Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187997
PAGE 41 of 48
Quote:Any group that votes for Trump more than once is a group of evil people. 6ixStringJoker, did you smoke a cigarette and watch porn this morning to launch your day?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a message from human beings to other human beings.
We don't exactly know what you are, but you aren't a part of the group.
Go fuck yourself, you miserable little piece of dog shit.
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
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Any group that votes for Trump more than once is a group of evil people.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a message from human beings to other human beings.
We don't exactly know what you are, but you aren't a part of the group.
Go fuck yourself, you miserable little piece of dog shit.
Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.
Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.
AMERICA is finished with you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Why can't Trump remember why he had an MRI?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.
Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.
AMERICA is finished with you.
By Lisa Needham | Monday, December 01, 2025 at 3:30:06p CST
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/12/1/2356309/-Why-can-t-Trump-re
member-why-he-had-an-MRI
President Donald Trump is pretty sure he just had the most perfect MRI of all time, but he can’t quite seem to remember what part of his most perfect body was scanned.
This, of course, raises not one, but two, health concerns: Which health condition is the president hiding that required a magnetic resonance imaging test, and which health condition is the president unwittingly revealing when he can’t seem to recall why he even had an MRI?
He did remember, however, to be a jerk to the female reporters who asked about it, personally attacking one by explaining that he does absolutely know what part of his body was not scanned. Per Trump, no one has shoved his large orange-slathered noggin into an MRI machine because his brain is perfect since he “aced” a cognitive test. He got a “perfect” score, which he told one reporter she would “be incapable of doing.”
Yes, Trump is still running around bragging about his cognitive abilities, seemingly unaware that he’s bragging about having been given the basic cognitive test to check for cognitive impairments such as dementia.
Back in his first term, Trump’s unreleased tax returns arguably represented everything we knew was bad about him, but didn’t have specifics for. Much like this mysterious MRI, Trump was forever promising those tax returns would be released at some point in the future, all the while fighting to stop them from ever seeing the light of day.
Fast-forward eight years, and it seems quaint to care about that. Trump’s second-term corruption is so open and obvious that seeing his tax returns wouldn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. When the House finally released six years of Trump’s returns, including those from his first term, in 2022, it wasn’t as much a revelation as a confirmation: Trump’s a tax cheat who is bought and paid for.
During Trump’s second term, the mysterious yet perfect yet still unknown MRI results serve the same function as the quest for his tax returns did: We all know there is something very bad regarding Trump’s health, but we don’t have specifics about it.
What we do have, though, is evidence of someone falling apart while insisting everything is totally fine and normal.
Is it normal for the president to take a little unscheduled wander along the White House rooftop?
Is it normal that the president keeps insisting that his creepy, heavily bruised, disintegrating hand is totally just from lots of handshaking, as if Donald J. Trump were the first president to shake a lot of hands? Or that after confirming Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which was glaringly obvious from his visibly swollen ankles, the White House tried to claim that it is also the reason for the creepy hand?
Is it normal that the president is using the r-word to slur a Democratic elected official—who just happened to be the vice presidential candidate in the 2024 election?
Hilariously, that attack on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz seems to have backfired, with Walz, unruffled, responding “Release the MRI results.”
While Trump has a history of vulgar name-calling, his other recent behavior is raising eyebrows.
He’s out here pardoning people but he can’t say who they are or why he’s doing it. He falls asleep during meetings and then gets furious if people point that out. Yes, Donald, the radical left conspired to make you fall asleep on camera.
Additionally, last time we checked, neither chronic venous insufficiency nor oodles of handshaking explain Trump’s ongoing decompensation when talking to female reporters, calling one “piggy” and another “insubordinate” for daring to do their jobs and ask him q
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Why can't Trump remember why he had an MRI?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.
Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.
AMERICA is finished with you.
I dunno...
Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?
Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Lest we forget… Trumptards claim that Democrats shut the entire world down for 2 years over a cold.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I dunno...
Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?
Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?
One of our biggest divides is over remembering who was president in 2020.
Hint: Trump.
On Friday, March 13, 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency under provisions of the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988 (Stafford Act) . . .
https://balderson.house.gov/coronavirus-updates/president-trump-declar
es-national-emergency.htm
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/13/coronavirus-emergency-declara
tion-trump-128530
"In addition to his executive actions, Trump has pressed Congress for an economic stimulus package that could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars." Actually, $7,800 billion. Seeing all that new money, the people who set prices proceeded to raise prices in order to capture that $7.8 trillion for themselves, thanking Trump for making the wealth transfer possible.
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Lock Them Up for War Crimes
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth must be prosecuted for murdering Venezuelan civilians on a speedboat
Dec 01, 2025
https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-war-crime-ve
nezuela
In September 2025, a U.S. military operation in the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of several Venezuelan civilians aboard speedboats. While the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the incident as a counter-narcotics operation, evidence suggests that he ordered the survivors to be executed. The killings violated international humanitarian law (IHL), specifically the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Hegseth’s actions constitute war crimes including extrajudicial killings, disproportionate use of force, and violations of the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. He must be held accountable under international law and prosecuted for these alleged crimes.
The Legal Framework: War Crimes and International Law
War crimes are defined under Article 8 of the Rome Statute as serious violations of the laws and customs of war, including:
1. Willful killing (Article 8(2)(a)(i))
2. Intentionally directing attacks against civilians (Article 8(2)(b)(i))
3. Excessive incidental death, injury, or damage (Article 8(2)(b)(iv))
4. Violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality (Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions)
Precedents for Prosecuting High-Ranking Officials
Several high-profile cases demonstrate that military and political leaders can be held accountable for war crimes:
1. Slobodan Miloševic (Yugoslavia) – Prosecuted by the ICTY for war crimes in Bosnia.
2. Charles Taylor (Liberia) – Convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for aiding and abetting war crimes.
3. Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) – Indicted by the ICC for genocide and war crimes in Darfur.
4. U.S. Cases – While no U.S. official has been convicted by the ICC, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld faced civil lawsuits in Europe for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
If the U.S. fails to prosecute Hegseth domestically, the ICC could assert jurisdiction under Article 12 of the Rome Statute, especially if Venezuela (a party to the ICC) refers the case.
Much more at
https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-war-crime-ve
nezuela
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Lest we forget…
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I dunno...
Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?
Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?
You forget everything.
Save your bullshit in here. Nobody is going down for any war crimes.
This is just another bullshit issue of yours to throw on the heap of bullshit issues you've posted here over the years and forgotten completely about 5 minutes later.
You suck dude. You're invisible now.
People don't even hate your kind anymore. We don't even see you anymore.
You no longer even exist in our world.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The legal system to bring Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to justice is the same one used on Slobodan Miloševic (Yugoslavia). Slobby died of old age before justice could be done because the legal system doesn't function. There are alternative methods completely outside of the legal system. Two bullets in the back of Pete's head would be quick justice, but that requires somebody who understands how fucked up the legal system is and who cares enough to fix what is wrong with Pete.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Lest we forget…
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I dunno...
Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?
Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?
You forget everything.
Save your bullshit in here. Nobody is going down for any war crimes.
This is just another bullshit issue of yours to throw on the heap of bullshit issues you've posted here over the years and forgotten completely about 5 minutes later.
You suck dude. You're invisible now.
People don't even hate your kind anymore. We don't even see you anymore.
You no longer even exist in our world.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Fury Erupts at NYT as Mental Decline Visibly Worsens
As Trump’s rage at the paper of record reveals too much, the author of a piece on Trump as a “lame duck dictator” explains how devastating it is for him that his carefully cultivated illusion of strength is collapsing.
President Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline. Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of Trump, but we think it gets at something deeper. Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled, floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the Public Notice Substack, has a good new piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a “lame duck dictator.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/203765/transcript-trump-fury-erupts-ny
t-mental-decline-visibly-worsens
Sargent: So the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he’s traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he’s seen in public less often. There’s this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled. He comes to the Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond. David, what did you make of this piece?
Lurie: Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia. But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed, because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide. It’s devastating precisely because it was so factual. The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it, as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre—I think historically bizarre—moment when a pharmaceutical executive collapsed next to Trump and he—in a state of bewilderment mixed with the apparent desire to remain the center of attention—stood up from his chair and then stared into the void. So it’s a devastating piece, and it’s devastating because of its factuality, in my view.
Sargent: Well, I think you raise a really important point in saying that it, if anything, danced around the elephant in the room, which is that he is in a state of serious mental decline, as well. We can all see it. It’s apparent to everybody at all times. He posted a long Truth Social rant, in which he said, “The creeps at the failing New York Times are at it again.” He claimed that he won in 2024 by a landslide, that he settled eight wars, that our economy is great, that he has his highest poll numbers ever. He even called the Times’ Katie Rogers ugly on the inside and out. Now, David, on the substance, all of that is bullshit. He won the narrowest victory in recent memory. He hasn’t settled anything close to eight wars. Our economy is in rough shape, and his polling has hit a new low. But there’s a real hit-dog quality to the lying here. Don’t you think, David?
Lurie: Well, on the one hand, it’s his greatest hits. But on the other hand, people are not imagining that Trump is becoming more out of control, that he’s becoming more misogynistic, that he lacks impulse control, which causes his natural meanness and bullying tendencies to come out.
Sargent: I want to bring in something Fox News did here because it’s extraordinary. There was a recent Fox poll, which had Trump’s approval on the economy at 38 percent to 61 percent disapproval, Trump’s approval on tariffs at 35 to 63, and his approval on health care at 34 to 64. Absolutely terrible numbers in the 30s
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Fury Erupts at NYT as Mental Decline Visibly Worsens
As Trump’s rage at the paper of record reveals too much, the author of a piece on Trump as a “lame duck dictator” explains how devastating it is for him that his carefully cultivated illusion of strength is collapsing.
President Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline. Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of Trump, but we think it gets at something deeper. Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled, floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the Public Notice Substack, has a good new piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a “lame duck dictator.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/203765/transcript-trump-fury-erupts-ny
t-mental-decline-visibly-worsens
Sargent: So the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he’s traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he’s seen in public less often. There’s this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled. He comes to the Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond. David, what did you make of this piece?
Lurie: Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia. But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed, because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide. It’s devastating precisely because it was so factual. The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it, as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre—I think historically bizarre—moment when a pharmaceutical executive collapsed next to Trump and he—in a state of bewilderment mixed with the apparent desire to remain the center of attention—stood up from his chair and then stared into the void. So it’s a devastating piece, and it’s devastating because of its factuality, in my view.
Sargent: Well, I think you raise a really important point in saying that it, if anything, danced around the elephant in the room, which is that he is in a state of serious mental decline, as well. We can all see it. It’s apparent to everybody at all times. He posted a long Truth Social rant, in which he said, “The creeps at the failing New York Times are at it again.” He claimed that he won in 2024 by a landslide, that he settled eight wars, that our economy is great, that he has his highest poll numbers ever. He even called the Times’ Katie Rogers ugly on the inside and out. Now, David, on the substance, all of that is bullshit. He won the narrowest victory in recent memory. He hasn’t settled anything close to eight wars. Our economy is in rough shape, and his polling has hit a new low. But there’s a real hit-dog quality to the lying here. Don’t you think, David?
Lurie: Well, on the one hand, it’s his greatest hits. But on the other hand, people are not imagining that Trump is becoming more out of control, that he’s becoming more misogynistic, that he lacks impulse control, which causes his natural meanness and bullying tendencies to come out.
Sargent: I want to bring in something Fox News did here because it’s extraordinary. There was a recent Fox poll, which had Trump’s approval on the economy at 38 percent to 61 percent disapproval, Trump’s approval on tariffs at 35 to 63, and his approval on health care at 34 to 6
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
The thing about Trump as I see it, is that it shows those here who support Trump to be hypocrites of the umpteenth degree.
You look like the dumbest person in the world saying shit like this.
This is why you need to look at threads of shit you've said in the past when I repost them.
You are a hypocrite to the core, buddy.
Nobody gives a single fuck what you think about them. Take your opinions and shove them up your ass before I do it for you again.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing
Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.
"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."
Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."
