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L.L. #8, April 26 [1]

['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Sabrina Haake', 'Chitown Kev']

Date: 2026-04-26  

Preface: I probably won’t have to resort to poetry yet (no promise for Monday), but this is Laudable Links — a curated collection of links to readings with comments and context provided. Members and authors are welcome, and comments are needed.

“Judge” Jeanine gives up the game when she gives up on prosecuting Jerome Powell. Jerome is no saint. SPLC lawsuit dissected Tod Blanche delights his client with firing squad talk.

First: Jean Jeanine Junks the Powell Prosecution (because it no longer matters, and it was never viable.)

I rarely find fault with Liz Dye’s pieces at Above the Law, but there is a little missing context in her “Pirro Taps Out On Powell.” She writes about the ridiculousness of US Attorney for Washington D.C. Jeanine Pirrhic’s attempted “investigation” and prosecution of the current chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

Wednesday, Ms. Pirrhus said that the investigation was kicking ass and taking names, and nobody better doubt her toughness. She was investigating, and therefore, she still wanted to subpoena the entire Federal Reserve main building staff, basically. See, she had probable cause that there were crimes in the overcharging for the building.

What crimes? Well, over charging. No. What crimes?

|[Quote] in March, Chief Judge James Boasberg quashed the subpoenas, noting that Pirro’s office had declined the opportunity to present evidence in camera of any actual crime.

“The Court is thus left with no credible reason to think that the Government is investigating suspicious facts as opposed to targeting a disfavored official,” he wrote. “When the evidence of improper motive is so strong and the justifications for these subpoenas are so tenuous, it is hard to see the renovations and testimony as anything other than a convenient pretext for launching a criminal investigation that the Government launched for another, unstated purpose: pressuring Powell to knuckle under.” [End Quote]|

“In camera” means in a closed court or in judge’s chambers. Pirro Esq. couldn’t find a crime to say she was investigating even in such a setting, so the judge said that it sure looked like a political act, not a legal one.

But as of Wednesday, she was still spitting fire and appeal promises. She was, in particular, conducting her investigation on Xitter and press releases. That is how law is done, right? I mean, it’s not prejudicial to start slagging off on the judges when you’re the US-A, is it? That doesn’t make your “investigation” politics, does it?

|[Quote] Republican Senator Thom Tillis vowed that none of Trump’s nominees to the Fed were getting out of the Banking Committee until Pirro called off her dogs. And, with no ability to replace Powell when his term expires in three weeks, Trump would be stuck with his nemesis indefinitely according to the bank’s own rules[End Quote]|

And so, on Friday, she swore that she was just as tough as ever, but, uh, the investigation was stopping, for now.

|[Quote] “Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so,” she tweeted, acknowledging even as she flounced out that the facts never warranted criminal investigation in the first place. [End Quote]|

In other words, Ms. Dye points out that Pirro just admitted that the “facts” do not “warrant” investigating now, nor have they all along.

What isn’t stated, though, is that the dropping of the investigation is not merely because Tillis threatened the prospects of replacing Powell, but the likely approval of “tough guy” Kevin Warsh by the somnolent and corrupt Senate. If he is approved, that will be the end of the independent fed. It will unmake the Jekyll Island meetings of 1910 and 1913, and it will knock out the last barrier to 1929 in 2029.

But wait, there’s more!

Secondly, let’s look at the hagiography of Powell, yes?

I rarely disagree with Liz Dye, and I rarely entirely agree with Robert Kuttner. Mr. Kuttner is one of the editors of The American Prospect, so he’s very valuable, and he usually has something good to say but (it’s the “but” that kills me). With “Time to Stop Lionizing Powell,” on the other hand, I just want to say, “Amen.”

I’m sure you’ve heard the joke: a man comes in with poop cradled in his hand and says, “Look what I almost stepped in!” Well, that’s about how I feel with Jerome Powell.

|[Quote] Warsh did himself no favors. Warsh, appointed by Trump to lower interest rates, insisted that he would be completely independent of Trump. Senators of both parties weren’t buying it.

Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Banking Committee, opened by terming Warsh Trump’s “sock puppet.” The name stuck. It was repeated in questioning by Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana[End Quote]|

I have quoted a line from the film Slackers where the street radical says that America has a “bipolar one party system.” What, I’ve thought, is that one party? I think we can see it when the subject is the Federal Reserve (or the 14th amendment’s exclusion clause). Elizabeth Warren is a woman trying very hard to rescue capitalism. I say that without any sneering. She can see how its internal contradictions can be managed via state guarantees (regulation and penal codes). I donated her her presidential campaign. However, all of them, Katie, get serious about the bank. In other words, there are no party differences when it comes to the Fed, because we really do have a bi-polar party of capital.

