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: Monday, September 22, 2025 15:02
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Saturday, September 20, 2025 1:10 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:

Good luck taking Trump to court on this. It will make its way up to SCOTUS and it will be another loss for Democrats in Ted's court case thread.

And in the meantime this will be Democrats on the wrong side of yet another 80/20 issue that will be on full blast.

The People are sick of your bullshit. You're finished.

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

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

A Rogue Nation on the High Seas

Trump is treating the military like his personal mercenaries.

By Tom Nichols | September 19, 2025, 10:02 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/rogue-nation-high-se
as/684272/

Donald Trump is being cagey about how many people he’s ordered the U.S. Navy to kill on the high seas. The official toll from American military strikes on two boats suspected of running drugs from Venezuela is now 14, but a few days ago, Trump teased the possibility that a third boat had been “knocked off,” presumably on his orders.

The Trump administration’s justification for these strikes, such as it is, seems to be that any shipment of drugs connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a direct threat to the United States. These “narco-terrorists” may therefore be destroyed on sight, and without the fuss of asking permission from the U.S. Congress. This argument reflects the president’s childlike but dangerous understanding of his role as commander in chief. The United States, once the leader of a global system of security and economic cooperation, is now acting like a rogue state on the high seas.

The White House position is wrong on many levels. I taught the rules and theories that govern the use of force to military officers at the Naval War College for many years, and every summer for two decades to civilians at Harvard; I always reminded students that international law and traditions require states to show that they are acting in some form of self-defense, either in response to an attack or to forestall more violence. Moreover, American law does not permit the president to designate people as terrorists and then declare open season on them in defiance of international agreements and without any involvement from Congress. Perhaps Trump’s people are watching too many Tom Clancy movies, but he cannot legally send the Navy out onto the world’s oceans as though they are seagoing sheriffs with satchels full of death warrants.

No one in the White House seems to care very much about the rules that govern killing people, at home or abroad, but these rules actually exist. International law allows interdicting contraband—drugs, weapons, captured human beings—under many circumstances, and countries execute such missions legally every day. These activities require great care to limit the danger to the military and the loss of civilian life, including diligently identifying suspect vessels, warning them to stop, and sometimes boarding them to identify and seize their cargo.

Military ships can engage these targets in combat under limited conditions. If they open fire on American vessels, for example, no one would deny that they’re signing their own death warrant. But in general, when states want to initiate the use of force in the international arena, their arguments are subject to what international law calls “the Caroline test,” an 1837 case that led the U.S. to agree that to employ force, a threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This is an elegant way of saying that nations can use violence in self-defense when they have neither the time nor ability to do anything else. What constitutes an “imminent” threat is an ongoing debate among international lawyers, but the recent Venezuela strikes do not appear to fall even remotely under any of this doctrine.

To understand just how far off the rails Trump has taken the military, imagine an alternate example. If the boats were carrying, say, explosives rather than drugs, and headed on a course for American waters, then yes, U.S. officials could claim that they had no choice but to act: Each minute would bring the chance of immediate death closer to American citizens, and no military is going to try to arrest or quarantine a giant, speeding bomb.

Now let’s return to what Trump is actually doing. The president is trying to argue that drugs pose a similarly immediate threat to American lives, because once the smuggling boats unload their poisonous cargo, Americans will just as surely die as if they had been blown up in a harbor in Miami, and therefore the Navy must kill the terrorist-traffickers with the same alacrity it would use to destroy a bomb-laden paramilitary vessel.

This is nonsense. If the boats were carrying drugs (something Trump hasn’t proved) and if the boats were full of terrorists (something Trump has asserted but without providing names or evidence) and if the boats were headed directly for a U.S. port (which Trump cannot show), then Trump would still be in the wrong to destroy them without warning. Other presidents have used drone strikes to kill terrorists, but they acted under narrow legal conditions, including authority granted by Congress, against targets they could not otherwise apprehend. But Trump thinks he can pick up the phone and have people blown up at sea on his personal orders—and so far, no one’s stopped him from doing exactly that.

The president’s actions and rationalizations flunk the smell test both for international and American law. You don’t have to take my word for it: The former George W. Bush–administration lawyer John Yoo weighed in on this a few days ago. (Yoo came up with the legal justification for using “enhanced interrogation techniques”—also called “torture”—against captured terrorists after 9/11.) “There has to be a line between crime and war,” Yoo told Politico a few days ago. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

A former senior military lawyer, Charles Dunlap, likewise told Politico that “there might be paths where the strikes could be legal,” if the Trump administration would share evidence about the targets, which it won’t. Trump says the proof is “spattered all over the ocean, big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” a convenient excuse that still doesn’t answer how the ships posed such an imminent danger that they had to be destroyed at sea and their crews killed.

