Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 16:11
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 37 of 48
Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.
If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.
Go for it. I dare you.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:President Trump Wants You to Buy His New $599 Watch So Bad He’s Appearing in the Ads Himself
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.
If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.
Go for it. I dare you.
A Trump-starring commercial for the new “Fight Fight Fight” chronograph is airing regularly on Newsmax.
By Oren Hartov | October 13, 2025
https://www.gq.com/story/trump-watches-newsmax-commercials
It’s been roughly a year since President Trump launched his own line of watches, which includes a $100,000 “Victory Tourbillon” made of solid gold as well as a “Fight Fight Fight” dive watch cased in stainless steel for $500. (A Wired article alleges that the tourbillon contains, ironically, Chinese components.) Now, despite some viral quality-control issues with the pink-dial “Inauguration First Lady” watch, the president is pushing his horological venture forward by appearing in new commercials airing on cable news.
“Check out this new red beauty, it’s one of my favorites,” Trump says in the spot, referring to Trump Watches’ new “Fight Fight Fight Chronograph Red.” “Wear it proudly on your wrist, and everyone will know exactly what it’s for, who it’s for, who it represents. It’s really gonna be something special—it’s from your favorite president.”
Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom took to X to retweet journalist Aaron Rupar’s post about Trump Watch commercials popping up regularly on Newsmax: “NO HEALTH CARE FOR YOU BUT YOU MUST BUY MY WATCH!!” Newsom wrote alongside the video.
The $599 “Fight Fight Fight Chronograph Red” comes individually numbered and uses a Miyota 6S20 quartz movement. According to the Trump Watches website, it’s “a major league timepiece worthy of a seat in The Oval Office” and “A future family heirloom, ready to pass down for generations.” The MAGA red dial too loud for you? You’re in luck: There’s also a two-tone version in steel and gold-hued steel.
The brand is also promoting a new 18-karat gold-plated “Fight Fight Fight Onyx” GMT with a Jubilee-style bracelet and a Miyota NH35 automatic movement. (At least, that’s what the Trump Watches website says, though the NH34 is the Miyota NH-series automatic GMT movement, whereas the NH35 is the three-hander.) While it’s seemingly a Rolex GMT-Master dupe, the watch costs $799 and boasts a real onyx stone dial. (Purchase is limited to three units per household, begging the question: What household is trying to buy more than three of these?)
Some fine print at the bottom of the ad states that “Trump watches are not designed, owned, managed, or controlled by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, CIC Digital LLC, or any of their respective principals or affiliates.” Nice to have that reassurance that there’s absolutely zero conflicts of interest happening here—no matter how many times a day the President of the United States himself appears on your television screen enticing you to buy a watch.
https://gettrumpwatches.com/
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:President Trump Wants You to Buy His New $599 Watch So Bad He’s Appearing in the Ads Himself
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.
If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.
Go for it. I dare you.
This has nothing to do with the Civil War you're stupidly praying for, moron.
If some dumb asshole wants to spend $30k more on a watch than I paid for my house, more power to them. They ain't my daddy.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Clarence Thomas’s Legal Clerk Issues Dire Warning About Supreme Court’s Agenda
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
This has nothing to do with the Civil War you're stupidly praying for, moron.
If some dumb asshole wants to spend $30k more on a watch than I paid for my house, more power to them. They ain't my daddy.
‘BOMBSHELL’
Legal scholar Caleb Nelson is worried about the “pro-president” direction the Supreme Court seems to be moving toward.
By Wiktoria Gucia | Oct. 14 2025 2:16AM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-clerk-issues-dire-warnin
g-about-supreme-courts-agenda/
A former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas has warned that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution “appears to be moving toward a sweepingly pro-president position.”
In an essay for the NYU Law Democracy Project, originalist legal scholar and University of Virginia School of Law professor Caleb Nelson argued that the Constitution’s text and historical context give Congress wide latitude to organize the executive branch and to impose limits on the president’s power to remove officials. https://democracyproject.org/posts/must-administrative-officers-serve-
at-the-presidents-pleasure
It’s an issue that is already front and center on the court’s docket, and one that Nelson warns “can do lasting damage to our norms and institutions” in the case of “a President bent on vengeful, destructive and lawless behavior.”
In September, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 emergency order allowing President Donald Trump to remove Federal Trade Commission leader Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position. Slaughter, who was appointed to the FTC in 2018 during Trump’s first administration, argued that she was “illegally” fired in a move that violated “clear Supreme Court precedent.”
The Court will hear arguments in the case in December, when it will consider whether to overturn the 1935 precedent that limits the president’s ability to remove independent agency regulators over policy disagreements.
“It is true that Article II vests the executive power in the President,” Nelson, who clerked for Thomas from 1994 to 1995, wrote in his article. “But Congress is in charge of creating offices within the executive branch, and the Constitution does not give the President unilateral power to dictate who will fill those offices or what their authorities and duties will be.”
While the current Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with the Trump administration since the president returned to office in January, Nelson hopes “the Justices will not act as if their hands are tied and they cannot consider any consequences of the interpretations that they choose” when deciding cases like Slaughter’s.
However, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak believes “There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the ‘unitary executive theory,’ which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.”
Still, Nelson’s article has elicited a massive response from the legal community.
“Bombshell!” was constitutional law scholar and professor William Baude’s immediate reaction to Nelson’s commentary. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation of Article II,” he wrote.
https://bsky.app/profile/williambaude.bsky.social/post/3lzyvlfbz4s2w
Nelson’s originalist understanding of the Constitution has led to his opinions previously being cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court decisions. Thomas himself referenced his former clerk’s work six times in a 2023 concurring opinion, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh named Nelson among a small group of “respected scholars” in a concurring opinion last year.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-86_l5gm.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf
Article II of t
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How Crypto Became a Trump Trade
It’s primarily a vehicle for crony capitalism now
By Paul Krugman | Oct 14, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-crypto-became-a-trump-trade
By now it’s obvious that Donald Trump suffers from CBS — Cowardly Bully Syndrome.
On Friday, Trump blasted China’s new export controls on rare earths, declaring them a “moral disgrace” which were “obviously a plan devised by them years ago.” And he threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on China, on top of the already high existing tariffs.
Less than a day later he was groveling:
Donald J. Trump Truth Social Post 12:43 PM EST 10/12/25
Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A, wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT
12:45 PM • Oct 12, 2025 788.4K Views
So it only took a few hours to go from “a plan devised by them years ago” to they “just had a bad moment,” from “moral disgrace” to “highly respected President Xi.” The Chinese must be having a good laugh: They took Trump’s measure and he came out looking very, very small.
But what caused this quick, abject retreat? I’d like to believe that economic experts within the administration took a sober look at the situation and concluded that China would have the upper hand in a trade war. But there are no economic experts in this administration, and anyway, who would dare to tell Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear?
No, Trump was almost certainly reacting to the markets. Stocks fell sharply Friday, but the really striking action came in crypto, where Bitcoin fell 20 percent and smaller, less liquid tokens fell even more. Here, to take an arbitrary example, is what happened to the value of the official Trump coin:
Also, it just so happens that Trump himself holds an estimated $870 million worth of Bitcoin, so he suffered large personal financial losses from the crypto crash.
This was the largest one-day crash crypto has experienced so far. My question, however, is why the prospect of an intensified trade war caused a crypto crash.
Oddly, I’ve seen almost no reporting about this issue. There has been a lot about the way the crypto crash was magnified by forced sales: Many crypto investors are highly leveraged, and there were many forced liquidations — with widespread speculation that one or more “whales,” that is, major players, may have imploded. But why did a threatened trade war cause crypto to fall in the first place?
The answer, I believe, has little to do with economics and everything to do with politics. These days crypto derives its value largely from the support of politicians and government officials — in particular, officials who can be bribed. As a result, at this point crypto is largely a Trump trade. And crypto fell because the backlash against the potential trade war threatened to weaken Trump politically.
A brief history of crypto: When Bitcoin, the original crypto asset, was introduced, enthusiasts predicted that it would displace conventional fiat money, that is, currency issued by governments. The blockchain, they claimed, would make transactions using cryptocurrency easier and cheaper than transactions using dollars. And cryptocurrencies would be safe from the ravages of the printing press: governments couldn’t debase your money through inflation.
That was more than 15 years ago, and crypto has completely failed to deliver on those promises. Almost nobody uses cryptocurrency as a means of payment. A recent research paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City notes that
The share of U.S. consumers who report using cryptocurrency for payments—purchases, money transfers, or both—has been very small and has declined
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MAGA Rage at “No Kings” Boils Over
President Trump’s allies are suddenly raging over the October 18th “No Kings” protests. MAGA Mike Johnson and MAGA-fied Representative Steve Scalise are angrily sliming expected attendees as America-haters, antifa, Marxists, and terrorists. MAGA influencers and other GOP figures have done the same, with one hinting that the National Guard should crack down on them. This unanimity of messaging about “terrorists” means it’s all almost certainly being coordinated by Stephen Miller. Yet it’s backfiring: Democrats and rally organizers are using it to galvanize attendance, which will likely succeed. Robert De Niro amplified the call to turn out, inspiring more anger on Fox News. Indeed, the GOP demonization of legitimate protests itself ratifies the “No Kings” message. We talked to Jill Lawrence, who writes well for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of blue America. We discuss why large legitimate protests infuriate Trump-MAGA, why the correct response to their smears is to turn out in force, and why that’s likely to happen. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/201672/maga-rage-no-kings-boils-over-a
nd-quickly-backfires-trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Can America recover from Trump? Here’s what new data says.
New political science research suggests democracy can survive leaders like Trump. But there’s a catch.
By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 14, 2025
https://www.vox.com/politics/464459/trump-american-democracy-u-turns
The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.
Can any democracy come back from this?
Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.
Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2024.2448742
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-myth-of-democratic-res
ilience/
So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.
What researchers learned about “democratic U-turns”
The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgements are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.
The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht, and Staffan I. Lindberg found that U-turns — defined as a country’s democracy score starting to increase after a recent decline — are very common. Over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn. And those U-turns are typically very successful, hence the topline finding that 90 percent of U-turns saw a country returning to its previous level of democracy or even improving on it.
To understand what a U-turn looks like more concretely, it’s helpful to look at the recent history of Poland. Once considered one of the strongest post-communist democracies, the right-wing PiS government elected in 2015 turned the country’s public broadcaster into propaganda and packed the judicial system with its own cronies. But in 2023, a coalition of opposition parties defeated PiS in national parliamentary elections and began trying to undo the damage. You can see, in Poland’s V-Dem score, the characteristic U-shaped curve — a decline under PiS and an increase after its defeat.
