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

Update: There goes Reince.

WASHINGTON—Let us begin with the surprising—and deeply sad—announcement that the 2020 presidential campaign officially has begun. We have a candidate, people! Let Delaneymentum roll like a mighty river. From The Washington Post:

The American people are far greater than the sum of our political parties. It is time for us to rise above our broken politics and renew the spirit that enabled us to achieve the seemingly impossible. This is why I am running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

No, I've never heard of him, either. But, if he goes to the Iowa State Fair next month, he'll be first in line at the Butter Cow. Meanwhile, the current president gave a little talk about his latest little enthusiasm, the MS-13 gang, to a country that is clearly tired of all this winning. His suggestion? What this country needs is a little more police violence and a little less rule of law.

"When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, 'Please don't be too nice,' Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody, don't hit their head, I said, 'You can take the hand away, OK?'" For years and years, [laws have] been made to protect the criminal. Totally protect the criminal, not the officers. You do something wrong, you're in more jeopardy than they are. These laws are stacked against you. We're changing those laws."

His audience, largely made up of uniformed police officers, gave him a big hand after he said this, and every one of them who did should have been fired on the spot.

On Thursday, as part of our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states, we mentioned that Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing giant, was planning on putting a huge plant in southeastern Wisconsin. Naturally, the president* leaped all the way there to take credit. Naturally, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular Midwest subsidiary, is all over the news, clearly chalking it up as a personal triumph.

Now, though, folks have had a day or so to look at the deal. Their conclusions are going to harsh many mellows. First, The New York Times would like a word.

Even as Mr. Walker celebrated the news with Foxconn executives at a rally at the Milwaukee Art Museum on Thursday, experts on the political left and right alike said the rewards were not justified by the cost of the tax breaks. Over all, the subsidies for the Foxconn plant, which would produce flat-panel display screens for televisions and other consumer electronics, equal $15,000 to $19,000 per job annually. That compares with $2,457 per year in the usual incentive arrangement, according to Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich. The new Foxconn jobs are expected to have an annual salary of at least $53,000 plus benefits, according to Mr. Walker. "It's a very, very costly package, and I'm skeptical that the benefits justify such big incentives," Mr. Bartik said. "This is well beyond the typical deal."

And, also, too:

If Foxconn lives up to its investment commitment and receives the full $3 billion tax break, it will be the fourth-largest incentive deal in United States history, according to Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group in Washington that tracks economic development subsidies. "We can only describe this as a gift from Wisconsin taxpayers to Foxconn shareholders," Mr. LeRoy said. "This is a guaranteed loser for the state."

But the Times was mild compared to Tim Culpan of Bloomberg, who's been doggling this boon for a while now..

Politicians, lobbyists and Foxconn can make the figures work by being generous with the facts. For example, if every one of those jobs came to fruition, they can claim 29,000 positions for $3 billion, or $103,000 per job. But that's not going to happen. Foxconn has factories in China and another dozen countries globally, yet that stated $10 billion investment is more than the group's publicly traded flagship -- Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. -- has devoted to capital expenditure over the past five years combined. There is potential for the payroll to climb to 13,000 in the future -- a figure crucial to Wisconsin justifying the expense -- but I wouldn't bet your 401(k) on it. That's because if Gou really does dish out $10 billion on this facility, the only way to make it viable is by keeping staffing low and leaning on automation to boost productivity. This LCD factory will be either labor intensive or highly automated. It can't be both.

Full employment for robots! Make Wisconsin Great Again.

Buzzfeed has a really weird one about yet another unfortunate former pal of Vladimir Putin who died, according to the official story, by falling down drunk repeatedly in his hotel room until repeated blunt force trauma caused his demise. No, really. That's what the investigation alleged.

"Lesin was beaten to death," one of the FBI agents said. "I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into… What I can tell you is that there isn't a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died. Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it."

I'm willing to believe that Putin is a supreme gangster who is capable of anything. But this story implies that the FBI, a U.S. Attorney, and the Department of Justice are involved in a cover-up for reasons yet unknown. This is quite the stretch.

Some American officials now fear the threat has hit home. Lesin's death raised "concerns" that the Kremlin would start "doing here what they do with some regularity in London," said a former high-level national security official who recently left government. Altogether, 18 current and former intelligence, law enforcement, and other federal officials told BuzzFeed News that they question the official story of how Lesin died. The FBI, which assisted with the investigation, and the Department of Justice declined to comment. The US Attorney's office for the District of Columbia said it had nothing to add beyond its statement last year calling Lesin's death an accident. The DC medical examiner's office said it is barred by law from releasing details of the autopsy so would not comment beyond the US Attorney's statement and a brief summary of its own findings that it released in March. A spokesperson for the DC Metropolitan Police — which led the investigation, deploying homicide detectives — told BuzzFeed News that "we have no evidence to suggest this death involved foul play. However, we will certainly reinvestigate should additional evidence be brought to light."