___________________
Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice
Summary of Governor Gavin C. Newsom’s Advanced Imaging Results
Physician to the Governor
State of California
Memorandum
December 1, 2025
To The Media
From Dr. Dolittle, MD., PhD., Governor’s Physician, Chief of Peak Human Performance
For Immediate Release
As part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s annual physical, we conducted advanced imaging of his cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and neurological health. I’m pleased to report that nothing about the Governor’s health is merely normal. Governor Newsom remains the healthiest human currently alive or recorded in medical history.
His cardiovascular scans are the best we’ve ever recorded. His arteries were described as shimmering, and his resting heart rate was so steady the EKG machine asked if he was meditating or just naturally enlightened.
His bone density is exceptional. A radiologist briefly wondered if we’d scanned a redwood, and his brain imaging showed no issues other than an unusually active region associated with intelligence, multitasking, and being wildly productive before sunrise.
While we do not typically comment on the health of other elected officials, we are aware of a letter released today from the White House claiming that President Trump is in excellent health. We simply note that Governor Newsom completes full workdays without falling asleep in meetings, does not require executive time to lie down and watch TV during work hours, and is able to stand upright without looking like the leaning Tower of Pisa.
If a side by side health chart were released, we recommend redacting it for the President’s emotional well being.
Governor Newsom remains the healthiest person alive and ever to live. Please direct follow up questions to my office.
Respectfully,
Dr. Dolittle
Physician to the Governor
California Department of Peak Excellence
Help this information get to more voters. A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to Democracy.—Thomas Jefferson
https://www.facebook.com/voteinorout/posts/governor-newsom-press-offic
egovpressofficesummary-of-governor-gavin-c-newsoms-ad/1485572413570927/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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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
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing
Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.
"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."
Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."
___________________
Wow, where did it go? Did they eventually find his brain?
too funny...
T
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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
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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
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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
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Eggs, Lies and Gasoline
The unbearable lightweightness of being Kevin Hassett
By Paul Krugman | Dec 04, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/eggs-gas-and-lies
Last Sunday Kevin Hassett — chair of the National Economic Council, effectively the Trump administration’s chief economist — was interviewed by Nancy Cordes for CBS’s Face the Nation. Most observers expect Hassett to be appointed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Prediction markets give him a virtual lock.
So CBS was probably hoping that he would say something newsworthy. He didn’t.
But he did, in just a few sentences, make it clear that he is absolutely unqualified — intellectually and morally — to be Fed chair. And the fact that nobody took notice, that his ignorance and mendacity were accepted as par for the course, demonstrated just how far our standards for public service have been degraded.
Here’s the exchange that caught my eye:
NANCY CORDES: What’s your advice to holiday shoppers who don’t want to spend more this year than they did last year, or can’t afford to spend more?
HASSETT: Right. Well, as you know, it depends on what you’re looking at. Like egg prices are down. Gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon in a lot of places, mortgage rates are down—
NANCY CORDES: --you mean below- gas prices on average are still at $3 a gallon.
HASSETT: Yeah that’s right for a few states they got below two.
Given the timidity of legacy media these days, Trump officials need to be really out there to get fact-checked in real time. But Cordes was right: average national gas prices are around $3 a gallon. And contra Hassett, there are no states in which gas prices are below $2, or even close:
Was Hassett lying, or just unaware of basic facts? Neither is what you want to see in a man who may soon be overseeing monetary policy.
Furthermore, if you’re trying to assess economic policy, it’s hard to come up with worse indicators than the prices of eggs and gasoline. Egg prices fluctuate wildly, not in response to policy changes, but because of the coming and going of bird flu. Gasoline prices mainly reflect the global price of crude oil, a price on which U.S. policy has at most a marginal influence.
So what are we to make of Hassett boasting about prices he should be ignoring if he becomes Fed chair?
Look, I’m not naïve. I understand that when you work for the president — any president — you’re expected to make the best case you honestly can for his policies. But “honestly” is the key word. Sycophancy toward a president who refuses to acknowledge reality, who insists that affordability is a “con job,” crosses that line.
It’s especially important that public officials not tarnish their reputations if they’re going to be moving on to jobs that are supposed to be apolitical — jobs like chairing the Federal Reserve.
The truth is that if Hassett becomes Fed chair, he’s likely to face some very hard choices. How will the Fed deal with the conundrum of weak labor markets combined with stubbornly elevated inflation? How will it respond to soaring electricity prices? If AI is a bubble, what will the Fed do when it bursts? If geopolitical conflict erupts, disrupting supply chains, how will the Fed react?
And the next Fed chair won’t just have to deal with these hard choices. He’ll have to build consensus among his colleagues. For crucial decisions about interest rates aren’t made by the chair, they’re made by committee.
To lead the Fed, then, requires both good judgment and gravitas. For the past two decades we’ve been blessed with chairs who possessed both. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen were both highly regarded researchers who were able to combine intellectual excellence with strong management skills and a firm grasp on real-world concerns. Jerome Powell came from the world of
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Condemning Millions for One Man’s Crime
By George Packer | December 3, 2025, 10:13 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/trump-refugee-collective-pun
ishment/685115/
Most of us are lucky enough to avoid any direct encounter with the true nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. But over time, abstract nouns such as authoritarianism and xenophobia lose their hard edges with too much use. It can take some personal experience to bring home what the Trump administration is doing to human lives and values.
The solitary Afghan man who allegedly shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House last week, killing a 20-year-old woman and critically wounding a 24-year-old man, gave the president exactly the pretext he needed to crush the hopes of desperate people here and around the world. Trump started with Afghans, canceling all U.S. visas issued to Afghans abroad and barring visa holders from entering the country, including men and women who aided the 20-year American war effort in Afghanistan. He halted asylum hearings in the U.S. for all migrants; announced that green cards issued to migrants from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, would be reviewed; and promised to examine every asylum case approved under the previous administration. He wrote that any foreign-born resident of the U.S. found to be “incapable of loving our Country” or “non-compatible with Western Civilization” would be deported.
This broad assault against the right of refuge is being staged on a heap of lies. Trump suggested that he would never have allowed the alleged gunman—who had served in a CIA-trained unit during the war—and others like him into the country; in fact Trump criticized President Joe Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind after the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the alleged gunman was granted U.S. asylum in April, under Trump. He said that Afghans were allowed into the U.S. “unvetted,” when they’ve been put through security screenings at every stage, from the original entry to the request for asylum and green cards. The claim by Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, that Afghanistan is now safe enough for her department to send Afghan refugees back there is a lie.
The argument that federal troops are needed in U.S. cities to end a nonexistent crime wave created by refugees and other migrants is a lie, as is the administration’s insistence that national security requires mass deportation. Trump himself has undermined that security far more by purging the FBI of agents deemed disloyal, cutting millions of dollars from counter-terrororism, and diverting thousands of federal law-enforcement officers to the dirty business of rounding up men in Home Depot parking lots and arresting married couples who have shown up to a green-card hearing. “If they are correct in characterizing the shooting as a terrorist attack,” Becca Heller, the founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me, “how come no one is talking about the intelligence failure that allowed a terrorist attack against U.S. troops on U.S. soil?”
All of these lies are built on a deeper one. Stephen Miller, the ideologue behind the foreigners-out policy, told it over the weekend in a social-media post: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
If it were true that those fleeing horrifying violence are bound to inflict the same oppression on others, Miller might well have added: Just as Jews imported here from postwar Europe brought the industrial slaughter of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen with them and inflicted it on their innocent American neighbors in Scarsdale. Just as South Vietnamese who managed to flee the victorious North terrorized the peaceful streets of Galveston with civil war and torture. Just as multiple generations of Iranians and
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This Is How Venezuela Becomes A Quagmire Like Iraq
U.S. 'decapitation' campaigns are rarely swift or clean
By Paul Iddon | Dec 02, 2025
https://www.trenchart.us/p/venezuela-could-become-an-iraq-style
As the months-long standoff between the United States and Venezuela intensifies, many speculate that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump may opt for a decapitation strike against Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro’s government. If Saddam Hussein’s Iraq serves as any precedent, a “clean” strike against the leadership in Caracas may not succeed—or avert wider war.
Trump and Maduro spoke by phone a week ago. According to sources cited by The Miami Herald, Trump offered Maduro and his family guaranteed safe passage if he agreed to resign immediately. The Venezuelan president’s public appearance a few days later, Nov. 30, following speculation that he had fled, confirms he hasn’t taken Trump up on this alleged offer. Venezuela, Maduro chanted, is “indestructible, untouchable, unbeatable.”
Over the last few months, the U.S. military has built up substantial naval and air power and deployed 15,000 troops in the Caribbean. They have destroyed several small boats allegedly smuggling drugs on dubious legal grounds. On Nov. 27, Trump said the U.S. military would counter this alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking “by land” and “very soon.” On Nov. 29, he declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety.” When asked on Nov. 30 if that meant imminent U.S. strikes on Venezuela, he vaguely answered, “Don’t read anything into it.”
Several prominent media outlets and think tanks have already highlighted Trump’s potential options for an escalated military campaign against Venezuela. These include decapitation strikes targeting Maduro’s government and military. Despite America’s overwhelming military superiority against the South American nation, such a move could prove complicated, as would mounting an effective coup. The 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq may offer some important lessons.
As War on the Rocks has already noted, Maduro has already been “coup-proofing” his regime over the past decade, “by building overlapping structures that can survive leadership decapitation.” Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party did the same shortly after taking power in 1968. Therefore, American hopes for an internal coup by the Iraqi military following the 1991 Persian Gulf War were fantastical. CIA efforts to depose Hussein later in the 1990s also ended in abysmal failures.
When the United States made the fateful decision to invade Iraq, it found that decapitating the Iraqi regime by military force wasn’t straightforward either.
As the U.S. amassed ground forces to invade in March 2003, then-president George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq. They refused. As that ultimatum expired, Washington received intelligence regarding the whereabouts of the Iraqi dictator and his two notorious sons. All three Husseins were apparently meeting in a bunker at the Dora Farms complex outside Baghdad. It was too good a potential opportunity to miss: eliminating the Iraqi dictator in a relatively “clean” strike in the war’s crucial opening salvo.
Shortly after the 48-hour deadline expired, on Mar. 19, 2003, two Lockheed F-117 stealth fighters flew toward Dora Farms. Each carried two 2,000-pound EGBU-27 bombs. It marked the combat debut of the EGBU-27, guided by GPS in addition to a laser seeker system and an inertial navigation unit. The F-117s dropped their bombs where the U.S. guessed the bunker was most likely located. A salvo of 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from naval destroyers and submarines in the Persian Gulf quickly followed the F-117s’ air strike.
The attack intentionally spared the primary residence at Dora Farms, where U.S. intelligence deemed there was a greater risk of killing women and children. Additionally, military lawyers rejected a follow-up Tomahawk bombardment on the site after deeming the risk of civilian casualties and killing of medical staff unacceptably high. Neither Hu
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Murderers claim it is perfectly legal to murder criminals instead of arresting them.
Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan said, “If there is intelligence to 'absolutely confirm' this, the Congress is ready to receive it.”
By Nick Turse | December 4, 2025, 10:41 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/boat-strike-venezuela-war-departme
nt-pete-hegseth-kingsley-wilson-chrissy-houlahan/
After Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson declared the War Department was certain about the identities of supposed drug smugglers killed in boat strikes, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., had some questions about the intelligence. When Houlahan called on Wilson to appear before Congress, however, the outspoken and controversial spokesperson suddenly went silent.
“I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Wilson said on Tuesday during a pseudo Pentagon press briefing where attendance was limited to media that have agreed to limits on the scope of their reporting.
Houlahan expressed her doubts and demanded proof.
“If there is intelligence that ‘absolutely confirms’ this — present it. Come before the House or Senate Intelligence committees and let Congress provide the proper oversight and checks and balances the American people deserve,” said Houlahan, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Put the whispers and doubts to rest once and for all. If there is intelligence to ‘absolutely confirm’ this, the Congress is ready to receive it. Until we all see it, you can surely understand why we are skeptical.”
Both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which Houlahan serves on, routinely receive classified briefings from the military.