Yet this is all very new, and Poland has not returned to its pre-PiS democracy. Moreover, there’s a real question of whether its progress in the right direction can be sustained. The new coalition has had a lot of trouble fixing what PiS broke, and just this year narrowly lost the presidential election to the PiS candidate.
The second paper argues that such a failure to make sustained gains would be more common than not.
Its authors — Nic Cheeseman, Jennifer Cyr, and Mattías Bianchi — also use V-Dem data and focus their analysis on post-1994 cases of democratic U-turn. Twenty-one cases (out of the initial 102) fit these parameters. The
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Russian state TV mocks Trump as ‘simple infant’ outwitted by Putin
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-state-tv-mocks-trump-as-s
imple-infant-outwitted-by-putin/ss-AA1OqAMl
For Moscow, Trump’s unpredictable statements and shifting positions have become regular fodder for state television.
The latest broadcast painted him as a vain and unreliable figure, while elevating Putin as a master manipulator of world leaders.
Mocking Donald Trump
Russian state television has ridiculed Donald Trump, calling him “as simple as pocket change” and claiming Vladimir Putin has outsmarted him over Ukraine peace negotiations.
The mockery came during a broadcast where political commentators celebrated what they described as Moscow’s upper hand in global diplomacy.
‘Putin gets better of Trump’
Political scientist Andrei Sidorchik told viewers that Putin’s strategy was working, contrasting it with Trump’s supposed naivety.
“He is saying the eternal peace will now start in the Middle East,” Sidorchik said, mocking Trump’s optimism.
He suggested the former US president lacked a sense of “responsibility and perception,” implying Putin was using Trump’s ego to his advantage.
Mocking Trump’s ego after Nobel snub
The discussion followed Trump’s disappointment over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sidorchik remarked that Trump’s pride had been “wounded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee” and that the Kremlin understood how to exploit his need for praise.
“Once again, to save the world from an apocalypse, we have to stroke the ego of a man who is behaving like a cowboy from a saloon or an infant,” he said.
Russian commentators celebrate Putin’s influence
The exchange on NTV highlighted how Russia’s state-controlled media portrays Putin as the dominant player on the global stage.
Host Roman Babayan noted Trump had publicly thanked Putin for his “warm words” about peace.
The segment framed Putin as a calm strategist, while Trump was painted as a volatile and emotional figure who could be manipulated.
Trump’s intellect mocked on live TV
During the broadcast, Sidorchik delivered one of the harshest lines of the night:
“His intellect is not up to par. He is as simple as pocket change. He thinks that, in the end, Russia can be cowed. His entourage thinks so too, which is sad.”
The insult drew laughter from the studio audience, reflecting the Kremlin’s growing confidence in its narrative against the West.
Predictions of European capitulation
Adding to the smug tone, Professor Andrey Koshkin predicted that Europe would soon “repay Russia its seized assets, with interest.”
He claimed such a development was inevitable, suggesting that Western sanctions were beginning to backfire.
“All of it will happen,” Koshkin said confidently, reinforcing Moscow’s message that patience would bring victory.
Manipulating Trump through ‘psychological tricks’
Journalist Evgenia Volgina told viewers that Trump’s engagement with Putin reflected a classic psychological play.
“There is an often-used psychological trick of telling your counterpart what he wants to hear,” she explained, implying Putin was using flattery to manage Trump.
“Most likely, he is doing that,” she added, noting that only Russia was “talking about peacemaking” while the US and Europe “don’t need peacemaking.”
Trump threatens to send Tomahawks to Ukraine
The broadcast coincided with Trump’s comments aboard Air Force One, where he told reporters he “might have to speak to Russia” about sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.
The weapons would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory, including Moscow.
Trump warned, “Do they want to have Tomahawks going in their direction? I don’t think so.”
Warning of ‘a new step of aggression’
The US president said he had raised the issue with Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the missiles “a new step of aggression.”
He added, “If the war is not settled, we may very well, we may not, but we may do it. I think it’s appropriate to bring
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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'We Suffered For 25 Years': Trump Invents His Own History, Claims Banning Tariffs In 1913 Was What Caused The Great Depression
During a recent bilateral meeting in the Oval Office with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, Donald Trump invented his own version of U.S. history as he claimed the Great Depression happened because the country banned tariffs in 1913. Tariffs were never banned in 1913, and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is often blamed for making the Great Depression worse.
Starts at 2 minutes into the video.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-did-that-work-out-trump-tr
ies-to-rewrite-history-claims-the-great-depression-happened-because-tariffs-were-banned-in-1913/vi-AA1MEmzY
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says
In a social media post, President Trump asserted without evidence that they had been transporting drugs. The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/us/politics/trump-drugs-boat-attack
.html?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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The law temporarily halts Trump from receiving a bribe worth hundreds of millions of dollars
Florida judge halts transfer of downtown Miami land for Trump's presidential library
The judge said a local college didn’t give reasonable public notice before it gifted the land to the state, which then voted to transfer the property to the Trump library foundation.
The nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on an iconic stretch of palm tree-lined Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other top GOP officials voted to transfer the land, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump, Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, and the president’s attorney James Kiley.
Who knows if the Trustees might decide to sell the "free" land and put the hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump's bank account? Trump knows, but you will hear about his plans too late.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-presidential-libra
ry-judge-blocks-miami-land-transfer-rcna237725
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I believe that China purposefully not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, is an Economically Hostile Act. We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution. As an example, we can easily produce Cooking Oil ourselves, we don't need to purchase it from China.
10/14/25, 3:37 PM
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/14/trump-china-ba
n-cooking-oil-soybean/86695788007/
What is Trump’s problem? This: In 2024, the United States received approximately 1.27 million metric tons of used cooking oil from China, which was about 43% of China's total used cooking oil exports, according to the USDA.
In 2024, the U.S. sold nearly 27 million metric tons of soybeans to China. However, as of October 2025, China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May 2025 due to trade tensions and tariffs, which have made American soybeans prohibitively expensive compared to those from South America. This has led to U.S. soybean exports to China dropping to zero for several months.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Trump Fabricates Story of Hand-to-Hand Combat Between Troops and Child Gangsters in D.C.
Trump’s claim that National Guard members beat child gang members on the streets of Washington was disputed even by the military.
By Nick Turse | October 15 2025, 2:29 p.m
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/15/trump-lie-national-guard-dc-tren-d
e-aragua/
President Donald Trump claims that U.S. troops have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with young members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C. But Joint Task Force–District of Columbia, the umbrella organization for the military occupation of the nation’s capital, says it never happened.
Trump’s outlandish claim — that National Guard members beat child gang members — is one of numerous demonstrably false claims peddled by the president concerning the deployment of military troops, including that there is now “no crime” in the district. It’s part of a raft of lies Trump has used to paint America’s cities as war-torn wastelands and justify urban military occupations. These blatant falsehoods have increasingly drawn the ire of the federal judiciary.
“You saw it in Washington,” Trump announced in an address to hundreds of top military officers late last month. “We had gangs of Tren de Aragua, say 10, 12, 15 kids. And these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded.” After twice more reiterating that U.S. troops “pounded” gang members, Trump claimed the suspects were “thrown into paddy wagons and taken back to their country.”
JTF–DC spokesperson Alexia Nal says that troops deployed on the streets of the capital have never engaged in combat with any suspected criminals. “Nope. We’re not allowed to,” she told The Intercept, stating that service members cannot put their hands on people. One defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called Trump’s claim “obvious bullshit.” Two more government officials laughed when The Intercept brought the president’s story to their attention. “Of course not. Not a chance,” one of them said when asked if there was any possibility that Trump’s account was based on a real incident.
“President Trump’s false and inflammatory justifications for deploying federal agents and National Guard troops to vibrant American cities may keep shifting, but the truth does not,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, told The Intercept. “There’s simply no emergency to justify deploying federal forces to Washington D.C. or any other city the president wrongly paints as a hellscape.”
The White House did not respond to questions about the supposed assault of members of Tren de Aragua; whether the supposed gang members were, in fact, children; and if the president was suggesting members of Tren de Aragua were driven by “paddy wagon” to Venezuela.
Trump’s fabricated tale of combat on the capital’s streets are mirrored by his clearly false claims about crime in Washington since troops began their occupation of the city in August. “D.C. is now a no — it’s a free crime city. We have no crime in D.C. … It took me 12 days,” Trump announced early last month, also referencing Tren de Aragua in those remarks.
Trump reiterated those boasts more recently. “We’ve got no crime,” Trump claimed last week. “It took 12 days to solve the problem. And we’re going to do that in Chicago, we’re going to do that in Portland.” The remarks came only hours after D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department announced the victims of two deadly shootings.
A JTF–DC spokesperson refused to contradict her commander-in-chief. “We do not speculate,” she responded when asked if crime in the district had been eliminated. “However, JTF–DC stays committed to the mobilization in the District until law and order is restored.”
Regular announcements on the Metropolitan Police Department’s website, alone, put the lie to Trump’s boasts. “On Sunday, October 12, 2025, at approximately 10:18 p.m., Seventh District officers responded to a report of
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
I hope he figures it out.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Trump has got this figured out:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
I hope he figures it out.
Trump keeps wandering off the job to give tours of his White House remodel: report
By Tom Boggioni | Oct 15, 2025
https://www.rawstory.com/white-house-renovations-wandering/
Donald Trump’s obsession with remaking the White House into something more like his Mar-a-Lago resort is interfering with his presidential duties, as he sets aside time spent running the government to give dignitaries and visitors tours of his handiwork, according to new reporting.
According to a report from Marc Caputo of Axios, the president has had dioramas built representing all the changes he makes and likes to play with them during his meals, with one insider remarking, “This is all the president's baby. It's the Trump White House."
The report notes the president has “spent as many as 20 hours on some projects, aides say, engaging in impromptu design sessions between negotiating peace deals and talks over the government shutdown,” adding that, “After strong-arming Benjamin Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire two weeks ago, Trump led the Israeli prime minister on a 40-minute tour of White House renovations. Last week, Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb got the same treatment.”
“Last month, a delegation of Florida House lawmakers spent even more time with the president — well over an hour — as he showed them the new tile floors in the old washroom of the Lincoln Bedroom (statuary marble Trump had selected),” Caputo wrote before noting that one member of the group explained that the president engaged them in voting of which tile should be used, which a White House insider confirmed by explaining, “He asks everyone for a vote on everything. We vote. Anybody that walks through gets a vote. He cares so deeply about perfection that this is what he does."
During a recent meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Trump walked the entourage outside to show off his new sound system in what he is now calling the "Rose Garden Club," and boasted, “We have a great speaker system.”
