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

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

Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social

I'm just glad one of these men has the nuclear codes and the other has all our personal data.

June 5, 2025 at 3:24 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/chrislhayes.bsky.social/post/3lqv5nyg5yk2d

Monkey Knife Fight: Trump vs Musk

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

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Thursday, June 5, 2025 9:06 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Trump used Elon as a publicity stunt.

The reality is that while DOGE can dig around and find all kinds of waste,

1) Until departments and agencies follow normal accounting practices for a full fiscal year, nobody knows where the money is going, to whom, and for what , and ...

2) Only Congress can shut off the tap. And THAT is a political price that Trump can't, or won't, pay.

Trump has gotten squishy on foreign policy (letting Lindsay Graham negotiate with foreign governments, forwarding a neocon plan) and fraud and waste. Trump is acting like somebody has something on him.

Short version is, if Musk lawyers up and the courts find he went rouge while heading DOGE, which there is plenty of evidence for, given what we were told about how he was and how he wasn't by Trump, there is a very good chance the courts will rule Trump has to undue everything Musk did.
I'm so happy. Are you happy?

Just a couple more MAGA morons making my day.

T

It's rogue, not rouge. "Rouge" is French for "red" and refers to either the red powder that women put on their cheeks, or sometimes a red colored polishing compound (jeweler's rouge).

Also, it's undo, not undue. Undo means to take apart what was done, undue means excessive or beyond what is normal or justified.

Where is the articulate man who's in a bad mood, and what have you done with him?

I was hurrying. I had someplace else to be and the news was too good not to post. I can live with the mistakes. And I notice you didn't address what I wrote, just how I wrote it. That's a bit anal, don't ya think?

T

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Thursday, June 5, 2025 9:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

When it comes to spending or saving money, there's a good chance that some actions will be found to be under administrative discretion. For example, letting everyone on probation go. It's well understood in public agencies that people on probation can be let go for any reason.

AFA government spending is concerned, there's a gray area between Congressional approval of expenditures and actually spending the money.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/can-a-president-refuse-to-spend-fu
nds-approved-by-congress
Very little of this AFAIK has to do with Musk, since he can't hire or fire anyone, or impound money. If anyone has the authority to do this, it's either top managers - like Cabinet level department heads - or Trump himself.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Thursday, June 5, 2025 9:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do you see what the Media is doing to him? Or possibly not even the media but just the clickbait farms that he's been watching?

His imagination is running wild with possibilities right now. The sky is the limit! Every asshole with an opinion he agrees with is out there speculating about all the possibilities under the sun of what might come of this.
The media is not at fault.

At the end of the day, you are correct.

It is your fault for allowing them to lose the trust of the entire country.

You should have held them to a higher standard.

Oops.

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

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 7:32 AM

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

Wake Up and Smell the Corruption
How far we've fallen, how fast

By Paul Krugman | Jun 06, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/wake-up-and-smell-the-corruption

Musk believes that he delivered the presidency to Trump, and may well be right. He gave Trump and his allies a lot of money; he helped Trump regain confidence after his disastrous debate; he brought in the bro vote.

And Musk clearly believes that this entitles him to receive special favors from the White House — not policies he likes in general, but contracts and specific actions that benefit him personally. He even seems to have imagined that he was effectively co-president. That is, he simply assumed that U.S. policy was for sale, and thought he had bought it.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t responded by saying “How dare you suggest such a thing?” Instead, he has threatened retaliation — again, not in the form of general policies Musk won’t like but in the form of specific actions aimed to hurt Musk’s bottom line. Steve Bannon is even calling for Musk’s deportation.

The point is that both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance.

And everyone takes it for granted that both men are right. Musk’s only mistake was in underestimating the depths of Trump’s lack of principles, imagining that he was the kind of corrupt politician who stays bought, as opposed to a guy who always breaks his promises the moment it seems expedient to do so.

In short, we no longer have rule of law, just rule by the Leader’s whims. We have abandoned everything America was supposed to stand for.

I don’t blame either Trump or Musk for America’s degeneration. I blame their enablers, who have refused, again and again, to enforce the Constitution or place any restraints on Trump’s abuses. And yes, this means Republicans. You don’t have to love the Democratic Party to recognize that it does, in fact, expel politicians who engage in egregious corruption.

Oh, and anyone suggesting that Democrats should reach out to Musk is a fool. Yes, he’s currently Trump’s enemy, but he’s evil, and his brand is toxic. Better to see if there is anyone left in the G.O.P. who is finally ready to take a stand on behalf of democracy and law. But don’t get your hopes up.

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 11:33 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wake Up and Smell the Corruption
How far we've fallen, how fast

By Paul Krugman | Jun 06, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/wake-up-and-smell-the-corruption

Musk believes that he delivered the presidency to Trump, and may well be right. He gave Trump and his allies a lot of money; he helped Trump regain confidence after his disastrous debate; he brought in the bro vote.

And Musk clearly believes that this entitles him to receive special favors from the White House — not policies he likes in general, but contracts and specific actions that benefit him personally. He even seems to have imagined that he was effectively co-president. That is, he simply assumed that U.S. policy was for sale, and thought he had bought it.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t responded by saying “How dare you suggest such a thing?” Instead, he has threatened retaliation — again, not in the form of general policies Musk won’t like but in the form of specific actions aimed to hurt Musk’s bottom line. Steve Bannon is even calling for Musk’s deportation.

The point is that both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance.

And everyone takes it for granted that both men are right. Musk’s only mistake was in underestimating the depths of Trump’s lack of principles, imagining that he was the kind of corrupt politician who stays bought, as opposed to a guy who always breaks his promises the moment it seems expedient to do so.

In short, we no longer have rule of law, just rule by the Leader’s whims. We have abandoned everything America was supposed to stand for.

I don’t blame either Trump or Musk for America’s degeneration. I blame their enablers, who have refused, again and again, to enforce the Constitution or place any restraints on Trump’s abuses. And yes, this means Republicans. You don’t have to love the Democratic Party to recognize that it does, in fact, expel politicians who engage in egregious corruption.

Oh, and anyone suggesting that Democrats should reach out to Musk is a fool. Yes, he’s currently Trump’s enemy, but he’s evil, and his brand is toxic. Better to see if there is anyone left in the G.O.P. who is finally ready to take a stand on behalf of democracy and law. But don’t get your hopes up.

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

I think Musk and Trump will back off. Both have too much to lose. However, the press is going to want Trump to answer for what he said. That the best way to cut spending is to cut off Mucks’ grants. He said they are a waste of money. Therefore, how can he now justify continuing them?

And Musk insinuated Trump is a pedophile. How can he make nice with Trump knowing that. What does that say about him that he wants to be friends with a pedophile? His best defense against Trump is that he is going to be around for 40 more years. Trump, not so much. So republicans have to consider that when they take sides. If they take sides.

T

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Friday, June 6, 2025 11:37 AM

Paul Krugman has been fapping away all night in his basement to this one just like you two fags.

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 12:28 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Paul Krugman has been fapping away all night in his basement to this one just like you two fags.

Poor Gilligan, if he can’t say something in two sentences of less his brain shuts down. And even then, what he says is mostly childish.

T

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Friday, June 6, 2025 1:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Paul Krugman has been fapping away all night in his basement to this one just like you two fags.

Poor Gilligan, if he can’t say something in two sentences of less his brain shuts down. And even then, what he says is mostly childish.

T

I don't have any desire to bother wasting time "debating" with mindless headline readers.

I have written pages upon pages of thoughtful things, but whenever I do I end the thread because neither of you two have anything to argue once I've shut you down. This site is riddled with dead threads that I've ended on the both of you.

You have nothing to say that I can't get by skimming the headlines on news aggregate sites.