None of this seems to bother Trump or his circle. Almost two weeks ago, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” (I think, having taught hundreds of them, that most military officers would say that defending America and the Constitution is their highest duty, not being the world’s most brutal vice cops.) When one X user replied that what Trump is doing is a war crime, Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, shot back: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Meanwhile, White House officials are having a good laugh at how much they’ve scared innocent people in the region. Trump smirked this week that “no boats” are taking to the water in the Caribbean now. “I mean, to be honest, if I were a fisherman, I wouldn’t want to go fishing, either,” presumably because the United States might think the boat is carrying drugs. Vance tried to run with the same joke a few days ago, yukking it up with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Michigan rally. “I would stop too,” he said, laughing. “Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”

Not everyone is smiling. Despite Trump’s firing of the top legal advisers in the military, the Pentagon still employs attorneys, and they’re worried. According to The Wall Street Journal, military lawyers are concerned not only about the justification for the strikes on the boats—something any other president would have worked out before ordering the attacks—but also the “legal implications for the U.S. military personnel involved in the operations.”

Trump may have a special Immunity Necklace from the Supreme Court, but others do not. The military has a responsibility to reject orders that break American or international law, even if those orders come from the president himself. But the bar for disobedience is high: The military, as a general legal principle, must presume that orders coming down the chain of command are legal and must be executed. Nor are officers getting much guidance; attorneys and other officials in the Pentagon who have raised such objections, the Journal reported, are “being ignored or deliberately sidelined.”

A more worrisome problem here is that Trump’s illegal orders to kill drug smugglers could acclimate the American public to the sinister idea that the military is the president’s personal muscle and that it must do whatever he says. Earlier this week, he declared “antifa”—a loose affiliation of people who identify themselves as “anti-fascists”—to be a “major terrorist organization.” But because “antifa” isn’t a single group with a headquarters and identified leaders, Trump could apply the label to anyone he thinks opposes him. The president has now claimed he can kill terrorists at will, and he has designated many of his American opponents as terrorists.

The Supreme Court majority, in its Trump v. United States decision, didn’t seem very worried about Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s hypothetical objection that the president, bolstered by absolute immunity, could order the military to assassinate a political rival. But if he can order the Navy to operate as a presidential hit squad on the high seas, any number of grim hypotheticals could become reality sooner than Americans might expect.

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

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Sunday, September 21, 2025 7:35 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 actual trajectory of the Russian summer offensive and the strategic air war has made claims for Ukrainian inevitable defeat seem decidedly parochial. As such, it was interesting to see both Trump and General Keith Kellogg this week speak about Russian losses (in Trump’s case) and Ukrainian successes (in Kellogg’s).

During a press conference during Trump’s visit to the UK, he spoke of losses being disproportionately on the Russian side. The “he” below is Putin.

"He's killing a lot of people and losing more people than he's killing himself."

"Frankly, Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than Ukrainian soldiers."

Kellogg spoke even more about Russian failure. He said in Kyiv that in August when Trump asked him about the state of the war, Kellogg was clear that Russia was not winning.

Btw, I take nothing at face value that either Trump or Kellogg say. What is interesting, however, is that they are moving away from the Russian steamroller, Ukraine has no cards, narrative. It might be a sign that the intelligence that they are getting is rather different than it was earlier.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-151-the-most-rev
ealing

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

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Sunday, September 21, 2025 7:46 AM

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

Housing costs have also surged, with the annual income needed to buy a median-priced home now reaching $114,000 — a 70 percent jump since 2019.

The labor market is also showing strain. Employers added just 22,000 jobs in August, following a loss of 13,000 in June — the first monthly drop since late 2020. The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent, the highest since 2021, as businesses adjusted to tariff-related disruptions.

To make matters worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down job growth from April 2024 to March 2025 by 911,000 jobs, the largest downward revision on record.

Trump has sought to pin economic woes on his predecessor, saying the U.S. “went to hell” under Joe Biden and that his administration inherited “an inflation nightmare.” But polls suggest the message is losing traction. A new Cygnal survey shows more Americans now blame Republicans than Democrats for rising inflation.