As for Trump’s noodling around with the 3D models, while the government is shut down, one insider admitted, “The tenser things are, the more he moves the [diorama] pieces around in his spare time, or he takes a break and thinks about the marble he wants or the columns, whether they're going to be Corinthian or not.”
*******
Don the Builder: Inside Trump's White House makeover
By Marc Caputo | Oct 15, 2025
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/15/trump-white-house-remodel-plans
Donald Trump is obsessing over remodeling the White House like no other president.
• He has gilded the Oval Office, replaced trees, paved the Rose Garden lawn, hung art and mirrors all over, erected flagpoles and begun work on a $250 million ballroom.
• He's not done: Trump has had models and dioramas built for other projects he's considering, and even directed how and where new marble-tiled floors are laid.
Why it matters: Long after Trump has exited the presidency, his imprint will be on the executive mansion in an unprecedented scope and scale — even if a successor removes the Oval Office gold leaf.
• He's spent as many as 20 hours on some projects, aides say, engaging in impromptu design sessions between negotiating peace deals and talks over the government shutdown.
• After strong-arming Beniamin Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire two weeks ago, Trump led the Israeli prime minister on a 40-minute tour of White House renovations. Last week, Finnish President Alexand
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Quote:Why not gilded statues of Trump at major intersections in Washington DC?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Wait until next year for the announcement!
Arc de Trump? President unveils Washington DC monument plan
The arch, to mark the USA’s 250th anniversary, would be nestled in a roundabout near the Arlington Memorial Bridge
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/arc-de-trump-president-
unveils-dc-monument-plan-70nwmdv38
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Is Trump Making Excuses for Hamas?
The president seems undisturbed by the terrorist group’s murderous campaign against dissidents. In fact, he seems to admire it.
By Jonathan Chait | October 15, 2025, 12:45 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/trump-israel-hama
s-executions/684563/
Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram “DEATH TO COLLABORATORS.” But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.
On Sunday evening, a reporter asked the president about reports that Hamas is reestablishing its authority in the Gaza Strip by executing its rivals. Trump said that the group is merely cracking down on crime, for which it has American approval.
“They do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said. “We are having ’em watch that there’s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished.”
Yesterday, talking with reporters in the White House, Trump added more detail to his defense of Hamas. “They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad—very, very bad gangs,” he said. “And they did take ’em out. And they killed a number of gang members. And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s okay. A couple of very bad gangs.”
Why is Trump praising one of the world’s most violent and fanatical terrorist organizations as crime-fighting guardians of public order? Two motives spring to mind.
First, Trump is invested in his cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. The terms of the pact are shaky, though. Hamas has agreed to release the bodies of its remaining Israeli hostages, but the group is reluctant to heed demands that it give up power. Its frantic campaign of murder and intimidation against alleged gangsters and gangs—who are mostly anti-Hamas armed groups and dissidents, some with ties to Israel—seems designed to foreclose the political transformation the deal calls for. Admitting that this violence poses a dire threat to the prospect of peace in the region would challenge Trump’s claim to have brought about a historic truce. And so he is reflexively brushing off any news that seems to undermine his own achievement.
A second, more disturbing explanation is that Trump genuinely does not distinguish between crime-fighting and authoritarian crackdowns. He has praised authoritarian governments elsewhere for using force to suppress protests. In 1990, he told Playboy that China had mistakenly allowed some protests before wisely reversing course: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
Trump has long praised autocrats who suppress dissent, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At a press event on Monday, he praised the dictatorship of Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for its supposed tough-on-crime stance: “It’s about leadership, and it’s really nice when you say, ‘How is your crime situation?,’ and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. ‘What do you mean crime? We don’t have crime.’ Because if he has crime, he puts it out very quickly.” Rather than recoil at the sight of masked goons carrying out street justice without due process, Trump seems similarly inclined to praise Hamas for being tough on crime.
The suggestion that Trump sees Hamas’s tactics as admirable may sound uncharitable, but Trump himself likened Hamas’s approach to his own. Elaborating on his defense of Hamas yesterday, Trump said, “You know, it’s no different than other countries. Like, Venezuela sent th
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Going to war without a declaration of war from Congress
Trump confirms he's authorized CIA operations in Venezuela, looking into land strikes
"We are certainly looking at land now," Trump said.
By Michelle Stoddart and Lalee Ibssa | October 15, 2025, 11:35 PM
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-authorized-cia-operatio
ns-venezuela-land-strikes/story?id=126563281
When asked whether the CIA was given the authority to "take out" Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro, Trump called it a "ridiculous" question for him to respond to.
Is that a Yes? Or a No? Or Maybe? I have my doubts that the difference is clear even in Trump's mind. The President does love to improvise plausible justifications for his randomness.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump expresses appreciation toward the people who are bribing him:
Donald Trump Reveals His White House Ballroom Site With Epic Anticlimax
By Cameron Adams | Oct 16, 2025
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-reveals-his-white-house-bal
lroom-reno-with-epic-anticlimax/
Donald Trump has delivered a supremely anticlimactic reveal of the site of the new $250 million White House ballroom at an exclusive dinner to thank the people who helped fund his pet project.
Trump, 79, filled the East Room on Wednesday with deep-pocketed guests, including oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and crypto billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There were also representatives from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and defense and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin. During the dinner, Trump talked up the architectural designs for the ballroom and noted that the construction work was already happening outside, right behind his podium.
The dinner will help “Establish the Magnificent White House Ballroom,” according to a copy of the invitation reviewed by the Journal.
“Should I show you? I guess maybe so they can see, right?” Trump mused, before instructing someone else to open the curtains behind him.
After the build-up, Trump’s big reveal turned out to be seriously low-impact. Through the small panels of the glass double doors, the influential guests got a glimpse of a construction site illuminated by industrial lighting—and not much else.
“We don’t really want you to walk on there, but you can take a look if you want,” Trump said.
He then pointed at tiny toy-sized models of his latest plans for the White House including a replica of the future ballroom. “We’ve already started excavation,” Trump said. “I’m very good at building things on time and on budget.”
While the White House announced the plans for the ballroom in July, Trump did not give any indication when it will be finished. The official statement said “it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
At one point, after a rambling speech where Trump again complained about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, the curtain was discreetly closed.
The president also talked up his skills as he thanked the “legends” in the room.
“That’s why we’re here to celebrate you, because you’ve given tremendous amounts of money to see a ballroom built for the first time at the White House,” Trump said. “For 150 years plus they’ve wanted a ballroom and it never happened because they never had a real estate person.”
Trump made sure to call out his “really, really generous” friends in the room.
“A couple of you sitting here [were] saying, ‘Uh, sir, would $25 million be appropriate?’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ You know, it doesn’t take too many 25[million]s to get it done, but a lot of I mean, a lot of you were have been really fantastic.”
He revealed the ballroom will be big enough to hold “literally the inauguration if we want” and the exterior design will feature four sides of “beautiful glass,” which will all be bulletproof.
He also said it will have a capacity of 999 people, an increase from 650 people in July and 900 last month.
Trump also told the diners the ballroom is now “fully financed.”
“It’s fully taken care of now, and in fact, we’ll have money left over and we’ll use that for something.”
Trump also referenced his Presidential Hall of Fame during the diner, with the audience laughing at his “controversial” portrait of President Joe Biden being represented by a photo of an auto-pen.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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CDC scientist let go during shutdown says "it's truly like an episode of 'Squid Games'"
By Michael Kaplan, Caitlin Huey-Burns, Dr. Celine Gounder | October 15, 2025 10:14 PM EDT
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-scientist-let-go-during-shutdown-says
-its-truly-like-an-episode-of-squid-games/
Washington — A scientist laid off by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said "the everyday American should be very concerned" by reductions in force amid the government shutdown.
The scientist, one of hundreds of CDC employees terminated by the Trump administration last week, asked that her identity be concealed for fear of retribution.
"It's going to mean more deaths, more preventable deaths," she told CBS News on Wednesday of the layoffs. "People will absolutely die from the impact of this administration."
The scientist worked at the CDC for the past decade, studying chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
She spoke out the same day a federal judge in Northern California issued a verbal order temporarily halting all the government layoffs that were issued since the shutdown began. This was in response to a lawsuit brought by federal employees' unions.
"They went in and fired entire programs, even statutorily mandated by law programs, they cut entirely," she said. "So there is no staff to do this work anymore."
She said everything she was working on has come to a complete stop.
"It's truly like an episode of 'Squid Games,' because we don't know what's going to happen next," she said.
The Trump administration has used the government shutdown, now in its third week, to lay off more than 4,000 federal workers, and plans to go further, according to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
"I think we'll probably end up being north of 10,000," Vought said Wednesday during an appearance on "The Charlie Kirk Show."
Since last week, the Trump administration has informed approximately 600 CDC employees they have been laid off.
On Tuesday, internal CDC officials not authorized to speak to the media told CBS News that on Oct. 10, about 1,000 CDC employees were initially given reduction-in-force notices, a government term for layoffs.
However, within about 24 hours, hundreds of those notices were rescinded, reducing the total number of layoffs in the agency since Oct. 10 to about 600, the officials said.
The judge's ruling Wednesday would put the layoffs of those 600 employees on hold, leaving them in limbo while the case plays out.
According to numbers provided by a congressional source familiar with the cuts, the 600 CDC layoffs impacted all staff in the CDC's offices in Washington, D.C., all staff for the office of the director for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, all staff for the National Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce, and all policy and communications staff for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
The CDC agencies that saw their layoffs rescinded, according to the source, were the Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Center, the Global Health Center, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report team, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and scientists working on responses to outbreaks of measles in the U.S. and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
So far this year, the CDC has lost about 3,000 employees to resignations and layoffs, or just under a quarter of its staff, according to AFGE Local 2883, the union that represents CDC employees. That number was confirmed by the CDC officials who spoke to CBS News.
The CDC has been beset by changes since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year. A vaccine skeptic, Kennedy controversially replaced all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immuniz
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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In case you were unaware that Trump is evil, he once again reminds you:
Trump ‘OK’ with DC statue honoring Civil War leader who fought for slavery: ‘Lot of people in this room’ agree
Trump’s administration has pushed for restoring multiple memorials to the pro-slavery leader
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he’d have no problem with erecting a massive statue honoring Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the South in rebellion against the United States to try and preserve the enslavement of Black people — within sight of the Lincoln Memorial.
His administration has consistently moved to restore tributes to Lee, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordering a portrait of Lee back to a place of honor at the U.S. Military Academy.
This restoration at West Point contradicts a Congressional commission's directive to remove items commemorating the Confederacy, with an Army spokesperson stating they honor history rather than erase it.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-
ballroom-dinner-robert-e-lee-statue-b2846627.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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When I was chairman of the Republican National Committee, I sat in countless meetings where we carefully crafted the talking points for the week, fine-tuning the language so everyone from local lawmakers to friendly cable news pundits could stay on message.
