Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 188819
PAGE 46 of 48
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country
An unpopular war, skyrocketing gas prices, unsteady financial markets, a cabinet filled with sycophants — the president’s colossal missteps have led to calamity at home and abroad
By Matt Bai | April 12, 2026
Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ (Look closely at the illustration. Can you see Trump's error?)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/donald-trum
p-incompetence-chaos-maga-1235544798/
It was the first week of September in 2005, about a week after Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, when George W. Bush uttered the line that would come to define his second term, if not his entire presidency: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” It was a throwaway comment, a plainspoken president telling his aide, FEMA Director Michael Brown, that he appreciated the effort. But the effort wasn’t nearly adequate, the federal response pitiful, and Bush’s ad-lib became the slogan for an out-of-touch administration that either couldn’t run the government or, worse, didn’t care. For the rest of Bush’s dismal time in office, every new failing would be met with the same sardonic response from his critics. Heckuva job, Brownie.
Donald Trump’s “great job” to Marco Rubio, tossed out during his State of the Union speech in February, didn’t have quite the same staying power. (“I think he’ll go down as the best ever,” Trump told his secretary of state, causing Henry Kissinger to bolt upright in his grave and laugh out loud.) But however much he may try to distract us with outrageous posts and circus-like spectacle, it’s becoming clear that second-term Trump is sinking faster and deeper than Bush ever did, and the dead weight on his back is pretty much the same.
It’s really not ideology that’s tanking Trump right now. I mean, yes, his administration is the meanest, most xenophobic, and most imperialist in at least the past century. And I’d like to think that would be a deal-breaker for the vast majority of middle-ground American voters, but if we’re being real, it probably isn’t. Independent and moderate voters have been with Trump on immigration, broadly speaking, since he first started doing his nativist routine a decade ago. And even a lot of populist leftists can get behind an “America First” foreign policy and protectionism for American manufacturers. Maybe Trump should be flailing politically because he’s brazenly profiting off the presidency and renaming half of Washington after himself, but near as I can tell, that part doesn’t especially trouble people, either.
No, what’s killing Trump right now isn’t the extremist agenda — it’s the mind-blowing incompetence. Deporting immigrants is one thing; masked agents executing American citizens on Midwestern boulevards is another. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions might get majority support on paper, but launching a war without any clear rationale, without having thought through even the most basic consequences, is how you lose the electorate in a hurry. (About six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s wartime performance, according to Pew Research, and that number isn’t going down anytime soon.) Gas prices are spiking, mortgage rates are soaring, financial markets are lurching back and forth. Airport terminals look like Disneyland in July.
Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nope.
I want Democrats to stop attempting to ruin men by any means necessary for the sin of being in their way.
You're nothing but a bunch of liars, and you manipulate women's minds more than any Muslim leader ever did.
Quote:
Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country
All polling data still shows that this is just another lie.
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Peter Magyar: former govt insider promising system change
https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/peter-magyar-former-govt-insider-
promising-system-change/article
Good for Hungary.
Now there will be ZERO Muslims in the country.
Lefties wanted this guy, and I just can't figure out why...
He's for no immigration. He's going to end any work programs they had under Orban and there won't be anybody in Hungary that doesn't belong there.
Maybe he can teach Trump how to finally get that done here, because we're going on 2 years now and the poison of the Democrats has still blocked us from doing what needs to be done.
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Quote:Why are Trumptards so angrily opposed to Trump paying $88.3 million for raping E. Jean Carroll?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nope.
I want Democrats to stop attempting to ruin men by any means necessary for the sin of being in their way.
You're nothing but a bunch of liars, and you manipulate women's minds more than any Muslim leader ever did.Quote:
Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country
All polling data still shows that this is just another lie.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
Why are Trumptards so indifferent to Trump taking $billions in bribes in exchange for government contracts, pardons, and tax relief directed toward billionaires?
Trump net worth increased by $4 billion in one year
https://www.bing.com/search?q=trump+net+worth+increased+by+%244+billio
n+in+one+year
I know why, and it's the same reason why Trumptards struggle in America, but I love hearing Trumptards explain their own version of why they act as badly as they do.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?
Under his administration, governance became performance; truth became negotiable; and power became personal.
By Kua Kia Soong, former MP and a former director of Suaram
March 31, 2026
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2026/03/30/donald-t
rump-the-worst-us-president-ever
Have you often wondered how history will remember Donald Trump?
If history were a meritocracy, Trump would be remembered as a footnote – an eccentric real estate showman who mistook television ratings for governance.
Unfortunately, history is not so tidy. It occasionally hands immense power to a man who believes instinct outranks knowledge, volume outranks reason, and spectacle outranks substance – and then watches as the consequences unfold in real time.
To call Trump “the worst president in American history” is not merely an insult. It is an attempt to describe a presidency that did not just fail – it redefined failure itself.
His tenure can be understood through four defining breakdowns: the collapse of intellectual seriousness, the corrosion of truth and law, the reckless mismanagement of economic power, and the normalisation of cruelty without borders.
The cult of ignorance in power
Previous US presidents at least paid homage to expertise. Trump treated it as an obstacle.
His handling of Covid-19 stands as the clearest indictment. Faced with a once-in-a-century public health crisis, he downplayed the threat, saying “it will disappear”, contradicted his own scientists, and publicly mused about injecting disinfectants, turning White House briefings into global spectacles of confusion. While other governments mobilised coherent responses, the US lurched between denial and improvisation.
This was not merely poor communication; it was a governing philosophy.
Expertise was sidelined, agencies were undermined, and scientific consensus became politically negotiable. The result: one of the world’s highest death tolls, paired with a president more interested in television optics than epidemiology.
The war on truth, law and democracy
Trump did not merely bend the truth – he attempted to bury it under an avalanche of falsehoods. Fact-checkers stopped counting after tens of thousands of misleading or false claims. But the deeper damage lay not in any single lie, but in the normalisation of unreality as a political environment.
This culminated in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Having lost, Trump refused to concede, promoting baseless claims of fraud and pressuring officials to overturn certified results.
His call to Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes was not satire – it was an unvarnished attempt to bend democratic machinery to personal will. The inevitable climax came with the Jan 6 Capitol attack, when a mob, animated by his rhetoric, stormed the seat of American democracy. It was a moment that would have been unthinkable in a system that still commanded universal allegiance to the rule of law.
Human rights norms, already fragile, were further weakened as they became transactional. The message was unmistakable: principles were negotiable, truth was optional, and power was personal.
Economic nationalism as strategic self-harm
Trump promised to restore American economic greatness through toughness, chiefly in the form of tariffs and trade wars. The results were instructive.
His trade confrontation with China triggered retaliatory tariffs that hit American farmers particularly hard, forcing the government to spend tens of billions in bailouts – an ironic outcome for a policy meant to strengthen domestic industry. Supply chains were disrupted, uncertainty surged, and businesses faced rising costs.
Even allies were not spared. Tariffs were imposed on steel and aluminium imports from partners like Canada and the European Union under the dubious justification of “national security”, straining ties that had underpinned decades of economic stability.
Markets oscillated wildly, not because investors admired bold str
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?
I'm sure you have no shortage of idiots who will tell you that.
So why are you picking the guy nobody heard of, from the country that nobody could point out on a map, working for an organization nobody ever heard of?
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, read Trump's words. If you conclude he is NOT the worst President in history, you demonstrated why your own life is a goddamn mess that you ought to be ashamed of:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?
I'm sure you have no shortage of idiots who will tell you that.
So why are you picking the guy nobody heard of, from the country that nobody could point out on a map, working for an organization nobody ever heard of?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about “fear” of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart. I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History. Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise. He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican. Unfortunately, Leo’s Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons, does not sit well with me, nor does the fact that he meets with Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod, a LOSER from the Left, who is one of those who wanted churchgoers and clerics to be arrested. Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 12, 2026, 8:03 PM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116394704213456431
Roll Call tracks Trump's written nonsense:
https://rollcall.com/factbase/topic/twitter
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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IRS Cuts Open Door For Cheats. More Taxpayers Bet ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’
The Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees — and some taxpayers appear eager to cheat
By Richard Rubin | April 12, 2026 9:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/irs-staffing-tax-enforcement-1a18e
33f
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is scaling back tax enforcement, leaving fewer federal employees to audit returns, collect unpaid tax debts and deter Americans from skirting the law.
The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak.
The retrenchment is spurring a vibe shift across the tax landscape ahead of the April 15 deadline, and lawyers say they see more taxpayers and tax-shelter promoters eager to cut corners or cheat.
“There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,”’ said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington.
Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year. Partnership audits declined, reversing an attempt to scrutinize private-equity firms and other complex entities that have long bedeviled the government. In 2025, the IRS collected less direct revenue from audits and appeals than in any year since at least 2012, though the money can arrive years after audits start.
Even without the proposed cut for next year, inflation-adjusted spending on tax enforcement is already the lowest in at least 20 years, according to the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“They have defunded the police,” said Matthew Rappaport, a tax lawyer at Falcon, Rappaport and Berkman in New York. “There’s no more succinct way to describe what’s happened.”
The cutbacks will be costly for the government's bottom line and expand budget deficits. The administration’s own IRS budget document acknowledges that chasing scofflaws generates more money than it costs. “Reductions in enforcement spending create missed opportunities and lost revenue for the United States,” the document said.
The IRS workforce reductions so far would cut an estimated $46 billion in federal spending over the next decade and reduce revenue collections by $643 billion, according to The Budget Lab at Yale.
While in office, Charles Rettig, who was Trump’s first-term IRS commissioner, described the agency as outgunned by wealthy, well-advised taxpayers. He estimated that the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed and paid — was approaching $1 trillion a year.
More at https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/irs-staffing-tax-enforcement-1a18e
33f
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Parable of the President
Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV reveals that to him, religion is primarily about power, not morality.
By David A. Graham | April 13, 2026, 2:15 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/trump-vs-pope-contradi
ctory-message/686784/
Many people get the Sunday scaries, but most of them are not a sitting president facing self-inflicted global chaos and the growing possibility of a bruising midterm election in a few months. What feels like a weekly social-media crashout from the president of the United States usually starts some time on Sunday and continues into the early hours of the next morning. Given the failure of negotiations with Iran on Saturday, the likelihood of elevated gas prices for months, and the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally and role model Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump had plenty of fuel for a freakout last night.
But the most notable subject in this week’s edition was Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and war in Iran. The posts illustrate that Trump views religion much the way he views everything else: as something that can serve him but does not create any obligations on him.
“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, kicking off a lengthy jeremiad. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump claimed that Leo XIV was elected only because the cardinals believed he’d be good at dealing with the current administration. Trump is also upset that Leo met with David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and commentator. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” Trump said.
Forty-six minutes later, Trump posted an illustration of himself as a Jesus-like figure, reaching out to heal a man in bed while a nurse, a soldier, and others look on, and with a background of patriotic bric-a-brac (flag, eagles, fighter jets). The image has been circulating for at least a couple of months, during which time an angel near the top of the image has somehow transformed into a creepy monstrosity, presumably through the wonders of generative AI. The illustration drew claims of blasphemy and even demonic possession from some usual Trump allies on the right; the president has since deleted it, telling reporters he believed that the picture depicted him as a doctor.
Too many contradictions appear here to list them all. For example, Trump insists that Leo renounce politics yet also complains about the pope’s policy stance on crime. What he’s referring to here is a mystery. (The Catholic Church could be said to have a decarceral agenda: Jesus, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, said that he had been sent to preach freedom to prisoners, and the first pope, Peter, was imprisoned at least once and likely executed for professing Jesus. Then again, the Vatican City has, by some accounts, the highest per-capita crime rate in the world, due mainly to pickpocketing.)
Another contradiction is that Trump doesn’t actually seem to have any problem with the intermingling of religion and politics—as the Christlike image shows, and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aggressive rhetoric about the war demonstrates. The president’s reflexive response to criticism (or perceived criticism) from any public figure is to unleash a social-media barrage against them, without much thought about who the person is or what their role in society might be. This black-and-white view of the world owes more to Mani, another religious leader whose death was depicted as a crucifixion, than to Jesus of Nazareth.
The tirade at Leo is the latest escalation of anti-Catholic sentiment among some figures on the MAGA right. Trump has a number of devout Catholics in his administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vi
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State Department Tells Human Rights Watchdog to Ignore Trump’s Extrajudicial Killings
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “lacks the competence” to review Trump’s campaign of deadly boat strikes, a State Department spokesperson said.
By Nick Turse | April 13 2026, 1:37 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/04/13/trump-boat-strikes-iachr/
The United States is waging a pressure campaign against the leading inter-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into illegal U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the monthslong campaign of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military.
Though the president of the IACHR disputes that the U.S. is pressuring his organization, the State Department responded to questions about the meeting with a statement urging the commission to move onto other matters. A past IACHR president said the organization may fear the “wrath” of the United States, which is the largest financial contributor to the commission’s parent organization, if it launches an investigation.
U.S. lawmakers and experts say an investigation by the IACHR could be an important mechanism to hold the Trump administration accountable for the lethal strikes. Scores of civilians have been killed in the campaign, which has seen families of victims petition the IACHR and sue the U.S. government, accusing it of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.
Last month, the IACHR — an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, charged with the promotion of human rights in the Western hemisphere — held a first-of-its-kind hearing on the legality of the boat strikes. The IACHR considers petitions dealing with violations of rights by member states, including the U.S. At the March 13 hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Crisis Group, and the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights made the case that the U.S. boat strikes violate both U.S. domestic and international law.
Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, noted that the attacks were conducted without the authorization of Congress and were “in violation of international law on the use of force.” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur and a professor of international law at the University of Sydney, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.” He said these “serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life” and were not permissible as law enforcement actions or in the name of national self-defense or allowed under the law of the sea, under international humanitarian law, under international counter-terrorism law, or treaties targeting narcotics.
The hearing drew sharp criticism from the United States, which sent representatives to the meeting. State Department legal adviser Carl Anderson rebuked the commission for holding the hearing and said it wasn’t fit to review legal claims. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the commission “strayed far outside its mandate” and was being manipulated by the ACLU.
“The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue,” Pigott said. “Convening hearings under these circumstances risks undermining — not strengthening — the credibility of the inter-American human rights system.” Pigott also instructed the commission to work through decades-old petitions instead of focusing on the boat strikes.
Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 48 attacks since September 2025, destroying 50 vessels and killing almost 170 civilians. The latest strikes, on April 11 in the Eastern Pacific, killed five people and, according to the Coast Guard, left one “person in distress.” The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or mor
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It’s Not Just Iran. Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts.
By Jonathan Lemire | April 15, 2026, 2:24 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/trump-iran-hungary-melani
a-epstein/686816/
You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.
Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.
Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.
The Venezuela raid in the year’s first days altered the course of Trump’s presidency. By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.
Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences
The U.S. military has smashed much of Iran’s defenses and damaged its missile arsenal. The joint operation with Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and many of his top lieutenants. But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.
This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they
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America’s Orange Jesus
Reflections on a week in which Donald Trump decided to feud with the Pope while comparing himself to the Saviour.
By Susan B. Glasser | April 16, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/americas-
orange-jesus
In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)
I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:
I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.
It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”
The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.
How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.
On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modell
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Russ Vought slammed for omitting $2.2 trillion deficit in Trump budget, didn't want to "confuse the country"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russ-vought-slammed-for-omitti
ng-2-2-trillion-deficit-in-trump-budget-didn-t-want-to-confuse-the-country/ar-AA214bJj
U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, delivered an opening statement at a Committee oversight hearing on President Trump's FY2027 Budget request that slammed the President’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russ Vought.
Merkley said: “Immediately upon opening this budget, I was struck by what was missing. No plan to bring down gas prices. No plan to bring down grocery prices. No plan to save Social Security, which will start running out of money in just six years, requiring a 28 percent cut to seniors' benefits according to the most recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.”
Merkley continued: “No funding for aid to farmers hurt by Trump's tariffs. No additional funding to deal with unexpected disasters, like wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. No meaningful revenue proposals. And no credible plan to reduce the debt, which is now over 100 percent of GDP.”
The lack of debt reduction planning in the budget led Merkley, who mentioned his own budget bona fides, to accuse Vought of breaking the law in his report by inadequately assessing the ballooning deficit.
