Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 77 of 479
Trump is killing off civil rights protections of all kinds
Recently "The President's Own" Marine Corps band was scheduled to begin a series of concerts featuring high school musicians of color who competed for spots. But merely performing with young Black musicians was too much for Trump's anti-DEI sensibilities. The concerts have been canceled.
Conservatives no longer want to admit even "yes, but" about racism. Instead, they want to flatly deny that women and minority groups suffer any possible discrimination at all. The result is the decimation of civil rights and EEO offices even though the relevant laws are still on the books:
It has long been on some conservatives’ wish list to kneecap the external civil rights work of the Labor Department’s contract compliance office, which for decades has audited the nation’s largest contractors — including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Deloitte — to ensure fair pay and hiring.
Plans obtained by The Post show the office will maintain 50 employees to enforce discrimination law for veterans and workers with disabilities, but it will no longer be staffed to audit companies for pay and hiring disparities for women and minority workers.
There you have it. Vets and disabilities? Sure. Women and Black people? Fuhgeddaboutit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2025/02/26/presiden
ts-own-marine-band-cancels-concert/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/28/doge-trump-civil-righ
ts-office-closing-eeoc/
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:You don't have to remind me every time you write that you are dickhead but you can't stop yourself.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Maybe. Not that you'd know for sure how any of it all ultimately turned out though since you'd no longer be breathing.
I'M the dickhead?
I can't stop myself?
Jesus Christ dude...
From from more calls for assassination to yelling NAZI!!! in my face with a bullhorn to this?
You almost have me feeling sorry for how thoroughly I've destroyed your psyche today.
You Leftard extremists sure are good at the victimhood thing.
If I hadn't already backed off and tried to make peace with you only to immediately regret it half a dozen times over the years already, I'd probably be doing that right now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you are locked in the insane asylum but insisting you and all the inmates are the only sane people. The staff takes care of all your needs, proving you are sane and smarter than they are. You don't have to work or pay because the asylum staff handles it all you, but you are not happy with the quality of service and the available TV shows and movies. You voted for a different President with the expectation of better treatment where you are locked up. (And better entertainment from Hollywood, which you despise.)
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You don't have to remind me every time you write that you are dickhead but you can't stop yourself.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Maybe. Not that you'd know for sure how any of it all ultimately turned out though since you'd no longer be breathing.
I'M the dickhead?
I can't stop myself?
Jesus Christ dude...
From from more calls for assassination to yelling NAZI!!! in my face with a bullhorn to this?
You almost have me feeling sorry for how thoroughly I've destroyed your psyche today.
You Leftard extremists sure are good at the victimhood thing.
If I hadn't already backed off and tried to make peace with you only to immediately regret it half a dozen times over the years already, I'd probably be doing that right now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky
He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.
By Jonathan Chait | February 28, 2025, 5:24 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/zelensky-trump-pu
tin-ukraine/681883/
Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.
Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”
Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.
In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.
Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and holds weakness in contempt.
And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.
Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war
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Trump has almost no supporters over Ukraine
Are you interested in who supports whom after Friday's revenge fest in the Oval Office? Here's the scorecard:
Supports Trump
Russia
Hungary
Supports Ukraine
Moldova
Spain
Norway
Czechia
Netherlands
Estonia
Poland
Canada
Germany
France
UK
Australia
Denmark
Sweden
Finland
Austria
Latvia
Lithuania
Portugal
Iceland
Ireland
Belgium
Romania
Croatia
Slovenia
That's 25-2, with Italy remaining neutral.
https://jabberwocking.com/trump-has-almost-no-supporters-over-ukraine/
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 Disgrace
While F.D.R. set a modern standard for the revitalization of a society, Trump seems determined to prove how quickly he can spark its undoing.
By David Remnick | March 1, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/10/trumps-disgrace
It was one thing to anticipate this prolonged political moment; it has been, these past weeks, quite another to live it. Each day is its own fresh hell, bringing ever more outrageous news from an autocrat who revels in his contempt for the government he leads, for the foreign allies who deserve our support, and for the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Since beginning his second term, six weeks ago, Donald Trump has commandeered public attention to such an extent that it is hard to recall that there was ever a time when an American President went about his first weeks in office in a frenzy of activity characterized not by threat, chaos, and corruption but by discipline, competence, and compassion.
Yet there was such a time. On the overcast morning of March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt arrived at the U.S. Capitol to deliver his first Inaugural Address. The country was in a general state of misery. Since the start of the Depression, in late 1929, one out of three American workers had lost his job. Countless schools were shuttered. Banks were collapsing. Edmund Wilson, reporting for The New Republic, wrote that “there is not a garbage-dump in Chicago which is not diligently haunted by the hungry.”
Roosevelt, having defeated Herbert Hoover in the popular vote by eighteen points, could honestly boast of a mandate and understood its meaning. As he said in his speech at the Capitol, the demands of the “stricken” electorate were clear: “This nation asks for action, and action now.” Before the notion of a President’s “first hundred days” was ever codified, he set off on a tear of executive orders and legislative initiatives. Roosevelt, with the support of enormous Democratic majorities in Congress, quickly saved the national banking system, took the U.S. off the gold standard, paid out significant relief to the poor, and created federal agencies that not only provided work to the jobless but helped revive the country’s economy and infrastructure for decades to come.
It has not taken Trump a hundred days to match Roosevelt’s New Deal for its speed, its “muzzle velocity,” as Steve Bannon, Trump’s formerly incarcerated court philosopher, has put it. But, while Roosevelt set a modern standard for the revitalization of a society, Trump seems determined to prove how quickly he can spark its undoing. In record time, he has brought shame and disorder to the country. Where F.D.R. set out to build and to comfort, Trump has set out to fire countless civil servants, punish his adversaries, and threaten the press. He has cast aside essential climate actions, humiliated undocumented immigrants and trans men and women, coddled dictators, and unnerved allies. F.D.R. appointed Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, and other formidable advisers to his first Cabinet; Trump has empowered extremists distinguished principally by their conspiracy thinking, sycophancy, and incompetence.
