Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, May 8, 2025 19:50
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Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump officials want Medicaid to pay drug makers “the lowest price charged by other developed countries” as, the Journal suggested, “a path of less political resistance to achieve some $880 billion in Medicaid savings.”

“President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it,” the Journal said of his drugs plans. “To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-donald-trump-worst-
idea_n_681c4a39e4b0b11c497973a4

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:56 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump is taking bribes because Why Not? Who will stop him? Nobody is Who!

President Donald Trump’s meme coin is already a thing that shouldn’t exist, much less as a vehicle for foreign entities to funnel money to the sitting president, yet here we are.

According to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg, over half of the top holders of $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency token established days before his inauguration — are likely foreign buyers, who have dumped millions into the project.

And likely not without motive. Last month, the token announced that Trump would be hosting an exclusive May 22 dinner for about 200 of $TRUMP’s largest investors at his Washington, D.C., golf club, leading to a flurry of purchases. According to Bloomberg, “76 percent of the token value held among the top 220 wallets likely belongs to foreign owners because the wallets used exchanges that are not available to U.S. residents.” According to a separate analysis by The Washington Post, roughly $100 million worth of tokens were purchased after the dinner was announced.

$TRUMP’s existence as a piggy bank through which so-far anonymous entities from across the globe can dump untold amounts of cash into the president’s coffers in exchange for exclusive access to his time is a pretty clear cut case of corruption. According to an analysis published by the Associated Press earlier this week, the coin has already generated over $320 million in transaction fees for its creators.

The president’s crypto coin is by no means a safe investment. A Tuesday report from NBC News found that of the approximately two million crypto wallets that purchased $TRUMP, around 764,000 lost money on their investment. Just 58 wallets account for roughly $1.1 billion in value gains, each making more than $10 million on their investment.

“The sitting president appears to be selling personal cryptocurrency while in office, granting access to people who buy it, and thereby enriching his business and his family. It’s gobsmacking,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) told Politico on Wednesday. “I’d like to hear one Republican senator defend it. Any self-respecting Congress would demand an accounting of everyone trading this coin who has any business before the government.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-meme-coin-to
p-bu-1235333516/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:16 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Impending Doom of Trump’s Trade War

The uncertainty is doing plenty of economic damage. He may make things much worse.

By James Surowiecki | May 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-trade-war-se
lf-defeat/682726/

Little more than a month has passed since Donald Trump announced his plans to upend the global economic order by imposing huge tariffs on almost every country in the world. The stock market sold off sharply following the announcement; within days, the S&P 500 had lost about 12 percent of its value. But if you look at the U.S. economy right now, it doesn’t look obviously different from the way it did just before Trump’s so-called Liberation Day. Job growth in April was respectable. Forecasts for April’s inflation number, which is due next week, suggest price increases have remained muted. Corporate-earnings reports have come in strong. And the stock market itself has regained the ground it lost in the weeks after April 2.

Unfortunately, none of this means the economy will emerge unscathed from Trump’s trade war. The conflict, after all, has barely begun: After markets’ steep sell-off, Trump put a 90-day pause on his higher tariff rates with every country except China, Canada, and Mexico; he also issued a host of exemptions from the minimum 10 percent global tariff he’s kept in place (though some of these tariff exemptions, such as the one on auto parts, were temporary and are now kicking in). Trump’s 145 percent tariff rate on Chinese imports did go into effect on April 9, but the administration then exempted semiconductor chips, smartphones, computers, solar cells, flat-panel TVs, and computer-storage devices. And U.S. retailers had already begun stocking up on inventory in anticipation of the tariffs, which is why we haven’t seen empty shelves or skyrocketing prices—so far.

We’re in a phony-war period of Trump’s trade conflict. Things appear fine on the surface, but look closely and plenty of signs of impending trouble are emerging. It’s still early enough that if Trump rolls back his tariffs on China and reaches deals with other U.S. trading partners, the damage will be limited. Stock-market investors seem convinced that Trump will come to his senses and make this happen, and it’s certainly in America’s best interest that he does so. But if the deals prove elusive and the tariff war escalates amid beggar-thy-neighbor tactics, economic reality will assert itself.

