Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 23:08
VIEWED: 86688
PAGE 11 of 14
Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
And that includes MAGA. They didn't even last through Trumps first year in office before they were at each other's throats. Before they realized Trump was full of shit and fucking them. As a voting bloc, they're done.
Jack acts as though the democrat's low approval means Trump and the republicans will win in the mid-terms. Nope, they're just disappointed in the democrats' job performance. They hate Trump and have already shown in 2025 how they will vote. When it's time to go to the ballet box again, the republicans will be destroyed. The democrats will make sure of that. The independents will make sure of that.
In the 2024 elections, a third voted democrat, a third voted for Trump and a third didn't vote at all. Think about that.
tick tock
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump has already spent $70 million of taxpayer money on golfing in less than a year as president. If this pace keeps up, he will spend $300 million playing golf by the time his second term ends.
HuffPost reports that the president on Wednesday made his sixteenth trip this year to his Mar-a-Lago estate and went golfing. Each trip carries a $3.4 million bill in travel and security costs. If Trump decides to go to Mar-a-Lago twice more before the end of the year, he will have spent a total of $75 million on golf, which, repeated each of the following three years, would result in $300 million spent on the trips.
That’s nearly double the $151.5 million in tax dollars Trump spent golfing in his first term as president. Trump spent a third of 2017, his first year as president, hanging out at his private clubs. This time, Trump has also made nine trips to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, spending $1.1 million on each trip. He also went to Aberdeen, Scotland, in July to promote a new golf course at his resort there, spending close to $10 million on the trip.
The security costs Trump incurs on his Florida trips can get pretty high, with machine gun–mounted patrol boats manning the nearby Intracoastal Waterway and the Coast Guard patrolling in the vicinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Using Air Force One costs $273,063 per hour to fly to Palm Beach International Airport, meaning that one four-hour round trip to Mar-a-Lago costs the taxpayer $1.1 million.
In 2016, before Trump was elected, he mocked President Obama’s work ethic, claiming that he was “worse than Carter” for how often he golfed. In the end, Obama only spent $85 million of taxpayer dollars in his eight years as president on golf.
Meanwhile, Trump has not only eclipsed that in his nearly five years as president, he’s shaped his presidency around golf. He has promoted his golf business on the White House social platform and even decided to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., because he hated seeing homeless people on his way to play golf.
Last month, Trump took dirt from his White House demolition and sent it to a golf course he’s taking over in Washington. It’s a fitting act for his presidency: taking something from the taxpayer and putting it toward playing an expensive game that he appears to cheat at.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203739/trump-golf-tab-taxpayer-money
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump has already spent $70 million of taxpayer money on golfing in less than a year as president. If this pace keeps up, he will spend $300 million playing golf by the time his second term ends.
HuffPost reports that the president on Wednesday made his sixteenth trip this year to his Mar-a-Lago estate and went golfing. Each trip carries a $3.4 million bill in travel and security costs. If Trump decides to go to Mar-a-Lago twice more before the end of the year, he will have spent a total of $75 million on golf, which, repeated each of the following three years, would result in $300 million spent on the trips.
That’s nearly double the $151.5 million in tax dollars Trump spent golfing in his first term as president. Trump spent a third of 2017, his first year as president, hanging out at his private clubs. This time, Trump has also made nine trips to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, spending $1.1 million on each trip. He also went to Aberdeen, Scotland, in July to promote a new golf course at his resort there, spending close to $10 million on the trip.
The security costs Trump incurs on his Florida trips can get pretty high, with machine gun–mounted patrol boats manning the nearby Intracoastal Waterway and the Coast Guard patrolling in the vicinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Using Air Force One costs $273,063 per hour to fly to Palm Beach International Airport, meaning that one four-hour round trip to Mar-a-Lago costs the taxpayer $1.1 million.
In 2016, before Trump was elected, he mocked President Obama’s work ethic, claiming that he was “worse than Carter” for how often he golfed. In the end, Obama only spent $85 million of taxpayer dollars in his eight years as president on golf.
Meanwhile, Trump has not only eclipsed that in his nearly five years as president, he’s shaped his presidency around golf. He has promoted his golf business on the White House social platform and even decided to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., because he hated seeing homeless people on his way to play golf.
Last month, Trump took dirt from his White House demolition and sent it to a golf course he’s taking over in Washington. It’s a fitting act for his presidency: taking something from the taxpayer and putting it toward playing an expensive game that he appears to cheat at.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203739/trump-golf-tab-taxpayer-money
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Everything Trump does proves MAGA and others who voted for him are complete morons.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T
PEACE PRIZE
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Everything Trump does proves MAGA and others who voted for him are complete morons.
You keep saying that as if anybody had any alternative to vote for.
There is a reason that Democrats are drowning in low 30% approval, and it's not because Kamala lost.
It's because when Kamala lost, it was the beginning of the end of the Legacy Democrats and Legacy Media working in tandem to literally CONTROL WHAT YOU THINK, which Joe's wife Mika told you flatly was her job.
Was anybody going to vote for 4 more years of 9% inflation? No.
Was anybody going to vote for an additional 10 million illegal invaders let into the country by the mid-terms? No.
Was anybody going to vote for more DEI policy that saw more than 90% of rehires at Fortune 500 companies after the Covid job losses intentionally all being anybody except for white males? No.
Was anybody going to vote for more "defund the police" on top of all the illegals allowed in and the fact that it's pretty much not safe for women and children to walk outside anywhere except for the whitest, richest neighborhoods without a male escort? No.
Your party is incompetent, and out of touch. They've grown even more incompetent and out of touch with every year that passes, and losing that election in November as bad as they did despite throwing a 90-day, $1.4 Billion party has done nothing at all to get them to seriously re-evaluate their strategy and ideological stances going forward.
And, quite frankly, the Democrats and their policies are dangerous. It is why women going on a bus or a subway in 2025 now have to stress over the idea that they might be stabbed or lit on fucking fire if they're not practicing 100% situational awareness every second they're out in public.
The Democratic Party simply does not want to change at all, and they will continue to burn down their own party because they are wrong on nearly every issue that matters to The American People, even as we reach December of 2025.
You want to beat Trump and/or his successor?
Fucking do better then.
If you even can at this point. It may really be over for the Democratic Party for good now. Your only other option to vote for by midterms could very well be actual Socialism via candidates that don't even hide the fact they're Socialists anymore. Many of those candidates coming from foreign countries. You can pretend not wanting this outcome is racist all you want, but nobody with a working brain gives a single shit about your insults anymore. We simply can't afford to anymore even if we could. You've inoculated everyone from that over the years besides, just like I said you were going to do. Congratulations. Another pat on the back for you.
With where Trump is at right now, Democrats should be up on Republicans by 20 points. That's where they would be at if we were still living in the world that hasn't existed for more than a year and the world which will never come back.
If you want people to vote for your Party, give them a reason to even consider it for 5 seconds.
You don't have a single issue that the Democratic Party is in line with the desires of the people. Not a single one.
It's why you're seeing both Trump and the Republican Party losing support on one side, but nobody is seeing the Democrats get a bump from this on the other side. They're all fence sitting. And shit is bad enough for them to be doing that after the last 5 years and it's why they haven't immediately gone and defected for the Democrat hills like you would expect in a usual election cycle.
All you're doing is making more Independents at a time when Republican support for Trump is still at 87% like it was on day one. He's still got his 42%-43% approval rating that he floated with for most of his entire first run as President. He hasn't lost any of his core following. And if Democrats have no meaningful platform by el
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Getting Ready to Party Like It’s 2008
Trump’s cronies are undermining financial stability
By Paul Krugman | Nov 28, 2025 at 5:39 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/getting-ready-to-party-like-its-200
8
Ten years on, the Fed's failings on Lehman Brothers are all too clear,
On Sept. 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers failed. Within weeks the whole U.S. financial system was caught in the downward spiral of a massive bank run, on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Yet there was an important difference from the 1930s bank runs: in 2008, the panic mainly resulted in flight from “shadow banks,” nonbank institutions that performed bank-like functions. Conventional banks were largely immune from the 2008 panic because deposit insurance and federal regulations – a consequence of the 1930s bank runs – protected them.
While the U.S. economy was already in recession when Lehman fell, the financial crisis pushed it off a cliff into a deep recession. Despite frantic efforts to stabilize the financial markets, including large bailouts and huge lending by the Federal Reserve, America lost 6 million jobs in the year following Lehman’s fall. Total employment didn’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014. The share of prime-working-age adults with jobs remained depressed until the late 2010s:
.
The clear lesson of 2008 is that effective financial regulation is essential. For three generations after the great bank runs of 1930-31, America avoided “systemic” banking crises — crises that threaten the whole financial system, as opposed to individual institutions. This era, which Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the Quiet Period, was the result of New-Deal-era protections — especially deposit insurance — and regulations that limited banks’ risk-taking.
But post 1980, finance was increasingly deregulated. In particular, the government failed to extend bank-type regulation to shadow banks that posed systemic bank-type risks. And the crisis came.
In a way, the laxity that made the 2008 crisis possible was understandable. By the 2000s nobody in government or the financial markets remembered what a real financial crisis was like. And no, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Christmas Day doesn’t count.
But here we are in 2025, and 2008 wasn’t that long ago. Many of us still have vivid memories of the gut-wrenching panic that gripped the world when Lehman fell. Yet Donald Trump’s allies and cronies are now moving rapidly to dismantle the precautionary regulations introduced after 2008 to reduce the risk of future financial crises. I say “allies and cronies” advisedly. There’s no indication that Trump himself has any idea what’s happening on his watch. But key players in Congress, within the administration, and, alas, at the Federal Reserve, are apparently determined to make a 2008 rerun possible.
The MAGA war on financial stability is being waged largely on two fronts. First, there’s an ongoing effort within some parts of the Federal Reserve to drastically weaken bank supervision — oversight of banks to prevent them from taking risks that could threaten the financial system.
The Fed has multiple roles: in addition to setting interest rates, it also has primary responsibility for bank supervision.
The Fed is supposed to be quasi-independent, and so far it has preserved its interest-rate-setting independence in the face of intense pressure by Trump to cut rates. Yet a Trumpian agenda is attempting to overtake the Fed’s bank supervision operations. In June, Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee, became the Fed’s vice-chair of supervision. She is in the process of reducing staffing at the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory unit by 30 percent, while hiring new staffers drawn from the banking industry.
Bowman is expected to substantially loosen capital requirements. Capital requirements – requirements that a bank’
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Except for a few outliers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, every lunatic who voted several times for Trump is NOT pushing back against Trump. Once Trump is dead, those tens of millions of lunatics will find another Trump to screwup America in exactly the way they screwup their own lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you want people to vote for your Party, give them a reason to even consider it for 5 seconds.
You don't have a single issue that the Democratic Party is in line with the desires of the people. Not a single one.
It's why you're seeing both Trump and the Republican Party losing support on one side, but nobody is seeing the Democrats get a bump from this on the other side.
6ixStringJoker, I am not kidding when I call you are a lunatic. Read your words: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67234&mid=12346
29#1234629
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T
Navigating Reindustrialization in a Deglobalized World
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trump Is In FAR Deeper Trouble Than I Anticipated | Paul Krugman
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Everything Trump does proves MAGA and others who voted for him are complete morons.
You keep saying that as if anybody had any alternative to vote for.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
According to ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING Paul Krugman.
OH NOEZ!!!! THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON TRUMP AGAIN!!!!
Loser. You're a loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Krugman did NOT say the walls are closing in. He did say that Trump is crooked. That would NOT be obvious to Trumptards, especially 6ixStringJoker, who starts and ends his day watching porn and smoking. Depraved 6ix will not recognize Trump as morally corrupt. Instead, he sees Trump as someone to vote for because they both share experiences.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
According to ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING Paul Krugman.
OH NOEZ!!!! THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON TRUMP AGAIN!!!!
Loser. You're a loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Trump: Pro-crypto or Pro-crime?
Or are they the same thing?
By Paul Krugman | Dec 01, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-pro-crypto-or-pro-crime
On one side, the Trump administration is sinking small boats that it claims, without evidence, are smuggling drugs — and according to the Washington Post, Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, has personally ordered at least one follow-up strike to kill the survivors. A working group of former JAGs, that is, members of the military’s legal branch, issued a statement declaring that it unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.