Wilson – who touted a “new era” of working to “keep the American people informed and to ensure transparency” on Tuesday – did not respond to questions or requests for comment from The Intercept about Houlahan’s remarks or appearing before Congress.
In past classified briefings to lawmakers and Congressional staff, the military has admitted that it does not know exactly who it’s killing in the boat strikes, according to seven government officials who have spoken with The Intercept.
Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.
“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate,” she added, using shorthand for “designated terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration’s term for the secret list of groups with whom it claims to be at war.
Twenty-One Attacks
The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September and killing at least 83 civilians. It has not conducted a strike on a vessel since November 15.
Since the strikes began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
The summary executions mark a major departure from typical practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, where law enforcement agencies arrest suspected drug smugglers.
A double-tap strike during the initial September 2 attack — where the U.S. hit an incapacitated boat for a second time, killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — added a second la
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Trump Is Trying to Legalize Corruption by Abusing His Pardon Power
The president has issued over 2,000 pardons since taking office, many to loyalists convicted of serious crimes
By John Avlon | December 4, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-pardo
n-abuses-legalize-corruption-1235477609/
You’ve probably heard that cosplay Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from Venezuela in extra-judicial killings that give new meaning to the phrase “war on drugs.”
But you might not have heard that his boss just pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for abusing his office by leading what prosecutors called “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
If the cognitive dissonance gives you whiplash, that’s because you’re paying attention.
For a guy who talks a lot about how much he hates drugs — and is now floating it as a pretext for knocking off the odious Maduro regime — Trump has developed a strange habit of giving pardons to drug dealers. A day after his latest inauguration, Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road website, which was notorious as a dark web drug den. This was followed by the strange commutation for the founder of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who flooded the Windy City with cocaine.
This weirdness is part of a wider pattern. Because Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year — 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term.
The presidential pardon is written into the Constitution, but Trump is not aiming for mercy or addressing objective injustices, as the founders intended.
He is abusing the power to reward partisan political allies, enabling pay-for-pardon schemes, and attempting to decriminalize corruption.
Right out of the gate, Trump offered pardons to all the January 6 MAGA minions who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This list included violent individuals who assaulted police officers and those with criminal records. Last month, he added blanket pardons for the white-collar instigators and fake electors who advanced those election lies — including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. The rule of law doesn’t apply to Trump loyalists.
A boatload of connected big businessmen have also been getting presidential pardons. A former nursing home executive who was set to report to prison for tax crimes found himself off the hook after his mother attended a $1 million fundraiser for Trump that promised face-to-face access with the president. As The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reported, the curiously timed pardon spared Paul Walczak from “having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the rich.’”
The judge spoke too soon. There are get-out-of-jail-free cards available to Trump supporters, for the right price.
The CEO of the failed EV Truck company Nikola, a Utah billionaire named Trevor Milton, received a full pardon after being convicted for defrauding investors. It was surely just a coincidence that Trevor Milton and his wife gave almost a million dollars each to a Trump-backing Super PAC less than a month before the 2024 election. That’s expensive but pardons are priceless.
More notorious is the case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost the Trump family’s crypto venture, which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year … far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Yes he is. States need to charge him so the supreme court can't protect him from going to jail.
T
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Quote:
Top Obama DEA Official Charged With Laundering Money For Mexican Drug Cartel
Friday, Dec 05, 2025 - 03:50 PM
A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official appointed as deputy chief of the Office of Financial Operations during the Obama administration - and who still holds a security clearance - was indicted on Friday on charges of agreeing to launder $12 million for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) - which was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February of this year.
Paul Campo, who oversaw the FBI's money laundering operations and resigned in January 2016 ahead of Trump's inauguration, laundered around $750,000 for the cartel by converting cash into cryptocurrency, and agreed to launder far more - totaling over $12 million, according to the indictment.
Campo's hoome was raided by federal agents on Thursday.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-obama-dea-official-charged-lau
ndering-money-mexican-drug-cartel
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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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
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Quote:
"Widespread Misconduct": Trump Admin Orders All Beneficiaries Of Nation's Largest DEI Program To Surrender Financial Records
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/widespread-misconduct-trump-admin-
orders-all-beneficiaries-nations-largest-dei-program
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters," said Donald Trump. And so he did:
Pentagon Pete’s Claim Drug Boat Was Headed to U.S. Blows Up
By William Vaillancourt | Updated Dec 6, 2025
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-hegseths-claim-drug-boat-was-headed
-to-us-blows-up/
The Navy admiral who oversaw lethal strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in September told lawmakers that the vessel was not headed to the U.S., contradicting claims made by President Donald Trump.
Frank Bradley said in a Thursday briefing that the boat was heading to transfer drugs to a larger boat, which was bound for Suriname, CNN reported Friday, citing two sources with direct knowledge of his comments. According to the report, Bradley said the drugs could have ultimately ended up bound for the U.S. from Suriname, which warranted striking the boat.
Yet drug trafficking routes that go through Suriname are mainly for European markets, according to U.S. drug enforcement officials.
In a Truth Social post shortly after the strike, Trump, 79, wrote: “The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”
All 11 passengers were killed, including two survivors of the initial strike who were clinging to the wreckage for more than 40 minutes, The Atlantic reported. Sources told CNN that Bradley told lawmakers that the two individuals were waving at the air after the first strike, meaning they could have been surrendering.
Killing shipwrecked individuals who are surrendering is widely considered a war crime.
“The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military,” Democratic Reps. Jim Himes and Adam Smith said in a statement Thursday after Bradley’s briefing.
“Regardless of what one believes about the legal underpinnings of these operations, and we have been clear we believe they are highly questionable, this was wrong.”
Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, however, called them “righteous strikes.”
“These are narco-terrorists who are trafficking drugs that are destined for the United States to kill thousands of Arkansans and millions of Americans,” Cotton claimed. “I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over, so they could stay in the fight.”
The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
21 States Are At Risk Of Losing SNAP Funding Amid Fraud Investigation
Saturday, Dec 06, 2025 - 02:30 PM
Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,
The federal government said it would withhold Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program (SNAP) funds for states that do not report user data.
The news came from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins earlier this week, following months of requests and investigations into instances of fraud within the program.
Here’s what to know about the change to the nutrition program.
The Announcement
Rollins made the announcement on Dec. 2 during a White House cabinet meeting, saying that states that have not complied with the federal request have only a few days to fix the issue.
The USDA secretary said the administration “has begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states” next week ”until they comply.“
According to Rollins, 29 Republican-leaning states have already provided SNAP data to her department. However, 21 ”blue states continue to say no” to the federal request.
The federal response to the lack of cooperation comes months after an early May request by the administering department, calling on states to hand over data detailing how and to whom the taxpayer funds are distributed.
The USDA noted that the intent behind the request was to ensure that no fraud or abuse existed in the program, frequently referenced as food stamps.
“President Trump is rightfully requiring the federal government to have access to all programs it funds,” said Rollins, “and SNAP is no exception. For years, this program has been on autopilot, with no USDA insight into real-time data. The Department is focused on appropriate and lawful participation in SNAP, and today’s request is one of many steps to ensure SNAP is preserved for only those eligible.”
Of the 28 states that have sent the data, all except for North Carolina have Republican governors.
Billions at Stake
SNAP costs federal taxpayers around $100 billion per year, $94 billion of which goes to actual food benefits, and the rest is spent on administrative costs.
Administrative costs are currently shared by federal and state governments, with states covering roughly half of SNAP’s administrative expenses. That share is set to shrink soon, as the federal government plans to reduce the state contribution to 25 percent.
How much each state receives varies, as does the portion of the fund that goes to administrative costs. The state of California alone received more than $1.2 billion for SNAP administration fees, which was around 10 percent of it’s total SNAP funding allocation.
Florida received $84 million for administration alone, which was just over 1 percent of it’s total SNAP funding. However, Wyoming received less than $9 million for administration fees, which was 12 percent of its SNAP dollars received.
This means that in addition to the loss of nutrition support funding, billions that go to state administration fees will be lost for those states that refuse transparency requests from the Trump administration.
The administration will likely face legal hiccups, as the attorneys general from 21 states have already been the subject of a lawsuit over concerns that the states allegedly illegally blocked the authorized food aid to certain legal immigrants.
Current Fraud
Since the beginning of the USDA information gathering in May, there have been more than 120 individuals arrested for food stamp fraud, according to the agency’s report last month.
The USDA worked with the Office of the Inspector General, which has resulted in 63 convictions and fines and fees exceeding $16.5 million.
This is due to data from 29 states alone, which found that more than 180,000 deceased individuals were receiving food stamps, and another 500,000 people were getting twice as much as they should have been.
“We believe there’s even more fraud and abuse,” Rollins said following news of the fraud discovery.
She later added that “we
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Per Trump, Europe is the enemy of freedom, while Russia is America's newest friend
December 7, 2025 02:57 pm GMT
The Kremlin has welcomed Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy document and claimed it is “largely consistent with our vision”.
The US president unveiled a new framework for his administration’s foreign policy and defence priorities on Friday, at a time when many in Europe hold wider concerns that Washington has a pro-Russia bias.
The NSS largely ignores the threat Russia poses to the West and instead concentrates a lot of its content on targeting America’s allies in Europe.
It claims economic decline in the continent is “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” – while also claiming the EU’s activities “undermine political liberty and sovereignty”.
Much more at https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russias-reaction-to-trumps-new-
national-security-strategy-is-deeply-worrying_uk_69358773e4b0e3887427ce33
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Per Trump, Europe is the enemy of freedom, while Russia is America's newest friend
Damn straight!
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Instrad of reading "about" the new National Security Strategy, why not read the actual thing?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Se
curity-Strategy.pdf
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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But why do that when you can just keep your brain shut down and listen to Rachel Maddow tell you what to think?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Aren't you supposed to be dead, 6ixStringJoker?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
But why do that when you can just keep your brain shut down and listen to Rachel Maddow tell you what to think?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
"Trump's claiming he has his highest poll numbers ever which means it's not just books he can't read. Trump's approval rating according to every major poll is the lowest since we flushed him out of office the first time. His negative rating is now at 60%. There are gas station bathrooms on Yelp with higher approval ratings than Donald Trump."
- Jimmy Kimmel
The fascist playbook clearly states that facts don't matter and if you keep repeating the lies eventually enough people will believe them. He's been the perfect Republican candidate because he can shamelessly lie about anything and will get aggressively agitated and start making threats when confronted with the truth.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Instrad?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instrad of reading . . .
GOP says it'll take a lot more than eyewitness testimony, photos, DNA, toxicology reports, victim statements, wire transfers, emails, flight manifests, phone records, surveillance logs, bank records, audio, video, & total confessions for them to believe Trump's Epstein ties were more than coincidental.
Has anyone tried beating a confession out of him? Would that work?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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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
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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
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instrad of reading . . .
SECOND:
Instrad?
GOP says it'll take a lot more than eyewitness testimony, photos, DNA, toxicology reports, victim statements, wire transfers, emails, flight manifests, phone records, surveillance logs, bank records, audio, video, & total confessions for them to believe Trump's Epstein ties were more than coincidental.
Yes, Trump's Epstein ties were "more than coincidental“. But were they CRIMINAL? So far, there's no evidence that Trump was anything more than a creepy peeping Tom with young teens.
This is you just posting bullcrap. TRUMP! RUSSIA! COLLUSION! all over again.
There most be something probative in that pile of info, right?
So if you've got it, post it.
If not STFU.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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FROM THE NEW SECURITY STRATEGY
*****
I. Introduction – What Is American Strategy?
1. How American “Strategy” Went Astray
To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and
most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent,
focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all
Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.
A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection
between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired
and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired
outcomes.
A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy.
The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy.
American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.
After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced
themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the
best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only
if their activities directly threaten our interests.
Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global
burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.
They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-
regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic,
intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and
destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very
middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military
preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their
defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And
they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of
which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism
that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did
our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they
undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our
nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.
. . .
II. What Should the United States Want?
1. What Do We Want Overall?
First and foremost, we want the continued survival and safety of the United States
as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given
natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests.