But when we did that, it was to keep someone from upending the party message by saying something unhinged. This time, the unhinged comments are the message.
The GOP’s coordinated attack on the ‘No Kings’ rally is ridiculous. The Republican talking points are out of touch with the reality of Saturday's protests.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/no-kings-protests-trump-re
publican-warnings-rcna237845
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America First? No, Billionaire Buddies First
Argentina: A very Trumpy debacle
By Paul Krugman | Oct 17, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-first-no-billionaire-buddie
s
The Trump administration is doing so many corrupt, destructive and simply stupid things that the failing attempt to rescue Javier Milei, Argentina’s MAGAesque president, with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars isn’t even in the top 10. But the Argentina debacle is getting a lot of public attention, for good reason: It’s a teachable moment, a naked demonstration of the administration’s hypocrisy and incompetence.
So let me ask two questions about this deployment of $20 billion, or maybe $40 billion in U.S. funds. (Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has talked about a second facility financed by the private sector, but I don’t see why anyone would put money into this facility without some kind of official U.S. backing that puts taxpayers further on the hook.) First, what if anything does this have to do with U.S. national interest? Second, will this bailout succeed and, if so, for whom?
Bessent has said that Argentina is a “systemically important ally.” As an editorial in the Financial Times — not exactly a left-wing rag — drily notes, this is “news to many.”
One way to highlight the weakness of the case for this bailout is to compare current U.S. economic links with Argentina with U.S. interest in Mexico back in 1995, when the Clinton administration provided a financial aid package to our neighbor that may, on the surface, look similar to what Bessent is giving the Milei government. Here are U.S. exports to Mexico (dashed green line) and Argentina (blue line) as a percent of total U.S. exports:
In 1994, just before the financial crisis that prompted Clinton to intervene, Mexico accounted for 10 percent of U.S. exports, a number that would rise over time as the North American Free Trade Agreement led to close integration of our national economies. Furthermore, Mexico is right next door, giving the U.S. an obvious interest in Mexico’s political stability.
Argentina is, to say the least, not next door, and accounts for less than 0.5 percent of U.S. exports. Why, exactly, should U.S. taxpayers bail out Javier Milei?
We know why Trump and Bessent want to help Milei. First, he’s a MAGA favorite, fond of posing with U.S. right wingers with a chainsaw as a prop. So the Trumpists want a right-wing, anti-government politician to succeed, no matter how much taxpayer money is required.
Second, some U.S. hedge-fund billionaires, personally close to Bessent, bet big on Milei and bought Argentine bonds. The bailout package almost surely won’t succeed in turning Argentina’s economy around and probably won’t rescue Milei politically. But it may buy enough time for Bessent’s buddies to get much of their money out before the bottom falls out of the Argentine economy.
Yet events may very well overtake Bessent’s bailout plans. As I’ll explain shortly, Milei’s situation appears to be deteriorating fast, and Trump’s intervention may be making it worse.
Milei has succeeded in reducing Argentina’s inflation rate, but only by keeping the peso overvalued against the dollar. This is a time-tested futile strategy — by which I mean that it’s a strategy that has been attempted many times and has consistently failed. Typically, there’s initial euphoria. Then, as the overvalued currency leads to rising unemployment and political backlash, money starts to flee the country in anticipation of a future devaluation.
The final acts of a failed “exchange rate-based stabilization” usually play out as follows: For a short period the government tries to keep capital from fleeing and prop up the currency by raising interest rates, sometimes to incredibly high levels. But soaring interest rates compound the economic pain. Event
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
It seems to me you can’t either. First, he could end Russian aggression in a week. He doesn’t because Putin has something on him, and or, he doesn’t think it benefits him personally. You have yet to figure out Trumps motivations and that’s sad. Or you're being dishonest.
And he didn’t bribe Qatar, they bribed him. Why did he crack down on Israel? They bombed his business partners, Qatar. I see no references in your posts expressing how he is acting like a dictator and destroying American institutions. Which shows your ignorance and biases regarding all matters, here and abroad. Isn’t that right comrade?
You are on board with the Alex Krainer's of the world. He likes dictators like Putin and believes Putin being a strong man benefits the masses. You think the same. Which is why you always come off as a Russian troll who never gets, how and why America is what it is and the promise only it offers. And, it's why you are all in for tearing it down.
T
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Mike Waltz, President Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador, was asked Thursday on Fox News about the administration’s plans for Venezuela. Trump recently authorized covert CIA operations against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and has publicly considered conducting land strikes on the country.
Waltz told Fox News that Maduro is an “illegitimate leader, convicted in the Southern District of New York,” adding that the U.S. will “do whatever it takes” to dismantle Venezuelan “terrorist gangs.”
Notably, Maduro was not convicted, but rather charged with narcoterrorism and other offenses, in New York’s Southern District in 2020. He has not been apprehended nor stood trial, and the Trump administration has a $50 million bounty out on information leading to his arrest. (Venezuela’s foreign minister at the time called the charges against Maduro “miserable, vulgar, and unfounded,” and consistent with a U.S. “policy of forced regime change in Venezuela.”)
And of course, if a conviction in New York is such a stigma, as Waltz suggests, then Trump is in deep trouble. Trump became the first felonious president in May 2024, convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a New York State Supreme Court jury—whose verdict he is appealing.
Waltz, a congressman at the time, cried election interference.
https://newrepublic.com/post/201875/trump-waltz-world-leader-maduro-co
nvicted-new-york-illegitimate
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You keep cheerleading for the bad guys and see what happens to you.
CNN's Enten: Odds Of Dems Taking The House "Have Gone Plummeting Down," Much Closer To A Toss-Up At This Point
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/10/15/cnns_enten_odds_of_
dems_taking_the_house_have_gone_plummeting_down_much_closer_to_a_toss-up_at_this_point.html
That's not even considering that SCOTUS is going to reverse all of the blue state racial gerrymandering in June, the fact that we're removing illegals off of the census for house seats, we're removing mail-in ballots, we're removing ballot harvesting, we're removing drop boxes, and we're going to require voter ID.
Once all of the cheating has been removed from the election process, Democrats will never gain control of the house again.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
It seems to me you can’t either. First, he could end Russian aggression in a week. He doesn’t because Putin has something on him, and or, he doesn’t think it benefits him personally. You have yet to figure out Trumps motivations and that’s sad. Or you're being dishonest.
And he didn’t bribe Qatar, they bribed him. Why did he crack down on Israel? They bombed his business partners, Qatar. I see no references in your posts expressing how he is acting like a dictator and destroying American institutions. Which shows your ignorance and biases regarding all matters, here and abroad. Isn’t that right comrade?
You are on board with the Alex Krainer's of the world. He likes dictators like Putin and believes Putin being a strong man benefits the masses. You think the same. Which is why you always come off as a Russian troll who never gets, how and why America is what it is and the promise only it offers. And, it's why you are all in for tearing it down.
T
Trump’s Qatar military deal is historic — for all the wrong reasons
Qatar’s ruling family may have just found out how much influence a run-down Boeing 747 buys you in Donald Trump’s America.
In a scenario that would have dominated the headlines in any other administration, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that Qatar’s Air Force would be moving into a plush new “military facility” at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Yes, the same Qatar that Trump once accused of funding global terrorism. What a difference an airplane makes!
The president’s new love affair with Qatar is flying under the radar, it seems, thanks to a constant stream of fresh political scandals closer to home. But this new coziness with Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is causing turbulence with everyone from top military brass to Trump’s closest Capitol Hill allies. If Democrats want voters to treat this like the national security crisis it is, they’ll need to get a lot more comfortable explaining why Qatar isn’t our friend.
The Qatari government apparently knows that when it comes to Trump’s ego, the sky is the limit. When the regime offered the White House a “free” Boeing superluxury jumbo jet (estimated value $400 million), Trump was quick to accept it as a show of respect, even though doing so put American taxpayers on the hook for nearly $1 billion in repairs and security refits. As Trump said at the time, only “a stupid person” would turn down a free airplane. But even setting aside the exorbitant taxpayer-funded upgrade costs, Qatar’s 747-800 now looks anything but free.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-qatar-military-deal-is
-historic-for-all-the-wrong-reasons/ar-AA1OCOOl?ocid=msedgntp&pc=EDBBAN&cvid=a5034daee3f64658b4b76105d0b5a6f1&ei=32
You never speak of any of this because your agenda is Anti-American comrade. Trump is a Putin ally. That may change but so far, Trump has been a Russian stooge. If this were Biden, wow, you'd be yelling it from the roof tops. Even Bidens son was a favorite target of yours for what may have amounted to a few million; may have. With Trump and his sons, it's billions, and nothing but silence from you.
Who the fuck do you think you're kidding?
T
&l
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
THGR:
It seems to me you can’t either. First, he could end Russian aggression in a week.
If Trump could, then so could Biden*.
So why didn't Biden*?
I bet you never answer that question!
Quote:
He doesn’t because Putin has something on him, and or, he doesn’t think it benefits him personally.
I see Q-anon's representative is posting.
Again.
Quote:Glad he cracked down on Israel.It's nothing but trouble and we should dump them altogether.
THGR:
And he didn’t bribe Qatar, they bribed him. Why did he crack down on Israel? They bombed his business partners, Qatar.
Quote:The institution that counts is the Constitution. Everything else is a growth on that fundamental document, and not necessarily a good one.
THGR: I see no references in your posts expressing how he is acting like a dictator and destroying American institutions. Which shows your ignorance and biases regarding all matters, here and abroad. Isn’t that right comrade?
Quote:
You are on board with the Alex Krainer's of the world. He likes dictators like Putin and believes Putin being a strong man benefits the masses. You think the same. Which is why you always come off as a Russian troll who never gets, how and why America is what it is and the promise only it offers. And, it's why you are all in for tearing it down.
Alex said something interesting. He grew up in Communist Croatia, but came here as a foreign exchange student when he was 17. When he got here, everyone said "So aren't you happy living in a free country?“ or words to that effect. And what he said was that people ASSUMED we were free with only one frame of reference, without anything for comparison. But he felt freer in Croatia.
An additional point that Glenn made was something along the lines of "virtue by identity" ... you ASSUME you're virtuous, or free, or civilized, or advanced, not because of what you do but bc of who you are (American, in this case).
Also, quotes from de Tocqueville about democracy.
It was an interesting conversation, which I'll try to find for you.
Quote:
Trump’s Qatar military deal is historic — for all the wrong reasons
For a while Saudi Arabia and Qatar were competing to see who could find their preferred faction of head chopping jihadi extremists who were, strangely, our proxies in our "wars“ against Assad and Qaddafi and Putin.