On the other side, Donald Trump has declared his intention to grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who has been convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. In fact, Hernandez was part of a cartel, including his brother, that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into this country.
At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.
First, understand that Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is all about dominance display, an exhibition of his ability to order violence. The real object may be to set the stage for invading Venezuela.
Second, while Trump is clearly willing to inflict gratuitous suffering on the little people, he positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin; or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had a critical journalist dismembered with a bone saw; or Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road, an underground e-marketplace known for drug trafficking, whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office; or Larry Hoover, a Chicago crime boss, who was sentenced to several lifetimes in prison for leading the Gangster Disciples, also pardoned by Trump. Yes, Trump really and truly cares about crime in Chicago.
Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?
The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.
A case in point is Ulbricht, whose Silk Road was an early example of what is still the main non-speculative use of Bitcoin: facilitating criminal activity. Ross Ulbricht was a darling of the tech-libertarian crowd, which includes Peter Thiel, arguably the godfather of Silicon Valley and whose financial backing was critical to JD Vance’s senate win. Trump first promised to pardon Ulbricht in 2024, as part of a pitch to win the votes of libertarians:
Speaking at the Libertarian Party convention in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to free Ross Ulbricht, a former tech entrepreneur who created a dark web site called Silk Road that was
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Journalists say they know why Trump pardoned Honduran drug trafficker
“Let’s be very clear: the narco dictator Trump is pardoning was beloved by the crypto world for creating lawless, sovereign zones for tech utopias organized around crypto,” wrote journalist Ryan Grim in a social media post on X. “The current [government] moved to shut them down. The crypto class fought back and Trump is now doing their bidding.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/journalists-say-they-know-why-tru
mp-pardoned-honduran-drug-trafficker/ar-AA1RrlMv
---------
Trump Gives Bonkers Excuse for Pardoning Drug-Runner President
President Donald Trump thinks a former Central American leader was simply set up by the Biden administration.
By Julia Ornedo | Dec. 1 2025 6:30AM EST
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-bonkers-excuse-for-pardoning-scan
dalous-honduran-ex-president/
President Donald Trump defended his pardon of a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”
Trump, 79, stood by his announcement on Friday that he would grant “a full and complete pardon” of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the 57-year-old former Honduran leader who was sentenced to 45 years in prison last year after he was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses.
“Well, I was told—I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
The Justice Department, under former President Joe Biden, had said Hernandez “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world,” helping heavily armed traffickers smuggle as much as 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.—all while publicly promoting anti-narcotics policies in the Central American nation.
The prosecution of Hernandez began in Trump’s first term and concluded under Biden. Hernandez was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and sentenced in a New York federal courtroom two years later for taking bribes from drug traffickers to move “well over approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.”
In 2021, a witness recalled Hernandez as saying, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
But Trump insisted Sunday that “the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.”
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country, and they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with that,” he claimed.
When a reporter asked him to share any evidence showing that Hernandez was set up, Trump replied: “They could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Krugman did NOT say the walls are closing in.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
According to ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING Paul Krugman.
OH NOEZ!!!! THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON TRUMP AGAIN!!!!
Loser. You're a loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
I don't give a fuck what Paul said, retard. You couldn't pay me to read one of his articles in 2025.
You want me to go dig up how many times he's lied and said that to you in the past, stupid? Huh?
Seriously. Shut the fuck up.
You lost. Everything. FOREVER.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump turned the department of defense into an organization headed by a NAZI.
T
Trump 'can fire Hegseth but a lot needs to change in the WH': House member on boat strikes
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Costco sues Trump admin seeking tariff refunds before Supreme Court rules if they’re illegal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/01/costco-sues-trump-tariffs-trade-suprem
e-court.html?msockid=1f76560bc8e56b9718ad40bdc98a6a53
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump has argued with architect James McCrery II over the size of the ballroom for the White House, which has increased since it was first announced in July.
The ballroom’s initial design had a seating capacity of 650.
But the project grew to 999 seats.
And now it could hold up to 1,350 guests.
(What's next for Trump? 2,000? 3,000?)
The latest ballroom plan is much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. The tensions over its size have left McCrery to take a step back as Trump manages the project.
https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/12/will-the-white-house-ballroom-be-t
oo-large-trump-breaks-silence-amid-pushback.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T
Trump's tariffs caused a HUGE increase in prices and inflation this Black Friday
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Keep posting your clickbait bullshit, morons.
Just more posts to add to your eternal embarrassment of always being wrong and always being on the wrong side of every issue.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ixStringJoker, why don't you kill yourself? That would help the environment and fff.net.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep posting your clickbait bullshit, morons.
Just more posts to add to your eternal embarrassment of always being wrong and always being on the wrong side of every issue.
‘Renewable’ No More: The Trump Administration Renames the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
A key driver of U.S. renewable energy research is now called the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
By Dan Gearino | December 2, 2025
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02122025/renewable-no-more-the-trum
p-administration-renames-the-national-renewable-energy-laboratory/
The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar and other renewable energy research.
“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.
He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.
The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.
Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition,’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”
A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.
Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to assume that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in energy research.
“It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.
Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor.
“The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you, because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.
After leaving office, he founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research, and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.
Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.
“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.
People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.
“In the early days of DOGE people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”
He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.
Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, why don't you kill yourself? That would help the environment and fff.net.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep posting your clickbait bullshit, morons.
Just more posts to add to your eternal embarrassment of always being wrong and always being on the wrong side of every issue.
Archived.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ixStringJoke, the idea behind that archive is as silly as the rest of your life.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, why don't you kill yourself? That would help the environment and fff.net.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep posting your clickbait bullshit, morons.
Just more posts to add to your eternal embarrassment of always being wrong and always being on the wrong side of every issue.
Archived.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Federal Reserve Delivers Bad News About President Trump's Tariffs
Research from the Federal Reserve says tariffs will increase unemployment and slow economic growth
By Trevor Jennewine | Dec 3, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/the-stock-market-so
unds-an-alarm-and-the-federal-reserve-delivers-bad-news-about-president-trump-s-tariffs/ar-AA1RCqyw
Earlier this year, President Trump said, "From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been."
That statement is patently false. Real GDP per person has increased tenfold since 1900, which means Americans generally have a much higher living standard today.
Trump has made similar claims on other occasions. "Tariff power will bring America national security and wealth the likes of which has never been seen before," he wrote on social media in November. Trump has even proposed using tariffs to eliminate individual income tax, or else to pay Americans (excluding high earners) a $2,000 dividend check.
Unfortunately, those plans are disconnected from reality. The new tariffs are projected to bring in $210 billion in 2026. That sum is nowhere near enough to offset individual income tax, which totaled $2.6 trillion last year. Nor is it enough to cover $2,000 dividend checks, which would cost more than $600 billion, depending on who actually gets the payments, according to the Tax Foundation.
However, there is a more fundamental problem with Trump's tariffs: Historical information suggests they will not make America wealthier. A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco examines 150 years' worth of data and arrives at this conclusion: Tariffs will lead to higher unemployment and slower economic growth.
The study attributes those outcomes to economic uncertainty. Consumer sentiment tends to worsen during periods of uncertainty, which reduces economic growth by suppressing demand and prompting companies to hire fewer people. Indeed, those circumstances are already coming to fruition: Consumer sentiment fell to the second-lowest reading in history in November after the unemployment rate increased to 4.4% in October, the highest level in four years.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Lying And Unwell
December 3, 2025
THE PRESIDENT IS LYING
Constantly. Though maybe it’s not lying in the traditional sense if you’re unhinged from reality, living 24/7 in your own reality.
Whatever it is, it’s disheartening that 36% of our fellow citizens, give or take, are okay with a lying or delusional president.
Case in point from his latest Cabinet meeting: “I inherited the worst inflation in history.”
No, he inherited 3% inflation. Which is about where it remains today.
(Inflation peaked at 23.7% in 1920 . . . nearly 14% in 1947 and again in 1980 . . . and 9.1% during the worst of the COVID supply chain disruptions in the middle of Biden’s presidency . . . but had dropped to 3% by the time he left, leaving Trump an economy The Economist called “the envy of the world.”)
___________
THE PRESIDENT IS UNWELL
Dr. Gupta: Trump’s MRI Excuse Raises More Questions Than Answers.
(And if you missed Monday: ‘Trump will not make it to the end of this term compos mentis’ | Psychologist analyses Trump.)
https://andrewtobias.com/lying-and-unwell/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead
Sorry, but we don’t help the little people
By Paul Krugman | Dec 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-to-disaster-victims-drop-dead
The Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters. Some 27,000 square miles were inundated, in some cases by 30 feet of water. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died — many of the victims were poor and Black, and their deaths went unrecorded. Around 700,000 people were displaced — equivalent to about 2 million people today, adjusting for population growth.
How did America respond? Initially, President Calvin Coolidge was adamantly opposed to any federal role in disaster relief, declaring that “The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements.” His refusal to provide aid was, however, deeply unpopular, and he eventually gave in to demands from Congress to deliver government aid.
Ever since that catastrophic flood, providing government aid to the victims of natural disasters has been an integral part of the American Way: federal aid to disaster victims became the norm after the Mississippi flood. Yet it was often a haphazard, uncoordinated process until 1979, when the federal response to natural disasters was consolidated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Since then FEMA has become a well-established part of the American social safety net, especially in the face of worsening climate catastrophes. Americans have come to rely on FEMA as a first line of support after disasters. And when FEMA was seen to be falling down on the job, as it did after Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed New Orleans in 2005, Americans were angry. The fact is, they want FEMA to be better, not smaller. In a July poll, only 9 percent of Americans wanted to see FEMA eliminated, and only another 10 percent wanted to see its budget cut.
Donald Trump, however, believes that he knows better than the majority of Americans. In June he announced his intention to dismantle FEMA and force the states to assume responsibility for disaster relief. While Trump publicly backed down after an intense public backlash, in practice he is gutting FEMA nonetheless. He is drastically scaling back federal emergency aid, even for communities in which the need for federal assistance is overwhelming.
The latest example of Trump’s stiffing those in need is in rural northern Michigan, where the power grid suffered severe damage from an ice storm last March. Rebuilding the power lines will cost thousands of dollars for each household served by the region’s power cooperatives. Without outside help, that cost will have to be paid by the cooperatives’ customers, a huge burden on a relatively poor part of the state. Yet FEMA has turned down the state’s request for aid, in an unprecedented break with past policies.
Adding further injury to Michiganders, who – by the way – voted to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump in 2024, the Trump administration has ordered another Michigan utility to keep an aging, unneeded, highly polluting coal-fired power plant operating, at a cost to ratepayers of $113 million so far, and ongoing at $615,000 per day.
Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to withhold wildfire aid from California unless it adopted voter ID. He has also tried to divert aid away from states that, in his view, aren’t cooperating with his immigration policies, although the courts stopped him. But the storm-hit areas that he is currently refusing to help are, or plausibly “were”, Trump country. The map on the left shows the areas covered by different Michigan electricity utilities; #3 and #7 are the utilities seeking FEMA aid. The map on the right shows the 2024 presidential vote by county, with deeper red corresponding to a higher Trump share:
Since this is not an
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
A sickening moral slum of an administration
Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.
By George F. Will | December 2, 2025 at 1:47 p.m.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/02/trump-hegseth-rubio-ukraine
-venezuela-boats/
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.
Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.
The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.
Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Last Big Case Against Trump Has Been Dropped
The U.S. justice and political systems have shown that they can’t hold the president and his allies to account for trying to steal the 2020 election.
By David A. Graham | December 2, 2025, 6:33 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/trump-georgia-case-dro
pped-election-subversion/685119/
Even today, nearly five years later, listening to Donald Trump’s call is shocking.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes,” he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and a few aides on January 2, 2021. Trump warned Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, that if he didn’t act, he would face prosecution: “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” And to underscore that he was asking Raffensperger to subvert the election results, he added, “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The Washington Post obtained the call and published it on January 3. Three days later, a crowd of Trump supporters, whipped into a frenzy by the president, marched on the Capitol, attacked police, and sacked the building in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. In the days, weeks, and years to follow, much more would be revealed: a long-running campaign, as dedicated as it was sloppy, to steal the 2020 election.