Worrisome data are already coming in. Trucking volumes—basically, a measure of how many goods are being moved around the country—have begun to fall. Starting this week, shipping volumes at West Coast ports appear to be plummeting as shipments from China simply dry up: Container-ship arrivals in L.A. this week will be down 35 percent year over year.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week that Trump’s exorbitant tariffs have created an effective “embargo” on Chinese goods. The steep decline in imports from China will translate into even less demand for trucking within the U.S. by the end of this month, which will almost certainly lead to layoffs in that industry. Depending on where a product is made, we’ll see empty shelves in some stores by the end of June, and that could lead to layoffs in retail as well.

American importers have, to a degree, diversified away from Chinese-made goods in recent years, but they still account for almost 13 percent of imports—and a higher percentage of imports of manufactured goods. So retailers and consumers have no way to entirely dodge the impact of a virtual trade embargo with China. And Trump has acknowledged this with his odd riffs on how American kids might have to make do with three expensive dolls rather than 30 cheap ones, or with five pencils rather than 250—which one Republican pollster has called a “Marie Antoinette” moment.

Annie Lowrey: How to prepare for the Trumpcession

Those who are going to take a hit are not limited to the retailers that sell imports and the consumers who buy them. American exporters are already feeling the effect of other countries’ retaliatory tariffs. That’s especially true of U.S. farmers, who lost tens of billions of dollars in sales thanks to Trump’s trade war with China during his first term (and were made whole only thanks to a hefty bailout). Those farmers are already facing a renewed wave of canceled orders, to the point that the head of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, an export-trade group, told CNBC that farmers are in a “full-blown crisis” as their sales nosedive. This not only is leading to job cutbacks in agriculture but also means that container-ship departures, as well as arrivals, are falling at U.S. ports. That will put the jobs of dock workers, warehouse workers, and truckers in further jeopardy.

The deeper concern is that reduced demand from consumers because of higher prices will combine with layoffs in retail, trucking, logistics, and allied sectors to create a cascading effect: weaker demand leading to lower sales, triggering more layoffs, leading to still lower demand, and so on. Amid such concern, consumer confidence has been severely shaken by the insecurity Trump has injected into the economy. The business-intelligence nonprofit Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence fell in April for the fifth month in a row, and consumer expectations for the short-term future tumbled to a 13-year low as survey subjects expressed pessimism about business conditions, employment prospects, and future income—in other words, pretty much every practical dimension of the economy.

Concrete signs of reduced consumer spending are already appearing: McDonald’s said last week that sales in its nationwide restaurant chain fell unexpectedly in the first quarter of 2025 because customers were “grappling with uncertainty,” while Harley-Davidson reported a double-digit decline in sales because of consumer uncertainty. The motorcycle manufacturer said it was pulling its guidance for future quarters’ revenue and profit because it cannot predict where the economy or consumer sentiment will be just a couple of months hence.

Even so, the more far-reaching effects of the trade war may not be felt until late summer, after the inventories that businesses have stockpiled run out and when companies realize they have to cut back on investment and hiring in order to adjust to the higher input costs and reduced demand they’re facing. For now, companies are mostly holding off on any big changes—because they’re counting on the possibility that Trump will either cut deals with China and other trading partners or indefinitely extend the pause on higher tariff rates.

The fact that Trump should do these things does not mean, however, that he will. Hardly a day goes by when he does not propose some new tariff—on Sunday, it was on movies made abroad—or tell Americans they don’t need to buy so much stuff. No investor or business person should be all that surprised if Trump went back to his Liberation Day rates and continued to try to strong-arm China, which would almost certainly send the U.S. economy into a self-inflicted, utterly unnecessary recession. The markets are betting that the phony war will never become a real one. We can only hope they’re right.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Will Trump Pretend to Fix What He Broke?
Why you shouldn’t get excited about his “deals”

By Paul Krugman | May 08, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-trump-pretend-to-fix-what-he

The Trump administration is planning to announce its first trade deal today, with Britain. Except it won’t be a deal; more of a “deal.” Reportedly it will mainly be a “framework” for an actual deal that may or may not happen sometime in the future. This is the tariff equivalent of “concepts of a plan” for health care.