Now that Assad and Qaddafi are out of the way, are they done with the head chopping stuff?
We've been buying their oil and gas for decades. I can understand that. But we really REALLY should be more careful who we partner with! So, no, I'm not a big fan of buddying up with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the "mujahideen", and our many other unsavory proxies.
Quote:I've posted MANY times about that, stupid. Something's wrong with you.
You never speak of any of this because your agenda is Anti-American comrade.
Quote:
Trump is a Putin ally.
One of us is confused. I thought he was a Qatari ally!
Quote:
blah blah blah ...
Just consider this a friendly gesture ...
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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What Won’t Congress Let Trump Get Away With?
The president’s Caribbean boat strikes are setting a dangerous new precedent.
By Conor Friedersdorf | October 17, 2025, 9:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/boat-strikes-trump-v
enezuela/684583/
On President Donald Trump’s orders, the U.S. military last month began carrying out a series of strikes in the Caribbean, blowing up boats suspected of moving drugs and killing a total of at least 27 people so far. (Multiple news outlets reported that a strike yesterday was believed to be the first one to leave survivors.) Although Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists,” his administration has not provided good evidence to support that characterization. Even pundits who defended extrajudicial killings during the War on Terror years—including Lawfare’s Ben Wittes, National Review’s Andy McCarthy, and John Yoo, the author of the so-called torture memos—have deemed these strikes illegal or legally suspect.
Yet the American people don’t seem particularly concerned. A recent Harris survey found that 71 percent of registered voters support “destroying boats bringing drugs into the United States,” and the strikes have prompted little public outcry. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama meted out death without due process even outside the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inuring Americans to the practice. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the Obama administration carried out 563 strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing 384 to 807 civilians, in addition to militants. If, as Trump repeatedly asserts, “narcoterrorists” from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua pose a threat to national security, simply killing them without due process might seem to many casual observers like continuity. This is what the United States did to men like Ayman al-Zawahiri. Why not do it to men like Pablo Escobar?
That thinking is dangerous. To kill needlessly, when you could easily detain and prosecute, is morally wrong. Ongoing lethal strikes will inflict carnage on innocents. It will also sow hatred of the United States in our hemisphere as surely as War on Terror drone strikes did in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And if Americans become desensitized to these killings as a routine tactic in the War on Drugs, the threat to civil liberties at home and abroad is profound. Drug trafficking is endemic, and will always be endemic, in free societies. Every plane in the sky, every boat in the ocean, and every truck on the highway could plausibly be smuggling drugs on behalf of a dangerous cartel. If the president is permitted to blow up modes of transport on his suspicion of drug running alone, and without having to provide proof even after the fact about the identity of the people he killed, the War on Drugs will have rendered the Bill of Rights void. No one will be safe from a president’s dictatorial power to kill without evidence, arrest, or trial.
Trump is almost certainly misleading the public about whom he is killing. There has been no definitive accounting of the identity or even the nationality of the people who have been struck. (“Evidence suggests that the last boat bombed was Colombian with Colombian citizens,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro posted on social media last week.) But drug boats are most often driven by impoverished fishermen, not dangerous drug kingpins, three Ohio State University professors found in a May 2025 analysis of federal punishments handed out to the hundreds of people arrested each year for transporting drugs by boat. A typical crew might include a fisherman recruited for knowledge of the ocean, a mechanic, and an unskilled laborer, and only rarely are they armed. Many are motivated by “economic desperation,” the professors write, or describe “being forced to join smuggling crews” under threat. Trump wants the public to believe that his lethal new tactic will eliminate dangerous knights in a geopolitical chess game against drug cartels. But the tactic is likelier to kill
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
THGR:
It seems to me you can’t either. First, he could end Russian aggression in a week.
If Trump could, then so could Biden*.
So why didn't Biden*?
I bet you never answer that question!
----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Won’t Congress Let Reagan/ Clinton/ Bush/ Obama Get Away With?
The president’s strikes are setting a dangerous new precedent.
By Conor Friedersdorf | October 17, 2025, 9:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/boat-strikes-trump-v
enezuela/684583/
Regime changes, attempted and/or completed, in my lifetime alone:
Cuba
Guatemala
Congo
Indonesia
Grenada
Nicaragua
Chile
Yugoslavia
Panama
Afghanistan
Iraq
Libya
Syria
Georgia
Ukraine
I'm sure I missed a few. Ironically, this is under the "winds of change" title when, in fact, it's just more of the same. I was hoping for something different.
Quote:
And if Trump is, in fact, pursuing regime change in Venezuela, he is doing it in a way that subverts the Constitution, which vests Congress with the power to declare war, even when a foreign regime is as appalling and abusive as the one that holds power in Venezuela. The precedent that Trump is setting threatens the rule of law and everyone’s rights.
The precedent that TRUMP is setting???
Congress has been either MIA or actively supporting our regime changes abroad since at least 1900. No wonder Congress has such a low approval rating.
But .... why are you making a big issue of it NOW??? Just because, yanno, TRUMP?
Jeez, SECOND. The people you quote are dumber than rocks. And you are too, since you quote them so often!
For the record, I'm against ANY of our regime changes/ foreign interference abroad, whether by Trump or any Republican, or Biden* or any Democrat.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:You are for regime change if Putin does it.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
For the record, I'm against ANY of our regime changes/ foreign interference abroad, whether by Trump or any Republican, or Biden* or any Democrat.
. . . And once the meeting was over, the stories came out about just how destructive it had been. First, Trump went public to say no new weapons for Ukraine, instead it was time for Ukraine to sacrifice its own territory to appease Putin.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was very interesting, and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL! Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide! No more shooting, no more Death, no more vast and unsustainable sums of money spent. This is a War that would have never started if I were President. Thousands of people being slaughtered each and every week — NO MORE, GO HOME TO YOUR FAMILIES IN PEACE!
Oct 17, 2025, 9:46 PM
So the official position of the US is now “blood makes borders”. Good to know.
For the Ukrainians this was terribly deflating. Indeed, the more the details came out about the meeting and Trump’s earlier phone calls with Putin, the more terrible it seemed. One report was that far from saying he would be happy with the line freezing where it is, Putin actually asked for the cessation of more Ukrainian territory before he would agree to a deal. Amazingly, it seems that people around Trump immediately started amplifying Kremlin demands, using Russian talking points. Other stories said that the meeting with Trump and Zelensky became emotional, as Trump dropped the hammer on the Ukrainians.
And at the end—people are still speculating whether in the end Trump might send Ukraine Tomahawks. Please end this charade now.
No More, Please!
I bet in about three months, the media and analytical community will go on a breathless splurge, speculating about whether Trump might actually give Ukraine nuclear weapons. They will report about how frustrated Trump is with Putin for not ending the war, how this time its different, and how Trump is poised to make Russia pay by giving Ukraine nuclear weapons. Seriously, we will be told, even though Trump has made such threats countless times before and never followed through, this time it will be different.
Of course its not and he won’t.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-155-no-more-plea
se
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “ detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at Brown people?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-finally-say-the-qu
iet-part-out-loud-literally-opinion/ar-AA1OIloA
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 are for regime change if Putin does it.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
For the record, I'm against ANY of our regime changes/ foreign interference abroad, whether by Trump or any Republican, or Biden* or any Democrat.
Don't tell us that you forgot "Fuck the EU" Nuland picking out Ukraine's new regime after we toppled the old one?
So, that's one regime change.
You were all for that.
Then we armed our new regime and set it against Russia to "decolonize" it and take its resources.
ANOTHER regime change you were all for.
I should have included Russia in my list of attempted and/or successful regime changes. Thanks for the reminder!
PS: Your pearl-clutching faux outrage is pathetic. As is your faux hysteria about deporting "brown people".
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.
It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.
THGR:
It seems to me you can’t either. First, he could end Russian aggression in a week.
If Trump could, then so could Biden*.
So why didn't Biden*?
I bet you never answer that question!
Check.
Quote:You are for regime change if Putin does it.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
For the record, I'm against ANY of our regime changes/ foreign interference abroad, whether by Trump or any Republican, or Biden* or any Democrat.
Don't tell us that you forgot "Fuck the EU" Nuland picking out Ukraine's new regime after we toppled the old one?
So, that's one regime change.
You were all for that.
Then we armed our new regime and set it against Russia to "decolonize" it and take its resources.
ANOTHER regime change you were all for.
Checkmate.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Trump threw maps, cursed at Zelenskyy while demanding Ukraine cede Donbas to Russia
Trump’s repetition of Putin’s rhetoric during the meeting dampened hopes that he could be persuaded to support Kyiv.
US President Donald Trump reportedly pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept Russian demands for territorial concessions during a “volatile” meeting at the White House on Friday, warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin could “destroy” Ukraine if no agreement is reached, according to the Financial Times.
Ukraine has repeatedly rejected Russian demands to cede territory, including Donbas, warning that any concessions would be temporary since Russia has consistently said it wants to control all of Ukraine. The White House meeting underscored the gap between Trump’s willingness to entertain Moscow’s proposals and Kyiv’s focus on defending sovereignty and maintaining territorial integrity.
People familiar with the meeting told the Financial Times that the encounter repeatedly escalated into shouting.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/19/trump-urged-zelenskyy-to-accept
-russian-terms-in-tense-white-house-meeting/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oct 20, 2025 5:45 AM
Although the 7th Circuit gave “substantial deference” to the commander in chief’s views, it found no credible evidence to support his claim that Chicago is in rebellion.
The appellate panel wouldn’t accept that acts of protest and civil disobedience happening on the streets are a “rebellion” just because the president keeps yelling “rebellion.”
The panel ruled that there’s no rebellion, insurrection, or mass chaos on the ground. Thus, there is no legal justification for Trump to send the National Guard into the streets of Chicago.
Quote:
We emphasize that the critical analysis of a “rebellion” centers on the nature of the resistance to governmental authority. Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/supreme-court-arrogance-pr
oblem-for-trump.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Q: What do you have to say to farmers who feel that the deal is benefiting Argentina more than it is them?
TRUMP: Look, Argentina is fighting for its life, young lady. You don't know anything about it. You understand what that means? They are dying.
QUICK TO ANGER Trump Lashes Out Over Question About Bailing Out His Buddy
The U.S. is pumping billions into Argentina as China shifts its focus to South America for food.
By Ewan Palmer | Oct. 20 2025 6:22AM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-lashes-out-over-question-ab
out-bailing-out-his-buddy-javier-milei/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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MAGA’s spin on No Kings Day 2 was both insane and revealing
Donald Trump has not yet consolidated anything like absolute political power. But parts of our society — the Republican Party and supposedly independent institutions like CBS — are in effect living inside a bubble in which they operate as if he has. Within that bubble, a cult of personality around Trump has been built, a cult of personality worthy of Kim Jong Un. And to show their fealty to Dear Leader, Republicans must engage in bizarre rhetoric.