I'm trying to find a grassy knoll where I can sit down and think about all of this.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Buy Me Some Juice" (Blu Lu Barker): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's the Senate during a 125-hour filibuster in 1960. The star is Gale McGee, Democrat of Wyoming. That same year, McGee would whip the four votes out of the Wyoming delegation that put John F. Kennedy over the top for that year's Democratic presidential nomination. One of McGee's lasting contributions is that he led the fight for the annual August recess in the Senate, on which the present Senate is about to embark. History is so cool.

Apparently, there were sad faces all around on Friday morning, as the House Republicans tried to cope with the knowledge that their Senate colleagues were not quite as inclined as they were to commit ritual political suicide. (Gerrymandering, after all, is the House member's amigo.) Nobody was more downcast than Speaker Paul Ryan, as Tiger Beat On The Potomac reports.

At a closed-door conference meeting with House Republicans hours after Sen. John McCain scuttled perhaps the last best hope of repealing Obamacare, Ryan read an excerpt from "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," a song about sailors drowning in a 1975 shipwreck. He likened the tune to what he deemed the Senate's tragic failure to repeal Obamacare.

Well, that's as maudlin as it gets. (I, for one, easily see the parallels between a shipwreck that killed 29 men and the defeat of a ghastly bill that would've killed countless more.) Why don't we just move on now to the cannibal feast?

House Republicans — the infamously fractious group that drove out their former speaker — are now the most functional part of government, the speaker told his members.

Please don't fire me until Foxconn begins to build that factory in my district.

"The House did its job… The Senate needs to deliver," said Rep. Steve Russell (R-Okla.), on his way into the morning meeting. "We're all on this plane, and if it crashes, we all go down together."… Members couldn't help but think, however, that most of those measures are stuck in the Senate. "The House time and time again has passed strong legislation and the Senate isn't able to get anything to the finish line," said Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) a top deputy whip for GOP leaders. "We want to see them get off the dime and get moving. This is a disappointment. It's a failure for the American people — and this is on the Senate." Asked how she would deal with any of the blowback from constituents over for the failure to replace Obamacare, she added: "I'm going to talk about the 270 pieces of legislation we passed and advanced through the House — 226 of which are sitting over in the Senate waiting to be sent to the president's desk."

All Rep. Joe Barton could manage to say say was, "I am very sad." His fellow Texas Republican Mike Conaway insisted the Senate "needs to pass something."nArch-conservative Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), meanwhile, called for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to step down. "We need new leadership in the United State Senate," said Brooks, who is running for an open Alabama Senate seat. "If Mitch McConnell cannot get the job done, then those 52 senators need to get together and try to figure out who amongst them has the leadership capability to get the job done."

But, wait, isn't there someone else to blame?

Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican who voted against the House repeal bill, said the GOP's health effort was doomed from the start because the president "never really laid out core principals and didn't sell them to the American people." "Usually the executive has to provide a plan and go out and sell it… It was never really sold," he said, arguing that now is the time to turn to bipartisanship.

Buck up, little cowboys.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, USA Today? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Many dinosaur species had long, slender necks and stomped about on two legs, as did this one, officially known as Corythoraptor jacobsi. And many dinosaurs sported bizarre bony skullcaps. But Corythoraptor's tall, narrow crest, tipped rakishly forward above the eyes, makes it a dead ringer for the cassowary, a modern-day bird native to Australia and New Guinea. Scientists describe the ancient reptile in the current issue of Scientific Reports. No other dinosaur so strongly resembles a particular living bird, says study co-author Junchang Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

Corythoraptor lived roughly 65 to 100 million years ago, during the final reign of the dinosaurs. The specimen in the new study died before it had finished growing. Even so, it had a headdress for sending sexual signals, hinting that the animals reproduced before they reached full size, the study says.

I'm sure there were a lot of dinosaur pundits back then decrying the failure of the culture in this regard.

The Committee had a feeling that the outburst from Congressman Buddy (Snatch A Knot In Yer Ass) Carter, along with the challenge extended to Lisa Murkowski by Rep. Blake (Footies) Farenthold, was going to bring us this week's winner, and Top Commenter Bob Brault did not disappoint.

Mebbe Rep. Buddy and Rep. Blake can get together with their knots and dueling pistols and play the Russian Roulette version of rock, paper, scissors...

I spent an hour trying to imagine this and finally gave up when the image emerged of Farenthold driving a pair of scissors through his hand with a rock.

I'll be back on Monday, home from the very strangest place on earth. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. The air's pretty fresh up there.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io