at the center of the federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. California’s pension fund also has a $235 million stake in a Chatham fund. The hedge fund is run by Anthony Melchiorre, a GOP donor who reportedly met with the president and AMI CEO David Pecker at the White House soon after Trump took office. Melchiorre and his wife have donated more than $100,000 to Republican candidates and party committees since 2010. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, recently pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws stemming from payments he made to women to hide affairs with the former reality TV star and real estate magnate. AMI executives helped Cohen purchase stories that could have hurt Trump’s presidential bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Francois Durand Getty Images

“I am personally appalled by the Enquirer being an accessory to Cohen’s criminal behavior on behalf of the candidate,” said Tom Bruno, a state union representative who is the chairman of the pension’s board of trustees and serves on New Jersey’s State Investment Council, which oversees the pension system’s investments. If asked to vote, I can assure you I will be voting for us to divest,” he said. “I cannot talk on behalf of the entire SIC, but I will be doing everything in my power to convince a majority to vote the same way.”

The looting of public pensions at the state level is one of the more undercover stories of our time. Sirota has been all over it for years. To paraphrase Joe Bob Briggs, Blog says check him out.

As a fervent fan of the original Law and Order, I am resolutely dubious regarding this latest addition to the franchise. First of all, even speaking as the president of the New England chapter of the Lennie Briscoe Memorial Statue Fund, and as chairman of the national Claire Kincaid Memorial Scholarship Endowment, Dick Wolf's politics always have been just a bit retrograde. (He gave Fred Thompson a platform to run for president and spout bullpucky about the right to privacy.) I don't have a lot of faith in the notion that he really believes in hate-crime laws at all, even though Jack McCoy clearly did. On the other hand, Warren Leight is the co-runner, and he's a lot less reactionary. But the show inevitably is going to become a chew-toy for the Right. I'll watch, but I'm not optimistic.



Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Eli's Pork Chop" (Little Sonny): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is the U.S. Senate rejecting President Richard Nixon's nominee for the Supreme Court, G. Harrold Carswell, by a vote of 51-45. In 1948, running for the Georgia state legislature, Carswell told an audience at Mercer College: "I yield to no man, as a fellow candidate or as a fellow citizen, in the firm, vigorous belief in the principles of white supremacy." By 1970, these words were sort of a millstone around your neck if you wanted to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Thirteen Republicans joined 38 Democratic senators to sink Carswell's nomination. In other words, 13 Republicans thought something Carswell had said before he was nominated—in fact, decades before he was nominated—was enough to mark him lousy as a SCOTUS appointee. Just sayin'.

However, Carswell's nomination did result in one of the most famous political quotes of all time. Speaking in support of the nominee, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, said, "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?" History is so cool.

The other night, kindly Doc Maddow had John Kerry on her electric teevee program to discuss our current state of affairs and to shill for his new memoir. I'd like to send some kudos her way for leading their conversation with Kerry's lonely, bold fight against the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a financial institution that pretty much was the world's laundromat for dirty money of many lands. For those of us who are Iran-Contra obsessives, and who think a lot of things went permanently wrong when that scandal largely was swept under the rug, BCCI is like catnip.

In 2004, I wrote a profile of Kerry in the magazine hereabouts. I made a point of concentrating one part of it on BCCI.



In the Senate, throughout the 1980s, Kerry made his mark spelunking down the darkest caverns of what had become a reinvigorated secret government. He chased the illicit aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua and the byzantine operations of a bank called BCCI, a sort of international ATM for black ops. And he did so alone, as far outside in the clubby world of the Senate as he ever had been in Massachusetts. "This was a bad case of bubonic plague," says Jack Blum, Kerry's investigator through those years. One prominent Democratic senator tried to sabotage Kerry's investigations, and the Republicans, riding Ronald Reagan's popularity, went after him as harshly as the Nixon people ever did. In fact, it is a kind of unprecedented historical parlay that John Kerry's name appears both on Nixon's White House tapes and in the notebooks of Oliver North. For Kerry, the investigations were pure reform politics, but they also were leavened with a respect for what happens when people are tricked away from their investment in their government.

"It's antithetical to everything we are," he explains. "A government with secrets is accountable; a secret government is not. And when that happens, the American people are cheated of what is rightly theirs."

BCCI is why I always will admire John Kerry. Nobody wanted any part of what the bank had to hide, but he went after it anyway. But I really hope he doesn't run for president again. In addition, I am looking forward to MSNBC's Iran-Contra special on Sunday night. I fully expect to be enraged by something someone says in it.

Bob Woodward's book is making a proper amount of noise for heavily reinforcing the notion that Camp Runamuck is truly the festival of fools we all knew it was. Woodward is being celebrated as the Great American Truthteller, mostly by people who don't remember his deathbed quote from Bill Casey about Iran-Contra, or the backlash against his John Belushi bio from many people who knew the late comedian well. Woodward's got enough cred for two lifetimes, but I recall my only brush with him as being more than a little bizarre, and as convincing me that Bob Woodward thinks there are two kinds of people in the world: people who talk to him, and targets.