Meanwhile, in reality, I have quite the long record of correct predictions that gets bolstered every week that passes and you've just got another 100 clickbait videos and trash articles clogging up your 12 tick tock threads to nowhere.

So... yeah. Why bother writing out the reasons why I always end up right and you always end up wondering why you were wrong again and you never learn anything, when I can just call you a fag and a loser and we all end up with the same end result?

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

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 2:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Paul Krugman has been fapping away all night in his basement to this one just like you two fags.

Poor Gilligan, if he can’t say something in two sentences of less his brain shuts down. And even then, what he says is mostly childish.

T

I don't have any desire to bother wasting time "debating" with mindless headline readers.

I have written pages upon pages of thoughtful things, but whenever I do I end the thread because neither of you two have anything to argue once I've shut you down. This site is riddled with dead threads that I've ended on the both of you.

You have nothing to say that I can't get by skimming the headlines on news aggregate sites.

Meanwhile, in reality, I have quite the long record of correct predictions that gets bolstered every week that passes and you've just got another 100 clickbait videos and trash articles clogging up your 12 tick tock threads to nowhere.

So... yeah. Why bother writing out the reasons why I always end up right and you always end up wondering why you were wrong again and you never learn anything, when I can just call you a fag and a loser and we all end up with the same end result?

Quote:

“I have written pages upon pages of thoughtful things, but whenever I do I end the thread because neither of you two have anything to argue once I've shut you down. This site is riddled with dead threads that I've ended on the both of you.”

I have quoted you here. Your entire post comes off much the same way. What way is that, you ask? As you being a sick narcissist.

What could I, with a lesser IQ than you possibly say to show you are an idiot? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I can point out you are posting to SECOND and I thousands of times in dozens of threads. All of which continued for us until we chose not to post there. Then whatever happens to them happens.

You like to comment when I go back and refresh a thread because I believe it is still relevant. It pisses you off when I wake a bunch of them. Other threads I let go. You, moron have nothing to do with what I chose to do.

So, I guess aside from being a narcissist, you’re full of shit.

A challenge, post something so brilliant I stop posting. Do it in all my threads Gilligan.

T

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Friday, June 6, 2025 3:18 PM

Quit licking your own asshole, mutt.

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 7:00 PM

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

The Real Reason for the Trump-Musk Feud is Uglier Than You Think

Strip away the ego contest, and what you really see here is a competition about how to screw over poor and working people more effectively.

By Greg Sargent | June 6, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/196246/real-reason-trump-musk-feud-ugl
ier

As the war between Donald Trump and Elon Musk worsens, what’s truly odd about this whole spectacle is that the actual substantive disagreement between them seems to be of little interest to media observers. And when you strip away the trolling and shitposting, here’s what becomes clear: This is really a battle over how comprehensively to screw over poor and working people, largely to the benefit of the wealthy.

The superficial argument between them, of course, is over Musk’s opposition to the “big, beautiful bill” that the House passed and that Trump wants the Senate to adopt. That opposition is rooted in Musk’s claim that the bill is loaded with “pork” and will explode the deficit. Trump, meanwhile, is infuriated by Musk because he can’t brook criticism and wants the bill to pass to notch a victory.

But the respective positions underlying those stances are mysteriously missing from the whole Trump-Musk discourse. Flush them into the open, and it helps illuminate the true spectrum of the MAGA movement’s ideological goals—and why its “pro-worker populist” pretensions are so thoroughly phony.

The House GOP bill would entail a large upward transfer of resources. The bill, which would continue Trump’s 2017 tax law and add new tax giveaways for wealthy investors, heirs, and others, would deliver a big tax cut to those in the highest income brackets. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the tax cuts enjoyed by those in the bottom 20 percent in 2027 would be one seven-hundredth the size of those reaped by the top 1 percent.

Worse, those relative table scraps for the bottom could be erased by other changes. The bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid and other health care changes would result in over 10 million people losing health insurance. Add in other cuts to the safety net, and you see why the bill ultimately would lower household resources for the bottom 10 percent while raising them for the top 10 percent—a sizable redistribution upward. As Paul Krugman notes, the bill’s “cruelty is exceptional even by right wing standards.”

Musk is angry about the $2.4 trillion those changes would add to the debt. But, crucially, he’s said little—if anything—about the role that those tax cuts for the rich would have in that outcome. He is primarily obsessed with the bill’s “pork,” meaning that he wants the bill to cut more spending—much, much more.

Where would that money come from? Musk’s cuts via his Department of Government Efficiency have already decimated foreign aid and other programs, producing more starvation, disease, and death among the global poor. Given that DOGE searched for “waste, fraud, and abuse” and found very little, if Musk wants massive additional cuts, by definition they would fall more heavily on important government programs, almost certainly ones that low-income Americans rely upon.

Another way to say this is that their real difference is over how far to push the “waste, fraud, and abuse” scam. Trump, who’s mindful of the MAGA-GOP’s image as a “working-class party,” has insisted the GOP won’t cut Medicaid and will target only fraud. That’s a lie—even some MAGA Republicans warn that the bill’s deep Medicaid cuts will hammer Trump’s working-class base and, in so doing, expose how Trump is betraying MAGA’s “populist” aura. Indeed, Trump is actively deceiving his base by pretending those cuts only target fraud. Musk, similarly, would use the “waste, fraud, and abuse” canard to absolutely annihilate the state if he could.

Which leads to an argument we keep hearing: The Trump-Musk feud reveals the deep, possibly irreconcilable strains in the MAGA alliance between the tech-bro oligarchs and the Trumpist populists. Yes, Trump and Musk do differ on things like tariffs and immigration. But on fundamental matters involving the role of the state in creating a more (or less) egalitarian future, the two men are largely in sync.

For one thing, both view the state largely as something to capture for themselves—Musk to gain support for his Promethean schemes for the future of “humanity,” and Trump to engage in world-historical self-dealing and corruption. This was neatly captured by Trump’s threat to cancel Musk’s federal contracts. Musk’s visions for space travel and electric vehicles have benefited enormously from federal support over the years. His achievements might not exist without the U.S. state. Yet Musk’s DOGE—with its assault on science, universities, and research and development—would dramatically downsize the state’s role in enabling the future flourishing of countless Americans and in keeping total immiseration and death at bay for the poorest of the poor. As Michelle Goldberg notes, the DOGE boys showed zero curiosity about who is being helped by all that foreign aid, and how.

Musk does have some sort of vision of future human flourishing. But he often talks about keeping alive the human “consciousness,” an oddly cold concept that doesn’t really depend on making the whole world a better and fairer place for living, breathing human beings. It could be kept alive by a select few—some of them on a faraway planet like, say, Mars—once the civilizational dead weight were systematically abandoned, as cutting foreign aid seems like a first step toward doing.

Meanwhile, to Trump, everything involving the state is up for corrupt horse trading and for punishing and extorting enemies. So his immediate instinct was to threaten Musk’s contracts, which Trump can only understand as a form of self-dealing by Musk—one that Trump can take away in a grand dominance display.

A helpful framework for understanding what links their worldviews comes from writer John Ganz. Neither is capable of understanding the state and political society as something that helped create the conditions that enabled their own power, wealth, and worldly achievements. These accomplishments must only be seen as a reflection of their own laudatory individual greatness.

What’s more, neither sees the state as having a meaningful role in promoting distributive fairness. This, ultimately, is what unites the tech oligarchs and MAGA: Both are deeply hostile to the social-democratic goal of using the state to promote a more liberal-egalitarian order. Both agree that the U.S. state should cut loose, literally, the worst-off people on the planet to face unimaginable suffering. Both agree that the U.S. state should dramatically roll back its commitment to providing minimal social and economic resources for lower-income Americans, including the working poor.

For Trump and Musk alike, the U.S. state provides opportunities for seemingly endless grasping and taking. It’s something to manipulate for megalomaniacal ends—though Musk imagines he’s saving human “consciousness” in doing so, while Trump is largely using it to line his family’s pockets and build chintzy gold-plated playgrounds abroad for the pleasure of the global superrich.

