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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 2, 2026 18:17
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Friday, May 29, 2026 8:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."

"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."

Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.

"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."

https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/

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

Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, May 29, 2026 9:34 AM

SECOND

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

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.

While the historical circumstances and issues are different today, the house is once again divided against itself. The nation is at a critical crossroads and faces a similar dilemma: can the social, cultural, and political chasm that emerged between Red and Blue America be repaired? Can the Union be saved or will the country continue to separate politically and ideologically, if not geographically, into two sharply opposed societies whose core values, beliefs, and identities are incommensurate and irreconcilable? Is the U.S. entering a prolonged period of social upheaval and political conflict, a kind of cold civil war, between and within Red and Blue states that leaves the country increasingly fragmented and politically dysfunctional?

While many sources contributed to this division, including the rise of neoliberalism and extreme income and wealth inequality, social media algorithms that produce incendiary content designed to addict users, and a far-right media ecosystem that disseminates socially corrosive and divisive propaganda, the primary issue driving national politics in the U.S. today is demographic: the racial restructuring of U.S. society, the browning of America.

This process began with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924 that significantly reduced immigration and heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe to ensure the continued dominance of the white majority.

In the last few decades, Republican Party politics has largely been aimed at cutting taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and reversing this demographic trend, at re-establishing racial and gender hierarchies, in rolling back the civil rights gains of Black Americans and other minorities over the past half century. In addition to an agenda of deregulation and privatization, the party has sought to eliminate the social progress achieved by New Deal and Great Society programs and restore the racial, gender, and class relations of an idealized and fictionalized past.

To achieve this, Trump and his MAGA allies have exploited ambiguous legislation and anti-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution. The demographic and geographic distribution of the electorate gives the Republican Party a structural advantage because seats in the U.S. Senate are apportioned equally among the states, regardless of population. In this way, smaller and less populated states, which are typically more rural and conservative, are disproportionately represented. This advantage is then transferred to presidential elections through the Electoral College, so that California’s nearly 40 million residents have the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming’s nearly 600 thousand.

Other anti-majoritarian and undemocratic features of the U.S. political system include the practice of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering, which divides voters into state legislative and congressional districts that favor one political party, the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate that enables a minority of senators to exercise veto power over most legislation, and the Supreme Court, which currently has three justices who were nominated by a president (Trump) who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by narrow margins by Republican senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population.

Majoritarian democracy was further eroded by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which gutted section five of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating the requirement that states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws obtain preclearance by federal courts before making changes in voting laws, and by weakening section two of the Act in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which made it harder to challenge racially discriminatory effects of voting laws.

More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court effectively nullified the enforcement provision of section two of this landmark civil rights legislation by requiring that opponents of district maps that deny Black voters a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice must prove intentional discrimination. The court ruled that all racial gerrymanders, even those that were created to remedy a long history of racial discrimination, are unconstitutional. In doing so, it eliminated majority-minority districts, which will significantly reduce the number of seats in the House held by Black and other minority representatives. With this catastrophic decision, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, the decades-long struggle of Black Americans and others to create a multiracial democracy, has been demolished.

The hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act opened the way for the passage of a wave of voter suppression laws by Republican-dominated state legislatures after the 2020 presidential election, which were passed mostly on party-line votes by Republican majorities that were themselves elected on the basis of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering.

In a further erosion of democracy by a rouge Supreme Court that is untethered to the law or precedent and invents legal doctrines, the Court decided in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that states are free to engage in extreme partisan gerrymandering, even if it produces district maps that diminish the voting power of Black Americans or other minority groups. This decision gave a green light to use partisan gerrymandering as a cover for racial gerrymanders that dilute the voting power of minority groups. Republicans can simply claim they were drawing districts to achieve maximum partisan advantage, which just happened to pack minority voters into the fewest number of districts or break up concentrations of minority voters into others.

In the wake of these Supreme Court decisions a number of Southern states rushed to eliminate majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts in the midst of an unprecedented mid-term redistricting process, initiated by Trump, in which extreme partisan gerrymanders will give the Republican Party a structural advantage in the House. This means that Democrats will likely need to win the combined national popular vote by about four percentage points to win a slight majority, perhaps by more if the political winds shift before the midterm elections. In this way, as Jamelle Bouie argues, the House may come to resemble the Electoral College, in which the party that wins a slight majority in winner-take-all elections in the states can “rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely.”