Affluent Voters See Economy Differently

However, polling suggests that this economic uncertainty may not be a major concern for the wealthiest voters.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/donald-trump-s-approval-rating
-suddenly-shifts-with-richest-americans/ar-AA1MZOR7

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

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Sunday, September 21, 2025 8:54 AM

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

Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America.

I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr made against networks, involving a little-used doctrine called “news distortion,” show how easy it is to weaponize vaguely worded statutes and the executive’s discretionary powers against the president’s enemies. Such tools can also be used to reward friends — to provide regulatory favors, like merger approvals and exemptions from tariffs — who toe a politically correct line.

This is how authoritarianism has taken root in other democracies, most notably Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. And from the get-go, President Donald Trump’s second term had been moving the United States down this road. But for much of the time his efforts appeared too haphazard and poorly planned to produce a consolidated authoritarian regime — meaning one that could durably compromise the basic ability of its opponents to contest elections under reasonably fair conditions.

But in the past few weeks, a series of developments — most notably, but not exclusively, the authoritarian energies unleashed after Charlie Kirk’s death — have revealed a disturbingly credible policy pathway to power consolidation. We can now see how American Orbánism could take full root before the 2028 elections. We now know what a Trump-led authoritarian state in America would look like — and how we would get there from here.

Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.

More at This Is How Trump Ends Democracy
https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk

The past week has revealed Trump’s road map to one-party rule. Will Americans let him follow it?

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

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Sunday, September 21, 2025 9:07 AM

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

Continuing from above.

Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.

First, using hiring and firing powers to purge career civil servants from key agencies, like the Justice Department, and erode the traditional barriers preventing undue political influence on law enforcement and regulatory decisions. We saw this in the DOGE cuts, in the appointment of political hacks like Carr and Pam Bondi to top positions, and (most recently) Trump’s move to fire a federal prosecutor who refused to file politically motivated charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Second, using the power of these newly Trumpified agencies to target dissent in civil society — a broadening of the assaults on Ivy League universities. This would include following through on threats to use racketeering charges against liberal NGOs and going after other prominent critics the way they went after Kimmel.

Third, bullying and bribing large corporations until significant economic power is concentrated in the hands of regime allies dependent on the president’s goodwill for their survival. To a degree, this is already happening — see Trump’s habits of granted tariff exemptions to connected companies or using the threat of antitrust enforcement to bend CBS to its will. In an authoritarian America, such politicization would be expanded and deepened to the point where any corporation that crossed the White House would expect to pay a crippling financial cost.

Fourth, turn this accumulated power against the political opposition — turning elections into facially free contests where, in fact, Democrats face enormously unfair hurdles (and would likely be unable to govern even if they managed to succeed). This began with a nationwide push for mid-cycle redistricting, but would require further steps (like turning the Justice Department investigation into the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue into actual criminal charges).

At this point in the Trump administration, only the first has been accomplished to any significant degree. The efforts in other areas have been of limited effectiveness, stymied both by the courts and the Trump team’s incompetence.

But recently, and especially in the immediate wake of Kirk’s death, the administration has taken startling new swings in the second and third areas. If these efforts succeed, the fourth will become a live possibility: That is, we could be living in a country whose elections are no longer free and fair in any meaningful sense.

There is still plenty of time to prevent this future. Much depends on whether the Trump administration can get better at the nuts and bolts of lawfare, developing tactics that avoid legal hurdles or provoking a potent backlash. Acts of courage in Congress, the courts, the streets, and even corporate boardrooms could stymie Trump until at least the midterms.

But the risk of authoritarian consolidation is real and growing. Now that the endgame is clear, it’s time for all of us to start thinking about how to stop it.

More at https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk

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

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Sunday, September 21, 2025 9:37 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 Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes

His demand came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of his most-reviled adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey.

President Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at the Justice Department.

By Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman, Devlin Barrett | Sept. 20, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/trump-justice-departmen
t-us-attorneys.html

President Trump demanded on Saturday that his attorney general move quickly to prosecute figures he considers his enemies, the latest blow to the Justice Department’s tradition of independence.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post addressed to “Pam,” meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Mr. Trump named James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California; and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, saying he was reading about how they were “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”

Asked later by reporters about his message for Ms. Bondi, Mr. Trump said, “They have to act. They have to act fast.”

Even for a president who has shattered the traditional norms of maintaining distance from the Justice Department, Mr. Trump’s unabashedly public and explicit orders to Ms. Bondi were an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal.

His demands came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of the adversaries he most reviles, Ms. James and Mr. Comey, showing how far Mr. Trump has gone in exerting personal control over the Justice Department and breaching the longstanding norm about keeping politics at a distance from law enforcement.