In the end, Musk would use deficit fears to gut the state more thoroughly than Trump would, while Trump seems more focused on dramatically reducing the tax burden of the wealthy and slashing the safety net to pay for it. They are at odds, but mainly because they merely fall at different places on the same spectrum of impulses. And those impulses all tilt toward the same place—toward making our society a less egalitarian, more unequal, meaner, crueler, and much more savage place.

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 7:17 PM

I'm going to laugh when it turns out to be performative art and they make all of your so-called intellectuals all pondering the worst way to frame this expose themselves as the assholes they are.

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

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 7:30 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm going to laugh when it turns out to be performative art and they make all of your so-called intellectuals all pondering the worst way to frame this expose themselves as the assholes they are.

Ponder this Trump project from last month:

What would the Golden Dome cost?

June 06, 2025

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2025/0606/trump-golden-dome-mis
sile-defense

A recent Congressional Budget Office report says that though top estimates for building such a program have decreased by a third – from $831 billion to about $542 billion – over the past 20 years, due mainly to lower space-launch expenses – threats have simultaneously grown “in ways that could increase the overall size and cost” of a Star Wars-style defense system. Costs could also be higher due to increased sophistication and the number of ICBMs from potential adversaries, such as North Korea.

The Golden Dome system, which Mr. Trump says will cost $175 billion – a figure at the lowest end of the CBO estimate – has already been allocated $25 billion. That’s 2.5% of the total Defense Department budget’s $1 trillion request this year – for its initial phase. But final costs are unclear, as the initiative is currently in the conceptual stage.

As such, the proposed project is seen by many defense analysts, in Pentagon parlance, as an “exquisite” system – a term used to imply doubts about a weapon’s technological feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called it “essentially a slush fund.”

Even supporters are quick to concede how costs are often low-balled. “I’m 34 years in this business,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, commander of U.S. Space Force, said at a Politico event last month. “I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high.”

The Golden Dome project would also require defense budget tradeoffs, most notably around the size of the U.S. Army, including troop strength. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned in an April memo that the Army must “streamline its force structure” to prioritize air and missile defense through the Golden Dome.

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

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Friday, June 6, 2025 9:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm going to laugh when it turns out to be performative art and they make all of your so-called intellectuals all pondering the worst way to frame this expose themselves as the assholes they are.
Ponder this Trump project from last month:

Nah

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

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Saturday, June 7, 2025 6:10 AM

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

Inside the Billion-Dollar Effort to Make Trump Feel Good About Himself

Trump’s administration is marshaling vast public resources and more than $1 billion worth of taxpayer money to flatter the president

By Ryan Bort, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez | June 6, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-d
ear-leader-bondi-noem-republican-propaganda-1235356187/

Pam Bondi seemed a little nervous during Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting on April 30, the week the administration celebrated his first 100 days in office. Vice President J.D. Vance was seated directly across from the president, and she was seated immediately to Vance’s left — meaning Trump would practically be looking right at her as she delivered her report on the state of the Justice Department.

Bondi, the nation’s attorney general, is one of more than two dozen billionaires, conspiracy theorists, television hosts, and otherwise die-hard MAGA personalities that Republicans allowed Trump to install in the most important positions in government. As such, they were provided a seat at this Cabinet meeting, which featured “Gulf of America” hats set up in alternating colors around the table. Trump did not choose them to oversee America’s federal agencies because of their qualifications, of which most of them possess very little (though Bondi was a state attorney general). They were selected for their ability to flatter Trump, of which all of them possess a great deal. These televised Cabinet meetings are a prime way for them to showcase their fealty and devotion.

Trump sat with his arms under the table, calling on his deputies one by one. They thanked him effusively. They touted his leadership and fearlessness. They laughed along as he joked about the federal judges blocking his administration’s agenda, including his efforts to send immigrants to foreign jails without due process. Bondi was ready to perform after Vance calmly explained to the assembled media that they should be reporting on Trump’s historic accomplishments rather than “fake BS.” Bondi wasn’t so calm. She cleared her throat.

“Mr. President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever … ever,” she said, awkwardly emphatic. “Never seen anything like it. Thank you. Your directive to me was very simple: Make America safe. And, despite that, we’ve still been defending over 200 civil lawsuits filed against you.”

Bondi read some statistics about the government’s fentanyl seizures, “which saved — are you ready for this, media?” She turned to the camera. “258 million lives.” She turned back to Trump. “Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk,” she said. “They’re dropping dead, and no longer, because of you, what you’ve done.”

It’s unclear what kind of math Bondi used to determine that Trump saved the lives of 258 million Americans, equal to around 75 percent of the nation’s population. She had said the previous day that Trump had saved a comparatively modest “119 million lives.” A source with knowledge of the matter says Bondi intentionally inflated the number at the Cabinet meeting not just to flatter Trump, but to troll the media. Regardless, the exaggeration was so absurd that even White House officials were howling with laughter about it later.

According to two other sources, several Trump aides responded to Bondi’s boast by actively scouring the internet for evidence that Democrats and media figures were, in the words of one of these sources, “flipping the fuck out.” This was, in part, so they could compile a dossier of the reactions, print them out, and show them to Trump, knowing he would delight in the outrage. The Cabinet meeting was a success.

The way Trump is handling these meetings with his top lieutenants “definitely gives off Dear Leader vibes, like what you would see with Kim Jong Un or [Vladimir] Putin,” says Virginia Canter, the chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at Democracy Defenders Fund. She says it shows the president “constantly needs to be reassured of loyalty” and sees his Cabinet members as “basically his personal staff, and they’re there to stroke his ego.”

Trump’s demands for flattery are costing a fortune. His new administration is only a few months in, and already the total price of just three such initiatives — a flashy, Trump-flattering ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security, a gigantic military parade in Washington, D.C., on Trump’s birthday, and the repurposing of a palatial airplane from Qatar as Trump’s new Air Force One that he can use in his post-presidency — will easily top $1 billion. And that’s just the beginning.

The sprawling efforts to flatter Trump are about more than serving his ego, according to Anthony DiMaggio, author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here. “They have to do with a president who needs to be not only at the center of a media circus, but who needs to be told ritualistically over and over how great he is,” DiMaggio says. “What’s interesting to me about this, as a political scientist, is that it’s not just a personality-based thing or a defect. It’s a broader pattern that has to do with behaviors that are overlapping with authoritarian politics and ideology.”

DiMaggio says that authoritarianism scholars have long identified “the idea that the first term is the trial run, where the person is figuring out what works and doesn’t work for what they’re looking for in politics, and [they] kind of get what they want, and then they realize they need to get rid of anybody who’s not a yes-man or -woman. They need these sycophants at every level who will not raise questions, because otherwise you don’t get the political outcomes that you want. If you want to engage in authoritarian politics, you have to get rid of the people that Trump calls the ‘deep state,’ the bureaucrats who are standing in your way and have a lingering commitment to checks and balances and the rule of law.”

The all-encompassing effort to satiate Trump’s ego — in Cabinet meetings, TV appearances, and beyond, throughout multiple branches of government — has been essential to the president’s autocratic efforts. Trump and his administration have plunged the United States into a series of constitutional crises, engaged in overt corruption, and overseen genuine democratic backsliding — all of it buttressed by propaganda designed to further inflame his personality cult.

It’s not about the welfare of the nation. It’s about promoting an American president whose White House calls him “the King,” and helping him accumulate power to match.

Asked for comment, a White House official says, “Everything President Trump does is to benefit the American people, and he has secured many GOOD deals on their behalf.”

Throughout the government, agencies are making it their mission to propagate Trumpism and do his bidding. There’s no better example than Bondi’s Justice Department, which, contrary to recent history, operates without any veneer of independence and instead enforces the Trump line and aids his propaganda efforts.