Trump and several associates were charged for their roles in the scheme in a splashy Georgia indictment, but the case’s dismissal last week, on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, received less attention. A judge acted at the request of Peter Skandalakis, the prosecutor appointed to handle the case after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who obtained the indictment, was disqualified from overseeing it. Skandalakis made both legal and practical arguments against the racketeering case, deeming the charges against some of the defendants weak. (The racketeering law allowed Willis to charge many people at once but created a sprawling case.) As for Trump, Skandalakis wrote, “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment.” By the time he leaves office, “eight years will have elapsed since the phone call at issue.”
The Georgia case was the last remaining criminal case against Trump, and the last legal or political avenue to hold him accountable for the 2020-election plot. (It was also important because Trump cannot pardon himself or others if convicted in state court.) A federal election-subversion case against him was dismissed after he won reelection last November. State prosecutions against fake electors have not made much headway. And last month, Trump issued pardons to dozens of people implicated in the attempted subversion. In short, Trump has gotten away with his attempt to subvert the election: If the criminal-justice system is incapable of prosecuting attempts to steal an election, then stealing an election is de facto legal.
Each of these cases had its own wrinkles and reasons for failing. In the Georgia case, for example, Willis made grievous errors in judgment, intertwining her personal life and work by hiring a dubiously qualified special prosecutor with whom she was in a romantic relationship. Her racketeering charge was also ambitious but risky, as Skandalakis argued; the collapse of her case against the rapper Young Thug’s YSL group shows how such cases can go wrong.
The federal prosecution was set up for failure by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to slow-walk prosecuting Trump to appear nonpartisan; the result was that by the time Special Counsel Jack Smith took over, he had little time to work. The Supreme Court used much of that time deliberating a challenge from Trump before issuing a startling opinion that gives presidents immunity for a huge range of “official” acts.
Political remedies haven’t worked eit
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way
Our election system is reaching a breaking point.
By David A. Graham | October 28, 2025
This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/2026-midterms-tru
mp-threat/684615/
Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.
Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.
By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.
Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.
Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump has his name carved into the building’s stone cladding.
The Trump administration has renamed the United States Institute of Peace to the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace despite an ongoing legal battle over the administration’s attempt to seize control of what was an independent organization.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-name-added-us-institute-of-peace-buildi
ng-11152830
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Trump administration's EPA is preparing to approve its fifth PFAS-based pesticide ingredient this year — chemicals known as "forever chemicals" because they never break down. Scientists warn these compounds can contaminate food, soil, and drinking water for generations.
Four of the top EPA chemical safety officials under #DonaldTrump are former lobbyists for the same pesticide and chemical companies now pushing for these approvals. It's a return to the same pattern from his first term, when the EPA blocked PFAS water limits and reversed bans on toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos.
Under #JoeBiden, the EPA invested billions in cleanup, launched the PFAS Strategic Roadmap, and set the first national drinking water standards. But many of those protections were rolled back this year, giving the chemical industry—one of the GOP's biggest donors in 2024—exactly what it paid for.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/11/trump-pfas-forever
-chemical-pesticide
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump is a truly disgusting person.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:If you think Trump is bad, the tens of millions who voted for him three times are worse because they cannot see much wrong with him. And why should they? Their personal lives are just as disgraceful, but on a much smaller scale, because they can't organize the massive thievery that Trump can. (Are there Trumptards who don't cheat on taxes, as does Trump? Very few.) He is very bold in what he does.
Originally posted by THG:
Trump is a truly disgusting person.
T
Just wow.
By Andrew Tobias | December 4, 2025
https://andrewtobias.com/just-wow/
I remember when Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy had to resign from the Clinton Administration because Tyson Foods give his girlfriend a $1,200 scholarship that he urged her not to accept but she accepted anyway . . . and because he sometimes used a Department-leased Jeep for non-government travel. Later, the government spent $17 million on an independent counsel indicting him on 30 counts of things for all of which he was acquitted. (Among other things, he was given Super Bowl tickets by the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, which he disclosed. Details of that scandal here.)
By way of collateral damage, his top aide had his life ruined.
Clinton himself, and his wife Hillary, older readers may recall, lost $30,000 on a real estate investment called Whitewater. This was enormous national news for, like, forever.
Not to mention the television audience of 60 million when Richard Nixon defended his acceptance of a cocker spaniel (and some other stuff).
Things like this used to be taken very seriously.
All that has been thrown out the window.
Thom Hartmann reflects on corruption and the Emoluments Clause.
In part:
. . . Donald Trump tried to convince us in his first term that he was complying with the law by calling a press conference where we were treated to huge stacks of papers and manilla file folders supposedly representing his complex estate that he was handing off to his kids, but we soon learned it was entirely a scam: Trump was getting checks to sign every two weeks in the Oval Office, and all that paper and those folders were blank.
This second term, he’s not even trying. He extracted millions of dollars from his suckers followers in exchange for his and his wife’s so-called digital coins (they’re just “collectible” digital images); the value of those “coins” has now fallen by 86% (Donald) and 99% (Melania) respectively. And don’t get me started on the so-called “Trump Phones” scam.
But those are chump change compared to the billions he’s accumulated in crypto, and the billions being thrown at Trump-branded/licensed properties being negotiated or built right now in over 20 countries including India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Vietnam, Serbia, Romania, Uruguay, and the Maldives.
Or the $400 million plane Qatar gave Trump, along with the billion-dollar Trump-branded resort they’re building for him, which were followed by the US giving that country — and only that country — an astonishing NATO-style security guarantee that our soldiers will shed their blood to defend that kingdom’s potentates.
So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Jared, after taking $2 billion from the Saudis along with his $25 million/year “fee,” would insert a paragraph into the Russia/Ukraine deal that would benefit the Saudi crown prince who’s been his top benefactor. . . .
But he inherited 3% inflation from Biden and has gotten it down to . . . 3% . . . solving what he has called the “affordability hoax” . . . and he has developed (though not shared) “the concept of a plan,” now nine years in development, to provide his followers with excellent health care “at a tiny fraction” of the cost . . . and he has kept taxes low for billionaires . . . and persuaded his followers that immigrants are garbage who should be disappeared without due process
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Have you noticed Jack isn't the only one gone? I don't see JSF or JT posting either.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How Many Kids Will Have to Die for RFK Jr. to Be Stopped?
“Everybody in public health who's watching what's going on is horrified.”
https://slate.com/technology/2025/12/hepatitis-b-vaccine-acip-cdc-rfk-
jr-doctor-recommendations.html
If you just look at the numbers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s headquarters in Atlanta ought to be a ghost town right about now.
Over the past year, the agency has lost a third of its staff. During the government shutdown, the administration tried to fire hundreds more. Scroll around and you’ll find pictures of the notes employees have allegedly been leaving behind. Some simply present data supporting their work, like “1.4 million children are living with HIV.” In the women’s bathroom, though, the messages are reportedly more pointed. They include Post-its reminding workers that “It’s okay to not be okay.”
But despite all this, this agency is still going about its business. On Thursday, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is set to issue recommendations about the kinds of immunizations infants get, for instance. And there’s nothing any of us can do to stop them.
“Anti-vaccine activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been around forever, arguably since the first vaccine, usually shouting from the sidelines, but now they’re not shouting from the sidelines anymore, they’re making policy,” says Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Former CDC directors, like Rochelle Walensky and Tom Frieden, have said they don’t trust the agency anymore, he notes, “so you can’t look to them, other than with your heart in your throat waiting for the next dangerous, misguided thing they say.”
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Offit about what we can do as Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services leans into its anti-vaccine agenda. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: I want to break down exactly what this panel’s going to be talking about. The first day of the meeting, they will talk about the hepatitis B vaccine, which is given at birth to babies. I wonder if you can lay out why this vaccine has been so important.
Paul Offit: If your mother has hepatitis B and you then go through a birth canal that is invariably bloody that contains hepatitis B, and you’re then infected by passing through that birth canal, you need to be vaccinated at birth. And the reason is that if you’re not, you have an 85 percent chance of getting hepatitis B, passing through a birth canal that has the virus in it. And if you get it, you have a 90 percent chance of going on to develop chronic liver disease, which is to say cirrhosis or liver cancer, and it shortens your life. And if you get hepatitis B in the first five years of life, you have a 25 percent chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer, which will shorten your life.
Some people would say, “Well, then just test the mother. See if the mother has hepatitis B. If she does, then you vaccinate the baby.” What would you say to that?
Great, but it makes a few assumptions. There’s about a 5 percent false-negative rate, meaning falsely reassuring. Two, it assumes that you haven’t been infected in your second and third trimester. Three, it also assumes that when the child is between 1 and 5 years of age and goes to a day care center, everybody that person comes in contact with at that day care center is not chronically infected.
Most people who are chronically infected with hepatitis B in this country, and there are millions, don’t know they’re infected, and they are highly contagious—50 to 100 times more contagious than human immunodeficiency virus, the cause of AIDS.
The vaccine is as safe and as effective at birth as it is at two months of age. So why take that risk? Why would you ever take that risk? Because it’s a risk without benefit.
Much more at https://slate.com/tec
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You might be right! Here is a listing for them:
Originally posted by THG:
Have you noticed Jack isn't the only one gone? I don't see JSF or JT posting either.
T
JEWELSTAITEFAN http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=28350
JAYNEZTOWN http://fireflyfans.net/profileshow.aspx?u=6740
6IXSTRINGJACK http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20928
Are they co-conspirators? I'm pretty sure they are Trumptards. What if they are the same split-personality nutjob?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You might be right! Here is a listing for them:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Have you noticed Jack isn't the only one gone? I don't see JSF or JT posting either.
T
JEWELSTAITEFAN http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=28350
JAYNEZTOWN http://fireflyfans.net/profileshow.aspx?u=6740
6IXSTRINGJACK http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20928
Are they co-conspirators? I'm pretty sure they are Trumptards. What if they are the same split-personality nutjob?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I am looking. JAYNEZTOWN last posted on the 2nd. Unusual but not proof. The boards have stopped changing at a hypomania pace.
JSF last posted a few times yesterday.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The problem isn't Trumptards at fireflyfans.net. They are ne'er-do-wells. It is Trump, the lunatic:
Originally posted by THG:
I am looking. JAYNEZTOWN last posted on the 2nd. Unusual but not proof. The boards have stopped changing at a hypomania pace.
JSF last posted a few times yesterday.
T
The New US National Security Strategy
Phillips’s Newsletter by Phillips P. OBrien / Dec 5, 2025 at 4:10 AM
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-new-us-national-security-st
rategy
In case you missed it, the US government has just released its new National Security Strategy. Here is a link so you can download a copy for yourself. As such I wanted to write a few words about what is said in it specifically about Europe—as these are the most fascinating and frightening parts.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Se
curity-Strategy.pdf
One thing that stands out (and we can see it in other recent moves such as the Trump administration weakening its already pathetic sanctions on Russia, cozying up to China, sandbagging Ukraine and Europe, and weakening its commitment to NATO) is that the administration is being more and more open about its intentions. This new strategy is a return to JD Vance’s speech in Munich which was delivered not long after the administration came to power. This speech, if you remember, caused consternation amongst some Europeans who had not yet grasped what the administration believed. You can watch the whole speech here if you really want to.
In Munich, Trump called for more support for the populist right in Europe—think Viktor Orban in Hungary, the AFD in Germany, National Front in France and Reform in the UK. And in the new National Security Strategy, the US is has come right back to pushing for exactly this. The major point is that European culture is under threat (the continent is becoming “non-European” and as such, even NATO is as always with Trump being questioned as a viable institution.
Here are the summary points, and they are worth looking at because they reveal everything you need to know about how the Trump administration views things.
Quote:There is much here to pick out point by point.
Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.
Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:
• Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia;
• Enabling Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense, without being dominated by any adversarial power;
• Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations;
• Opening European markets to U.S. goods and services and ensuring fair treatment of U.S. workers and businesses;
• Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges;
• Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance; and
• Encouraging Europe to take action to combat mercantilist overcapacity, technological theft, cyber espionage, and other hostile economic practices.
• The US wants Putin’s Russia to be seamlessly reintegrated into Europe (no sanctions of war crimes punishments can be expected here.
• The US wants Europe to be “a group of aligned sovereign nations” which means of course it wants the EU to be weakened so the US can dominate the individual members.