In other words, this will be smoke and mirrors, an attempt to persuade the gullible that Trump’s tariffs are actually working. Markets — driven by small investors who seem desperate to believe that the people in charge have some idea what they’re doing — may briefly bounce on the announcement.

Trump, however, has already declared that the tariff that really matters right now, the prohibitive 145 percent rate on imports from China, won’t be coming down. That tariff has already caused a 30-40 percent drop in the volume of US-China trade, which, given the time it takes to ship stuff, guarantees a sharp increase in consumer prices and possibly empty shelves a few weeks from now.

But back to that UK “deal.” Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to any significant opening of the British market to U.S. goods. Why? Because that market was already wide open before Trump stomped in.

The most important thing to understand about Trump’s trade war is that it’s an attempt to solve a problem that only exists in his imagination. He keeps insisting that other countries are engaged in unfair trade, but the reality is that most of our important trading partners impose very low tariffs on U.S. products:

https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/uk-us-trade-and-tariffs-real-stats

You could argue that China is less open to trade than the tariff number suggests, because the government plays such a large role in the Chinese economy. But for Britain, Canada and the European Union Trump’s tariffs are a huge, destructive attempt to fix something that wasn’t broken. These nations can’t stop doing bad stuff on trade because they weren’t doing bad stuff before Trump came along.

What about America’s trade deficit? As economists have repeated ad nauseam, this deficit doesn’t reflect unfair foreign trade policies. It is, instead, the flip side of large flows of capital into the United States, which historically reflected the fact that the U.S. was perceived as an attractive place to invest. Even if Trump manages to score some actual deals, as opposed to concepts of deals, they won’t change that logic. If his strategy does manage to reduce the trade deficit, it will do so only by destroying America’s attractiveness to foreign investors, which may be an achievable goal.

But let me go back to the point that Trump’s tariffs are a response to a problem that didn’t exist. That’s actually an observation that goes beyond trade policy. The Trump team likes to claim that it inherited an economy in terrible shape. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, keeps claiming that the economy needs a “detox.”

In fact, however, when Trump took over the U.S. economy was in very good shape. Unemployment was around 4 percent, while inflation was at most a fraction of a percentage point above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. Our productivity growth was the envy of the world. We had a trade deficit, but as I said, this mainly reflected America’s attractiveness as a place to invest.

It's true that Goldilocks now seems to be leaving the building, but that’s entirely — entirely — due to Trump himself. In discussing the Fed’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged, Jerome Powell repeatedly talked about “uncertainty,” but the only reason things seem much more uncertain now than they did a few months ago is the chaos Trump has created.

And stuff like this doesn’t help:

Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
"Too Late" Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn't have a clue. Other than that, I like him very much! Oil and Energy way down, almost all costs (groceries and "eggs") down, virtually NO INFLATION, Tariff Money Pouring Into the U.S. — THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF "TOO LATE!" ENJOY!
454 ReTruths 1.85k Likes
May 08, 2025, 6:31 AM

Actually, I’m baffled by the quotation marks around “eggs.”

Anyway, aside from the attempt to bully the Fed, you should be worried by Trump’s evident disconnect from reality. Prices are, in fact, going up, with a notable upturn in the inflation expected by businesses:

So what will Trump do if, as seems likely, Monday’s report on consumer prices shows the first signs of accelerating inflation? Even more important, what will he do when the cutoff of imports from China really hits consumers? There’s no chance that he will admit that he was wrong. There’s a very good chance that he and his minions will soon begin trying to corrupt the economic data.

So should we celebrate the trade deal that will be announced today? No. It won’t solve any of the problems Trump has created. It will, if anything, offer Trump the temporary illusion of success, encouraging him to create even more problems.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 11:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The price of Trump’s war on universities

Trashing American science is not only the goal of the Trump White House, it has the support of the Republican Party.

Self-Destruction

By Josh Marshall | May 7, 2025 10:29 a.m.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/self-destruction-2

A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.