A day after she was confirmed, Bondi issued a memo telling Justice Department employees they must “zealously” defend Trump’s views and policies and act as “his lawyers.” She announced the formation of a “weaponization working group,” at the DOJ, designed to probe the prosecutors who charged Trump as well as those who investigated and charged the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to help him cling to power. Trump has demanded, via executive order, that independent agencies adhere to legal interpretations favored by the “president and the attorney general (subject to the president’s supervision and control).”

Under Ed Martin, an election-denying, Trump-adulating lawyer, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia took on a comically MAGA bent. Martin publicly described himself and his team as “President Trump’s lawyers,” there to “protect his leadership as our president.” A large printout of Trump’s executive order on “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” — designed to expand pretrial incarceration, remove homeless encampments, and crack down on petty crimes — was mounted on the wall next to the elevators, according to a photo obtained by Rolling Stone.

Martin’s behavior unnerved others who had worked for the Justice Department for years, some of whom began using one simple term to describe what he was doing: “North Korean.” As one senior White House official notes: “Ed goes a little overboard; that’s why the president loves him.”

Trump seems to welcome the comparisons to totalitarian regimes abroad. According to this official, in recent months, when advisers have flagged to Trump that some of his critics liken his zeal for military parades to customs in North Korea or other repressive states, the president has said those countries do that because they “respect” their leaders and those displays of national military might are good for the population’s morale. (Trump did not seem to acknowledge these regimes do those things because the dictator is making them.)

After Martin failed to win enough support from Republicans to keep his U.S. Attorney job permanently, Trump made him his pardon attorney — and Martin is now publicly pledging: “No MAGA left behind.”

“Everything about the way the Department of Justice is operating now is different from how it’s worked in the past,” says Liz Oyer, the department’s former pardon attorney, who was fired after refusing to allow actor Mel Gibson to own guns again. “The directions appear to be coming from the top down.” She adds, “They’re treating the department as though it is President Trump’s personal law firm.”

It is growing progressively more difficult by the day to characterize Trump’s second administration as anything but an American caricature of the totalitarian hero worship enforced by regimes like the one in North Korea. Under those kinds of dictatorship, for instance, so much of the art and entertainment exists simply to make the Dear Leader happy.

When Trump isn’t busy commanding his government to launch a criminal investigation into Bruce Springsteen and his liberal political activity, he and his administration are doing things like launching a takeover of the Kennedy Center in D.C., in large part because Trump has never gotten over the fact that many artists who’ve performed there openly hated him and his policies.

According to a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it, Trump has told several of his close associates about some of his plans for the Kennedy Center as he moonlights as its chair. First off, he has said he wants to “review” lists of upcoming seasons’ scheduling, planned performances, and slated artists, in part so that the center can screen for anti-Trump performers who might make comments onstage trashing the president. Trump has also demanded the Kennedy Center programming be made more “pro-American,” and has told people close to him that he’d even accept presentations in the Oval Office pitching new musicals or plays, especially if the original material is anti-“woke.”

He has also inquired to at least two confidants about naming a renovated wing or sections of the center after himself, and even whether it would make sense to put a “statue” of himself in the building — much like how there is a famous, large bust of JFK in the venue. (That may be because the place is named after President John F. Kennedy.)

“President Trump cares deeply about American arts and culture, which is why he is revitalizing historic institutions like the Kennedy Center to their former greatness,” says the White House official, adding: “Halting anti-American propaganda is critical to protecting our children and fostering patriotism.”

Some of the Trump administration’s cruelest and most expensive propaganda is ostensibly designed to scare immigrants into either self-deporting or avoid traveling to America at all — but even these messages have doubled as efforts to promote and flatter Trump.

The Trump administration budgeted $200 million for ads in which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, speaking in front of a row of American flags, issues warnings to immigrants. Noem repeatedly thanks Trump in these taxpayer-funded ads, which were announced in February.

“Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border, for deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and for putting America first,” Noem says in a 60-second version of the ad. “President Trump has a clear message for those that are in our country illegally: Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.”

Noem said in February that the ad campaign was Trump’s idea, and that he specifically asked that she thank him. Trump said, according to Noem: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

In a second round of DHS ads, Noem credits “President Trump’s leadership” for her department catching criminals. Those ads include footage from Noem’s grotesque photo op at CECOT, the infamous mega-prison in El Salvador where Trump sent hundreds of immigrants without due process, in defiance of a court order.

The administration decided there was such “an unusual and compelling urgency” for these ads that officials selected two Republican firms to work on the campaign without a competitive bidding process. They exempted the deals from review by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The White House official says “it is normal for an agency head to thank their principal — in this instance the president of the United States — for their policies and leadership.”

While this hasn’t been disclosed in procurement data, records filed with the Federal Communications Commission show the Trump campaign’s ad-buying firm, Strategic Media Services, has actually been buying some (maybe all) of the ads for DHS. Trump’s campaign committee disclosed paying $270 million to Strategic Media Services during the 2024 race, most of it to place ads. Records show the firm buying TV time for many DHS ads, including for a version in which Noem starts: “Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border and putting America first.”

A DHS spokesperson denies knowing anything about Strategic Media Services, and says the department “doesn’t have control of subcontractors and cannot tell a vendor who or who not to hire.”

“For all their talk about wasteful spending, the Trump administration is frivolously spending taxpayer dollars for a political-ad campaign to stroke the president’s ego,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) tells Rolling Stone.

‘Trump’s Birthday Parade’

The administration’s propaganda around every arm of its policies is in service of Trump’s emotions. He must be thanked for closing the border. He must be praised for his haphazard tariff scheme throwing the economy into chaos, which officials insisted proved his dealmaking prowess, even as financial markets cratered. Bondi talks about fentanyl seizures as if Trump himself is cuffing drug runners. The most pointed example of the administration’s slavish devotion to the president’s self-image isn’t on the cable-news airwaves, though. It’s within the walls of the White House, which has been transformed into a veritable shrine to his visage.

A garish painting of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt against him near Butler, Pennsylvania, last year has replaced a portrait of Barack Obama. A tacky portrait of Trump with the American flag superimposed across his face — the same image he has long used as his Truth Social avatar — has been crammed in between paintings of former First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. The West Wing walls now feature a piece of boardwalk-caliber art depicting Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln posing in front of the American flag together. Trump is in the foreground. (The art retails online for $27.)

Trump’s gaudy sensibilities have seemingly been indulged without limit. The Oval Office has been gilded to the hilt, with much of the molding painted gold and an assortment of gold statuettes occupying the bulk of the once-venerated room’s ledge and table space. The president bragged about his “24-karat gold” office during a meeting in May with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney. (The Oval Office statuette of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt, however, is bronze.) A different White House official favorably compares the new decor and faux glitz to that of Iraq’s late genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein, whom Trump has praised for his prolific ability to slaughter “terrorists.”

The White House is merely a physical realm, though. The ability to deify Trump as the god-king of the United States is unlimited on the internet, and the administration’s social media has been rife with AI-generated images depicting Trump as everything from the new pope to a muscle-bound, light-saber-wielding figure posing in front of bald eagles and American flags. It’s supposedly being done in the name of trolling, a word the White House has used to describe the administration entertaining the idea that Trump could stay in office beyond 2028. Trump has seemed serious about the notion, claiming he’s “not joking” about it before noting that there are some “loopholes” that could allow him to serve beyond a second term.

Trump serving a third term would be blatantly unconstitutional. The attorney general, of all people, should understand this, but Bondi refused to rule it out during a Fox News interview in April, only saying the president would “probably” be finished after his current term is up, and that “we’d have to look at the Constitution.”

