The Arrest of Judge Dugan Is as Appalling as It Is Useless

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

Crimebusting FBI director Kash Patel has landed his first big miscreant on charges of aggravated compassion.

From The Washington Post:

FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan in a post on the social media platform X, which he deleted moments after posting. Patel accused Dugan of “intentionally misdirecting” federal agents who arrived at the courthouse to detain an immigrant who was set to appear before her in an unrelated proceeding. “Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since,” Patel wrote. “But the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”

I find it curious that Patel deleted the post shortly after it appeared. I'm fairly sure Judge Dugan's lawyers will find it curious, too. Anyway, the circumstances of the case are sufficiently bizarre on their face. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Officials have not yet identified the defendant whom she is accused of assisting, but it appears to be Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican immigrant facing three misdemeanor battery counts. He was in Dugan's courtroom on April 18 for a pre-trial conference. According to federal court records, Flores-Ruiz, 30, was arrested April 18. Flores-Ruiz is listed as being in ICE custody at Dodge Detention Facility in Juneau, according to the federal online detainee locator system...That arrest marked at least the third time in recent months that federal immigration agents have come to the courthouse with arrest warrants. In March and early April, two people were arrested by ICE officials in the hallways of the courthouse.

It has become apparent that, if and when we ever come out of this xenophobic frenzy, some serious effort is going to have to be put into reining in and reforming ICE, which has been given its head to run roughshod over the Constitution, local law enforcement, and the judiciary at every level of government. This arrest of Judge Dugan is as appalling as it is useless. It is plainly an act of intimidation. It is, in itself, an obstruction of a legal proceeding.

The latest news from the Department of Defense has Secretary Pete Hegseth in a desperate search for whoever it was that stole his strawberries. From The Wall Street Journal:

“I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth demanded proof that Grady hadn’t leaked news of the March 21 briefing. Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, the Joint Staff director, whom Hegseth also threatened with a polygraph test.

But for Hegseth, the episode marked a turning point in an already rocky tenure. Coming just days after revelations that the former Fox News host had shared sensitive military information in unsecured group chats on Signal, the leaks deepened his frustrations and eroded his trust in his close circle of advisers, the officials say. Problems only snowballed from there. At least five political appointees have been fired or resigned, and Hegseth has said he is referring some of the aides for criminal investigation. Meanwhile, he is under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general for the alleged mishandling of classified information.

This is what happens when you have a five-sided building being run by a guy with a four-cornered head.

Hegseth’s anxiety only intensified after the leaks of Musk’s briefing, fueled by a string of new revelations that he brought his wife to sensitive meetings, that the White House asked the Pentagon to develop military options for the Panama Canal and that he shared sensitive information about U.S. strikes in Yemen on a second Signal chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. Every new leak of sensitive Pentagon operations or planning induce new concerns and fears in Hegseth, a senior defense official said.

For the moment, however, the boss seems perfectly willing to go along with a SecDef who spends his mornings bouncing off all five walls. For now.

Trump, who in recent days has spoken with Hegseth on the phone and met with him in the White House, has indicated he will stand by the defense chief. He has praised him for “doing a great job,” and blamed “disgruntled employees” for the leaks. Still, Trump has begun to ask people around him about Hegseth’s performance, and his advisers have closely watched his recent media appearances.

As questions have mounted about Hegseth’s political survival, he has backed the abrupt dismissal of key aides and longtime advisers over as-yet unproven allegations of leaking information. He has narrowed his inner circle, trusting a junior retiring Marine to serve as his top adviser. And despite close advisers’ counsel to appear calm and collected on camera, he has opted for a combative approach, confronting the media head-on and defiantly defending his leadership, the officials said. “As you may have noticed, the media likes to call it chaos,” Hegseth said of the Pentagon turmoil in a speech Wednesday at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. “We call it overdue.”

I, for one, call it "batshit insane," but that's just me.

On Friday, the administration ran up the white flag again, this time on one of the centerpieces of its deportation strategy, probably because it keeps getting used as a heavy bag all over the federal judiciary. From Politico:

The Trump administration has restored the student visa registrations of thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who had minor—and often dismissed—legal infractions. The Justice Department announced the wholesale reversal in federal court Friday after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges who deemed the mass termination of students from a federal database—used by universities and the federal government to track foreign students in the U.S.—as flagrantly illegal.

All you have to do to avoid being grist for the New American Golden Age is say "no" to it, and its architects are likely to fold like the cheap suits that they are. This is news that should get around more.

