Pam Bondi Accused of Ethics Breaches by Dozens of Florida Attorneys, Judges, and Law Professors

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

This is a tragedy-purpled week every year, both fictionally and not. Tuesday was the third of June, and I presume the Delta was sleepy and dusty. (The high was 87.) What I did not know was that the original Tallahatchie Bridge collapsed in 1972 after vandals tried to burn it. And I've never bought the rag-doll theory that they cooked up for the movie about what they tossed off the bridge. That remains a mystery.

On Thursday, almost without notice, the anniversary of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy passed. That's the one I never got over. Something went dead in this country that night in the Ambassador Hotel and every perilous political moment ever since operated like Schliemann digging down and finding that there were several Troys and not yet one. There are buried architectures of grief in this event.

I remember when my son saw this address for the first time. He could not believe an American politician ever gave these remarks at that time and in that place. RFK was not afraid to drop a little Aeschylus on a shocked and saddened crowd. And it's not because he was intent on demonstrating his knowledge of classical Greek poetry but, rather, that the comfort he'd gained from the words was something he could share with his audience. The further we get from those days, the more I think I've come around to my son's original opinion. I can't believe it anymore, either.

Finally, Friday was the 81st anniversary of the Allied landings at Normandy in France. There has been so much written and filmed and discussed about Operation Overlord that there's hardly anything more I can add. However, I can recommend Cornelius Ryan's original The Longest Day if only for the great appendix to the book in which Ryan reported what hundreds of survivors on both sides did after the war. Fans of the movie, of which I am one, will note that both Werner Pluskat, the German officer who first sees the arrival of the armada, and Josef Priller, the rambunctuous Lufwaffe pilot who sails off with his wingman to strafe the beaches, survived. I do not know how.

I remain fascinated that General Eisenhower kept in his wallet the brief public announcement he had prepared if the landings had failed.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

I find it impossible to imagine the current holder of Ike's old job in the White House even conceiving of something like that.

Helluva week for examining your conscience, as the nuns used to put it.

And, dammit, that wasn't any rag-doll they threw off the bridge.

Now this is interesting. From the Miami Herald:

Now, a liberal- and moderate-leaning coalition of about 70 law professors, attorneys and former Florida Supreme Court justices is attacking Bondi’s record in an ethics complaint filed on Thursday with The Florida Bar. They accuse Bondi, a Florida Bar member, of violating her ethical duties as U.S. Attorney General, saying she has committed “serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice.” The complaint claims Bondi “has sought to compel Department of Justice lawyers to violate their ethical obligations under the guise of ‘zealous advocacy’ “ that she espoused in a Feb. 5 memo to all agency employees on her first day in office.

The Florida Bar wasted no time in 86-ing the petition on jurisdictional grounds, but, in Washington, the petition occasioned a sneer from one of the young punks now populating the federal agencies, especially at the DOJ.

"The Florida Bar has twice rejected performative attempts by these out-of-state lawyers to weaponize the bar complaint process against AG Bondi,” Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle said in a statement provided to the Miami Herald on Thursday. “This third vexatious attempt will fail to do anything other than prove that the signatories have less intelligence —and independent thoughts — than sheep.”

Says the spokesman for a DOJ under the command of a woman who can't tell you who won the 2020 presidential election. As the grandson of a former shepherd, I resemble this punk's remark.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Bad Chicken" (Little Freddie King): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1939, is English king George VI, the current monarch's grandfather, visiting Canada. "The dark-skinned tribesmen are happy." Yikes! Everybody seems happy to see him. (At least he's not his hapless, Nazi-curious brother.) Even the Italian War Veterans are happy, even though actual Italian veterans have been fighting in Ethiopia for the previous four years. Three months later, Germany would invade Poland and we'd be off. History is so cool.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is getting some national run as an opponent of the administration and its deportation thuggery. (She even got a shout-out at the NYC mayoral debate this week as a Democratic politician to be admired.) And she's declared herself willing to take on the administration if it comes to bully her city. From WBUR:

“City government's job really is not political in that way. We take care of  potholes, we take care of streetlights,” Wu said during a wide-ranging interview at The WBUR Festival Friday afternoon. “We're accountable to residents who care about what they see when they open their door, start their day, and every little detail matters. And that cuts across many of the usual political affiliations and lines. But what we're experiencing today,” she said, after months of efforts by the federal administration to target the region’s science and education institutions, as well as immigrant communities, “is truly unprecedented.” Wu said what worries her the most are the “long-term impacts of even the uncertainty of the moment."

“People are terrified for their lives and for their neighbors,” Wu said. “Folks [are] getting snatched off the street by secret police who are wearing masks, who can offer no justification for why certain people are being taken and then detained.”

And, my, did that "secret police" remark ever get up in MAGA grills. On Xwitter, Trump's acting US Attorney for Boston, Leah Foley, a former aide to Senator Orrin Hatch and someone of no conspicuous record, said, "Referring to federal agents as 'secret police' is offensive. There are no secret police." Just big jamokes—armed, masked, and wearing shades, but with no identification visible and no insignia of rank—jumping out of unmarked SUVs. But they're not secret. Oh, no, not them. Anybody can see them.

Anyway, Wu is up for re-election this fall, and her polling looks strong at the moment. One of her principal opponents is Josh Kraft, the non-football son of New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft. Josh has got money, mostly from the New Balance shoe people, but he's a rookie, and he's stumbling. Who knows what national ratfcking money may come flooding in, but Wu seems to know what the job of being mayor of Boston is all about. I think Jim Curley would approve.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Popular Mechanics:

According to a release from the World Monuments Fund, a team of archaeologists explored the Gran Pajatén area within the Rio Abiseo National Park, a UNESCO Mixed World Heritage site recognized for both cultural richness and natural beauty. The area was first rediscovered in the 1960s, and in the 1980s—the national park was officially founded in 1983—archaeological teams found 26 ancient structures. This new discovery of over 100 additional structures expands our understanding of the Chachapoya civilization, the members of which were known as the “people of the cloud forest.”

I wouldn't have minded being a person of the cloud forest. It sounds like a cool thing to have been.

On the ground, investigations have confirmed the Chachapoya presence at Gran Pajatén stretches back as far back as the 14th century, with soil layer analysis hinting at even earlier use of the site. Adding to the discovery is a nearby network of pre-Hispanic roads connecting the site to others in the region, supporting the theory that the civilization was part of a well-connected territory full of hierarchical systems.

The People of the Cloud Forest worked it out. You know they did. Hey, SciNews, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

“In the southern hemisphere, titanosaurian sauropods were the dominant herbivores and abelisaurid theropods dominated as predators... Although isolation played an important role in driving biogeographic patterns, it is increasingly clear that dispersal played an important role, especially towards the end of the Cretaceous.”

And thus did we get Taleta Taleta which, I believe, is the basic inspiration for the old blues song that begins:

Taleta, Taleta, where ya been so long?Tell me Taleta, where ya been so long?

I haven't had no lovin', since you been gone

Of course, I could be wrong about this.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles and in Canada, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. (Hang in there, Pedro.) And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.