Of course, Bondi is not one to say no to the president. In May, she authorized the administration to accept a rather extreme gift from the royal family of Qatar, one that played to Trump’s lavish tastes: a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet, known as a “flying palace,” worth hundreds of millions of dollars. While the emoluments clause of the Constitution explicitly bars federal officeholders from accepting any present or gift from a king, prince, or foreign state without approval from Congress, Bondi — a former lobbyist for Qatar — deemed the gift permissible because the plane will replace Air Force One and not belong to Trump personally.

Trump has said he will not use the plane for personal use, but in private, he has referred to it as “one of my new big, beautiful planes,” as Rolling Stone reported. The jet is expected to be transferred to Trump’s presidential-library slush fund after he leaves office. In the meantime, experts say it could cost taxpayers $1 billion and multiple years to retrofit it for use as Air Force One. Lawmakers have expressed concern about upgrading the plane so Trump can maximize his time luxuriating in it as president. Trump has scoffed at the bipartisan criticism of what many have called a bribe, insisting he would be “stupid” to not accept the plane.

“This is the $400 million golden jet that personifies corruption,” says Canter of the Democracy Defenders Fund. She adds that the plan to retrofit it and then turn it over to Trump’s library fund “would be the greatest abuse possible…. It’s as plain as day that he just wants his hands on a golden plane.”

The Defense Department said it had accepted the “sky palace” from Qatar as it prepared an exorbitant military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C. The parade was scheduled for June 14, the 250th anniversary of the Army’s formation, which also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday. The celebration is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars, and feature tanks and other armored vehicles, aircraft filling the skies overhead, and thousands of soldiers traveling into town from bases around the country.

The government has attempted to downplay the idea that the parade is meant to be Trump’s birthday party. The White House official says, “The Army parade is part of a yearlong celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The Army parade is being held on the Army’s anniversary — June 14. It’s not President Trump’s fault that his DNA is USA.”

However, the president insisted to administration officials that it take place on his birthday, according to two sources with knowledge of his demands. He didn’t want a grand July 4 military parade, like the disappointing one he demanded in 2019. He wanted a big bash on his birthday.

Several Trump advisers and aides have privately referred to the event as “Donald Trump’s birthday parade,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Trump’s desire for a military parade is at least partially borne out of wanting to stick it to France. According to former Trump aides, in July 2017, the president convened several advisers in his White House private dining room to ramble on about the Bastille Day celebration in Paris that he had just attended with France’s leader, Emmanuel Macron. He went on for a long time about the pageantry, the large number of soldiers, the tanks — oh, boy, did he talk about the “big” tanks! — and the fireworks, instructing his staff: “Get it done.” He added that there was no reason that America couldn’t show the French, and everyone else around the globe, how performative militarism is done on the streets of a great capital city.

“In some ways, this is the greatest tragedy,” Canter says about the birthday parade. “This is not a parade that honors our veterans or our military … who have lost life and limb. This is to honor a man who never served one day in the military. And it’s again, reminiscent of the Dear Leader actions taken by the leaders of North Korea and Russia.”

The GOP has introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday.

It’s not just Trump’s administration marshaling resources to burnish the president’s idea of himself. Republicans in Congress, who are supposed to be acting as a check on the president’s power, are no less desperate to please him. They have almost completely abdicated their constitutional duty so that Trump can impose his will without restraint, sitting idly as he repeatedly undercuts their authority over everything from funding federal programs, as lawmakers have appropriated, to managing the Library of Congress. They’re also finding increasingly cultish ways to show their devotion to their leader.

House Republicans didn’t just pass Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy in May, for example — they did whatever they could to make the bill about Trump himself. Trump loves calling it a “big, beautiful bill,” so Republicans named the policy package that slashes social services the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” In the final stretch before the bill’s passage, they decided to rename the bill’s “MAGA Accounts,” which would give $1,000 savings accounts to babies born in the next few years, to “Trump Accounts.”

The abhorrent cultishness of all this has reached such towering heights that a ray of self-awareness has entered the chat. In February, according to a source present for this meeting, several senior House Republican aides from different congressional offices gathered at the Capitol-area restaurant Butterworth’s, touted as the latest martini-heavy MAGA hot spot. At one point, after several rounds of drinks, a leadership aide took out a pen and pad of paper and started asking the table for increasingly ridiculous ideas for legislation that could bring a smile to the president’s face. The brainstorming session — described to Rolling Stone as “obviously” in jest — produced bullet points of mock legislation like making Trump’s birthday a holiday, and naming the National Zoo “Donald J. Trump Presents: the D.C. Zoo.”

Was it a joke? The GOP has introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday a holiday.

Last year, Republicans introduced a very real resolution to rename the Washington area’s Dulles airport after Trump, and another to rename America’s coastal waters after the president, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) citing how Trump “took several commendable actions for our oceans.” Shortly after Trump took office this year, Republicans tried to formally censure a bishop at the Washington National Cathedral whom Trump attacked after she delivered a sermon asking him to have mercy on the less fortunate. They’ve also introduced bills to rename D.C.’s Metrorail the “Trump Train,” to amend the Constitution so he can run for a third term, to put his face on the $100 bill, and if that wasn’t enough, to put his face on a newly created $250 bill.

“The most valuable bill for the most valuable president!” said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).

Trump wants to see his face on something much larger than a piece of currency, though. He talks to this day about how much he deserves to see himself on Mount Rushmore. Yes, Republicans have introduced a bill to make it happen.

Trump is serious about this, according to current administration officials who’ve heard him discuss it. One of them says that since returning to office, the president has told close allies he wants to be the first American president to live to see his face sculpted into the South Dakota cliff. Trump, this official notes, pointed out that George Washington, who had been dead for around 140 years by the time the memorial was completed, never got to see his face put on the mountain.

“He’s not kidding,” says the Trump administration official. “He wants his fucking face up there with all those other greats. Donald Trump does not think Teddy Roosevelt was a better president, I’m sorry to say.”

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

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Saturday, June 7, 2025 6:32 AM

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

'Jesus warned about hypocrites': Baptist minister slams Mike Johnson in scathing op-ed

By Adam Lynch | June 06, 2025 10:23AM ET

https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-prayer/

Baptist minister and author Brian Kaylor is taking House Speaker and evangelical Christian Mike Johnson to task for parading his religion to the press.

The “way he has sought to publicize his faith … violates the founding spirit of a sacred space in the United States Capitol,” writes Kaylor in Religion News.

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

Mike Johnson violates spirit of congressional chapel

(RNS) — When Jesus said to go pray in a closet, he didn’t mean you should then show it off to Fox News or The Associated Press.

By Brian Kaylor | June 5, 2025

https://religionnews.com/2025/06/05/mike-johnson-violates-spirit-of-co
ngressional-chapel/

As a Baptist minister, I would warn my fellow Baptist serving as speaker that it also goes against Jesus’ teachings about prayer. Jesus warned about hypocrites who love to pray where they can be seen by others.

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

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Saturday, June 7, 2025 11:37 AM

Just another 12 stories out of you today.

*yawn*

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

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

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Saturday, June 7, 2025 2:20 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Just another 12 stories out of you today.

*yawn*

Trumptards can't stop yawing at stories about Trump. They disbelieve everything.

Yawn for Trump opening a death camp, when he wants. Call the death camp Presidential and special, different from regular federal prisons. The prison guards and executioners have the same immunity from prosecution that the President has. Trump could build an Auschwitz with only a few highly dangerous prisoners, then expand based on the polling of Trumptards’ opinions. I think they would approve of the right kind of prisoners being killed. If Trump keeps it secret and defends strongly what he is doing in secret, his polling numbers won’t be hurt. Big Yawn from the Trumptards. Winds of Change are blowing, 6ixStringJack . . .

The Biden Investigation Is a Path to Even Greater Lawlessness

The president is not just abusing the immunity that the Supreme Court granted him. He might be seeking to expand it.