Judges also expressed frustration with the seemingly arbitrary moves and the unwillingness of government lawyers to say whether the students could continue to attend classes or needed to leave the country immediately. The terminations from the federal database earlier this month sparked more than 100 lawsuits, with judges in more than 50 of the cases — spanning at least 23 states — ordering the administration to temporarily undo the actions. Dozens more judges seemed prepared to follow suit before Friday’s reversal.

This should put some steel in the spines of every major institution in the country. You can stand up to the bluffs of grifters. You should always, always call.

WWOZ Pick To Click: "Waldstein Wobble" (John Batiste): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1958, is the funeral of Pope Pius XII. All the pomp and ceremony blinded the commentator to the grisly facts. Because the pope didn't want conventional embalming, his internal organs were left intact. Decomposition began immediately. At the time of his funeral, the pope's nose and fingers had fallen off and, while he was lying in state, the gas buildup inside the body went into the red zone and the pope exploded. The smell was so bad that they had to rotate the Swiss Guards on duty every 15 minutes. History is so cool.

Oh, dear Tiger Beat On The Potomac, just when I begin to have some hope for you.

If some of her predecessors at times seemed uncomfortable with selling the logical leaps that are necessary when tasked with defending Trump—Sean Spicer’s furrowed-brow-scolding, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Southern sternness, Stephanie Grisham’s aloofness, Kayleigh McEnany’s Oxford-hewn sunny cerebralism—Leavitt has always seemed to be as inside his head as possible. She relishes dispatching mainstream reporters’ hardballs with dismissive quips and, increasingly, welcomes right-leaning influencers’ softballs. She has amped up Trump’s anti-media tirades while playing loose with the facts, breaking longstanding precedents for how the White House interacts with the press. Reporters in the briefing room, while friendly with Leavitt interpersonally behind the scenes, are worried about what norms will be shattered next in the administration’s assault on the media.

Leaving aside the mushy descriptions of Leavitt's predecessors as this president's Secretaries Of Prevarication—they were all simply professional liars, all of them, in the service of a criminal president, and the respective aspects of how they did it is simply irrelevant—this fearful awe in the description of Leavitt does a disservice to the truth. Her daily lies are not an "assault on the media." Neither is her handing the seats of actual reporters in the pressroom to MAGA internet goons, threatening the FCC over a broadcaster's license, or demanding tribute before your administration will greenlight agency actions, those are assaults on the media. What Leavitt does is just dumbshow. That she enjoys the job of lying about, say, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is largely immaterial. It's not a super power. It's something that happens in kindergarten every day.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. And it's pretty grim. From Reuters:

Gladiators also were pitted against animals. While there are depictions of these contests in ancient mosaics and texts, actual forensic evidence has been elusive, until now. Scientists have determined that bite marks on the pelvis of a man buried in what is believed to be a cemetery for gladiators near the English city of York, known at the time as Eboracum, were made by a big cat, probably a lion.The man, estimated to be 26 to 35 years old at the time of death, appears to have lived during the 3rd century AD, when Eboracum was an important town and military base in the north of the Roman province of Britannia. The bite marks provide clues as to his suspected demise in the arena. "Here we can see puncture and scalloping, indicative of large dentition piercing through the soft tissues and into the bone," said forensic anthropologist Tim Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. "We don't think that this was the killing wound, as it would be possible to survive this injury, and it is in an unusual location for such a large cat. We think it indicates the dragging of an incapacitated individual," Thompson said.

I admire the measured optimism of the researchers that the wound was survivable, but I think the conclusion that the individual was incapacitated and dragged by the big cat was "survivable" very briefly.

Hey, CNN, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Deinosuchus was one of the largest crocodilians that ever lived, with a body nearly as long as a bus and teeth the size of bananas. From about 82 million to 75 million years ago, the top predator swam in rivers and estuaries of North America. The skull was wide and long, tipped with a bulbous lump that was unlike any skull structure seen in other crocodilians. Toothmarks on Cretaceous bones hint that Deinosuchus hunted or scavenged dinosaurs.

With salt glands allowing Deinosuchus to travel where its alligatoroid cousins couldn’t, the terror crocodile settled in habitats teeming with large prey. Deinosuchus evolved to become an enormous and widespread predator that dominated marshy ecosystems, where it fed on pretty much whatever it wanted. “No one was safe in these wetlands when Deinosuchus was around,” said senior study author Dr. Márton Rabi, a lecturer in the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “We are talking about an absolutely monstrous animal,” Rabi told CNN. “Definitely around 8 meters (26 feet) or more total body length.”

This thing ate dinosaurs. Whole dinosaurs. Actual dinosaurs. Its mission in life was obviously different. It lived then to put us in awe now.

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 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 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 the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. 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 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.