“In addition,” Merkley said, “as a former Congressional Budget Office analyst, I went looking for the deficit projections, but you didn't bother to put them in, yet again ignoring the law – 31 U.S. Code § 1105 – which requires the President's Budget to include at least 5 years of deficit and debt projections – but yours does not. So, you are breaking both the spirit and letter of the law.
“What your budget does include are projections that the President's tariffs will raise an eye-popping $1.6 trillion in revenue more than CBO estimates. And CBO's estimates were made before the Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs unconstitutional. So, your revenue projections should have been even lower than CBO's, not higher. Making your estimates here simply fictional.”
When Merkley asked Vought why he didn’t include deficit numbers in the budget, as required by law, Vought said: “It’s a discretionary budget. One of the things that I think is important is not to confuse the country when we’re in the middle of several reconciliation efforts over the next year.”
Merkley responded: “I disagree with the notion that it’s discretionary to follow the law. The law did require deficit numbers.”
Extrapolating from the budget’s revenue numbers — even as he portrayed those numbers as dubious — Merkley reported that he did the math and that the deficit amounts to about $2.2 trillion. Merkley told Vought, “I think perhaps the reason you didn’t want to include deficit numbers is you didn’t want to draw attention [to them].”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Could Be Political Suicide for Republicans
In normal times, this budget would be dead on arrival.
By Fred Kaplan | April 20, 2026 5:45 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-defense-budget-iran-
war-hegseth-republicans.html
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans criticized Democrats for “throwing money at a problem.” Now here comes President Donald Trump, proposing a military budget for next year of $1.5 trillion, and most GOP lawmakers are just nodding.
If passed, this would be, even when adjusted for inflation, the United States’ largest defense budget ever—larger than the amount spent (again, adjusting for inflation) in any year during World War II, when the nation’s entire economy was geared to war.
Joe Biden was the first president who, just two years ago, nudged a military budget up against the $1 trillion mark. The world is a turbulent place, to the point where almost nobody in politics proposes cutting defense spending. But is the world so turbulent, and is our position in it so precarious, that we need to increase the budget by almost 50 percent in a single year? Nobody in the Trump administration has made the case, and it’s particularly puzzling, given that Trump’s “National Security Strategy” proposed reducing America’s security commitments abroad.
Let’s say we do need to buy a lot more weapons. Are the weapons he proposes to buy in larger quantities the sorts of weapons we need? And to clarify matters, most of this $1.5 trillion will be spent on weapons. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touts that the budget includes a 7 percent pay hike for members of the armed forces (about twice the national inflation rate), but the total proposed cost for military personnel is just $205 billion (about 13 percent of the defense budget), which exceeds this year’s amount by only $8 billion.
By contrast, Trump and Hegseth propose boosting the budget for weapons procurement from $223 billion to $413 billion—a staggering 85 percent increase. Research and development for new weapons rise almost as steeply, from $210 billion to $344 billion—a 64 percent increase.
There is almost no precedent for such a surge.
The Pentagon has not yet released all the line items in the budget, so it’s hard to break down these figures in much detail. Some of the growth seems somewhat related to advanced satellites (a $24 billion increase for Space Force) and A.I. (a $42 billion increase for “autonomous” systems). But steeper increases (and larger stacks of money) go for traditional Cold War–era systems, such as piloted combat planes (money for Navy aircraft alone doubles from $17 billion to $34 billion), and warships (up from $45 billion this year to $66 billion next year).
The warships are especially expensive ($13 billion for a new USS Gerald Ford–class aircraft carrier, $2.7 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer) and take many years to build. It could be argued we need more ships, but do we need the kinds of ships we’re buying? They are far more capable than ships of older times, but they’re also more vulnerable, given the swarms of anti-ship missiles and drones, which, for instance, China has prepared to fire in case of a war near the Taiwan Strait.
A few years ago, some analysts noted that big ships were good for crisis management—all those attack planes and missiles could intimidate an adversary—but they should probably be moved out of harm’s way if bullets started to fly. (Submarine crews have a related joke: “There are two kinds of warships—submarines and targets.”) This spring’s war with Iran shows they’re of limited use for crisis management: Two aircraft carriers and their escort ships didn’t scare the Iranians into backing down. (However, against a country of limited military power, such as Iran, the carriers can still launch a lot of firepower.)
There’s another, more mundane problem with this budget, especially with the scads it devotes to shipbuilding—the largest sum (adjusting for inflation) since 1962. Even if Congress passes it, the Navy won’t b
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Pope James David Vance the First
The vice president has decided he’s a more accomplished theologian than Leo XIV.
By Tom Nichols | April 16, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/pope-jd-vance-iran/686826/
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.
President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.
But no. Vance just had to speak up. He could have taken his cues from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public life, they must govern as Americans according to the Constitution. Vance decided on a different approach: The pope, he implied, wasn’t a very good, or very smart, Catholic.
Vance’s response to Leo’s statements came during an interview at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia. It was a sour cocktail of equal parts hubris and ignorance with a spritz of Vance’s trademark smarm, and it is worth considering in full:
Quote:Vance just told the bishop of Rome that theology should be “anchored in the truth”? What does that even mean? Whose truth? Somewhere in the nether gloom, Pontius Pilate is rubbing his aching temples and thinking he’s heard this one before.
In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been—if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do, and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.
Catholics, of course, believe that the pope is infallible when he issues ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and doctrine and, yes, morality, so challenging his pronouncements on war and peace seems a tad presumptuous for a member of the faithful. (My own faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, does not have a figure with power like the pope, but you can bet I’d think twice before telling our top cleric, the patriarch of Constantinople, that he was all hosed up on some important theological stuff.) Vance’s slap at Leo—including the pompous implication that he needs to go back and do some theology homework—illustrates the political and religious risks that Vance is willing to take not only with the Vatican, but with a country whose population is one-fifth Catholic, in order to demonstrate his utter fealty to Trump.
Some years ago, I wrote a book, The Death of Expertise, in which I examined the strange phenomenon whereby every person thinks they’re an expert, to the point where they are willing to lecture actual experts about those experts’ own field of competence. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and people in trades such as carpentry and electrical work can tell stories of some layperson who had ideas about medications, the law, or what kind of circuit breakers to use. It’s human, it’s silly,
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The Aides Keeping the President in the Dark
Donald Trump’s advisers are treating him like he can’t handle the reality of the war in Iran. They might be right—but that fact is a danger to the constitutional order.
By David A. Graham | April 20, 2026, 5:48 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/donald-trump-aides-ira
n-war/686875/
Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down. Commanders were scrambling to create and execute an operation to rescue both. The second was the president’s temperament. As plans developed and went into effect, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”
It’s a stunning bit of news: During a national-security crisis, top advisers decided the commander in chief’s presence was a liability. This incident is only the latest example of how Trump’s aides have been trying to keep him in the dark and build a protective bubble around him.
A president whom aides do not view as reliable and steady is a danger in any situation, but the war in Iran has brought many of these issues to the fore. In the lead-up to the war, which Trump launched without consulting Congress, making a case to the American people, or assembling allies, many of his aides believed that Trump was not taking seriously the risks and trade-offs involved, according to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. (The fact that these aides have voiced none of these concerns publicly but said enough privately that the comments leaked later does not speak well for the Cabinet’s judgment or courage.)
Once the war began, Trump received updates that were screened and bowdlerized for him. He has long been inattentive to briefings—early in his first term, aides realized that he liked maps and graphics and would glaze over if given much information in text—but he has reportedly been starting his day off with a sizzle reel of stunning explosions rather than with hard info. These clips, which show the real prowess of the American military, did not convey the ways that the U.S. was losing the war on a strategic level. According to Time, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles became “concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically.” Trump was reportedly shocked at how easily Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, even though the military had warned of the possibility.
Although Trump’s erratic and horrifying social-media posts have absorbed much of the media’s attention of late, his live appearances haven’t done a lot to assure the public of his steadiness either. He unconvincingly told reporters that he had believed that a picture that depicted him as Christlike actually showed him as a doctor. Trump has never excelled at reading from a teleprompter, often coming off as stiff and bored, but his delivery has been especially rough in recent weeks. He seemed tired and unfocused delivering lines in his April 1 White House speech, has waffled on whether the action in Iran is or isn’t a “war,” and declared the war complete even as hostilities continued. Trump also said he wasn’t made aware of a curious press statement by First Lady Melania Trump, where she denied any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, before it was made.
Every president eventually feels trapped in a bubble. In 2014, an evidently claustrophobic Barack Obama reveled in the act of just walking to Chipotle from the White House. Other predecessors have complained about receiving heavily filtered information and feeling removed from the real world. The Biden administration raised new questions of whether the president was bein
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People should be free to build gratifying fantasies free from unpleasant facts.
When I first wrote about Trump in the 2017 edition of The Death of Expertise, I was willing to believe that Trump’s political base did not hold him accountable for his ignorance and errors because they lacked the ability to see his errors as actual mistakes. At the time, I quoted psychologist David Dunning—who along with his colleague Justin Kruger discovered the Dunning-Kruger Effect—when he noted that “some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes.”
Today, we have to reconsider that view. Many Americans who support Trump have doubled down on their loyalty, at levels that now suggest a cult-like following rather than political support.
In Trump (and other celebrities, such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), the American public has found public figures who indulge their paranoia about shadowy forces ruining their lives. Citizens feel they know these celebrities and can trust them. Social scientists call such attachments “parasocial relationships,” in which people feel a deep personal connection to famous people who, in the main, have no idea who they are. -- Tom Nichols, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Second Edition [2024]
parasocial-relationships
https://www.findapsychologist.org/parasocial-relationships-the-nature-
of-celebrity-fascinations
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘The Right Amount of Crazy’
In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.
By Fintan O’Toole
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-right-amount-of-crazy-
fintan-otoole/
In January, when The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.
Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.
To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”
But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:
He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.
One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”
Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
For Trump’s apologist
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Trump fought to keep the ballroom fundraising contract secret. Here’s what’s in it.
The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed.
By Jonathan Edwards, Dan Diamond
April 21, 2026 at 6:03 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/21/trump-ballroom-dono
r-deal/
The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show.
The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing. Public Citizen, a government watchdog organization, sued to obtain the contract between the White House, the National Park Service and the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit managing donations for the project, and shared the document with The Post.
“The Trump administration’s failure to disclose this contract was flatly unlawful,” said Wendy Liu, a Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit, filed after the Park Service and the Interior Department failed to fulfill a public records request for the document. “The American people are entitled to transparency over this multi-million-dollar project.”
The secrecy surrounding the contract mirrors the administration’s broader approach to the project. White House officials have declined to disclose the total amount raised, the identities of all donors or, until recently, basic details about the building’s design. Court documents show Trump knew he was going to tear down the East Wing at least two months before doing so, but he never told the public.
The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.
“President Trump is working 24/7 to Make America Great Again, including his historic beautification of the White House, at no taxpayer expense,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement defending the administration’s process.
White House officials said not publicly posting the agreement was standard practice for contracts involving the executive residence, citing security concerns. They also said offering anonymity for donors was standard for significant projects and framed the use of private funds as a boon for taxpayers. The administration did not respond to questions about failing to respond to the public records request for the contract or fighting the release of the document in court. Trump has said that the administration has raised about $300 million for the project.
The contract resembles templates used by the Park Service for more routine fundraising partnerships — with several notable differences: Provisions peppered throughout the agreement prevent the signatories from revealing the identities of anonymous donors, and a review process for detecting conflicts of interest with the Park Service and Interior Department makes no mention of doing the same for the president, other White House officials or the 14 other executive departments he oversees.
White House ballroom fundraising agreement
Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Critics have argued that allowing anonymous gifts to a sitting president’s signature project creates precisely the kind of conflict the contra
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Cultifying the U.S. Military
By Paul Krugman / Apr 23, 2026 at 5:33 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cultifying-the-us-military
In February 1777 George Washington issued an order requiring that American soldiers be inoculated against smallpox:
Quote:It was a wise decision. Smallpox was a debilitating, often fatal disease. And Washington’s army, which put many farm boys with little previous exposure to infectious disease into crowded encampments, was especially vulnerable. As Washington said, the situation “seems to require the measure.”
Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.
It was, nonetheless, a bold, enlightened move. And why not? Washington, like many of the Founding Fathers, was very much a man of the Enlightenment.
By contrast, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who insists on being called the Secretary of War, is a bloodthirsty religious fanatic. He’s more comfortable with fascism than with America’s founding principles. And in another attempt to prove his manhood, he announced on Tuesday that he was ending the sissy requirement that members of the military be vaccinated against the flu.
This was, he said, to “restore freedom” to our armed forces:
Quote:Even before we get into the practical damage Hegseth’s move will inflict, note the bizarre framing. Personal freedom is great and should be granted wherever appropriate. But one place where it isn’t and never has been appropriate is in the military. When Americans sign up to serve the nation under arms, they agree to temporarily forego many of the freedoms of civilian life. They must wear uniforms, not street fashion. They must eat Army or Navy food. They must salute officers and obey orders. They must, in other words, adhere to military discipline.
If you, an American warrior entrusted to defend this nation, believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest, then you are free to take it. You shouldn’t. But we will not force you because your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable.
It won’t surprise you to learn that Hegseth is completely hypocritical on this subject. He says that your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable. But he has banned most beards from the U.S. military and cracked down on religious exemptions. After all, bearded men can’t be effective warriors:
Ulysses S. Grant and the American Civil War - Wikipedia
He has also demanded that members of the military lose weight, because he doesn’t like how they look:
Quote:But requiring that serving troops receive a vaccine that helps maintain their military effectiveness and also helps protect their comrades from infection? Tyranny!
Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad and it’s not who we are.
This isn’t simply about vaccines and facial hair. These directives are part of a larger project, another step in Hegseth’s drive to cultify the US military.
What do I mean by cultifying the military? I mean creating an environment in which professional integrity, military discipline, and historical precedent are destroyed in service to the personality cult of Donald Trump and his enforcer, Pete Hegseth.
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President Donald Trump seems to have lost his marbles, according to some critics, but one former Trump official said the man was already in decline in his first term.
Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor on Wednesday took to task Nicole Wallace's point about Trump’s behavior getting bizarre, saying that he picked up on hints of breakdown during his "two and a half years inside the administration." "We would go in to talk in the Oval Office about matters of life and death. And there was always a weird non-sequitur, a complete distraction, unfocused, couldn't remember things. The guy was a basket case," said Taylor. "There's no better way to put it. There's no academic way to put it. He was a basket case. Any normal person would have sat there on the couch in the Oval Office and said, 'What's this guy taking? What's he on? He's acting in such a bizarre manner, given the subject. So that was always true.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/former-trump-official-says-pre
sident-was-already-a-basket-case/ar-AA21v6Xr
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A Far-Right Court Allowed the Ten Commandments in Every Texas Classroom—in Direct Defiance of SCOTUS
By Alexis Romero and Mark Joseph Stern | April 23, 2026 4:53 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/supreme-court-fifth-circui
t-ten-commandments-religion-schools.html
On Tuesday, the nation’s most reactionary appeals court allowed Texas to install the King James version of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. By a 9–8 vote, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas did not violate the First Amendment by exposing students to the state’s chosen scripture all day, every day, gutting the constitutional separation of church and state in the process. What’s most remarkable about the decision, though, is not its support for theocracy, but its direct defiance of the Supreme Court. In 1980, justices struck down a law virtually identical to Texas’, forbidding states from placing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. By flouting this precedent, the 5th Circuit effectively went rogue, daring the Supreme Court to check its brazen disobedience. SCOTUS’ conservative supermajority may be tempted to bless this ruling in light of its own rulings that have steadily allowed religion to encroach on public education. But doing so would come at a steep cost: imperiling its own authority to say what the law is.
Tuesday’s decision in Nathan v. Alamo Heights is the latest chapter in red states’ quest to put Christianity back in their public schools. So far, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas have enacted laws requiring prominent display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, with several more states poised to follow suit. Republican lawmakers crafted these statutes to test whether today’s Supreme Court will continue to shield students from sectarian indoctrination. For decades, the court held that Christianity in the classroom violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which bars the government from promoting or endorsing religion. It enforced this principle with extra vigilance in public schools, where children, as a captive audience, are uniquely susceptible to religious coercion.
