REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 28, 2025 07:44
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Saturday, October 25, 2025 6:47 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Rewriting History to Justify His Sketchy Pardon of a Crypto King

Trump directly tied his pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao to the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.”

By Matt Sledge | October 24 2025, 6:41 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/24/trump-pardon-crypto-binance-cz/

After Donald Trump pardoned a billionaire crypto king on Thursday, he claimed that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was “persecuted” by Joe Biden’s Justice Department as part of what the White House called a “war on cryptocurrency.”

On one level, that assertion was an attempt to explain away a pardon that many see as a naked quid pro quo with a man whose business used Trump’s crypto tokens in a transaction that benefited the president’s family firm.

On another level, observers say, that claim is simply wrong. Zhao willingly pleaded guilty under a carefully negotiated deal with former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, which ultimately saw his company pay $4 billion in fines and serve only four months in prison. At the time, one analyst saw the overall package as a clear “victory” for Binance and Zhao, who is also known by his nickname CZ.

There’s a sense of bitter irony for longtime critics of Biden Justice Department. They had long complained in general about Biden’s approach to corporate crime, and Binance in particular was accused of facilitating everything from terrorism to child sexual abuse images before it received a deal that allowed its founder to spend a few months in prison. He also paid a fine worth a small percentage of his wealth.

“He got to keep all his money, control of Binance, and was allowed to handpick his successor CEO,” Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the financial reform nonprofit Better Markets, said in an email. “Even a quick read of the charging documents detailing the actual facts and violations of law would reveal that Binance and CZ got a sweetheart deal from DOJ.”

Choosing Club Fed

Progressive critics have maintained a drumbeat of criticism of Biden and Barack Obama’s Justice Departments ever since the Great Recession, when top bankers avoided jail time for their role in the housing market crash.

Prosecutions of corporate criminals fell to a record low during Biden’s final year in office, according to a report released by Public Citizen earlier this year.

“Biden is certainly not anybody to hold up as an exemplar of people ‘persecuting’ people,” said Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate with Public Citizen.

Binance was one of the thinning ranks of companies to find itself in court, but critics say it may be the exception that proves the rule. Three years ago, it was one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, as it effectively thumbed its nose at U.S. anti-money-laundering laws designed to prevent terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminals from making their dirty money look clean.

In statements around the time of the November 2023 plea deal, Biden Justice Department officials laced into Zhao. Still, the deal they crafted allowed Binance to remain one of the leading players in the field.

Unlike the bankers who escaped jail time, Zhao was the rare executive to see the inside of a prison’s walls, but not for long.

Prosecutors sought a three-year sentence for Zhao, but a federal judge dipped below that request to hand him the months-long term. He served his time at a low-security prison in California. Since then, he has returned to serving as something of an oracle to crypto industry fanboys.

“If you set the bar at response to the great financial crisis, then yeah, bar cleared. It was more than was common in the past,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit Revolving Door Project. “But if you consider how seriously the establishment of both political parties takes issues like terrorism, I think a four-month prison sentence is comically inadequate.”

Even at the time of the settlement, observers believed that it might not dent Binance’s business by much.

“While the massive penalty is a blow to the company’s treasury and the humbling of Zhao undercuts Binance’s longtime edge, the early market response suggests the company will survive,” Fortune magazine intoned shortly after the deal was announced. As of this quarter, Binance is still the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Nevertheless, Trump has cast the prosecution has a grave overreach by the Biden administration that he had to correct.

“It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people,” Trump said.

“Unparalleled, Open Corruption”

During and after the Biden administration, cryptocurrency insiders painted a dark portrait of regulators’ attempts to place guardrails on the industry in the wake of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s far-reaching fraud. They complained about relentless attention from agencies ranging from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Justice Department.

The idea that the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on crushing crypto is absurd, Hauser said. At most, Hauser argued, the SEC under former Chair Gary Gensler was generally skeptical of the industry.

“The Garland Justice Department did not, and nor did the Yellen Treasury Department, or other aspects of the national security state, never sought to delegitimatize crypto and tie it strongly to terrorism,” Hauser said. “If they had told that story repeatedly, I think the reputation of crypto may have been very different, and that might have impacted at a minimum how Trump chose to be corrupt in this administration.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, he has sought to rapidly reverse perceptions of the federal government’s attitude toward crypto. He has pardoned crypto executives and even a crypto company itself, in an apparent first. In addition to cheerleading crypto’s growth, moreover, he and his family have jumped headlong into crypto schemes themselves, relying on various ventures to rapidly boost Trump’s net worth.

Trump directly tied his pardon of Zhao to the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.” In doing so, he also pardoned a man whose business is linked with his.

“Zhao helps the Trumps make billions and gets a pardon.”

In May, an investment fund created by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund used the Trump family’s stablecoins to invest in Binance, effectively allowing the Trump family to reap the benefits of a large transaction relying on its token.

Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor who studies pardons, said that if reporting on the financial ties between Binance and Trump’s business ventures is accurate, “the pardon is perhaps the most overtly corrupt in American history. Zhao helps the Trumps make billions and gets a pardon. With Trump, one has already almost exhausted the superlatives. But this is unparalleled, open corruption.”

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 6:59 AM

SECOND

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


These Judges Are Warning Us We’re on the Fast Track to Martial Law

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | Oct 25, 2025 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-news-judges-warning-
martial-law.html

If there is one question everyone in America is trying to game out at this moment, it’s this one: Can the judiciary impose meaningful checks on President Donald Trump’s ability to deploy the National Guard in American cities to retaliate against political protests? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit grappled with that question over the past week, although it failed to reach anything approaching consensus. On one side, Judge Ryan Nelson (a Trump appointee) argued that courts have no authority at all to halt the president’s domestic mobilization of the Guard. Several of his colleagues believe that courts must give immense deference to the executive branch’s decision that an “emergency” necessitates the use of troops. Still others have warned that judges have a duty to carefully review—and, when necessary, block—any unlawful deployment within the United States.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed this increasingly heated dispute, and why some members of the court have warned that it amounts to a trial by fire for American self-governance. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I want to flag some of the language from Judge Susan Graber’s dissent. And it’s shocking because, in a deep sense, she’s not just talking to her colleagues, to other judges on the 9th Circuit. She’s talking to us. Toward the end, she wrote: “I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/10/20/25-6268.pdf

This is very much in the key of judges trying to tell us that they are pinned under a heavy collapsed refrigerator and that we — the rest of us — have to put some skin in the game. It is literally a judge telling Americans who are shrugging—who say, “Well, there’s nothing the courts can do”—to pull it together.

Mark Joseph Stern: She’s breaking the fourth wall, which is something judges do only in case of emergency. She’s reaching out directly and asking us not to lose faith in the judiciary. And I get it, because I am actively losing faith in the judiciary. But I think Graber is urging us to hold on, not only because she believes that the full 9th Circuit can correct this error, but because she knows that the judiciary is the last buffer between us and tyranny. This is the paradox you and I have been living with since Jan. 20, right? The judiciary is badly corrupted by Trump and his appointees. There are real limits on its ability to enforce the law. The Supreme Court itself is frequently in Trump’s pocket. And yet, in so many cases, the only real check on Trump’s abuses of the law is the courts. It’s the federal judges who are going to either step up or shrink from their duty. That’s true at least until Congress reasserts itself, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

So I really admired the way Graber closed this dissent. Frankly, I think more judges need to do this kind of thing. People are losing faith in our judicial system. They’re questioning why federal courts even exist if they aren’t going to stand up to the worst abuses of executive power in American history. And I guess Graber is telling us to hang on—that if we keep the faith, soon enough the courts will show us why they still deserve to be trusted as guardians of liberty.