In a different social media post later on Saturday, Mr. Trump defended Ms. Bondi, saying she was doing a “GREAT job,” but that she needed a “tough prosecutor” in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Erik S. Siebert, was abruptly forced from his post atop the U.S. attorney’s office on Friday. Mr. Trump said he would nominate Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president who was on his personal legal team, to fill the role.

Ms. Halligan, who spent much of her career as an insurance lawyer, has never been a prosecutor.

Mr. Siebert’s exit deepened troubling questions that have arisen in recent months about the politicization of the Justice Department’s supposedly self-governing satellite offices.

But it also raised a blunter and more immediate issue: Which of the nation’s U.S. attorneys might be next?

Beyond their efforts to push out Mr. Siebert, whose inquiries into Ms. James and Mr. Comey effectively fizzled out, administration officials have also ramped up pressure against Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Ms. Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr. Trump: Mr. Schiff, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr. Trump’s allies; and John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.

Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.

Mr. Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys, who oversee offices in 93 federal districts across the country, is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at the Justice Department headquarters and the F.B.I. against those who worked on the criminal cases brought against him before he returned to power.

But his latest demand for the prosecution of his foes also underscores how his desire for retribution against those who pursued him after his first term remains as intense as ever, and how he appears to feel less constrained by political and legal norms in imposing payback.

“I was indicted five times, it turned out to be a fake deal, and we have to act fast, one way or the other, one way or the other — they’re guilty, they’re not guilty, we have to act fast,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be charged, they should be charged.”

Given that these prosecutors’ offices are where federal cases are filed on a day-to-day basis, the move strikes at the nuts-and-bolts foundations of the criminal justice system. It seems intended both to create a frictionless path for prosecutions of those who have run afoul of Mr. Trump, and perhaps to provide the White House with a tool it could use to set aside or slow cases it would like to see disappear.

White House interference in the work of U.S. attorneys was once considered such a taboo that former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who served under President George W. Bush, resigned in scandal after the Justice Department fired nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 for what were perceived to be political reasons.

But Mr. Trump’s reaction to Mr. Siebert’s ouster could not have been more different.

Several people, including Ms. Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and the president’s former defense lawyer, lobbied hard to keep Mr. Siebert in place, arguing that he had been an efficient and cooperative partner on immigration and crime enforcement in Washington’s southern suburbs.

But Mr. Trump responded to repeated entreaties by saying, “I don’t care,” according to a person with knowledge of the matter. His position seemed to be that he had been warned several times during his first term about firing U.S. attorneys, given that it could have put him in jeopardy, and he ended up being investigated after leaving office anyhow, the person said.

While U.S. attorneys are appointed by, and serve at the pleasure of, the president, they like to think of themselves as having some measure of professional autonomy, said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. That sense of independence largely arises from measures put in place in the 1970s, after the Watergate scandal, dictating that partisan politics should never play a role in a prosecutor’s decision-making process.

“U.S. attorneys pride themselves on saying that we act without fear or favor,” Ms. McQuade said. “But if you see other U.S. attorneys getting fired for failing to comply with orders from the White House, well, that could lead to fear. And if you are letting someone off the hook for political reasons, well, that is favor. Both are inappropriate.”

For now, Mr. Siebert will be replaced by Mary Cleary, a conservative lawyer active in Republican politics who has served as a local prosecutor in Culpeper County, Va., according to an email she sent staff members at the office on Saturday. Her email did not mention her predecessor or his predicament, saying only that “the Eastern District of Virginia has a distinguished legacy upon which we will build.”

It was unusual enough when Mr. Trump, at the start of his term, placed a team of his own personal lawyers, including Mr. Blanche, in key positions at the Justice Department.

It was even more unusual, however, that the president ignored the advice of those officials in favor of others who have limited or no experience at all in handling criminal cases: Ed Martin, the self-described captain of the Justice Department’s weaponization working group, which was created to go after Mr. Trump’s enemies, and William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mr. Pulte had been pushing Mr. Trump for weeks to get rid of Mr. Siebert and was joined by Mr. Martin in delivering a message intended to prompt a dismissal, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Siebert, the two men told the president, had for some time been blocking efforts to subject Ms. James to the punishment he desired.

That message gained new urgency this week after Mr. Siebert encountered a significant hurdle in his separate investigation of Mr. Comey for allegedly lying in testimony to Congress. That inquiry — said to be based on testimony that Mr. Comey gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 — was under additional pressure because it was set to bump up against the statute of limitations within 10 days.