We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of
life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage,
predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and
influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.
We want full control over our borders, over our immigration system, and over
transportation networks through which people come into our country—legally and
illegally. We want a world in which migration is not merely “orderly” but one in
which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing
population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit.
We want a resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters,
resist and thwart foreign threats, and prevent or mitigate any events that m
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instrad of reading . . .
SECOND:
Instrad?
GOP says it'll take a lot more than eyewitness testimony, photos, DNA, toxicology reports, victim statements, wire transfers, emails, flight manifests, phone records, surveillance logs, bank records, audio, video, & total confessions for them to believe Trump's Epstein ties were more than coincidental.
Yes, Trump's Epstein ties were "more than coincidental“. But were they CRIMINAL? So far, there's no evidence that Trump was anything more than a creepy peeping Tom with young teens.
This is you just posting bullcrap. TRUMP! RUSSIA! COLLUSION! all over again.
There most be something probative in that pile of info, right?
So if you've got it, post it.
If not STFU.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Absolute worst case scenario, Trump's earlier days looked like a white version of any Rap video made in the last 25 years. Big money and pretty girls everywhere you looked.
Where do you think they got the idea? From Trump and from Hugh Heffner.
Everybody knows that sex sells. Even the white college "educated" liberals. They know it the most, and they hate it because they're all fat and nasty.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:NOTHING is criminal. I learned that in a high school class on Constitutional law that nothing is unlawful until a court says it is. But, and this is a very big but, because the Supreme Court has ruled incorrectly many times, the courts are not a sufficient guide for what is right and wrong. See, for example, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857).
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yes, Trump's Epstein ties were "more than coincidental“. But were they CRIMINAL? So far, there's no evidence that Trump was anything more than a creepy peeping Tom with young teens.
This is you just posting bullcrap. TRUMP! RUSSIA! COLLUSION! all over again.
Often, there is a minority on the court that ruled the opposite of the Supreme Court justices in the majority, who were absolutely determined to do wrong.
The Worst Supreme Court Decisions of All Time
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/supreme-court/13-worst-supreme-cour
t-decisions-of-all-time/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Instrad?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instrad of reading . . .
GOP says it'll take a lot more than eyewitness testimony, photos, DNA, toxicology reports, victim statements, wire transfers, emails, flight manifests, phone records, surveillance logs, bank records, audio, video, & total confessions for them to believe Trump's Epstein ties were more than coincidental.
Yes, Trump's Epstein ties were "more than coincidental“. But were they CRIMINAL? So far, there's no evidence that Trump was anything more than a creepy peeping Tom with young teens.
This is you just posting bullcrap. TRUMP! RUSSIA! COLLUSION! all over again.
NOTHING is criminal. I learned that in a high school class on Constitutional law that nothing is unlawful until a court says it is. But, and this is a very big but, because the Supreme Court has ruled incorrectly many times, the courts are not a sufficient guide for what is right and wrong. See, for example, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857).
Often, there is a minority on the court that ruled the opposite of the Supreme Court justices in the majority, who were absolutely determined to do wrong.
The Worst Supreme Court Decisions of All Time
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/supreme-court/13-worst-supreme-cour
t-decisions-of-all-time/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Careful what you wish for.
There's a whole lot of things that can be reversed.
You're not going to like a lot of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult as Spin on Mental State Flies Off Rails
As Karoline Leavitt’s defense of Trump morphs into bizarre praise for his racism toward Somalis, a former White House official explains how the saga unmasks the deeper depravities consuming Trumpworld.
By Greg Sargent | December 8, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/204077/trump-press-sec-goes-full-cult-
spin-mental-state-flies-off-rails
Under persistent questioning about President Trump’s unfitness for office at his latest Cabinet meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered one of the ugliest defenses we’ve ever seen. She singled out Trump’s vile racist attack on Somalis, and praised it as an “epic moment” that put an “exclamation point” on that meeting “for the whole world to see.” Never mind that Trump appeared to fall asleep there, and in that rant about Somalis, called them “garbage” who “contribute nothing” and suggested he wants them all out of our country, even though many are American citizens. We talked to Vedant Patel, a former State Department and White House official. We discuss what it means that Leavitt went full cult in giving White House sanction to Trump’s ugly bigotry, why the targeting of Somalis is so ghoulish, and what Trump really intends when he threatens denaturalization and “remigration,” as he is now doing.
Listen to this episode here.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-blast-with-greg-sargen
t/id1728152109
https://open.spotify.com/show/39bB7ap7275oJsA1b0BEO4
A transcript is here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/204093/transcript-trump-press-sec-goes
-full-cult-defending-new-racist-tirade
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump has now set his sights on Somali immigrants. He’s been ranting furiously about them, calling them garbage, and saying he wants them all to get out of our country. And he’s even talking about stripping citizenship from immigrants in order to remove them. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reacted to this with obsequious praise, calling it “epic.” We thought this was a telling moment. The Trump cult has gotten so out of control that his propagandists now go out of their way to deliberately highlight his most racist and disgusting moments, and pump those up into moments of heroism and triumph. Meanwhile, almost no Republicans had anything critical to say about any of this. In fact, JD Vance pounded the table in agreement with Trump on Somalis. How far is this madness going to get? Today we’re talking about all this with Vedant Patel, a former State Department official who worked on immigration issues under Joe Biden. Vedant, good to have you on, man.
Vedant Patel: Really good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s quickly run through what Trump’s been saying about Somalis. He said, “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country.” He said, “Your country stinks.” He said, “We’re taking garbage into our country.” Meaning Somalis. He attacked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as garbage, in fact. Vedant, that is naked bigotry coming straight from the president of the United States. Now, we’ve heard versions of this for years, but it almost seems like a new level of fury and hysteria. What’s your response to all this?
Patel: I want to say that I wish I were surprised, but truly, Greg, I mean, this is a playbook out of the president’s first administration. I mean, I think you recall that there was a really poignant moment in which President Trump was saying that he didn’t want immigrants from a certain, fill-in-the-blanks, swear word–types of countries. This is the exact playbook that we’ve seen before of dividing this country, targeting immigrant communities. It’s despicable.
Sargent: So just to clarify what Vedant’s talking about there is Trump’s infamous comment back during his first term that he hates people from “shithole countries,” something to that effect. I would poi
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Quote:You know what is irreversible? Death. That is why wars are fought. When your evil opposition refuses to be reasonable, be it the Confederates or the Nazis or the Russians, you stop talking and start killing them until they see reason.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Careful what you wish for.
There's a whole lot of things that can be reversed.
You're not going to like a lot of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Has Granted Clemency To About 100 People Accused Of Drug-Related Crimes Despite Anti-Narco Rhetoric: Report
The most high-profile people who received clemency are Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez
Published Dec 08 2025, 8:41 AM EST
https://www.latintimes.com/trump-has-granted-clemency-about-100-people
-accused-drug-related-crimes-despite-anti-narco-592326
President Donald Trump has granted clemency to about 100 people accused of drug-related crimes despite his anti-drug rhetoric, which has justified a large military buildup in the Caribbean and tens of strikes against alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, according to a new report.
The Washington Post noted that the most high-profile people who received clemency are Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, as well as Baltimore drug kingpin Garnett Gilbert Smith.
The contrasting actions, the outlet added, have given ammunition to Democrats, who point at the discrepancy to question Trump. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine described the scenario last week on the floor. "How does this protect Americans from the flow of narcotics entering our country?" he said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the claims, saying "President Trump has been quite clear in his defense of the United States homeland, to stop these illegal narcotics from coming to our borders, whether that's by land or by sea, and he's also made it quite clear that he wants to correct the wrongs of the weaponized Justice Department under the previous administration."
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, on her end, told the outlet that the "only pardons anyone should be critical of are from President Autopen, who pardoned and commuted sentences of violent criminals including child killers and mass murderers — and that's not to mention the proactive pardons he 'signed' for his family members like Hunter on his way out the door."
The pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernandez was also criticized by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who said on Sunday that "those dying as a result of missile strikes are poor fishermen, some of whom do short cocaine trips for narcos out of need," but those "who get pardon are former presidents with strong ties with narco terrorism in Honduras and Colombia."
"The former, some, travel with kilos. The latter with hundreds of tons. The U.S. is getting its allies wrong. It can't be allied with narcos," Petro said.
He was making reference to Hernandez, who Trump defended after pardoning. Speaking to press aboard the Air Force One, Trump was asked why he would "pardon a notorious drug trafficker." "The people of Honduras really thought he was set up. He was the president of the country and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. They said it was a Biden administration setup and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them," Trump claimed last week.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
DC Police Chief Resigns As 'Massive Scandal' Over Crime Stats Heats Up
Monday, Dec 08, 2025 - 01:40 PM
Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Monday that Police Chief Pamela A. Smith will be stepping down, three months after we reported that the DOJ was investigating a "massive scandal" over manipulated crime data.
Smith, who also doesn't know what the term "chain of command" means, is out for unknown reasons - however she told Fox 5 that she resigned to spend more time with her family.
"After 28 years in law enforcement, I have been going nonstop," she said.
...
Crime Data Scandal
The DC Police are also under investigation in a pair of federal probes into alleged manipulation of crime statistics. In early September, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller revealed an ongoing Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into whether Washington D.C. officials manipulated crime statistics is in the process of uncovering a “massive scandal."
Miller told reporters that when the results of the investigation are finally that, “It will stun you,” adding, “Even though D.C. had the worst crime in America–honestly measured–it dramatically understated how bad it was.”
Miller said that DOJ investigators have uncovered evidence that crime data was manipulated to the point that some murders and homicides were falsely reported as accidents.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dc-police-chief-resigns-massive-sc
andal-over-crime-stats-heats
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Everybody with half a working brain knows that the only reason crime has been "down" in any blue area and/or state is because they simply stopped arresting criminals and tracking anything at all.
There have been videos of all of it for years and years now, but the idiots on the Left will keep pretending none of those videos exist because the problem itself doesn't exist.
I don't understand how people can be this thoroughly brainwashed. It's not as if they're happy or getting any pleasure out of anything other than getting off on being angry all the time and spreading hate.
That can't really be all it takes, can it?
How can you do everything in your power to ruin yourself and people you pretend to care about if you're not getting immense pleasure to the point of tipping you beyond all reason for more?
Are they really that scared of living in a world where they can't trust their media and/or in a world where there are no "experts" because all of the so-called ones are frauds, perhaps?
Yeah. It is a scary world out there.
For a while there, it wasn't all that scary for most people inside of America though.
But Liberals ruined all of that, and all we can do now is hope to get it back one day.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:AI Overview
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Everybody with half a working brain knows that the only reason crime has been "down" in any blue area and/or state is because they simply stopped arresting criminals and tracking anything at all.
There have been videos of all of it for years and years now, but the idiots on the Left will keep pretending none of those videos exist because the problem itself doesn't exist.
The claim that crime has decreased in "blue" areas solely because officials stopped arresting criminals and tracking data is false, according to criminologists and crime data analysis. The data shows more complex trends, with crime rates in "red" states generally being higher than in "blue" states.
Analysis of the Claim
Arrests and Crime Tracking: The assertion that "blue" areas have stopped arresting criminals and tracking crime is not supported by evidence. While there was a national decline in overall arrests per officer across the U.S. over the past few decades, this is not a phenomenon exclusive to politically "blue" areas. Law enforcement agencies continue to track and report crime data to federal programs like the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, although the FBI's transition to a new reporting system (NIBRS) has resulted in some incomplete national data temporarily.
Crime Rate Comparisons: Multiple analyses have found that, on average, U.S. states and cities that voted Democrat in recent elections have consistently had lower rates of gun homicides and murder compared to those that voted Republican. For example, in both 2021 and 2022, murder rates in "red" states were approximately 33% higher than in "blue" states. This contradicts the narrative that crime is primarily a "blue" area problem.
Reasons for Crime Trends: Criminologists point to a variety of factors influencing national crime trends, which have seen a general decline in homicides since a peak during the pandemic. These factors include:
Changes in police practices and community relations.
