Those 900 Hours of Free AOL Finally Came Back to Haunt Mike Pence

By Charles Pierce
Esquire
March 03, 2017

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53594/mike-pence-private-email/

MILWAUKEE—Mike Pence stopped by Janesville on Friday, accompanied by Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver who calls the city home, even though it would rather not vote for him. They came to pitch the current GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, the secret one that they stashed in the basement of the Capitol while Senator Aqua Buddha made like Nic Cage in National Treasure trying to find it in a burlesque that went on for most of Thursday.

(Pence was also grilled about his characteristic stupidity in doing business on a private AOL account while he was governor of Indiana. He fobbed it off. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the Republican concern for the security of private email servers over the past four years was somewhat insincere.)

Anyway, the appearance in Janesville was every bit as vague and incoherent as all of Ryan's attempts to produce an actual policy has been. He wants to use the replacement to shove more of the country's wealth upwards and people keep harshing his mellow. (Rand Paul, for one, hates the secret bill because he thinks there's too much of the old ACA in it.) He also would like the country to buy his scam that repealing the Medicaid expansion is liberating the 20 million people who have health insurance for the first time and he can't do that if the flying monkeys of his Freedom Caucus keep screeching about freeeeeeeeedooommmmmmmm!!!!!!

So he has to hide the bill and talk as vaguely about it as possible, and that latter task is the job for which Mike Pence was born. From The Wisconsin State Journal:

Instead, Pence described a White House working purposefully and in concert with congressional Republican allies. He said Trump's administration will work with Congress to soon begin repealing former President Barack Obama's health care law and replacing it with, in Pence's words, "something that actually works and lowers the cost of health insurance for every American." "It's just going to start happening in just a few days," Pence vowed. "Let me make you a promise: the Obamacare nightmare is about to end."

And, why wouldn't you believe Mike Pence, just because the Republican legislators back home again in Indiana are talking publicly about dismantling the architecture of disaster that was Pence's efforts to put the goober back in gubernatorial. From USA Today:

His handpicked successor and former lieutenant governor, Gov. Eric Holcomb, began the day with a news conference where he announced that he was canceling contract negotiations to lease state-owned cellphone towers to an Ohio company. The Pence administration had struck a tentative deal with the company and promised it would cover the cost of more than $50 million in bicentennial construction projects he initiated. Holcomb also pardoned Keith Cooper, who was wrongfully convicted of robbery nearly 20 years ago, and declared a disaster emergency for an East Chicago neighborhood where residents have been forced to relocate because of lead contamination.

Sell it, Mike. Sell it hard.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Old Man River" (Riverboat Natchez Calliope): Yeah, it's Mardi Gras week and I still love New Orleans, cher.

(Link's to Paul Robeson because why the hell not?)

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: To celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the Fenian Uprising, here is some footage from the funeral of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa in 1915. It was at this funeral that Padraig Pearse—who may or may not be a distant relative—gave the famous graveside oration that ended with:

The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

A great deal followed after that, as you know. History is so cool.

But sometimes, it's not. In other news from the Motherland, it long had been suspected that babies were killed and disposed of at what always is mistakenly called an "orphanage" in Tuam, County Galway. A remarkable woman named Catherine Corless, a local historian, was struck by the fact that the local registry had recorded 800 death certificates from the facility but only listed two actual burials. Corless ferociously pursued the investigation and she was finally (and tragically) proven correct this week. From The Guardian:

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday. Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains", the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said. The commission said DNA analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961. The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns, received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted.

This is a very mild description of what really went on, as Limerick historian Liam Hogan has been explaining on his essential stream on the electric Twitter machine. The children were separated from their mothers, who often got shuffled into the infamous Magdalene Laundries. The children then were put up for adoption. Hogan has links to Irish newspapers going back years describing the repressive, sex-hysterical Catholic theocratic impulse behind facilities like the one in Tuam. Some of the clips describe a bureaucracy of death only a couple of steps beyond that of Buchenwald.

God damn the people who did this, and whoever in the Church enabled it. And a bit of a hymn for the departed, most of whom never really had a prayer.

In related news, from Reuters:

Women and children crossing together illegally into the United States could be separated by U.S. authorities under a proposal being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to three government officials. Part of the reason for the proposal is to deter mothers from migrating to the United States with their children, said the officials, who have been briefed on the proposal. The policy shift would allow the government to keep parents in custody while they contest deportation or wait for asylum hearings. Children would be put into protective custody with the Department of Health and Human Services, in the "least restrictive setting" while until they can be taken into the care of a U.S. relative or state-sponsored guardian.

Who's the bloodless ghoul who dreams this stuff up? The rest of the world must think we're out of our minds.

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

Penguins are flightless, but they can swim at speeds of up to 22 mph. The biggest living penguin, the emperor penguin, can grow to be about 3.9 feet tall, but previously unearthed fossils revealed that extinct penguins could get as large as 5.4 feet tall.

The scientists discovered that these penguin leg bones were about 61 million years old. They belonged to a bird the same age as the oldest known penguin to date, Waimanu manneringi, Mayr said. Moreover, the newfound penguin reached a size of about 4.9 feet -- nearly as large as the biggest known extinct penguin, Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, which lived in Antarctica about 45 million to 33 million years ago. These findings reveal that "penguins reached a giant size very early in their evolution," Mayr said. He added that giant penguins were likely driven extinct by the emergence of marine mammals such as seals and toothed whales.

Whales grow teeth and giant penguins disappear. It's the damn circle of life.

(Also, why is the dude in that graphic wearing evening dress? Is it to make the penguins feel at home? I wonder about these things.)

The Committee has hired more staff because Top Commenter of the Week is becoming a madhouse almost by the day with the way things are going in Washington with these guys. The Committee had a feeling, however, that the speech on National Bar-Lowering Day would produce this week's winner, and by god, it did. Take it away, Top Commenter Mark Couzens:

Trump is a patriot which is why he was given the Purple Heart. He is a good public speaker and that was proven by his incredible speech last night. The stock markets around the world acknowledged his business acumen by going to new heights. He is a genius billionaire who pays no taxes and has many beautiful wives. If he ever dies there will be 72 virgins waiting for him in heaven because he is a true believer. God is Great!!

I am assuming this is pure snark, although you never can tell these days. (Can you, tovarich?) Anyway, the benefit of the doubt gets Couzens 81.23 Beckhams.

We'll be reporting all weekend from America's Dairyland, so check back in from time to time. Otherwise, be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, or I'm sending giant penguins to slide down your spines.