By Paul Rosenzweig | June 7, 2025, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/biden-cognitive-decl
ine-investigation/683060/

President Donald Trump’s presidential memorandum ordering an investigation of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his use of the autopen is just the most recent step in Trump’s hostile takeover of the Department of Justice. It is also nonsensical fan service, amplifying addled MAGA conspiracy theories that contend, with a straight face, that Biden was really a robotic clone. In these senses, the investigative order was a sign of just another Wednesday in the chaotic, topsy-turvy world of Trump.

On a legal level, one thing is striking about the text of the memo: The order does not explicitly target Biden himself, at least not directly—only the aides who supposedly facilitated Biden’s use of the autopen and suppressed evidence of his decline. Biden’s absence as a direct target is almost certainly the result of last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States granting presidents immunity for “official” acts. That decision was intended to stanch a cycle of retribution. The Biden administration’s investigation of Trump, the argument goes, would beget the vengeful Trump investigation of Biden. And so on, the Court feared, ad infinitum, with each successive turn of the political wheel. By this logic, the decision is what is now protecting Biden from just the sort of retribution the Court hoped to avoid.

But although the decision will have occasional positive impact, its flaws are manifested almost every day. Even on its own terms, the Trump opinion evidently failed to achieve its objective. Far from preventing retaliatory and escalatory criminal investigations, it has enabled them. And now, with this new memo, Trump’s team may be setting the country on a path to further expand the immunity bubble, to protect not just the president but his aides as well—enabling yet more lawlessness.

To begin with, the absurd investigation of Biden’s cognitive decline was almost certainly encouraged by the immunity decision itself—in the sense that the grant of presidential immunity frees Trump from any personal responsibility for his own “creative” use of the law. In a rational world, Trump might face legal consequences for his illicit abuse of the criminal-justice system—in the form, say, of a civil suit for malicious prosecution. But thanks to Trump v. United States, Trump is free to undertake any plausibly official act with complete impunity, including ordering nonsensical investigations of those who worked for his predecessor. Even if Biden is protected, the Court’s immunity calculus failed to account for Trump’s obsession and left open the possibility that an opponent’s aides would be targeted.

Which brings us to the final and, perhaps, most insidious aspect of Trump’s order: a possible further expansion of presidential immunity. Following the Trump decision, some defenders of the Court contended that the adverse impact of granting presidents criminal immunity would be minimal. Aides to the president, through whom he acted, would, they argued, remain subject to criminal prosecution and thus be deterred from partaking in criminal activity. And so, the argument went, the grant of presidential immunity was no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

The argument is a comforting one, but other possibilities exist. A nonfrivolous argument can be made that, because a president can act only through subordinates, a faithful reading of Trump would extend presidential immunity to those whose assistance he requires to effectuate his official presidential actions. If we grant the (in my view, ahistorical) Supreme Court premise that immunizing core presidential conduct was, in the Founders’ minds, essential to enable presidential action, then it seems wildly inconsistent to simultaneously prevent the president from acting effectively by denying the same protection to his essential subordinates.

Others have seen this inconsistency and tried to use it to buttress claims that aides should also be immune. For example, as part of its Trump holding, the Court explicitly determined that Trump’s pre–January 6 directions to the Department of Justice to investigate alleged election fraud were absolutely immune acts. Building on that holding, one of Trump’s DOJ allies, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, has argued that he is covered by derivative presidential immunity for what he did at Trump’s request, and that he cannot be prosecuted or disciplined for acting on Trump’s behalf.

This is not the law as of now, and in the present state of affairs, Clark (and his successors in Trump’s current administration) will likely lose a claim of immunity. But one suspects strongly that part of Trump’s motivation (or, more probably, that of his self-interested advisers) in authorizing the Biden investigation is to change the law.

The investigation will, as noted, target Biden’s aides. Those aides may, under the pressure of criminal inquiry, offer the same sort of defense that Clark has—I was working for the president, and I share his immunity. The sheer outrageousness of Trump’s investigation may tempt courts to side with Biden’s aides, shielding them from the time, expense, and anguish of a frivolous investigation.

And that temptation may be just what Trump’s team is counting on: using a bogus investigation of Biden to set a precedent to shield their own subsequent criminal activity. Adopting that doctrine would remove the last shred of structural restraint on Trump’s team—the specter of post-Trump prosecution.

Perhaps I’m overthinking this, and the bank shot to derivative immunity for Trump’s aides never occurred to the Trump team (in which case, I apologize for putting it on their radar). Perhaps this investigation is indeed merely fan service.

But I think not. If anything, the Trump team has demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated understanding of how to assert unilateral presidential authority to work an expansion of presidential power. Therein lies the danger. Even if the result of aide immunity is not intended, it may be what lies ahead. The country must avoid this—and thus Biden’s aides must seek to defend themselves against the outrageous investigation of Biden’s cognition on the merits, not on any procedural immunity grounds. That way is more burdensome, to be sure, but in the end, it will be far better for the nation.

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 6:48 AM

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

DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts

We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” one expert said.

By Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky | June 6, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-veterans-affairs-ai-cont
racts-health-care

As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.

The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

************

Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to “Munch” Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health

Experts who reviewed the code for ProPublica found numerous and troubling flaws in the system, providing a disturbing glimpse into how the Trump administration is allowing artificial intelligence to guide critical cuts in services.

by Brandon Roberts and Vernal Coleman

June 6, 2025, 5:05 a.m. EDT

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ai-tool-doge-veterans-affair
s-contracts-sahil-lavingia

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 7:19 AM

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

If Trump would say “I’ll drop bombs on Musk’s businesses” it would be clear Trump is threatening to do what no President has done, but Trump is too smart to make it clear how crazy he is because Congress would impeach him, as it has done twice, already. Knowing how Republican Senators react, even if Trump did bomb Musk’s businesses, only half of the Senate would vote to convict Trump in a trial.

Trump threatens ‘very serious consequences’ if Musk backs Democrats

Trump warns his former ally against backing Democratic candidates to challenge Republicans, as a messy feud between the two escalates.

By Amy B Wang | June 7, 2025 at 2:55 p.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/07/trump-musk-feud-dem
ocrats/

President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened “very serious consequences” against Elon Musk if the tech billionaire and former adviser were to fund any Democratic candidates, the latest escalation in rhetoric in the messy breakup between the two former allies.

Since their spectacular falling-out, Musk has floated the idea of launching a new political party and continued to criticize a massive tax and immigration bill that Trump is urging congressional Republicans to pass.

In an interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk would “pay the consequences” if he were to start funding Democratic candidates to challenge Republicans who support that bill but would not describe what those consequences would be.

“If he does, he’ll have to pay the consequences for that,” Trump said in the phone interview, later repeating: “He’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that.”

Trump told the network that he assumed his relationship with Musk was over and also continued to insist, as he did in several interviews with media outlets Friday, that he was too busy to reach out to Musk.

“I gave him a lot of breaks, long before this happened. I gave him breaks in my first administration and saved his life in my first administration,” Trump told NBC News, without elaborating on what those interventions were. “I have no intention of speaking to him.”

Trump also claimed he had not given any further thought to terminating government contracts with Starlink or SpaceX, two of Musk’s companies, an idea the president had first suggested on social media Thursday.

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday.

Trump ended his interview with the network by suggesting that Musk was “so depressed and so heartbroken,” though it’s unclear if he thought that was a result of their feud or the driving force behind Musk’s sudden public attacks on the Trump White House three days ago.

Little more than a week ago, Musk amicably left his formal role as a special government employee overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service. Trump lavished praise on Musk, saying he was “really not leaving” and hinting that he would actually shuttle back and forth between his tech companies — Musk also owns Tesla and the social media site X — and advising the White House.

However, shortly after he departed, Musk began publicly criticizing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill legislation that Musk highlighted would drastically increase the national debt.

