Why Did The Debate Ignore Project 2025 Entirely?

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

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley has decided to be the national town crier on the subject of Project 2025, the Federalist Society dreamscape and blueprint for the next Trump administration. She learned to recognize power plays in one of the pre-eminent schools for them—the Boston City Council. And she sees a big one coming down the tracks. At a House committee meeting in May, she said,

“For many people, this is their first time hearing about it, and we must sound the alarm. Project 2025 is a far-right manifesto. It is a one-thousand-page bucket list of extremist policies that would uproot every government agency and disrupt the lives of every person who calls this country home. If enacted, Project 2025 would destroy the federal government as we know it.”

To my surprise, there was no mention of Project 2025 in Thursday night’s debate, either from the two moderators or from the president. And what I thought of most was Special Order 191. On September 17, 1862, the men of the 27th Indiana Volunteers were lounging in a meadow in Maryland. Two of them found some cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. The paper was Confederate General D.H. Hill’s copy of Special Order 191—the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle plan for the invasion of Maryland. Robert E. Lee’s army was divided into five parts. General George McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had in hands the means to crush Lee and end the Civil War. But, McClellan being McClellan, he declined to move and lost the advantage he had, managing only a bloody half-victory at Antietam out of the whole mess.

Project 2025 explains in detail what the next conservative administration will do and, as Rep. Pressley says, it will affect every American family in various ways, most of them terrible. It is Special Order 191. If you don’t move on it, you lose the advantage it gives you against the gathering authoritarian darkness.

Usually, we leave Ryan Walters, the religious fanatic who’s in charge of Oklahoma’s public education, for our semi-regular weekly survey, but he deserves a brighter spotlight this week because he apparently looked at Louisiana’s new Ten Commandments idolatry and thought, “I am such a heathen, Lord.” From News4 in OKC:

The public school superintendents were sent a memo on Thursday announcing the new rule. “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” said State Superintendent Ryan Walters. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction. This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country.”

With the customary Christian Right weaselspeak, Walters is not saying that Oklahoma teachers have to “teach” the Bible, but what else can you use it for in a classroom? A doorstop? Going upside the heads of the unruly? An accessory for the hamster cage? So Oklahoma taxpayers will now be dragooned into paying for another ultimately futile legal battle because being vague about it doesn’t make this any more constitutional. I mean, politicians lose their jobs for squandering the sacred taxpayer dollars all the time, why don’t they ever get fired for this kind of wasteful spending?

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Love And Happiness” (Tony Hightower): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1925, are the Deep Sea Anglers, setting out from Brighton. There are good shots of them heading out to sea. I sort of wish there was some footage of them coming back. I presume they did. History is so cool.

We lost the great Bill Cobbs this week, as fine a character actor as we’ve had. He popped up all over the place for the last few decades. His choice of projects was impeccable—his Broadway work included Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I first spotted him as Walter, the erudite barfly concerned with space germs and Polynesians in John Sayles’ Brother From Another Planet. And then he showed up as a bartender called The Dutchman in the short-lived but beloved sitcom The Slap Maxwell Story. (His wife was called The Dutchwoman.) And West Wing fans will remember him as the retired furnace worker whose childhood letter to FDR somehow gets to the Bartlet White House.

And we also lost a true American original in Kinky Friedman. From, of course, the Austin American-Statesman:

He was signed to Vanguard Records in the early 1970s after an introduction to the label by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, who met Friedman through George Frayne (aka Commander Cody) in California. Vanguard released Friedman’s first album, “Sold American,” featuring the songs “Ride ’em Jewboy” and “High on Jesus,” in 1973. The outlandish Friedman opened a show for Benson’s Western swing band in Berkeley, Calif., that year, taking the stage in that hotbed of feminism wearing red, white and blue cowboy chaps, smoking a cigar, a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a guitar in the other, and played, “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed.”

He also was a first-class writer of prose—both in his mystery novels and in the column he used to write for Texas Monthly.

“He was a champion self-mythologizer,” [Texas Monthly editor Evan] Smith said of the man who appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly three times, twice in drag. “There was a certain amount of bullshit in everything he said, and you had to factor that into every interaction you had with him. He was an original.”

And he ran for both governor and agriculture commissioner of Texas, and he pulled a respectable 12.45 percent in a crowded Republican primary field that included incumbent— and future hopeless presidential hopeful—Rick Perry. They ain’t making Jews like Jesus any more, he sang, and they ain’t making anyone like him anymore, either.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Heritage Daily:

Excavations of an early Christian church, one of two churches excavated in the settlement, have revealed a marble altar measuring 20 by 30 centimetres. Beneath this altar, archaeologists found a fragmented ivory reliquary “pyx”, a container traditionally used to hold significant religious relics. The use of reliquaries became an important part of Christian practices from at least the 4th century AD. Reliquaries were exhibited in public for visiting pilgrims or were carried in procession on the saint’s feast day or on other holy days.“We know of around 40 ivory containers of this kind worldwide, and, as far as I know, the last time one of these was found during an excavation was around 100 years ago – the few pyxes that exist are either preserved in cathedral treasures or exhibited in museums,” explains the finder, Gerald Grabherr.

Often, these reliquaries contained the alleged body parts of various saints and martyrs. This, of course, prompted some serious entrepreneurship within Holy Mother Church. A bishop once bit a chunk out of the alleged arm of Mary Magdalene. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer included a character called The Pardoner, who boasted of his trafficking in relics: “Than shewe I forth my longe cristal stones, Y-crammed ful of cloutes and of bones; Reliks been they, as wenen they echoon.” I include this for the benefit of public schoolchildren in South Carolina, who soon might not get to read Chaucer any more.

Hey, Nature.com, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

A partial leg found in Zimbabwe on the shoreline of Lake Kariba, on Spurwing Island in the Mid-Zambezi Basin has been identified as that of a newly identified species of sauropodomorph dinosaur. Sauropodomorphs are a group of dinosaurs that have long necks, small heads and eat plants. They started off as small to medium-sized, walking on two legs but, evolved into the largest animals to have lived on land, according to Kimi Chapelle, a paleontologist from Stony Brook University, New York, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

That’s a helluva call from one leg, but science marches on.

The holotype — the single specimen upon which the description of a new species is based — comprises a right femur, tibia, and astragalus and exhibits a distinctive combination of features setting it apart from other Late Triassic massopodan sauropodomorphs. Phylogenetic analysis positions Musankwa as the earliest branching member within Massopoda.

And this chap was a survivor. Not in the watered-down sense in which we use the word today, but a for-real survivor of serious planetary events.

It lived 210 million years ago, during the Late Triassic, before the end-Triassic Extinction which wiped out 70% of Earth’s species. “The group of sauropodomorph dinosaurs like Musankwa appear unaffected by the extinction event,” says Chapelle.

Plucky critters. They lived—and survived—then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the good people in south Florida, which is now a lagoon only Martha-Ann Alito could love, and the people in similar peril in the upper Midwest, and in Mexico, and for the people of Iowa and across the Plains states who have been living under the gun of all the tornadoes, especially the folks in Texas, who are staring down the barrel again this weekend. And for the people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in Oregon, and western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.