In 1980’s Stone v. Graham, the justices squarely addressed a Kentucky law that, like Texas’, required the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. They found the case so straightforward that they disposed of it summarily, without full briefing or oral argument. Kentucky’s goal, the court held, “is plainly religious in nature,” and the law’s likely effect would be “to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.” Because it lacked any secular purpose, and would coerce students into religious observation, the statute obviously violated the establishment clause.
So how did the 5th Circuit justify upholding a law that’s basically identical to Kentucky’s? The Supreme Court, after all, has never overruled Stone. But in 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton, the conservative supermajority did say that the court had “long ago abandoned” a different establishment clause decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman. On Tuesday, the 5th Circuit reasoned that Stone cited Lemon, and Lemon had been “abandoned,” so it was free to disregard Stone altogether. As the majority put it: “With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone.”
There is a major problem with this bold assertion: The Supreme Court has instructed lower courts never to assume that a precedent has been silently overruled by later decisions that seem to conflict with it. Just three years ago, SCOTUS scolded a lower court for doing exactly that. It declared that if a Supreme Court precedent “has direct application in a case,” the lower court must “follow the case which directly controls, leaving to this court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.” That’s true, SCOTUS explained, even if the precedent is in tension with “some other line of decisions,” or appears to have been “implicitly overruled” by a more recent case. Binding precedent stil
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Trump’s Dreams for a Battleship Led to His Navy Secretary’s Ouster
The Navy secretary, John Phelan, was supposed to deliver the first of the president’s ships by 2028. The timeline was nearly impossible.
By Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper | April 23, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-navy-secretary.ht
ml
President Trump wanted one thing, more than anything else, from his secretary of the Navy, John Phelan: a new class of battleships.
“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Mr. Trump boasted at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort in Florida a few days before Christmas. Mr. Phelan, a billionaire investor who has a home near the club, stood next to the president as he made the announcement.
Mr. Phelan’s job was to deliver the first of Mr. Trump’s battleships by 2028.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Phelan, who had struggled to come up with a plan to deliver the ships on the nearly impossible timeline that Mr. Trump has demanded, senior defense and administration officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to be forced from the Defense Department during this administration, though he is far from the only senior Pentagon official to be dismissed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals over the past year, including the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month. Mr. Hegseth has also butted heads with the secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, over promotions and a host of other issues.
The churn of senior Pentagon officials at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in war with Iran has alarmed top Republican and Democratic members of Congress.
The Pentagon did not respond to questions regarding the circumstances surrounding Mr. Phelan’s dismissal. Mr. Phelan could not immediately be reached for comment.
The breaking point for Mr. Phelan, who often said that he and Mr. Trump texted and talked on the phone regularly, came in the last two weeks as the president’s frustration over Mr. Phelan’s management of his prized battleship program grew and Mr. Phelan’s enemies in the Pentagon, including Mr. Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen A. Feinberg, mounted a campaign to force him out.
Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg told Mr. Trump that the Navy secretary was not a team player and needed to go, military officials said. Mr. Trump called Mr. Phelan to talk about his poor relationship with other leaders in the Pentagon.
Mr. Feinberg and Mr. Hegseth had recently seized some decision-making authority from Mr. Phelan, tapping a three-star admiral to oversee the Navy’s submarine portfolio and having him report directly to Mr. Feinberg.
That left Mr. Phelan with oversight of a major investment in new ships that Mr. Trump has called a “golden fleet,” built around the president’s beloved battleship program.
Presidents rarely pay close attention to military procurement, but Mr. Trump has spoken repeatedly about his plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship. In a February speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Mr. Trump insisted that he had helped design the new class of ships that bear his name.
“I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Mr. Trump told the troops. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.”
For Mr. Trump, the ships recalled “Victory at Sea,” a documentary television series that ran in the 1950s and touted the role that battleships and other Navy vessels played in World War II.
“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he mused to reporters in January when talking about the new battleships. “What a great thing that is to watch!”
Mr. Phelan played a prominent role in selling Mr. Trump on the new ships and his ambitious plans for revitalizing the U.S. Navy’s fleet and the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
In his confirmation hearing l
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Donald Trump’s Pardon Economy
For some wealthy offenders, clemency is just a golf game—or a million-dollar plate at Mar-a-Lago—away.
By Ruth Marcus | April 27, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-pardon-eco
nomy
“I have great respect for you,” Donald Trump told Rod Blagojevich. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up. But, Rod, you’re fired.” It was April, 2010, week four of the third season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” and Blagojevich, the pugnacious former governor of Illinois, had bungled the assignment: to design a promotional campaign for a new Harry Potter exhibit at Universal Studios. In truth, Blagojevich had bigger things to worry about. He was broke—hence the “Celebrity Apprentice” gig. More worrisome, he was about to stand trial on corruption charges, for, among other things, trying to profit from naming Barack Obama’s replacement in the Senate. Blagojevich was ultimately convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He served eight of them, until Trump, in his first term as President, commuted his sentence. Blagojevich, a Democrat, had launched a lobbying blitz and received support from Jesse Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, and the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. A full pardon came later, at the start of Trump’s second term. The weekend after the Inauguration, the President “called me on a Saturday night to say he’s gonna pardon me,” Blagojevich said. Speaking with me recently, he recalled his “Celebrity Apprentice” appearance with glee. “That’s the great miracle of the whole thing—if I don’t do that television show, then President Trump doesn’t become the only President in American history to have fired and freed the same guy,” he said.
Now, in an only-in-Trump’s-America turn, Blagojevich has become a pardon lobbyist. His client is Anne Pramaggiore, who was once one of the most prominent women in Chicago: the C.E.O. of Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility; the chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and a benefactor of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Chicago Urban League. In January, Pramaggiore reported to a federal prison in Marianna, Florida, to serve a two-year sentence for her role in a scheme to provide no-show jobs to associates of Michael Madigan, the long-serving speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and, before his own conviction on corruption charges, perhaps the most influential politician in the state. At the time, Pramaggiore was appealing her conviction, and she stood a reasonable chance of winning. (A Supreme Court ruling had wiped out the basis for part of the conviction, and the foundation for the remaining charges was shaky.) But, in Trump 2.0, the courts are just one route to freedom, and not necessarily the swiftest. So Pramaggiore had also turned to lobbyists in the hope of a Presidential intervention, eventually paying them a total of nearly five hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred and thirty thousand went to Blagojevich, according to federal lobbying reports.
In several months of reporting on pardons during the second Trump Administration, I reached out to dozens of lawyers, lobbyists, pardon recipients, and Administration officials, most of whom declined to be named, if they responded at all. Not Blagojevich, who returned my phone call with alacrity. “Put me on the record, because Anne Pramaggiore is one thousand per cent innocent,” Blagojevich insisted when we first spoke, in late February. “She’s a victim of a terrible injustice, inflicted on her by a system in Illinois that’s dirty, rotten, and corrupt.” (Pramaggiore was indicted in November, 2020, during Trump’s first Administration, and his second Administration has defended the conviction on appeal.)
In pursuit of clemency for Pramaggiore, Blagojevich said, he met with multiple players in the world of pardons under Trump: Ed Martin, the Stop the Steal activist who was installed in the position of pardon attorney after his nomination to be the U.S. Attorney for the Dis
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The Age of American Caesarism
The legal right spent decades empowering the presidency. Now it must reckon with the system it helped create.
By Gregg Nunziata | April 27, 2026, 9 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-caesar-executive-power
/686846/
Julius Caesar styled himself as a servant of the republic, claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice. The Roman republic did not survive him.
The second Trump administration has revealed American Caesarism in nearly full bloom. Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda. Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortionate transactions, using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s launched foreign military adventures and full-blown wars seemingly based on personal whim, and has made the military a political prop and a tool for domestic law enforcement. With Congress sidelined and the courts reluctant to check Donald Trump’s excesses, America has been left with what some legal scholars have described as an “executive unbound”—and with a president who threatens to supplant the republic in all but name.
Trump’s most fervent supporters justify his approach in terms reminiscent of Caesar’s. The White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has remarked that “the whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” Many Republicans argue that Trump’s policy preferences deserve support because he has a “mandate,” and they heap scorn on the “unelected” judges who have had the temerity to rule against him.
This is not American democracy. The central premise of the Constitution is that liberty requires divided authority. The accumulation of power in one branch of government is, as James Madison warned, “the very definition of tyranny.” Americans are already feeling the consequences of this imbalance: Because executive orders, emergency declarations, and unilateral action lack the durability of legislation passed by Congress, policies swing wildly from one administration to the next. Families and businesses cannot plan ahead, which undermines investment, growth, and prosperity.
American Caesarism did not emerge overnight with the election of Trump, but over the course of decades. And though conservatives alone did not create this state of affairs, many were key proponents of a vision of politics centered on one commanding figure—a vision that is now destabilizing our country. I have spent my career in the conservative legal movement, which has included advising Senate Republicans on judicial nominations. I have become convinced that if the Madisonian republic is to endure, conservatives must reckon with our role in bringing the nation to its current breaking point, and work to reestablish the checks and balances that we helped erode.
For much of American history, conservatives were the nation’s fiercest skeptics of executive power, warning that a swelling presidency could threaten liberty by displacing the authority of Congress and the courts. By the 1970s, a rise in what conservatives saw as judicial activism had shifted their focus to overreach by the courts. To those on the right, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was emblematic of a Court operating far beyond the bounds of the Constitution to usurp policy making. The courts of the era also reshaped criminal law, ordered busing to desegregate schools, redefined the relationship between church and state, and even waded into tax-and-spending issues. Convinced the judiciary had slipped its constitutional leash, the conservative legal movement dedicated itself to preventing what it called “legislating from the bench,” through scholarship, advocacy, and organizing.
But this focus on reforming the judiciary, combined with the politics of the period, meant that comparatively little attention was paid to the other two branches of government—and, in particular, to the slide toward rule by presiden
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The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption
The president is no longer intimidated by backlash.
By David A. Graham | April 28, 2026, 6:17 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/evolution-of-trump-cor
ruption-g7-summit/686983/
Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida. The backlash was fierce, and somehow the then–Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s dismissive attitude—“Get over it”—failed to quell concerns, including among Republicans. Two days later, Trump gave up and moved the event to Camp David. (In the end, it was canceled because of COVID.)
Things are different in Trump’s second term. Later this year, the United States will host the G20 summit—an offshoot of the G7 that includes approximately 20 leaders of the world’s largest economies—and the president has selected Trump National Doral as the location. A few days ago, The Washington Post reported that Trump even intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, a global pariah, to the meeting. But the Doral G20 has gotten nowhere near the same amount of attention, and much less backlash.
The way the two summits have been received feels like a case study in the differences between the first and second Trump presidencies. In 2019, neither the press nor the public was yet so fatigued by news and numb to outrage, as New York magazine observed this week, nor were they yet accustomed to a president using his position to openly enrich himself. (The Atlantic’s headline about the G7 announcement was “Trump’s Most Shameless Act of Profiteering.” How young we were!) The Republican Party also had more leaders who were willing to criticize the president, either publicly or privately. Finally, although Trump has never seemed especially vulnerable to shame, the president and his aides could still be swayed by sufficient embarrassment back then. The phrase shameless corruption gets used a lot, but Trump’s second term embodies it.
Although the first Trump administration created a fire hose of news, the country has been going at this pace now for 10 years, and the public is getting tired. Trump’s announcement of the location for the G20 back in early September, was overshadowed by larger stories, particularly the Epstein files; days later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, briefly blotting out all other coverage. The G20 summit may also seem less relevant than other global events, especially given that Trump is currently shaking or breaking the world order through different means. (He has also already dis-invited South Africa from the summit for largely imagined offenses against Afrikaners.)
Perhaps most important, the idea of Trump grubbing a few dollars out of hosting a meeting at one of his properties seems positively quaint today. During the first Trump term, I covered a succession of egregious choices: Trump refusing to financially disentangle himself from his companies; diverting Mike Pence to his Irish resort for a stopover; charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at Mar-a-Lago while protecting him; and making his hotel in Washington, D.C., a physical affront to the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
To say that these actions now look like nickel-and-diming is not to forgive them but to acknowledge the much larger scale on which Trump and his family are working now. The president’s government is signing off on big payouts to former aides, including Michael Flynn ($1.25 million for a case in which Flynn pleaded guilty) and Carter Page (another $1.25 million, even though courts twice dismissed his lawsuit). The government has not yet made deals with people convicted for their involvement in the January 6, 2021, riot, but their lawyers are hopeful. Trump has handed out clemency to a slew of people who have donated money to his campaign or his other efforts, which looks a great deal like selling pardons.
Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has signed lucrative deals in cities aroun
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Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:You and Trump agree that the old World must die to make way for his New World:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The YOLO Presidency
Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s “great men.”
By Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer | April 29, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/donald-trump-legacy-histo
ry/686817/
Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?
Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.
And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.
“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”
The tendency to self-aggrandize is as fundamental a feature of Trump as his sculpted hair and overlong red ties. But it has become even more important in setting his priorities and steering his actions as he hurtles through his final term in office. He no longer has to worry about the judgment of voters and can instead focus on what he’s decided really matters: ascending to become one of history’s so-called great men and leaving an enduring—and, in many cases, physical—imprint. The result, at least so far, has cost many lives and billions of dollars, damaged the world economy, strained already fragile alliances, and cratered the president’s standing with the public. But those around him cast his new focus as a liberation. “He is unburdened by political concerns and is able to do what is truly right rather than what is in his best political interests,” the administration official told us. “Hence the decision to strike Iran.”
What the American people think—and what near-term consequences they may face—has mattered less to Trump than his own designs to remake the world by bombing seven countries, toppling two world leaders in as many months, threatening to seize Greenland, and undermining the NATO alliance. Earlier this month, Trump described the conflagration with Iran in existential terms, writing on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Even when he later agreed to a two-week cease-fire—which has since been extended—Trump portrayed his Middle East adventurism as “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” At home, he has focused his time and attention on unending tributes to his reign—building projects that recall ancient Rome, decorative gilding that evokes imperial France, banners with his visage draped across government buildings, and a gold coin set to be minted with his image for the nation’s 250th birthday. “He is conscious, proud, and hopeful that some of the things that he does are resetting long-standing orders of things,” a second senior official told us. “Not in a Socrates sort
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You and Trump agree that the old World must die to make way for his New World:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I'm certainly not going to be reading any part of that wall of text from one of your intellectual idiots.
I've been telling you for a year and a half that your world is dead and it's never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I'm certainly not going to be reading any part of that wall of text from one of your intellectual idiots.
I've been telling you for a year and a half that your world is dead and it's never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Would he look like Trayvon Martin?
By Jonathan Chait | May 1, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/obama-son-trayvon-martin/687
018/
“If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen,” Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and prominent libertarian activist, wrote on X earlier this week.
The claim that a former president’s hypothetical son would have attempted to assassinate President Trump is insane. Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.
The reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For some on the right, Obama’s remark is the most emblematic moment of his presidency, hauled out again and again by Fox News, Breitbart, and other right-leaning news outlets to remind them of his responsibility for racial strife.
As Ben Shapiro put it last year on Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America—which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream. And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white-supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot. And: My son could have been Trayvon.”
Shapiro explained, “The reaction of the right was: This is an interest group–based politics that does not particularly like the founding, and we are going to react to that with Trumpism.”
It is hardly unusual for a president to acknowledge his ethnic heritage. Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden liked to play up their Irish American background. Just this week, Trump touted his mother’s Scottish background.
It may feel to conservatives as though Obama was talking about his race all the time; perhaps that is because they keep reminding one another of the rare prominent instance he did so. Obama delivered a memorably nuanced address about race as a candidate, then mostly avoided mention of it throughout his presidency. If Obama had spoken about his race more frequently, conservatives would not rely so heavily on the singular example. His remark about Martin being Black like him has been endlessly repeated by conservatives because it was the exception rather than the rule.
It is true that the American political discourse around race changed during and after Obama’s presidency. Progressive Americans became more conscious of racism, and many white Americans grew more resentful. In progressive spaces, it became common for mob-style panics to hyperbolize trauma and shut down criticism.
Yet Obama was an early and forceful critic of that tendency. He attacked the left over and over and
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Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
How Trump Screwed Himself
Talking with Greg Sargent
Paul Krugman
May 02, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-trump-screwed-himself
I’m sort of on vacation, and didn’t do an interview this week. However, I talked with Greg Sargent of The New Republic from my hotel.
