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(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
So, because Washington is going to be in the deep freeze on Monday, they’re swearing him in at a podium in the Capitol rotunda, the place that his more fervent fans desecrated on January 6, 2021. History is playing a joke on us all, a prank that echoes through the sad history of the last decade of American politics. Maybe he could dress up with a buffalo-head hat and a spear. He could hand out zip ties as souvenirs. From Politico:
[Brian] Kelly filmed a horrific scene: Rioters seeking to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden clashing with Capitol police and vandalizing artwork and statues, as the halls of Congress choked with tear gas. On Friday, Kelly was one of a handful of Jan. 6 defendants sentenced for his role in a riot that Trump has made clear he hopes to erase from history—while federal judges plead with the world to never forget it.
“I only wish the rest of the country could see some of the things I see,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said before sentencing Kelly to 10 days in prison. “This may be, based on what happens outside these courthouse walls, the last one of these. I don’t know.” Chutkan said she had never been in the Capitol until she visited to pay her respects to President Jimmy Carter earlier this month. Her visit, she said, after presiding over so many Jan. 6 cases, was a reminder that “people came in and desecrated that beautiful space.”
Chutkan has been a valiant winter soldier in what now appears to have been a largely futile attempt to maintain the rule of law in its battle against the rule of vandals. That battle was lost last November, when the voters delivered a verdict that the president who’d roused the rabble should be president again. That battle was lost in the Supreme Court, when, first, the carefully manufactured conservative majority “reinterpreted” a section of the 14th Amendment that bans anyone involved in an insurrection against the government from any federal office, and then when that same carefully manufactured conservative majority produced a radical doctrine of presidential immunity that hamstrung the case before Judge Chutkan. That battle was lost when a pet judge in Florida tore up the rules of procedure in the Pool Shed Papers case, then dismissed it, and is now engaged in trying to stifle the release of that report from the Special Counsel’s office. The memory hole has claimed all those investigations, and his two impeachments, and all the evidence and findings of the January 6 special committee. The rule of vandals has triumphed. The Capitol rotunda, recently graced by the memorial service for President Jimmy Carter, is now doing business as a train carriage outside Compiègne and Monday is May 22, 1940.
This week, in addition to the confirmation burlesque in the Senate, we had the Supreme Court dealing with a Texas law requiring an age-certification for anyone viewing adult websites on line. This allowed Justice Samuel Alito to make a little funny. The attorney opposing the Texas law argued that these websites were the modern equivalent of Playboy back in its heyday in the 1960s and ’70’s.
“Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”
Wow. I guess some people really did read it for the articles.
Meanwhile, the confirmation hearing for Pam Bondi as the next attorney general was marked by a couple of grotesque anomalies. The first was that Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley kicked things off with a statement that was a compendium of MAGAworld bogeymen. A sample:
And then we get to Special Council Jack Smith and his lawfare operation. It involved an unprecedented FBI raid on Trump’s house, including agents that even searched the former First Lady’s clothing drawers. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden certainly did not receive the same treatment by government regarding their records. Indeed, as my oversight exposed, the FBI amazingly agreed to destroy laptop records and end records associated with Clinton’s staff. This Orwellian conduct should have no quarter.
The Department of Justice used the might of the federal government to prosecute individuals peacefully praying outside of an abortion clinic. The FBI suggested that traditional Catholics could be domestic terrorism threats claiming that these individuals adhere to quote, “anti-Semitic, anti-immigration, anti-GBT and white supremacy ideology,” end the quote. The FBI opened dozens of investigations into parents who voiced their concerns at school board meetings regarding curriculum choices and COVID-19 mandates.
Chuck on a carphone, you’re next.
And, as far as I can tell, Bondi’s dubious interference as Florida AG in the Trump University fraud case didn’t even come up in her hearing, which would be a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the committee’s Democrats. As AG in Florida, Bondi declined to investigate the university. Shortly before that decision, by what I am sure was a unfortunate coincidence, her campaign received a $25,000 donation from the Trump Foundation.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Who’s Sorry Now?” {Percy Humphrey’s Hot Six} — Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1925, is the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge, which must have been a real dabba-doo time, Cal’s having beem a notorious 23-skidoo Roaring Twenties party animal. My god, there are so many really white people there. History is so cool.
I am a notorious baseball agnostic. Whatever soul-deep connection the game has for some people is lost on me. But those things I like about the game I really like about the game—summer evenings. Fenway. The old Tiger Stadium. Minor League concession stands. Bob Uecker, who passed away this week, was definitely one of those. A genuinely funny man, he used his days as a player as a springboard for Johnny Carson’s couch, his own admittedly lame sitcom, and, most memorably, he role as broadcaster Harry Doyle in the Major League movies, particularly the first one, which a number of baseball people I know rank as their favorite baseball film, and which I see as a necessary corrective for the piously mendacious Field Of Dreams. In more than one press box, I’ve heard a conspicuously wild pitch greeted with Doyle’s signature, “Jusssst a bit outside.” Sail on, Uks.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found!
Inside a residential house, archaeologists have uncovered one of the largest and most intricate thermal spa complexes yet found at the world-renowned site, according to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
The luxurious bath spaces are connected to the black-painted, fresco-covered banquet hall found in April, suggesting that the private house was an immense setting for celebrations, the park said in a press release Friday.
A home spa in Pompeii. Nice house until the volcano reinvents the thermal bath.
Hey, SciNews, Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
The newly-identified dinosaur lived in what is now Africa during the Cretaceous period, some 95 million years ago. Dubbed Tameryraptor markgrafi, the ancient species is a member of a group of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs called Carcharodontosauridae.
The dinosaur’s fossilized remains were found in 1914 approximately 2 km (1.2 miles) from Ain Gedid on the Western foot of the Gebel Harra of the Bahariya Formation.
The remarkable thing about this story is that these actual fossils were destroyed in World War II. Scientists reconstructed the dino from the journals of the original archaeologists and an old scan of its brain. But you can’t keep a good dino down. They lived then, after all, to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday, live from Hell’s Envore in DC.. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and The New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, with winter coming on, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Queens, who were visited by The Crazy before the year had hardly begun. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.
