IF IT WERE ME they'd be Porky and Petunia pig. But I don't do AI so I'll just let you make your own mental image. Trust me, it'll be better.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Monday, February 9, 2026
The Inherent Corruption Of Our Presidential System Permits Trump To Steal Billions From Us
Under our system the Department of "justice" is only as clean as those in it choose to be, being staffed by the president and acting at his whim, we have seen through successive Republican administrations since Nixon that they will generally be corrupt, in a line of Do"j" officials, starting with John Mitchell, William French Smith, Ed Meese, William Barr,* John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey, Jeff Sessions, Matthew Whitaker, William Barr (again) and on to Bondi with slightly lower levels like Blanche in all of those Republican administrations, that pattern is firmly established with a few, arguably less corrupt examples in between. I would be tempted to site Gerald Ford's Attorney General, Edward Levi as an exception to that rule if it were not for the fact that he had Rudy Giuliani, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia working under him. No truly honest person would have such consistent bad judgement as that.
Any system in which the criminal investigations and prosecution department is under the control of a self-interested, guaranteed to be partisan branch of the government is open to direct corruption of the kind that has flourished under every Republican president since Eisenhower and that corruption could be matched with the lack of courage and judgement of a number of those under Democratic administrations, Reno, Garland, . . .
I was curious to know if there was ever another instance like Trump's ten billion dollar grab by a sitting head of state in a modern democracy and found no instance of looking all weekend. The closest I found was when the ex- Prime Minister of Canada, the one often cited as the worst PM in Canadian history Brian Mulroney sued when the RCMP accused him of corruption in the infamous Airbus scandal which, from everything I can see Mulroney was guilty of corruption in. The Jean Chrétien government settling with the criminal was, no doubt, an act of short term political expediency when taking a chance on defending the case would probably have served the country and history better in the long term. I wish I'd written down in my notes who it was who, after he had left office, said they'd never believe a word that Mulroney said because he was an habitual liar, but going into that will only get me into the permissive handling of lies under our system of government. By American standards, by the way, Mulroney would have never come close to being the worst president, he'd have lingered somewhere in the middle.
The framers of the Constitution, a pretty corrupt lot, themselves, probably didn't believe there would come a time when the regime of corruption represented in that list of Attorneys General above would become the norm for the government they were forming, they certainly couldn't imagine a Supreme Court - armed with a self-created power that they never put in the Constitution - would turn the American president into a criminally impune monarch of the kind they'd explicitly thrown off in the Revolution. But such is the inherently wrong assumptions they had about government, to start with in their novel scheme of "balanced powers" and the country continuing in the direction of good governance under a republic they believed, wrongly, that they'd sent the ship of state in that the very things they created have been corrupted UNDER THE VERY RULES THEY ESTABLISHED.
There is always a potential of corruption under any scheme of governance but one that puts the investigation and prosecution of crimes AND THE SETTLEMENT OF CIVIL CLAIMS BY THE SITTING OR PAST EXECUTIVE in the hands of POLITICAL APPOINTEES BY THE VERY MAN WHO COMMITS THOSE CRIMES OR BRINGS THOSE CLAIMS, is a guarantee of corruption and theft. I can't believe they couldn't imagine such corrupt partisans as Bondi, Blanche and Bessent being a possibility - along with such criminals having the power to hollow out experienced, career investigators and prosecutors as has come to maturity and instant rot in Trump II - but that is the consequence of the presidential system they set up. I have not taken the time to see if such consequences were predicted by the Anti-federalists but it is such an obvious problem with how the Department of "justice" and other agencies under the presidential system that someone could not have noticed it as a possibility.
Depending on the. . . um. . . "honor" of lawyers and politicians to avoid the kind of corruption that Trump has installed and will certainly profit from, unless he dies before Bessent gives him the ten billion, can't ever be depended on again. Like the corrupt Rehnquist and Roberts Court, once a road has been cut through the make-believe lore of the Constitution and through those most stupidly depended on entities such as "norms" that road will ever remain open UNTIL THE CONSTITUTION IS EFFECTIVELY CHANGED TO PREVENT A FUTURE COURT TO OPEN THEM UP AGAIN. To prevent that the Marbury power-grab of 1803 has to be forever nullified in the clearest and most effective ways. I think to do that there will have to be a fixed an limited term or membership of the Court with a lifetime ban on ex-"justices" profiting from rulings they've made from the bench. One with real prison terms attached, to be served in real prisons.