• The US wants to culti
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
MAGA’s Affordability Crisis Will Soon Get Worse
And Trump’s numbers will continue to slide
By Paul Krugman | Dec 05, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-affordability-crisis-will-soo
n
. . . In the opening scene, Coburn is on a talk show, being quizzed about the high rate of inflation. He responds that people shouldn’t be upset about rising prices, because their incomes are rising even faster. Presumably the scriptwriters intended this to show how smarmy and cynical he is.
And that’s why Donald Trump won the 2024 election. No, Democrats didn’t lose because they use big words, or advocate for open borders, or talk too much about trans rights. None of those things actually happened to any significant degree, regardless of what Trump or the self-defeating wing of the Democratic Party says. They lost because Americans were angry about higher prices and not mollified by the fact that most people’s wages had risen more than overall consumer prices. In this coming Sunday’s primer, I’ll talk more about the underlying economics of the affordability issue, and in the following primer I’ll talk about specific strategies for Democrats to adopt to address it.
But what I want to focus on today is the politics of affordability. As current polls show, swing voters are increasingly blaming Trump, rather than Biden, for the cost of living. And the public’s ire is likely to get worse for the Republicans as time goes on.
In the summer of 2024, as Trump was lagging in the polls behind Kamala Harris, he began to repeatedly and explicitly promise not simply to reduce inflation but to deliver large declines in consumer prices: “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down.” Although economists warned that there was no way he could deliver on those promises, enough voters believed him to swing the election.
Now that Trump has in fact utterly failed to deliver, those voters — especially those Black and Latino voters who believed him — have swung back to the Democrats with a vengeance.
Trump is handling this reversal with his usual style and grace: in the past few days he has repeatedly called affordability a “hoax” and a “con job.” According to Axios, he’s planning a nationwide retribution tour to convince voters that things are going great and that they’re wrong to be so down on the economy. Democratic strategists must be rubbing their hands with glee.
And if you are one of those Republicans reconsidering your future career options, know that things are going to get worse. A lot worse.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-affordability-crisis-will-soo
n
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Agreed; let it rain down onto their heads.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:In the last 100 years, the Republicans and especially the Trumptards, have learned nothing about how an economy actually works. Herbert Hoover is pretty typical. He is a milder version of Trump. They were both wealthy, but neither knew a damn thing about the well-known methods to improve the country's economy. Hoover let the Crash of 1929 destroy the economy during his Presidency. If there is another crash, Trump won't do a damn thing to improve the situation. Hoover even established the Hoover Institute, a think tank committed to NOT responding to economic emergencies. According to Hoover, things fix themselves. For the government to hurry a solution would only make it worse.
Originally posted by THG:
Agreed; let it rain down onto their heads.
T
Herbert Hoover spoke like a more erudite Trump.
I asked google: Did Herbert Hoover accuse FDR of being a commie?
Google's answer reminds me very much of Trump, but only if his speechwriters could make him coherent and follow the script:
Yes, while Herbert Hoover didn't explicitly call FDR a "commie," he accused FDR's New Deal of being dangerously radical, bordering on "creeping collectivism" or "soft socialism," and fundamentally betraying American principles, a stark contrast to his own vision of free enterprise, making him a fervent critic of Roosevelt's "new deal" approach as anti-American and potentially leading to totalitarianism, though he saw fascism and communism as distinct evils.
Hoover's Criticisms of FDR:
• "New Deal" as Socialism: Hoover saw the New Deal's expansion of government intervention as a move towards socialism, attacking it as a threat to American liberty and capitalism.
• Dangerous Radicalism: In the 1932 campaign, Hoover framed the election as a choice between his philosophy and FDR's radical proposals that would "destroy the foundations of the American system".
• "Freedom Betrayed": In his later writings. Hoover detailed his belief that FDR's policies, particularly regarding foreign policy, inadvertently helped build up communist power under Stalin, a serious charge from Hoover.
• Anti-Totalitarian Stance: Hoover viewed Nazism, Fascism, and Communism as evil, alien ideologies, and while he didn't label FDR a communist, he feared FDR's policies were leading America down a path of government control similar to those totalitarian systems.
In essence, Hoover saw FDR's programs as a betrayal of traditional American individualism and free markets, leading him to label them as fundamentally dangerous, even if he reserved the specific term "communist" for actual Soviet ideology.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
5 Excuses MAGA Makes for Its Toddler President
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 5, 2025
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/5-excuses-maga-makes-for-toddl
er-trump.html
Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/04/trump-presidency-chi
ld-renovations-entertainment-attention-00676183 Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:
Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.
The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.
Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.
But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree.
Martin is just scratching the surface here, of course. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.
But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:
Trolling the liberals
Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administ
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump just removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the list of free entry days at national parks.
They are being replaced with Trump's birthday.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/national-parks-t
rump-birthday-free-days-juneteenth-mlk-interior-rcna247734
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:You might be right! Here is a listing for them:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Have you noticed Jack isn't the only one gone? I don't see JSF or JT posting either.
T
JEWELSTAITEFAN http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=28350
JAYNEZTOWN http://fireflyfans.net/profileshow.aspx?u=6740
6IXSTRINGJACK http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20928
Are they co-conspirators? I'm pretty sure they are Trumptards. What if they are the same split-personality nutjob?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I am looking. JAYNEZTOWN last posted on the 2nd. Unusual but not proof. The boards have stopped changing at a hypomania pace.
JSF last posted a few times yesterday.
T
JAYNEZTOWN still hasn't posted. And neither has Jack.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I ranked the Trump moments that are actually worth your rage
What has Donald Trump done this week to offend or upset everybody? From calling a sitting governor the r-word to pardoning a convicted cocaine kingpin, we're ranking the latest Trump outrages here at the 1600. Which ones you should care about and which ones you can safely let wash over you like waves in the ocean.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Is This The End of the Free World?
Trump wants to MAGAfy Europe, too
By Paul Krugman | Dec 08, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-this-the-end-of-the-free-world
There was a time, not so long ago, when America was the leader of the free world. It was the first among equals within an alliance of nations bound together by shared values — above all a commitment to democracy and civil liberties. From London to Berlin to Tokyo, in the aftermath of genocide and the utter devastation of World War II, America – as Ronald Reagan put it – was the shining city on the hill. We should never forget that Americans played the pivotal roles in the Nuremberg trials, upholding the rule of law in an impartial and transparent manner in the trials of those who had committed unspeakable atrocities and acts of war. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” declared John F. Kennedy in Berlin, as East Germany tried to trap its own people behind the Berlin Wall.
MAGA, however, doesn’t want to be part of that world. In fact, it doesn’t want a world of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to exist. The Trump administration has become especially hostile to Europe, precisely because the Europeans are trying to hold on to the values MAGA is trying to destroy at home.
Last week the Trump administration released its updated National Security Strategy for the United States. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Se
curity-Strategy.pdf
Much of the document is vague, meandering and self-contradictory. But it becomes clear and focused when it turns to Europe. Quite simply, Trump and those around him hate Europe. And they hate it because it still honors the ideals they’re abandoning in America.
The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” Why? Because “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: “non-European” clearly means “nonwhite.”
But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to “the growing influence of patriotic European parties,” by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.
The political scientist Henry Farrell sums it up this way:
This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors.
Where is this attack on Europe coming from? Some readers may remember the old slogan from the War on Terror days, “They hate us for our freedom.” Clearly, MAGA hates Europe for its freedom. The people trying to turn America into an authoritarian, white supremacist state, who want us to forsake democratic ideals in favor of Volk, of blood and soil nationalism, want to see Europe go down the same path.
There’s also the role of the tech bros — billionaires who still describe themselves as libertarian but have in practice become hardline authoritarians with enormous sway over the Trump administration. After the European Commission imposed a modest fine on X for failing to obey its rules on transparency, Elon Musk declared that the EU should be abolished and threatened personal retribution against the “EU woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the ruling. And the Trump Administration is acting as the tech bros’ enforcer against Europe, threatening to keep steel tariffs high unless the EU scales back its tech regulations.
Moreover, this is part of a general pattern: the broligarchs hate Europe because the Europeans are trying to impose sensible limits to protect their societies from the well-documented psychological and economic harms that are inflicted by an unrestrained Silicon Valley agenda. For example, the EU is trying to limit the proliferation of digital hate speech as well as the pernicious effects of social med
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Trump Administration’s Chaos in the Caribbean
Pete Hegseth’s conduct is a case study in how the government’s growing sense of heedlessness and unaccountability is shaping disastrous policy.
By Jonathan Blitzer | December 7, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/the-trump-administration
s-chaos-in-the-caribbean
In a federal courtroom in New York City last year, a crime boss from the most notorious drug cartel in Honduras took the stand to testify against Juan Orlando Hernández, the country’s former President. “They should have tried to catch us,” he said, of the Honduran government, which Hernández led from 2014 to 2022. Instead, “they allied with us.” The former President was found to be responsible for more than four hundred tons of cocaine reaching the United States. The Justice Department had been building the case against many of his family members and associates for years, most notably during Donald Trump’s first term.
On November 28th, two days before national elections in Honduras, President Trump announced that he was pardoning Hernández, who was just a year into a forty-five-year sentence he was serving in a federal prison in West Virginia. “It was a Biden setup,” Trump said. “I looked at the facts.” Though the White House denied it, such facts had apparently come via the political operative Roger Stone, who’d handed the President a letter from Hernández in which the former President called Trump “Your Excellency” and compared his plight to Trump’s own “persecution.” The two men’s shared resentment of Joe Biden evidently proved more important than Hernández’s rap sheet. Trump didn’t seem troubled by the fact that combatting the flow of drugs into the U.S. is his Administration’s principal rationale for launching a string of boat attacks in the Caribbean. Those attacks, in which the U.S. military, without evidence, has targeted alleged drug traffickers and killed at least eighty-seven people to date, appear to violate national and international law.
The same day that Trump announced the pardon, the Washington Post published a story saying that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had reportedly given a verbal order to kill two survivors of a September strike in the Caribbean. It is a war crime to kill anyone who has surrendered or is incapacitated. Hegseth, who had watched the operation from a remote location, immediately deflected responsibility to Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commanding officer in charge of the operation. “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said. “This is called the fog of war.”
On Thursday, Bradley briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session at the Capitol, where he denied that there had been an order to kill survivors and justified the second strike on the ground that undestroyed cocaine on the boat posed a “risk.” Predictably, the vast majority of Republicans were ready to move on, but lawmakers who saw the footage described the two survivors clinging to part of the boat. “How is that legitimate,” Senator Chris Coons, of Delaware, asked of the strikes, “if President Trump can pardon a convicted narcoterrorist trafficker?” By that evening, Hegseth was facing another scandal: the inspector general at the Department of Defense had just released to Congress its report that he had “created a risk to operational security” by sharing classified details of an attack in Yemen in a group chat on his phone. “Total exoneration,” Hegseth wrote on X.
Hegseth’s conduct is a case study in how the Administration’s growing sense of heedlessness and unaccountability is shaping disastrous policy. Because the President had labelled several drug cartels “terrorist organizations” in a series of executive orders, the government simply asserted that suspected traffickers were “unlawful combatants” who could be summarily killed. Trump, citing drug-overdose deaths in the U.S., claimed that the boat attacks were a form of national self-defense. But the drug overwhelmingly responsible for such deaths in the U.S. is fentanyl, which do
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
All the warmonger bullshit posted by kiki and Signym over the years and it's their guys, Trump and Putin, who turn out to be the killers. And signym still acts as though these two guys are the victims.
You keep talking shit comrade. It's what you're good at.
T 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump to announce $12 billion tariff relief for farmers
President Donald Trump on Monday plans to announce a $12 billion relief assistance package for farmers, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that haven’t yet been made public.