At the same time, what Trump and his cronies are doing to the education system with their anti-science agenda will pretty much guarantee that home grown talent is likely to be non-competitive globally. As the split with Musk over visas indicates, the tech sector knows how much it has benefited from draining the brains from overseas. Trump’s actions will reverse the flow — that loud sucking sound will be top talent leaving the US. US higher ed is a significant export industry in which the US runs a big surplus (a lot more international students come to study here than the other way around). Losing the US edge in higher ed, means not just losing the research expertise and findings, but also the students.

Trump and co. don’t care as long as it means weakening the university system. As is becoming clear, their ideological project outstrips economic considerations. They are happy to weaken the US and relegate it to second tier status globally if they can remake the cultural and ideological landscape. I guess they don’t care about turning the US into a backwater as long as they get to be the tin-horn dictators.

What continues to confound me is how many people who do not benefit from this support it.

It was striking to me to hear Trump talking about kids getting fewer dolls at Christmas. If a democrat had done something similar, the right would have gone nuts. It’s like some weird Kennedy parody: “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’s billionaires…” It’s fascinating how many Trump supporters are willing to make the sacrifices they would never countenance from a Democratic administration.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:04 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Actual Math Behind DOGE’s Cuts

If you thought Elon Musk was really trying to cut costs, you weren’t in on the joke.

By Jessica Riedl | May 8, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/05/musk-doge-spendin
g-cuts/682736/

In November, when Donald Trump first announced his plan to place Elon Musk in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency, the idea was widely written off as a joke. Then Trump took office, and DOGE began its very real stampede through the government. As an effort to meaningfully reduce federal spending, however, DOGE remains wholly unserious.

Musk initially promised that he would eliminate $2 trillion of the $7 trillion federal budget, before scaling back his ambitions to $1 trillion, and then $150 billion. Even that revised target is highly improbable.

Precisely measuring the budgetary effects of the Musk experiment remains difficult, but we can begin by looking at the claims made by DOGE itself. In late February, its website claimed to have achieved $55 billion in annual-spending reductions. However, its “wall of receipts” detailed only $16.5 billion of this total. Half of that figure came from a typo claiming $8 billion in savings from terminating an $8 million contract. As The New York Times has reported, that was far from the only accounting error. Once such mistakes as false contract cancellations, triple counts of the same reform, and the inclusion of contracts that expired decades ago were fixed, verified budget savings stood at just $2 billion.

The DOGE website now claims $165 billion in savings. However, it still details only a fraction of the supposed cuts, and earlier accounting errors have given way to new ones. A common sleight of hand is canceling a “blanket purchase agreement”—in which the recipient had been given the equivalent of a credit limit to incur necessary costs on a project—and then claiming savings of the full credit limit rather than the (in many cases substantially lower) amount that was actually spent. Even assuming that the website’s stated savings have become twice as accurate as they were in February, annual savings would reach perhaps $15 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal spending.

Fortunately, more reliable sources than DOGE’s self-reported figures exist. The best is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of spending by agency and program. Any true DOGE spending reductions should show up in these budget totals, as should the results of other White House initiatives, including cuts to public-health spending and the ongoing efforts to eliminate USAID and the Department of Education.

These spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth—approximately $500 billion at an annualized rate—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.

We can see this by looking at Treasury’s breakdowns of monthly spending by agency. Short-term program spending can fluctuate greatly, and sustained trends might not be fully apparent for several months, but the early data are nonetheless revealing. Perhaps the highest-profile cuts under the Trump administration so far have been to public-health spending and foreign aid. And yet, even here, the numbers are rounding errors in the context of the federal budget. Public-health spending, previously about $8.2 billion monthly, fell to $7.1 billion in March, led by cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration, the latter of which funds state and local health grants to serve underprivileged families.

Monthly spending on targeted foreign-assistance programs has fallen from $2.4 billion to $1.4 billion. This includes spending on “Global Health and Child Survival” programs—which includes highly effective funding to combat HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and other illnesses in less developed countries—falling in half to $400 million a month. Payments to “International Organizations and Conferences,” such as the United Nations, have fallen to zero. And monthly USAID spending has fluctuated wildly but overall declined by one-third in the first quarter of 2025.

