A Few Thoughts on the Departure of Bill O'Reilly
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favorite Living Canadian)
WASHINGTON-In case you haven't been following the adventures of Mike Pence, conqueror of Asia, he's become quite the international man of goofery recently. There is the photo of him sternly looking at North Korea. There's the thing about how he made everyone watch Hoosiers on the flight home. And then there was this very strange thing he said that appears to be drawn from an early draft of Game of Thrones, as written by Randy Newman, brought to us by the L.A. Times.
Pence, dressed in a green military jacket, said aboard the Ronald Reagan that President Trump's administration would continue to "work diligently" with Japan, China and other global powers to apply economic and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. But, he told the sailors aboard the vessel, "as all of you know, readiness is the key." "The United States of America will always seek peace but under President Trump, the shield stands guard and the sword stands ready," Pence told 2,500 sailors wearing blue fatigues and Navy baseball caps on a sunny, windy morning aboard the carrier at the U.S. Yokosuka naval base in Tokyo Bay.
It's important to remember that, at the time he signed onto the staff of Camp Runamuck as assistant head counselor, Mike Pence was done like dinner. His popularity in Indiana was down to nothing. (If you have a few minutes, go back through the archives of the late, great Hoosier J. Doghouse Riley, for an extended treatment of Mike Pence, The Early Years.) Then, the impossible was engineered to happen, and there he is, filling out the flight jacket like a real vice president, talking about swords and shields.
If he's done nothing else, this president* has given every Republican politician license to let their freak flags fly. (Lindsey Graham is anxious to tee it up on the peninsula, too, it seems. This is insane.) But Pence seems to be liberated more than most folks.
The shield stands guard and the sword stands ready.
All together now…why do they laugh...
Jaysus, these people…
Well, it ought to be fun down here next week. The president* says they're going to get healthcare and a massive tax-reform package done and passed despite the fact that Congress is only meeting for four days. In addition, the last thing the president* did on Friday was sign an executive order aimed at unwinding the protections of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed in the wake of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. This is amazing. Nobody learns anything.
As far as the other stuff goes, it's impossible to see how this ambitious bloviation doesn't collide with a government shutdown at the end of next week, leaving bits and pieces of the government all over the intersection. This will cause an outbreak of maundering about How Did We Ever Come To This? And, probably, a continuing resolution that keeps the lights on over next weekend. The existential question of evil vs. incompetence will rise to a new level of intensity. And then it will start all over again.
On the other hand, the planet survived another close shave this week. From Wired:
But common doesn't mean boring. Once the Catalina Sky Survey determined that this big orbital rock wasn't an immediate danger, they passed the data along to NASA's Near Earth Object program. It's up to that latter group to figure out the asteroid's return period: Is it going to come back and smack Earth sometime in the next 15, 20, 100 years? In 2014 JO25's case, they'll have a better idea when they process all the data from this latest fly-by. "The other thing is to get information about where and how close the object is going to pass by so other astronomers can prepare to aim their telescopes and radars to collect data," says Kelly Fast, the Near Earth Object program manager.
Of course, we also learned that someone named Lindley Johnson has the greatest business cards in the history of the government.
"This is the type of asteroid we should be worried about," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, told TheDCNF. "Not this one in particular, of course, since we spotted it 3 years ago and we now know that its orbit doesn't put us in danger of an impact from it anytime for the foreseeable future. But even 3 years would have been too short of time to deflect it in space had it been of concern for impact."
When I grow up, I want to be Planetary Defense Officer. Seriously.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Love Walks Away" (Cats On Holiday): Yeah, I still sort of love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some people waving swords and shields in a Viking festival in 1939. Then they all burn the boat. The end. History is so cool.
I know I'm supposed to have something to say about the end of The O'Reilly Factor. As it happens, when I was first starting out at the Boston Phoenix, he was starting out in local TV in Boston. Every now and then, a friend would call on us to come talk to a class she taught at Emerson so we could tell students who wanted to go into some form of journalism that their prospects weren't entirely hopeless. Emerson legend has it that, when O'Reilly came to that class, he sat down in the front of the room and announced, "I should be sitting in Peter Jennings' chair." So, yeah, there was something of an ego involved from the start.
The only conclusion I can draw from recent events is that the Fox News Channel was even more of a sewer backstage than it is on the air,which boggles the mind, and that Gretchen Carlson deserves some special Peabody Award for the guts it took for her to step out in front.
Neil Gorsuch made his first real decision as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. It helped kill a guy in Arkansas, where they're trying to hustle up executions so the poisons they have in stock don't go past their sell-by date. From the NYT:
At one point on Thursday night, the Supreme Court nearly halted Mr. Lee's execution, but decided, 5 to 4, to allow the state to proceed with its plan, which had called for eight prisoners to be put to death over less than two weeks. The court's majority - which included the newest justice, Neil M. Gorsuch - did not explain its decision, but in a dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer complained about how the state had established its execution schedule because of the approaching expiration date of Arkansas's stock of midazolam.
Meanwhile, The Intercept has an astounding account of a couple of other guys Arkansas wants to kill.
In Lee's case, the records show shocking failures of his defense attorneys, both at trial and post-conviction, which were compounded by egregious conflicts of interest. His trial judge was having an affair with the prosecutor; the two would later get married. The same judge later expressed his regret at appointing a lawyer to Lee's state habeas proceeding who showed up to court obviously intoxicated. A state prosecutor raised concerns that the attorney was slurring his words, stumbling in the courtroom, and speaking incoherently, while "introducing the same items of evidence over and over again." Later, the judge told the lawyer that he was unaware he had only recently been in rehab. "If I had known that, I would not have put you on this case," he said.
It's stories like this that deepen the wisdom of what Harry Blackmun had to say about his reversal on capital punishment, his solitary dissent in the case of Callins v. Collins.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question--does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die?--cannot be answered in the affirmative.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Sky News? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
The round-shaped eggs belonged to plant-eating phytophagous dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period. Qiu Licheng, from Guangdong's Archaeological Institute, said: "We found five eggs: three were destroyed, but they are still visible."The other two have their imprints on the stone. The eggs were round in shape, belonging to phytophagous dinosaurs," There have been similar finds in the Foshan region, which has gained a reputation in the scientific community for revealing valuable information from the Cretaceous period. Liu Jianxiong, Foshan's chief geologist, said: "There are two things special about the Sanshui Basin: one, it's rich in minerals, two is that it's rich in fossils, like dinosaur eggs. "This discovery is very important to our research on paleoclimate and sedimentary environment."
They are very helpful to us and that's because those eggs hatched dinosaurs that lived then to make us happy now.
The Committee was fairly sure that this week's Top Commenter Of The Week would come from our treatment of the lost carrier attack group which was supposed to be sailing north but which actually was sailing south. The Committee was, of course, right again, and 91.11 Beckhams go to Jamie Jacks for his red-hot alternative history take.
Jamie Jacks: Just realized today marks the 75th anniversary of the Doolittle raid on Japan. If "President Bawbag" had been in charge 75 years ago Doolittle would have bombed Australia.
Followed, of course, by the amphibious landing on the beaches of Nepal.
I'm hanging around down here for the March For Science tomorrow, so the shebeen will be open this weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or Viking chieftain Mike Pence may stop by with his mighty sword.
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