Chris Christie, the erstwhile Trump ally and former governor who once served as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, said that decisions about criminal prosecutions should be made by people with the requisite résumé and training, and that Mr. Trump was “clearly not qualified” to make such decisions “in either respect.”

“When the decisions are made by someone who has neither the education nor the experience to make those decisions, people immediately jump to the conclusion that they’re being made for reasons that have nothing to do with the law,” Mr. Christie said in a brief interview. “And that’s the type of slippery slope that we cannot have our criminal justice system go down.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump and his allies have often sought to justify their attacks on U.S. attorneys by claiming that the justice system under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been weaponized against his predecessor.

Still, there is no evidence that federal law enforcement officials in the Biden administration were strong-armed into bringing or dropping prosecutions for what were overtly political reasons. Nor were there any high-profile resignations by U.S. attorneys under Mr. Biden that were similar to Mr. Siebert’s resignation on Friday.

During his first term, Mr. Trump occasionally inserted himself into the affairs of U.S. attorney’s offices, but was often held back from doing so by his allies and advisers. In one high-profile episode, he fired Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whose office handled case after case that rankled him, including those against two of his personal lawyers.

After his return to power, Mr. Trump and his top political appointees quickly moved to step into high-profile legal matters.

In an early example, top Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of a federal bribery case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, overruling local prosecutors in Manhattan and prompting the resignation of the U.S. attorney there. Ms. Bondi personally intervened in a different case in Utah in July, ordering local prosecutors to drop the charges against a doctor accused of selling fake Covid vaccination cards.

Administration officials have also used a series of arcane legal maneuvers in an effort to have Mr. Trump’s nominees run federal prosecutors’ offices in New Jersey and Delaware after their temporary terms ran out, and despite federal judges in those districts using their lawful powers to oppose the candidates.

Moreover, a handful of top federal prosecutors handling sensitive cases have resigned in recent months under curious circumstances.

In August, Todd Gilbert, the former U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, left his post one month after taking the job as prosecutors under him conducted a related investigation into Mr. Comey. And in May, Ben Schrader, a top prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, quit just before the office filed charges against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and then returned to U.S. soil to face indictment.

----------

Tyler Pager contributed reporting.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 21, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ouster Pushes Justice Dept. Closer to Cliff.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 6:17 AM

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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 second:
Trump Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes

His demand came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of his most-reviled adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey.

Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time

The president is gambling that he can consolidate authority before the public turns too sharply against him.

By David Frum | September 21, 2025, 11:49 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-bondi-edva/684
292/

President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator. If he loses the race, he will be pulled ever deeper below—and the escalator keeps moving faster against him.

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

Trump’s hold on power is indeed loosening. His standing with the voting public is quickly deteriorating. Grocery prices jumped in August 2025 at the fastest speed since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation in 2022. Job growth has stalled to practically zero.

Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of higher tariffs, Trump’s signature economic move. His administration’s attack on vaccines for young children is even more unpopular. This year has brought the highest number of measles cases since the Clinton administration introduced free universal vaccination for young children in 1993. Parents may be rightly shocked and angry.

Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted, “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure. As of early August, nearly two-thirds of Americans regarded Trump as corrupt, 45 percent as “very corrupt.” More than 60 percent think the Trump administration is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case. Almost 60 percent regard Bondi personally responsible for the cover-up.

The MAGA project in many ways resembles one of former businessman Donald Trump’s dangerously leveraged real-estate deals. A comparatively small number of fanatics are heart-and-soul committed. Through them, Trump controls the Republican apparatus and the right-wing media world, which allows him to do things like gerrymander states where he is in trouble (50 percent of Texans now disapprove of Trump, while only 43 percent approve) or wield the enforcement powers of the Federal Communications Commission to silence on-air critics. But overleveraged structures are susceptible to external shocks and internal mistakes.

Trump in his first term mostly avoided screwing up the economy. His trade wars with China triggered a nearly 20 percent stock-market slump in the fall and early winter of 2018. Trump retreated, and no recession followed the slump until the COVID shock of 2020. But in his second term, Trump has jettisoned his former economic caution. The stock market is doing fine in 2025 on hopes of interest-rate cuts. The real economy is worsening. The percentage of Americans who think the country is on the “wrong track” rose sharply over the summer. Even self-identified Republicans are now more negative than positive.

The souring is especially bitter among younger people. More than 60 percent of Republicans younger than 45 say things are on the wrong track, a 30-point deterioration over the three summer months.

Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free and fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.

The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 6:21 AM

SECOND

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

A New War Department Policy

https://theintercept.com/2025/09/21/department-of-war-pentagon-press-f
repete-hegseth/

Under new rules, the Department of War said it would forbid reporters from gathering any information that had not been approved for release and would revoke press credentials from any journalists who did not obey.

A 17-page document laying out the new guidelines says that journalists who wish to report from the Pentagon must sign agreements restricting their movement in the building and stipulating that they will not obtain or possess unauthorized material.

“DoW remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust,” the department’s Orwellian memorandum states.

One defense official called the new policy a “mockery of American ideals.” Another likened it to policies seen in some of the most repressive and unstable nations on the planet. “The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic not the United States,” that official told The Intercept. A third said it was Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest assault on accountability, referencing his earlier efforts to kneecap the military’s lawyers.

Agreeing not to print what the government doesn’t want you to print, is propaganda, not journalism.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 6:43 AM

SECOND

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

Hey, Let’s Undermine America’s Technology, Education and Research!

H-1B visas: The latest front in a campaign of destruction

Paul Krugman | Sep 22, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hey-lets-undermine-americas-technol
ogy

It often seems as if Donald Trump and his minions are engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine America’s preeminence in the world.

We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.

H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.

The rollout of Trump’s new $100,000 fee for holders of H-1B followed what has become a familiar pattern. First, without warning, the White House announced a drastic policy change that, on its face, looked catastrophic for many workers and businesses. As NBC put it, the announcement set off “panic and chaos” among workers, companies and governments. Businesses and universities advised their foreign workers not to leave the country, because they might not be able to return to the United States. In at least one case, large numbers of passengers demanded that they be allowed to get off a plane about to depart San Francisco for Dubai.

Then — a day late and $100,000 short — the administration scrambled to limit the damage, announcing that this was a one-time fee that didn’t apply to those holding previously issued visas. Needless to say, the initial proclamation didn’t state any of these later clarifications. Magnifying the chaos, the clarifications were announced by posts on X — which does not, as far as I know, constitute an official channel for statements of U.S. policy.

And there is an outstanding legal question: does Trump even have the legal right to impose these fees? Probably not, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. The lawsuits are being filed as I write. However, it’s all too possible that a supine Supreme Court will let him get away with hammering yet another nail in coffin of the American rule of law.

The chaos of the announcement aside, Trump’s new policy on H-1B visas is a disastrous move. It will damage American leadership in the network of sectors — tech, education and research — that has driven our economic success for decades. And it will probably backfire even in its stated goal, which is to create more good jobs for native-born workers.

Normal economic analysis suggests that allowing highly educated foreigners to work in the United States is highly beneficial to the U.S. economy. Most directly, these workers add to America’s GDP. Consequently, highly educated foreign workers increase U.S. tax revenue, thereby helping to pay for Social Security and Medicare without claiming benefits. Moreover, by increasing the supply of high-education labor relative to less educated workers, they also help mitigate income inequality.

There is an additional bonus arising from the fact that H-1B workers are largely employed in the tech industry. For tech is an industry characterized by strong “positive externalities”: Every successful company helps create an environment favorable to other companies. As a result, more high-tech companies want to locate in Silicon Valley and other clusters because they are home to an existing network of successful tech companies.

The larger the industry, the greater are the technological spillovers — loosely speaking, the shop talk among engineers which enables companies to learn from each other. Furthermore, the larger the industry, the more extensive the network of companies that play specialized, complementary roles. For example, Silicon Valley’s uniquely vibrant venture capital scene is as much a consequence as a cause of tech’s success. And the larger the industry, the deeper and more flexible the market for specialized skill. That is, in a large tech industry expanding firms can easily recruit talent and talented workers can leave less successful firms and find new jobs.

Some readers may realize that I just described the “Marshallian trinity” of forces that support industrial localization. Anyway, these forces are especially strong in tech. They are the reason Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. And the tech industry’s positive externalities mean that we should be very wary of any policy that might undermine the virtuous circle that explains America’s technology success.

Although I have focused so far on the U.S. tech sector, the same set of phenomena underlie the success of the American educational and research sectors. Top universities such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard are made immeasurably greater by the ability to hire the best faculty from around the world. Likewise for the unparalleled National Institute of Health and our research clusters in biotech and applied engineering.

Let’s consider a historical example: America took the lead in world scientific research during and after World War II with critical help from refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, who helped build everything from the atom bomb to the space program. The Trumpists should watch Oppenheimer.