What are we to make of the completely unhinged things Republicans were saying in advance of the protests?
CNN has a good rundown of the craziness coming from leading Republicans in advance of No Kings Day 2. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, called them “hate America rallies” consisting entirely of the “pro-Hamas wing” and antifa. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary — remember when people thought he was the adult in the room? — said that the demonstrations would involve “the most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attacked the whole Democratic base: “The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
These claims were all self-evidently absurd. So why make them? CNN says that it was a “weird strategy”: Calling grandmothers Hamas terrorists won’t convince anyone who isn’t already deep in the MAGA tank and will backfire as those not in the tank see the disconnect between this rhetoric and the reality of the protests.
But it all makes sense once you realize that what we have been seeing in operation isn’t the Trump administration’s strategy for dealing with its critics. It is, instead, the strategies of individual MAGA apparatchiks for dealing with He Who Must Be Obeyed.
Political scientist Xavier Marquez noted that autocracies that cultivate a cult of personality around their leader are prone to “flattery inflation.” Marquez’s examples go all the way back to the Emperor Caligula, but the logic has remained the same over the centuries.
Here’s how it works. The ruler’s lackeys and courtiers believe that they must praise him to the skies, proving their loyalty by offering paeans to his wisdom, character, and golf game. And they must continually up the ante.
How do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader. Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.
A similar process of self-reinforcement applies to telling lies that serve the autocrat’s ego. Call it “mendacity inflation.” Trump insists that he’s overwhelmingly popular and that only a lunatic fringe disapproves of his presidency. Well, to show loyalty his hangers-on must go further, declaring that grandmothers and parents pushing prams down 7th Avenue are illegal aliens and violent criminals. The humiliating absurdity is a feature, not a bug. Simply lying about demonstrators isn’t enough; to prove their MAGA mettle, people in Trump’s orbit must tell lies that are grotesque and ridiculous.
Again, what’s historically odd about this is that while Trump’s personal depravity may match that of historical autocrats, his power doesn’t. Call him Caligula, if you like, but he can’t order Senators — even Republican Senators — to commit suicide. (Dear historians: yes, I know that many of the stories told about Caligula were probably exaggerated.) He’s only able to act as if he has absolute power within a limited enclave, a bubble created by greed and fear.
Does it matter whether people are out there marching and carrying signs, even if they number in the millions? Well, there is a solid body of research by political scientists like Erica Chenoweth about the effects of
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Epstein connection disqualifies Prince Andrew from royal titles, but qualifies him for the US Presidency
Prince Andrew's six-year downfall over Jeffrey Epstein ties comes to a dramatic conclusion
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/prince-andrew-six-year-do
wnfall-jeffrey-epstein-ties-rcna238322
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Risks of Trump's Capture of the Economy
By Evan Hughes | October 20, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/10/the-risks-of-trumps-capture-
of-the-economy/684610/
In his new book about the stock-market crash of 1929, the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin recounts a scene from a summer day that year in Manhattan. The dining room of the Plaza Hotel came to attention, he writes, when top figures from Wall Street and the business world trickled in for Saturday lunch. The presence of such a crowd might not have created a stir at another historical moment, but these were not typical times. The nation was infatuated with the market, which was showering wealth on investors big and small.
Several of these boldface names, including the esteemed leaders of big banks, had a history of joining forces in market-manipulation schemes that were not a well-kept secret. Together, major players would form a pool and bid up a stock through “wash trades” with one another, creating the appearance of high demand, before they all sold, cratering the price and devastating the dupes who had followed their lead.
One might think that some of these men would have faced consequences, or at least lived in fear of exposure, even though their conduct was technically legal at the time. But they were well connected. One of them, John J. Raskob, was the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a prominent political donor; his biggest beneficiary, the former New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith, was dining with him that day. Another, William Durant, had secretly met with President Herbert Hoover earlier in the year, to lean on him to stop the Federal Reserve Board from curbing Wall Street’s excesses.
In his book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation, Sorkin refers to “remarkable parallels” between the run-up to that crisis and today’s political and economic climate, but he doesn’t elaborate on the notion; his account is essentially a straight history, written in a journalistic register. Yet some revealing parallels do emerge from beneath the surface, and they don’t reflect well on our current path. In addition to the greed and “this time is different” hubris that precedes every stock-market tumble, the 1929 collapse was powered, it seems to me, by a more insidious and pervasive force that is in fact everywhere in evidence today.
The 1920s were, as Sorkin shows, an era in which Wall Street largely got its way and Washington kept its hands off, a precursor to President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. More interesting to examine, in light of the present day, is how the environment became so perilously friendly to Wall Street in the ’20s—and how it stayed that way even as red flags began to appear. The key element, I would argue, was the phenomenon known in regulatory circles as “capture”: Wall Street and Big Business managed to co-opt the other centers of power in society. Those with clout in various spheres coalesced into one clubby circle, and fell prey to a groupthink that foresaw riches for everyone, without consequences. The regulatory bodies, the political and judicial apparatus, the press—nearly all of the mechanisms of correction in our system were either enfeebled or so aligned with the bullish and wealthy that it didn’t occur to them to use what muscle they still had.
Some critics did raise alarms, most notably Senator Carter Glass, but the banking elite and their well-placed friends could safely ignore the skeptics, who would get swept away by the prevailing current. (Only after everything fell apart was the senator able to rein in banks with the Glass-Steagall Act.)
Financiers organized press offensives and enlisted top reporters as allies, offering lucrative jobs or outright bribes. Private-sector titans took on quasi-governmental roles—for instance, advising the president and negotiating deals with other nations—or they became actual federal officials. The investor and industrialist Andrew Mellon enjoyed a lengthy tenure as Tr
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--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
Federal Appeals Court Allows Trump's National Guard Deployment in Oregon
Monday, Oct 20, 2025 - 01:40 PM
A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump can send National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon while a lawsuit against the action works its way through lower courts.
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit voted 2-1 to stay an Oct. 4 order by US District Judge Karin J. Immergut of Oregon - who blocked Trump's move to deploy members of the Oregon National Guard to the city.
"Defendants [Trump] are likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal, and ... other stay factors weigh in their favor. We grant Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal," wrote the panel - which consists of Circuit Judges Ryan Nelson, Bridget Bade, and Susan Graber, who heard oral arguments in San Francisco on Oct. 9.
Because if you have Federal officers enforcing Federal laws being attacked, and local PD refuses to stand on the side of the law ...
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Defendants [Trump] are likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal,
This is the end result of ALL of the court cases against Trump.
It's what I keep telling Ted.
His party is run by a bunch of fucking idiots and their time is up.
Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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George Santos is the perfect avatar of Trump's America
Perhaps the president was moved by Santos’ complaints, including some about solitary confinement. Or perhaps he simply fell for Santos’ flattery.
Santos’ loyalty seems to have helped secure his freedom less than three months into a seven-plus year sentence following the president’s commutation on Friday night. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, a small portion of the misdeeds he has been accused of by former friends, colleagues, and enemies.
Explaining his decision, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Santos “has been horribly mistreated” and also “had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” That first part is a stretch, given Santos’ own guilty plea. But it’s hard to argue with Santos’ loyalty.
In an open letter penned from prison and published just a few days before the commutation, the 37-year-old Santos made his commitment to the president explicit. “During my short tenure in Congress, I stood firmly behind your agenda,” Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”
Much more at https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/george-santos-free-man-ava
tar-trump-presidency-rcna238762
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 Has Lost Touch With Reality
And it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?
By Paul Krugman | Oct 21, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-has-lost-touch-with
The other day I learned a new term: “AI sycophancy,” also sometimes called “chatbot sycophancy.”
I already knew about the phenomenon, having read stories about how Large Language Models flatter their users, telling them what they want to hear, assuring them that they’re always right. This self-reinforcement hooks into psychological vulnerabilities, potentially leading users to believe in their own brilliance, while shortcutting attempts by other human beings to insert some reality sense. A growing body of research shows that the use of generative AI – like social media but worse – is often damaging to users’ mental health. In the worst cases chatbot sycophancy has led to self-harm – even, allegedly, suicide.
But the way chatbots play with your mind isn’t new. Sycophancy has been sending people into delusional spirals and destructive behavior for millennia. In the past, however, sycophancy was reserved for the rich and powerful. AI’s innovation is to democratize the experience.
Being surrounded by actual human sycophants will inevitably happen if you are rich and powerful, unless you have the strength of character to avoid it. But, alas, we have as our president Donald Trump, who is a glutton for sycophancy. Moreover, he’s not alone: the tech-bro oligarchs – in particular, Musk, Andreesen, Zuckerberg, Ellison and Thiel – inhabit their own sycophancy bubbles, while also slavishly supporting Trump. Just read an excerpt from Jacob Silverman’s new, and highly recommended book, to understand the dynamic.
But while the tech bros can certainly make many people’s lives miserable, it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).
On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:
The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.
Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry. A Credible sources say that Pam Bondi was reluctant to charge former FBI director James Comey given the flimsiness of the case. However, Trump made clear that this was non-negotiable — it was Comey or her. So Bondi saw to it that Comey was duly charged.
Another very recent example of Trump’s disconnect from reality was the temper tantrum he reportedly threw when meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warning among other things that Putin “will destroy you” if he wants.
In reality, Putin has spent 3 years and 8 months trying as hard as he can to destroy Ukraine, without success. Dig a little deeper and you learn that Russia’s latest big offensive has been a bloody debacle: hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives lost without any significant strategic gains. You have to be seriously delusional to imagine that if Putin gets really, really angry he will suddenly develop the ability to blast through the “kill zone,” the deadly kilometers-wide no man’s land created by drones, precision artillery and mines that keeps bringing Russian offensives to grief.
But again, who’s going to brief Trump about his beloved Putin’s failures?
There are many, many more examples of Trump’s delusi
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Trump Fell Short on a Splashy Campaign Promise.
Trump’s IVF Move Is Kind of a Dud—and It Speaks Volumes About His Politics
By Jill Filipovic | Oct 21, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-ivf-abortion-reprodu
ctive-rights-natalism.html
One of Donald Trump’s splashier campaign promises was that he would make in vitro fertilization free for all Americans. “Under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” the president said. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”
After issuing a toothless executive order pledging to do something about IVF but not actually doing anything about IVF, the president has finally rolled out his plan. And despite much fanfare, the Trump IVF plan is a bit of a dud. It’s not nothing—it will modestly reduce IVF costs for some families—but it’s unlikely to meaningfully change the “Do we or don’t we” calculus for most people, and it’s nowhere near his “free” promise. It’s not even clear that the proposal will make much of a dent in costs for the families it does help. And it seems virtually guaranteed that the tiny IVF benefit on offer will not, as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV personality Mehmet Oz said, create “a lot of Trump babies.”
