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

The president* completed quite a couple of days at his appointed task of screwing up important things about which he knows less than dick. First, he played arsonist with people’s healthcare because all he knows about it is that the guy who wounded his fee-fee once passed it. Late on Friday, he completed the I’ll-Show-You-You-Think-You’re So-Smart parlay by taking his tiny little shears into his tiny little fingers and snipping away at the nuclear deal with Iran. From the Beeb:

International observers say Iran has been in full compliance with the 2015 deal freezing its nuclear programme. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the US was "more than ever isolated" and could not change the nuclear deal. "As long as our rights are guaranteed, as long as our interests are served, as long as we benefit from the nuclear deal, we will respect and comply with the deal," Mr Rouhani said. Mr Trump said the deal was too lenient, and Iran had "committed multiple violations of the agreement". Iran, he said, was spreading "death, destruction and chaos".

Leave aside the fact that he presented no evidence for his charges. Do you think he could find Iran on a map? Do you think if you gave him three possible answers as to what the capital of Iran is, he’d get it right? If you Photoshopped the face of the Ayatollah Khomeini into a photo of ZZ Top, do you think he’d be able to tell you which of the four bearded guys wasn’t in the band?

Nowhere is he more clearly at sea than in foreign policy—and John Kelly should be ashamed to have stood up before a microphone and said how smart this gossoon is—and he’s being led around by people who do not have the interests of peace in the Mideast at heart. (Tom Cotton? White courtesy phone, please.) This has been a horrible couple of days.

It hasn’t even been a year yet.

In case you missed it, Judge Roy Moore, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, and who will be on the ballot on both the Republican and Deuteronomic lines, as I understand it, is pretty much as bad as you always thought he was. Of course, when you are your state’s chief justice and you get fired twice for ignoring the law, well, people will think you’re pretty damn bad. But, because political campaigns occasionally can be wonderful bathyspheres to your soul’s dark abyss, we are learning that Moore’s is plenty deep and plenty dark.

Getty Images

Back in 2004, which would be 50 years after Brown v. Board and 39 years after the passage of the last Civil Rights Act, Alabama legislators moved to remove formal segregationist language from the state’s constitution. This would seem to be the easiest damn thing to do, it being the 21st century and all, and that language having been rendered moot by the federal courts for over five decades anyway. Guess who led the fight against removing the language?

Tell us, Josh's Joint.

“He had a huge impact. It was a measure that was set to pass without much opposition and then because he got involved it changed the dynamic completely,” said Susan Kennedy of the Alabama Education Association, the state public teachers’ lobby that supported the amendment. At the time, Moore, who is currently the GOP nominee and the front-runner to become Alabama’s next U.S. senator, had recently been booted from the state supreme court for defying higher court orders to remove a Ten Commandments statue from in front of his courthouse. That fight had made him a superstar in the religious right both in the state and nationally. When conservative evangelical activists including the Alabama Christian Coalition began warning about adverse effects of the segregation amendment he stepped up to be the amendment’s most prominent foe — a move that kept his name in the headlines as he geared up for a 2006 primary challenge against Riley and sent the amendment down to a narrow defeat. “This amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the people of Alabama should be aware of it,” Moore told the Birmingham News in 2004, warning it would “open the door to an enormous tax increase” — one of many broadsides he issued.

I’m sure it was all about economic anxiety for ol’ Judge Roy.

In related news, ol’ Judge Roy liked to brag about how he never took “a regular salary” from the Christomaniac foundation he ran. But, again, you know, campaigns, transparency, and here comes that bathysphere again, this time dispatched to the depths by the Washington Post.

But privately, Moore had arranged to receive a salary of $180,000 a year for part-time work at the Foundation for Moral Law, internal charity documents show. He collected more than $1 million as president from 2007 to 2012, compensation that far surpassed what the group disclosed in its public tax filings most of those years. When the charity couldn’t afford the full amount, Moore in 2012 was given a promissory note for back pay eventually worth $540,000 or an equal stake of the charity’s most valuable asset, a historic building in Montgomery, Ala., mortgage records show. He holds that note even now, a charity official said.

In one sense, ol’ Judge Roy is telling the truth. He did not take a “regular” salary from the Foundation. I mean, 180 Gs for part-time work is a lot of things, but regular, it’s not. God works in mysterious ways but His bookkeeping remains lousy.

In somewhat brighter political news, this time from the newly insane state of North Carolina, it probably is worth keeping an eye on Dr. Jennifer Mangrum, who’s running for a seat in the state senate against a Republican named Phil Berger, and more about him in a minute. Mangrum is the child of two public-school teachers and a lifelong educator herself, being now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greenboro. She also was a lifelong Republican, until the state legislature in North Carolina lost its mind and the state went newly insane. From The Carolinian:

“I’m open. I was a Republican, I need to tell you that. I had a father who fought in World War 2, Vietnam and Korea, and when I registered to vote in the ‘80s, if you were military then the Republican Party was the party that you felt was going to take care of your family,” said Mangrum. “The party has changed so much since I registered. I’m also really embarrassed that leaders in the Republican Party represent us in the way they do but I was a voter who looked at the person.” She decided to run a few weeks after changing her registration…“In January, I thought about the fact that when I had gone to the polls in 2016, there was not a Democrat option for my district,” Mangrum said. “One way to get attention on teachers is to challenge [Berger] and see if he wants to have a conversation about some of these policies.”