The rift escalated rapidly. By Thursday, the two were engaged in a full-blown tit-for-tat on their respective social media platforms. After Trump suggested the federal government terminate contracts with SpaceX, Musk said his space company would begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft “immediately.”

Musk also appeared to support the idea that Trump be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance and warned that Trump’s tariffs would “cause a recession in the second half of this year.”

On Saturday, Trump also said it was the Justice Department’s decision, not his, to bring Kilmar Abrego García back to the United States and charge him with human smuggling. The Supreme Court ordered Trump officials in April to facilitate Abrego García’s return from El Salvador, where he was deported in March in violation of a court order.

Trump said he did not speak with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele about returning Abrego García to the United States. The president also bashed Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who has criticized the Trump administration for not affording Abrego García and others due process.

“He’s a loser. The guy’s a loser,” Trump said.

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 8:02 AM

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

The Trump White House Is a Giant National Security Red Flag

A damning new report alleges DOGE and Trump allies dismissed warnings that Starlink posed serious security links.

By Inae Oh, Senior News and Engagement Editor | June 7, 2025

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/starlink-doge-trump-white
-house/

Imagine working as a White House communications expert when, on a brisk February morning, you look up to see a crew of unannounced Elon Musk associates climbing the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. You squint and quickly learn that this unit belongs to Starlink, the very company you had identified as posing serious security concerns. But there they are, scaling the roof to install internet service for the White House.

That’s essentially the scenario outlined in a stunning new report from the Washington Post today, alleging that DOGE and Trump administration officials outright dismissed concerns from the White House’s communications team that Musk’s Starlink internet service was rampant with security risks. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/starlink-white-ho
use-security-doge-musk/ That reportedly included an exceedingly flimsy WiFi network that could rival your own personal setup:

A “Starlink Guest” WiFi network appeared on White House phones in February, prompting users only for a password, not a username or a second form of authentication, according to the people. That WiFi network was still appearing on White House visitors’ phones this week.

The government’s reliance on Starlink is not new. On the contrary, the US depends on Musk’s business heavily, throughout vast corners of our military and national security apparatus. But the Post‘s reporting once again demonstrates the stunning authority with which DOGE and Musk, at least before his spectacular blowup with the president this week, have been able to wield within the Trump administration. This latest revelation is just the latest national security red flag to come from the Trump administration: the Qatar plane, Pete Hegseth’s entire personality, confirmed hackers, etc.

Starlink is now one of several government contracts that could be on the chopping block now that President Trump and Musk are on the outs. (This, regardless of what you think of Musk, would pull the feud into blatantly lawless territory.) But regardless of the fate of Musk and Starlink, the core stupidity of Trump’s White House remains intact. Don’t be too surprised to see unannounced workers have started climbing the rooftop once again.

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 9:25 AM

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

June 08, 2025

Trump can’t stand to be humiliated — as he has been in the last two weeks. By senate Republicans refusal to quickly enact his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. By Xi Jinping’s refusal to back down on trade (and restrict shipments of China’s rare earths, which American industry depends on). By Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine. By the federal courts pushing back against his immigration policy. And, now, by insults and smears from the richest person in the world, who has a larger social media following than does Trump.

So what does Trump do when he’s humiliated? He deflects public attention. Like any bully, he tries to find another way to display his power . . .

More on the mental illnesses of Trump and his Trumptards at

https://www.alternet.org/trump-california/

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 10:29 AM

Shut up fag.

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 1:15 PM

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

Trump could have left five criminals in jail for 18 years.
Instead, Trump pardoned them and will probably pay them $100 million.
The Winds of Change are blowing away $100 million in exchange for nothing.

Proud Boys' $100 Million Lawsuit Puts Trump In A Lose-Lose Position

Five members of the violent extremist group are suing the federal government after President Donald Trump pardoned them over Jan. 6.

By Lydia O'Connor | Jun 6, 2025, 07:46 PM EDT

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/proud-boys-jan-6-trump-lawsuit_n_684361
9ce4b043146daacef8

Five members of the Proud Boys pardoned by President Donald Trump for orchestrating the Capitol insurrection have turned around and sued the federal government, forcing Trump’s administration into an awkward position.

The lawsuit from members of the neofascist group — all of whom were convicted and given lengthy sentences for the key roles they played in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 — claims they were the victims of “egregious and systemic abuse of the legal system and the United States Constitution to punish and oppress political allies of President Trump.”

The complaint, which seeks $100 million in restitution, compares their punishment to “placing one’s enemies’ heads on a spike outside the town wall as a warning to any who would think to challenge the status quo.”

Their lawsuit effectively leaves Trump’s administration with two politically unappetizing options: Defend the Biden administration’s prosecution after Trump pardoned them and nearly all other Jan. 6 offenders, or force American taxpayers to shell out for a settlement with them.

The plaintiffs include Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who was convicted of plotting the attack on the Capitol and sentenced to 22 years in prison, the longest sentence handed down to anyone tried over Jan. 6.

At a press conference Friday, Tarrio called the lawsuit a chance for Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, to rectify the Biden administration’s errors.

“Today, we call on her to honor her commitment to the American people, to right the wrongs of her predecessor and to hold accountable those who violated our rights,” he said. “We trust President Trump’s judgment. He doesn’t make mistakes.”

Three of the other men - Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl - were found guilty of spearheading the attack in the absence of Tarrio, who couldn’t enter Washington, D.C., due to a prior arrest. They were sentenced to 18, 17 and 15 years in prison, respectively.

The final Proud Boy in the lawsuit is Dominic Pezzola, who was captured on video using police equipment to break through glass at the entrance of the building. He was given 10 years in prison.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit, which refers to the Proud Boys as a “patriotic activist organization for young men.”

The complaint says the men suffered greatly during their time in detention, where some of them endured “solitary confinement under deplorable and unsanitary conditions” and were denied access to visits from their families and lawyers. Trump referred to them as “hostages” when he signed his executive order pardoning riot participants in January.

The Proud Boys lawsuit comes the same day Shane Lamond, the former leader of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s intelligence division, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for leaking information to Tarrio ahead of the Jan. 6 attack.

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

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 1:54 PM

Shut up, fag.

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 6:10 AM

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

Trump’s Words vs Reality

Trump - “The doctor says I’m a beast.”

Doctor - “Sir, you’re obese.”

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 7:02 AM

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

The Trump administration is hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general. Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine. (And partisan orientation became a key factor determining whether people were willing to be vaccinated against Covid.) Practitioners of voodoo economics don’t want anyone looking into the actual results of cutting taxes on the rich. Nativists proclaiming an immigrant crime wave don’t want anyone examining who commits violent crimes. And so on.

American scientific leadership and research universities are key pillars of U.S. power and prosperity. Corporate America certainly understands that our scientific and educational institutions contribute to its bottom line. So you might have expected even MAGA enthusiasts to be a bit cautious about killing this particular golden-egg-laying goose.

You would have been wrong. Everything points to an effort to effectively destroy U.S. science — not gradually as part of a long-term plan, but over the next year or two. Start with the money. The preliminary budget the Trump administration released last month called for a cut of almost 40 percent in funding for the National Institutes of Health, more than 50 percent in the budget of the National Science Foundation, the virtual elimination of federal spending on climate and ecological research and a drastic cut in NASA’s research budget. All of this was for fiscal 2026, which begins in October — that is, something like half the federal government’s financial support for science would be eliminated within a few months.

There’s what clearly looks like an attempt to politicize whatever scientific funding remains. Medical journals have received threatening letters from the Justice Department. An executive order issued May 23, titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” purports to be about restoring “scientific integrity,” but would give political appointees the right to “correct scientific information” and to “forward potential violations to the relevant human resources officials for discipline.”

And can you trust Trump and his people to “correct” science?