The success of these sectors is, in turn, at the core of U.S. economic success more generally. The influential Draghi report on European competitiveness asked how much of the growing U.S. productivity advantage since 2000 can be attributed to our lead in digital technology. The report’s answer is, basically, all of it.
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c
-f152a8232961_en
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c
-f152a8232961_en#page=29

If you read the White House proclamation on H-1B visas, however, it’s clear that whoever devised the policy — Stephen Miller? Steve Bannon? — understands none of this. They clearly imagine that there are a bunch of highly paid technology jobs whose existence can be taken for granted, and that these jobs can simply be taken away from people they don’t like and given to native-born Americans.

That is not, in fact, how it works. America’s strength in tech isn’t the result of some inherent, indestructible natural advantage. If natural advantage determined industrial success, Silicon Valley would still be growing apricots. Instead, as I said, our tech industry rests on a virtuous circle of self-reinforcing success, which depends above all on the industry’s ability to attract talented workers from around the world. Cut off the supply of such workers, and you risk ending that virtuous circle, maybe even turning it into a vicious circle of decline.

One more thing: Trump’s visa proclamation basically gave his officials open-ended authority to waive the fees for people and companies they like:

The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.

The potential for corruption — for using selective granting or withdrawal of visas to extract political favors and outright bribes — is obvious. “Nice tech company you have here. It would be a shame if something were to happen to your work force.” Will Trump and company abuse this power? Do bears do their business in the woods?

There are many valid criticisms one could make about the details of the H-1B program, which could definitely be improved. But Trump’s attack on the program is purely destructive, knocking away yet another pillar supporting American greatness.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 7:03 AM

SECOND

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

After cuts to food stamps, Trump administration ends government’s annual report on hunger in America

By PAUL WISEMAN
Updated 5:01 PM CDT, September 20, 2025

https://apnews.com/article/trump-ending-america-hunger-report-snap-cut
s-750f90757f50ab2d8bc97dfca5a917dd

The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”

The decision comes two and a half months after President Donald Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 2:53 PM

SECOND

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

Trump Is Getting Closer to Having an ‘Infinite Money Pit’

Rogé Karma | September 22, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/trump-federal-rese
rve-control-unchecked-power/684279/

President Donald Trump could be close to taking over the Federal Reserve. On September 9, a federal district judge blocked Trump’s effort to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor; on Thursday, the administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow the firing to go through. If the high court ends up siding with the administration, then Trump will have a clear path to filling the central bank with loyalists willing to vote the way he directs them to.

So far, most of the hand-wringing over this possibility has centered on Trump’s desire to dramatically cut interest rates, which could juice the economy and improve the GOP’s political prospects in the short term, but make inflation worse and destroy the Fed’s credibility in the long term. But the Fed has far more power than just setting rates; in fact, setting rates is the least of what it can do. The central bank determines the supply of money flowing through the economy, decides which institutions can have access to the financial system, and can print and spend money at will. If Trump takes control of the Fed, he will have attained extraordinary power to reward his friends and destroy his enemies.

The Constitution makes clear that Congress, not the president, holds the power to authorize new government spending. But a major exception to this rule exists. In 1932, Congress gave the Federal Reserve the power to lend money to “any individual, partnership, or corporation” during “unusual or exigent circumstances.” The Fed used the emergency-lending provision to make a few modest loans during the Great Depression. The power then lay dormant until the 2008 financial crisis, when the central bank issued hundreds of billions of dollars in loans in an effort to rescue major financial institutions on the brink of collapse. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fed went even further, offering trillions of dollars in loans not just to big banks but to corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, and even city governments.

Several legal experts told me that even this expansive use of the Fed’s lending authority was relatively restrained compared with what the central bank could do. Federal law imposes virtually no limits on what kind of institutions the Fed can lend to, how much money it can lend, or whether the loans ever need to be paid back. Whether any party would even have standing to sue the Fed for abusing its lending authority is unclear. As part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, Congress imposed a few restrictions, but these turned out to be vague and easily gamable. “There are really no limits to this power,” Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Treasury official who helped draft the relevant provisions of Dodd-Frank, told me. “The Fed can basically lend however much it wants, to whoever it wants, whenever it wants.”