Transcript
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Donald Trump rejected a proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This offer would have set aside questions about Iran’s nuclear program for now. That may be why Trump rejected it. But there’s another possible reason—accepting that deal wouldn’t make him look as if he’s winning. Yet this comes as gas and oil prices continue to rise, which isn’t making Trump look like a winner either. And partly because of that, Republicans are privately warning that their prospects in the midterms look increasingly dire. So what now for Trump?
Paul Krugman has a great new piece on his Substack, arguing that Trump simply does not have the cards in the Iran situation, even though he may not know it. So we’re talking with Krugman about where all this is going. Paul, always nice to have you on.
Paul Krugman: Good to be on again.
Sargent: So Trump rejected that proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps in part because it would not address Trump’s demand for total termination of Iran’s nuclear program. But the New York Times had an extraordinary detail about the Iranian offer: “A U.S. official also said that accepting it could appear to deny Mr. Trump a victory.” Paul, apparently that’s the single most important factor in all of this, right?
Krugman: That’s what’s been holding everything up. For most of us, by about a week into the war, it was obvious that basically America lost. But Trump cannot bring himself to acknowledge that.
He’s been trying—he’s threatening to bomb them back into the Stone Ages, and he’s been threatening war crimes, and he’s been imposing counter-blockades against the blockade—all of which seems to be because he cannot seem to accept that actually he screwed up badly. There is no good outcome for the United States here. All we can do is accept something that actually leaves Iran stronger than it was, but he won’t do it.
Sargent: Well, we just learned that gas prices rose on Tuesday to the highest level in four years. It’s well over $4 a gallon on average. Brent crude is over $100 a barrel again. Paul, can you just walk us through the basics of how those developments are tied to the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed?
Krugman: Yeah. Before this war, about 15 percent of the world’s oil flowed through that strait. And it’s other stuff too—natural gas, helium, fertilizer—but right now let’s focus on the oil.
So 15 percent of the world’s oil goes through that narrow passageway, which is extremely easy for Iran to block. That 15 percent—there’s really not much of an exit. There’s no real way around the Iranian blockade. A little bit of stuff can go by pipeline, but not much. And that’s a lot of oil being denied to the world market. And of course, the price of oil has gone way up.
But if this continues, he ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the really interesting thing—I cited some numbers from Goldman Sachs in the Substack—although the price of oil is way up, consumption of oil is only down a little bit. And mostly what’s happening is that they’re drawing down inventories of oil, that people who have oil in storage tanks, with oil that was already on tankers, is bein
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls. There is still time to repent or else burn in Hell forever:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump picked a fight with the Pope: The one person he can't fire, can't outbid, and can't outlast
The Pope and the President of the United States are both American. That seems to be a problem.
By Catherina Gioino | May 2, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-picked-a-fight-with-the-p
ope-the-one-person-he-can-t-fire-can-t-outbid-and-can-t-outlast/ar-AA22dGhA
Trump’s version of the American Dream says the winners are being stolen from: by immigrants and globalists, and by institutions that no longer serve the people who built them. His opponents mostly argue within the same framework, insisting the system should be fairer but still organized around the same ideals. Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope, and is also the only person in the world with the moral authority, the biography, and the institutional platform to critique the MAGA vision of America on its own terms, using its own words.
Trump chose to pick a fight with the Pope in a way that his own base argue is against the very things he preaches. His approval rating has fallen to 34% in Pew’s latest survey, the lowest of his second term. The Iran war he launched has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted 20% of global oil supplies, pushed gas prices past $4 a gallon, and driven inflation back to 3.3%, the highest since May 2024, with economists warning it could reach 4.2% by year’s end.
The IMF has flagged global recession risk. A majority of voters, 53%, now call the Iran military action a failure, and Democrats hold a 10-point lead on the generic congressional ballot heading into the midterms. An AP poll puts Trump’s approval on the economy at 30%. And into this steps an American pope with a 42% favorable rating and an 8% unfavorable rating, a net favorability 34 points better than the president’s, making the moral case against the very war that is producing the economic pain. The reason why he remains so untouchable despite Trump’s attacks is that he embodies the same thing Trump is: an American.
Iran challenged Trump’s hold over MAGA like no other conflict, and so Leo has like no other figure. Every other critic Trump has faced, from Democrats to foreign leaders, could be dismissed as partisan, but Leo is from Chicago and leads the faith Trump’s own vice president converted to. Now he runs the oldest institution on earth from a sovereign city-state smaller than most golf courses.
When President Donald Trump built the MAGA political movement, he used a very specific version of the American Dream: nationalist, zero-sum, culturally defensive, built on accumulation and dominance. Leo tends to counter that: same country and same institutions but a completely different approach to what the United States should do.
“He’s a believer in the United States, and what he’s saying is also, indirectly, trying to correct where the United States is going,” Massimo Faggioli, professor of historical and contemporary ecclesiology at Villanova University, told Fortune. “He’s credible when he talks about America in ways that an Italian, a German, or a Pole couldn’t be.”
Two American dreams in conflict
Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV previously served as a missionary in Peru before becoming the first North American pope. For years, the American Catholic right dismissed Vatican criticism of U.S. politics as the meddling of out-of-touch European clerics or a Latin American pope with an anti-American chip on his shoulder. Now, that argument is no longer available.
Christopher White, associate director at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and author of Pop
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The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over
For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.
By Adam Kirsch
May 3, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/jurgen-habermas-debate-trump
/687016/
Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.
But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prolific commentator on world events, didn’t live to comment on the Iran war. He died on March 14, at the age of 96, two weeks after American and Israeli air strikes began. But it bore out his worst fears about the fate of liberal democracy, which he spent a long lifetime analyzing and defending. For Habermas, the essence of democracy was discourse, back-and-forth argument about ideas and values. In his landmark works of political and social theory, he wrote about the “public sphere” where citizens come together to hammer out judgments, and about “communicative action,” which turns language into a force for cooperation. “All political power derives from the communicative power of citizens,” he wrote, and in an ideal democracy “all relevant questions, issues, and contributions are brought up and processed in discourses and negotiations.”
The end of a life as long and productive as Habermas’s can’t be called a tragedy. But there was a special pathos about the tributes published around the world after his death, which seemed to symbolize the tragic condition of democracy itself. In one of his last public appearances, in Munich in November, he gave a speech mourning “the now–barely reversible dismantling of the oldest liberal-democratic regime,” the United States, thanks to Trump’s “arbitrary-autocratic expansion” of executive power.
America’s autocratic turn darkened the end of what Habermas described in the speech as a “politically rather favored life.” Perhaps it was favored in the sense that it began at such a low point, there was nowhere to go but up. Habermas was born in Germany in 1929 and grew up under Nazism; he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and his father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He lived long enough to see democracy take root in West Germany, and then to see a reunified Germany become the bulwark of free Europe.
This happy ending was by no means guaranteed, and Habermas’s work as a theorist and polemicist made an important contribution to it. He began his career in West Germany in the 1950s, when ex-Nazis still dominated the academic establishment. Turning against the influence of Martin Heidegger, then the idol of German philosophy despite his collaboration with the Nazi regime, the young Habermas found a mentor in Theodor Adorno, a radical social critic who spent the Nazi period in exile. Adorno was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and Habermas took up his mantle as the leader of the school’s second generation, spending most of his career at the University of Frankfurt.
But whereas Adorno effectively lost hope for modern civ
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ix, you and Trump are personifications of the seven deadly sins — pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth — a classification of vices in Catholic tradition that originated in the 4th century and was refined by Pope Gregory I and Thomas Aquinas. Often called "capital sins," these seven vices are considered the root causes of other immoral behaviors and spiritual decay.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Seven Deadly Sins and Their Meanings:
• Pride (Superbia): Often considered the root of all other sins, it is an excessive, selfish belief in one’s own superiority and abilities.
• Greed (Avarice): An obsessive, insatiable desire for material wealth, possessions, or power over others.
• Lust (Luxuria): An intense, disordered craving for sexual pleasure, focusing purely on self-gratification rather than love.
• Envy (Invidia): Resentment or sadness directed at another person’s talents, possessions, or happiness, often wishing to take them away.
• Gluttony (Gula): Overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste, particularly food and drink.
• Wrath (Ira): Uncontrolled, intense anger, hatred, or rage that drives a desire for vengeance.
• Sloth (Acedia): Laziness, apathy, or a failure to utilize one's talents and pursue Spiritual growth.
These vices are famously detailed as the structures of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Counter-Virtues (Remedies):
To combat these, traditional teachings offer corresponding virtues:
• Pride -» Humility
• Greed -» Generosity
• Lust -» Chastity
• Envy -» Gratitude
• Gluttony -» Temperance
• Wrath -» Patience
• Sloth -» Diligence
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas
Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rocker.
Sunday, May 3, 2026 by Bonnie McCune
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/sorry-kiddos-were-not-in
-wonderland-anymore-were-not-even-in-kansas.html
It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized we’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naive or slow to realize it. Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity. He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.
Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from many authorities? Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
All with complete impunity. Why is he able to ignore and walk around all the customary forms of crime that so many others are currently imprisoned for? Why are we tolerating this? This man? Anyone else would either be charged with harassment or sued for defamation of character or indicted for crimes.
A friend of mine blames the laissez-faire attitude of society on the laxity with which society treats contemporary media nowadays. We see murders, thefts, beatings, and crimes in a constant flood of words and images in books, videos, and news. I’m not convinced. After all, these despicable behaviors have been part of human conduct from time ad infinitum. They are the stuff of which folk tales and religions are made.
I have taken small comfort in the questionable belief that he’s lost his mind. We’re encouraged to extend tolerance and sympathy to those mentally and emotionally handicapped. My question, however, is why no one has tried to disarm him? Supposedly, there are penalties for failing to halt this destruction. At least there are ethical and moral constraints, even if no one appears willing to stop him.
Do these sound like rational actions by an adult male in our society?
• He authorizes expenditures (for which he has no legal claims) for huge, unnecessary construction projects that have no legitimate purpose but which proclaim his name.
• He single-handedly closes federal agencies and programs, some in existence for years, with little blowback.
• He identifies with god figures so much that he creates (or instructs others to create) images of himself as what obviously is a Messiah figure and Superman.
• He loudly and openly criticizes the actions and purported purposes of other leaders, both civil and international, evidently just to denigrate them.
The publication of Alice in Wonderland is often touted as a view of reality as insanity. Welcome 2026, where Trump’s assessment of reality is bizarre to say the least, and inexplicable is another accurate description. His latest proposal is to build a giant arch in Washington, DC, that would dwarf other monumental arches in the world. The administration has not released cost estimates, but the proposal is massive. The excuse? The country’s 250th anniversary.
In other recent news, Trump downplayed the impact of high fuel prices, suggesting the economic fallout from the ongoing war with Iran is less severe than anticipated. He referred to the current inflation as “fake,” attributing it to fluctuating energy prices. Despite gas prices exceeding $5 a gallon at local stations, Trump has chosen not to address the rising costs of fuel or airline tickets during his remarks at a recent appearance.
Other activities too complicated to detail here include responsibility for the death
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
That's what we're doing now.
We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.
You lose. Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women. That's why the Law allowed slave-owners to bullwhip, starve, and torture their slaves, the best-known methods to teach darkies obedience to superior white authorities. Funny how Trump got upset when monuments to slave-owning Confederate generals were removed, unless Trump can't tell the difference between what is evil and good.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
That's what we're doing now.
We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.
You lose. Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. 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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
That's what we're doing now.
We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.
You lose. Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
THE CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.
That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.
Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Today, Democrats don't show their distain and hatred for black people by burning crosses on their yard, or tying them up to the ball hitch on their truck and dragging them through the streets...
They broke up as many black family units as they could by putting black men in prison for minor weed offenses. They used the Department of Education to ruin their schooling so hardly any of them have a fucking prayer at a decent life once they graduate after 12 years of learning NOTHING. They spent the last 65 years making black people as completely dependent on the government as they possibly could.
They put abortion clinics all over the country, called them an innocuous name (Planned Parenthood), and sat back and watched as 19 Million black children were murdered before they were even born since 1973.
The only time Democrats even pretend to care about black people is right before an election when they go to all the black churches and make all the promises again that they know full well they have zero intention of keeping.
They EXPECT black people to vote for them. Neigh... they DEMAND it. If you're black and you don't vote Democrat, they call you Uncle Tom. They call you a race-traitor. They even call you a nigger.
FUCK DEMOCRATS.
Cancer, the entire fucking lot of you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ix, Trump's actual life is evil, and he is a dick. But like slave-owners everywhere, the difference between evil and good is completely inverted in the minds of evil people. That got partially solved in the American Civil War by killing massive numbers of slave-owners. It didn't change their opinion of themselves, but it did intimidate those who survived. To preserve their old ways, the slave-owners became less obviously evil. They switched from starving and torturing their slaves to only abusing and underpaying their workforce.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
THE CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.
That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.
Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. 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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
That's what we're doing now.
We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.
You lose. Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
THE CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.
That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.
Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Today, Democrats don't show their distain and hatred for black people by burning crosses on their yard, or tying them up to the ball hitch on their truck and dragging them through the streets...
They broke up as many black family units as they could by putting black men in prison for minor weed offenses. They used the Department of Education to ruin their schooling so hardly any of them have a fucking prayer at a decent life once they graduate after 12 years of learning NOTHING. They spent the last 65 years making black people as completely dependent on the government as they possibly could.
They put abortion clinics all over the country, called them an innocuous name (Planned Parenthood), and sat back and watched as 19 Million black children were murdered before they were even born since 1973.
The only time Democrats even pretend to care about black people is right before an election when they go to all the black churches and make all the promises again that they know full well they have zero intention of keeping.
They EXPECT black people to vote for them. Neigh... they DEMAND it. If you're black and you don't vote Democrat, they call you Uncle Tom. They call you a race-traitor. They even call you a nigger.
FUCK DEMOCRATS.
Cancer, the entire fucking lot of you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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You are evil, personified, Second.
We have zero interest in hearing anything out of you about who is and isn't evil.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.
All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.
And... SPOILER ALERT:
You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.
Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Who is Senator Byrd?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.
And... SPOILER ALERT:
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions". Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan
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:Who is Senator Byrd?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.
And... SPOILER ALERT:
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions". Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
FUCK YOU.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.
All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.
And... SPOILER ALERT:
You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.
Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Judge tosses Laura Loomer’s defamation suit against Bill Maher
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
FUCK YOU.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The conservative activist alleged that Maher defamed her with a joke suggesting she had an affair with President Donald Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/22/judge-tosses-laura-loomer-bil
l-maher-defamation-suit-00887992
Loomer, an influential figure in the MAGA movement, has used her platform since Trump returned to the White House to weed out administration officials she accuses of being insufficiently loyal to the president. She has targeted dozens of staffers across the White House and executive departments, many of whom have been swiftly fired or seen their nominations pulled.
Breaking: Laura Loomer Loses Bill Maher Lawsuit After Her Dad Said She Always "Bragged" About Giving Trump Blow Jobs. A federal judge, a deposition for the ages, an honest father and a roast beef cameo nobody saw coming.
https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-laura-loomer-loses-bill
This week, a federal judge in Florida — a Bill Clinton appointee, which is already a cinematic touch — granted summary judgment to Maher and HBO before the case could even reach a jury. Not “you might lose.” Not “this is shaky.” Summary judgment, which in lawyer-speak means “there is no universe where you win this, please stop.”
Then, of course, the bombshell: Her Dad said he might put her back into involuntary psych hold because the blow job stuff is probably true.
A tearful Jeff Loomer declined to say over the phone whether he was currently considering another involuntary psychiatric hold for his daughter, given her bizarre claim this week that she has been performing oral sex on President Trump, but did not rule it out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S.
The Trump administration falsely claims that boat strikes target fentanyl and have halted 97 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S.
By Nick Turse | May 4, 2026
https://theintercept.com/2026/05/04/trump-boat-strikes-fentanyl-cocain
e-drug-supply/
The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.
“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”
Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.
Experts in the laws of war, as well as 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. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.
“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”
While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.
“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.
The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.
Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of ent
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The End of America’s Soft Power
The United States has given up on one of its core international strengths.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
May 4, 2026
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/04/trump-soft-power-usa/?tpcc=recirc
_latest062921
One of the more striking features of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy—not the chosen ends, but its preferred means—is its absolute confidence in America’s hard power and its near-total disdain for what my late colleague Joseph Nye called “soft power.” Nye defined the latter as “the power of attraction,” as a nation’s ability to get others to do what it wanted because it possessed qualities that made others want to emulate it, associate with it, and follow its lead. States with a lot of hard power could compel others through force and intimidation or by offering aid or protection; states with an abundance of soft power enjoyed greater influence because others wanted to be like them, agreed with the principles they stood for, or viewed them as fashionable, successful, and even “hip.”
A good realist like me is hardly going to denigrate the importance of hard power; on the contrary, it’s hard to have lots of soft power without substantial hard power to back it up. But you can have plenty of hard power and little or no soft power, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia has shown. Ideally, a state would like to have a lot of both, because having a lot of soft power means others will be naturally inclined to do what you want and you won’t have to use your hard power very often. Nye believed America’s combination of hard and soft power gave it enormous advantages when dealing with the outside world, which is one of the reasons he was optimistic about America’s future and skeptical of those predicting its decline. Yet by the end of his long career, even he had begun to worry about what was happening to America’s global appeal.
Under Trump 2.0, the belief that hard power is all you need is abundantly apparent. The administration used the threat of tariffs to force trading partners into one-sided economic agreements, and it vows to continue the effort despite the Supreme Court decision that strikes them down. The administration has used military force in more than half a dozen countries and continues to kill alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, even when it doesn’t know who they are, cannot prove all of them are in fact engaged in narcotics trafficking, and admits that these actions will have little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs. President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused other world leaders of being weak, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t “have the cards” and should therefore cut a deal with Russia, and imposed a blockade on Cuba intended to further immiserate ordinary Cubans and eventually force its regime to surrender. Last but by no means least, it abandoned diplomacy and launched an unnecessary and unprovoked war against Iran, on the mistaken assumption that the Iranian regime would quickly collapse and yield a government more to our liking.
What is most striking about this fixation with hard power is how little effort is being made to disguise, legitimize, or justify its use. Most countries do nasty things on occasion, and great powers do so more than most, but they usually try to find ways to hide the mailed fist in a velvet glove of normative justification. Not so the Trump administration, which seems positively gleeful whenever it is able to violate some established norm and inflict some pain. When the president threatens to eradicate Iranian civilization, or when the secretary of defense dismisses international law and boasts that U.S. troops will show opponents “no quarter” (which would constitute a war crime), it is clear their goal is to intimidate rather than persuade, to compel rather than attract. Their motto, it seems, is: “Being the strongest means never having to s
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If you took all the undocumented people who have illegally voted since 1988, and multiplied it by all of the transgender athletes that played in any college sport in the year 2025, your total would still be 37,720 less than the number of times Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Republicans Make Jaw-Dropping $1 Billion Demand for Trump’s Ballroom
The president has insisted his vanity project would be funded by wealthy donors.
By Ewan Palmer | May 5 2026
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-make-jaw-dropping-1b-demand-
for-donald-trumps-ballroom/
Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion of taxpayer money to help fund “security adjustments and upgrades” linked to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.
The proposal was outlined in a reconciliation package focusing on federal law enforcement and border security spending, which was released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday.
The legislation also allows for part of the $1 billion package to be used for security upgrades for the East Wing Modernization Project—also known as Trump’s ballroom project—including “above-ground and below-ground security features.”
The push arrives as Trump and MAGA figures have desperately demanded that the ballroom be allowed to go ahead in the wake of the assassination attempt against the president at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25.
The package does include the caveat that none of the requested funds may be used for “non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project.”
The proposal outlining how to allocate funds to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) through 2029 includes more than $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and nearly $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection, including funding for training and hiring staff.
Trump has suggested that the 90,000-square-foot room—which the East Wing of the White House was demolished to make way for—is necessary, as it would provide greater security.
The 79-year-old has insisted that the project, previously estimated to cost $400 million, will be funded by private donors. The White House also indicated in a July 2025 statement that the Secret Service would provide any “necessary security enhancements and modifications” needed for the ballroom to be used by the president for state dinners, galas, and other glitzy events.
A federal judge had ordered that construction of the ballroom be halted unless it receives approval from Congress, as requested in a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Last month, a U.S. appeals court allowed construction to resume on the ballroom pending the conclusion of the legal challenge.
Trump has bemoaned that the lawsuit forced him to reveal his plans to build a large military base underneath his White House ballroom.
“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in late March while holding up large placards detailing how the completed ballroom might look.
“The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under the military, including from drones, and including from any other thing.”
In a statement while releasing the reconciliation bill, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backward by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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MAGA Will Kill Many Americans
Greed, willful ignorance and mortality
Paul Krugman
May 06, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-kill-many-americans
Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.
In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:
Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.
The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.
Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.
Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:
What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.
You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:
I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.
What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.
Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was
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Trumptards singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" - Cabaret
Grand Theft Oil Futures
Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
Paul Krugman
May 07, 2026
Under Trump II, corruption runs rampant. Success in business depends not on what you know but on who you know, and there are no rules beyond having — and, obviously, buying — the right connections.
This is bad for everyone who doesn’t have those connections. It’s bad for economic growth. And it undermines the moral basis of the economy and society as a whole. It’s the path of how a country slides into third-world status.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/grand-theft-oil-futures
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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ARE YOU SOCIALLY LIBERAL BUT FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE?
Then, with the U.S. deficit projected to hit $2 trillion and Republicans controlling all three branches of government, I would argue that you must be a Democrat.
It was Reagan, Bush 43, and Trump who’ve done the most to get us into this National Debt quicksand.
Mostly, they did it by overdoing tax cuts for those who needed them least.*
It was Bill Clinton who famously left his successor a surplus . . . Barack Obama who left his successor, Trump 1.0, a National Debt shrinking relative to the economy as a whole . . . and Biden who averted a Covid-induced financial collapse / global depression — averting even the widely predicted recession — and handing his successor a growing economy and inflation of just 2.7%.**
Two no-brainers for shrinking the deficit:
(1) Adequately fund the IRS to collect the taxes due.
(2) Close loopholes and raise rates modestly on billionaires and billionheirs — while making it clear every time the subject arises that, in the main, we celebrate their achievements and admire their success, wish them well, appreciate their numerous good works (truly) . . . and don’t blame them a bit for not paying more tax than the tax code requires. It’s just that the tax code has gotten out of whack, and it’s tearing our country apart.
Join the Patriotic Millionaires if you are one (annual income $1M+ or new worth $5M+) . . . or support their proposals if you believe the playing field has been tilted a little too far in their favor.
* The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981 when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich. Sensibly, at first, but then by too much. Made worse by Bush 43 and now Trump.
** In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Biden overdid the Covid stimulus; but underdoing it, I believe, would have been far worse.
https://andrewtobias.com/126904-2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This article is 4 months old, but still true:
Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional
The president’s thinking is stuck in the 1980s.
By Rogé Karma | January 10, 2026, 9:55 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-plan-venezuela-oil-eco
nomic-mistake/685572/
So, about all that Venezuelan oil. Although President Trump has declared that America’s oil companies will soon “go in” to Venezuela and “spend billions of dollars” to rebuild that country’s petroleum industry, the administration is making two huge assumptions. First, that unleashing Venezuelan oil would yield lower energy prices for American consumers and giant profits for American companies. Second, unlike previous administrations, which got bogged down for decades in failed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump can simply let great American companies do what they do best—drill, baby, drill.
But my conversations with several oil-industry veterans and energy analysts indicate that the administration has the situation precisely backwards: Restoring Venezuela’s oil industry is completely unrealistic in the short term, and might not be in America’s economic and geopolitical interests at all. “Trump seems locked in the world of the 1980s and ’90s, when the U.S. imported most of its oil from a handful of foreign sources,” Arnab Datta, a lawyer who specializes in energy markets, told me. “But today, America is the world’s biggest oil producer. The play for Venezuelan oil doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the new world we’re in.”
Although some oil executives who met with Trump at the White House yesterday expressed a vague interest in doing business in Venezuela, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods offered a blunt warning about the country. “Today,” he said, “it’s uninvestable.”
The Trump administration is right about one thing: Venezuela has a lot of oil. As recently as the ’90s, it was one of the world’s top producers, pumping out more than 3 million barrels a day. But in the early 2000s, the populist leader Hugo Chávez forced out most Western oil companies, seized their assets, and turned their operations over to the country’s dysfunctional state-owned company. Production has since plunged by more than two-thirds. In this history, the Trump administration sees a golden opportunity. With Maduro, Chávez’s hand-picked successor, out of power, U.S. companies can return and bring hundreds of millions of barrels of new supply to the global market.
Yet expert after expert told me that rebooting the country’s oil industry would require a herculean effort. It would involve training an army of workers with no experience in the industry, rebuilding decrepit processing facilities and miles of crumbling pipelines, and amassing a private security force to protect these investments from cartels and private militias. “I really can’t overstate just how hard this would be to actually pull off,” Ben Nussdorf, who served as a senior adviser for the Department of Energy’s Office of Oil and Natural Gas from 2014 to 2021, told me. “Don’t even think about making a dollar for at least a decade.” According to the most optimistic projections, simply restoring Venezuela’s production to its previous peak would require a decade and $100 billion of investment; more conservative estimates put the numbers closer to 15 years and $200 billion.
In a Truth Social post before the White House meeting yesterday, Trump announced, “At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL.” That prediction would be more believable if oil companies could expect a lucrative return on these gargantuan investments. But in inflation-adjusted terms, current oil prices—about $60 a barrel—are historically low. And they are well below the roughly $80-a-barrel cost of extracting and refining Venezuelan oil—much of which is the kind of thick, low-quality petroleum (known within the industry as “heavy sour crude”) that requires extensive processing.
This basic dynamic is unlikely to change anytime soon. The price of oil is widely expected t
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What attracts Trumptards to Trump?
Why Do People Embrace Hate? Sartre Has an Answer
A classic essay examines the hidden dynamics behind modern prejudice.
By Livia Gershon | May 8, 2026
https://daily.jstor.org/why-do-people-embrace-hate-sartre-has-an-answe
r/
What makes a person hate a particular group of people and support policies that harm them? Writing in 2020**, comparative literature scholar Judith Greenberg looked at French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” in light of twenty-first-century American politics.
Sartre wrote the essay in 1944, as people around the world were learning the extent of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. He was also grappling with the continuing power of anti-Jewish sentiment in France at the time.
Greenberg takes issue with the way that Sartre understood Jews themselves. Ignoring Jewish religious belief, history, and culture, Sartre equated Jewish identity with legitimate fear of antisemitic violence. He claimed that “it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”
However, Greenberg notes that Sartre’s real interest wasn’t in Jewish perspectives but in what makes a bigot. In fact, Sartre explicitly wrote that in other contexts the same scapegoating purpose could be served by Black or Asian people. Today, Greenberg writes, we might also substitute immigrants, Muslims, or members of the LGBTQ community.
Sartre viewed antisemitism as a solution for the fundamental human problems of anxiety and alienation. In particular, he focused on how “being-for-others”—existing with the awareness of others’ perceptions—creates tension through the risks of exposing one’s inadequacies. Because of this, anyone may become overwhelmed by a social world with many different perspectives and demands, and by the possibility of getting things wrong.
To Sartre, antisemites are people who suffer from this insecurity and fear and are unwilling to do the work of adapting to cultural change and learning new things. This leaves them vulnerable to propaganda offering simple answers. The antisemite also revels in the release of constraints imposed by living peacefully in society with others and finds comfort in joining crowds of people like themselves.
“When gathered among other like-minded people, they celebrate their resistance to difference and difficulty,” Greenberg writes. “In creating fear for the scapegoat, they displace their existential anxiety and bolster themselves with a false sense of superiority.”
** A Situation of Fear: Revisiting Sartre in Trump’s America
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerjewilite.39.1.0073?mag=wh
y-do-people-embrace-hate-sartre-has-an-answer
“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” says candidate for president Trump during an interview with eminent journalist Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (2018, i).
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Typical for Trump: promise big, take the money, don't deliver on the promise, make excuses, spread confusion and uncertainty
MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phones or Deposits Back
By Chelsie Napiza | 10 May 2026, 7:28 AM BST
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-mobile-t1-phone-scandal-1795914
An estimated 590,000 buyers paid a £74 ($100) deposit to secure a Trump phone, collectively handing the venture roughly £43.7 million ($59 million). As of May 2026, not a single confirmed customer has received the device.
. . . Trump Mobile launched on 16 June 2025 at an announcement at Trump Tower, headlined by the president's two eldest sons and timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign launch. The T1 was marketed as a gold-coloured Android handset bearing an American flag on its back and bundled with a monthly service plan at £37.50 ($47.45) per month. Initial delivery was promised for late summer 2025.
That deadline slipped to November 2025, then December, then the first quarter of 2026. A mid-March 2026 T-Mobile carrier certification deadline also passed without resolution. By April 2026, Trump Mobile quietly redesigned its website, removing the release date entirely rather than replacing it with a new one.
NBC News, which placed its own £74 ($100) deposit in August 2025 to track the story, called Trump Mobile's support line five times between September and November 2025 and received inconsistent answers each time. A representative said in October that the phone would ship on 13 November, but it did not.
In January 2026, a call centre operator said the T1 was 'in the final stages of certification and field testing,' with a ship date 'sometime in Q1 2026.' That quarter has now passed. At one point, customer service representatives blamed a 43-day federal government shutdown for the delay, an explanation analysts quickly dismissed as irrelevant to a private-sector hardware company.
Updated Terms Strip Buyers of Guarantees
The clearest signal yet that buyers may never see either a phone or their money came with a revised terms of service published on 6 April 2026. The updated document states explicitly that paying a deposit 'does not constitute a completed purchase and does not create a binding legal contract.' The payment is described as 'a conditional opportunity to buy the device if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it,' with the company retaining all control over whether a phone is produced at all.
The terms confirm that deposits will not accrue interest, are non-transferable and carry no independent cash value. Buyers who wish to cancel must submit a request through customer support before any final sale is completed. If Trump Mobile cancels the project outright, it says it will issue refunds of the original deposit amount. The fine print adds, however, that the company bears no liability for delays caused by 'parts shortages or hold-ups with regulators,' and that buyers waive any right to pursue claims beyond the original deposit figure.
Investigative journalist Joseph Cox of 404 Media, who attempted to place a deposit when pre-orders opened, found the process immediately chaotic. His card was charged the wrong amount, no shipping address was ever collected, and a confirmation email arrived promising delivery notifications that never came. Cox called it 'the worst experience I've ever faced buying a consumer electronic product.' He subsequently reported unauthorised recurring charges being levied against customers' cards.
Android Authority, which placed its own deposit in 2025 and has tracked the story since, wrote in January 2026 that it fully expected to 'never get a phone' and 'never see the $100 deposit again.'
The 'Made in the USA' Claim That Quietly Disappeared
The T1 was sold from day one on the strength of a single, politically loaded promise: it w
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36 neurologists, forensic psychiatrists and physicians from Harvard, Columbia, Tufts and George Washington just entered a formal statement into the Congressional Record declaring Trump mentally unfit for office. Not a political statement. A medical one. Signed by Nobel laureates. In the official record.
They cited worsening cognition, grandiose delusions, and severely impaired judgment. Then noted he has sole unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons. Let that sentence exist in your brain for a moment. SOLE. UNCHECKED. NUCLEAR. AUTHORITY. 36 doctors said this is the problem.
Here is the Congressional Record: https://www.congress.gov/119/crec/2026/04/30/172/76/CREC-2026-04-30-pt
1-PgS2162.pdf
Trump does not take criticism well. Rather than quote Trump's aggressive gibberish, satirists wrote Trump’s reply because he is easy to imitate and completely off his rocker:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
36 so called DOCTORS who probably went to very BAD medical schools, possibly the worst in history, are saying I am mentally unfit which is TOTALLY FALSE and also VERY UNFAIR!! My brain is PERFECT, possibly the greatest brain ever examined, Doctor Ronny Jackson said my cognitive test results were INCREDIBLE, he was WEEPING, big strong doctor, tears everywhere, never seen numbers like mine!! I know more about nuclear weapons than any of these fake psychiatrists, my uncle taught me NUCLEAR THEORY at MIT, tremendous theory, the best, and I have never once accidentally launched anything EXCEPT tremendous economic growth!! Grandiose DELUSIONS?? I AM ACTUALLY THIS GREAT, not delusional AT ALL, there's a DIFFERENCE, very important distinction that these so called Harvard doctors don't understand!! 59% of Americans think I'm mentally unfit but 59% of Americ also thought Hillary would win and we all know how THAT turned, TREMENDOUSLY!! The 25th Amendment is a DEEP STATE EEP STATE DOCUMENT planted by Soros and also Obama whose birth certificate is STILL missing!! MY BRAIN IS TREMENDOUS AND FULLY FIT!!
https://imgur.com/gallery/59-of-americans-think-hes-mentally-unfit-36-
doctors-just-made-official-congressional-record-codes-havent-fucking-moved-x5OEEo2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Will our Hyper-Gilded Age Usher in Genuine Populism?