These cuts have already been highly disruptive to beneficiaries, contractors, and employees, and they threaten immense long-term harm. And yet, their total monthly savings have totaled just $2.1 billion. At the Department of Education, another shutdown target, spending has remained steady aside from the early termination of post-pandemic funding that was already scheduled to phase out over the next year.

Cost reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to show up in the data. This is not surprising, because even laying off one quarter of the 2.3 million federal civilian employees would shave off just 1 percent of federal spending. To be fair to DOGE, more savings will materialize in October, when the salaries of the 75,000 federal employees who took a buyout come off the books. That should save Washington $10 billion a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending—except even that is an overestimate, because Washington will surely end up hiring contractors to perform at least some of the work previously handled by those civil servants, and many contractors cost more than employees.

Moving forward, identifying politically acceptable savings will become harder. Trump and Musk have already hit their easiest targets that do not directly burden most MAGA voters, such as government employees, foreigners, academics, and recipients of contracts with some kind of DEI component. More recent moves to slash Social Security customer-service and veterans’-health personnel have faced a backlash from affected Republican voters. Congress has shown little interest in passing legislation to ratify the executive branch’s cuts, meaning many of them will likely be reversed in court. This year’s appropriations bills—which require seven Senate Democratic votes to break a filibuster—will probably continue to finance and mandate the existence of the Department of Education, USAID, and traditional public-health spending.

That, by the way, is the good news for DOGE. The bad news is that the project seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. Slashing IRS enforcement will embolden tax evasion and reduce revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade. Laying off Department of Education employees who ensure collection of student-loan repayments will increase the deficit. Illegally terminated federal employees are already being reinstated with full back pay, leaving the government with little to show for its trouble besides mounting legal fees.

Even if DOGE somehow manages to end up in the black, any modest savings it achieves will be completely overwhelmed by the GOP’s push to expand the 2017 tax cut at a cost of roughly $500 billion annually. Claims that Washington can no longer afford to spend 0.1 percent of its budget providing lifesaving HIV treatments to 20 million impoverished Africans cannot be taken seriously when the administration and Congress are preparing to cut taxes and expand other spending by trillions of dollars.

None of this is to say that DOGE has failed. Musk might not have followed through on his unfocused and evolving promises to eliminate payment errors, balance the entire budget, and implement regulatory reform. But he has successfully given the White House cover to purge and intimidate the civil service, helped Congress justify exorbitant tax cuts, rewarded MAGA voters with revenge against their perceived enemies, and granted himself the ability to access sensitive government data and possibly ensure his companies’ continued government contracts. Sure, annual budget deficits remain on track to double over the next decade. But if you thought DOGE was really about cutting costs, you were never in on the joke.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump officials want Medicaid to pay drug makers “the lowest price charged by other developed countries” as, the Journal suggested, “a path of less political resistance to achieve some $880 billion in Medicaid savings.”

“President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it,” the Journal said of his drugs plans. “To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-donald-trump-worst-
idea_n_681c4a39e4b0b11c497973a4

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:46 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

Do you realize that every Republican in Congress, including a few of the dumbest Democrats, opposed all changes? If just a few Republicans would have voted for change, it could have happened despite the idiotic Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the stupid bitch from Arizona, whatever her name was, who was forced to leave politics when Democrats in Arizona realized what a goddamn bribe-taking cunt she was. She has cited U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, as a role model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrsten_Sinema#Political_positions

Both Manchin and Sinema had been kicked out of the Senate because they were neither Democrat nor Republican. They were taking bribes from industry to vote against Democratic sponsored legislation, but they were not charged or convicted of bribery.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:48 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump radically remade the US food system in just 100 days

The people who grow and sell America's food no longer trust the USDA. We made a timeline to show you what happened.

https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-usda-food-system-agricult
ure-first-100-days/

Grist interviewed farmers, food businesses, and agricultural nonprofits across seven states about what the first 100 days of the administration has looked like for them. Nearly all of them told Grist that the agriculture department’s various funding cuts and decisions, as well as the moves to shrink its workforce capacity, have changed how much trust they have in the agency — and, by extension, the federal government.

Food policy analysts and experts throughout the nation also told Grist that this swift transformation of the USDA is unprecedented.

