Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 16:11
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Trump’s tirade at interviewer wrecks his own case against Abrego Garcia
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/04/30/trumps-tirade-at-interview
er-wrecks-his-own-case-against-abrego-garcia/
Greg Sargent writes:
President Donald Trump grew angry as a reporter persistently questioned him about his refusal to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison in El Salvador—and in so doing, Trump accidentally demolished his whole case against the wrongfully deported Salvadoran man.
In the interview, ABC News’s Terry Moran pointed out that Trump has the power to pick up the phone, call El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and with the “power of the presidency” get Bukele to release him.
“I could,” Trump replied. “If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.”
At the most basic level, this destroys one of the Trump administration’s central arguments for leaving Abrego Garcia to rot in an El Salvadoran gulag. Administration officials say they have no power to compel Bukele to release him because it would intrude on Salvadoran sovereignty to dictate that country’s treatment of one of its own.
But Trump just admitted that if he called Bukele and asked him to do this, his fellow dictator would in fact comply. This wrecks the fake distinction upon which Trump has hung his whole argument—the one between compelling Bukele to release Abrego Garcia and merely requesting that Bukele do so.
That phony distinction survives in the MAGA information universe—and in Trump’s head—because it’s insulated inside a propaganda bubble from precisely this sort of questioning from Moran. Here in the real world, of course Bukele would release Abrego Garcia if Trump asked him to. We are paying El Salvador to hold all these prisoners at our request.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What is — and isn’t — getting pricier under Trump’s tariffs?
The Yale Budget Lab has projected that the tariffs could cost Americans an average of $4,900 per household.
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-april-15-2025
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I think he wants to be the center of attention. I think that’s probably his principal motivating factor.
I think his approach was once described by [conservative columnist] Charles Krauthammer very well. Krauthammer said that he began by thinking Trump was an 11-year-old. But he realized after a close evaluation that he was about 10 years off: Trump’s really a 1-year-old who just sees everything in the world and asks the question, “What’s in this for me?”
Somebody else, I don’t remember the name, observed that Trump doesn’t have ideas, he has reactions. And I think that’s also an important insight.
If you took all of his decisions in his first term, they’d be a big archipelago of dots; a lot of the dots I agreed with. But if you try to connect the dots…Trump himself couldn’t connect the dots.
https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/411225/john-bolton-trump-f
ascism-government-chaos
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The 6 ways Trump has been a gift to the meat industry
Every president is friendly to the meat industry. Trump is on track to reach another level.
By Kenny Torrella | May 1, 2025, 6:30 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/410733/trump-meat-agriculture-100-d
ays
President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have been a gift to a sector of the economy that gets little attention but has enormous social and economic consequences: the US meat industry.
While Congress and both Republican and Democratic administrations tend to do what meat companies want — in part because those companies tend to give a lot of money to politicians and intensively lobby them — Trump has been even friendlier than most.
The one striking exception, of course, are the tariffs, which farm groups have opposed and are already feeling the sting from. The ensuing trade war has reduced two of US agriculture’s most important exports to China: pork and soybeans.
In most other respects, though, the Trump administration has behaved like traditional anti-regulation conservatives. It’s quickly taken a number of actions that directly benefit the meat industry, at the expense of the environment, animals, slaughterhouse workers, and the American consumer.
Here are the six most consequential ones.
1. Speeding up slaughter lines at meat processing plants
Pig slaughter lines are already allowed to process as many as 1,106 hogs per hour, or roughly one pig every 3.2 seconds, while poultry operations are allowed to slaughter up to 140 birds per minute. Yet in March, the US Department of Agriculture announced that it was drafting a rule to allow pig and poultry slaughterhouses to operate even faster.
Labor advocates say the new regulations will further endanger slaughterhouse workers, who already work one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, suffering high rates of injury from the repetitive cuts they must make to animal carcasses for hours on end.
“Increased line speeds will hurt workers — it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite,” the president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, which represents over 15,000 poultry workers, said in a press release.
Meatpacking workers are far more likely to be seriously injured than people in nearly every other industry.