This dovetails so nicely with the conversation Joyce Vance and I had on the main show, which is that giving up is not an option—as vindicating as it would feel to say: Hey, why do we need Article 3 judges in the first place? Now, weirdly, we all face this question of how we stand up for judges who may themselves feel as though Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are going to flip a coin at the end of the day. Their answer is: You keep believing in this judicial project, you hold us to it, and you get very, very loud. And that’s what I think Graber is asking us to do.

Mark, on top of this Portland decision, we also had an order from the 9th Circuit involving the National Guard in Los Angeles from this past summer. And 11 judges indicated that they believe Trump’s deployment of the Guard in American cities is not only illegal but a threat to self-governance itself.
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/10/22/25-3727.pdf This court was once known as the most liberal hippie circuit, but it’s now populated by a lot of conservatives, and there is an internal war going on. And I guess the question is: Will that massive divide get resolved soon?

It needs to, because it’s a hot war now, right? On Wednesday, the full court declined to reconsider the L.A. decision en banc, but 11 judges said it should have, because the majority gave way too much deference to the president. Judge Marsha Berzon wrote an extraordinary dissent in which she asserted that without careful judicial review of the Guard’s domestic deployment, “this country could devolve into one in which the use of military force displaces the rule of law, principles of federalism, and the federal separation of powers, all fundamental precepts of our democracy long understood as protecting the liberties of individuals and the assurance of self-governance.”

Let’s be clear what Berzon is warning about here: It’s martial law. She is warning that we are on a path to martial law if the courts are not allowed to enforce the strict limits on the domestic peacetime enforcement of the National Guard by the president. She is warning that our representative government is on the brink of disaster, if not extinction, if the courts allow the president to send in the military every time there are protests and dissent that he doesn’t like, wielding the troops as a weapon against his perceived political opponents.

I think she’s dead right, of course. But I also think there’s a tendency among a lot of people to dismiss all this because the Guard hasn’t yet committed any obvious, egregious, and violent violations of the Constitution, as far as we know. And, in a separate dissent, Judge Ronald Gould warned us that could happen. He raised the specter of the Kent State shootings and said that we are basically gambling on this happening again very soon, perhaps multiple times, if the president continues to deploy a force into American streets that is trained to fight foreign wars.

Gould and Berzon are really ringing the alarm about as loud as a sitting federal judge possibly can about what happens when judges sideline themselves forevermore, as one of their colleagues argued for last week.

There are different ways this could play out: Trump sending the Guard into blue cities during the 2026 midterms to try to suppress votes, or crush political dissent in the streets, then destroy the right to peaceably assemble. But no matter how it happens, we are on a path toward something that looks a lot like tyranny. It certainly doesn’t look a lot like democracy.

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 9:03 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't see a problem with this at all.
Trump can shit on the Constitution and still get 6ix's vote.

There is a Plan for a Third Trump Term

By Catherine Bouris | Oct. 24, 2025

https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-reveals-theres-a-plan-for-t
hird-donald-trump-term/

Steve Bannon openly shared that there are plans to help Donald Trump circumvent the 22nd Amendment and secure a third presidential term.

In an interview with The Economist, Bannon told the magazine’s editors, “He’s gonna get a third term, Trump ’28, Trump is gonna be president ’28 so people just ought to get accommodated with that.”

When asked about the 22nd Amendment, Bannon replied, “There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ’28.”

Bannon continued, arguing that Trump had “longer odds in ’16 and longer odds in ’24? than he does looking ahead at the 2028 election, adding that “the country needs him to be President of the United States. We have to finish what we started.”

He went on to call Trump an “instrument of divine will” despite not being “churchy” or “particularly religious,” explaining that “you can tell this from how he’s pulled this off.”

“We need him for at least one more term, and he’ll get that in ’28.”

Bannon’s rhetoric echoes that deployed by others in Trump’s orbit, including Trump himself, with the president frequently alluding to the possibility of a third term despite the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to a maximum of two. On Sunday, the president posted a video to Truth Social that showed him ruling not just through 2032, but forever.

In a March interview with NBC News, Trump said that “a lot of people” wanted him to seek a third term, and that while he was “focused on the current [term],” there “are methods which you could do it.”

Asked by NBC about those methods, including a scenario where Vice President JD Vance runs for president and then passes the role to Trump, the president said, “That’s one, but there are others, too.” He declined to provide examples of other potential methods.

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 12:56 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't see a problem with this at all.
JD Vance went on his seventh vacation in 6 months and 2 weeks at a $28,000 per week Scottish estate as inflation soars and prices skyrocket yet not a peep from right wing media. Meanwhile, this was Fox News when Kamala Harris bought cookware for $500.

Kamala Harris reportedly spent over $500 on cookware in Parisian shop amid US economic uncertainty
Cost of Thanksgiving dinner has reportedly increased more than 14% from 2020's average.

She spent her own money. He's on the public's dime.

https://www.threads.com/@sugarpusher/post/DNZedtZsXEJ/500-isnt-even-that-much-for-cookware

Where’s JD Vance? On Vacation!

Vice President JD Vance has been in office since January, and already he’s racked up more vacation days than most Americans could dream of in a decade. The man who built his brand railing against “elites” has basically become one — living like the very people he claimed to stand against.

https://thehill.com/opinion/lindseys-lens/5462066-jd-vance-vacation-da
ys-criticism/

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 1:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I don't see a problem with this at all.
JD Vance went on his seventh vacation in 6 months and 2 weeks at a $28,000 per week Scottish estate as inflation soars and prices skyrocket yet not a peep from right wing media. Meanwhile, this was Fox News when Kamala Harris bought cookware for $500.


Yeah. And they talked about Bill Clinton's $250 haircut when I was in middle school, and they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.


I don't give a fuck about Harris' $500 cookware. I'm surprised it was that cheap, to be honest. I know Nancy Pelosi doesn't have any pheasant-worthy $500 cookware in her house. Her $24,000 refrigerator would disown her.


Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 2:44 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
. . . they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.

Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?
Did you know that is false? But this is true: A February 2019 report by the GAO investigated four specific trips Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in early 2017. The total cost for the four trips was approximately $13.6 million, or about $3.4 million per trip. That is a fortune for a game of golf. Cost to the taxpayer for Trump not playing? Zero. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-178

Based on past news reports, the claim that the Obamas spent $1 million on a Broadway show is false. While their Broadway outings received media attention, the "million-dollar" figure is a misinterpretation of a separate 2015 fundraising event. https://www.google.com/search?q=+The+Obama's+spending+%25241+Milli
on+to+go+see+a+Broadway+show

The origin of the $1 million figure
• In July 2015, former President Obama took his daughters to New York for a weekend that included seeing the musical Hamilton.
• The same weekend, Obama attended a Democratic National Committee fundraiser that generated $1 million. The event was held separately from the family outing, and the money was raised from attendees, not spent by the Obamas.

The real cost of a Broadway “date night"
In May 2009, an earlier date night for the Obamas that included a Broadway show was heavily criticized by Republicans.
• Initial media speculation of the travel and security costs ranged from $25,000 to $250,000.
• Some reports, including one from The Telegraph, put the aircraft cost at roughly $24,000, with the Obamas reportedly paying for their own dinner and show tickets.