The tech bros are worse than the robber barons ever were — and voters are catching on
Paul Krugman | May 11, 2026
Elon Musk is no Andrew Carnegie
America used to be a middle-class society. But income and wealth disparities began rising rapidly during the Reagan years, and by the late 80s many observers began drawing parallels between the new era of inequality and the Gilded Age.
At this point, however, it’s clear that we are not experiencing a mere replay of the reign of the robber barons. We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the “malefactors of great wealth” called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.
Some widely used measures of inequality suggest that income disparities, which soared in the 1980s and 1990s, have plateaued since then. But the concentration of wealth at the top is continuing to soar. Today’s oligarchs control a huge share of America’s wealth — much larger than their share even at the end of the 1980s:
The growth in wealth concentration is even more extreme if we look at the very, very top. Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth and income inequality, argues that the concentration of wealth is now much higher than it was at the peak of the Gilded Age: https://gzucman.substack.com/p/standing-up-to-trumps-imperial-blackmai
l
Tellingly, unlike the robber barons of yore, many modern plutocrats show little sense of gratitude for their good fortune, little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works. Forbes reports that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have devoted almost none of their wealth to philanthropy, while Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are only slightly better.
More important than the stinginess of the superrich, however, is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale.
Thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, plutocrats are able to pump vast amounts of money into elections. Here’s a recent headline from the New York Times:
BILLIONAIRE BOOM
The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics
Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards.
One example of many: Peter Thiel bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign, burying his Democratic populist rival under a flood of PAC money. Without Thiel’s big bucks, J.D. Vance would not now be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
And Elon Musk actually controlled a significant part of U.S. government operations in 2025 — control that he used, among other things, to eviscerate foreign aid. Those aid cuts have already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, mostly children, with millions more deaths likely to come. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_m
inutes&order=asc
The big political question going forward is whether there will be a significant backlash against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of mean-spirited men.
I believe that there will be such a backlash, indeed that it is already starting, and that there is a political opening for some genuine populism if politicians have the courage to take a stand.
Polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of Americans — roughly speaking, almost everyone except MAGA Republicans — now consider the gap between rich and poor a major problem:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zMYd!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_
auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimag
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The Assassin’s Delusion
Violence serves an authoritarian agenda.
By Adam Serwer | May 12, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/assassins-delusion-backfirin
g-violence/687135/
People keep trying to kill the president. The closest call came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when Donald Trump (then a candidate) had his head grazed by a bullet. Other apparent attempts include an incident at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and possibly another that resulted in a Secret Service shooting at Mar-a-Lago in 2026. The latest would-be executioner, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was stopped long before he got anywhere near Trump. Nevertheless, these repeated incidents are disturbing symptoms of an obsession with vigilante violence that has infected the country.
No figure on the left in a position of power comparable to that of the president has called for violence the way that Trump has—but the sentiment that he deserves to be killed is easy to find online. Imagining that assassinating a president would solve any kind of problem is delusional. Presidents are chosen by the electorate; their supporters and their politics do not disappear when they die.
Thinking that you live in an action movie is also delusional. The wannabe assassin at the dinner showed up, allegedly, to kill the most protected man in the world with, The New York Times reported, “a shotgun, a handgun and knives.” In real life, violence is not like in a video game. You do not have a health bar you can refill with pixelated roast turkeys. The man is lucky to be alive, and his chances of success were always near nonexistent.
Thinking that an assassination would advance a political cause is likewise delusional. The only cause these attempted assaults have benefited is Trump’s. His main preoccupation since the dinner has been justifying the illegal construction of his lavish ballroom. But on Thursday, he tried to leverage the horror with which Americans react to political violence to criminalize a political opponent—demanding that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries be prosecuted for “inciting violence.” Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of Jeffries with a sign reading maximum warfare that was meant to promote Democrats’ redistricting success in Virginia. The phrase—certainly extreme—had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, Jeffries said; he chose it because it had originally been used by an anonymous Trump associate who told The New York Times that the White House political strategy was “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” The charge was absurd, but Trump wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.
The greatest delusion of all—one shared by both the would-be shooter and the president he targeted—is that violence is an expression of strength, and nonviolence a symptom of weakness. Now, I am not a pacifist. I do not believe that violence is always wrong. And I am not arguing that it is always ineffective. But the Trump administration’s greatest failures have been connected to its obsession with violence, and its opponents’ most dramatic victories have resulted from the organized and courageous use of nonviolence.
The Trump administration scrapped an already existing diplomatic accord with Iran in favor of war, and now finds itself desperately trying to reach an inferior agreement to end that war before the conflict crashes the global economy. Its immigration crackdown, which has killed at least four Americans and produced scenes of brutality associated with dictatorships, has contributed to the president’s plummeting approval ratings and Republicans’ diminishing chances in the midterms. The entire world watched as Trump tried to crush the Twin Cities with an army of masked officers, only to be defeated by ordinary people who loved their neighbors enough to risk their own lives to defend them.
The success of that kind of nonviolent civic resistance is not an anomaly. Around the world and across history, nonviolent campaigns have triumphed against even the most brutal regimes. A
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The Chinese view Trump as an ‘accelerator of American political decay.’
For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. President Trump’s volatile second term shattered that image.
By Li Yuan | May 12, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/china-trump-xi-decline.htm
l?unlocked_article_code=1.h1A.BSLV.DtxZZRKqANF8&smid=url-share
When President Trump visited China in late 2017, Xi Jinping welcomed him with a grand display of Chinese history and culture: a four-hour private tour of the Forbidden City culminating in a performance by the Peking Opera.
Eight years, a pandemic and two trade wars later, Mr. Trump is returning to Beijing, where the theme of future dominance, not ancient majesty, has filled domestic and international headlines with articles about dancing robots, drone swarms and the quiet hum of electric vehicles.
China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”
For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked. Mr. Trump’s ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.
In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”
The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.
“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.
Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.
The narrative of American decline did not begin with Mr. Trump. For years, Chinese state media and nationalist pundits have highlighted mass shootings, homelessness, political polarization and economic inequality in the United States as evidence of the failures of Western democracy. More recently, official outlets embraced the viral phrase “kill line,” borrowed from video game culture, to describe what they portrayed as the irreversible downward spiral facing America’s working poor. It’s a familiar tactic of the Communist Party to distract the Chinese public from the country’s own issues.
But Mr. Trump’s return to office and his administration’s erratic decision-making in both domestic and foreign policy have supplied the propaganda machine with plentiful fresh material. Images of immigration raids, the Minneapolis shootings and bitter political infighting circulate widely on Chinese social media alongside triumphant commentary about American dysfunction. What once sounded to many educated Chinese like exaggerated propaganda increasingly feels, to some, observational.
A 31-year-old education consultant in northern China who advises families on overseas study told me that parents who had once aspired to Ivy
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[Trump had much to learn in 1991, but he didn't]
Warren Buffett Exposed the Top Reason for Donald Trump’s Business Failures
The contrast between these two men’s approaches to money is not merely a matter of temperament. It reflects fundamentally opposed theories of how wealth is built and sustained.
By Jade Small | May 13, 2026
https://theheartysoul.com/warren-buffett-donald-trump/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/warren-buffett-exposed-the-top
-reason-for-donald-trump-s-business-failures/ar-AA235ja9
Few moments in modern business history are as prescient as a single Q&A session at a Midwestern university in the spring of 1991. A student stood up and posed a deceptively simple question to one of the world’s most respected investors. The answer that came back was brief, calm, and, as history would eventually confirm, almost prophetically accurate. It didn’t make the front pages that day. There were no breaking-news alerts. But the diagnosis delivered in that university lecture hall would prove to be one of the most precise autopsies of a business career ever recorded, delivered while the patient was still operating.
The investor was Warren Buffett. The subject of his analysis was Donald Trump. And the single word at the center of Buffett’s explanation, leverage, would go on to define not just Trump’s early business failures in the 1990s, but a pattern of financial behavior that would later be scrutinized in a New York courtroom three decades later, producing one of the largest civil fraud penalties in American history.
What Buffett said that day was simple enough for a college student to understand. What it revealed about the mechanics of financial failure was something business schools have been teaching ever since.
The 1991 Lecture That Became a Masterclass
Buffett cautioned students to avoid borrowed money during a question-and-answer session at Notre Dame in 1991, using Donald Trump’s troubled casino investments to explain the life lesson.
The question, as posed by the Notre Dame student, was direct: where did Donald Trump go wrong?
Buffett’s answer cut straight to the core. “The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right,” Buffett said. “He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money. He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets, and what he paid for them, and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there.”
That final sentence is worth pausing on. Equity, in financial terms, is the difference between what an asset is worth and what is owed on it. It is the genuine ownership stake, the real value that belongs to you after the debts are stripped away. Buffett recounted how Trump made his assets appear to be worth much more than they really were. Trump’s approach was to lock in property loans at prices far higher than their true value, which meant he also incurred significant debt to acquire them in the first place. The assets looked impressive on the surface. The numbers underneath told a different story.
At that 1991 lecture, Buffett estimated Trump owed “perhaps, $3.5 billion now, and, if you had to pick a figure as to the value of the assets, it might be more like $2.5 billion.” Trump was “a billion in the hole,” which, Buffett noted, was actually better than being $100 in the hole. “If you’re $100 in the hole, they come and take the TV set. If you’re a billion in the hole, they say ‘hang in there, Donald.'”
The Warning Buffett Had for Every Investor
What made the lecture memorable was not only Buffett’s dissection of Trump’s finances. It was the broader principle he drew from it. “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. Donald Trump failed because of leverage. He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back,” Buffett said.
His advice to the students was unambiguous. “You really don’t need leverage in th
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Late-Night Truth Social Bursts Offer a Peek Into Trump’s Mind
WSJ analysis shows president using the platform to spread conspiracies, attacks
By Anthony DeBarros and Annie Linskey
WASHINGTON-Monday was a typical day for President Trump. He took questions in the Oval Office. He met with members of Indiana University’s championship football team. And he had dinner with law-enforcement officers in the White House Rose Garden.
After the sun went down, another familiar ritual began: late-night social-media posting. The president’s Truth Social account posted 55 messages between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m.
The messages, mostly reposts from other accounts, falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, aired frustrations from anonymous social-media users that Democrats hadn’t been indicted by the Justice Department and called for the arrest of Barack Obama for, among other things, a claim that the former president “fabricated” the U.S. finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House.
The activity is emblematic of Trump’s account, which operates as a nearly round-the-clock, high-volume amplification system that blends his own voice with a network of partisan and fringe content.
Since the start of his second term, Trump’s Truth Social account has ballooned to 12.6 million followers, up from about 8.6 million. The president himself—with the help of staffers—has posted at least 8,800 times, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Monday was one of 44 similar spates of a dozen or more Truth Social posts published from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. since Trump returned to the White House. Last Dec. 1, from 8:17 p.m. until just before midnight, the president’s account posted nearly 160 times—more posts than on any other day in his second term.
Trump’s messages that night included reposting an item calling for the deportation of all Somali Americans and reposting a message saying Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Ca.) should be jailed for allegedly having planned the Jan. 6, 2021, attack of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
The bursts of social-media activity feature content from other accounts—including images, videos and text—that appeal to the president and his team. The nighttime missives often include some of the president’s sharpest and most divisive messaging, amplifying conspiracy theories, describing migrants as a threat to the country, threatening to punish his adversaries and mocking his opponents—all while giving a platform to obscure, anonymous accounts.
The account’s most active nights have been driven by posts featuring videos and screengrabs from users on X and other social-media platforms. For example, in the early-morning hours of Jan. 5, days after a successful military operation in Venezuela, Trump’s account posted nearly 90 times in the span of an hour.
The posts included a video clip of Trump saying that Somalia isn’t a nation, “it’s just people walking around killing each other.” Since January 2025, the account has published more than 120 posts critical of that country or its people, including posts disparaging Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat and prominent member of Minnesota’s Somali community.
The posts leave the public with a stew of presidential musings and reposts, many of which are published while people in the U.S. are asleep. Most of the messages get little scrutiny, disappearing into the cascade of posts on his account.
Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-late-night-truth-social-st
orms-that-offer-a-window-into-the-president-s-mind/ar-AA233xYf
https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-truth-social-late-night-posts-167cb
47a
Download today’s Wall Street Journal from https://tinyurl.com/2mpdd47p
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote
By Helen Lewis | May 14, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-
misogyny/686939/
Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.
When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’?” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”
Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”
This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.
Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”
Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.
But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from
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Women voting ruined America, so there is that.
If women didn't vote, there wouldn't even be a Democratic Party.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:You Trumptards are silly. At least half of the total brain power and intelligence in America is in women. Male Trumptards contribute little, except abundant stupidity, arrogance, and problems. I have seen that for decades about the kind of people who vote for Republicans. Trump voters are just greedy, grasping, dishonest, and plagued with mental problems.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Women voting ruined America, so there is that.
If women didn't vote, there wouldn't even be a Democratic Party.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
By the way, the best talent is moving back to China, thanks to Trumptards. If the Trumptards had been in ascendance before WWII, all the talented scientists would still have been living in Europe and the US would not have been able to build the A-bomb, for one high-tech example. The burst of scientific enquiry after the War ended would have never occurred. The Apollo Moon landing? It would have failed. Couldn't have designed the rockets with Trumptards as the engineers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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China’s Top Tech Talent Is Heading Back Home
The Wall Street Journal | May 16, 2026
Those who return after working here, called 'sea turtles’ are fueling efforts to take on Silicon Valley
- Hannah Miao and Jon Emont
https://www.magzter.com/stories/newspaper/The-Wall-Street-Journal/CHIN
AS-TOP-TECH-TALENT-IS-HEADING-BACK-HOME
By Hannah Miao and Jon Emont
When Meta Platforms said in April that it would lay off 10% of its staff, Allen Sun quickly booked a trip to Menlo Park, Calif.
It was a prime opportunity. Sun, a Beijing-based headhunter for some of the biggest Chinese tech companies, works to lure China-born talent back home, targeting people at U.S.-based companies such as Meta, Google, Anthropic and Amazon. Some clients are authorizing him to promise salaries that match or exceed the workers’ Silicon Valley pay—a windfall given China’s lower cost of living.
“The compensation is very competitive,” said Sun.
For decades, making it in the U.S. was the ultimate sign of success for China’s best and brightest. Now, many of them are coming home—and the reverse brain drain is fueling Beijing’s efforts to edge out the U.S. in artificial intelligence, robotics and medical research.
There is an unprecedented jostling for AI talent among the richest companies and global superpowers that has skyrocketed tech researchers to NBA and Hollywood levels of wealth and spurred a cutthroat recruitment blitz across the industry. It’s not just American CEOs attempting to entice researchers with lavish job offers. (Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was dangling $100 million pay packages last year.)
Recent examples of high-profile Al talent poached by top Chinese tech companies include Wu Yon-ghui, a former vice president of research at Google who helped develop Gemini and now heads research for TikTok-parent Byte-Dance’s AI arm, and Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher who was named Tencent Holdings’ chief AI scientist.
From ‘Seattle Freeze’ to Beijing
There’s a longstanding name within China for those going back home—“sea turtles,” a pun on the Mandarin term for overseas returnees, haigui, that also evokes female sea turtles’ instinct to return to their natal beach after years of migrating around the world’s oceans.
But the trend as it relates to top tech talent today has implications for American economic competitiveness, both now and in the future. The number of recent Chinese graduates returning home to seek jobs grew 12% in 2025 from the previous year, and the figure has more than doubled since 2018, according to a report by Chinese recruiting platform Zhaopin.