Animal advocates also worry about how this will impact the billions of animals that move through US slaughterhouses every year. “With fewer protections and higher pressure, animals will endure even more suffering on the already cruel live-shackle slaughter line,” Michael Windsor of the animal protection group the Humane League told me in an email.
The USDA didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.
2. Rolling back food safety measures
Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s term, his USDA proposed — but didn’t finalize — a rule that would require poultry companies to limit salmonella levels in their products and test raw chicken and turkey for six strains. “If the levels exceeded the standard or any of those strains were found, the poultry couldn’t be sold and would be subject to recall,” according to the Associated Press.
The Biden administration aimed to prevent more than 10 percent of the 1.35 million salmonella infections Americans suffer from each year. But that won’t be happening. The National Chicken Council, the industry’s leading trade group, opposed the rule when it was proposed; in April, Trump’s USDA withdrew it.
3. Gutting the USDA’s animal welfare research department
In February, the USDA shrunk a farm animal welfare research team from five scientists to just one, Sentient Media’s Grey Moran reported.
Rows of dozens of large pigs confined in small crates that prohibit them from moving.
The unit’s research aimed to better understand “the gruesome mutilations and injuries routinely suffered by farm animals, including the pain experienced by livestock during and after castration (the removal of the testicles to prevent further breeding); the far-ranging psychologi
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'Writing on the wall': Battleground newspaper sees stunning plunge in Trump support
By Krystina Alarcon Carroll | April 30, 2025 2:42PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-2671873543/
A major newspaper in Georgia reported Wednesday that it's witnessed a major decline in support for Donald Trump among MAGA and independent voters.
The finding is a big warning as it comes from a battleground state essential to the Republicans' path to future victories.
Another concerned Georgia voter, Daniel Austin, said, “[Trump is] alienating our foreign allies. He thinks he’s some master negotiator, but instead, in 100 days, he’s managed to ensure in the next 100 years the U.S. won’t even be third place.”
”Nearly two-thirds of voters say they plan to cut back spending because of tariffs, including 28% who anticipate taking 'major' steps to tighten their wallets.
“I can see where he’s coming from with tariffs. He’s trying to make things more even and fair,” said Clint Myers. “But at the micro level, I’m really concerned.”
He told the outlet that he “begrudgingly” voted for Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Another concerned Georgia voter, Daniel Austin, said, “[Trump is] alienating our foreign allies. He thinks he’s some master negotiator, but instead, in 100 days, he’s managed to ensure in the next 100 years the U.S. won’t even be third place.”
"Third place"?
Third place in what?
Number of rats per capita?
I bet if you asked this guy what unit of measure he was using, he couldn't tell you.
*****
Quote:MOSTLY UNDER BIDEN
Five and a half years later,
Quote:
our civilizational outlook has not improved. It is not just the fires, floods, zoonotic diseases, and other insignia of ecological emergency.
*****
These people are reaching for criticisms.
Yanno, Trump is due for a lot of criticism, but not these. These are as much bullshit as "RUSSIA! COLLUSION! KOMPROMAT!"
How about focusing on real stuff? There's plenty to go around.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:100 years from now, the economic ranking:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Another concerned Georgia voter, Daniel Austin, said, “[Trump is] alienating our foreign allies. He thinks he’s some master negotiator, but instead, in 100 days, he’s managed to ensure in the next 100 years the U.S. won’t even be third place.”
"Third place"?
Third place in what?
Number of rats per capita?
I bet if you asked this guy what unit of measure he was using, he couldn't tell you.
1) China
2) The European Union
3) Russia
4) India
5) Japan
. . .
Nth) USA (Texas and California became separate countries)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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From Evasion to Defiance
As the courts resist his deportation orders, Trump has responded with shockingly bad-faith arguments
David Cole | May 1, 2025
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/01/from-evasion-to-defiance/
On June 2, 1919, bombs went off in eight cities across the country. One blew the door off the house of the country’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, in Georgetown. The government’s response was to round up thousands of foreign nationals, not on charges that they were involved in the bombings but for technical immigration violations and association with communist or anarchist organizations. Writing about the dragnet, Louis Post, who as Acting Secretary of Labor overturned more than a thousand deportation orders arising from the raids, observed that “the force of the delirium turned in the direction of a deportations crusade with the spontaneity of water flowing along the course of least resistance.”