Conclusion
The $1 million figure is associated with a political fundraiser that occurred during the same weekend as a personal family trip to New York. The Obamas did not spend $1 million on tickets for a Broadway show.

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 2:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
. . . they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.

Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?
Did you know that is false?


No. It's not.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 3:10 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No. It's not.
In two sentences, 6ix explained why his life fails. Denial of truth has messed up the lives of many Trumptards: "My wife will never know." "I can drink and drive." "I can afford this." "That is not skin cancer." "The boss won't discover my embezzlement because I'm clever."

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 6:28 PM

SECOND

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


The Shutdown Is a Knife at a Gunfight

The two sides in Congress may forge a deal, but what difference will it make to a president who doesn’t respect Congress at all?

By David Frum | October 24, 2025, 5:18 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/weird-shutdown-tr
ump-congress/684685/

That real issue is Trump’s challenge to Congress’s constitutional taxing and spending powers. The president has refused to spend funds that Congress appropriated, and he is raising revenues that Congress never approved. Just today, for example, the Pentagon announced a so-called gift of $130 million from an unnamed Trump supporter** to fund military pay during the shutdown. Raising funds from plutocrat allies in defiance of the legislature is something that the authors of the Constitution might have cited as a death spasm of republics. It follows Trump’s plan to pay for a new ballroom by extracting $300 million or more from donors who surely expect something in return.

Trump is also raising about $30 billion a month in tariff revenues, again without a vote in Congress. He plans to spend those revenues on grants to his favored constituents, once more without a vote. The Supreme Court has given Trump at least temporary permission for some of his recent moves. Republicans who control the House and the Senate have largely acquiesced to his abuses. But the president’s underlying view is abundantly clear from his words, deeds, and petty deepfake videos mocking Democratic leaders: Trump does not respect Congress.

This government shutdown, then, should be understood as a protest against Trump’s bid to tax and spend without Congress’s consent. But how do the president’s opponents make a budget deal when the president does not regard anything that comes out of Congress as binding? Any concessions will mean little when they are so likely to be abandoned on a whim.

The president’s allies in Congress seem keen to help him sideline lawmakers by keeping the House of Representatives closed through this fight. The Senate has remained in session, but the House has met on only 42 days since July 3. Trump’s opponents accuse House Speaker Mike Johnson of keeping the lights off to protect the president from procedures to release materials from the Jeffrey Epstein sex-abuse case. Although Johnson denies this, he has yet to offer a convincing excuse for extending the House’s summer vacation through the fall. Just as Trump devalues the work of Congress, Johnson is reinforcing the House’s irrelevance.

Which brings us back to the larger predicament faced by congressional Democrats. They are trying to negotiate with a president who does not accept Congress’s constitutional role—or his own constitutional limits.

Democrats chose Affordable Care Act subsidies—which benefit mostly Republican areas of the country—as their battlefield because they believed that ground to be uniquely favorable to them. So far, that instinct has proved correct. Polls unanimously report that Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for this shutdown.

Trump and the Senate Republicans may soon have to hand the Democrats a victory on ACA subsidies. But that “win” will not change what actually sent Democrats into this battle. Trump rejects constitutional limits on his power. His party in Congress will heed his desires even if it means defying the Constitution and disempowering itself. These threats are bigger than health subsidies—bigger, even, than this shutdown. Every day, Trump comes to work to advance his bid for an American autocracy. That effort will continue, even after this weird shutdown finally ends.

** Billionaire Who Gave $130M to Trump Identified
https://www.newsweek.com/billionaire-who-gave-130m-to-military-during-
shutdown-identified-report-10939372

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 8:20 PM

SECOND

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


Regarding his boat bombings, Trump said: “Every boat that we knock out we save 25,000 American lives so every time you see a boat and you feel badly you say, ‘Wow, that’s rough’…It is rough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people.” There is a video of Trump saying the whopping big lie.

Trump’s Lies Get Bigger
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/trumps-lies-get-bigger/

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

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Saturday, October 25, 2025 8:22 PM

SECOND

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


President Trump said today that if Hamas doesn’t stop killing people in the Gaza Strip, then the United States would have no other choice but to “go in and kill them.” Trump is always talking about killing people, and apparently likes ordering Americans to kill for him. Is any boat in the Atlantic safe?

Why Does Trump Always Talk about Killing People?
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/why-does-trump-always-talk-about-
killing-people/

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 12:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Whatever bullshit you were crying about today you're not even going to remember tomorrow.

*yawn*

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 12:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

No. It's not.
In two sentences, 6ix explained why his life fails. Denial of truth has messed up the lives of many Trumptards: "My wife will never know." "I can drink and drive." "I can afford this." "That is not skin cancer." "The boss won't discover my embezzlement because I'm clever."

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



What truth?

The 1,000 times I told you that Trump would be fine and would also be your next President?

The Truth that trump was going to win every swing state and the popular vote by over 1 Million votes?

The Truth that Hollywood was going to fuck itself right out of business and that America hates all of them?


I've been right about everything all along, my dude.

You're the one in denial.

Check yourself.



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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 7:57 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Whatever bullshit you were crying about today you're not even going to remember tomorrow.

*yawn*
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63473&mid=11086
72#1108672
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.

My mom was just shy of Piper Laurie (minus the religion) on Carrie (which incidentally was one of her favorite movies).

She actually had the nerve to ask me about a year before I got kicked out why I never had any friends around anymore. I straight up told her that she was an embarrassment. My friends don't like being screamed at for stupid shit like forgetting to take their hat off when they come in the house and other dumb rules she and the step dad had. When one of my girlfriends girl friend came by before we went to see a movie mom told her that we don't allow hats in the house and when she kind of laughed because she thought it was a joke (seriously, who in the 90's even did that anymore) my mom started yelling at her and it was the first (and last) time they ever met.

Then there was the time that my mom started just reaching back to the sky and slapping me in the face for some dumb shit reason or another and I just kept looking her dead in the eye and yelling "THANK YOU SIR! MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!"

That went on for about 5 or so minutes while she was breaking down in tears and just kept doing it until I assume her hand hurt too much to do it anymore and she slunk off to her bedroom. Both my brothers remember that one since they were upstairs and peeking down to watch it happen.

I honestly felt a lot of guilt leaving both of them, but it was time for me to move on. I shouldered the brunt of her illness for at least 10 years and spared them most of it. After I left, my middle brother couldn't take it very long and enlisted in the military less than a year later. Then my youngest brother was there alone, turned to booze which made a horrible situation even worse for everyone, and finally was out on his ass after my stepdad beat the shit out of him.

But the happy ending was that my old man didn't have a problem finally ending the child support payments for my 28 year old brother that seemed like they were never going to end since mom had a great lawyer and they they milked the shit that disabled card as long as they could (while never once making a legitimate attempt to get him on SSDI where he belonged, because it was much easier to just steal money from my Dad instead).

Who'd have guessed that Judges don't look too fondly on parents beating the shit out of their disabled children? The more you know.



And years and many horrible financial decisions later (and minus my dad's child support), they don't have much to their name, when they should probably have a couple of million saved up with all those years in the 401k and 20 years running a successful business. But they're basically retarded when it comes to money and they pissed it all away.

I've already let it be known to my brother that he and my pharmacist sister in law can foot her expenses when the time comes to put her in a home. I'm not paying a dime, and I'm sure as hell not giving her a place to live either.


Seriously. Why would anybody ever want to get married?

My parents did me a huge favor.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63473&mid=11280
35#1128035
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Telling you that I don't believe a single person died of Covid wasn't honest enough for you?

Quote:
But fwiw I see a lot of the emotional trauma that your mommy dearest put you through. I imagine she made you feel guilty if your brother was having a rough time neurologically. And maybe she even beat you over the care you were giving him. And now, you see it everywhere, even where it doesn't exist.


My mom smoked through all three of her pregnancies and couldn't stop gorging on 10,000 calories worth of M&M's before shoving her fingers down her throat and puking them all up all throughout her pregnancy with him, leading to him being over 3 months premature, weighing less than a pound, spending his first few weeks in this world in a plastic box, and the last 30 years of his life pissed off at the world for the undeniably shitty hand he was dealt in life.

Don't be a cunt.


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

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 7:59 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What truth?

The 1,000 times I told you that Trump would be fine and would also be your next President?

The Truth that trump was going to win every swing state and the popular vote by over 1 Million votes?

The Truth that Hollywood was going to fuck itself right out of business and that America hates all of them?


I've been right about everything all along, my dude.

You're the one in denial.

Check yourself.

Does anyone still remember the Cheney energy report? Early in the George W. Bush administration a task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney released a big report offering recommendations for energy policy.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0428/ml042800056.pdf

There was a lot of controversy at the time — you might even call it a scandal — over Cheney’s secretiveness, his refusal to reveal how much role corporate interests played in writing the report, whose conclusions might be summarized as “drill, baby, drill.”

Those were innocent days. These days we have much bigger scandals multiple times a week.

But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy. The report grudgingly admitted that technological progress had reduced the costs of renewable energy, but still saw solar and wind as trivial for our energy future:

By 2020, non-hydropower renewable energy is expected to account for 2.8 percent of total electricity generation.

Here’s what actually happened:

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

Today’s primer will be devoted to the rise of renewable energy. This is, of course, a deeply politicized subject: Donald Trump and his officials hate, just hate wind and solar power, and there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation. But I’ll leave detailed discussion of where those attitudes come from for the next primer.

For today I want, instead, to focus on the economics of renewable energy. How did energy sources that a generation ago were widely dismissed as hippie fantasies become a major source of electricity? What are these sources’ future prospects, and how will their growth be affected by policy?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-renewable-energy

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 9:33 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What truth?
'You'll go down as a wimp:' Pence's never-before-published notes key evidence in case against Trump

By Peter Charalambous | October 26, 2025, 6:11 AM

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/youll-wimp-pences-published-notes-key-
evidence-case/story?id=126837443

Donald Trump berated Mike Pence, calling his then-vice president a "wimp" during their final phone call on Jan. 6, 2021, hours before Congress certified the 2020 election of Joe Biden.

According to court filings, had his case against Trump gone to trial, special counsel Jack Smith planned to use the handwritten notes as evidence to document the hours before Trump directed a violent mob to storm the Capitol.

In his final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland made public this past January, Smith said the evidence his team gathered would have proved that Trump "used lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States' democratic process."

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 10:25 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What truth?
Trump Grants Clemency to One of the World’s Richest Men

The recent pardon is an overture to an industry that has made the president millions.

By Will Gottsegen | October 24, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/10/trump-crypto-p
ardon-changpeng-zhao/684699/

In “Federalist No. 74,” Alexander Hamilton envisioned the presidential pardon as a “benign prerogative,” an act of mercy important enough to supersede all other laws. But clemency hasn’t always been used that way; sometimes, presidents like to get something out of it too (Bill Clinton, for example, was widely criticized for pardoning a fugitive whose ex-wife had donated to the Clinton Presidential Center). During both of his terms, President Donald Trump has marshaled that power for extreme ends, reserving pardons mostly for those in his political orbit, and rewarding loyalty and personal remuneration on an unprecedented scale.

This week’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, perhaps the single richest person in the cryptocurrency industry, marks an escalation of that strategy. In 2023, Zhao pled guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws during his tenure as CEO of Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. In a settlement with the Treasury Department, Binance agreed to completely exit the U.S. market. The company was also slapped with a $4.3 billion penalty, and Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison. Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described Binance’s oversights as “willful failures” that allowed transactions involving cybercriminals, child abusers, and terrorist groups (among them al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) on the platform. Although Zhao has been out of prison for more than a year, he has been restricted from running the company.

Zhao’s newfound freedom is likely more than a happy coincidence. Binance reportedly helped create the code behind the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto start-up that counts Trump’s three sons as co-founders. And in May, an Emirati-backed firm invested $2 billion into Binance using that stablecoin—a deal that exponentially increased the coin’s value. Although the White House has described the transaction as “totally unrelated to any government business,” the new relationship between Binance and World Liberty Financial could generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family and their business partners.

Zhao was not shy about his wish for clemency. This year, he embarked on a monthslong effort to lobby the White House for a pardon, working hard to ingratiate himself with Trump’s circle. In February, he hired Teresa Goody Guillén, a lawyer at BakerHostetler, who also represents World Liberty Financial and its CEO, Zach Witkoff. The New York Times reported that BakerHostetler works with a firm owned by the lobbyist Ches McDowell, a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.’s; McDowell also reportedly lobbied for Zhao’s pardon. Cultivating the right friends seems to have paid off, even if the president seemed unable to recall Zhao’s name in a press briefing yesterday. (Trump called him “the crypto person,” and added that he was “recommended by a lot of people.”)

Zhao’s path to clemency is yet another instance of Trump reshaping the function of the pardon. Lee Kovarsky, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, told me that Trump’s recent pardons tend to fall into one of two buckets. The first one encompasses overtures to Trump-affiliated groups, including political factions or particular industries that the president wants to keep happy. Trump’s pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who founded the Silk Road and was serving life in prison for overseeing a criminal enterprise, was the fulfillment of a promise he’d made to the crypto community before his second election. The second bucket, Kovarsky explained, is based on “venality”—the willingness “to pardon people that make large financial donations either to him directly or to aligned entities.” One possible example is Paul Walczak, the convicted tax cheat who was pardoned in April, three weeks after his mother attended a $1 million–per–head Trump fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

Zhao’s pardon is seemingly both a gesture toward a Trump-inclined industry and a response to the Trumps’ substantial profit from the May deal. Although Zhao’s future involvement with Binance’s business operations is at this point unclear, he has promised to “help make America the Capital of Crypto,” a clear echo of Trump’s own goal. And the president has little reason to slow Binance’s growth through regulation. Already, pundits are suggesting that his administration could unwind the penalties on the company and clear the way for its reentry into the U.S. market.

“Trump wants everybody to see what the returns on loyalty are,” Kovarsky said. This year, Trump has already granted clemency to former Representative George Santos (whose convictions include fraud and identity theft) and to the January 6 rioters, some of whom ended up breaking the law again after their release. “He is not the first president to issue clemency for personal reasons, but presidential administrations usually carefully administer commutations and pardons, in part to avoid recidivism,” my colleague David A. Graham noted in April. “The Trump White House, however, has shown little regard for the process.”

If history is any indication, Trump will keep using the presidential pardon to serve his own interests. By making clear that clemency has a price, he is charting a possible path to mercy for those who can afford it. Forget benign prerogatives—how about a check instead?

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 10:37 AM

SECOND

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


Meet all 37 White House ballroom donors funding the $300 million build, including Silicon Valley tech giants, crypto bros and the Lutnicks

By Nino Paoli | October 26, 2025 at 5:03 AM EDT

https://fortune.com/2025/10/26/37-white-house-ballroom-donors-funding-
300-million-build-tech-ceos-trump/

Their private, tax-deductible donations will be made to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall.

Every donation is a bribe because every donor can receive federal money directed by Trump.

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

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Sunday, October 26, 2025 4:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


It must suck crying this much every single day.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, October 27, 2025 7:26 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

It must suck crying this much every single day.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t a free-trade purist, but he was nothing like Trump.

Trump had a hysterical reaction to an ad run by the Canadian province of Ontario that featured audio of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs and extolling free trade.

The ad especially enraged Trump because it featured Reagan, still the Republican lodestar, making a serious, reasoned case for why tariffs are generally bad for the country. In the ad, Reagan sounded presidential and trustworthy, a sure reminder of how far the Republican party has sunk while in the grip of a grandiose, snarling, whining toddler.

So Trump claimed that the ad was “FAKE” and that Reagan “LOVED tariffs.” Actually, the ad accurately conveyed the sense of Reagan’s remarks — and no, Reagan didn’t love tariffs.

It’s straightforward to go through the historical record to discover Reagan’s actual position on trade. As the Financial Times puts it, Reagan “was a devout champion of open trade who used tariffs sparingly and reluctantly.”

Reagan, in fact, repeatedly emphasized the virtues of free trade. Like all modern presidents, he nonetheless imposed some tariffs for political reasons. But Reagan always stayed within the boundaries of the law, using his right to impose discretionary tariffs as pressure release valves rather than abusing his authority to make tariff policy an instrument of his personal whims.

Reagan and his people — totally unlike Trump — took their promises to other countries seriously. If a proposed policy was in clear violation of our international agreements, it was simply out of bounds.

By contrast, everything Trump has done regarding tariffs involves breaking solemn, supposedly binding past pledges to other nations and expecting those countries to meekly comply.

Reagan's tariff policy was nothing like the lawless chaos under Trump.

https://www.ft.com/content/1e4afc0d-ab7e-4a2c-a02c-fe895c842b4e

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

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Monday, October 27, 2025 1:40 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Might Test That Theory

The woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump’s newly created “election integrity” position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a “national emergency” to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.

Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden, said this authority would come from “an actual investigation” of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.

In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has “some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” and that by using the investigation as a pretext, “we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”

Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added: “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-emergency-hijack-2026-election

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

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Monday, October 27, 2025 3:51 PM

THG

Keep it real please


Alex Krainer, comrade signyms propagandist.



T

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Monday, October 27, 2025 5:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

It must suck crying this much every single day.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t a free-trade purist


It must suck crying this much every single day.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, October 27, 2025 6:59 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

It must suck crying this much every single day.
How do you stop Trump from murdering again and again? By murdering Trump.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/10/26/the-peril-of-a-white-house
-that-flaunts-its-contempt-for-the-law/

The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has the power to summarily kill people.

Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.

A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.

The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.

The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.

It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed. Around 15 years ago, intense legal con­tro­versy sur­roun­ded Pres­id­ent Barack Obama’s drone strikes tar­get­ing al-Qaida mil­it­ants in ungov­erned places where the United States did not have ground troops, like Yemen and tri­bal Pakistan. Those included the killing of a U.S. cit­izen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was deemed an oper­a­tional ter­ror­ist leader whose cap­ture was infeas­ible.

Behind the scenes, Obama admin­is­tra­tion law­yers wrestled with the scope and lim­its of how the con­gres­sion­ally author­ized armed con­flict against al-Qaida could apply to such scen­arios. They developed lengthy and detailed memos cit­ing Supreme Court pre­ced­ents and sys­tem­at­ic­ally worked through issues of domestic and inter­na­tional law.

The details of its legal rationale became known to Con­gress and the pub­lic not only through unau­thor­ized dis­clos­ures and Free­dom of Inform­a­tion Act law­suits but also because the admin­is­tra­tion delivered speeches and pro­duced a white paper sum­mar­iz­ing its reas­on­ing, which it gave to Con­gress.

Today, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is mostly behav­ing with auda­cious trans­par­ency about its boat attacks. Trump has pos­ted sur­veil­lance videos of the deadly strikes, talked with rel­ish about how “it is viol­ent and it is very — it’s amaz­ing, the weaponry,” and even acknow­ledged he had author­ized the CIA to take cov­ert actions in Venezuela.

But admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have clammed up when asked for the legal ana­lysis to sup­port their asser­tion that there is a legal state of armed con­flict that makes the killings law­ful.

Even in closed-door con­gres­sional brief­ings, accord­ing to people famil­iar with them, offi­cials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug over­dose deaths of Amer­ic­ans, and stated that Trump decided the coun­try was in an armed con­flict with drug car­tels. They are also said to have poin­ted to the part of the Con­sti­tu­tion that makes the pres­id­ent the com­mander in chief of the armed forces, without much fur­ther elab­or­a­tion.

Jack Gold­smith, a Har­vard Law School pro­fessor and former top Justice Depart­ment law­yer in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, said Trump’s actions demon­strated an indif­fer­ence to law that threatened to hol­low it out.

“Nixon tried to keep his crimin­al­ity secret, and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion tried to keep the tor­ture secret, and that secrecy acknow­ledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Gold­smith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is break­ing law or norms, is act­ing pub­licly and without shame or unease. This is a very suc­cess­ful way to des­troy the effic­acy of law and norms.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokes­per­son, said in a state­ment that Trump prom­ised dur­ing the cam­paign to take on drug car­tels whose actions “res­ul­ted in the need­less deaths of inno­cent Amer­ic­ans.” She sug­ges­ted his “unpre­ced­en­ted action” would con­tinue.

“All of these decis­ive strikes have been against des­ig­nated narco-ter­ror­ists, as affirmed by U.S. intel­li­gence, bring­ing deadly poison to our shores, and the pres­id­ent will con­tinue to use every ele­ment of Amer­ican power to stop drugs from flood­ing into our coun­try and to bring those respons­ible to justice,” she said.

In peace­time, tar­get­ing civil­ians — even sus­pec­ted crim­in­als — who pose no threat of immin­ent viol­ence is con­sidered murder. In an armed con­flict, it is a war crime. Inter­na­tional law accep­ted by the U.S. mil­it­ary says that, as do U.S. laws.

By assert­ing he can have the mil­it­ary kill people sus­pec­ted of drug traf­fick­ing as if they are enemy sol­diers on a bat­tle­field, Trump is blur­ring a line between enfor­cing the law and waging a war.

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

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Monday, October 27, 2025 7:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

It must suck crying this much every single day.
How do you stop Trump from murdering again and again? By murdering Trump.


You don't possess an instinct for self-preservation, do you?

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:07 AM

SECOND

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


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

It must suck crying this much every single day.
How do you stop Trump from murdering again and again? By murdering Trump.


You don't possess an instinct for self-preservation, do you?
Trump is very eager to execute child rapists, which is why the Epstein files are being kept secret, because he would be killed for what he has done to children. Saying "Fake News" does not change Trump's history of rape, for your information and enlightenment.

Donald Trump Dreams of More Executions

The president and the Republican Party are bringing capital punishment back to the forefront of American criminal justice.

By Elizabeth Bruenig | October 27, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/death-penalty-golden
-age-trump/684691/

Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance, and now his efforts are coming to fruition. This year has been a particularly lethal one for America’s death-row prisoners. Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people in the past 10 months by injection, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squad, surpassing 2024’s total of 25—a significant spike in an otherwise-downward long-term trend. Trump’s return to power—and the Republican Party’s resurgence more generally—is driving a heavy push for more death sentences and more executions. He has restored the federal death penalty following the prior administration’s moratorium, and Republican state legislatures have sought to expand the list of crimes punishable by death and to allow new execution methods.

Capital punishment is central to Trump’s authoritarian approach to criminal justice. His pro–death penalty views emerged decades before he ascended to the presidency. In 1989, he bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday calling for the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape in Central Park to be sentenced to death. In the text of his ad, Trump blasted Ed Koch, the New York City mayor at the time, for being soft on crime, both spiritually and practically. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” He repeated the ad’s headline—“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”—by way of conclusion above a now-familiar signature. The five men accused of the Central Park gang rape were later exonerated.

When Trump arrived at the White House, federal executions had not been carried out in more than 17 years—a hiatus Trump promptly dispensed with, presiding over 13 executions in the last several months of his first term. Joe Biden, clearly troubled by those events, issued commutations to 37 of 40 people on federal death row during his last weeks in office, which prevented Trump from picking up where he left off when he returned to the White House. Trump responded furiously online: “As soon as I am inaugurated,” he swore on Truth Social, “I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters. We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!” He did just that. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order intended to reinvigorate the death penalty both federally and at the state level, instructing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pursue federal death sentences when possible, and to encourage and assist states in carrying out executions.

On cue, several states set about realizing Trump’s dreams, Florida chief among them. Under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has carried out a record 14 executions so far in 2025, with plans for more before the year is over. Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told me that this pace of executions is unprecedented in Florida’s recent history, and that DeSantis has now ordered more executions in a single year than any other governor in Florida history.

DeSantis has also overseen efforts to alter Florida’s death-penalty statutes to require mandatory death sentences for any undocumented person convicted of a capital crime, signing a bill in February that would wrest the decision away from juries. Last month, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, wrote a letter to Bondi and White House counsel Dave Warrington asking Bondi to fight to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which held that pedophilic sex offenders could not be sentenced to die unless their crimes either resulted or were intended to result in the death of their victims. Doing so would expand capital crimes to include categories other than murder, creating new avenues for states to pursue death sentences. “We have every confidence that, with President Trump’s strong leadership and with principled, rule-of-law Justices on the Supreme Court,” the letter reads, “child rapists can be appropriately punished for their unspeakable crimes.” Officials from 15 states co-signed.

The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but states attempting to rack up executions and death sentences can be reasonably sure that the Supreme Court will not stop them. “There has been a clear signal from the Trump Supreme Court that it will not be enforcing constitutional guarantees in death-penalty cases,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me, citing this Court’s unwillingness to intervene in states’ efforts to pursue executions using arguably cruel and unusual methods. Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, pointed to the decline in stays of execution issued by the Supreme Court this year relative to prior years as another sign of this Court’s friendly posture toward capital punishment. “The Supreme Court has stepped way back from its historical role in regulating use of the death penalty in the states and staying executions where they are troubled by the circumstances,” Maher said. Alabama’s execution of Anthony Boyd last week is a clear example: Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that Boyd’s execution via nitrogen suffocation would likely be torturous, the Court declined to entertain his final appeal. Sotomayor was nevertheless proved right, as Boyd’s execution became the most protracted nitrogen execution in history.

In this permissive environment, efforts are already under way to resurrect the death penalty in jurisdictions that have previously suspended or banned it. Trump has announced plans to revive capital punishment in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that the practice was abolished by the city council in 1981, and residents later overwhelmingly rejected a 1992 referendum to reinstate capital punishment within its borders. When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Trump weighed in to demand the perpetrator be sentenced to death, though North Carolina has not carried out an execution in 17 years. “The ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!” Legislators in North Carolina got the message, and swiftly passed a sweeping piece of legislation titled “Iryna’s Law” aimed in part in resuming executions and expediting the state’s death-penalty-appeals process. “What’s happened this year is that the Trump administration has attempted to open the floodgates when it comes to executions,” Dunham told me. Considering the success it has had in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the worst may be yet to come.

Trump’s abiding interest in capital punishment is not incidental to his overall politics, but seems rather to be an expression of several of his apparent animating impulses: his will to achieve profound and concentrated personal power, for one, and his tendency to channel the conservative id, for another. Trump’s political project is unabashedly authoritarian, as is evident in the prosecution of his enemies, his battles with the free press, and his deployment of the military in major American cities. He seems intent on suppressing the elements of society he considers unfit or dysgenic, and the death penalty maximally empowers heads of state to control civilian populations—which is why countries that still practice executions tend to have authoritarian governments, as in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. “The death penalty has always been political,” Maher told me. “If you look back through history, we have thousands of years of examples of how the death penalty is used by different regimes to repress dissent or to punish opposition.” And Trump’s demands for capital punishment appear closely entwined with his political ambitions. After the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last month, Trump called for the death penalty before law enforcement even had a suspect in custody, and later said at Kirk’s memorial service, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” an echo of his 1989 screed against Ed Koch.

Predicting how far Trump is willing to go to create a more lethal justice system is difficult. If he intends to rely on popular support for his mission, he might find that public opinion about the death penalty does not match his zeal. In 2024, capital punishment merited a 53 percent approval rating—a 50-year low, which suggests that the American people may be less interested in the death penalty than their elected representatives are.

But perhaps that won’t matter: The spike in executions could represent a temporary increase brought about by a political fad, or an omen of an even more brutal future. Trump has allegedly mused in the past about group or televised executions. And though people frustrated with the secrecy surrounding American executions occasionally suggest that if the goings-on inside death chambers were better known, then people would reject the practice, I suspect that significant portions of the public would enjoy the exhibition. When public executions were common, they were widely attended, and I see no reason to believe humans have generally improved in moral quality since those days. The worst-case scenario is that Trump manages to whet the public’s appetite for executions either by featuring them prominently in his rhetoric or by escalating them to spectacles, thereby fashioning a revival in popular demand from his own private fixation.

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:12 AM

SECOND

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


Reagan knew Trump and warned the Nation about him.

"We should beware of the demagogues who are willing to declare a trade war against our friends, weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world, all while cynically waving the American flag." - Ronald Reagan

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-demagogues-trade-war/

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:17 AM

SECOND

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


ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Already a Disaster

It's cutting standards and racing to hire exactly the wrong people, precisely as predicted.

By Garrett Graff | October 27, 2025

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ice-s-hiring-surge-is-already-a-disa
ster

It turns out, if you’re hiring for a pariah agency using nakedly fascist and racist messaging and recruiting for a job where you get to be jeered by your neighbors, America’s best, brightest, and most fit don’t apply.

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:24 AM

SECOND

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


What’s driving Trump’s military campaign against Venezuela? Marco Rubio, who is motivated by a desire to oust the government of Venezuela, which would weaken the allied government of Cuba. Rubio is a Cuban refugee who wants revenge.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/10/27/rubios-ideological-project
-whats-driving-trumps-military-campaign-against-venezuela/

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:36 AM

SECOND

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


Trump and Republicans Join Big Oil’s All-Out Push to Shut Down Climate Liability Efforts

Republican attorneys general, GOP lawmakers, industry groups and the president himself are all maneuvering to foreclose the ability of cities and states to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for damages linked to climate change.

By Dana Drugmand | October 26, 2025

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102025/trump-republicans-big-oil-
climate-liability/

As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.

From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.

“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.

Pushback to liability initiatives from fossil fuel interests is not new. But the political landscape has shifted dramatically this year as the second Trump administration works to reward loyalists and campaign donors, including fossil fuel interests.

The oil and gas industry spent $445 million during the last election cycle to influence President Donald Trump and Congress, including $96 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, according to the progressive advocacy group Climate Power.

“What has changed is that there is a new administration,” said Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. And the Trump administration, she said, “is continuing to defend the fossil fuel industry and assail anyone who dares try to hold them accountable.”

Over the past eight years, communities across the country have filed tobacco-style lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil and major players in the fossil fuel industry, seeking to recover damages for localized climate impacts or to force companies to cease greenwashing and other misleading behavior.

More than 30 of these lawsuits brought by municipal, tribal and state governments are working their way through the courts, and several are now closer than ever to reaching trial.

At the same time, some states are enacting or considering so-called climate superfund legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies strictly liable for climate damages and require them to help pay for a portion of climate change costs incurred by state governments. Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states.

In response to these budding accountability efforts, the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress and GOP attorneys general are mounting what Wiles describes as a “massive orchestrated campaign” to try to stop climate liability laws and lawsuits in their tracks, and to push for legal immunity akin to what gun manufacturers received two decades ago. Trump’s Department of Justice has even filed highly unusual, if not unprecedented, lawsuits against Vermont and New York seeking to overturn their climate superfund statutes.

“It’s just this superbly choreographed effort on the part of the oil industry and its allies to get gun-industry-style legal immunity for all the damage that they’ve caused,” Wiles told Inside Climate News.

Oil Industry Is Lobbying Congress for a Liability Shield

Among the climate liability lawsuits inching closer to trial: a consumer protection case brought by Massachusetts against ExxonMobil, and suits seeking damages filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and Boulder, Colorado.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year and confirmed by The New York Times last month, industry representatives are lobbying Congress for a liability shield of some kind.

The details remain unclear. But the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, reports lobbying on “draft legislation related to state efforts to impose liability on the oil and gas industry,” while disclosures from ConocoPhillips show that the company has lobbied on the matter of “state superfund legislation,” including draft legislation in Congress addressing it.

Neither API nor ConocoPhillips responded to requests for comment.

Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Inside Climate News that he thinks immunity provisions for the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to pass the Senate.

But the fact that the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for legal protections suggests to Wiles that the industry realizes it could be facing serious legal jeopardy. “Let’s be clear. You don’t seek a [liability] waiver unless you know you’re guilty,” Wiles said.

Over the summer, language emerged in a draft House Appropriations Committee spending bill that specifically would prohibit the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law “against oil and gas companies for environmental claims.” The bill that included this provision passed the committee but was not brought to the full House for a vote.

But climate accountability advocates say the provision was still alarming because it effectively would have shut down D.C.’s ongoing consumer protection lawsuit against Big Oil. That suit, filed in 2020, alleges that several major oil companies lied to consumers about the climate risks of their products and that they continue to mislead consumers through greenwashing campaigns. In April the D.C. Superior Court rejected the companies’ motions to dismiss the suit.

Anne Havemann, deputy director and general counsel at Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said the appropriations provision “is a threat to this ongoing lawsuit.”

“If [D.C.] can’t use any money to prosecute these cases and advance these cases, then it effectively can’t work on them,” she said.
Big Oil Lawyers Seek Supreme Court Intervention

A parallel effort to skirt accountability is playing out in the courts. Fossil fuel companies are vigorously defending themselves in climate liability lawsuits, and they have seen some success in recent months getting cases dismissed by state trial courts.

Now Boulder’s lawsuit is back before the nation’s highest court on a fresh petition from the oil company defendants, after Colorado courts, including the state Supreme Court, refused to dismiss the case. The question posed by the companies in their petition is whether federal law precludes such state law claims.

It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up the case this time.

In January the Supreme Court denied a similar petition from oil companies in a case brought by Honolulu. Courts in Hawaii have rejected the companies’ bids to have the case dismissed, and with the Supreme Court declining to intervene, Honolulu’s case is advancing toward a trial.

Parenteau said the prospect of facing a trial and a potential adverse verdict likely has the oil companies extremely worried. “They’re certainly frightened of a trial just from a reputational standpoint,” he said.

The new petition in the Boulder case now offers the Supreme Court another opportunity to step in. Should the justices decide to intervene, legal experts say that it could essentially shut down all climate liability attempts.

“If they do step in, that’s huge. That changes everything,” Parenteau said. “That is the end game.”

“In one fell swoop it could get rid of all of these cases,” said James May, a law professor at Washburn University.

On Oct. 9, over 100 Republican House members submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court backing oil companies ExxonMobil and Suncor in their petition to block Boulder’s lawsuit from moving forward. It is the first time that Republicans in Congress have called on the Supreme Court to intervene in this litigation and to shut down not just this one lawsuit but all others like it.

“In recent years, multiple state and local governments have launched a courtroom war against the American energy industry,” the brief asserts in its opening. “It must stop now.”

The 103 Republican House members who signed onto the brief argue that the municipal and state lawsuits against oil and gas companies are trying to “dictate national energy policy” and that only the federal government has the authority to regulate transboundary greenhouse gas emissions.

“They are arguing that it’s solely EPA’s role to regulate greenhouse gases, but the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate that role by revoking the Endangerment Finding. If that revocation goes through and survives in the courts, it will greatly weaken the oil companies’ preemption defense,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Inside Climate News.

“This full-court press to block these lawsuits shows that the oil companies and their allies in Congress are really nervous about what would come out if any of these cases actually went to trial,” Gerrard added.
Trump Administration on the Offensive

The Trump administration, through its Department of Justice, is fully backing the fossil fuel industry in climate liability litigation, filing amicus briefs, for example, in cases now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Maryland Supreme Court.

But its efforts to shield the industry from accountability extend beyond friend-of-the-court briefs.

Following a White House meeting where oil company executives raised concerns about state climate laws and lawsuits, Trump issued an executive order in April directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to try to put a stop to these legal initiatives.

In response, the DOJ then sued four states, including preemptive suits brought against Hawaii and Michigan before either state had filed such a lawsuit (Hawaii sued major oil companies the next day). The DOJ’s other lawsuits targeted Vermont and New York to try to strike down their climate superfund laws, which are based on the “polluter pays” logic of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program aimed at forcing polluting companies to remediate damage from toxic waste sites.

Advances in a field known as climate attribution science have made the “polluter pays” aspect of the superfund laws possible, enabling scientists to quantify the individual contributions of major fossil fuel producers to climate impacts such as sea level rise and heat waves.

The DOJ has now filed motions for summary judgment in both of these lawsuits, asking federal courts to permanently block the states’ climate superfund laws.

“Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this Administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement issued by the DOJ on Sept. 16.

Havemann, with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told Inside Climate News that the current Trump administration seems to be taking a more aggressive approach to protecting the fossil fuel industry and to fighting attempts to hold it accountable.

