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

I know this may seem a bit out of the box, but isn't this a particularly lousy time in history for the Congress to go on vacation for six goddamn weeks. OK, it's good that they all get to go home and have people yell at them at town halls, and so they can help out with constituent service, and generally get out of Washington, which is godawful in the month I call Jefferson's Revenge. But what say we cut things a little short this year. Take three weeks and not six, say.

Because, here's the thing. With Congress gone, and the Supreme Court term finished, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is the whole damn government. I think experience hath shewn that this is a truly bad idea on numerous levels. You can get things done in August, even in the national sweatbox that is our nation's capital. I mean, Nixon got run out of office one August.

There is a momentum gathering itself that may not last until everybody comes back after Labor Day. (Damn, football season will be underway by the time the government starts up again.) I'm just saying that, maybe, we save up our vacation time until we can all really relax again.

This is not the way you build a career in politics, not even in Oklahoma. From the Tulsa World:

A man who campaigned for Oklahoma governor in the last election has been charged with threatening an act of violence on the day after he was arrested in connection with a shooting at his residence.

Dude got busted for a shooting and then started talking about a mass shooting. Everybody keeping up? Splendid.

Barnett operates a group called Transparency for Oklahoma. On the website transparencyforoklahomans.com, a page titled "How would Chris Barnett take down TU?" includes the specific threat listed on the criminal charge. "Wait for football season to come, start getting every single AR-15 put into place on the highest floor," the message states. "Rig up a system that will fire all of the guns at once. ... Wait until almost half time or when everyone is leaving the game. When people start to flood the gates to leave, the automatic system built starts firing." The website contains a disclaimer at the top that reads: "This is all hypothetical and not a threat and of course will never happen, but it'll drive the far left crazy so here it goes."

Fantasizing about mass murder to own the libs. I wish I didn't understand this as well as I have come to understand it. Anyway, there was more Barnett action earlier that day.

Barnett has not yet been charged in a shooting about 9 p.m. Thursday at his south Tulsa home. He said he shot a process server in the arm after the man tried to serve him legal papers, but Barnett alleges the man had pointed a gun. Barnett was released from jail early Thursday after being booked on a complaint of shooting with intent to kill. According to an investigator's affidavit, Barnett "has the means to act on the threats that he has made based on firearms located in his residence as well as his most recent history/arrest in conjunct with his Google search 'can you legally shoot a process server?'"

Man, "Clear History" is your amigo.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Stalkin'" (Flat Duo Jets): Yeah, I pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is the first edition of Astra Gazette, the RAF video magazine. It has a glider competition, a boat race, and a woman taking a shower. It is very strange, but history is so cool.

I see where the lunatics are still threatening to "storm" Area 51 out in Nevada. This is a bad idea. They have aliens who have photon torpedoes and know how to use them. Storm a buffet in Reno instead.

I hate to pick on Chuck Todd, but he had John Podesta on Meet The Press on Friday afternoon and told Podesta that "both parties" have to come together on election security, and Podesta had to slap the "both sides" out of his mouth. I personally watched Mitch McConnell personally kill two such measures in about 20 minutes in a nearly empty Senate chamber. Good god, do better.

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



The femur bone is over six feet long and is thought to have belonged to a sauropod -- a subgroup of herbivorous, long-necked and four-legged dinosaurs common in the Jurassic era. Think Littlefoot from "The Land Before Time" and you'll get the idea. Just, you know, bigger. "This femur is huge! And in an exceptional state of conservation. It's very moving," Jean-François Tournepiche, curator at the Museum of Angouleme, told Le Parisien. The bone was found at the Angeac-Charente excavation site, where in 2010 paleontologists extracted another femur, also over six feet long. Since then, scientists have succeeded in rebuilding over half a sauropod, according to Le Parisien, along with other bone, fossil and vertebrate discoveries.



You give me femur/in the morning/femur all through the night...Lord, how they lived then to make us happy now,

The Committee takes this week off. You all are Top Commenters every week. Be well and play nice, ya bastids, Stay above the snake-line, and try hard not to shoot anyone who might be a process server.

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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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