“Multiple parts of our food systems are now under attack,” said Teon Hayes, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. At the same time, food prices and overall costs of living are continuing to rise.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:20 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

New American Pope Trolls Trump in Very First Speech

By Kenneal Patterson | May 8 2025 3:45PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/read-pope-leos-full-speech-here-new-amer
ican-pope-trolls-trump-in-very-first-speech/

Newly-elected Pope Leo XIV appeared to take aim at President Donald Trump Thursday during his first speech as pontiff.

American-born Cardinal Robert Prevost echoed the words of the late Pope Francis, a regular critic of Trump’s, when he advocated for migrant rights.

“We must seek together how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, [and is] always open to receive—like this square, with open arms—everyone, all those who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love," he said.

Francis, often called the “People’s Pope,” often countered Trump’s anti-undocumented immigrant campaign slogan “Build the Wall” by urging global leaders to instead “build bridges.”

“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times,” Cardinal Re said when he delivered the late pontiff’s homily.

The new Holy Father payed tribute to Francis in a speech honoring the world’s migrants. Francis, who was a migrant himself having been born in Argentina, was the world’s first Latin American pope.

“Help us too, then, each other, to build bridges... uniting all of us to be one people, always in peace,” Leo XIV added. “Thank you to Pope Francis.”

He even took a moment to speak Spanish and encourage the church to always seek peace, charity, and “to be close, especially to those who suffer.”

“I too would like this greeting of peace to enter your hearts, to reach your families, to all people, wherever they may be, to all nations, to the whole earth‚” the pontiff said to the thousands that gathered beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, adding that God “loves us all, unconditionally.”

“Peace be with you all,” Pope Leo XIV said from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, a common message within the Catholic Church but also one that could apply to Trump’s divided America.

Cardinal Robert Prevost has directly criticized the Trump administration in the past, including calling out Vice President JD Vance.

Francis was one of the most transgressive popes in the church’s history and was revered by progressives for his stances on social causes. He spent his final moments on Earth lamenting the world’s xenophobia. In his frail state, he directed Archbishop Diego Ravelli to read what would be some of his final words.

“What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Ravelli read. “How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!”

Francis implored the world to “revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas. For all of us are children of God.”

Trump congratulated Leo XIV in a post on Truth Social, despite recently suggesting that he should be pope instead.

“Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope,” he wrote. “It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!”

The rest of MAGA, however, has already begun to melt down over the Vatican’s choice, with rightwing influencer Laura Loomer posting on X that Leo XIV “is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.”

Leo XIV is a native Chicagoan and the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

***

Read Leo XIV’s full speech below:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/read-pope-leos-full-speech-here-new-amer
ican-pope-trolls-trump-in-very-first-speech/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

Do you realize that every Republican in Congress, including a few of the dumbest Democrats, opposed all changes? If just a few Republicans would have voted for change, it could have happened despite the idiotic Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the stupid bitch from Arizona, whatever her name was, who was forced to leave politics when Democrats in Arizona realized what a goddamn bribe-taking cunt she was. She has cited U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, as a role model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrsten_Sinema#Political_positions

Both Manchin and Sinema had been kicked out of the Senate because they were neither Democrat nor Republican. They were taking bribes from industry to vote against Democratic sponsored legislation, but they were not charged or convicted of bribery.

No. See... You don't get to make this argument, because it's not a valid argument.

You're coming into it presenting this as if there was one singular bill that everyone was voting on, relating specifically to this one issue. And then you're pointing fingers at individual people who voted against a much, much, much larger piece of legislation that just so happened to include your current specific talking point.

Do you see the flaw in your logic here? Or should I go further into depth?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:03 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming

From militarized crackdowns to legal impunity, Trump’s policing agenda is designed to crush dissent and critics.

The Intercept Briefing | May 8, 2025, 4:30 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/08/trump-police-crime-radley-balko/

Donald Trump’s all-caps executive order on policing — “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS” – is less about policy and more about intent. And that intent is clear: To give Trump direct control over local law enforcement and further shield police from accountability.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/strengthening-
and-unleashing-americas-law-enforcement-to-pursue-criminals-and-protect-innocent-citizens/

As journalist and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop” Radley Balko puts it, “It’s a statement of intent and whether or not Trump is able to do a lot of the more pernicious and unconstitutional things he wants to do.”