The recovery of local government employment, including social workers and counselors, which support crime prevention efforts.
Gun safety laws (states with stronger laws have lower gun violence rates).
A return to normal routines after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Role of Videos: Viral videos often highlight specific, isolated incidents of crime, which can create a public perception of widespread lawlessness. However, data analysis by non-partisan think tanks and research organizations indicates that these individual incidents, while serious, do not accurately represent the overall, data-driven trends in national crime statistics.
Overall, the data suggests that crime trends are influenced by a complex mix of social, economic, and policy factors, and there is no evidence to support the claim that "blue" areas are artificially lowering their crime rates by failing to make arrests or track data.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Echoes of 1938 in 2025
Trump's Likely Next Step
By Timothy Snyder | Dec 07, 2025
https://snyder.substack.com/p/self-terrorism
In certain ways, the autumn of 2025 in the United States has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany.
The mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s largest coercive policies before the war. That fall, the German police and SS rounded up Jews who lacked German citizenship and dumped them on the Polish side of the German-Polish border. This set off a chain of events which can give us a useful perspective on where we are now. A family was deported; a provoked refugee took revenge; the government organized a pogrom and re-organized its police; the Second World War followed.
The family was the Grynszpans. The father and mother had moved to Germany in 1911 from the Russian Empire. Their children were born in Germany, spoke German, and saw themselves as Germans. The Grynszpans had sent their son Herschel to study in Paris. He faced a series of disappointments in his documentation, including the loss of his citizenship. Denied permanent residence in France in August 1938, he was hiding in an attic to avoid deportation when a postcard from his sister arrived: “everything is finished for us.” Herschel Grynszpan took revenge. On November 7, 1938, he walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. A policy of mass deportation had led to a reaction that, although unpredictable in its details, was not surprising.
In Berlin, Nazis saw an opportunity. Joseph Goebbels invoked a conspiracy and conflated the actions of one person with the responsibility of a group.
Hitler allowed Goebbels to plan a nationwide pogrom: Kristallnacht. On November 9, 1938, the SA and the SS and the Hitler youth, joined by many other Germans, destroyed Jewish businesses, burned Jewish books, desecrated Torah scrolls, and invaded Jewish homes. Some 91 Jews were killed and hundreds died by suicide. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
Nine decades later, no one could know in advance the details of what would happen when the Trump administration made the deportation of the undocumented its basic policy, and deploy the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC, adding the provocation that such places should be seen as “training grounds for our military” and “war zones.”
But it was predictable that there would be some consequence, and now two national guard troops patrolling in Washington have been tragically shot; one has died. The accused is a refugee; a onetime participant in the US war in Afghanistan. Like Grynszpan, he is someone who experienced trauma and dehumanization.
Having fought and killed for a foreign government in his own country, the assassin had reason to expect some sort of shelter after he was evacuated from Afghanistan to the United States. It appears he faced a series of disappointments. Here was his experience, eerily similar to Grynszpan’s, as reported in the New York Times: “The volunteer said it was unclear what exactly triggered the change, but sensed part of it was his frustrations with the uncertainty of America’s immigration process, the volunteer said. His family feared being deported to Afghanistan as his application for a Special Immigrant Visa dragged on.” This is not an excuse for his horrible act. It is a fact that is necessary to understand the overall structure of the moment.
It was foreseeable that Trump will seek to exploit such violence. He announced his intention to target “Third World countries,” blamed all American problems on migrants, and called Somalis “garbage.” Trump has expressed the desire to deport millions of people and to denaturalize -- take away citizenship from -- citizens whose values he disapproves or whom he deems incompatible with “Western civilization.” Life will be made even harder for non-citizens in the United States.
What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps towards creating a centralised national polic
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Don't you have anything better to do, loser?
Nobody wants to hear about your Nazi fantasies.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Did you ever try to understand the Nazis? They were not extraordinary people. They were average. They were Trumptards, except the guy who was exciting them wasn't Trump, who goes on and on about evil foreigners and domestic traitors, feeding his Trumptards fantasies about being surrounded and oppressed.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't you have anything better to do, loser?
Nobody wants to hear about your Nazi fantasies.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Trump Reversing "Humphrey's Executor" Is NOT Priced In
Tuesday, Dec 09, 2025 - 07:00 AM
By Michael Every of Rabobank
There are key central bank decisions this week, starting with the RBA today. However, the market has already priced in their expected outcomes. What it’s failing to price in, though it’s more important, is the stream of political and geopolitical developments in which it operates...
Rather, the US Supreme Court appears ready to overturn decades of precedent to grant Trump the power to fire a swathe of government officials. Reversing ‘Humphrey’s Executor’ will allow him to overcome legal and bureaucratic resistance to the Gramscian* changes he’s introducing to the political economy. That isn’t priced in. Indeed, despite Justice Kavanaugh’s opposition, it could put the Fed in the firing line too, with Governor Cook’s court case in January and a Fed Chair nominee, likely Hassett, promised within weeks. That isn’t priced in either.
Neither is Friday’s US National Security Strategy (NSS) even if for some countries and many markets it implies staggering changes ahead.
It’s America First, starting with “protecting the country and its way of life” and ending with “restoring US spiritual and cultural health”.
Its working principles are a focused definition of national interests; peace through strength; a predisposition to non-interventionism; flexible realism; the primacy of nations; a balance of power; pro-American worker; fairness; and competence and merit.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trump-reversing-humphreys-executor-n
ot-priced
*I had to look this up. Gramsci was an Italian Communist, and neo-Marxist philosopher fiercely opposed to Mussolini and fascism, jailed and died in prison after 11 years.
Unlike Marx, who thought that economies determined society and social relations between the classes, Gramsci thought that the elite maintained social dominance through cultural institutions instead of violence, economic force, and open coercion.
Personally, I don't think this is an either-or question. The ruling class, oligarchs, use all tools at their disposal to maintain their status.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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What they really need to figure out is how to destroy idea of the family unit completely and just grow us in farms like in Brave New World.
Then, just like in that story, everybody who's job it is going to be to break rocks down into smaller rocks is given just enough IQ points to wipe their asses without help and eat without choking themselves.
The "elite"'s problem has always been that there are so many poor people that are smarter than they are, and a few billion more who are at least too smart for their station in life, which leads to depression, misery and civil unrest.
Make everybody too stupid to realize how bad they've got it and most of the problems go away overnight.
Taking the Oligarchs down isn't going to accomplish shit. It's been done before. Quite a few times. And at the end of the day the top 1% are always going to own a majority of everything in the end. It's just the way things go.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Make everybody too stupid to realize how bad they've got it and most of the problems go away overnight.
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’
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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.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, you are a lying sack of shit, as is Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
There hasn't been any cratering on Trump's approval.
How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bullet
in
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Just before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter—a seismic test of presidential power—on Monday morning, Donald Trump himself showed why the case is so dangerous. The president posted a screed about 60 Minutes’ critical coverage of his administration under its new ownership, Paramount, complaining: “Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!” Anyone familiar with Trump’s playbook would understand the implication of his post. Prior to his rant, news broke that Paramount would try to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, muscling out Netflix’s megamerger bid. The Federal Trade Commission has the power to block the Netflix deal and hand Warner Bros. to Paramount on a silver platter. The FTC was designed by Congress to be an independent agency, so Trump’s Truth Social posts should be meaningless. If Slaughter goes the way SCOTUS is signaling, though, Trump will be able to strongarm the agency into doing whatever he wants—including by rewarding censorship of a news program like 60 Minutes or punishing media companies whose journalists question his absolute rule.
The choice for Paramount will be simple: Want the FTC to block Netflix’s bid and then pave the way for your takeover? Don’t worry about antitrust compliance. Just bring your journalists to heel.
Slaughter supplies the blueprint for this very kind of corrupt regulatory retaliation. The case asks whether the president has constitutional authority to fire FTC commissioners, and virtually any other agency leader, in pursuit of absolute control over the executive branch. Congress has given agencies significant independence from the president since the earliest days of the republic in an effort to shield them from political pressure. Today, more than two dozen agencies are insulated from direct presidential control by removal protections. For the last 150 years, Congress has built much of the modern government around this principle. Now Trump wants to destabilize this foundational framework by seizing the power to fire anyone he wants and assert direct control over independent agencies. As expected, on Monday, six Republican-appointed justices signaled that they are eager to let him do so.
Here is a sampling of who will be better off following this legal earthquake: Trump, Republicans loyal to Trump, corporations kowtowing to Trump, billionaires ingratiating themselves to Trump, media moguls flattering Trump, and foreign governments courting Trump.
Here is a partial list of the casualties: Congress, the First Amendment, journalists, whistleblowers, the civil service, unions, and everyday investors. In short: everyone and everything that this Supreme Court deems a hindrance to Trump’s monarchical consolidation of power. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it on Monday: “Under our constitutional design, given the history of the monarchy and the concerns that the Framers had about a president controlling everything,” one might assume that courts should defer to Congress’ decision that the chief executive should not have an iron fist on the administrative state. But the collective will of the people’s representatives is no match for six unelected justices with a trendy political theory they’re itching to superimpose upon the Constitution.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/paramount-netflix-fight-su
preme-court-trump.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Enfeebling of the President
Trump is showing signs that he’s lost the physical stamina to do the job.
By David A. Graham | December 9, 2025, 5:56 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/trump-lost-physical-st
amina/685203/
The president of the United States can expect to face tough questions, but one that ABC’s Rachel Scott asked Monday wasn’t among them. In fact, it was nothing more than a recitation of his own words. “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela,” Scott began. President Donald Trump immediately snapped at Scott: “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news.”
In fact, as Scott reminded him, that’s exactly what he said. “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem,” he said on December 3 in the Oval Office. After Scott pointed that out, Trump shrugged it off, as though he’d simply forgotten. Perhaps this was willful obfuscation. But moments of apparent forgetfulness—whether one calls them senior moments, wandering attention, or spacing out—have been happening a lot recently.
In late October, Trump said he received an MRI. For valid reasons, this has raised questions: MRIs aren’t a routine part of annual physicals, and the president’s most recent physical was way back in April; his doctors’ public disclosures about his medical exams have often been vague but full of puffery; he’s been seen with bruises, makeup, and bandages on his hands, which the White House has attributed to frequent hand shaking and his use of aspirin. Voter concerns about the health and vigor of his predecessor, Joe Biden, were one reason that Biden was forced into a late withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
Rather than quiet these concerns with transparency, however, the Trump administration played coy for weeks. When Trump was asked about the MRI on November 14, he insisted both that he didn’t know what it was about and that it had a great result: “I have no idea what they analyzed,” he told reporters. “But whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” When pressed more recently, he continued to brag that he had “aced” a test designed to assess baseline cognitive function, as though it was an IQ test—a boast that raises more questions than it answers. When the president’s physician eventually released a letter about the procedure, which referred to his October scan only as “advanced imaging,” it was similarly heavy on superlatives and light on detail. (That’s a contrast with the practice prior to Trump’s first term, when administrations publicly shared more medical information. When George W. Bush went through MRI machines during his presidency, for instance, the White House explained that they were intended to understand the reasons for a sore shoulder in one case and assess possible damage to his knees in another.)
Trump has always seemed more interested in the pomp of his office than in doing the actual work, but he’s begun expressing lack of interest more physically in this term. Last week, Trump appeared to doze off repeatedly during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. To be fair, these are boring events: I am also not interested in sitting through several hours’ worth of secretaries and aides delivering obsequious praise, but they’re doing it for his benefit. If he wants more efficient meetings, he has the power to make it so. During one moment, Secretary of State Marco Rubio prattled on about how only Trump could achieve a cease-fire in Gaza. Trump himself slumped slowly forward with his eyes closed, then sat up before his eyelids fluttered again. The president did rouse himself at the end of the meeting, finding the energy for a racist rant about Somalis.
This is not the first instance of Trump appearing to nap during public meetings, as The Washington Post reported last month. When he repeatedly snoozed during his Manhattan trial, last spring, it was a curi
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Trump calls media reports on his health 'seditious'
Danny KEMP | Wed, December 10, 2025 at 9:27 AM CST
US President Donald Trump has been seen closing his eyes periodically at a number of events
US President Donald Trump has blasted media reports questioning his state of health as "seditious, perhaps even treasonous," sparking pushback Wednesday by one of the major outlets behind the stories.