Throughout our history, as I noted in these pages in the early months of Donald Trump’s first term, politicians have found scapegoating noncitizens to be “the course of least resistance.” Noncitizens don’t vote, and citizens rarely object too loudly to derogations of foreigners’ rights. No one has deployed this tactic more aggressively than Trump, who won two unlikely presidential bids by labeling immigrants “criminals” and “rapists.” From the Muslim ban he imposed in his first term to his deployment of the Alien Enemies Act in his second, the president has used broad-brush measures intended only for emergencies to single out noncitizens, not in response to any actual emergency and not for any individual wrongdoing but for mere association with a disfavored country or group. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 applies only when the US is in a declared war or subject to an “invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign nation, neither of which is the case here. Trump has nonetheless claimed that the Act permits him to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, as “alien enemies” without any process whatever.
But this time the tactic may be backfiring. In the past several weeks Trump has faced substantial resistance from the courts. Federal judges, some of whom Trump himself appointed, have barred his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and ordered him to facilitate the return of a Salvadoran wrongly deported. So far Trump has not taken the resistance kindly. He flew more than a hundred Venezuelans out of the country without any process even as a federal court was conducting an emergency hearing challenging his authority to do so. Even though his administration admitted that it erroneously deported a citizen of El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to that country’s notorious megaprison, Trump has so far balked at making any genuine effort to get him back, despite having been ordered to do so by every judge who has considered the matter: a federal district court, a unanimous court of appeals, and a unanimous Supreme Court.
In his second term Trump has not only sought to exploit “the course of least resistance” as a political matter, by targeting vulnerable individuals who lack widespread popular support. He has also attempted to sidestep or eliminate the legal obstacles the system poses to his desired ends. Speaking in the Oval Office last week, he boasted, “We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial.’ The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.” Or, as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller put it on social media, “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”
What happens when the course of least resistance meets judicial opposition? The executive has three possible responses: compliance, evasion, or outright defiance. Only the first is lawful. But there is an important difference between evasion and defiance. It is one thing to shoplift surreptitiously and another to w
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:100 years from now, the economic ranking:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Another concerned Georgia voter, Daniel Austin, said, “[Trump is] alienating our foreign allies. He thinks he’s some master negotiator, but instead, in 100 days, he’s managed to ensure in the next 100 years the U.S. won’t even be third place.”
"Third place"?
Third place in what?
Number of rats per capita?
I bet if you asked this guy what unit of measure he was using, he couldn't tell you.
1) China
2) The European Union
3) Russia
4) India
5) Japan
. . .
Nth) USA (Texas and California became separate countries)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You honestly think that's what he's referring to?
Besides, nobody can predict 100 years into the future. Heck, we can't even predict tomorrow.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Really? Destroy what is valuable and can't predict the consequences?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Besides, nobody can predict 100 years into the future. Heck, we can't even predict tomorrow.
A 100-day push to remake federal research will have lasting consequences
By David Malakoff, Jeffrey Brainard | 30 Apr 2025 5:05 PM ET
https://www.science.org/content/article/100-days-that-shook-u-s-scienc
e
It is almost certainly the most consequential 100 days that scientists in the United States have experienced since the end of World War II.
Since taking his oath of office on 20 January, President Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented rapid-fire campaign to remake—some would say demolish—vast swaths of the federal government’s scientific and public health infrastructure. His administration has erased entire agencies that fund research; fired or pushed out thousands of federal workers with technical backgrounds; terminated research and training grants and contracts worth billions of dollars; and banned new government funding for activities it finds offensive, from efforts to diversify the scientific workforce to studies of the health needs of LGBTQ people. The frenetic onslaught has touched nearly every field—from archaeology to zoology, from deep-sea research to deep-space science. And it has left researchers from postdocs to lab heads feeling bewildered, worried—and angry. Many fear that in just 14 weeks, Trump has irreversibly damaged a scientific enterprise that took many decades to build, and has long made the U.S. the envy of the world.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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