The first prong of the Trump IVF initiative isn’t a policy at all; it’s more or less the administration’s request that companies offer IVF benefits, just as some might provide dental plans to their employees. There is no mandate that companies offer IVF coverage. There is no penalty if they don’t. There are no government subsidies to offset the costs. There’s just the president saying, “Hey, guys, you should do this,” with a promise of a how-to to come.
The second is a bit more substantial but still small: an agreement with a single pharmaceutical company to decrease the cost of a single IVF drug, Gonal-F. The discounted drug will be sold through the Trump-branded https://trumprx.gov/ . The name itself is an abuse of Trump’s position, but at this point the public and press alike seem to have stopped caring.
“We’ll dramatically slash the cost of IVF and the treatment and many of the most common fertility drugs for countless millions of Americans,” Trump announced last week. “Prices are going way down, way, way down.” To be fair, “way, way down” is a matter of opinion. According to an estimate by Oz’s agency, patients pursuing IVF could save as much as $2,200 per cycle with the discounted drug. And although $2,200 is a significant amount, consider that a single cycle of IVF averages $15,000 to 20,000 and can cost as much as $30,000. Also, the estimated savings is as much as $2,200—meaning it will likely be far less for most people. When we’re talking about four-figure sums, $2,200 helps, but that number likely won’t make or break a person’s ability to undergo fertility treatments. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, and when you’re paying for exorbitantly expensive medical procedures, you’ll take any discount you can get. But a good start and a nice benefit is not the same as a life-changing policy that will lead to “many more beautiful American children,” as Trump pledged.
The IVF policy may not be groundbreaking, but it is perfectly Trumpian: a lot of big talk and bravado, without much in the way of substance behind it. The president and his administration are boasting that this benefit will fuel a Trump baby boom, but there’s no evidence that a single $2,200 drug is all that’s standing in the way of a fertility rate spike. With the IVF price tag being what it is, it’s frankly hard to imagine that this benefit will make the difference between getting IVF or skipping it for more than a tiny number of families, if any at all.
But as with so much of what Trump does, the result isn’t the point; the performance is. The presiden
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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The Trump administration, perhaps in acknowledgment of the potential backlash of leaving more than 70 million Social Security recipients in limbo, announced the BLS team will return to produce its report on Friday, Oct. 24, so that the 2026 cost-of-living increase can be announced the same day.
The administration’s initial attempt to use the shutdown to end reporting on the rate of inflation is just one example of how in President Donald Trump’s America, information that has been relied on for decades to make critical economic, scientific, environmental, public safety and health-related decisions has been disappearing — scrubbed from government websites or no longer collected because it doesn’t conform to the administration’s views.
It’s reminiscent of “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian novel in which the fictitious Ministry of Truth altered historical records and discarded unwelcome data by disposing of it in “memory holes” where it was wiped out of existence. And in the novel, when individuals fell out of favor, they were made into “unpersons.”
In what can be seen as an uncanny real-world parallel, in 2025, government officials who have provided information contrary to the president’s perception of reality have been fired. This includes the head of the BLS, who provided unwanted employment data on a slowdown in the labor market, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose preliminary report about the limited impact of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites contradicted Trump’s more grandiose claims.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna238444
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Trumptards are confused and misunderstand the simplest concepts. I have dealt with Trumptards all my life, and not even one of them has good sense. Neither do you, 6ix. Here is a long story about Trump's handpicked lawyer, who is a complete nincompoop, just like you are, 6ixStringJack. Being highly articulate does NOT mean a Trumptard is smart.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
This particular Trumptard-lawyer does NOT understand the concept of speaking off-the-record, nor does the Trumptard know what the limitations are on revealing grand jury testimony or who those limits apply to. The Trumptards are completely confused about the simplest things in the world:
“Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.”
My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.
By Anna Bower | Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here
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:Trumptards
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Trump is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to pay him $230 million. When asked about it during an Oval Office event on Oct. 21, he remarked on the extraordinary nature of the president potentially overseeing a huge payout for himself from the government he runs.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
"You know that decision would have to go across my desk," Trump said. "And it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself."
Why not make it $230 billion instead of only $230 million? Trump is the President, so why not?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-doj-pay-230-million-previous-investiga
tions-sources/story?id=126731700
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
Unless you wanted to read the part out loud to the class that said:
Quote:
"It's interesting, because I'm the one that makes a decision, right?" Trump said. "And you know that decision would have to go across my desk, and it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity."
I think it's kind of funny that the figure is $230 Million.
That's almost exactly how much Nancy Pelosi and her husband scammed with insider trading since she got into politics.
It would be funny to know that she's watching Trump scam $230 Million from the US Government in a single afternoon when it took her an entire life to scam that much money... and then to see her face when he gives it all to Toys 4 Tots or some shit. To Nancy, that would be no different than if Trump lit the $230 Million on fire right in front of her.
Ahhhhh... to be a fly on the wall in the Pelosi Household.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"? Like, charitably make the Trump ballroom attached to the White House bigger because space for only 999 guests is too small? Like, charitably make the Arc de Trump in DC 100 feet taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris?
Trump makes a claim: Somebody said, 'You're the third best president behind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.' And I got extremely angry, hey, they didn't put out eight wars.
President Donald Trump couldn’t help but favorably compare himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a rambling speech in the Rose Garden on Tuesday.
“Hey, they didn’t put out eight wars, nine coming,” he said. “We put out eight wars, and the ninth is coming, believe it or not.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-says-hes-got-abraham-lincol
n-and-george-washington-beat-as-president/
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:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?
Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.
This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.
Now he happens to be President.
It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.
In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.
But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
John Brennan Hit With Criminal Referral Over Steele Dossier Lies
Tuesday, Oct 21, 2025 - 02:59 PM
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Tuesday referred former CIA director John Brennan to the Justice Department for prosecution, alleging that Brennan made false statements to Congress about how the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference handled material from the so-called Steele dossier.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:In an alternate universe, Trump does not receive $billions in bribes for Presidential favors: Forbes reported a net worth of $7.3 billion for Trump as of its September 2025 update. This marks a $3 billion increase over the past year, primarily fueled by cryptocurrency and real estate licensing ventures.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?
Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.
This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.
Now he happens to be President.
It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.
In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.
But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/presidency-boosts
-trumps-net-worth-by-3-billion-in-a-year/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing the wave of legislation. The effort would strip away protections that have been built over a century.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/anti-science-bills-hit-statehouses
-attacking-longstanding-public-health-protections
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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So are we in what Phil Gramm — remember him? — once called a “mental recession,” a sort of mass delusion that the economy is bad? It’s likely that some of Americans’ sour mood is driven by political unease. Huge and ever-changing tariffs, masked agents grabbing people off the street, assassinations, vindictive prosecutions, rising measles cases, Trump’s false claims that cities are “war zones” as pretext for sending in the National Guard, and more. Increasingly unhinged statements from the administration feed a general sense of destructive instability. Next thing you know they’ll start demolishing the White House itself to make room for some vanity project. Oh, wait.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-us-economy-is-in-worse-shape
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:In an alternate universe, Trump does not receive $billions in bribes for Presidential favors: Forbes reported a net worth of $7.3 billion for Trump as of its September 2025 update. This marks a $3 billion increase over the past year, primarily fueled by cryptocurrency and real estate licensing ventures.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?
Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.
This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.
Now he happens to be President.
It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.
In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.
But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/presidency-boosts
-trumps-net-worth-by-3-billion-in-a-year/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Shut up, faggot.
Get a hobby.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So are we in what Phil Gramm — remember him? — once called a “mental recession,” a sort of mass delusion that the economy is bad? It’s likely that some of Americans’ sour mood is driven by political unease. Huge and ever-changing tariffs, masked agents grabbing people off the street, assassinations, vindictive prosecutions, rising measles cases, Trump’s false claims that cities are “war zones” as pretext for sending in the National Guard, and more. Increasingly unhinged statements from the administration feed a general sense of destructive instability. Next thing you know they’ll start demolishing the White House itself to make room for some vanity project. Oh, wait.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-us-economy-is-in-worse-shape
Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Why are you unemployed, 6ix? Because you are erratic. Trump’s wildly erratic policies are creating huge uncertainty which is deterring many companies – essentially those that are not in the AI sector or a sector catering to the affluent – from making investments. And those forgone investments include hiring new workers. The result is that much of the economy is frozen — companies aren’t hiring or investing. This freeze, in turn, explains both worker anxiety and rising inequality. Without the AI boom/bubble spending, we might very well have fallen into a recession, as some economists like Mark Zandi have claimed. And despite the AI boom, times for many workers are tough.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Orwellian Idea That Prompted a Whole Movie
By Shirley Li | October 21, 2025, 12:50 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/10/george-orwell-1984-documen
tary-raoul-peck/684637/
George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984 in the late 1940s on the desolate Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Tuberculosis ravaged his body, and typing thousands of words a day only weakened him further. His skin flaked off. Blisters burst across his throat. Feverish and emaciated, he endured painful procedures to support his failing lungs, but the treatments were too late. Eventually, in 1950, Orwell succumbed to the disease.
Close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria fill the screen in the opening minutes of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5—images as bold and unnerving as what follows. Directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, the film examines an idea popularized by 1984: that blatant falsehoods can, through propaganda, be accepted as truth. That conceit, along with Orwell’s state of mind during his final months, has been scrutinized for decades—by high-school students, biographers, and other documentarians. But Peck builds out a bigger argument, using material provided by the Orwell estate—including the writer’s letters, essays, and diary entries—to trace the authoritarian tactics that can suppress truth and lay out what he sees as a disturbing pattern: one of wide-scale complacency in the decades after Orwell’s death. Generations of readers have recognized the prescient warnings of 1984. Yet according to Peck’s film, recognizing that reality can resemble Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece has led to numbness, rather than meaningful change.
The tuberculosis-bacteria motif underscores this idea. To compare authoritarianism’s rise to an infection is perhaps obvious. But as the microbes spread across the screen, the visual becomes almost hypnotic—and, as Peck recently told me, akin to how dictators overwhelm people’s abilities to determine fact from fiction. “It’s the same story again and again,” he said, “and we don’t learn.”
Peck grew up under multiple authoritarian regimes. At 8 years old, he and his family fled Haiti after François Duvalier, the dictator known as Papa Doc, began his rule. Around the same time that his family moved to the Republic of the Congo, that country’s first democratically elected prime minister was assassinated; the following coup placed the despot Mobutu Sese Seko in power. To Peck, Papa Doc and Mobutu followed the same playbook: “They attack intelligence, they attack universities, they attack science, they attack the press,” he said. “They attack every institution that can be a bulwark against them.”