The group, a key segment of the president’s base, faced fallout from Trump’s tariff policies, which have heavily impacted the American agriculture sector.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-to-announce-12-billion-t
ariff-relief-for-farmers/ar-AA1RWJnb?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=6937204ab1ea4d48af29603a327cdb74&ei=44
Comrade, here we go with those pesky tariffs again.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Keep cheering for the fall of America instead of fixing your party and coming up with any reasonable solutions for anything and watch as your relevance just continues to slide into nothingness, Theodore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You are insane, 6ixStringJoker. Really. Blaming the Democrats for what Trump does is crazy. But Trump also shifts the blame to Democrats. He could be insane or else he understands Trumptards' shifty ways of affixing blame.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep cheering for the fall of America instead of fixing your party and coming up with any reasonable solutions for anything and watch as your relevance just continues to slide into nothingness, Theodore.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
America Has Become a Digital Narco-State
Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe
By Paul Krugman | Dec 09, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-has-become-a-digital-narco
Imagine what would happen if the United States were to legalize the distribution and sale of heroin — and do so without any restrictions or regulations on how the drug is marketed and who can buy it.
Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.
Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling - and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.
If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.
Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.
A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”
Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top? Not according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, which in 2023 released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (download it now before RFK Jr. suppresses it!), which summarized extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-
media-advisory.pdf
Furthermore, the operators of these platforms know that they’re doing harm. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.
Nor are children and adolescents the only victims. Last month Reuters, after reviewing a cache of internal Meta documents, reported that
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.
At the same time, Elon Musk’s X has become a huge promoter of hate speech, with many of its major MAGA accounts based overseas while posing as American patriots.
So social media clearly do considerable harm. But social media giants have been able to use the power of money to block regulation. Last year Congre
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You are insane, 6ixStringJoker. Really. Blaming the Democrats for what Trump does is crazy. But Trump also shifts the blame to Democrats. He could be insane or else he understands Trumptards' shifty ways of affixing blame.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep cheering for the fall of America instead of fixing your party and coming up with any reasonable solutions for anything and watch as your relevance just continues to slide into nothingness, Theodore.
The only thing I'm blaming Democrats for here is not having anything to run on.
Nobody cares about your TDS, dude. Grow up.
Your party is dead. You'd better fix it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump Warns of ‘Dark and Sinister Forces’ as Supreme Court Decision Looms
By Shane Croucher | Dec 09, 2025 at 07:08 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-supreme-court-ruling-111
78256
President Donald Trump warned that the Supreme Court ruling against him in a key case on his power to apply tariffs would be the "biggest threat in history to United States National Security."
"We would be financially defenseless," Trump said in an early hours post on Truth Social, pointing to a report that the European Union is planning to apply new tariffs on China. "We would not be allowed to do what others already do!"
Trump said tariffs have "greatly enhanced" national security and that they had made the U.S. the "financially strongest" country in the world, adding: "Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!"
Supreme Court Weighs Future of Signature Trump Policy
In November, Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments in the case that challenged Trump's executive authority to impose tariffs—his signature economic policy—over the head of Congress.
The court expedited the case after a request from the Trump administration. Justices are yet to make a ruling, one that could upend a foundation stone of Trump's policy agenda.
Lower courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration's authority in imposing broad and sweeping tariffs on an emergency basis.
Trump has liberally used tariffs since retaking office in January. He sees them as a vital tool of American economic power, one that can protect and rebuild American manufacturing and production sectors by deterring unfair global competition.
The Republican president has also used tariffs to punish U.S. rivals and foes, such as China for its role in the fentanyl trade and Russian trading partners for their role in aiding the Kremlin's war on Ukraine.
But critics of the tariffs—a tax paid by the importer—say they are pushing up inflation and can deprive American firms of raw materials and other products they need.
Moreover, they say Trump has also used tariffs aggressively against allies, weakening vital strategic partners that the U.S. should be helping to strengthen.
And they have prompted trading partners to hit back with their own tariffs on American imports, hurting U.S. exporters.
What Supreme Court Justices Are Thinking on Tariffs
A potential majority in a ruling against the tariffs would almost certainly bring together the court’s three liberal justices and at least two conservatives.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, both Trump appointees, and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be the most likely to rule against the president.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
At the hearing for oral arguments, Gorsuch signaled he was troubled by the idea that Congress could give away its power over taxes to the president.
"The power to reach into the pockets of the American people is just different and it’s been different since the founding," Gorsuch said, when disputes over taxes helped spark the American Revolution.
Both Barrett and Roberts asked questions indicating at least some unease about how the case should come out, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also could support the administration.
Kavanaugh asked about the 10 percent worldwide tariffs imposed by President Richard Nixon under a predecessor to IEEPA that used very similar language.
Understanding Nixon’s tariffs, which were upheld by an appellate court but never reached the Supreme Court, "is real important to deciding this case correctly," he said.
Barrett and Kavanaugh seized on arguments made by the challengers that the president could order a complete tra
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
It's moot.
SCOTUS will side with Trump on this.
Your article written by "experts" who are always wrong about everything isn't worth reading.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump Says That You Are the Problem
Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?
By Paul Krugman | Dec 10, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-says-that-you-are-the-problem
Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.
That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.
On Monday Politico interviewed Trump, asking him, among other things, what grade he would give the current economy. His answer: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied
I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.
Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”
I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:
We’ve made a lot of gains, but remember, we’ve got this embedded inflation from the Biden years, where mainstream media, whether it’s Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal, toxic Paul Krugman at New York Times or former Vice Chair, Alan Blinder, all said it was a vibecession. The American people don’t know how good they have it.
Incidentally, I appreciate the personal plug. Trump has already called me a “deranged bum.” Now Bessent says I’m “toxic.” Give me a fake peace prize, and I’ll have all the honors anyone could ask for.
Anyway, I may not be a political strategist, but I don’t think “You’re all a bunch of ingrates” is a winning message. It was, however, really the only message Trump could deliver, given his utter lack of empathy or humility.
At this point I could bombard you with a lot of data showing that the economy is not, in fact, A+++++. But it isn’t a disaster area, at least not yet. So why are Americans feeling so down? The main culprit is Trump himself.
First, during the 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring consumer prices way down beginning on “day one.” We’re now 11 months in, prices are still rising, and voters who believed him feel, with reason, that they were lied to. Last night Trump insisted that prices are, in fact, coming way down. Again, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” is a self-destructive political strategy.
Second, Trump would be in much better political shape right now if he had basically continued Biden’s policies, with only a few cosmetic changes. When he took office inflation was on a declining trajectory. Consumer sentiment was relatively favorable at the start of 2025. Americans were still angry about high prices, but the inflation surge of 2021-3 had happened on Biden’s watch and was receding into the past. My guess is that many voters would have accepted Trump’s claims that high prices were Democrats’ fault and given him the benefit of the doubt about the economy’s future if he had simply done nothing drastic and left policies mos
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
There hasn't been any cratering on Trump's approval. He's still above where Biden, Obama and GWB were all at during this time in their 2nd term.
Keep dreaming, Paul.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The last time so much wealth was tied up in such obscure overlapping arrangements was just before the 2008 financial crisis.
By Rogé Karma | December 10, 2025, 1:13 PM ET
An AI-induced financial disaster is far from inevitable. Still, given the warning signs, one would hope for the federal government to be doing what it can to reduce the risk of a crisis. Instead, the Trump administration is doing the opposite. In August, the president signed an executive order that instructs federal agencies to loosen regulations so that ordinary 401(k) holders can invest directly in “alternative assets” such as, yes, private credit, a change that could expose a far broader swath of the public to the fallout if AI loans go bad. Perhaps that is the key difference between 2008 and 2025. Back then, the federal government was caught off guard by the crash; this time, it appears to be courting one.
Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/nvidia-ai-financing-deals/
685197/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Merkel: G-7 summit with Trump was a 'sobering' experience
FRANKFURT, Germany — German Chancellor Angela Merkel found the contentious Group of Seven summit with U.S. President Donald Trump a "sobering" and "depressing" experience but said European leaders won't be "taken advantage of" on trade.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/merkel-g-7-summit-with-trump-was-
a-sobering-experience/ar-AAytwie?ocid=spartanntp
Some of us called this as soon as Trump started campaigning. The rest here were at that time, and remain to this day, to be fools and trolls.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Why are you doubling down on stupid shit you've posted all over the board today?
You're just embarrassing yourself twice for the same thing when you do that.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/10/2025-22461/agency
-information-collection-activities-revision-arrival-and-departure-record-form-i-94-and
The new rules, which would also require travelers to provide emails, phone numbers and addresses used in the last five years, would come into effect early next year — shortly before hundreds of thousands of football fans are expected to travel to the U.S. to watch their teams compete in the World Cup, which begins in June. The U.S. is co-hosting the tournament with Mexico and Canada.
“President Trump’s plan to screen visitors to the U.S. based on their past five-year social media history is outrageous,” Irish Member of the European Parliament Barry Andrews of the centrist Renew group said in a statement.
“Even the worst authoritarian states in the world do not have such an official policy,” he added. “The plans would of course seriously damage the U.S. tourist industry as millions of Europeans would no longer feel safe … including football fans due to attend next year’s World Cup.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-fifa-world-cup-social-med
ia-technology-politics-europe/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims
By James C. Reynolds | Thursday 11 December 2025 11:41 EST
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/trump-eu-break-up-it
aly-hungary-bloc-b2882684.html
The Trump administration made plans to pull four friendly countries out of the European Union and into America’s orbit in an effort to “Make Europe Great Again”, according to a report.
The 29-page US National Security Strategy (NSS) sent shockwaves around Europe when it was unveiled last week, condemning Washington’s European allies as “weak” and offering support to far-right political parties.
According to Defense One, a longer and unpublished version of the document suggested taking Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland out of the EU and into greater alignment with the US, while backing movements supportive of “traditional European ways of life”.
The four nations were cited as countries the US should “work with more ... with the goal of pulling them away” from the EU, according to US-based news channel Defense One, which claimed to have reviewed the document.
Defense One claims that it elaborated on how Trump would like to build Washington’s relationship with ideologically-aligned administrations, as the US focuses on domestic priorities.
“We should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” it said, according to Defense One.
The alleged document is likely to spark further alarm in Europe, just days after the NSS claimed countries such as France and Germany were “decaying” due to migration and stifled economic growth.
[The White House denies it, but the cat is out of the bag.]
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:
Good.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims
Even better, if true.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump, Security Threat
The call is coming from inside the White House
By Paul Krugman | Dec 12, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-security-threat
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Because of Tariffs, easily and quickly applied, our National Security has been greatly enhanced, and we have become the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World. Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!
Dec 09, 2025, 3:45 AM
To update Samuel Johnson, these days national security is the last refuge of a scoundrel. According to Donald Trump, anything he doesn’t like is a threat to national security. Question his clearly illegal tariffs? You’re a dark and sinister force trying to undermine America. When the New York Times reported on signs that age may be taking a toll on Trump’s stamina, he denounced the reporting as “seditious, maybe even treasonous.”
But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.
On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner:
The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.
Without a doubt, Denmark’s concerns have been heightened by Trump’s repeated assertions that he wants to “get” Greenland, which is a Danish territory. In August the Danish government summoned the head of the U.S. embassy to protest about “covert influence operations” in Greenland undertaken by Americans with ties to Trump.
However, Denmark is certainly not alone in raising concerns and acting on them. Several of America’s closest traditional allies, including Canada and the UK, have reportedly acted to limit intelligence-sharing with the U.S. One cited concern is the risk of being complicit in unlawful acts or war crimes arising from the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
Sotto voce, it’s also clear that the Canadians and the Europeans are alarmed by the presence of Putin sympathizers and conspiracy theorists like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in sensitive positions within the Trump administration. After hearing the leaked tape of Steve Witkoff’s fawning and borderline treasonous conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser – in which Witkoff coached him on how to manipulate Trump -- who would want to share sensitive information with this American president?
More broadly, in a world of growing geopolitical conflict, it has become increasingly clear whose side the Trump administration is on — the side of Trump’s personal interests, grudges and biases. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, made this dynamic clear. There was no condemnation of Russian aggression against Ukraine and hardly any mention of the US rivalry with China. Yet it lambasted Europe and openly supported right-wing extremist parties that are trying to undermine European democracy.
Trump’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine not only reads like a Russian wish list, but it also uses some odd phrasing and syntax suggesting that it was translated from a Russian original. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the plan includes a number of undisclosed appendices that would unlock frozen Russian assets and bring Russia’s economy “in from the cold,” effectively ending the sanctions Putin has faced since he invaded Ukraine.
As odious as Witkoff’s actions were, they revealed the truth of the matter: Trump’s foreign policy is not about securing the safety and well-being of the United States. It’s about playing to Trump’s ego, about appealing to his incessant psychodrama of domination and sycophancy. A
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Curse of Trump 2.0
What does it say that the President doesn’t even feel he needs to hide his most profane and radical views anymore?