Senator Warren read Pirro’s confession that there is no probable cause differently from Ms. Dye and others:

|[Quote] As Sen. Warren commented, “Let’s be clear what the Justice Department announced today: They threatened to restart the bogus criminal investigation into Fed Chair Powell at any time while failing to drop their ridiculous criminal probe against governor Lisa Cook … The Senate should not proceed with the nomination of Kevin Warsh.”[End Quote]|

In our one-party system, Powell will be true to capital and stand up to Trump. When Donald is inimical to capital flow, Powell has resisted. That doesn’t make him wise, or even courageous.

|[Quote] In 2018, the Fed and the banking industry wrote and promoted a bill, S. 2155, that weakened regulatory requirements over large regional banks. Under Powell, the Fed removed its own ability to block banks from distributing capital to shareholders if banks demonstrated bad risk management. It also weakened liquidity rules.

And under Powell, the Fed weakened the Volcker rule’s restrictions on proprietary trading and the restrictions on bank investments in private equity and hedge funds.

Now we are at risk of crashes from crypto, AI, and private credit. The Fed needs to be increasing vigilance, not weakening it.[End Quote]|

The internal contradictions of capitalism are heightened by a mad rush to laissez-faire — an experiment America has run more than once with the same result. Further, currency is weakened both in integrity and stability by the “innovations” of stable coins and crypto.

As the police like to say, he’s no angel. He’s a hard core neo-liberal capital fiend.

Go read, because I can’t summarize it

I’ll do this from time to time. Like other people, I’ll say, “Hey, this is good. Check it out.” Normally, that’s when a piece is too complex to summarize or when it is too rationally organized to need any comment.

This is “one of them latters,” as The Misfit says in Flannery O’Connor.

Andrew Weissmann was at Just Security in a recorded interview about the Department of Justice indictment of the SPLC on Thursday. Now he has written a very clear dissection of the flaws in the legal instrument Blanche is using.

“The Poverty of the DOJ Indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center” is written as a legal commentary. That means it has very clear sections and very clean language. I didn’t find it too labyrinthine, either, so I recommend just going to read it.

Finale: The man who loves snuff films has an DAG auditioning for AG

Tod Blanche is Deputy Attorney General, and he really wants to be Attorney General. I am convinced that he is in a frenzy of wild acts meant to give his “client” a sugar rush.

An odd article/interview at Mother Jones by Sophie Hurwitz covers one of these bits of bliss for Donald: “The Truth About the Trump Plan to Bring Back Execution by Firing Squad.”

|[Quote] The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.” [End Quote]|

You can see why I call the man “Tod” (German for “death”). The highest duty is to kill more people and to do so in ways that are accompanied by violence, guilt, loud noises, and blood. . . lots of blood. Gas chambers, lethal injections, and even hanging don’t have BLOOD!

The article isn’t about the numbers affected. Instead, it deals with the way that this method of execution violates the constitution. It uses the case of the last person to be executed this way, Mikal Mahdi in 2025, and the author devotes almost all of her article to an interview with

|[Quote] Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. [End Quote]|

Now, about the execution in 2025 and cruel and unusual. . .

|[Quote] In the execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year…the three shooters were positioned 15 feet away from Mr. Mahdi. There was a target pinned on him. The folks that were witnessing his execution noticed that he cried out as the bullets hit him, that he groaned two times about 45 seconds after that, and that he continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp.

There were two wounds—not three—even though there were three shooters. The entry point for the bullets was downward through the liver, the pancreas, and the left lower lung lobe, before crashing into his spine and ribs.

He did bleed, he did die, but an expert pathologist who studied the state’s autopsy report said that Mr. Mahdi’s ventricles were not disrupted. He was conscious for a lot longer than the state had suggested. You’re causing multiple multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum, and obviously also piercing flesh and internal organs. And that is extraordinarily painful. If it doesn’t cause an immediate lack of consciousness, which it clearly did not in Mr. Mahdi’s case, then it is torture. Mr. Mahdi was sentenced to death. He was not sentenced to be tortured. [End Quote]|

We know, though, that Donald Trump seems to really like the idea of watching people suffer. He has demonstrated repeatedly actual sadism.

As a society, we find it abhorrent, but Tod Blanche’s “client” has assigned the “highest duty” of public officials — make those unlucky enough to be judged to the death penalty suffer.

[Conclusion]: Perhaps I could have put a warning up on that last story, but, frankly, I personally feel as if we need to be confronted with the evil done in our names. I know one of the things that will shape my worship today.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/26/800027951/community/l-l-8-april-26/

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