In a long, late-night social media post, the oldest elected president in US history raged about stories in The New York Times and elsewhere suggesting that at the age of 79 he is slowing down.
"There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best," Trump said in the nearly 500-word screed on his Truth Social network.
"I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean 'THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.'"
The Republican added that he had been through "long, thorough, and very boring" medical examinations and had been able to "ace" cognitive tests that he claimed other presidents had not taken.
Trump added that the "best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful 'source' of information."
The outburst comes despite the fact that Trump regularly accuses the media of having failed to cover the health of his predecessor Joe Biden, who dropped out of the 2024 election after a shambolic debate performance raised concerns about the Democrat's age.
He has also long contrasted his vigor with that of Biden -- whom he dubs "Sleepy Joe" and described at the rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday as a "sleepy son of a bitch."
Discover more than you want to know about Trump's hemorrhoids at https://www.aol.com/articles/trump-calls-media-reports-health-15274084
8.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instrad of reading . . .
SECOND:
Instrad?
GOP says it'll take a lot more than eyewitness testimony, photos, DNA, toxicology reports, victim statements, wire transfers, emails, flight manifests, phone records, surveillance logs, bank records, audio, video, & total confessions for them to believe Trump's Epstein ties were more than coincidental.
Yes, Trump's Epstein ties were "more than coincidental“. But were they CRIMINAL? So far, there's no evidence that Trump was anything more than a creepy peeping Tom with young teens.
This is you just posting bullcrap. TRUMP! RUSSIA! COLLUSION! all over again.
There most be something probative in that pile of info, right?
So if you've got it, post it.
If not STFU.
Trump was convicted of sexual assault which the judge during sentencing told Trump, under our current system of laws what you did was rape.
During the Hollowood tapes he said he, repeatedly grabbed women by the pussy. That is him confessing to many sexual assaults upon women. And then there is this Epstein affair.
Comrade, first you’re disgusting. Second, when you post of any form of corruption, it is not because you are outraged, but instead to fulfill your Russia commie agenda.
It’s gross how you think finding someone doing something wrong somewhere, always lets Trump off the hook. And yes, Putin as well. Where I come from, people like you are considered trash.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, you are a lying sack of shit, as is Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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.
No. I'm not.
You should probably ask yourself how many other times you've allowed them to lie to you today and how many more of their lies you've helped them spread.
*NOTE: I guess my "lie" here was mistakenly putting Joe Auto-Pen Biden* on that list. He was a one term loser and didn't make the graph.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trump was convicted of sexual assault
This never happened. Stop saying stupid shit.
It was a civil court and that's not what was voted on.
It was also held in Deep, Deep Blue with a judge and jury with a TDS hate boner as big as yours. That extortion will not stand and will be thrown out on appeal, just like ALL of the other court cases in your dumb court thread, and just as I've always told you.
Lying slut E. Jean Carroll will not see a dime of that money. And hopefully, if there's any justice in the world, she'll be forced to pay Trump's legal fees after the appeal takes place.
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Quote:If Trump were the President of a corporation, he would be fired when less than 50% of the board of directors approve of his performance. That's why some corporations are extremely efficient compared to the government and why Republicans want the government to run like a business. Except that Trump is the Trumptards' president for life, as Hitler was the Nazis' Führer for life, and can't be terminated.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, you are a lying sack of shit, as is Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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.
No. I'm not.
You should probably ask yourself how many other times you've allowed them to lie to you today and how many more of their lies you've helped them spread.
*NOTE: I guess my "lie" here was mistakenly putting Joe Auto-Pen Biden* on that list. He was a one term loser and didn't make the graph.
--------------------------------------------------
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If Trump were the President of a corporation, he would be fired when less than 50% of the board of directors approve of his performance. That's why some corporations are extremely efficient compared to the government and why Republicans want the government to run like a business. Except that Trump is the Trumptards' president for life, as Hitler was the Nazis' Führer for life, and can't be terminated.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, you are a lying sack of shit, as is Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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.
No. I'm not.
You should probably ask yourself how many other times you've allowed them to lie to you today and how many more of their lies you've helped them spread.
*NOTE: I guess my "lie" here was mistakenly putting Joe Auto-Pen Biden* on that list. He was a one term loser and didn't make the graph.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
If you're going to reply to me and my FACTUAL graph, I don't want to hear anything out of you
other than "Sorry. I was mistaken."
Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
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Quote:Drop dead, you goddamn Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you're going to reply to me and my FACTUAL graph, I don't want to hear anything out of you
other than "Sorry. I was mistaken."
Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
Trump’s reality TV tricks can’t hide the affordability crisis
The president's policies cost families $2,250 in 2025 — and the economy is only getting worse
By Amanda Marcotte | December 10, 2025 6:45AM (EST)
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/10/trumps-reality-tv-tricks-cant-hide-th
e-affordability-crisis/
Donald Trump made his money through fraud. So it makes sense, then, that he thinks the quickest way out of the affordability crisis is to rely on the same carnival barker tactics he used for decades to trick banks and investors into giving him money.
The billionaire president was born into wealth and has coasted on his family’s name. But there can be no doubt of his talent as a con artist.
Despite being so good at talking people out of their money, he still managed to go bankrupt multiple times. The scheme that saved his empire was a different flavor of fraud: Being falsely portrayed as a successful businessman on a reality show, NBC’s “The Apprentice.” This fakery netted him nearly a half-billion dollars, but because Trump is as bad at finances as he is at everything else but lying, he lost all that money too. https://www.salon.com/2020/09/28/forget-the-apprentice-trumps-taxes-sh
ow-he-was-really-the-biggest-loser/
He craves a quick fix to this whole economic dilemma — the same disaster he created through chaotic policies that have raised costs on everything from housing to health care to groceries…
Still, Trump’s skill at bamboozling people helped him win not just in 2016, but again in 2024, when he managed to convince swing voters he could somehow lower costs after a few years of pandemic-driven inflation. Instead, he has done the opposite, and now he is clearly annoyed at aides and reporters who insist that the cost of living is a real issue that voters care about. Trump is notoriously lazy, even on issues he cares about, so caring about the concerns of people who weren’t born rich taxes his extremely limited patience. He craves a quick fix to this whole economic dilemma — the same disaster he created through chaotic policies that have raised costs on everything from housing to health care to groceries, often for no other reason than a narcissistic insistence that he knows economics better than economists.
There are the tariffs, which Trump levies chaotically, as an expression of his ego, even as his propagandists pretend there’s some grand economic theory behind his impulsive and constantly changing orders.
As Thomas Edsall of the New York Times demonstrated this week, the self-inflicted inflationary pressure is hurting ordinary people. By combining all these factors, he calculated “an estimated net loss of $2,250 in 2025 spending power” for the median American household — and that’s before the health care premium rise that’s coming.
Trump’s first move was to simply deny that it’s happening by flinging the word “hoax” around. Last week, he declared that affordability concerns are not just a “hoax” but a “con job” and a “scam.” (One of his go-to hustler tactics is to accuse everyone else of his own sins.)
But that’s not working, so Trump moved on to his reality TV tactic of using tricks and empty gambits to create the illusion of doing something, while actually doing nothing. He tried co-opting the message by giving himself a nickname, declaring on Truth Social that he’s “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” and whining that people won’t just take his word for it. During an interview with Politico Monday, he returned to the “fake it and and hope they buy it” strategy he used to sell himself on “The Apprentice.”
“Prices are coming down substantially,” he lied. “Prices are all coming down,” he lied again. “Now everything is coming down,” he said again, clearly hoping repetition will erase people’s direct experience with
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Drop dead, you goddamn Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you're going to reply to me and my FACTUAL graph, I don't want to hear anything out of you
other than "Sorry. I was mistaken."
Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
OH NOEZ! DON'T CALL ME A NAZI IN 2025!!!!!
Fuck off, retard.
That word holds no meaning anymore. Pat yourself on the back. You did that.
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Quote:You are a complete asshole, 6ixStringJoker. It is no surprise that you support Trump:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
OH NOEZ! DON'T CALL ME A NAZI IN 2025!!!!!
Fuck off, retard.
That word holds no meaning anymore. Pat yourself on the back. You did that.
Denmark lists America as a security threat after Trump suggested doing what Russia did to Crimea
By Olena Mukhina | Dec 10, 2025
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/12/10/for-first-time-nato-ally-lists-
america-as-security-threat-after-trump-suggested-doing-what-russia-did-to-crimea/
Danish intelligence has identified the US as a potential security threat to the country under the Trump administration, amid ongoing geopolitical disputes over Greenland.
In the forecast for 2025, published on Wednesday, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS) stated that the US is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “currently uses its economic and technological power as a tool of influence over allies.”
“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,” the report said.
The annual threat assessment by DDIS comes after repeated statements by Trump expressing a desire to take control of Greenland, which strained diplomatic relations between Copenhagen and Washington. The US president did not rule out seizing the Arctic island by force.
6ixStringJoker, in case you are too stupid to see the Nazi connection, long before invading, Hitler was publicly demanding that other countries give him parts of their land, which is what Trump is doing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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"While I expected a crowd of a few thousand with the nostalgic sound of MAGA chants echoing off metal bleachers, I tuned into Fox News Tuesday evening to find the president in a conference center ballroom inside a local casino that appeared to hold, generously, 200 people. And even that small crowd seemed hesitant, almost resigned, as Trump ranted for nearly an hour."
Tesfaye adds, "Fox News, of course, dutifully avoided any wide shots. But the truth was clear on screen: The MAGA magic had vanished."
According to Tesfaye, Trump's "gaslighting" on the economy during his Pennsylvania rally did nothing to persuade swing voters.
"The Trump of 2026 is not the Trump of 2024," Tesfaye observes. "The president is clearly tired, angry, confused and incapable of adjusting to a country in economic crisis. Even Fox News can’t spin this."
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/10/trumps-return-to-maga-rallies-is-a-fl
op/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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he was ass kissing the socialist islamic NYC guy
Honeymoon is truly over
Democrats Win Miami Mayorship for First Time in 30 Years
https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/zahranicni-amerika-demokrate-ziskali-pos
t-starosty-miami-poprve-po-triceti-letech-40552848
‘Trump wreaking havoc on everyday people,’ Virginia Governor-Elect Abigail Spanberger says
Trump says meeting with NYC mayor-elect Mamdani “surprised” him
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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What will America look like after 3 more years of Trump?
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 11, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-will-america-look-like-aft
er-3-more-years-of-trump/ar-AA1SaanA
America could get the full MAGA makeover
Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?
Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.
And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What will America look like after 3 more years of Trump?
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 11, 2025
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-will-america-look-like-af
ter-3-more-years-of-trump.html
America could get the full MAGA makeover
• A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
• A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
• A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
• Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
• Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
• A new “deep state" of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
• A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
• An economy where Al is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
• A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
• A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
• And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What will America look like after 3 more years of Trump?
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 11, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-will-america-look-like-aft
er-3-more-years-of-trump/ar-AA1SaanA
America could get the full MAGA makeover
Good. Fuck you, Ed. Move out of my country.
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Quote:Tough talk from a Joker who spends his day smoking, watching porn, unemployed, and aware that he will die because Medicaid will end for the unemployed, thanks to Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What will America look like after 3 more years of Trump?
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 11, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-will-america-look-like-aft
er-3-more-years-of-trump/ar-AA1SaanA
America could get the full MAGA makeover
Good. Fuck you, Ed. Move out of my country.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA), which became law on July 4, 2025, requires states to implement Medicaid work requirements for many able-bodied adults, including those who are unemployed, starting in January 2027. This change, along with other cuts, is projected to result in a significant number of people nationwide losing coverage, potentially impacting tens of thousands in Indiana.
Specific Impacts on Indiana
• Work Requirements: Starting January 2027 (or potentially earlier if the state receives a federal waiver), most Medicaid expansion enrollees in Indiana ages 19-64 who are not exempt must work, volunteer, or participate in work-related activities for at least 80 hours per month.
• Potential Coverage Loss: While many current Medicaid enrollees already work, individuals who are unemployed and do not meet the work requirements or qualify for an exemption (e.g., parents of a child under 14, medically frail individuals, pregnant women) could lose their coverage.
• State Funding Challenges: The OBBBA caps or limits the use of certain state funding mechanisms, such as provider taxes, which Indiana uses to fund its share of the Medicaid program (Healthy Indiana Plan, or HIP). This could force the state to make further eligibility rollbacks or service cuts to balance its budget.
• Increased Administrative Burden: The law also increases paperwork and eligibility verification requirements, such as requiring redeterminations every six months for expansion populations (instead of annually), which can lead to eligible individuals losing coverage due to administrative errors or missed notifications.
• State Efforts: Indiana lawmakers had already passed state-level legislation earlier in 2025 seeking to impose work requirements, but federal law has set the effective date for these specific federal mandates for 2027.
The law does not automatically "end" Medicaid for all unemployed individuals in Indiana, as certain exemptions and waiver possibilities exist, but it does establish stricter rules and financial pressures that make it more difficult for unemployed Hoosiers to maintain coverage.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What will America look like after 3 more years of Trump?
By Ed Kilgore | Dec 11, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-will-america-look-like-aft
er-3-more-years-of-trump/ar-AA1SaanA
America could get the full MAGA makeover
Good. Fuck you, Ed. Move out of my country.
--------------------------------------------------
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The US Is Looking More Like Putin’s Russia Every Day
We may already be on a superhighway to the sort of class- and race-stratified autocracy that it took Russia so many years to become after the Soviet Union collapsed.
By Andrea Mazzarino | Dec 11, 2025
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/putin-russia-trump-autocracy/
It’s strange so many years later, in the United States of America, to feel as if I’m living in a country threatening to become like the Russia of Vladimir Putin that I spent years experiencing earlier in this century. To start, let me tell you a little something about that.
For decades as a young adult, I lived and traveled in Russia. I was an anthropology doctoral student and human rights worker, studying the effects of President Vladimir Putin’s centralizing policies and that country’s Christian nationalist media on the everyday lives of Russians. In one of my last projects, I investigated the government’s practice of separating kids with disabilities (and poorer kids generally) from their parents and detaining them in closed institutions. My report detailed how much changes in society when the government excludes swaths of the population from basic services like healthcare, education, and even just access to city streets. The answer? Everything.
That marginalization was part of a governing process aimed at further enriching the wealthiest few and those in power. It reflected the leadership of figures lacking a basic understanding of what all people need and deserve. I consider that a hallmark of a fascist regime.
One of my last evenings in Russia was a chilly November night in 2014 in the northern city of St. Petersburg. Mothers and children, grandparents and teenagers alike stepped with care to avoid slipping on black ice and bumping into (and possibly falling thanks to) large plastic advertisements for fast food, clothing, cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery, and even IVF treatments sticking up like weeds on the cobblestoned sidewalks of the city’s center.
Those glowing placards seemed to replace what had once been a slew of different kinds of people when I first traveled to Russia as a college student in the late 1990s. In the same central train stations of that city, old women then sold carrots and beets from cardboard boxes they had lugged from their country homes. Young women could sometimes be seen in bikinis and stiletto heels (even in that weather!) with beer advertisements scrawled across their chests. Uzbek and Tajik men scrambled to finish construction on new stores, restaurants, and apartment buildings before winter set in. Roma mothers, their babies strapped to their backs in jewel-toned scarves, begged for money for food and housing.
Sometimes, when traffic grew too congested for their liking, Russia’s newly rich—aptly dubbed “New Russians” in the country’s popular press—drove their luxury Mercedes and BMWs onto the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians like me, along with mothers pushing strollers and a few wind-worn men and women hurrying to work, to scatter in panic. Despite the chaos and a significant amount of deprivation (more on that later), for many I met then, much seemed possible, including working for ever larger companies, migration, and new luxuries. Electronic remixes of Western songs like “If I Were a Rich Girl” and Cher’s “Believe” blasted from vendors’ tinny sounding boom boxes on repeat.
By the time of my last trip to Russia in 2014, however, shiny buildings had been built, older ones renovated, and developers with close ties to Russia’s political elite were even richer, thanks to the country’s growing oil wealth. Roma (or gypsy) families were no longer anywhere to be seen, as St. Petersburg’s government had conducted “purges” of the city’s informal Roma settlements. Nor were old women selling their wares on the streets, while Central Asian migrants from poorer countries to Russia’s south seemed ever fewer and less visible during the busiest times. Indeed, local authorities were rounding them up and detaining them without warrants, based on ap
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The US Is Looking More Like Putin’s Russia Every Day
You did that. Pat yourself on the back.
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October 15, 1948
10 Nazis Executed For Murdering U.S. Fliers During War
By United Press
LANDSBERG, Germany, Oct. 15. — Ten German war criminals were hanged here today, seven for the murder of American fliers who were shot down over Germany during the war and three for atrocities at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
The executions were carried out in the Landsberg Prison courtyard where Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf after the Munich Putsch.
Clemencies Denied
All were convicted in United States Army trials at Dachua. Their appeals for clemency were denied.
The executions took an hour and 40 minutes, with all the Nazis protesting their innocence.
They brought to 52 the number of lesser Nazis executed here.
One Nazi, a former Gestapo chief, screamed, “You murderers,” to the Americans.
An ironic note was added when American jet-propelled planes from nearby American bases screamed overhead as the men went to their deaths.
Shouts From Gallows
He shouted from the gallows platform, as the noose was adjusted, that his final petition for clemency had not been acted upon.
“I did my duty as a German soldier when I killed American terror fliers who murdered German women and children,” he cried.
His shouts were cut off as the trap was sprung.
Jan Akkerman, former Mayor of Borkum Island off the north coast of Germany, who was executed for inciting his townspeople to attack seven American fliers, died shouting that his execution was an act of revenge by the victorious Americans.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-borkum-island-massacre-a
nd-trial/
https://newspaperarchive.com/the-lima-news-oct-15-1948-p-1/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A Secret Service Agent Explains What Trump Is Like Behind The Scenes
Nov 17, 2025
https://thehalfwaycafe.substack.com/p/a-secret-service-agent-explains-
what
A Secret Service agent who has served seven presidents says Donald Trump is weirder than all of them put together. The following are details the agent has compiled based on reports of Trump’s behavior:
• Trump has never once ridden in a car with Melania or Barron because Melania forbids it.
• Trump is a big fan of the Swedish pop group ABBA, and on motorcade rides liked to blast “Dancing Queen,” and when he hears the lyrics, “You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen,” he tells the driver, “Epstein used to love this song.”
• The floor mats in the back seats of the presidential limousine had to be replaced monthly because of how much fried chicken Trump eats messily on his way to rallies that coats the fabric with grease.
• Once a month Trump likes to go on a long drive with a Republican member of Congress he’s upset with into the middle of nowhere in Virginia farm country, and leave him or her there to walk back to D.C.
• The Secret Service had to start offering bonuses to drivers of the presidential limousine because Trump smelled so bad. The agents quietly went on strike in January at the start of his second term, and refused to drive him without extra “stench pay.” It made Trump furious because the strike made him miss a few days of golf.
• Trump often farts, and then accuses the driver of the flatulence.
• The seats of the vehicles Trump rides in are regularly stained with orange foundation makeup. On long drives, Trump sleeps and always leaves orange stains on the seat belt strap.
• He regularly tries to convince agents to invest in his crypto currency by promising it’s not a pump and dump scheme, but, also, if he does decide to do a rug pull on all his investors, he’ll let them know when it’s coming ahead of time.
• Sometimes Trump throws Big Macs he brings for snacks against the windshield when he hears bad news. The Secret Service thinks of this as an incredibly reckless, potentially catastrophic security threat given that each time they have to stop the vehicle and wipe off the smeared ketchup.
• Following every meeting with an Asian diplomat or leader, Trump talks with an exaggerated Asian accent for fifteen minutes.
• Every Secret Service agent has heard Trump recommend they spend their next vacation in Moscow because “Russian girls are into some crazy stuff.”
• During international events and global summits, Trump tries to “accidentally” walk into the women’s bathrooms, which is always really awkward for Secret Service agents to have to witness.
• Trump occasionally asks his Secret Service drivers to run over people just to see how they react and test how loyal they are.
• Trump tries to get perimeter defense Secret Service agents to help him cheat when golfing. He hands them several balls and tells them that if they see him hit a ball into water or sand, to throw the balls somewhere on the green.
• After every motorcade ride, Trump tells his drivers, “I’d tip you but I don’t have any cash, so I promise I’ll tip you big on the next one.” The Secret Service also heard him say that to every Mar-a-Lago employee who served him, his golf caddies, and various hotel staff members when staying in foreign countries.
• The Secret Service had to triple its golf cart fleet and pay for storage space in foreign countries to store them because Trump refuses to walk anywhere, even when attending ceremonial events outside with other leaders, including female leaders wearing heels.
• Trump sometimes makes long phone calls where he listens a lot, and says things like, “NATO is ripping us off, you’re right,” “Ukraine is ripping us off, you’re right,” and “the US should tell Poland, the Baltic states, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union to fuck off, you’re right,” and then announce after he hung up, “That wasn’t Putin I was talking to by the way, it was—uh—Barron, yeah, Barron was asking me qu
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Originally posted by second:
October 15, 1948
10 Nazis Executed For Murdering U.S. Fliers During War
You Nazis had better watch your backs today.
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We Investigated the 5 Most Corrupt Presidential Pardons
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Originally posted by second:
We Investigated the 5 Most Corrupt Presidential Pardons
Great. Now do Joe Biden*'s Autopen.
I'll wait.
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How are Trumptards stopped in a way that neither Trump nor the Trumptards on the Supreme Court can undo? See how Ashli Babbitt was stopped, permanently, upsetting Trump to this day. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the shooting of Babbitt, describing it as an "assassination".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
The Last MAGA Prisoner
Trump desperately wants Tina Peters released but can’t make it happen without help.
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez | December 12, 2025, 5:27 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/tina-peters-maga-colorado
-trump-pardon/685240/
Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars.
The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. (Her attorney and the Trump ally Steve Bannon recently floated on a podcast the idea of having Trump call in the 101st Airborne Division to set her free. The attorney said he’d “love to see that happen.”)
Trump’s embrace of Peters’s cause threatens to erode the public’s trust in the validity of electoral outcomes and the independence of state criminal-justice systems, constitutional experts told me. Election officials from around the country who have faced years of violent threats and harassment for defending the 2020 presidential vote—and each election since—told me the clamor around Peters signals to those who may seek to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections that they can flout the law with support from the White House.
Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that he is granting Peters a “full Pardon,” but legal experts said his power doesn’t extend to state charges. The one person who could free Peters—Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who has issued tepid public statements on the case, seems disinclined to offer Peters, a 70-year-old lung-cancer survivor, any leniency.
“I, like the president, have the values of compassion and mercy, and there’s been times when people are ill and we’ve let them out,” he told me in an interview this month. So far, he said, “the indications I’ve seen are that she’s healthy.” If circumstances change, he added, “I’ve told people publicly, as well as the White House,” that “we would consider doing something.”
In Mesa County, along the state’s snowy western slopes, where Peters once served as the chief election official, most people I spoke with seem to think that she is exactly where she belongs. “There’s not an uprising in Colorado to free Tina Peters,” Scott McInnis, a Republican who served as a congressman and county commissioner, told me.
But far from the state correctional facility where she finds herself, the effort to release Peters continues. Her attorney pursued Trump’s pardon for his client, who once regaled crowds with elaborate election-cheating theories. Peters is deteriorating in prison, even struggling to finish her own sentences, according to friends and attorneys who have seen her.
“Where is everybody,” read part of an “UPDATE FROM TINA PETERS: 364 Days o
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How are Trumptards stopped in a way that neither Trump nor the Trumptards on the Supreme Court can undo? See how Ashli Babbitt was stopped, permanently, upsetting Trump to this day. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the shooting of Babbitt, describing it as an "assassination".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
Yeah. We know you fantasize about killing Trump voters.