Restoring Gold Standard Science
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold
-standard-science/

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 7:13 AM

Keep preaching to the 10% of people who no longer matter in 2025.

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 7:24 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep preaching to the 10% of people who no longer matter in 2025.

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

6ix, I'm certain from a vast amount of experience with Trumptards either dropping dead or vanishing from the workforce because of alcoholism/drug use/illness that no Trumptard matters. Once a Trumptard is gone, things go smoother. It is weird how Trumptards think of themselves as indispensable while complaining that the truly important people, none of them Trumptards, aren't necessary.

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 7:55 AM

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

We’ve Saved Democracy Before. FDR’s First 100 Days Made It Possible.

By Elizabeth Wilkins | April 29, 2025

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/weve-saved-democracy-before/

Let’s set the scene: Millions of people live paycheck to paycheck at best, inequality is rampant, and the nation’s richest are calling the shots. Trust in financial markets is cratering, and chaos and uncertainty reign. Feeling burnt by capitalism, working people across the globe are flirting with authoritarianism, lured by the promise that it can deliver for them more quickly and effectively than democracy can.

The scene I’m describing is not—or not just—America on President Trump’s 100th day in office. It’s March 1933, the height of the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt has just taken office. Amid a devastating economic crisis and after years of hands-off, imagination-limited governance, the American people are questioning the very viability of capitalism, and the ability of democracy to manage it. The rapacious plutocrats who defined the Roaring Twenties seem too powerful to be curbed by our weak institutions, and Americans are increasingly looking to fascist Italy and communist Soviet Union for solutions.

One hundred headline-dominating days into his presidency, some have compared Trump to FDR, the first president to use the “first 100 days” framework. The comparison couldn’t be more wrong. One is choosing chaos, cruelty, and corruption. The other brought the competence to contain instability, answer the uncertainties of unchecked capitalism, and rein in grift. One man is undermining democracy. The other sought to preserve it. And in this moment, FDR has a lot to teach those of us who seek to preserve.

Much more at https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/weve-saved-democracy-before/

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 9:08 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep preaching to the 10% of people who no longer matter in 2025.

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

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

Because they are maladjusted to life in America, I don't tell Trumptards this, but they are evil people, which is the reason their lives don't proceed smoothly and serenely.

Really, Secretary Rubio? I’m lying about the kids dying under Trump?

Commentary seeks to pierce U.S. denial of fatal impacts of aid freeze

June 7, 2025

https://76crimes.com/2025/06/07/commentary-aimed-at-marco-rubio/

Columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times on May 31 presented examples of children dying of AIDS because the United States has halted deliveries of life-saving medications. He could just as well have used examples of any HIV+ people.

One study, published in The Lancet HIV, predicts up to 2.9 million additional HIV-related deaths by 2030 if the U.S. aid isn’t restored. The UN’s anti-AIDS agency projects more than 6.3 million deaths by then.

In his column, reprinted below, Kristof cites the examples of two children’s deaths from HIV to make the point:

By Nicholas Kristof

COMMENTARY

I see Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a good man doing bad things, but perhaps he thinks even worse of me: He recently suggested that I was a liar.

While testifying before Congress, Rubio claimed that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development had not cost any lives.

“No children are dying on my watch,” he asserted. At another point in the hearing, he broadened his statement to include adults as well: “No one has died because of U.S.A.I.D.”

This is ludicrous: The only debate is whether to measure the dead in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, challenged Rubio, citing reporting overseas by me and by Reuters of individuals who died as a result of the shutdown of American humanitarian aid.

“That’s a lie,” Rubio said. “False.”

So let me help Rubio with the truth. Meet Evan Anzoo, a 5-year-old boy who was born with H.I.V. in South Sudan:

I mentioned Evan in a column in March from South Sudan. This was a child as precious as yours or mine. Evan’s life was in our hands, and for five years America kept him alive with antiretroviral medicines costing less than 12 cents a day, through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. This was a program started by President George W. Bush that has saved more than 26 million lives so far, and it turned the tide of AIDS around the world and built enormous good will toward the United States.

Then along came President Trump and his freeze on most humanitarian aid in January. How could a 5-year-old orphan possibly obtain medicine on his own? Evan weakened and soon died of an opportunistic infection.

If Rubio needs further reminder of the human toll, this little girl is Achol Deng, 8, who likewise died when she lost access to antiretrovirals because of the U.S.A.I.D. freeze.

I share these photos of Evan and Achol because it strikes me as doubly offensive not only to cause unnecessary deaths of such children but also to deny these deaths and call them lies. The denials erase these children and dodge all responsibility.

It was Elon Musk who first insisted that “no one has died.” Now Rubio has doubled down.

Rubio is smarter than this and better than this; over the years he has shown himself knowledgeable about foreign affairs and has demonstrated compassion. I was relieved when he became secretary of state, for I want smart, experienced people around Trump.

When I reached out to Rubio to ask about the “lies” comment and the suggestion that no one had died, he declined to be interviewed. But he seemed to back off and presented a more sensible response — albeit a complete evasion.

“America is the most generous nation in the world, and we urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts,” a senior State Department official said in a statement.

It is true that the United States has donated more in total humanitarian aid than any other country, although some European nations donate several times as much per capita. However, the United States by slashing aid set an example that Britain and France promptly followed, compounding the suffering.

Trump is right that U.S.A.I.D. needed reform. But American aid overall still saved about one life every 10 seconds, based on estimates by the Center for Global Development.

The transfer of U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea if it were done carefully. But simply shuttering the agency with no transition has been catastrophic. An “impact counter” developed by an economist estimates that about 300,000 people have died so far from the reductions in American assistance, two-thirds of them children. The death toll is said to be rising at a rate of 103 per hour.

I’m not sure it’s actually that high, partly because I’ve seen some laid-off health workers continue to work without pay and some health ministries step up to pick up the slack. And it takes time for children to weaken and die. Yet while nobody knows the true number — partly because the cancellation of programs means that no one is counting the dead — the flat denial of any deaths at all is preposterous.

Rubio chooses not to make the argument that I believe is Trump’s true position: We want tax cuts (disproportionately benefiting the rich), so we need to cut funds in the budget from people who are so marginalized that they can’t complain.

So Evan and Achol died.

To deny the reality of dying children not only insults the memory of children starving to death in Sudan and Yemen and Afghanistan; it also insults the intelligence of Americans.

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 10:52 AM

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

Does a president need to uphold the Constitution? Trump says 'I don't know'

June 9, 2025

The United States is currently dealing with multiple emergencies at once, according to President Trump's administration. There's a national emergency at the southern border, an energy emergency and an economic emergency, to name a few — and the president has used these to enact some of his most wide-reaching policies, from pushing fossil fuel production to seeking to complete the border wall with Mexico and setting steep and sweeping tariffs.

Trump invoked emergency powers eight times in his first 100 days in office.

Challenges to Trump's emergency orders have yet to reach the Supreme Court, but legal experts worry his use of them could lead to an upending of the constitutional balance of power if the Supreme Court sides with the administration, essentially giving the president free rein to do more without congressional approval.

"This is pedal to the metal on executive power," says Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University who is a scholar on the use of emergency powers.

Some courts have ruled that Trump is exceeding his power, particularly in regard to tariffs, and appeals are ongoing. But Scheppele says the Trump administration expects a friendly reception if a legal challenge to the president's emergency powers reaches the Supreme Court — and it seems likely that it will.

"The point of it is to get the case to the Supreme Court when he thinks he's got a majority, to give him unlimited power," she says. "I mostly study the fall of democracies in other places, and it's through this expansion of unlimited executive power. I'm worried that's the path we're on."

More at https://www.npr.org/2025/06/09/nx-s1-5424666/trump-national-emergencie
s-democracy-supreme-court-constitution

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

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Monday, June 9, 2025 11:22 AM