“The Trump administration has come in and used many different tools in its toolbox to go after these accountability lawsuits and the laws that also seek to hold the biggest polluters accountable for climate damages,” she said. “It’s very much on the radar of the Trump administration in a way that it has not been in the past.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Enter the Dragon”

With U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) holding the gavel, climate litigation came up as the subject of a Republican-led congressional hearing this summer before a Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

The hearing’s provocative title: “Enter the Dragon—China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.”

Cruz used the hearing to attack climate liability lawsuits and claim that they are a nefarious left-wing plot that is in part funded by, and that benefits, the Chinese Communist Party. “Both China and the Democrats want to bankrupt the American energy industry,” Cruz said during the hearing.

NPR’s Michael Copley reported last month that “Cruz’s office has not offered evidence that China or a China-linked nonprofit that Cruz identified by name has funded climate lawsuits in the United States.”

In response to that reporting, Cruz told Inside Climate News that “NPR deliberately ignored objective facts.”

“The Chinese Communist Party uses cut-outs and ‘nonprofits’ to shape U.S. energy policy, funding propaganda, advocacy, and litigation that harm American workers,” Cruz said in an emailed statement, which was also included in the NPR story after it was published. The “China-linked nonprofit” referenced in the NPR story, Energy Foundation China, does fund some climate initiatives, Cruz said in his statement.

“In January 2024, three House committee chairs opened an investigation into Chinese influence, citing EFC’s ties and funding of groups like [the Natural Resources Defense Council] and RMI,” he added.

A spokesperson for RMI, a nonprofit group working on the global energy transition, said that the organization “does not participate in litigation.” RMI’s “work supported by Energy Foundation China, which is a U.S. based charitable organization, is focused squarely on the energy transition inside of China,” the spokesperson added.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit group that works to protect public health and the environment, does some “work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that can be fixed unless China is part of the solution,” NRDC spokesperson Josh Mogerman said. He added that the organization “does not fundraise in China” and that “money from China does not fund NRDC litigation in the United States, period.”

Cruz, who represents the country’s biggest oil and gas producing state, did not respond to Inside Climate News’ question about whether he supports immunizing oil companies from liability.

GOP Attorneys General Enter the Fray

During the Cruz-led hearing, the Republican attorney general for the state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, testified as one of the majority witnesses. He referenced the New York and Vermont climate superfund laws, claiming these statutes impose extraterritorial regulation on energy companies, and mentioned that his state and other Republican-led states are suing to try to overturn these state laws.

“We will continue these fights in court as state attorneys general. But we do need some help from Congress,” Kobach said. He suggested that Congress could legislate to expressly preempt state climate laws like the climate superfund laws.

Kobach and 15 other Republican state attorneys general also made this suggestion, along with several other recommendations for congressional action, in a letter addressed to Bondi, the U.S. attorney general.

The June 12 letter references Trump’s executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and protect the fossil fuel industry from “state overreach.” The letter says its purpose is to “suggest additional steps” the Department of Justice could take to effectuate these orders and assist in the “fight against anti-energy interests.”

Specifically, the Republican AGs suggest the DOJ could recommend legislation to reinforce federal preemption of state climate liability laws or lawsuits; restrict federal funding for states seeking to impose liability on energy companies; create a right of removal to federal district court for climate suits; and, among other items, stop “activist-funded climate lawsuits” with a liability shield, similar to the law that granted immunity for gun manufacturers.

Wiles, with the Center for Climate Integrity, said it is especially striking to see Republican attorneys general explicitly recommend a similar liability shield for fossil fuel companies. “The attorneys general actually called for Congress to enact a gun-style liability waiver for the oil industry,” he said. “We saw how that [gun industry immunity] ended up. It certainly was not helpful in curbing gun violence or in serving any public interest objective.”

The coordinated litigation strategies and actions of Republican state attorneys general in defense of fossil fuel and other industries stem from an organization called the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which Graves said was created in the wake of the tobacco industry being held accountable through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.

The organization, which currently lists 29 Republican state attorneys general as members, has been funded through donations from conservative judicial activists like Leonard Leo as well as from corporate interests including those in the fossil fuel industry. The American Petroleum Institute gave over $125,000 to RAGA in 2024, and in the first six months of this year Chevron’s Policy, Government and Public Affairs division donated $25,000 to the organization, for example.

Graves describes RAGA as a “pay-to-play organization.”

“It has a pay sheet listing what kind of access you get to attorneys general based on how much you give,” she told Inside Climate News.

“These attorneys general use the prestige of their office and their power and the resources that their taxpayers are providing to serve the interests of industry, select industries that they are most tied to, and that certainly includes the fossil fuel industry,” Graves added.

The Republican Attorneys General Association did not respond to a request for comment.

“A Perilous Moment”

The intensifying backlash to climate accountability efforts coming from the fossil fuel industry and its political defenders is happening at a time when some political scholars warn that the U.S. is sliding into some form of authoritarianism, which advocates say magnifies the challenges of holding powerful interests to account writ large.

“It’s a perilous moment for democratic norms and institutions,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Anybody who is pursuing policy change or litigation for accountability or enforcement is counting on the courts to be a real backstop for democratic institutions,” Mulvey told Inside Climate News.

Should the fossil fuel industry somehow succeed in securing legal immunity, Wiles said it “would be consistent with the erosion of the rule of law that we’re seeing.”

“No industry should be above the law,” he added.

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and Republicans Join Big Oil’s All-Out Push to Shut Down Climate Liability Efforts


Good.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 6:13 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and Republicans Join Big Oil’s All-Out Push to Shut Down Climate Liability Efforts


Good.
You know how to efficiently stop Trumptards and their nonsensical beliefs? Two bullets in the back of the head will calm down even the most overstimulated Trumptard gripped by a deeply emotional mania.

Trump again declines to rule out an unconstitutional third term

By Avery Lotz | Oct 27, 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/27/trump-2028-third-term-jd-vance

President Trump refused to rule out an unconstitutional bid for a third presidential term on Monday but floated a potential ticket of Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The big picture: Trump and his allies have repeatedly teased a third term for the already twice-elected president. However, the 22nd Amendment states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice."

Steve Bannon, a MAGA podcaster and former Trump adviser, turned heads in a recent interview with the Economist by suggesting there was "a plan" for Trump to stay in office.

Driving the news: "I haven't really thought about it," he told reporters on Air Force One when asked about Bannon's comments.

Trump claimed he has the "best poll numbers" he'd ever had, even though prominent polls suggest otherwise.

He said if Rubio and Vance "formed a group" they'd be "unstoppable." But the president again added, "I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever."

When pressed if he would rule out a third term, he replied, "Am I not ruling it out? You'll have to tell me."

Reality check: Trump has said he's "not joking" about a third term. And while legal scholars have told Axios they're taking his comments seriously, he's constitutionally barred from running again.

Amending the Constitution is an arduous process that would be unlikely to succeed.

Trump previously said in a conversation with NBC News that there were "methods" by which he could serve another term, such as Vance running for president and then passing the baton back to him.

Yes, but: The president told reporters Monday that while he thinks he'd be "allowed" to do that, he ruled out that method as "too cute."

The 12th amendment, however, provides another potential safeguard. It states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

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

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 7:44 AM

SECOND

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


New reporting reveals the Trump administration cut $500 million in deliveries to food banks across the country.

Food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived and went to waste instead.

Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived.

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cuts.

By Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz | Oct. 3, 2025

https://projects.propublica.org/trump-food-cuts/

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

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