By Susan B. Glasser | December 11, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-curse
-of-trump-20
In January of 2018, Donald Trump hosted a group of lawmakers in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a bipartisan immigration deal. But, when talking about plans to give protected status to immigrants from African countries and other nations, such as El Salvador and Haiti, he grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he demanded, adding that he’d prefer to have more people enter the U.S. from largely white, European nations such as Norway. The remarks, published soon after the meeting in the Washington Post, caused a sensation. Trump denied the reporting, and a couple of the Republican senators who were present said they did not recall him making the comments. “This was not the language used,” Trump tweeted. He called the account “made up by Dems.” When questions about the statements persisted, he told reporters, “I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”
Nearly eight years later, and more than an hour and twenty-five minutes into a speech at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump finally admitted that he had, in fact, used the “shithole” language. He then set off on an extended riff about how the United States takes in too many immigrants from Somalia and other places that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” Trump didn’t just acknowledge what he once denied; as the audience applauded, he lingered on his past remark as a fond memory.
For many, it was a gotcha moment—the President taking ownership, belatedly, for one of his most iconic lines. “The truth comes out,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, whose account of the meeting had been questioned by his G.O.P. colleagues, posted on social media. Others focussed less on the revelation that our chronically untruthful leader had failed to tell the truth about something, and more on the escalating hate speech about Somali immigrants in Minnesota that the President is now spewing forth on a regular basis. It was both of those things, of course, and also a perfect example of the contrast between Trump’s two terms. Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said “shithole countries” to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.
Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past, and that, we must now understand, includes Trump 1.0. For years, he has complained that pretty much all of his predecessors in the White House were wrong about everything. The surprise of his second term, to the extent that there is one, is that Trump’s critique of America’s other Presidents is no longer just a repudiation of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; it now extends to Trump himself. Not to him personally, of course. Anyone who has watched even a minute of a Trump Cabinet meeting knows that our President is never wrong about anything. But, if Trump is unwilling to admit any errors of his own, he is more than happy to reject the policies of those who worked for him, even when it’s his big, bold signature scribbled with his trademark black Sharpie on the cover.
Eight years ago this month, Trump’s White House published its first national-security strategy, a document that extolled NATO’s enduring value as “one of our great advantages over our competitors,” and praised America’s allies as, in the words of one of the strategy’s principal authors, the then national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, “the best defense against today’s threats.” Its most famous passage declared a new era of “great power competition” and warned that China and Russia posed grave long-term dangers to the United States. I cannot count
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Lacking 1) self-discipline and 2) mental stability, Trumptards and Trump are trapped by their personal dramas. They blame their troubles on Democrats rather than on their malfunctioning minds because the effort required to achieve 2) mental stability is too much, especially because they lack 1) self-discipline.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
RIP American Tech Dominance
Lifting export controls on Nvidia’s second-best chip jeopardizes America’s AI advantage over China.
By Rogé Karma | December 12, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/trumps-china-ai-chips/6852
35/
Donald Trump launched his political career by insisting that free-trade deals had sacrificed the national interest in the pursuit of corporate profits. One wonders what that version of Trump would make of his most recently announced trade policy. On Monday, he declared on Truth Social that the United States would lift restrictions on selling highly advanced semiconductors to China. In doing so, the president has effectively chosen to cede the upper hand in developing a technology that could determine the outcome of the military and economic contest between the U.S. and its biggest geopolitical rival.
The U.S. is currently ahead in the AI race, and it owes that fact to one thing: its monopoly on advanced computer chips. Several experts told me that Chinese companies are even with or slightly ahead of their American counterparts when it comes to crucial AI inputs, including engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a cutting-edge AI model requires an unfathomable number of calculations at incredible speed, a feat that only a few highly specialized chips can handle. Only one company, the U.S.-based Nvidia, is capable of producing them at scale.
This gives the U.S. not only an economic advantage over China, but a military one. Already, AI systems have revolutionized how armies gather intelligence on enemies, detect troop movements, coordinate drone strikes, conduct cyberattacks, and choose targets; they are currently being used to develop the next generation of autonomous weapons. “Over the next decade, basically everything the military and intelligence communities do is going to some extent be enabled by AI,” Gregory Allen, who worked on the Department of Defense’s AI strategy from 2019 to 2022, told me. This is why, in October 2022, the Biden administration decided to cut off the sale of the most advanced semiconductors to China. The aim of the policy, according to the head of the agency in charge of implementing it, was “to protect our national security and prevent sensitive technologies with military applications from being acquired by the People’s Republic of China’s military, intelligence, and security services.”
Rogé Karma: Something ominous is happening in the AI economy
The policy seems to have done its job. Chinese AI firms tend to explicitly cite export controls as one of the biggest obstacles to their growth. DeepSeek, the Chinese company that earlier this year introduced an AI model nearly as good as those made by the leading American firms, is the exception that proves the rule. At first, DeepSeek’s progress was taken as evidence that restricting China’s access to advanced chips was a failed project. However, the company turned out to have trained its model on thousands of second-tier Nvidia chips that it had acquired via a loophole that wasn’t closed until late 2023. DeepSeek’s AI model would have been even better if the company had had access to more and better Nvidia chips. “Money has never been the problem for us,” Liang Wenfeng, one of DeepSeek’s founders, told a Chinese media outlet last year. “Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”
At first, Trump seemed eager to tighten the Biden-era restrictions even further. In April, his administration banned the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chip, which the company had designed specifically to sell to China without violating the export ban. But in subsequent months the balance of power in the White House began to tilt toward advisers who were skeptical of export controls, notably Trump’s AI czar, the Silicon Valley investor David Sacks. Meanwhile, Trump began meeting regularly with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—who, somewhat understandably, didn’t love that his company was being deprived of the Chinese market. In July, Trump reversed course and lifted restrictions on the
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It isn’t yet clear how exactly this will work or whether it is even legal.)
Then shut the fuck up, Rogé Karma.
And then get a new name, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Comrade signym, it's them damn tariffs again.
T
Trump PANICS as Companies SUE to STOP Taxes on Americans
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump Is Using a Sacred Power for Depraved Purposes
The president’s pardons encourage public officials to place personal interests ahead of the interests of the people.
By Liz Oyer | December 15, 2025
Liz Oyer served as Pardon Attorney for the Department of Justice from 2022 to 2025.
When Donald Trump pardoned U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar earlier this month, he added to a spate of clemencies that has directly attacked a founding principle of America’s democratic republic: the expectation that elected representatives will serve as fiduciaries of the public trust. Cuellar became the 11th elected American official to receive clemency from President Trump this year. Other presidents have shied away from using the pardon power to protect public officials. Joe Biden issued individual pardons to just two state-level elected officials, but not for crimes that occurred while they held public office. Neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush pardoned any elected officials during their respective eight years in office.
Trump, by contrast, has pardoned both well-known figures such as Cuellar, accused of taking $600,000 in bribes from foreign companies; Representative George Santos of New York, who defrauded his constituents in virtually every conceivable way; and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat; and lesser characters, such as a state official in Nevada who stole money from a police memorial fund, an elected sheriff in Virginia who sold badges for cash, and a former Tennessee state legislator who defrauded taxpayers to win contracts for his business. Cuellar’s pardon came just days after Trump’s unprecedented pardon of a foreign head of state—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—who was convicted of corrupting his own government from the top down by operating it as a narco-state. Trump pardoned at least 10 public officials in his first term in office.
Read: Trump grants clemency to one of the world’s richest men
Since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which prompted swift public backlash, pardons for official corruption have been rare, until now. The Justice Department—whose Office of the Pardon Attorney advises the president on pardons—has long considered crimes involving a breach of the public trust to be among the most serious offenses on the books. That office, which I led from 2022 until March of this year, has rarely if ever recommended pardons for such betrayals. In effect, Trump’s pardons are licensing elected officials, at all levels of government, to profit off the powers entrusted to them by the American people.
Trump’s agenda transcends partisan politics. In addition to Cuellar and Blagojevich (who recently visited the Justice Department), Trump has pardoned a third Democratic politician this year: Alexander Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati city councilman convicted of bribery and attempted extortion. Elected officials on both sides have also benefited from dismissals of prosecutions, sweetheart plea deals, and the dismantling of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit created to target public corruption. Trump’s goal is much more ambitious than boosting his political allies—he is aiming to fundamentally reshape the American system of governance to make room for graft. Such self-enrichment is antithetical to a government that is supposed to serve the people.
Trump, though, has moved swiftly to implement a different vision for American government. He is engineering a return to a patronage system, in which pardons feature prominently. The Justice Department used to rely on merit-based guidelines, rooted in considerations of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. Trump has abandoned those, favoring instead a transactional approach. Pardon seekers once applied for relief through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a process that can be lengthy and cumbersome due to rigorous vetting requirements. Today, wealthy and powerful pardon hopefuls are funneling their requests straight to the president’s desk by way of well-c
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Maybe somebody would take your claims seriously if you hadn't posted 20,000 negative articles about Trump over the last decade.
Nobody cares. Shut the fuck up, stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T
Pollster: Americans OVERWHELMINGLY believe country is on the WRONG TRACK
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
Affordable Care Act subsidies are expiring anyway, so what’s the difference, right?
By Charles P. Pierce | Dec 15, 2025 4:05 PM EST
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69731828/doctors-rural
-america-trump/
Among its more obvious faults—and there is no bigger one than the vicious clowns the president has appointed to run it—the administration’s toxic spitball approach to immigration is almost completely incoherent. This administration is deliberately oblivious to consequences anyway, be they intended or unintended. However, its policies on H-1B visas are doing real-world damage in many different places. From The Washington Post:
The overworked kidney doctors in this small town were supposed to get reinforcement this fall with the arrival of a new colleague from India. Patients already had appointments scheduled with the incoming nephrologist. Then the Trump administration demanded that companies pay a $100,000 visa fee to bring highly skilled workers from abroad, including doctors and medical professionals urgently needed in health care deserts. Nephrology Associates of the Carolinas could no longer afford to sponsor the Indian kidney specialist, and it has not found an American well suited for the job. After President Donald Trump signed the executive order restricting H-1B visas in September, soaring costs are roiling rural health care facilities that have long struggled to find staff. The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to labor experts and immigration lawyers.
It is easy to say, Okay, rural voters, stop voting for morons and mountebanks who couldn’t care less if you sicken and die. I’ve done it myself, many times. But kidney patients in Shelby are just as much in need of medical treatment as kidney patients in Wellesley or the Hamptons. And to have their health ruined by the administration’s frankly extortionist H-1B policy is a disgrace about which none of us should be blithe.
These legal workers fill crucial gaps in rural and underserved regions, according to medical associations and health care researchers. Iowa, North Dakota and West Virginia—states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last three elections—lead the nation with the highest percentage of physicians who hold H-1B visas, according to a study published this year. Last year, the percentage of H-1B-sponsored doctors in rural counties was nearly twice the share in urban ones, according to research published in JAMA in October. Impoverished counties also had a significantly higher percentage of H-1B physicians, said lead author Michael Liu, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Liu himself works on a trainee visa from Canada and hopes to eventually remain in the United States on an H-1B visa.
With the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expiring, most of these folks aren’t going to be able to afford to see a doctor anyway, so what’s the difference, right? That this county can’t—and won’t—be able to figure out what every other industrialized nation figured out years ago continues to amaze and astonish.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
What The US Is Doing To Ukraine Is Far Worse Than Yalta
Phillips P. OBrien
Dec 16, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is
If history does not exactly repeat itself (and it does not) then it does often rhyme. What we are seeing from the Trump administration is unprecedented in its betrayal of Ukraine. The US is now acting like an agent of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in bullying democratic Ukraine to surrender parts of it territory, a wealth of natural resources and millions of its people to Putin’s brutal rule. The USA is not negotiating between Ukraine and Russia, it is putting enormous pressure on Ukraine to agree to a deal that might appeal to Putin. This is what I mean when I say that the US is now the enemy of freedom. It wants to strengthen dictatorships at the expense of democracies.