Electoral democracy was dealt another blow by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which ruled that individuals can spend unlimited funds “on their own political campaigns or on independent expenditures on behalf of other politicians they hoped to elect.” Then, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 the Court enabled the rise of super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals on political advertising and communications. With these decisions, the Court opened the floodgates for massive corruption in elections, unleashing a tsunami of donations from wealthy individuals and dark money organizations, in which donors remain anonymous, into the bloodstream of electoral politics. The result is that large corporations and billionaire oligarchs have been given a disproportionate amount of power to influence elections in the U.S.

The exploitation of these anti-majoritarian aspects of the U.S. Constitution and political system by Trump and a supine Republican Party, aided and abetted by a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court majority with a far-right ideological agenda, has contributed significantly to fostering a loss of faith in U.S. elections and the capacity of liberal constitutional democracy to deliver stability, security, and prosperity.

The reality is that majoritarian democracy no longer works for the Republican Party, whose core constituency is overwhelmingly white, male, rural, and evangelical, although suburban dwellers accounted for almost half of all Trump voters in 2024. The Republican Party rejected the recommendations of the autopsy it conducted after losing the 2012 presidential election, which urged the party to moderate its platform and expand its shrinking base of white voters by becoming more diverse and inclusive. Party leaders failed to heed the call for change and chose instead to double-down on its core constituency, which means that Republicans can only win national elections by making it increasingly difficult for minority or “counterfeit” voters, as opposed to white or “real” Americans, from casting what Republicans consider “fraudulent and illegitimate” votes.

The legislative gridlock imposed by the Republican Party on successive Democratic administrations (Republicans are only concerned about budget deficits when Democrats control the White House), ostensibly began in 1994 with the Gingrich-led Republican revolution and was continued by Senator Mitch McConnell and others, whose confrontational and unyielding politics sought to undermine Obama’s ability to govern. As Majority Leader McConnell sought to diminish Obama’s legacy by refusing to hold hearings on his nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016, effectively stealing a seat from the Democrats. Their objective has been to politically weaken the Democratic Party and prevent it from meaningfully addressing pressing social and economic issues, which helped open up a political space in which an authoritarian and neo-fascist movement is now challenging the liberal democratic constitutional order.

In autocratic regimes things go from bad to worse in stages, they do not happen suddenly and all at once. The proverbial frog in the pot of water does not realize it’s boiling until it’s too late. As the water gets incrementally hotter, people adapt to the warmer temperature, to the latest outrage or atrocity, which sets the stage for the next incremental increase in heat, to which they also adapt. Each time they adapt they normalize a higher level of heat, of tolerance for state violence and lawlessness, until the autocratic regime consolidates its power and it is too late to jump out of the pot of boiling water. The hot water in America is reaching the boiling point.

There are a number of strategies to address these anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution and political system. They include the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among states and Washington, D.C. to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections. Virginia recently joined the compact, increasing the number of electoral votes by 13 to 222, with 270 needed to reach a majority. Once it becomes operative, presidents will be elected on the basis of the national popular vote and the Electoral College will, in effect, be null and void.

Other strategies to democratize the political system include establishing fusion voting systems that allow candidates to be endorsed by more than one party, rank choice voting, in which voters rank their choices, making it more likely that less well-known or financed candidates will win elections, multi-member congressional districts so that voters who support smaller parties are represented in Congress, term limits for politicians, and abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

Congress can pass legislation to democratize the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices, limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the Court and its ability to adjudicate certain kinds of cases or legal issues, such as appeals to voting rights bills, establishing term limits with staggered terms so that every president has an opportunity to nominate justices, and limiting the Court’s ability to use the “shadow docket” to decide cases, which does not require that cases be argued before the Court or that the Court state its legal reasoning for the decision.

While amending the U.S. Constitution is the most direct and effective way of democratizing the political system, it is also subject to the will of a small minority. Slightly more than one-third of the House and Senate, or thirteen states, can prevent an amendment from being proposed and ratified. While state legislatures can mandate that Congress call a constitutional convention to propose amendments, this route has never been taken and is equally onerous. The reality is that amending the Constitution to democratize the political system in such a deeply polarized context has become virtually impossible.