It was for a piece I did for this magazine on a little boy from Mississippi named Marcus Stephens, whose short life was made harder at least in part by some severe high-end media malpractice in which Woodward was involved. From that story:



Nora Cooke Porter was a pediatrician and a lawyer. She worked in the Pennsylvania Bureau of Disability Determination in Harrisburg and was appalled by the meteoric growth in the number of SSI recipients that she had to monitor. She told people that kids were getting checks for fighting in class. According to sources familiar with her work, she was loud and persistent in her claims that families were cheating the SSI system, that waste, fraud, and abuse were widespread. She thought most of the kids were gang kids. People were buying Mercedes-Benzes with their SSI checks...Before she left, however, Porter contacted Bob Woodward, outlining her concerns, which was how Jonathan Stein came to be on the telephone with him. Stein suspected that Woodward was ready to cast Nora Cooke Porter as an embattled whistle-blower and suggested that Woodward might want to check with her superiors in Harrisburg to make sure that he wasn't hanging his story on the office crank.

"He berated me," Stein recalls. "How come you're telling me this so late? My reply was that I'd just learned that they were going to use her and that I thought he should know. He just brushed me off, told me it was too late."

Enter, well, me.

"How long have you been in the business?" he asked me when contacted for this article. "Can you remember everything about a story you did five years ago?"

I was used to "Where did you play the game?" answers from semi-literate outfielders, but not from journalistic icons. You talk about a question right out of Wichita, Kansas.

"The files show, she says, that children who curse teachers, fight with classmates, perform poorly in school, or display characteristics of routine rebellion are often diagnosed with behavioral disorders and therefore qualify for the [SSI] program's cash benefits." ... When contacted for this story, Porter wouldn't comment on these points, and neither would Woodward, although several years ago, he did tell James Ledbetter in The Village Voice that he had examples to back up Porter's claims but that he had held them back due to "privacy problems."

Ledbetter asked Woodward why he didn't just use the files pseudonymously. (Woodward, after all, has managed to keep the biggest secret in the history of American journalism for almost thirty years.) Woodward told Ledbetter that he didn't want to get "bogged down in details." "As I recall, there were some privacy concerns," Woodward explained when contacted for this story. "I'd have to go back over my notes, but I can tell you that the story was very carefully reported."

Anyway, congrats on the book, Bob. I've been in the business for 43 years now.

I am just finishing up Ron Chernow's epic bio of Ulysses S. Grant, and have enjoyed it tremendously. (Holy crap, was The Gilded Age ever corrupt. I had no idea of the scope of the thing. Everybody around Grant was stealing from someone.) In 1875, I just learned, as his second term was ending, Grant went to Des Moines to a reunion of his Union Army of the Tennessee and he gave the most remarkable speech on secular public education.



"Now, the centennial year of our national existence, I believe, is a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundations of the structure commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago at Lexington. Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees for the security of free thought, free speech, a free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men irrespective of nationality, color, or religion. Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar, appropriated for their support, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian schools. Resolve that neither the State nor Nation, nor both combined shall support institutions of learning other than those sufficient to afford to every child growing up in the land the opportunity of [sic] a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistical dogmas. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the Church and State forever separate. With these safeguards, I believe the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.

Mister, we could use a man like Ulysses S Grant again.

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



Cretaceous Alaska could have been the thoroughfare for fauna between Western North America and Asia -- two continents that shared each other's fauna and flora in the latest stages of the Cretaceous. "This study helps support the idea that Alaska was the gateway for dinosaurs as they migrated between Asia and North America," said Dr. Kobayashi.

To support the theory, Fiorillo's international team of scientists from across the U.S., Japan and South Korea worked to establish if the tracks were those of a therizinosaur and to study any unique aspects of the ecosystem. The members -- including a sedimentologist, geologist, paleobotanist, paleoecologist and additional paleontologists including an expert on therizinosaurs -- determined that this particular area of Denali was a wet, marsh-like environment and that one fossil in particular looked like a water lily, which supported the theory that there were ponds and standing water nearby. They suspect that both therizinosaurs and hadrosaurs liked these wetter locations.

Traffic on the threes! There's a three-hadrosaur pileup on the Denali interchange. One lane open. Dinosaurs went out of their way—whole continents out of their way!—to live then in order to make us happy now.

The Committee pronounced itself disappointed that more people missed our tribute to the late Joe Strummer in our post about Anominush's op-ed in The New York Times. Therefore, it leaped at the chance to make Top Commenter Kevin Lindley our Top Commenter Of The Week:

...and an additional 15 points for The Clash reference in the penultimate sentence. London Calling!

You, my good man, are The Only Top Commenter That Matters. There are 90.11 Beckhams newly arrived into your account.

I'll be back on Monday with the latest from the Chronic Ward. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don't throw axes at moving trains. It never works out.

This post has been updated.



Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

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