However there are some interesting historical comparisons that people are making—the rhymes as it were. The one most commonly thrown around in US history is Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. In this case the US supposedly accepted the expansion of brutal totalitarian rule over countries that wished to be their allies. Aha, we are told, Trump is nothing new. The USA has in the past sold out possible allies into dictatorial rule.
Btw, before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, you could reliably expect to hear any Democratic attempt to reach a compromise deal described by Republicans as a potential sell-out of the type Franklin Roosevelt supposedly did at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945). Ronald Reagan, for example, was a constant critic of Roosevelt’s actions at Yalta, with examples ranging from the 1950s through his two terms in office.
The widely shared Republican critique was that the Roosevelt too easily trusted Stalin, deferred to the USSR and as a result consigned half of Europe to totalitarian rule for generations.
So it is rather bitterly ironic today that it is the GOP, after decades of attacking FDR for “betraying” Poland, that is using all of America’s might to betray and weaken a democratic Ukraine. That being said, what Trump is doing is far far worse than anything FDR was accused of. To understand just how large the differences are, I will start with a short primer on Yalta and FDR.
Roosevelt and Yalta
What happened factually at Yalta is actually not an area of disagreement. Roosevelt went to the conference, in the Crimea, with Stalin and Churchill to try and work out some growing problems between the Big Three over the shape of post-war Europe. When it came to Eastern Europe, and in particular Poland, FDR wanted to convince Stalin to allow some democratic influence into a new Polish government. He was faced with a great dilemma on Poland. He very much would have wanted a free Poland with a pro-western alignment, but Poland was entirely occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, and it was Stalin who was establishing the facts on the ground.
In particular Stalin refused to have anything to do with the pre-war Polish government (which had been recognized by the USA) and had installed a new pro-Communist “Lublin” government which was preparing to do his bidding.
Much more at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Longest Suicide Note in American History
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.
By Anne Applebaum | December 16, 2025, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/national-security-strategy-d
emocracy/685270/
Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.
This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.
The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.
Before explaining, I should acknowledge the curious features of this document, which seems, like the Bible, to have several different authors. Some of them use boastful, aggressive language—America must remain “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful country for decades to come”—and some of them prefer euphemism and allusion. Sometimes these different authors contradict one another, proposing to work with allies on one page and to undermine allies on the next. The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future.
The one genuinely new, truly radical element in this faction’s thinking is its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill. This is a major departure from the first Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke of creating an alliance against North Korea; noted that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments”; and observed that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to bully others. The 2017 Trump policy team also observed a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order.”
The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.
Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe
Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competi
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.
by Zack Beauchamp | Dec 16, 2025, 5:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/politics/472346/trump-democracy-2025-haphazard-aut
horitarian
If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.
Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.
Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.
Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.
The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.
Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115703610330402175
The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”
Key takeaways:
• Trump’s first year has revealed that he’s pursuing an authoritarian agenda in an incoherent and incompetent manner.
• This style of politics, which I’ve termed “haphazardism,” emerges from Trump’s own character — both his insistence on wielding untrammeled power and his inability to approach acquiring it in a strategic or detailed fashion.
• The emergence of haphazardism should make us optimistic about American democracy’s survival, even if the short-term outlook is still quite troubling.
Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.
“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”
Haphazardism, as a concept, helps us understand Trump’s dangers to democracy in a more nuanced and precise way. And it can also help us see, after almost a year of Trump’s second presidency, where things might stand when he leaves power for good.
What haphazardism is
Donald Trump, like many of history’s villains, has extraordinary political talents. His authoritarian menace stems from these talents being married to a deep, primal lust for power — a desire to wield full authority over others without constraint or restriction. In his first term, these
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.
December 16, 2025:
Trump: 43.8% Favorable / 52.8% Unfavorable (Split: -9.0)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump
December 17, 2021:
Biden: 42.9% Favorable / 52.2% Unfavorable (Split: -9.3)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden
December 15, 2013:
Obama: 42.5% Favorable / 53.4% Unfavorable (Split: -10.9)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/barack-obama/approval-
rating
December 16, 2005:
GWB: 43.2% Favorable / 53.6% Unfavorable (Split: -10.4)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/george-w-bush/approval
-rating
Shut up, Idiot.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?
Sounds like a problem that you created.
America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.
We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I know those young, white men. It is NOT money that is stopping them from becoming doctors. They don't become doctors because they don't have what it takes to graduate. See 6ixStringJoker's multiple attempts at college. And the ones who do have the stamina to finish college and medical school and an internship don't want to live where the population is angry, poor white trash. Trumptard country. Where the pay is low, and the patients are sicker because they are stupider. Sick from smoking. Sick from drinking. Sick from gluttony. Teeth falling out because they are too stupid to brush or even go to a dentist.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?
Sounds like a problem that you created.
America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.
We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
. . . the treasury secretary appeared onstage with Aaron Ross Sorkin and acted as though he was auditioning for the Scott Jennings chair at CNN.
Secretary Scott Bessent blustered. He attacked the media and claimed that he no longer reads the New York Times because it dared to say that Donald Trump — the most powerful, virile, dynamic man since Liberace — is old and slowing down. Then, when asked about affordability, Bessent made things up. Here’s the exchange:
Bessent: In a blue state, affordability is worse than a red state.
Ross Sorkin: We can debate that, but keep going—
Bessent: No, no, there’s no debate. The number is 50 basis points higher inflation. The ten highest inflation rates are in blue cities.
Ross Sorkin: But just so you know, because I went to look at this — this is the Joint Economic Committee—since 2021 the highest inflation of the past four years has been in red states, especially Florida.
Bessent: I’m talking about current. Current. Current, not over the past four years. . . . Today.
At this point, the audience laughed at the U.S. treasury secretary. I’m not sure people realize how dangerous it is for the SecTreas to be a laughingstock.
We’ll talk about why in a minute, but first I want you to consider the future. In May, President Trump will nominate the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bessent might get that job. If he does not, the gig could go to Kevin Hassett, who is a political hack like Bessent, only dumber.
What happens if Trump breaches the wall between the presidency and the central bank? What happens if the world understands that American fiscal policy is no longer being decided by an apolitical group of serious economists, but dictated by a geriatric conman through his puppet?
No one knows.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-if-its-already-too-late-maga-institu
tions-leadership-bessent
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I know those young, white men.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?
Sounds like a problem that you created.
America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.
We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
No. You don't.
You don't have any friends. You don't have any family.
Everybody you have ever known hates you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I don't think any limits on either Trump or his Trumptards are stopping them. They vomit all day. It's a contest. Who among the Trump lovers can empty their guts in public, making the biggest, nastiest mess where everybody can see what goes on inside Trumptards?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. You don't.
You don't have any friends. You don't have any family.
Everybody you have ever known hates you.
Why Trump’s Viciousness Matters
He wants to destroy our values, not just our democracy
By Paul Krugman | Dec 18, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-trumps-viciousness-matters
For a recent example of Trump being himself:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!
9.83k ReTruths 41.5k Likes Dec 15, 2025,10:51 AM
My first reaction upon reading Donald Trump’s despicable statement on the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a sense of both shock and lack of surprise. It wasn’t news to me that the president of the United States is a vicious shmuck. My second reaction was the thought that I have nothing new to contribute here, as plenty of other people were already denouncing yet another example of Trump’s vindictive narcissism.
Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hate-mongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.
I am not going to present some rose-tinted, Pollyannaish view of America’s past here. There were people who crowed over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For most of our history there were Americans who reveled in harming, subjugating and dispossessing those who were considered of the wrong race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. But we, as a country, changed. Over time, Americans on the whole became more humane and tolerant.
It’s true that significant numbers of Americans were never fully on board with liberal humanism. For example, a majority of white American’s didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1997. However, we were slowly becoming a country in which open bigotry was frowned upon. Although we were never perfect, there was a growing sense of norms that contained any underlying hatred.
Now the impulse to hate is back. For example, according to a long-running survey conducted by NORC and the ADL, antisemitism has been making a big comeback:
Antisemitic Attitudes in America 2024
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-202
4
And Trump has made innumerable crudely racist comments about Black Americans, particularly about Black American women. He’s demonized immigrants and Muslims, and suggested Democratic politicians should be executed. But the resurgence of hate speech isn’t just about Trump, nor is it solely about politics. Grown men — it’s mostly, although not only, men — now feel f
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
By Tom Nichols | December 17, 2025, 10:36 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/what-presidential-panic-look
s-like/685307/
The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.
We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.
In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.
I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.
His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.
This was not a holiday address from the president of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. Trump has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trump is attaching a ballroom to the White House, but can't even do that properly. The price has gone from $200 to $400 million in a couple of months because he is fucked up in the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual price goes to $800 million or $1.6 billion because Trump is seriously screwed up. He keeps saying that taxpayers don't have to pay because billionaires are paying, but the billionaires are going to receive something under the table for their generosity toward Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5652531-trump-cost-new-ballroom-
400m/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The U.S. Has a Great Warning System for Deadly Weather. Trump Wants to Destroy It.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research helps power weather and wildfire forecasts across the country. Now it’s being targeted in a presidential feud.
By Marianne Lavelle | Dec 18, 2025 3:15 PM
https://slate.com/technology/2025/12/donald-trump-jared-polis-colorado
-climate-change-extreme-weather.html
One of the world’s leading climate, weather, and wildfire science research institutions is being targeted for elimination in what many of those affected see as President Donald Trump’s political vendetta against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
Word that the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder would be broken up, with some of its functions moved elsewhere, came hours after the cancellation of $109 million in federal environmental and safety grants for Colorado, and one day after Trump took time during an Oval Office ceremony to excoriate Polis as a “weak and pathetic man.” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, announced that the center would be eliminated in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday evening. His office did not respond to a request for further comment Wednesday.
Trump’s beef with Polis stems from the jailing of a former county election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of giving Trump allies unauthorized access to a voting machine in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An anonymous White House official told the Washington Post: “The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president.”
Scientists affiliated with NCAR expressed shock that the center—a linchpin in climate and weather research globally—is at risk of becoming collateral damage in one of Trump’s feuds.
“One theory is that this is designed to put pressure on the Governor of Colorado to allow the pardon Trump attempted to go through???!!!” wrote NCAR distinguished scholar Kevin Trenberth in an email. “Shutting NCAR would be a major setback for the entire community and would have impact for decades to come.”
NCAR, founded in 1960 and administered by the National Science Foundation, provides state-of-the-art data and technology resources for 129 North American university partners. Partners rely on NCAR supercomputers, heavily instrumented aircraft, and Earth-systems modeling. NCAR developed the Dropsonde, the equipment that hurricane-hunter aircraft use to measure temperature, pressure, and humidity of tropical storms. The center does real-time operational forecasting for the military, for example, at the antiballistic missile systems site at Fort Greely, Alaska, and has done the computer modeling that has helped improve forecasting of wildfire behavior.
NCAR is “is quite literally our global mothership,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe in a post on X. “Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather—not only in the US, but around the world—has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.”
NCAR is “truly an international treasure, not just a national treasure,” said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR for the National Science Foundation. UCAR has 1,450 employees, 830 of them at NCAR.
As of Wednesday midday, Busalacchi said he had received no word from Washington about the dismantling plan aside from Vought’s announcement Tuesday night, linking to an exclusive USA Today story that quoted him.
Aside from meeting any political aims, the elimination of NCAR would fulfill Vought’s goals of shrinking the size of government and rooting out climate science. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said in his post on X, quoting verbatim the controversial conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, Project 2025, which he helped author.
He said that critical weather work woul
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The check is NOT on the way because Trump came up with this idea during the speech and has pre-planned nothing.
Trump Promises $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividend’ for Troops — Here’s What Service Members Need to Know
Douglas Lindsay, Nick Mordowanec | December 18, 2025
https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-features/2025/1
2/18/trump-promises-1776-warrior-dividend-troops-heres-what-service-members-need-know.html
President Donald Trump's promised one-time $1,776 payment for U.S. service members dubbed a “Warrior Dividend” is being framed as both a financial boost and a symbolic gesture tied to the nation’s founding.
“We are sending every soldier $1,776 — and the checks are already on the way,” Trump said. “Nobody deserves it more than our military.”
The announcement made Wednesday evening during a nationally televised address immediately sparked questions across the force—not just about the money itself but about who actually qualifies, when it would show up on paychecks, whether it would be taxed, and whether it would affect existing pay and benefits.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a video posted Thursday morning on X, said the payments will be tax-free and issued to more than 1.45 million service members "in the coming days." He made a mention of payments being issued before Christmas.