Where does this leave us? While these strategies can open up possibilities for change, they do not necessarily lead to the kind of structural change that is desperately needed to democratize the political order. Structural reform will require a major party realignment, a reconfiguration of the national electorate, and the creation of a politically stable coalition that is capable of passing major legislation and proposing amendments to the Constitution, one that cannot be swept away in the next election cycle. By definition, this is a long-term project that will likely take many years to accomplish but must nonetheless be attempted since the alternative is the increasing consolidation of authoritarianism and neo-fascism in America.

Some political analysts argue that the United States is already far along the path to autocracy, that a long period of democratic backsliding has opened the door to an autocratic takeover of the country. Barbara Walter, a professor at UC San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, participated in a CIA taskforce that examined factors that can lead to civil war. Based on the findings, she argues that “the most important indicator of a growing risk of instability, political violence, and civil war is a weak and rapidly declining democracy” that is moving quickly toward autocracy. Another key risk factor is when “citizens of a democracy choose political parties on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity rather than ideology,” when they support a party based on identity “rather than because they are liberal or conservative.”

Both of these risk factors are present in the U.S. today. The nation is experiencing an unprecedented deterioration of democracy in which the Republican Party has become the overwhelming choice of white voters, especially white evangelicals.

If Trump succeeds in creating a nearly 1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” slush fund to hand out to his supporters in paramilitary militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and to other January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers, the probability of political violence in the near term will increase significantly.

Based on these findings, Walter argues that the U.S. is “solidly in the autocracy zone,” the space between a declining democracy and an autocracy, and is at a high risk for political violence and instability in the short-term. The taskforce’s findings also suggest that the trigger for civil war tends to be contested elections “that people don’t trust, that are close, and have a winner-take-all zero-sum feeling to them.” That is, a situation in which people feel that “there might never be another election again and you might permanently be shut out of power.”

This is clearly the case regarding the 2026 midterm elections. Given the increasingly deranged and fascistic rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA allies, their efforts to suppress and disenfranchise potential Democratic voters, and their transparent plans to disrupt and, if necessary, steal the election, many Democrats are alarmed and fear that this may be the last free and fair election for the foreseeable future, that Republicans will refuse to give up power if they lose and will further consolidate their control of the federal government and political system. When this perception leads more moderate voters to give up on playing by the rules of electoral democracy, Walter warns, “bad things happen.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political science professors at Harvard and co-authors of How Democracies Die, argue that “the U.S. has descended” into what they call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which “elections are held, but the ruling party abuses its power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favor.” That is, a situation in which a country is no longer a full democracy nor an autocracy, but is in a kind of liminal political space that Walter calls the “autocracy zone” in which a declining democracy is rapidly moving toward an Orbán-like illiberal democracy, to a ruling one party dictatorship.

There is no going home again. We cannot return to the past to restore what existed before Trump severely damaged or destroyed large parts of the federal government, politicized the rule of law, and trampled on the separation of powers. The growing divide between Red and Blue America is not one of policy differences, or of different conceptions of the proper size and role of government, but of fundamentally opposed views about the value and desirability of liberal constitutional democracy, of a multicultural and multiethnic America.

What, then, are the prospects for making the structural changes needed to democratize the political order? The short answer is that we have a long road ahead to get to where we need to go to reinvent and restructure the political system, but history shows that it is possible, as demonstrated by the recent election in Hungary in which Viktor Orbán, the icon of the American far-right, and his Fidesz party were soundly defeated, despite being in power for 16 years and controlling much of the Hungarian media and economy. History tells us that the seemingly impossible is sometimes possible, that Nelson Mandela can become president of South Africa and that the former Soviet Union can disintegrate, can collapse like a house of cards. The future is unknown and unknowable, whatever the historical patterns and trends may indicate.

In the meantime, pro-democracy forces must turn out in large enough numbers that Republican efforts to barricade themselves behind a raft on voter suppression laws and tactics, and extreme racial and partisan gerrymanders, fails to win elections. If and when Republicans lose and try to steal the midterm elections through baseless claims of voter fraud and meritless court challenges, by strongarming state legislators to delay or reject the results or declaring an emergency in which the federal government seizes voting machines or takes over state-administered elections, that the pushback is so strong and pervasive that they are forced to accept the will of the voters.

As we have seen, the problem is not just Trump, but his enablers in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court who refuse to hold him accountable for his crimes and lawlessness or put any meaningful limits on his abuse of executive power, who have willfully dismantled democracy for personal and partisan advantage. The structural impediments to defeating the MAGA movement and expanding democracy are significant and will require playing the long-game of continuously building grassroots electoral power at all levels of government around a credible and compelling vision of change that expands democracy and makes people’s desire for a dignified life, for economic security and an equal opportunity to thrive, a realistic possibility.