(Ms. Mangrum, I know you’re new to this and all, and the Republican microchip may still be partially active, but the correct adjectival form is “Democratic” option. People get testy about that.)

As for Berger, he’s been at the center of almost everything that’s gone wrong with North Carolina since Art Pope completed his hostile takeover of the government. He’s the Republican leader in the state senate. He’s been a crucial part of the state’s redistricting shenanigans, defending the process that produced a that a federal court said targeted minority voters with “almost surgical precision.” This week, he and the rest of the legislative leadership called the legislature back into session to override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of a Republican-backed bill that would cancel the state’s primaries as regards the 2018 judicial elections.

(Have I mentioned recently that an elected judiciary is The Second Worst Idea In American Politics?)

And need I mention that Berger is all about keeping the statues of treasonous bastards right where they are? From TV12:

Senate leader Phil Berger released the letter he sent the governor: "I do not think an impulsive decision to pull down every Confederate monument in North Carolina is wise, that attempting to rewrite history is a fool's errand." Berger went on to call Cooper's move, "more political theater than a principled stand."

So, the shebeen is going to adopt this little race as one of its own. Remember, Dr. Mangrum. You belong to the DemocratIC Party now.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Mercy Now” (Mary Gauthier): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Oh, look. Here’s Shah Reza Pahlevi returning to Iran after the CIA helped depose Muhammad Mossadegh at the behest of American and British oil interests. Everyone looks so happy. I predict this all will work out for the best in the future.

Blog Official Music Archivist, the great and powerful Oz, sends along from his vast library in Kansas City this previously unreleased—and, as far as I knew, completely unknown—track from The Master. The next “bootleg series” installment will cover the years between 1979 and 1981, including what I think is his unjustly criticized “Christian” period. I always thought “Gotta Serve Somebody” was a great track. (So did the late Bob Marley, by the way.) And “Every Grain Of Sand” can stand with anything the late Thomas Dorsey wrote, except possibly “Precious Lord.” And, in between devotionals, you could hear some great rock and roll a’borning, including the stick-swinging jeremiad, “Foot of Pride,” and the thunderous “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar,” which is the closest he ever came to the music he made with The Band without The Band. And, of course, out of that same period, but two years later, came Infidels, one of the greatest of his several comeback albums and also, with the inexplicable absence of “Blind Willie McTell,” one of his most mysterious.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I do tend to get carried away. Here’s the cut Oz sent along. It’s pretty sweet.

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

It seems that, if you were planning to go all Jurassic Park in your basement lab with a pint of dinosaur blood, you might be out of luck, clone-wise.

Their findings demonstrate that previous claims showing the preservation of keratin protein in dinosaur fossils are likely to be false. Similarly, widely publicised claims of dinosaur blood in fossil bones were shown to likely represent an artefact of degraded organic matter rather than actual blood cells. The researchers undertook experimental treatments that either used microbes to decay tissues or subjected tissues to intense heat and pressure -- a process known as maturation -- in order to mimic the conditions a fossil experiences deep underground. Evan Saitta from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Science, led the research which has been published in the journal Palaios. He said: "Decay and mild maturation resulted in some intriguing textural differences in degradation patterns based on the type of keratin such as curling versus crimping of filaments when matured. "These results may show promise for identifying relatively recent archaeological keratin remains but when maturation conditions are increased to simulate conditions present during burial and fossilisation, the keratin degrades into a foul-smelling, water-soluble fluid that can dissolve or leach away from the fossil."

Well, that’s a disappointment, especially that foul-smelling fluid part. Nothing that produces a foul-smelling fluid can come to any good end, not even dinosaurs, who nonetheless lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee had a feeling that the post about Ryan Zinke’s Emblem Of Office would draw this week’s Top Commenter of the Week, and so it has with Top Commenter Ty Reid’s deft leap into the Strangelovian mind.

I look forward to reading the tell-all expose from the guy that guards Zinke's bottles of precious bodily fluids, where he preserves his essence.

As do we all, Mandrake. As do we all. Until then, enjoy your 81.11 Beckhams in joy and happiness for as long as we on this pitiable planet have left. From National Geographic:

After analyzing minerals in fossilized ash from the most recent mega-eruption, researchers at Arizona State University think the supervolcano last woke up after two influxes of fresh magma flowed into the reservoir below the caldera. And in an unsettling twist, the minerals revealed that the critical changes in temperature and composition built up in a matter of decades. Until now, geologists had thought it would take centuries for the supervolcano to make that transition.

I’ll be back on Monday, if possible. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line because it it ain’t one damn thing, it’s another.

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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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