Once known more as a technology copycat than as an innovator, China now offers returnees a chance to work in cutting-edge industries. National and local governments dangle perks such as housing subsidies and startup funding. The shift also comes as some Chinese feel less welcome in the U.S. owing to worsening U.S.-China relations and tightening immigration policy. Returnees said they felt it was harder to advance to leadership roles in the workplace being Chinese in the U.S. In some cases, returnees were motivated by the promise of more professional freedom.
Zhang Kai is a star researcher who works to visualize the inside of cells down to the near-atomic level, an area of high interest for pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this year, he left a professorship at Yale for the state-run University of Science and Technology of China.
Zhang said it was becoming harder for Chinese researchers to lead ambitious projects in the U.S., and that the political environment was getting tougher, citing the example of a Chinese Ph.D. student working with him who was restricted from entering the country during the first Trump administration.
“Invisible restrictions exist,” he said in an email. “While I don’t intend to frame this as a lofty nationalist gesture, Trump’s actions over the years actually made me ‘more patriotic.’ ”
Jeff Li felt pigeonholed in his job in the U.S. After graduating from New York University with a master’s degree in comp
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Trump’s brazen plan for a $1.7 billion slush fund
Trump will reportedly drop his IRS lawsuit — for a price.
By Cameron Peters
May 15, 2026, 5:05 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/488910/trump-irs-lawsu
it-tax-returns-weaponization-compensation-fund
Earlier this year, Trump, along with two of his children and his family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns to media outlets. Now, he reportedly plans to drop the case — in exchange for a $1.7 billion fund he can dole out to his allies through a commission under his control, according to ABC News. https://abcnews.com/US/trump-poised-drop-irs-suit-launch-17b-weaponiza
tion/story?id=132962661
How is that supposed to work? The $1.7 billion would take the form of a so-called “weaponization” fund, ABC reports, that could be paid out to address the grievances of Trump allies who believe they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration — including those prosecuted in connection with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Trump himself reportedly would not be eligible to make a claim against the fund, but “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims,” per ABC.
What’s the context? The settlement, which could be finalized “in the coming days,” looks like an end-run around judicial skepticism over Trump’s suit, which pits a sitting president against the government he leads.
As the New York Times reported earlier this month, the judge overseeing the case has suggested that the case may be moot because the parties — Trump and the other plaintiffs vs. the IRS and the Justice Department — are not really in opposition (Trump is, again, the DOJ’s boss). Both sides are supposed to defend their position in briefs due this coming Wednesday, which a settlement could allow them to avoid. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/trump-suit-irs.html
What’s the big picture? Two major focuses of Trump II have been getting even for perceived wrongs against him and his movement, and finding ways to enrich himself and his allies. The reported settlement, if it goes through, would accomplish both in one fell swoop.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Maybe your party shouldn't have done a bunch of evil shit.
And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.
Just shut the fuck up already dude.
You lost the war.
Everyone is exhausted and bored and nobody cares anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ix, maybe you should read your own words? "By this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about" means 50 more Trump goofs.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.
Just shut the fuck up already dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. 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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When the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations met in Beijing, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping spoke about the lessons of history:
Quote:The Thucydides trap refers to the theory, originally propounded by the Greek historian for the war between Athens and Sparta, that conflicts erupt when a declining power is confronted by a rising rival.
Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?
So Xi was implicitly insulting the United States, portraying it as a nation in decline. Someone presumably explained this to Trump, who went on Truth Social to declare that Xi was talking about U.S. decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” not now that he has made us “the hottest Nation anywhere in the world.”
In reality, the widespread Chinese view that America is in decline has only grown stronger under Trump II. In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”
And that was before the debacle in Iran.
The fact sheet released by the White House after his trip to Beijing proclaimed that President Trump negotiated a sweeping package of commitments that will drive high-paying American jobs and open new markets for U.S. goods.
The main component of this package was a Chinese commitment to buy $17 billion a year of U.S. agricultural products, on top of an earlier commitment to buy more soybeans. Actually, I should put “commitment” in scare quotes: China made similar promises during Trump I, and completely failed to deliver. But suppose that the Chinese actually come through this time. How big is this “sweeping package”?
It is an extra $17 billion for beans compared to the US exporting goods worth $2,197.5 billion in 2025. It is a small hill of beans.
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-thucydides
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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China calls Beijing summit deals with Trump "preliminary," undercutting White House claims of concrete wins on tariffs, agriculture, and 200 Boeing aircraft. (The Arizona Star)
https://tucson.com/news/nation-world/business/article_489ec934-2cfb-58
49-a511-0e63be1af7ad.html
Trump said China agreed to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, but analysts questioned the lack of a timeline.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Is Worse Than Stealing
Recasting the January 6 insurrection as the work of heroic patriots remains the president’s highest priority.
By Jonathan Chait | May 19, 2026, 9:13 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/trump-anti-weaponization-fun
d-january-6/687215/
Among the very first things Donald Trump did upon assuming the powers of the presidency for the second time was commute the sentences of, and grant pardons to, everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Republican allies expressed moderate disappointment but vowed to move past this ugly blemish. Senator Susan Collins called it a “terrible day for our Justice Department.” Senator Tommy Tuberville admitted, “It’s a hard one, because we work with them up here,” referring to Capitol Police who were viciously beaten by Trump’s allies. Tuberville concluded, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to get Jan. 6 behind us.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Republicans were “not looking backwards; we’re looking forward.”
It was not, however, just one terrible day. Trump’s loyalty to his most violent and criminal supporters was a signal of his highest priority and has been a reliable guide to his decisions ever since. The impulse to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, appears to be the inspiration even for the establishment of a $1.8 billion Treasury Department slush fund for victims of so-called weaponization of government.
Last week, when the administration floated the notion of disbursing payments to alleged victims of government weaponization, cynics assumed that Trump meant to divert the money to himself. But this assessment may have turned out to be too naive. Trump already has ample ways to profit from office, including from stock trading with the benefit of inside knowledge and by accepting gifts from client states. The Justice Department told reporters yesterday that Trump, his sons, and his family business would not receive payments from the fund. The recipients will almost surely be insurrectionists and other allies.
How, exactly, can Trump hand out taxpayer dollars at his whim? The putative mechanism is a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2020, an IRS contractor leaked a few years of Trump’s tax records. (Before Trump, major presidential candidates had for decades voluntarily released their returns, an essential step in demonstrating that they had no conflicts of interest.)
The contractor was caught and sent to prison. Trump nevertheless sued for the offense of being subjected to a portion of the scrutiny his fellow candidates have voluntarily undergone. Because Trump runs the IRS, it is no longer in a position to place any limits on his demands. He has already exploited the loophole of suing his own government to pay a series of allies investigated for or convicted of committing crimes out of loyalty to him. The recipients include the family of Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed on January 6 while smashing her way into a corridor behind which members of Congress had taken shelter from the mob.
Trump’s Justice Department describes the forthcoming payouts as a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The process is, in fact, the opposite of systemic. It is designed to be controlled personally by Trump and sheltered from any judicial scrutiny.
If the government were actually compensating victims of lawfare, it would direct payments to James Comey, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and other targets of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions. Trump has described his actions as turnabout—“I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”—which, given that he has called his own prosecutions political targeting, is tantamount to confessing that he is targeting his enemies.
But, of course, nobody entertains for a moment the thought that the fund could conceivably reward an actual victim of weaponization. To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is schedu
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, maybe you should read your own words? "By this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about" means 50 more Trump goofs.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.
Just shut the fuck up already dude.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I forgot to put "major" in quotes.
You're just a whiny little bitch.
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Quote:My favorite word for today is Nihilist. 6ix, Trump, and his Trumptards are Nihilists, those for whom important things are meaningless. (Oh Well: On Nihilism, Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:00AM by Marie Snyder, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/oh-well-on-nihilism.html )
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I forgot to put "major" in quotes.
You're just a whiny little bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Looting of America
MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return
Paul Krugman
May 19, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-looting-of-america
So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.
Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.
Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.
But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.
Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.
Don’t say that this taxpayer-financed slush fund won’t have political consequences.
On the contrary, the polling and focus-group analyses I’ve seen say that voters are very angry about corruption. Trump’s theft of taxpayer money, while people are losing healthcare coverage and food aid while suffering from Trump-induced higher prices, is perfect fodder for the Democrats in the upcoming elections.
So we should ask ourselves why the Trumpists have abandoned all restraint. There have been many corrupt politicians in U.S. history – although they were pikers in comparison to Trump. Yet they at least attempted to hide their corruption, or at least keep it discreet and deniable, in order to avoid a voter backlash.
I would argue that the blatant nature of the new looting is a signpost of where America under Trumpism is heading in the months and years ahead.
It’s true that Trump has a base that will support him no matter what, in many cases literally believing that he has been chosen by God. This puts a floor under this support. But his disastrous recent polling, as Nate Cohn writes in the Times, suggest that this floor may be lower than many thought.
Now, we already know that Trump and his allies have no intention of facing free and fair elections. With the unstinting help of the Roberts Supreme Court, they have already rigged the midterms through redistricting. Trump minions are actively trying to depress Democratic-leaning voter turnout, by demanding from states the right to challenge their voting rolls. And it would be naïve to think that redistricting will be the end of the MAGA effort to undermine democracy.
Still, Trump is aware that, e
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Quote:United States President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses have been granted immunity from any ongoing audits into their tax affairs, according to a directive by the Department of Justice. In a one-page document, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department said authorities would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from “prosecuting or pursuing” tax claims against Trump, members of his family and his businesses.
Originally posted by second:
My favorite word for today is Nihilist. 6ix, Trump, and his Trumptards are Nihilists, those for whom important things are meaningless. (Oh Well: On Nihilism, Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:00AM by Marie Snyder, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/oh-well-on-nihilism.html )
The Looting of America
MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return
Nathan Goldman, a professor of accounting and tax expert at North Carolina State University, called the move “unprecedented”.
“The clause within the settlement that Trump and his family will no longer be subject to the audit process breaks from the current tax policies and puts Trump in a situation where he can pay what he believes is the correct amount without any fear of prosecution.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/20/us-president-trump-and-family
-given-immunity-from-pending-tax-audits
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Where Are the Republicans Who Put America First?
By Thomas L. Friedman | May 19, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/opinion/trump-republican-party-gerr
ymandering.html
As President Trump and his administration head toward the midterm elections, it’s now clear that the Republican Party has split into three factions: the “Never Trump” Republicans, who refuse to ever vote for this unethical man; the “America First” Republicans, who favor Trump’s policies but won’t countenance his destroying American norms and laws; and “Trump First” Republicans — those who think Trump’s dictates come first and the Constitution and traditional norms come second.
The most alarming thing happening in America today is that the Trump First Republicans, on Trump’s orders, are purging the few America First Republicans. So should the G.O.P. hold the House and the Senate in the midterms, there will be no brakes whatsoever on this party and this president. I would not at all rule out their pushing for a third Trump term. We are going to a very bad place.
Just look at the trend-line: The Never Trump Republicans, who included traditional conservatives like Liz Cheney, John McCain and Mitt Romney, did not believe in Trump the man or many of his ideas. They thought that he both dishonored the Constitution and true conservative principles. Alas, though, McCain died, Cheney was forced out of the party and Romney quit politics altogether. On Tuesday, another Trump antagonist in the Republican Party, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, lost a primary to an opponent handpicked by the president.
The America First Republicans were ready to sign on to many Trump ideas — lowering taxes or limiting immigration or deflating the woke left — but when it came down to a choice between advancing those ideas and undermining democracy, this faction drew a red line. They put America first, not Trump first.
I am talking about people like former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and the Indiana and South Carolina state legislators who refused to go along with Trump’s shameful out-of-cycle gerrymandering of electoral districts just to increase the G.O.P.’s odds of holding the House. But now they too are being driven from the party.
Cassidy, the two-term Republican who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, was just defeated by a Trump First Republican in his primary. The back and forth between Cassidy and Trump was revealing. While he did not mention Trump by name in his concession speech, there was no doubt about whom Cassidy was talking about.
“Let me just set the record straight,” Cassidy said. “Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Trump’s response was more direct — and incredibly revealing. He wrote on social media of Cassidy: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”
Read those words carefully: “His disloyalty to the man” — not to the Constitution — is what got him defeated. Trump first.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who seems willing to abandon any principle he ever held to stay on Trump’s good side and remain his golfing buddy, expressed the essence of the Trump First Republicans after Cassidy lost:
“You can disagree with President Trump,” Graham said, “but if you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose, because this is the party of Donald Trump.”
Read those words carefully, too: It is not the party of Republicans, it is “the party of Donald Trump," which means it is whatever Trump says it is. But the most revealing part of Graham’s quote was: “If you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose.”
Translation: If you vote, as Cassidy did, to convict Trump after he was impeached for inciting an insur
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Tax world gawks at Trump audit agreement: 'Never seen anything like this'
A DOJ agreement ending any current IRS audits of the president, his family or his businesses stuns tax practitioners and could reignite Democratic lawmakers' pursuit of Trump's tax returns.
By Brian Faler | May 20, 2026 04:04 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/tax-world-gawks-at-trump-audi
t-agreement-never-seen-anything-like-this-00929576
President Donald Trump is flipping what had been a doomed lawsuit against the IRS into a free pass from the agency.
Astonishment is rippling through tax world at a settlement that goes far beyond the specifics of Trump’s suit — he sought billions of dollars as compensation for some of his tax records being leaked to the news media — to instead provide him, his family and his businesses sweeping protections against government scrutiny of his taxes.
Under the plan signed off on by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the IRS would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from all audits of “any matters currently pending.” What’s more, some worry it may mean Trump will never again be audited by the agency, pointing to vague language in the settlement barring examinations that stem from “lawfare.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Steve Rosenthal, a former longtime senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
The one-page document the Justice Department released Tuesday represents the most audacious step yet in Trump’s ongoing efforts to shield his taxes from scrutiny. https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1441216/dl
Trump has long bucked a decades-old tradition of presidents voluntarily releasing their filings, but this would prevent the IRS from examining them as well — special treatment that the IRS does not provide any other American. It would also flout the agency’s longstanding policy of automatically auditing every president.
It also promises a massive fight with Democrats if they vault back into power in this year’s midterm elections, with the agreement rocketing up lawmakers’ oversight to-do list.
“Democrats are going to fight every element of this,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Finance committee.
It’s also likely to become an ongoing headache for Republicans who have had little to say publicly about the plan.
And it’s the result of a lawsuit that was unlikely to be successful in the first place.
Result of ‘phony’ litigation
Trump had sued the IRS in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor, Charles Littlejohn, to the New York Times. Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty to the leak in 2023, told a court he released the information because he was incensed by Trump’s refusal to release his returns.
The administration has cast the settlement, which would also set up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate those allegedly harassed by the Biden administration, as a response to the “weaponization” of law enforcement by the previous president.
But the leak actually happened in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office, and Littlejohn was prosecuted by Biden’s Justice Department. The Times used the information to produce a blockbuster report in September 2020 showing Trump frequently paid little or nothing in taxes. Littlejohn also leaked tax records of numerous other prominent wealthy people, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, to ProPublica.
Experts noted Trump’s suit over the leak was never likely to succeed, in part because he missed the two-year statute of limitations to file a civil suit over the unauthorized disclosure of tax information. And there were major questions about whether there was a legitimate dispute for a court to referee since Trump was effectively both plaintiff and defendant. Trump pulled the suit in favor of the settlement shortly before a judge could weigh in.
“This all arises out of a phony piece of litigation,” said Rosenthal.
When Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire whose tax data was
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Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo
By Heather Schwedel
May 21, 2026 5:58 PM
https://slate.com/life/2026/05/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bettina-anderso
n-iran-news.html
I would call what President Donald Trump just did to his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a slap in the face if it weren’t for the existence of a widely circulated anecdote about a time Trump once allegedly literally slapped Jr. in the face, in front of a bunch of his college classmates. Still, as figurative slaps in the face go, this one had to hurt: The president just told the world that he’s not sure if he’s going to make it to Don Jr.’s wedding this weekend.