Supporters of multiracial democracy need to approach the future clear-eyed and with resolve, but also with humility, with the understanding that we do not always know what we think we know, that we are participants in making history but, as Marx said, we do not make it under circumstances we choose, or in ways we can predict and anticipate. The future prospects for American democracy may well be dire, as many of the key elements of fascism are already present, but we cannot know that in advance. Americans are always looking to the future. While we need to prepare for the worst, we should not act as if we know, with absolute certainty, which way the political winds will be blowing over the horizon.

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

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 5:42 AM

SECOND

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

Trump clears way for companies to dodge taxes in havens like Malta, Bermuda, and Cyprus

By Jesse Drucker and Dylan Freedman
May 29, 2026

The New York Times reports:

A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.

A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.

Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led dozens of countries to impose a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.

American Express avoided paying $423 million in taxes last year using the island of Jersey. PayPal trimmed its taxes by nearly half during 2025 thanks to its units in Singapore. Stanley Black & Decker cut its bill by $27 million — nearly one-third — using the island of Cyprus.

A favorite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show.

Companies making similar moves spanned nearly every sector of the economy: Walmart and Uber; Mastercard and Pepsi; Crocs and Merck; Honeywell and Cigna. To put the $40 billion in taxes they avoided in perspective, it would be enough to triple the annual budget of the Federal Aviation Administration or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [Continue reading…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/economy/offshore-tax-haven
s-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mFA.Euhg.uOz6XnAdIugP

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

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Or. If we're going to be honest about it...

This has been happening to Americans no matter who was in office since before I was fucking born.

You're only reporting on it now because you hate the guy running the show.

Take all your hypocrisy and bounce on it, faggot.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.

John is writing about the Death of the Democratic Party.

He's not wrong. He's just a year and a half late with that prediction is all.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:50 AM

SECOND

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

How Do We Know the China Summit Was a Failure? Because Trump Did It.

Everything he does on the world stage is disastrous, and the U.S. is reviled globally. How much longer will some idiots believe this “Art of the Deal” garbage?

Michael Tomasky / May 15, 2026 / 12:21 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/210522/china-summit-failure-iran-jinping

Donald Trump says China agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing. He crowed about it on Fox News Thursday night. But funny thing: A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked specifically about the jet deal after Trump spoke, and he said nothing about any such agreement. Wanna take bets on whether it actually happened?

Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.

And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.

• Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.

• Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.

• The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.

• Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?

• How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?

• U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”

• And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world could face hunger or even starvation because of the global fertilizer shortage.

All the above adds up to this rather grim reality, contained in a survey conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundations and unveiled last week. The United States ranked 128th in how it is viewed by survey respondents across 85 countries. We netted out at -16. That’s behind Russia, Syria, and Myanmar, to name a few notables. But hey, we’re ahead of Iran! By a point.

Trump can fool himself, if he wants to, that Xi Jinping was talking about the Biden years when he referred to America’s decline and the suddenly famous “Thucydides Trap.” But everyone knows the truth. He was talking about the United States in general, under both parties—a country that is by now pretty much owned lock, stock, and barrel by a handful of greedy Robber Barons whom the GOP worships and the Democrats haven’t had the stones to stop.

And he was talking about the United States under Trump specifically. Xi may be a ruthlessly immoral tyrant. But one thing he isn’t is dumb. He sees very clearly what the United States is doing to itself, having reelected a low-I.Q. kleptocrat, adjudicated sex offender, and psychologically damaged sociopath who spends the wee hours firing off batshit tweets and obsessing about a ballroom the way the Sun King did over Versailles. That man, not Joe Biden, is why China now tops the United States in global approval ratings.

The United States always led China in those kinds of polls because at the end of the day we could say well, at least we’re a democracy. The way things are going, we’re not even going to be able to say that soon. But hey, he’s a great dealmaker, right?

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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:53 AM

SECOND

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

The Real—and Deeply Corrupt—Reason Trump Is After E. Jean Carroll

Actually, it’s not reason, singular. It’s reasons, plural. And there are 88.3 million of them.

Michael Tomasky / May 29, 2026 / 11:04 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/211110/trump-e-jean-carroll-justice-depar
tment-corrupt

CNN originally reported late in the day Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll.