Do it. See what happens to you.
We're sick of hearing your bitch ass talk about it.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:Constantly, Trump fantasizes about murdering his enemies, and he has done it, repeatedly:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How are Trumptards stopped in a way that neither Trump nor the Trumptards on the Supreme Court can undo? See how Ashli Babbitt was stopped, permanently, upsetting Trump to this day. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the shooting of Babbitt, describing it as an "assassination".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
Yeah. We know you fantasize about killing Trump voters.
Do it. See what happens to you.
We're sick of hearing your bitch ass talk about it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List
The Trump administration ignored questions about whether it would orderthe killings of those on its NSPM-7 list — even while answering our other queries.
By Nick Turse | Dec 12, 2025 at 1:08 PM
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/12/trump-nspm-7-domestic-terrorist-ex
ecutions-antifa-boat-strikes/
President Donald Trump has shattered the limits of executive authority by ordering the summary executions of individuals he deems members of designated terrorist organizations. He has also tested the bounds of his presidential powers by creating a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations, established under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.
Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.
Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.
In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.
“The Trump Administration is trying to justify blowing small boats out of the water by arbitrarily calling them ‘designated terrorist organizations’ — a label not grounded in U.S. statute nor international law, but in solely what Trump says,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “If Trump is using this justification to use military force on any individuals he chooses — without verified evidence or legal authorization — what’s stopping him from designating anyone within our own borders in a similar fashion and conducting lethal, militarized attacks against them? This illegal and dangerous misuse of lethal force should worry all Americans, and it can’t be accepted as normal.”
For almost a quarter century, the United States has been killing people — including American citizens, on occasion — around the world with drone strikes. Beginning as post-9/11 counterterrorism operations, these targeted killings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and other nations relied on a flimsy legal rationale that consistently eroded respect for international law. Details of these operations were kept secret from the Ame
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Constantly, Trump fantasizes about murdering his enemies, and he has done it, repeatedly:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How are Trumptards stopped in a way that neither Trump nor the Trumptards on the Supreme Court can undo? See how Ashli Babbitt was stopped, permanently, upsetting Trump to this day. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the shooting of Babbitt, describing it as an "assassination".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
Yeah. We know you fantasize about killing Trump voters.
Do it. See what happens to you.
We're sick of hearing your bitch ass talk about it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Not even close to the amount of people Obama killed with drones.
Shut the fuck up, dude.
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Quote:Mar 7, 2019 — There have been 2,243 drone strikes in the first two years of the Trump presidency, compared with 1,878 in Mr Obama's eight years in office.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not even close to the amount of people Obama killed with drones.
Shut the fuck up, dude.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207
Estimating the exact number of people killed in U.S. drone strikes under President Trump's first term (Jan 2017-Jan 2021) is difficult due to varying reporting and classification, but data from monitoring groups suggests thousands were killed, with a significant rise in civilian casualties in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, as the U.S. relaxed rules of engagement, especially in Afghanistan and against ISIS, leading to more frequent and less precise strikes.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+were+killed+in+drone+s
trikes+during+Trump's+first+term
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Mar 7, 2019 — There have been 2,243 drone strikes in the first two years of the Trump presidency, compared with 1,878 in Mr Obama's eight years in office.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not even close to the amount of people Obama killed with drones.
Shut the fuck up, dude.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207
Okay. Let me put it another way.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Nobody gave a fuck back then. Nobody gives a fuck now.
Shut the fuck up.
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Quote:Let me put it another way: the Obama administration continued with the War on Terrorism, except methodically with far more care to prevent collateral damage than George Bush had shown, while Trump was whimsically killing, trying to impress his guest, Chinese President Xi Jinping:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Okay. Let me put it another way.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Nobody gave a fuck back then. Nobody gives a fuck now.
Shut the fuck up.
Donald Trump ordered 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike a Syrian air base in April 2017 and informed Chinese President Xi Jinping about it during dessert at his Mar-a-Lago estate. In a later interview with Fox Business, Trump famously recounted telling Xi about the military action over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen".
In 2017, killing people was a piece of cake for Trump. Trump has gotten worse since then.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Let me put it another way
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Okay. Let me put it another way.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Nobody gave a fuck back then. Nobody gives a fuck now.
Shut the fuck up.
Don't bother.
Unread.
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Quote:Trump murdered millions of children.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't bother.
Unread.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=death+caused+by+end+of+USAID+program
The end of specific USAID programs has reportedly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths already, with studies projecting millions more in the coming years due to a lack of healthcare, nutrition, and humanitarian aid.
A study published in The Lancet estimated that USAID programs prevented over 91 million deaths globally between 2001 and 2021. Projections based on the severe funding cuts and the dismantling of the agency indicate that by 2030:
More than 14 million additional, preventable deaths could occur.
Over 4.5 million of these deaths would be among children under the age of five.
Reports and firsthand accounts from various countries have documented the immediate consequences:
Malnutrition: The World Food Programme (WFP) has reduced food aid in places like a refugee camp in Kenya, where an aid worker's child died after the program that provided therapeutic food was terminated. Globally, 50% of the therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children were funded by USAID.
Disease: Funding cuts have halted the delivery of malaria tests and drugs in Myanmar, where cases have increased tenfold, and have caused shortages of HIV medication and the closure of clinics in Lesotho.
Health Systems: Cuts in Kenya resulted in the termination of nearly 2,000 doctors and over 1,200 nurses. In Afghanistan, rural clinics closed due to a lack of U.S. funding.
These outcomes are described by some as "public man-made death," a result of conscious policy choices to abruptly halt funding without warning or transition plans for the partner countries that relied on the support. The Trump administration officials overseeing the cuts, including then-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have denied that anyone has died as a result.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump murdered millions of children.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't bother.
Unread.
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No. He didn't.
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Quote:While you are in denial mode, why not deny that smoking causes cancer?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. He didn't.
Why NOT deny that Trump halting medicine and food kills children?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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MERITOCRACY, AGAIN
Quote:
It's Official: Ditching The SATs Was A Big Mistake
Saturday, Dec 13, 2025 - 07:10 PM
Authored by Jonathan Miltimore via The Washington Examiner,
In early 2020, the University of California set the tone for the rest of the country when its regents voted to drop SAT and ACT admissions requirements through 2024. That decision, initially framed as a pandemic necessity, quickly reshaped admissions nationwide. By late 2022, roughly 1,750 schools, or about 80 percent of U.S. universities, had adopted test-optional policies, according to Forbes.
“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” Robert Schaeffer, of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told NBC News.
“The pandemic created a natural experiment.”
Five years later, the results of this “natural experiment” are in. A report released by UC San Diego in November tells the story.
“Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students—particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills,” a new university report reads.
“This trend poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission.”
Those words might sound ominous, but they don’t do justice to just how bad the slide has been.
Roughly 1 in 8 UCSD freshmen are working with math skills that don’t clear the high school bar - a 30-fold jump since 2020.
It gets worse, however.
The report concluded that 70 percent of those students [roughly 9% of total first year students] fall below middle school levels.
To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, a full quarter of students failed to solve the following equation: 7 + 2 = [ ] + 6.
. . .
So, why did universities engage in this “natural experiment”?
There is no single answer, but politics, ideology, and crass incentives all played a role.
Let’s start with politics.
As David Leonhardt pointed out in the New York Times, universities are run by progressives, and “standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives.”
Some progressives say standardized tests cause too much stress.
Others say they’re biased to explain why men score higher, on average, than women and why some racial groups perform better than others.
Ideology, a kissing cousin of politics, also plays a role. The fact that universities ditched standardized testing during the peak of the DEI craze is not a coincidence. As Leonhardt noted in the New York Times, the hostility to standardized tests is based largely “on the theory that they hurt diversity.”
MORE AT https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elit
ism/3907689/ditching-standardized-testing-colleges-big-mistake/
SAT scores by tace, gender, language etc
https://archive.ph/TUkPR
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:While you are in denial mode, why not deny that smoking causes cancer?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. He didn't.
Smoking does cause cancer. Trump hasn't murdered anybody.
Your pathetic attempts at emotional blackmail through hyperbole are as paper thin as your personality.
I know you think you're special, but you don't sound any different than anybody else saying all the things you say every day. Outside of anger and insults, you don't even have the capability to think for yourself anymore. None of your thoughts remain your own.
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Quote:
Regenerative Farming Just Went Mainstream; Here's Why It Matters
Saturday, Dec 13, 2025 - 06:00 PM
Authored by Mollie Englehart via The Epoch Times,
My phone started dinging almost all at once.
Text messages, links, alerts—people were telling me that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was about to make a major announcement on Dec. 10 related to regenerative agriculture. A YouTube link was circulating. The livestream was about to begin. There was a sense of anticipation in the air.
When the video came on, Rollins stood alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others. What stood out immediately was not the funding amount, but the language: soil health, human health, nutrient density, the microbiome, and microbiology. The living systems beneath our feet and within our bodies were finally being discussed as part of one connected reality.
That language matters.
Then the announcement itself came: $700 million allocated toward regenerative agriculture.
On paper, that sounds significant. In reality, when spread across acreage that is already regenerative, it comes out to roughly $16 per acre. My phone began lighting up again—this time with frustration and disappointment. Farmers were doing the math. Many compared it to the $12 billion recently allocated to soybean farmers to ease losses from China no longer buying at previous levels. The imbalance felt familiar.
I felt that disappointment myself. But I stopped.
Because the truth is, the government is not going to save us. It never was.
. . .
Incremental wins are still wins. And the direction of the wind has finally changed.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Smoking does cause cancer. Trump hasn't murdered anybody.
Your pathetic attempts at emotional blackmail through hyperbole are as paper thin as your personality.
I know you think you're special, but you don't sound any different than anybody else saying all the things you say every day. Outside of anger and insults, you don't even have the capability to think for yourself anymore. None of your thoughts remain your own.
If Trump killed hundreds of thousands of children, why did you ever vote for him, 6ix? Because you never believed it could happen to your choice for President.
How many children died because Trump shut down USAID?
The Trump administration's decision to freeze and cut most U.S. foreign aid programs has been estimated by public health experts and modeling studies to be in the hundreds of thousands so far, with projections reaching into the millions over the coming years if cuts continue.
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+children+died+because+Trump+s
hut+down+USAID
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How many Trumptards believe Trump won the 2020 election? Most of this crowd did not believe Trump:
“Professionals at cheating”: Trump claims “truckloads” of evidence that Dems rigged elections
The president said overwhelming evidence would appear in coming weeks
By Alex Galbraith | December 14, 2025 4:23PM (EST)
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/14/professionals-at-cheating-trump-claim
s-truckloads-of-evidence-that-dems-rigged-elections/
President Donald Trump claimed on Sunday that he has “truckloads” of evidence that Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020.
During a Christmas reception at the White House, Trump said that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election and made attempts to do the same in 2024.
“They’re good at cheating in elections. Very good at cheating, they’re professionals at cheating,” he said. “We won in 2016 by a lot. The election was rigged in 2020. We have all the ammunition, all the stuff, and you’ll see it come out. It’s coming out in truckloads.”
Related
Six big lies that won the election: How Donald Trump gaslit America
https://www.salon.com/2024/11/09/six-big-lies-that-won-the-election-ho
w-donald-gaslit-america/
Trump also suggested that he would win California if it weren’t for Democrats’ interference. Citing other states where he performed well with Hispanic voters (including in notoriously Republican-heavy Miami),
“If the vote in California was legitimate, it was not… we would win California by a lot,” he said. “California, more than any other place, is so rigged.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom shared a clip of Trump’s claims on social media, responding, “Hahahahahahahahaha ok.”
Elsewhere in the long-winded ceremony, the president was distracted by a woman in the crowd who he believed looked like Ivanka Trump, asking her to turn around for the cameras. He also told a story about a man who was bit by a venomous snake in Peru and marveled at the crowd’s lack of interest.
“Look how quiet everybody is,” he said, “You know, when you talk about snakes and things like that people find it interesting.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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