Don Jr. is set to marry socialite Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas in the coming days, and while taking questions in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was asked if he plans to attend. “Uhhhh. He’d like me to go,” Trump said. Already with that loaded uhhhh, he wasn’t off to a great start. “I’m gonna try and make it. But it’s going to be a just a small, little private affair. … I said, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called “Iran” and other things.’ ”
Sigh. Even when he’s being dismissive of his own flesh and blood and flippant about war, in addition to being just kind of out of it, the man still has a way with words. “A Thing Called Iran” sounds like a lost Tennessee Williams play. Does anyone actually buy that he’s too busy to attend? While it’s true that we’re at war, it’s also true that Trump started the war, and now we can’t rule out the possibility that he did so in order to get out of going to this wedding. Not to mention, Trump finds time to golf one out of every five days—he can probably find a few hours to zip down to his son’s wedding.
Trump went on, “That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed.” By the media, he meant, of course. While it’s entertaining to think Trump might sincerely believe that skipping his own son’s wedding would be counteractively good for his image, because it would show not that he is a cruel man who doesn’t love his son but a hardworking one, the far likelier explanation is that Trump just doesn’t feel like going. He doesn’t take the same sort of pride and joy in his children that others do, his relationship with Don Jr. has always been fraught, and he thinks weddings are boring because they’re not about him, so yeah, he’s not going to pretend to be excited.
My guess is that he will end up going in the end anyway—wars are clearly boring to him, too—rendering this fuss he’s making about how he might not completely pointless. It’s mean and messy for no reason, which is classic Trump. What’s the fun of just being a dutiful father? This way he still gets to withhold something and ensure that Don Jr. never for even a minute feels secure in his father’s love for him, which is sick, but such is the Trump family way. It’s the kind of thing that might make you feel bad for Trump Jr., if he weren’t who he is.
Later in the video that’s circulating online, Trump says one more thing of note, but sadly I have to debunk what people online think he said. He did not say, in reference to his son, “He’s a person I’ve known for a long time,” as funny as that would have been. What he actually said was, “No, but he’s got a very—a person I’ve known for a long time.” While he definitely got a little lost in that sentence, it seems pretty clear to me that he was talking about the woman Don Jr. is marrying, Anderson. I did wonder, though, if Trump has actually known her a long time, because even though he may have encountered her in Palm Beach, Florida, where she’s from and he has a home, she and Don Jr. are a relatively recent development. They got together in 2024, when the younger Trump was actually still engaged to his previous fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle. I don’t think Trump was trying to make a dig at his ne’er-do-well son’s awkward dating history per se, but Trump has seen Jr.’s romantic partners come and go. He himself has been married three times.
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Last year, Jeff Bezos and other tech billionaires evidently believed that they could insulate themselves from criticism — and secure their wealth against both taxation and regulation — by allying themselves tightly with Donald Trump. Notably, Amazon is one of the companies paying for Trump’s grotesque ballroom, along with Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
But Trump is now exploring new frontiers in presidential unpopularity, and Republicans are facing a wave of public revulsion so strong that it will probably overwhelm even their strenuous efforts to rig the midterm elections.
So paying court to the mad king isn’t looking like the smart political move Bezos and his ilk thought it was. How, then, can they defend themselves against the threat of taxes and regulations that might make them slightly less rich?
Well, Bezos evidently thought that the threat to his billions was sufficiently important to justify going on CNBC to lecture the rest of us about the evils of taxation — but not sufficiently important for him to learn a few facts first.
Somehow, I don’t think this new political strategy will work.
More about Jeff Bezos lying on TV about his taxes at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bezos-backlash-and-zombies
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You faggots loved Bezos.
Look at you little bitches whining today.
You're all a fucking joke. Paul Krugman is the least funny joke ever written.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo
By Heather Schwedel
Maybe he hates his fucking son, Heather.
Maybe it's NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, Heather.
And look at faggot second throwing around this OK! Magazine ladies bullshit.
You're a fucking joke, dude.
Get a life.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:My favorite word for today is Nihilist.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I forgot to put "major" in quotes.
You're just a whiny little bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
You don't even know what Nihilist means. Anything above two syllables is to difficult for your tiny brain to parse.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Go fuck yourself, Steven Colbert.
Have fun ruining The Lord of the Rings. Looking forward to that huge box office flop.
You suck. Just go away now.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump has built a cult of personality, but as his actions become more erratic, his hold on his followers may be slipping
By Elizabeth Yuko | May 25, 2026
Bioethicist and Adjunct Professor of Ethics at Fordham University
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/if-maga-is-a-cult-what-happens
-when-it-crumbles/ar-AA241H7c
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/maga-cult-donald
-trump-1235568069/
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
More specifically, MAGA is a cult of personality, says Steven Hassan, PhD, author of The Cult of Trump and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a consulting and educational organization that helps people leave destructive cults and authoritarian groups and heal.
A cult of personality is the "godlike glorification" of a charismatic leader whose followers perceive as superhuman and infallible, like the Jim Jones-led Peoples Temple - which ended in the massacre of more than 900 people at Jonestown in 1978 - and the Children of God, a Christian apocalyptic cult founded by David Berg in 1968.
Political parties can also operate as cults of personality, Mestyanek Young tells Rolling Stone. "Beyond Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, there are clear examples of political movements, including Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, and the hereditary leadership system in North Korea," she says. In this case, it's the MAGA arm of the Republican Party's devotion to Trump - especially those who subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
In addition to the requisite charismatic leader, MAGA also shares other key characteristics with cults, like black-and-white thinking, and viewing politics as a fight of good versus evil. Like other cults, MAGA has adopted their own version of reality and history - most notably, claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Along the same lines, Trump has managed to get his MAGA followers to reject rational analysis and critical thinking, and support his interests and positions no matter what.
Trump appealed to those who had lost faith in the government and were looking for something (or someone) to believe in. His campaign rhetoric promising to "drain the swamp" - or rid America of corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and unnecessary governmental bureaucracy and oversight - resonated with those who felt disenfranchised and abandoned by traditional political parties.
But there are signs that Trump's grip on his followers is starting to crumble. A few weeks ago, after he threatened to wipe out a civilization, verbally attacked the Pope, and posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, which he later claimed was him as a doctor, several prominent MAGA and Trump supporters - including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candance Owens, and Megyn Kelly - broke with the president. And things have only escalated from there.
Declining approval ratings suggest rank-and-file MAGA members have begun to jump ship, including some of Trump's most ardent conservative Christian supporters. Does this spell the beginning of the end of the MAGA cult? If so, what happens next? And is now the time to reach out to family members and friends who may be rethinking their position?
The birth of MAGA
When the Tea Party formed in 2009, one month after President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the members were an odd mix of right-wing populists and free market ex
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Quote:The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities
Originally posted by second:
If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
America descends into a flattery-failure doom loop
Paul Krugman
May 26, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-dumpster-fire-of-the-vanities
On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior officials' sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,
On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.
This “Dear Leader” treatment is unprecedented in American history. Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.
Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, and mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security:
Inside the MAGA fantasy bubble, however, Trump’s reign is hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.
Some of this reflects Trump’s own personality. His inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting stupid wars.
But Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremists Republicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.
The truth is that the right-wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush.
And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.
It’s tempting to dismiss personality-cult theater as trivial, but it isn’t. When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy, the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.
Beyond that, influential Republicans have substantively granted Trump more personal power, more ability to act as a monarch, than any of his predecessors. Republicans in Congress have abandoned their role as an independent branch of government. In a recent post on X, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, sounded just like Trump’s cabinet members:
Speaker Mike Johnson @SpeakerJohnson
President Trump is the ONLY one who could have gotten Iran —the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism — to the negotiating table.
We are greatly encouraged to learn a PEACE DEAL in Iran is underway — and look forward to learning more about the specifics.
Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump has built a cult of personality, but as his actions become more erratic, his hold on his followers may be slipping
By Elizabeth Yuko | May 25, 2026
Bioethicist and Adjunct Professor of Ethics at Fordham University
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/if-maga-is-a-cult-what-happens
-when-it-crumbles/ar-AA241H7c
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/maga-cult-donald
-trump-1235568069/
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
More specifically, MAGA is a cult of personality, says Steven Hassan, PhD, author of The Cult of Trump and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a consulting and educational organization that helps people leave destructive cults and authoritarian groups and heal.
A cult of personality is the "godlike glorification" of a charismatic leader whose followers perceive as superhuman and infallible, like the Jim Jones-led Peoples Temple - which ended in the massacre of more than 900 people at Jonestown in 1978 - and the Children of God, a Christian apocalyptic cult founded by David Berg in 1968.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
If gas is $3.50/gal and your tank is 36-gallons, Ford pickup truck.
36 gal × $3.50 = $126.00 to fill.
At $4.00/gal, that’s $144.00.
At $4.50/gal, that's $162.00.
I'm betting MAGA is realizing they fucked themselves bigtime. There god has failed them. They're just too fragile to admit it. Except when they are alone
tick tock...
T
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This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention
One of the worst-ever Ebola outbreaks is underway. Blame foreign aid cuts.
By Sara Herschander
May 27, 2026, 7:30 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/489763/ebola-outbreak-congo-aid-pre
vention
Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and there was no interruption.” That claim has since proven to be disastrously, profoundly untrue.
On May 17, the World Health Organization declared a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern,” only the ninth-ever time the agency has made that designation. In the weeks since, at least 220 people have died of the highly fatal virus, and more than 900 suspected cases have been identified so far. It is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record.
And yet, that toll is likely a tremendous undercount because, as the New York Times reported from the ground this week, “only a trickle of tests are being processed every day” in the cities most affected by the outbreak. “The virus is far ahead of us,” Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, told the Times. “And it’s spreading fast.”
In fact, publicly known cases are rising exponentially faster than in any prior outbreak, including the largest ever, West Africa’s catastrophic outbreak in 2014, and the second-largest in 2018. By the time this outbreak was declared, hundreds of people had already been infected.
When you stop looking, you can’t see
Why did this outbreak spread so quickly? Part of it was the virus itself, a rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is harder to diagnose and for which there are no vaccines or treatments. (At least, not yet.) Another reason is that this outbreak began in a remote province of eastern Congo, an active war zone, where what health systems exist have been ravaged by decades of armed conflict.
As if the odds weren’t already stacked enough, however, this outbreak broke out under the heavy shadow of US foreign aid cuts that, among other calamities, gutted the world’s Ebola detection and response apparatus last year. Despite Musk’s earlier assurances, US-funded programs to detect new Ebola cases and dispatch a response were indeed frozen under the Trump administration, according to Stat. US cuts also indirectly contributed to the outbreak by weakening local health systems and stockpiles.
Altogether, the US Department of Health and Human Services disbursed about $10 million to Congo last year, down from $33 million the year prior, Stat noted. USAID sent $693 million in aid to Congo last year, down from nearly $1.2 billion in 2024.
Cuts to disease surveillance meant that this virus took longer to identify than it should have. And with cuts to local health systems, it’s now much harder to come by the tests, nurses, doctors, and protective equipment needed to stop the spread.
“It’s so bad. It’s so bad,” Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told Devex. The Africa CDC’s role in quelling outbreaks has become even more important as wealthy countries have retreated from the global health stage, but it is impossible to fill all of the medical surveillance gaps left by the US withdrawal of support, he said. “No one can give you the magnitude of this outbreak.”
Bleeding out
The US has done some course correction since the outbreak began. Last week, the State Department pledged $23 million in emergency funding for Congo and Uganda, plus the deployment of a disaster response team and enhanced involvement from the CDC, which says it’s been actively coordinating with local health agencies. At least some lost funding should have a
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Texas’s Senate Race Will Be a Referendum On Healthcare
By Paul Krugman | May 27, 2026 at 6:05 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/texass-senate-race-will-be-a-refere
ndum
So Texas Republicans have, by a huge margin, rejected Sen. John Cornyn, a hardline conservative whose great failing, from Donald Trump’s point of view, was that he occasionally took stands on principle. To replace him they chose the scandal-ridden, deeply corrupt Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who received Trump’s endorsement precisely because of his vices. Paxton’s rottenness makes him a Trump kindred spirit and also guarantees that he will be dependent on Trump’s goodwill and hence slavishly loyal.
So much the better for the Democrats, who now may — may — have a chance at winning Cornyn’s Senate seat. However, despite Paxton’s utter unfitness for any public office – let alone Senator -- knowledgeable observers of Texas politics consider the race between Paxton and the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, no better than a tossup.
What will be at stake in the general election, beyond the question of just how much personal awfulness Texans will overlook? To an important extent it will be a referendum on healthcare.
Texas’s healthcare policy stands out, even among red states, for its cruelty.
Texas has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That is, it has turned down federal money that would have provided essential healthcare to hundreds of thousands of its residents, at almost no cost to Texas taxpayers, and injected large amounts of money into the Texas economy. Texan politicians have tried to justify their adamant opposition to expanded healthcare as a matter of principle, a way to prevent dependence on government programs. But in reality there’s no way to make sense of this choice except as a reflection of the drive to keep low-income people desperate and subservient.
This is the same drive that has led to Texas’s remarkably regressive tax system. Texas conservatives like to say that they rule a low-tax state, but taxes there are only low for the affluent. They’re quite high for the middle and working classes, and very high for the poor and near-poor:
Even among states that rejected the ACA Medicaid expansion, Texas’s Medicaid program is exceptionally harsh. As one summary explains,
In Texas, adults without children are not eligible for Medicaid coverage regardless of their income, and parents are eligible only if they earn less than 13 percent of the FPL [federal poverty line] (an annual income of less than $3,900 for a family of four).
The result is that Texas has worse health insurance coverage than any other state. Moreover, as the chart at the top of this post shows, the big improvement in coverage as a result of the ACA mostly bypassed Texas. Notably, 13.7% of Texan children are uninsured, compared with a 5.9% rate nationwide and 2.5% in New York.
High rates of uninsurance combined with a weak social safety net and, in recent years, growing rejection of vaccines largely explain one striking aspect of Texas’s evolution since 1980: its lagging life expectancy. In 1979-81 life expectancy in Texas and New York were almost identical. But since then a wide gap has emerged, with New York state residents outliving Texans by an average of nearly 3 years:
Part of this gap in life expectancy reflects death by violence. Texas is a big la
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The Trump administration plans to send to Kenya U.S. citizens exposed to the Ebola virus rather than bring them home for observation and treatment, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
The approach is a stark contrast to the way previous administrations responded to outbreaks, during which health care workers and other U.S. citizens exposed to the virus were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/politics/trump-ebola-kenya.html?
unlocked_article_code=1.llA.mqeT.9HgaIHgSBNlg&smid=url-share
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America is ruled by a mafia now
https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/199131984/america-is-ruled-by-a-mafia-no
w
Trump has worked feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…
Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]
So basically, Trump:
1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,
2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,
3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,
4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and
5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.
Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.
Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.
I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter Wha
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."
"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."
Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.
"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."
"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."
Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.
"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Donald Trump’s chief economist said something interesting the other day. On Fox News, Hassett was, as usual, boasting about how great the economy is, when he was asked why Americans aren’t feeling it — why the long-running Michigan index of consumer sentiment has hit its lowest level ever. He responded by claiming that the index “is being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.”
Well, yes indeed … someone is deranged here.
The Michigan survey tracks respondents by party, and politics clearly does affect economic perceptions. Democrats were much more positive about the economy under Biden than Republicans; they became much less positive, while Republicans became much more positive, when the White House changed hands:
At this point, however, independents’ views of the economy are similar to those of Democrats. Republican optimism, not Democratic pessimism, is out of line with the views of most Americans.
But wait, there’s more. YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better:
Let me present these data slightly differently:
Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.
So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans.
Given these numbers, Trump officials should conclude that they have failed in some way. The great majority of Americans — essentially everyone who isn’t a total Trump loyalist — believes that the economy is getting worse. And there are good reasons for that negativity. Inflation is way up as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his Iran war. Because of this surge in prices, real personal income has declined sharply:
And even if Trumpists believe that these numbers are somehow misleading and that the economy is really in great shape, they should acknowledge that they are failing to make their case to the American public.
Trump and his minions, however, never admit to failure. We’ve all seen that in the case of the Iran war: Trump keeps claiming that it’s a glorious victory and that reporters pointing out that it isn’t are “treasonous.”
They bring the same mindset to economic sentiment. If the public hates Trump’s economy, the problem must be with the politically deranged public, not with Trump.
Still, let’s look at it rationally. The 19 percent of Americans who support MAGA say that the economy is good. The other 81 percent of Americans say that it’s very bad. Which group is more likely to have economic perceptions that are warped by politics?
Seriously, who’s deranged here?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/whos-deranged-exactly
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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