He said the payments provide "a whole new modern meaning" to 1776 and the American Revolution, as well as to the current joint force, praising Trump's "unwavering commitment" for the military.
"This has never happened before, every member of our military from E-1 to O-6," Hegseth said.
Questions Service Members are Asking Right Now
Here’s what service members and military families need to know right now, including what’s confirmed, what’s still unclear, and what to watch for next:
Do I actually qualify?
When will this hit my LES?
Is it taxable?
Does this affect my BAH or pay raise?
Does this impact Guard and Reserve members?
Is this real or political talk?
In the hours after the speech, similar questions repeatedly surfaced across installations, unit group chats, and military family networks. While Hegseth provided some context regarding the tax aspect, most other questions currently remain unanswered.
What is the 'Warrior Dividend'?
Trump said the administration plans to issue a one-time $1,776 payment to roughly 1.4 million active-duty and eligible reserve service members, tying the amount to 1776—the year of American independence.
“In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776,” Trump said during the address.
White House officials have said the payment would apply to service members through the rank of colonel (or Navy captain equivalent), but final eligibility rules have not yet been released by the Department of Defense.
What This Is and Isn’t
A one-time bonus payment.
Not a permanent pay raise.
Not a change to BAH, BAS, retirement, or health care.
Not guaranteed until DoD and DFAS issue implementing guidance.
How to Know if You Qualify
Active-duty service members are expected to be the primary eligible group based on Trump’s remarks and historical precedent.
However, no formal eligibility memo has been released; rank limits, duty status and service dates may apply; and prior one-time payments often included cutoff dates or minimum service thresholds.
Until the Pentagon publishes guidance, eligibility should be viewed as likely but not confirmed.
What About Guard and Reserve Members?
This remains one of the biggest unanswered questions.
Although Trump used broad language mentioning “every soldier,” Guard and Reserve members have historically been included only if they meet qualifying active-duty criteria.
Those particular troops should watch for:
Activation or Title 10 requirements.
Minimum days served.
Specific qualifying windows.
For now, eligibility
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump is attaching a ballroom to the White House, but can't even do that properly. The price has gone from $200 to $400 million in a couple of months because he is fucked up in the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual price goes to $800 million or $1.6 billion because Trump is seriously screwed up. He keeps saying that taxpayers don't have to pay because billionaires are paying, but the billionaires are going to receive something under the table for their generosity toward Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
He's paying for it. Shut the fuck up.
Besides... Bill Maher is happy that he doesn't have to sit under a fucking tent outdoors the next time there's a White House get together.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The check is NOT on the way because Trump came up with this idea during the speech and has pre-planned nothing.
You've got nothing to complain about today so this worthless article full of nobody gives a shit needed to be posted here?
Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Trump blamed his predecessor, saying that under former President Joe Biden "inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” Inflation was worst under Biden in June 2022 when it hit 9.1%, though the largest inflation rate in U.S. history was 23.7% in 1920.
Oh. Okay. Let's quibble over the fact that the last time inflation was as bad as Joe Biden*'s destruction of the US economy came when less than 1% of 1% of 1% of currently living Americans were even born.
Shut the fuck up.
Quote:
When Biden left office and Trump was inaugurated for his second term, inflation was at 3%. The most recent numbers issued in September 2025 showed inflation still sitting at 3%.
Yeah. All the damage had already been done, long before Trump came back.
Thank you for confirming what we all already knew.
I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.
Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ixStringJoker, how can you NOT understand something so simple as how prices are set? The wages paid to workers are NOT set by workers in the US. The price workers pay for what they buy is also NOT set by workers. Who do you think sets wages/prices if NOT the poorest? It is the richest, not some imaginary invisible hand of the marketplace.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.
Shut the fuck up.
Trump refused to veto any congressional spending and added $7.8 trillion to the nation debt. Then the people who set prices raised prices to take all that unpaid tax money away from poorer people:
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+much+did+the+National+debt+increas
e+during+Trump%27s+term
How much did Biden increase the National debt? Half as much as Trump. If only Biden could have undone Trump’s tax cuts, the debt would be even smaller. Again, the people who set prices raised prices to take all that money back:
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/24/trump-biden-debt-deficits-election
All of Trump’s tax cuts were set to expire after 10 years, but instead of letting the tax cuts expire, Trump passed a new law to keep them in place. In time, the people who set prices will once again raise prices to take all that money back from poor people. There will be a new burst of price inflation to match older bursts:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1wmdD
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, how can you NOT understand something so simple as how prices are set?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.
Shut the fuck up.
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
You have shown everyone here over the years that you don't know one fucking thing about anything.
Loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ixStringJoker, you flunked out of college. That is possibly because you cannot understand ideas that take more than 100 words to explain. Trump knows your limitations and never goes beyond them, but Paul Krugman always pushes beyond your 100-word limit, which makes you angry at him. Also, any bar graph will go beyond 6ixStringJoker's limitations. This story has two bar graphs, causing 6ix to be discombobulated:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
You have shown everyone here over the years that you don't know one fucking thing about anything.
Loser.
What MAGA genius thought that Trump’s “affordability” speech was a good idea?
By Paul Krugman | Dec 19, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-trump-speeches
Healthcare is an area where policy has a huge effect on affordability. It’s also an area in which Trump talked utter nonsense.
Here’s what you should know: The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, offers Americans who aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or through their employers the ability to purchase insurance coverage from private insurers, with the federal government subsidizing most enrollees’ premiums. However, enhanced subsidies put in place under the Biden administration will expire on January 1st, 2026, leading to large cost increases for many families.
Costs will soar for two reasons. There’s the direct effect of losing subsidies. But there’s also an indirect effect, because the loss of subsidies will lead millions of people to drop their coverage — and those who drop coverage will, on average, be healthier than those who don’t, worsening the risk pool. Insurers, anticipating this effect, have already sharply raised premiums.
Charts from KFF show the effects on some representative couples. More than 20 million would be affected, but the worst hit will be older, moderately well-off Americans who are earning just a bit too much to remain eligible for subsidies. For example, a 60-year-old couple with an income of $85,000 will face a premium hike equal to more than a quarter of their pre-tax income:
Source: https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/aca-marketplace-premium-paymen
ts-would-more-than-double-on-average-next-year-if-enhanced-premium-tax-credits-expire/
What should the Trump Administration do? Here’s Trump:
“I’m also taking on the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people. The money should go to the people. That’s you, so they can buy their own health insurance, which will give far better benefits at much lower costs.”
So Trump says that he’ll replace the current system, in which people buy their own health insurance with the aid of government subsidies, with a system in which the government gives people money they can use to buy their own health insurance. How is that different? In fact, it isn’t different except for one devastating detail: Republicans in Congress will never approve subsidies adequate to make health insurance affordable. Because the Republican plan would be far stingier than the one currently in place, millions of people will be forced to drop their insurance. And as I said, because it’s the younger and relatively more healthy that will drop their coverage, the pool of those who keep their coverage will be older and sicker. And you know what happens next – premiums go up even further. No wonder that four Republican congressmen in purple districts defied Mike Johnson and voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, you flunked out of college. That is possibly because you cannot understand ideas that take more than 100 words to explain.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
You have shown everyone here over the years that you don't know one fucking thing about anything.
Loser.
I aced English. Reading and comprehension aren't any problems of mine, nor is critical thinking. You know this just as well as I do.
You and Ted, however, can barely read and have even a looser grip on writing.
This is why it's so easy for me to tell when you've plagiarized somebody else's work, and why I've caught you doing it so, so many times.
You and Ted are retarded.
Look all around you, my dude. They give plenty of college degrees to retards.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
https://www.threads.com/@pilarmiami/post/DSGs1ExjA4P/i-dont-know-who-to-give-credit-for-this-quote-but-it-rings-so-true-im-no-support
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How Epstein and Trump bonded over the pursuit of women
The two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/12/19/how-epstein-trump-
bonded-over/
Tina Davis, who modeled for Ford in the mid-1990s, said in an interview that her Ford booker instructed her to get dressed up and attend a Mar-a-Lago party in late 1994. Just 14 and new to Miami, she was told to “dress sexy,” according to her mother, Sandra Coleman, who had accompanied her to Florida. Eight or nine other models came along on the bus. “All the girls were really young,” Ms. Coleman recalled in an interview. “Some of them could have been in training bras."
When they arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Ms. Coleman said, her daughter was promptly handed a glass of champagne. She took it away, but waiters kept offering more. Each time one of the middle-aged men at the party approached her daughter, Ms. Coleman would walk over and introduce herself as Ms. Davis’s mother.
During a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr. Trump’s new wife, whom they had met earlier. Ms. Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, and looked her in the eye. “Whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband,” she told Ms. Coleman. “Protect her.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
We've been telling you about your problem for years.
Glad you're finally coming to terms with it.
Your party is dead. Your ideology is dead. We're shipping everyone back home.
You lose forever, loser.
Congratulations.
And save your Epstein bullshit.
You haven't even looked through those photos yet, have you?
Don't be surprised if Hillary has Bill murdered, is all I'm sayin'.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump promised a new ‘golden age’ for the US economy. Where is it?
Most Americans have yet to see this boom – but they’ve certainly heard a lot about it from the president
By Callum Jones, Andrew Witherspoon and Aliya Uteuova
Sat 20 Dec 2025 05.00 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/20/trump-us-economy
Moments into his second term, opening his inaugural address, Donald Trump was unequivocal. “The golden age of America begins right now,” he declared.
At a White House reception last weekend, a little over 10 months later, the US president appeared to acknowledge just how far his timeline had shifted.
“We’re going to have … I say it’s the golden age of America,” Trump told his audience. “We have an age that’s coming up, the likes of which … this country has never seen. And I just look so forward to the results. You’re going to see results in six months to a year.”
The US economy has come under pressure in 2025. A golden age did not promptly take hold, as Trump initially claimed, upon his return to office in January.
On two areas the president pledged to rapidly improve – jobs and prices – the results have so far been lackluster.
The labor market started the year steady. It had slowed, but still managed to expand by an average of 168,000 jobs each month, in 2024.
During his joint address to Congress in March, however, Trump claimed to have inherited an “economic catastrophe” from Joe Biden’s administration, and vowed to create jobs “like we have never seen before”.
A new ‘golden age’
Jobs growth has, in fact, stalled in 2025 – with an average of 55,000 jobs added each month, according to official data for the first 11 months of the year, down 67% on 2024.
The headline unemployment rate, which fluctuated between 3.9% and 4.2% in the last year of Biden’s presidency, has climbed under Trump to 4.6% – its highest level in more than four years – in November.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump promised a “new American industrialism” on his watch, through which the US would become a “manufacturing powerhouse” once again, with a resurgence in factory jobs.
In reality, manufacturing employment has not increased this year. The US economy has so far added factory jobs in just two of 10 months after Trump’s return to office.
Realizing this distant dream of an industrial renaissance, according to the White House, will require ramping up the president’s flagship economic policy: tariffs.
And Trump has moved to do just that, hiking the overall average effective US tariff rate from 2.4% to 16.8%, the highest level since 1935, according to analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale.
The rollout of higher tariffs has been erratic and marred by uncertain deadlines, delays and reversals. The process has been “more painful than I expected”, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles conceded to Vanity Fair.
‘Nobody can believe what’s going on’
For all the pain this agenda has caused inside the White House, economists have repeatedly warned of a potentially stark impact on millions of Americans. Tariffs on goods from overseas, often passed along by the businesses that pay them, can lead to higher prices on store shelves.
Officials and policymakers inside the Federal Reserve have spent months considering whether the ultimate effect of Trump’s tariffs will be a one-time jolt to prices, or something more lasting.
Inflation surged to its highest level in a generation in 2022 as the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed a series of supply and demand shocks on the world economy. By last year, however, the US consumer price index (CPI) was falling back down towards typical levels – and continued to do so during the early months of 2025.
By Trump’s telling, though, his administration inherited an “inflation nightmare” from Biden, which he vowed to turn around. In a primetime TV address on Wednesday, he declared: “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.”
But CPI has held firm since the spring. In November, it rose by an annual rate of 2.7%, according t
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME