Youtube Exclusive Content Only: Mike Johnson just can't keep his name out of the news. Jen & Pumps discuss his many failures in his short tenure as speaker and his belief that dinosaurs were saved from the flood on the Ark.
Showing posts with label DINOSAURS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DINOSAURS. Show all posts
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Sunday, March 27, 2022
RSN: FOCUS: Charles Pierce | We Have Two Political Parties and One of Them Has Gone Insane
26 March 22
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Half the political ecosystem of the United States has gone completely feral, like the wilderness around Chernobyl did.
I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
I try, but I can’t do it. I can’t look at what’s going on and find any of it clever or funny. I can’t use, “but it works” as an excuse for dangerous political foolishness anymore. I’m still willing to chuckle over past political shenanigans. But what’s going on now comes too damn close to the violent politics of the 1850s for me to chuckle wisely at it. Preston Brooks was not a million laughs.
We have two political parties and only two political parties, and one of them has gone utterly insane. Half the political ecosystem of the United States has gone completely feral, like the wilderness around Chernobyl did. They conduct their politics on a poisoned landscape. Here, for example, is Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, explaining why, consarn it, he just can’t vote for Judge KBJ, a decision that was approximately as unexpected as the rising of the sun.
“I went into this process with an open mind…”
That’s as far as you have to go to know that on this, as on most things, McConnell is even more truthless than he is ruthless. He voted against Judge Jackson when she was nominated to the position she currently holds. A month ago, upon the announcement of her nomination to the Supreme Court, he said in a statement:
I voted against confirming Judge Jackson to her current position less than a year ago. Since then, I understand that she has published a total of two opinions, both in the last few weeks, and that one of her prior rulings was just reversed by a unanimous panel of her present colleagues on the D.C. Circuit. I also understand Judge Jackson was the favored choice of far-left dark-money groups that have spent years attacking the legitimacy and structure of the Court itself.
Mitch McConnell’s mind was not open on this nomination, but it remains open for business. They’re all corrupt and/or crazy. But they’re not funny and they mean what they say.
Apparently, Vladimir Putin has been browsing a lot of American substackery these days. From the Guardian:
He went on to compare the treatment Russia had received with the controversy surrounding Rowling’s comments on transgender people. “Recently they cancelled the children’s writer Joanne Rowling because she – the author of books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide – fell out of favor with fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said.
Those Ukrainians with the rocket launchers are not defending their homes and families. They’re cancelling Putin. Maybe he should start a blog. Freedom!!!!
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Chilly Winds” (Wade Ward): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1937, are senators talking about FDR’s new ideas on the Supreme Court. Alas, unless you can lip read, you can’t hear what the senators are saying. Your mileage may vary on whether or not that adds to the quality of the film. History is so cool.
Most of the elders of the Republican party very much would like disgraced Missouri Governor Eric Greitens out of the race for the Senate seat held by retiring Republican Roy Blunt. Greitens resigned as governor after allegations surfaced that he had physically abused a woman with whom he was having an affair. Now, in a filing submitted by his ex-wife, Greitens is accused of physically abusing both his wife and his children. From the Washington Post:
Sheena Greitens, who now lives with their children in Austin, where she works as a university associate professor, described for the first time publicly what she says she experienced at the end of their marriage, in documents filed as part of an ongoing child custody dispute in Missouri state court. “In early June 2018, I became afraid for my safety and that of our children at our home, which was fairly isolated, due to Eric’s unstable and coercive behavior,” she wrote in the filing, which was obtained from Boone County Circuit Court. “This behavior included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then three-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by the hair.”
Incumbent Republican senators raced to throw Greitens overboard. For his part, Greitens has posted a video in which he goes seriously bananas. From Mediaite:
I wanna tell you directly, Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell. Hear me now. You are disgusting cowards and we are coming for you. We are no longer going to allow you – not just to attack me and attack my kids, but to destroy this country, and that’s what you’re doing. You’re making life hard for millions of families around this country by cooperating with the left, by stabbing President Trump in the back, by stabbing the people of America in the back, and we’re not gonna stand for it anymore.
Know this. The freedom wing of the Republican Party, true patriots, true conservatives, we are coming for you. And we’re not just taking back our party, we’re taking back our country. We see your game, we see your lies, but we also know this: that at the end of the day, truth prevails.
The prion disease is particularly acute in Missouri. Greitens is leading almost all of the polls taken in this Senate primary. However, he does worse than all the other prospective Republican candidates against the prospective Democratic candidates. But, of course, it’s the Democrats who never can get along with each other.
Hey, Smithsonian, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
Spinosaurs broke all the rules. Where most carnivorous dinosaurs had knife-like, curved teeth, spinosaurs had conical chompers more like those of crocodiles. Even the snouts of these dinosaurs were long, giving them a crocodile-like look, instead of the familiar profiles of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus. Some species even had prominent sails growing from their backs, ornate biological billboards that acted as social signals. But that’s hardly all. Some spinosaurs – including the immense Spinosaurus itself—were the only non-avian dinosaurs known to split their time between land and water.
To hell with the rules, says Spinosaurus. I got me some penguin bones! From National Geographic, where it’s also a good day for dinosaur news!
Now, using the biggest dataset of its kind, researchers have compared the density of the prehistoric carnivore’s bones to a wide array of living and extinct animals. The analysis found that Spinosaurus—and, surprisingly, its British cousin Baryonyx—had highly dense bone walls like penguins do, suggesting they likely spent much of their time in the water and hunted down aquatic prey.
Rules are made for lesser creatures. A few had to be broken so as to live then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday, looking forward to the full Senate’s debating the Judge KBJ nomination, which I’m sure will be engaging, and enlightening, and an embarrassment to democracies all the way back to Pericles. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn masks, and get the damn shots, especially the damn boosters.
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Saturday, December 12, 2020
RSN: FOCUS: Charles P. Pierce | You Don't Need to Seat the 126 Republicans Who Signed Onto the Covenant of Sedition
12 December 20
Most Readers Would Let RSN Go Under
Our biggest challenge each month is keeping RSN funded. The truth is that without energetic fundraising RSN would not have any budget at all.
We do have many very good donors who contribute consistently to sustain the organization but they are the few not the majority. The majority of readers who come to RSN would absolutely sit back and allow the publication go completely out of existence before making a donation.
We have readers, we badly need a few more supporters.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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12 December 20
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FOCUS: Charles P. Pierce | You Don't Need to Seat the 126 Republicans Who Signed Onto the Covenant of Sedition
Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Ari Berman, the relentless defender of the franchise against all enemies foreign and domestic, has been suggesting on the electric Twitter machine that none of the 126 Republicans who have signed onto the Covenant of Sedition should be seated when the new Congress opens in January."
As Rep. Bill Pascrell pointed out, there's a good case to be made via Section III of the 14th Amendment.
ri Berman, the relentless defender of the franchise against all enemies foreign and domestic, has been suggesting on the electric Twitter machine that none of the 126 Republicans who have signed onto the Covenant of Sedition should be seated when the new Congress opens in January. This I find intriguing because, after all, this whole election was corrupt because people said mean things to other people. Rep. Bill Pascrell, whose pursuit of the president*'s tax returns has been dogged, does Berman one better. He would refuse to seat them based on Section III of the 14th Amendment. It reads as follows:
Down with the traitor, up with the star!
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Sweet Emma" (James Andrews): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1964, is New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller trying to get the Republican National Convention to repudiate the John Birch Society and failing, miserably, as the ur-wingnuts go crazy. (Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke has a cameo.) And...it begins. History is so cool.
Newsflash! President AWOL Lists Demands!
From the Washington Post.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Friday told Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to submit his resignation if the agency does not clear the nation’s first coronavirus vaccine by day’s end, according to people familiar with the situation...The threat came on the same day that President Trump tweeted that the FDA is “a big, old, slow turtle” in its handling of vaccines, while exhorting Commissioner Stephen Hahn to “get the dam vaccines out NOW.” He added: “Stop playing games and start saving lives!!!” It also led the FDA to accelerate its timetable for clearing America’s first vaccine from Saturday morning to later Friday, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Can't we convince him that we've already had his parade and he missed it while he was in the hospital?
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Irish Times? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Since their discovery, palaeontologists had long suspected that they were of dinosaur origin but now dinosaur experts have finally identified them as such. “People knew about them but they had never been formally described. Now it’s official. We know what these dinosaurs are,” says Dr Mike Simms, a curator and palaeontologist at National Museums Northern Ireland and lead author on the study...By looking at details of the internal structure, shape and surface texture of the bone fragments, they were able to confirm that two of the specimens are indeed dinosaur bones – a first for Ireland – and that they belonged to two completely different dinosaurs.
It is completely amazing to me that the Motherland was dino-free for this long. The IT makes the expected joke about St. Patrick, but I regret bitterly that this discovery came far too late for Father Ted to have made an episode out of it.
The “great rarity” of Irish dinosaur fossils is in fact due to most of Ireland’s rocks being “the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young”, says Simms. Rocks of the correct age have been eroded away or covered up by other rock layers. Even where rocks of the right age are preserved, he explains, they were deposited in ancient seas or deserts and would not normally contain dinosaur remains because these animals mainly lived on land. We are “extraordinarily lucky” to have found these, he says. The bones, taken to have been eroded out of marine rocks nearby, raise questions about the dinosaurs’ diet and death. The two dinosaurs “were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic sea bed where they were buried and fossilised”, he says.
No matter, even in Ireland, they lived then to give us great craic now.
I'll be back on Monday to analyze the amicus briefs in support of the Texas lawsuit that will have been filed over the weekend by the residents of Vulcan, Eminiar 7, Talos IV, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and wear the damn mask.
Saturday, November 21, 2020
RSN: FOCUS: Charles Pierce | They're All in on This, Top to Bottom
21 November 20
Why can’t we get 30 donations from the 20,000 people who visit RSN each day? “Someone else” never donates. 30 readers donating on a daily basis is all it takes. That’s an absurdly low bar.
Not “someone else.” You.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
21 November 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | They're All in on This, Top to Bottom
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The visit to Camp Runamuck by the Republican leaders of both houses of the Michigan legislature has set off the storm sirens. This is understandable, especially to those of us who quit asking the question, 'He wouldn't do that, would he?' around about the night of the Indiana primary in 2016."
That includes the Republican leaders in the Michigan state legislature.
From Politico:
It is unclear how many GOP legislators will visit the White House, but the group is expected to include Michigan state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield. Jason Wentworth, who is succeeding Chatfield as speaker, was also spotted at the D.C. airport.
Shirkey and state Sen. Tom Barrett were met by a throng of protesters and reporters outside Reagan National Airport upon their arrival Friday. The pair passed through the airport without talking to the media. Earlier this week Shirkey told Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news outlet, that the idea the legislature would defy the voters is "not going to happen."
Local dog refuses to hunt.
No one from the Trump's campaign staff will be at the meeting, according to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany — who herself has doubled as a campaign surrogate, blurring the line between the two — and she downplayed the significance of the president summoning the state legislators. "He routinely meets with lawmakers from all across the country," McEnany said at a press briefing on Friday, her first since Oct. 1. "This is not an advocacy event."
I may be way out on a limb here, but I think the president* was associated with his campaign and, anyway, his personal lawyer was going to be stopping by.
However Rudy Giuliani, who recently took over the campaign's legal battles, told a New York City Fox affiliate Friday morning that he would be on hand at the meeting to answer any questions from Trump or the state lawmakers about the situation in Michigan "because I probably know the case better than anyone else." "I’m there just to answer any questions they have," he said on "Good Day New York."
The Michigan delegation was met at the airport in D.C. by reporters and demonstrators, some of the latter carrying big letters spelling out, "SHAME." Leader Shirkey finally resorted to singing a hymn to fend off a persistent reporter and Speaker Chatfield tweeted out that he was only doing his patriotic duty.
"No matter the party, when you have an opportunity to meet with the President of the United States, of course you take it," he tweeted. "I won’t apologize for that. In fact, I’m honored to speak with POTUS and proud to meet with him."
When the president* whistles, Chatfield rolls over. Good Speaker. Good boy.
They're all in on this, top to bottom and stem to stern. Shun them all if this ever ends.
Oh, hi there, Senator David Perdue. How're you doing? Getting by, are yez? From the New York Times:
Senator David Perdue, one of two Republican senators from Georgia facing runoff elections in January, began making large and ultimately profitable purchases of shares in a Navy contractor in 2018 just before taking over as chair of a Senate subcommittee overseeing the Navy fleet. The disclosure, first reported Wednesday by The Daily Beast, comes as both Mr. Perdue and Georgia’s other senator, Kelly Loeffler, have been under fire for their stock trades. Mr. Perdue, a millionaire and formerly a prolific trader of individual stocks, announced in May that he would divest from his large individual stock holdings after questions were raised about his well-timed purchases of Pfizer stock in February, after senators were briefed on the coronavirus threat.
This is the guy that Jon Ossoff called a "crook" to his face during their last debate. (Which really will be their last debate, since Perdue has, ahem, chickened out on debates before their January runoff election.) And, with all the money sloshing around the doubleheader run-offs in Georgia, his attitude towards profiteering in office is certainly a driving issue.
In the six weeks before the January 2019 announcement that Mr. Perdue was taking over as chair of the Senate Armed Services SeaPower subcommittee, he bought a total of $40,000 to $290,000 worth of BWX on dates when prices averaged about $40 per share, according to a Times analysis of Senate filings. The filings give only a value range for stock transactions, making it impossible to know how many shares are bought and sold. In the month after his appointment, the stock jumped more than 25 percent. Mr. Perdue sold his stock on dates from February to July 2019 when prices averaged more than $50 per share. In June of that year, he announced that he had helped push through additional funding for the Navy in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, including money for an extra submarine.
Not that this kind of arrangement is against the rules of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body or anything.
While not officially prohibited, individual stock trades by members of Congress have long raised questions, according to Kedric Payne, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “This is just a perfect example of why many members of Congress have decided on their own to not trade individual stocks, even though there is no evidence of insider trading. It still begs the question of whether his official actions are somehow motivated by personal interest.”
The real corruption is what's legal. Somebody said that once.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Got My Whiskey" (Mel Walters): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This week marked the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Tribunals. (I am not hinting at anything here. Honest. I'm not, as Kayleigh is my witness.) The play-by-play dude is very helpful in identifying the defendants. (Julius Streicher was "judged sane," which was a comfort to that thug, I'm sure.) Goering gets gaveled. History is so cool.
My old friend—and Marquette J-School idol—Jacqui Banaszynski writes the Nieman Storyboard newsletter which never fails to put a shine on my Fridays. This week, she spoke with one of my sportswriting heroes, Dave Kindred, about how he has transitioned onto writing narrative on Facebook. That, as the late Guy Clark put it, is a pair to draw to.
I always have been happy that Rachel Maddow is my friendly acquaintance. But, after her monologue about how the pandemic hit home for her, I am proud to know her as a fellow human. Good on yez, Doc.
Blog Official Cowtipping Columnist Friedman of the Plains sends us...bonus Oklahoma! From Newsweek:
Victory Church in Tulsa posted on Facebook that it was hosting a "Friendsgiving" on November 22 and encouraged people to "come share a meal with us & BRING A NEIGHBOR." "We always looking forward to this meal with you," the church wrote. "All of our campuses will be participating at their facility." Footage said to be from a recent service held by Victory Church, which boasts a 13,000-strong membership, appeared to show people not wearing masks or socially distancing.
It doesn't matter how Christian you are. Your immune system is agnostic.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, National Geographic? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
For more than a decade, paleontologists have speculated about a single fossil that preserves skeletons of two of the world’s most famous dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. Not only are the bones arranged as they once were in life, but the dinosaurs are practically intertwined. Each specimen is among the best of its kind ever found. Together, the pair—nicknamed the “Dueling Dinosaurs”—present a paleontological mystery: Did the beasts just happen to be entombed together by chance, perhaps as carcasses caught on the same river sandbar? Or had they been locked in mortal combat? Nobody has been able to study the fossil to find out.
How the fossil has come now to be available for scientists to study is a saga in itself. An accidental discovery. A stint in a Long Island warehouse. A failed auction. A decade of litigation. And now, finally, an arrival in a museum, which is where it belonged all along. We will know whether or not this is a relic of dino-MMA from millennia past. That's the way I'm rooting, anyway, because that would make me happy now, knowing that they lived back then.
I'll be back Monday with whatever chunk the president* decides to take out of democracy over the weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and wear the damn mask.
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