This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.

It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.

That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding,” the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)

If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for “defendant-appellant”: Todd Blanche.

This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.

Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.

So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.

Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. And indeed, he is said to have “recused” himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago.

But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions).

GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not.

What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: “In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him.” So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial.

That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and “his current lawyers” are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, “If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story.”

So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. The ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. The new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. The plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week.

I pondered writing about each of those. I chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory. It can, and will, get worse.

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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 2:43 PM

SECOND

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

Meet the Press | May 31, 2026

Mike Pence says 2nd Trump term ‘departed’ from ‘conservative agenda’: Full interview

Former Vice President Mike Pence tells Meet the Press he believes the “populist right” is pushing President Trump away from the conservative agenda.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/mike-pence-says-2nd-trump
-term-departed-from-conservative-agenda-full-interview-264240709752

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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 5:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 1, 2026 7:34 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:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.

You have no desire to pay income taxes. Nor does Trump:

Was Trump illegally an author of the tax agreement giving him and his family immunity from audits?

May 31, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-deal.
html

The New York Times reports:

The tax immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million.

That fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected — starting in about 2010. He justified the refund by declaring huge business losses, including on his tower in Chicago.

Early in Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the matter was put on hold, but it came back to life before he left office.

More recently, the company had entered settlement talks with the agency, laying the groundwork for a potential resolution, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Now, it seemed, the audit would vanish.

Acting as a cheerleader for the overall plan, including the tax deal, was Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s top outside legal adviser who has been close to the president for about a decade, both when he was in and out of office.

Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving the proposals forward, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, discussing the issue with Mr. Trump and circulating drafts of the tax agreement to Trump advisers.

While the origins of the tax maneuver remain somewhat obscure, the Justice Department began to assess the proposal about a week before Judge William’s May 20 deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the questions raised was whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.

The tax proposal did not end up appearing in the initial document that declared the lawsuit resolved and described the details of the compensation fund. That document was signed by the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Stanley Woodward Jr., who had worked with Mr. Blanche on Mr. Trump’s defense team and represented several of the president’s close aides in various investigations.

In a curious twist, the tax addendum was posted, without fanfare, on the Justice Department’s website one day after the terms of the main agreement were released. It was a murky piece of writing, full of long sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and the Trumpian use of words in capital letters. Only Mr. Blanche, and no one from the I.R.S., signed it.

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

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Monday, June 1, 2026 8:37 AM

SECOND

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

Pogroms, American Style

Paul Krugman / Jun 1, 2026 at 7:20 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pogroms-american-style

There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.

If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.

To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”

As the article explains,

For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.

According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,

has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee

So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:

Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.

So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?

Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.

We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.

Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.

According to one detainee, a guard told him that

It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.

Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurate description of what’s happening.

And the campaign of harassment and terror against immigrants is working. ICE doesn’t have to be able to find and arrest every immigrant to make life in the United States impossible to endure, just as Iran doesn’t have to be able to target every oil tanker to make passage of the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to try. Net immigration into the United States has probably turned negative — that is, more people are leaving the country than entering.

The Trump administration is pleased. In March it issued a press release hailing Census estimates that show plunging net immigration across U.S. metro areas.

There were two notable features of the release’s triumphalism. First, it hailed falling immigration in general — nothing about distinguishing between legal and illegal entry to the United States. Second, it said nothing — nothing at all — about why falling immigration should be considered a good thing.

The truth is that none of the claims made by anti-immigration hardliners about the benefits of driving the foreign-born away has survived contact with reality.

The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began:

And the idea that immigrants are, as a group, especially crime-prone, has been extensively debunked. Notably, cities like New York that have huge immigrant populations also have very low crime rates by historical standards.

It’s important to realize that the pogroms, aside from objectively failing to help native-born Americans, aren’t popular. Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration, which was positive when he took office, is now deep in negative territory.

And the American people are, in general, much more benign in their views about immigrants than the likes of Stephen Miller. On one side, we have the Trump administration trying to deny child care to children of all immigrants. On the other, according to Gallup, 78 percent of adults believe that people who immigrated illegally should nonetheless have a chance to become U.S. citizens — and 85 percent support offering that chance to children brought in illegally by their parents.

So what is all of this about? A lot of it is racism. The Trump administration has essentially ended refugee admissions to the United States, with only one exception, for whom refugees quotas have been hugely expanded and backed by federal aid to immigrants: white South Africans. Need we say more?