F.D.R. created the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; Trump has deputized Elon Musk, who has billions of dollars in contracts with multiple federal agencies, to freeze federal funding for programs that millions of Americans depend on and to fire thousands of workers in vital government agencies. “We will make mistakes,” Musk said in the White House, flashing a smile of privilege and malice. So far, these little goofs include, but are not limited to, momentarily laying off people who oversee the nuclear-weapons stockpile and cancelling Ebola-prevention measures.
Roosevelt, in his time, led the conquest of global fascism and the rescue of Europe. On matters of foreign policy, Trump has rapidly made common cause with autocrats from Budapest to Beijing and has made it clear to our European allies that
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It’s time to say it plainly. America’s leadership has switched sides in the war. The American people have not, and they should speak up.
In the past several weeks, the U.S. leadership has demonstrated explicit hostility towards Ukraine and aligned its rhetoric and policy with Russia.
The animosity culminated today when U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at a meeting in the Oval Office.
After a hostile meeting, Zelensky left the White House. Trump reportedly ordered the Ukrainian delegation out.
Let this sink in. The president of a battered Ukraine, an ally of the U.S., became the first world leader in history to be kicked out of the White House. Not a dictator, not a disgraced politician — the president of Ukraine, a country suffering from the worst invasion in the 21st century. The country that the U.S. administration swore to bring peace to.
In an ugly exchange, the president and vice president joined forces to admonish Zelensky for “not being grateful” enough for the help Ukraine was getting.
To that, Zelensky reminded them that he had thanked the American people multiple times, including earlier that day. But it appears that gratitude to the American people isn’t what Trump and Vance were looking for — they wanted him to grovel and prostrate himself in front of Trump. Kiss the ring.
For sure, Zelensky could have done a better job composing himself and restraining his reactions, but it’s fair to say that he was put in a situation he couldn’t win. If he let Trump and Vance — and apparently, it takes two of them to win a verbal argument against one non-native English speaker — continue their line of attack on Ukraine, unchecked, he would be seen as weak both at home and abroad. Weakness is something a country at war can’t afford to project.
Trump didn’t get into the same kind of arguments with other world leaders who publicly disagreed with him during recent meetings. He smiled and shrugged when French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer corrected him and Vance on their provocative and false statements about Europe.
Will Trump and Vance hit Vladimir Putin with the same attitude they showed towards Zelensky and scold the Russian leader for attacking Ukraine? By now, we’ve seen enough to know for sure that they won’t. If any ring-kissing happens in their meeting with Putin, the ring will be Russian.
During the heated exchange in the Oval Office, Trump even complained that Zelensky has “hatred” for Putin — the man who ordered an invasion of his country, killing thousands of civilians — saying it would be “tough” for him to “make a deal with that kind of hate.”
After the meeting, Trump claimed that Zelensky didn’t want peace. That’s a dangerous lie.
Let’s be clear. There is only one force in the world that can bring peace unilaterally, at any moment: Russia. Putin can order his troops to leave Ukraine and end the war any minute he wants. But Putin doesn’t want peace, he wants Ukraine.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/02/28/putin-doesnt-want-peace-he
-wants-ukraine/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Musk In Your Computers: An Interview With Nathan Tankus on risks to democracy nobody even thought about
By Paul Krugman | Mar 01, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/musk-in-your-computers-an-interview
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Senate Republicans
One neat trick to make all the pain go away …
What if we told you that Republicans could make the deficit impact of these tax cuts all disappear, on paper, with one neat accounting trick? With apologies to the Surge’s editors, yes, we will be devoting an entry to the debate over “current law” versus “current policy” baselines. It’s important! In the House’s budget, Republicans used a “current law” baseline—as is standard—to score their agenda. This means that since, under current law, the 2017 Trump tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of this year, it would add ~$4.5 trillion to the deficit to extend them another decade. That has two effects. First, it means that Republicans will want to make cuts elsewhere (like to Medicaid) to mitigate the paper impact of their tax cuts, and it means the tax cuts will likely have to be temporary again. Plus, Republicans have little breathing room to cut taxes deeper. What Senate Republicans insist on doing instead is using a “current policy” baseline to score their proposal. In their view, since the existing tax rates are current policy, then extending them another 10 years doesn’t “cost” anything. This sleight of hand would mean Republicans don’t need to work themselves into a sweat trying to find offsetting spending cuts, could use the extra space to achieve some of Trump’s new tax goals like “no tax on tips,” and could make this next round of tax cuts permanent—a top goal of the administration. The issue with this? Well, it would disguise a new $4.5 trillion deficit impact, and many House conservatives still want to make deep spending cuts. Plus, it would have to get by the Senate parliamentarian, unless Republicans just ignore her. But! If this is the path of least resistance, it’s where Republicans will end up.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/trump-zelensky-meeting-van
ce-ukraine-republicans-musk.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump to pardon Pete Rose for tax cheating (Trump has cheated, too)
After being kicked out of Major League Baseball, Rose was convicted of falsifying his tax records, a federal crime. He spent five months in prison after being sentenced to seven months.
https://www.scrippsnews.com/sports/in-memory-of-pete-rose-president-tr
ump-to-issue-posthumous-pardon
In 2017 the Philadelphia Phillies canceled a ceremony to honor Rose after allegations surfaced that he had had a sexual relationship with a girl before she turned 16. He said she was 16. (Trump has done that, too)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-pardon-baseball-gr
eat-pete-rose-2025-03-01/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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