Perhaps Trump would instruct his Fed appointees to exercise that power with restraint, lending only as needed to guide the economy through truly perilous circumstances. But little would stop him from instead treating the bank’s lending power as a bottomless slush fund. He could direct money to favored industries, such as crypto, or even his own businesses. He could reward media outlets that give him favorable coverage, companies that donate to Republican campaigns, and even the budgets of local officials who promote his agenda. If Democrats in Congress shut down the government to limit funds for ICE, say, he could send hundreds of billions of dollars to private contractors to keep operations moving. “It’s an infinite money pit,” Lev Menand, a professor at Columbia Law School who previously worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told me. “There’s really nothing to stop the administration from lending trillions of dollars to the president’s priorities.”

Perhaps even more alarming, control of the Fed would give the president a powerful weapon for punishing his enemies. The Fed is the central node of the U.S. financial system. Every major bank in the country holds a master checking account at the Fed, which they depend on to make and receive payments, manage their reserves, and access credit. The central bank, in turn, operates as the country’s main financial regulator: It determines whether banks are in compliance with existing laws on financial risk management and illicit transactions, for example, and has various ways to enforce that compliance, ultimately backed by the threat of cutting off access to the financial system altogether.

The Fed has considerable discretion over how it uses this authority, giving it enormous power over not only the country’s banks but all of the individuals, businesses, and organizations that require any kind of financial services. The response to marijuana legalization by one regional Fed branch is an instructive example. When Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, the Kansas City Fed, which has regulatory jurisdiction over the state, declared that banks offering financial services to cannabis sellers were in violation of federal law, implying they could lose their master accounts at the Fed. As a result, the state’s banks largely refused to provide services to marijuana businesses, forcing them to choose between dealing in cash, banking illegally, or going out of business. Colorado tried to fix this by passing a law authorizing the creation of special “marijuana financial-services cooperatives,” to provide credit for the industry, but the Fed refused to allow the new institutions access to the federal financial system. When one of the newly formed credit unions sued, the courts sided with the central bank.

How might Trump use the power to “debank,” as it is sometimes called? Take the administration’s threats against prominent left-leaning donors and organizations such George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Trump could designate them as a “domestic terrorist threat” and direct the Fed to cut off any bank that does business with them. “That kind of thing is basically what happened with cannabis,” Klein told me. “It isn’t hard to imagine the same powers being used to go after Trump’s enemies.”

The tools Trump has used so far to bend institutions to his will, such as withholding federal funding, are powerful, but they pale in comparison to the power of debanking. An organization subjected to such treatment would be unable to pay its employees, manage its endowment, or receive funding from government or private sources. An individual would be unable to receive direct deposits from their employer, get a mortgage from a bank, or pay their bills. “If you’re made a persona non grata by the Fed, that’s completely debilitating,” Menand told me. “It’s the financial equivalent of cutting someone off from the electricity grid.”

Several legal experts told me that, given the broad discretion the courts have given the Fed over both lending and financial regulation, the judiciary would be unlikely to stop Trump from taking full advantage of the central bank’s powers. In theory, the market itself could provide the necessary check: Reckless actions could cause investors to panic and tank the stock and bond markets, forcing the administration to back down. But control of the Fed would also give the administration plenty of tools to placate the markets with low interest rates and easy money. The only sure check on Trump’s power would be Congress stepping in to amend the Federal Reserve Act. But this would require an implausible two-thirds majority vote to overcome a presidential veto in both chambers.

And so the most likely way to prevent these scenarios from unfolding is for the Supreme Court to rule that the firing of Lisa Cook was illegal, preventing Trump from taking over the central bank in the first place. If it instead green-lights Trump’s efforts, the scale of what could ensue is difficult to predict. Most of the experts who have worked within the Fed or studied it closely have never contemplated what could happen if an institution with so much unchecked power came under the control of one man. Perhaps it’s time to start imagining.

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

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Monday, September 22, 2025 3:02 PM

SECOND

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

A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes 400.

By Annie Lowrey

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/billionaire-tax-st
udy/683987/

In the end, the top 400 Americans paid an estimated 23.8 percent of their income to Uncle Sam from 2018 to 2020 — down from roughly 30 percent before the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in 2017. They paid 1.3 percent of their total wealth to the IRS in those years, down from 2.7 percent from 2010 to 2013. Their tax rates were lower than the average paid by all American households.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump’s signature first-term domestic-policy package, helped these billionaires keep more of their money. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed this summer, extends the TCJA’s tax cuts, creates new business loopholes, and lowers taxes on estates. To help offset the revenue losses, the Trump administration is stripping health coverage from millions of low-income Americans and shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The rich, including Trump, will keep getting richer. The poor will pay for it.

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

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