And one final observation: The atrocities being perpetrated by ICE — atrocities that are almost surely far bigger and worse than we know about — are in part instrumental, a way to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. But is there any real doubt that mistreating and terrorizing people, especially people of color, is for some MAGA types a goal in itself — something they always wanted license to do?

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a justly famous essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. And what does it say about us as a nation if we accept this? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-p
oint/572104/

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 8:41 AM

SECOND

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

Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?

As his signature efforts falter, the president is pleading with his critics to pipe down and pay less attention.

By David A. Graham | June 1, 2026, 5:59 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-iran-kennedy-cen
ter-weaponization-fund/687395/

For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”

The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.

Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.

The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.

Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.

Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.

Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the center—though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.

Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.

That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.

Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 5:00 PM

SECOND

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

Two Senators Just Blew Up Trump’s Boat-Strike Justifications

Sens. Kaine and Paul say that the military’s targeting criteria don’t include the presence of drugs or arms.

By John Haltiwanger | June 2, 2026, 4:05 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/02/kaine-paul-rubio-trump-drug-boat-
strike-justification-latin-america/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

For months, the Trump administration has justified carrying out lethal military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific by asserting that the United States is targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists” transporting illicit drugs that kill Americans. But two U.S. senators say that, according to classified briefings they’ve received, the U.S. military doesn’t require a boat to have drugs or weapons on board to be targeted in a deadly strike.

It’s a stunning revelation that, if true, raises huge new questions about the administration’s already controversial campaign and could undermine the White House’s public rationale for the deadly strikes.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Republican Sen. Rand Paul made the claims during a Tuesday Senate hearing where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying. During his questioning of Rubio, Kaine said that he knows what the administration’s targeting criteria for the boat strikes are because of briefings he’s attended but that he could not publicly share that information because it’s classified. However, he said that he didn’t think he was prohibited from sharing what’s not included in the criteria.

“Here’s one that’s not so obvious, and that surprised me,” Kaine said. “There’s evidence of narcotics on the boat—that is not a targeting criteria.”

Kaine, who said there are “three elements” to the targeting criteria but did not offer specifics, said this struck him as “odd” given the Trump administration “always announced this is against narcotraffickers, we’ve attacked narcotraffickers.”

Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, told Kaine that he was not involved in conversations on the targeting criteria because “those are largely legal decisions.”

“Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,” Rubio said. “There have been strikes that they’ve walked away from, because it doesn’t meet the criteria, or because there’s doubt.”

Kaine did not dispute that the strikes met the targeting criteria, but he repeatedly emphasized how notable it was that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria.” He then encouraged his colleagues to “get the same briefing I’ve got, take a look at the strike files, you’ll be as surprised as I am.”

The fact that evidence of the presence of narcotics is not listed “is very contradictory to the administration’s public messaging and the way that they have framed Operation Southern Spear,” said a Senate source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.

The White House, Defense Department, and Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kaine has been among the most vocal critics of the strikes on alleged drug boats, among other military actions taken by U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term, and he has decried them as illegal. The strikes have not been authorized by Congress. But congressional lawmakers have so far failed in various efforts to prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes, which are also linked to the military operation in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Top legal experts have also contended that the strikes violate both domestic and international law and that drug trafficking does not constitute grounds for the use of lethal military force. Counterterrorism experts have also underscored that drug traffickers, while dangerous, should not be considered terrorists.

The Trump administration has not provided concrete evidence to back up its public justifications for the strikes, which have killed over 200 people since the campaign began in September, and questions have been raised by congressional lawmakers over whether the boats targeted actually belonged to drug cartels. In a sign that the Trump administration is aware it’s operating in legally dubious territory, the OLC in a classified memo last summer said that U.S. troops involved in the lethal strikes would not be exposed to prosecution in the future.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul—another vocal critic of the strikes on the alleged drug boats—also brought up the targeting criteria. “It’s interesting that the three secret criteria we’re using to blow up the boats doesn’t include whether they have drugs on board,” said Paul, who has criticized GOP colleagues for not speaking out against the strikes.

Paul went on to say that possessing arms is also not included in the targeting criteria for the strikes on alleged drug boats. “In order to blow them up, we don’t have to say that they’re armed or have drugs. I think a lot of people would have questions, which I still do,” Paul said.

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 6:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 6:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You have no desire to pay income taxes.

You're goddamned right.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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