Our system is totally corrupt, this scheme of Trump to give himself (and he's said it in those terms, himself) ten billion dollars through his corrupt appointees is the total and final collapse of the "honors" system that has, so far, kept that level of corruption at bay. From here on if we don't override the cowardice and corruption of the lawyers, and those in the House and, especially, the Senate will be a major hurdle to ending that corruption, and the witless foolishness of the "balance of powers" the American Republic will be destroyed by the things already proven to be possible "under the Constitution." The first step is we have to stop worshiping it and the slave-holders and corrupt financiers who wrote it and the corrupt "justices" that amended it at their whim, starting with the Marbury power grab.
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Since The Republican-fascists Don't Want The Clintons To Testify In Public
maybe the Democrats in the House should hold no-holds-barred hearings with them in public, live, online. Of course it would only work if they asked them really tough questions. I don't know if there is any legal-lore superstitious rite that would allow them to do that having them sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to give it that false aura of TV lawyer show reliability. I have yet to see the liars of the Republican-fascist party who lie their asses off under oath held to any kind of account. But such a hearing would produce public claims by Bill and Hillary Clinton which could, then, be used by the Republican-fascists though the same is true of any testimony on the record that they give.
The Democrats on the relevant committees could invite the Republican-fascists on those committees to ask questions - THOUGH THEY SHOULD NEVER DO THAT WITHOUT THERE BEING RULES THAT THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS HAD TO, THEMSELVES, BE HONEST AND RESPECTFUL. My guess is if they had to abide by honesty and fairness rules the fascists would choose to not participate because that wouldn't serve their purpose.
I am curious to hear Bill Clinton explain his relationship with Epstein outside of the kind of lawyerly truth shaving that his 1990s sworn testimony about his marital infidelity demonstrated. He has no political career or presidency to worry about and, if he's truly innocent of crimes, he doesn't have the same kind of worries about a crooked prosecutor and judge that he rightly had to consider three decades ago.
Of course he could have, well before this, given a full, public account of his relationship with Epstein, Maxwell and the others involved with the child trafficking and rape and, I have absolutely no doubt, compromat and blackmail ring. I say the same about George Mitchell or any others who appear in the Epstein files.
Looking at the online list of those whose names appear in the Epstein material, I was pleased to see only three names of musicians, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and, for pity sake, Itzhak Perlman. I take it from that that Epstein wasn't a music lover. You can contrast that with the names of those in the movie racket or other degenerate media. I think that other than the super-rich and political, perhaps neo-Darwinists and theoretical physicists and other such orthodox materialists account for a lot more of them than could be considered by chance. I'm tempted to go into the Pinkers and Dawkins and the old ScienceBlogs crowd and their relationship with Epstein along with the recently posted podcast of one of their own Rebecca Watson pointing out what a boob Larry Krauss is but that's more an indulgence than something important. I still might do it.
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A lot of what went on in those circles were a direct result of the Supreme Court knocking down the post-Watergate clean-elections laws in the Buckley v Valeo decision that opened the floodgates of dirty money, influence and law buying that the idiot "civil libertarians" did in that and subsequent "free speech-press" rulings by the idiot ridden Supreme Court. You would have to be a totally callow idiot who had spent a lifetime in the general make-believe of "the law" to not realize what the result of knocking down those laws would be, EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE ADOPTED TO STOP.
Fifty six years after the crimes of Nixon horrified those who wanted clean government, our politics AND SO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT is dirtier than it's ever been.
Trump is a direct result of those "first amendment" rulings. The Epstein money operations and those like it, known and yet to be revealed, may well have never found the foothold they did in our politics without those rulings and with the clean elections laws that the ELECTED OFFICIALS OF THE 1970s adopted in order to clean up our politics and government. The Roberts Court, a product of such money corruption in our politics is also a direct result of those "first amendment" "civil liberties" rulings.
I think its notable that the present British "Labour" government that may well fall due to the corrupt links to the Epstein crime gang is led by the hypocritical and corrupt Kier Starmer, who made his reputation as a "civil liberties" lawyer. That fact did nothing to dissuade me of my complete skepticism of that pseudo-liberal lawyer racket on either side of the Atlantic.