The executive order calls for “military and national security assets” to assist in local policing, directs federal resources and protections for state and local law enforcement, and enhances police protections, among other proclamations. But it reflects a deeper ambition.

“He wants more federal militarized law enforcement under his thumb instead of under the thumb of governors or mayors,” says Balko. “He wants to use them to help with immigration deportations. He wants help with cracking down on protest.” And the concern and fear, says Balko, is that Trump will also “use law enforcement to go after his critics and people he perceives to be his enemies.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Balko joins senior reporter Akela Lacy and host Jessica Washington to break down the Trump administration’s push to federalize local law enforcement and “unleash” police who already face minimal meaningful restraint.

“We’re really getting to the point where law enforcement officers have almost no accountability at all,” says Balko, who writes the newsletter The Watch. He adds, “All of this is based on a premise that isn’t true, which is that we’re in some sort of massive crime wave that’s been sweeping the country.”

The fearmongering, Lacy notes, is that cities run by Democrats — San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Baltimore — are dangerous.

But as Balko points out, “When [Trump] took office for the first time he had actually inherited the lowest crime rate of any president since like Eisenhower. And [he] was the first president in 40 years to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered it.” While crime spiked during the pandemic under Trump, Balko continues, “Under Biden it started going down over the last two years of [his] administration and it continues to go down.”

“The narrative,” Lacy adds, “is extremely detached from reality.”

But that narrative serves to justify a sweeping law-and-order agenda.

“The vision is for police to respond to everything,” says Lacy. It’s a vision for a militarized police force with no accountability under the discretion of the president that “they can deploy to enforce any and every part of their agenda beyond criminal issues, and then further criminalize participation in the public’s sphere and exercise of constitutional rights.”

Chilling Dissent

Over the last few months, Balko adds, the federal government has increasingly used masked, unidentified agents to snatch people off the streets — not for violent crimes, but for political speech, protests, and civil offenses “in a deliberate effort to evade judicial review.”

“They’re snatching people off the street and taking them to an overseas prison that’s more like a gulag and imposing on them what’s effectively a life sentence with no due process,” Balko continues. “No habeas corpus, no judicial review whatsoever. These are very classic characteristics of a police state.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-trumped-up-police-state-is-com
ing/id1195206601?i=1000706880860
https://open.spotify.com/show/2js8lwDRiK1TB4rUgiYb24

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No. See... You don't get to make this argument, because it's not a valid argument.

You're coming into it presenting this as if there was one singular bill that everyone was voting on, relating specifically to this one issue. And then you're pointing fingers at individual people who voted against a much, much, much larger piece of legislation that just so happened to include your current specific talking point.

Do you see the flaw in your logic here? Or should I go further into depth?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, you're like a talentless lawyer or self-taught computer programmer whose code is full of errors. A competent lawyer or programmer would dump in the trash your wordy legal briefs and programs because debugging your crap, and listening to your whininess, is more trouble than rewriting the whole thing, ignoring you and your half-baked ideas. Everything is words with you, but meaning escapes you, so don't bother explaining.

Do you remember that asshole Joe Lieberman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Joe_Lieberman

Lieberman screwed the Democrats during his entire career, taking the Republican's side. If the FBI had monitored his bank transactions with lobbyists, he would have been imprisoned. The voters finally dumped him for a real Democrat, but he and the Republicans had screwed over the USA.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:50 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The IRS has lost almost one-third of its tax auditors after 2 months of DOGE cuts, report says

May 7, 2025

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-doge-cuts-layoffs-31-percent-auditors
-tax-revenue-impact/

Losing a large share of auditors could impact the federal government's ability to collect tax revenue, given that these agents typically handle cases involving wealthy taxpayers or corporations, experts say.

"You lose the very staff trained to keep high-end taxpayers and corporate tax payers in compliance," noted Emily DiVito, senior adviser on economic policy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former policy adviser at the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS.

She added, "You can see some behavioral effects when taxpayers, especially those that really don't want to pay their bills, come to accept there is very little risk to not paying at all, or even filing."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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