Those memories shaped Peck’s approach to Orwell: 2+2=5. A more traditional exploration of Orwell’s fiction might turn to interviews with scholars of his work to unpack his resonance. Peck instead explores the idea cinematically, as he did in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 deconstruction of James Baldwin’s work: He creates an impressionistic collage, featuring scenes derived mostly from Orwell’s writings—which are recited by the actor Damian Lewis—or from relevant archival footage.
The documentary, Peck said, is intended to convey his frustration that Orwell’s name has too often been flattened into an adjective, and 1984 into mere speculative fiction. In one scene from Orwell: 2+2=5, Apple’s well-known Super Bowl ad—in which a model hurls a sledgehammer at a Big Brother broadcast—plays on a giant billboard above a busy street as passersby completely ignore it. Perhaps in an effort to unflatten Orwell’s warnings, the film points out what it sees as contemporary parallels to Newspeak, the uncanny English used throughout 1984 to prevent the articulation of abstract concepts. (Rather than say something is “great,” Newspeak uses the word plusgood. A more insidious example would be calling any ideas that go against the ruling party “thoughtcrime.”) Peck argues that some world leaders have seemed to embrace the practice of twisting words: In one sequence, he displays a mo
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Why are you unemployed, 6ix? Because you are erratic. Trump’s wildly erratic policies are creating huge uncertainty which is deterring many companies – essentially those that are not in the AI sector or a sector catering to the affluent – from making investments. And those forgone investments include hiring new workers. The result is that much of the economy is frozen — companies aren’t hiring or investing. This freeze, in turn, explains both worker anxiety and rising inequality. Without the AI boom/bubble spending, we might very well have fallen into a recession, as some economists like Mark Zandi have claimed. And despite the AI boom, times for many workers are tough.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Trump is literally tearing down the White House. No Russian or European leader ever, ever, were sick enough to tear down any Historic building like this. Instead, they did everything in their power to protect those buildings.
We have protected Historic properties all across this nation for this very reason. Trump is sickening.
For years in these threads comrade signym had a signature that said America is ruled by oligarchs. She intended it as an insult against this country. Now with Trump that was never truer.
Where is signyms outrage? It turns out she's all in when it comes to oligarchs ruling the country. Not running the country, ruling the country. Isn't that right comrade.
T
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Shut up, faggot. Go to BlueSky and cry with your endangered species.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
https://coming42.livejournal.com/479179.html
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”
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:
“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
I'm sure it's for the same reason that some Americans hate Trump.
They're wackjob Liberal shitheels with no life, just like you.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
I'm sure it's for the same reason that some Americans hate Trump.
They're wackjob Liberal shitheels with no life, just like you.
The Administration has blown up seven vessels in the Caribbean in recent weeks, but the President has been pushing for more dramatic military action in Latin America since his first term.
By Jonathan Blitzer | October 21, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-
on-drug-boats
Late this summer, James Story, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela for three years of Donald Trump’s first term and for two of Joe Biden’s, felt that anything was possible in the relationship between Washington and Caracas. It had been six years since the U.S. closed its Embassy in Venezuela, to protest the rule of the Socialist authoritarian Nicolás Maduro. The issue of how to dislodge Maduro’s regime has been an American political conundrum for at least a decade. Trump had wanted to overthrow it but couldn’t figure out how; Biden tried to find compromise, in large part because of a steady exodus of Venezuelan migrants coming to the U.S. But Maduro remained in power, despite appearing to have lost elections handily last year. “If you had asked me two months ago,” Story said, “I would have said it’s equally likely that we reopen the Embassy and restore some kind of relation as it is that we would bomb them.”
Since September 2nd, the Trump Administration has attacked seven boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least thirty-two people, on the grounds that they were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the U.S. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” There were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has no record of seizing it in the Caribbean.
In late September, the White House sent a notification to Congress declaring that the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which the government has designated as “terrorist organizations.” Those it killed in international waters were deemed “unlawful combatants.” In an escalation of hostilities against Venezuela, the Department of Defense has recently moved some ten thousand troops into the region, mostly to former military bases in Puerto Rico. Eight American warships and a submarine are now in the Caribbean, and, according to the Times, the Trump Administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. Last week, Alvin Holsey, the admiral in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all military operations in Central and South America, abruptly resigned; the job is typically held for three years, but he had served for less than one.
Legal scholars and experts in the history of executive power have expressed alarm that Trump is acting well beyond the limits of national and international law. But, earlier this month, when Senate Democrats introduced a resolution to curb Trump’s ability to strike narco-traffickers without congressional approval, it failed on largely partisan lines. “This is basically U.S. propaganda through force,” a former senior national-security official who served in the first Trump White House told me. “This is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s using a ten-ton truck to kill an ant.”
Venezuela’s Socialist govern
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Over the last decade, the government spent $4 trillion on interest, and Peterson calculated that it will balloon to $14 trillion over the next 10 years.
If it seems like we are adding debt faster than ever, that’s because we are. The debt was $37 trillion just two months ago; now it is $38 trillion, and the pace we’re on is twice as fast as the rate of debt growth since 2000.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/as-national-debt-accelerates-to-3
8-trillion-watchdog-warns-it-s-no-way-for-a-great-nation-like-america-to-run-its-finances/ar-AA1OZxAp
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 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot. Go to BlueSky and cry with your endangered species.
Hey Gilligan, you're just a pussy who is hiding who and what you really are because you are a coward; simple. Others have to take the lead because you're all talk. You're afraid to even admit who you are. Afraid to even admit what you really believe.
Hey Jack, point to the pussy. Yup...
T
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You can bitch about that all you want and nobody from either side is going to do anything about it. You'll see posts from me back in 2006 about this issue.
Things that rise exponentially in the long-term seldom benefit anyone.
One of two things is going to happen in our lifetime.
1. Things will continue on as they always have, and my generation's grandchildren will be in shock and awe to see the first time American debt reaches $1 Quadrillion.
2. Somebody is going to call in that debt and we're all going to officially be somebody's slave.
Looks like the national debt was only $27 Billion when my grandfather was born. We'd already added another $800 Billion to that number when I was born, and only a few years later before I was in preschool we had hit $1 Trillion. I feel like an old man now when I say I remember the days when the national debt was only $27 Trillion.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Are you really unaware that the National Debt has kept increasing because Republicans, and a few fucked up Senators like John Fetterman (who wears shorts and a hoodie in the Capitol building), have kept lowering the tax collected year after year? It was only this summer that all the Republicans voted to once again lower the tax collected by another $4 trillion, with most of those trillions going to me and my kind.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can bitch about that all you want and nobody from either side is going to do anything about it. You'll see posts from me back in 2006 about this issue.
Things that rise exponentially in the long-term seldom benefit anyone.
One of two things is going to happen in our lifetime.
1. Things will continue on as they always have, and my generation's grandchildren will be in shock and awe to see the first time American debt reaches $1 Quadrillion.
2. Somebody is going to call in that debt and we're all going to officially be somebody's slave.
Looks like the national debt was only $27 Billion when my grandfather was born. We'd already added another $800 Billion to that number when I was born, and only a few years later before I was in preschool we had hit $1 Trillion. I feel like an old man now when I say I remember the days when the national debt was only $27 Trillion.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Do you remember George Bush? He gave out checks in 2001 because Bill Clinton stopped the endless deficit spending. The government had a budget surplus, which Bush immediately destroyed, arguing that the surplus resulted from "over-taxation". By the end of Bush's Presidency, he had started a couple of $ multi-trillion-dollar wars and increased the National Debt by cutting taxes.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had projected a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion over the following decade. It didn't take long for Bush to destroy that surplus!
End of presidency: By the time Bush left office in 2009, the national debt had nearly doubled, from $5.768 trillion to $10.626 trillion, and the CBO was projecting a deficit of over $1 trillion for 2009.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Argentina and Rural America’s Awakening
Suddenly, Trump’s contempt for his base is showing
By Paul Krugman | Oct 23, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/argentina-and-rural-americas-awaken
ing
. . . the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.
The truth is that rural America is even more dependent than urban America on the programs now on the chopping block. The nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group has mapped out where in America people depend for a large share of their income on government transfers: the counties where a lot of income comes from government programs, indicated in yellow, are overwhelmingly in rural areas, while the places where such aid plays a relatively small role (light blue) mainly correspond to major metropolitan areas:
https://eig.org/great-transfermation/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Don't Let Ordinary Laws Stop You From Doing Whatever You Want!
Make Personalized Legal Interpretations Disconnected From Mundane Reality!
US military kills five people in strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific
The latest strikes were off the coast of Colombia, while seven previous attacks in the Caribbean killed at least 32.
White House officials have tried to justify the increasing number of strikes with a dubious legal theory that claims the boats are affiliated with “designated terrorist organizations” with which the US was now in a “non-international armed conflict”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/22/military-boat-strike-p
acific-pete-hegseth
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You know what the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom and Casino needs? More floors above the ballroom. Rooms for guests to stay. And a penthouse suite for Trump so that he doesn't have to live in an old building with two stories and an attic. There is no view from a short and small White House, especially compared to the big, beautiful skyscraper being built next door.
No One Is Tearing Down the Trump Ballroom
By Noah Rothman | October 23, 2025 12:37 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-one-is-tearing-down-the-trump
-ballroom/
Because he is the President, Trump does not need to obey the rules on building heights for his Trump Ballroom and Casino.
Washington, D.C. has a building height limit of 130 feet on business streets and 90 feet on residential streets, with a unique rule that a building's height is often limited to the width of the street plus 20 feet. Exceptions include a portion of Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where buildings can be up to 160 feet tall, and corner lots, which are subject to the height of the wider street. The Height of Buildings Act, passed in 1910, has preserved the city's horizontal skyline by preventing the construction of skyscrapers.
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:Are you really unaware that the National Debt has kept increasing because Republicans
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can bitch about that all you want and nobody from either side is going to do anything about it. You'll see posts from me back in 2006 about this issue.
Things that rise exponentially in the long-term seldom benefit anyone.
One of two things is going to happen in our lifetime.
1. Things will continue on as they always have, and my generation's grandchildren will be in shock and awe to see the first time American debt reaches $1 Quadrillion.
2. Somebody is going to call in that debt and we're all going to officially be somebody's slave.
Looks like the national debt was only $27 Billion when my grandfather was born. We'd already added another $800 Billion to that number when I was born, and only a few years later before I was in preschool we had hit $1 Trillion. I feel like an old man now when I say I remember the days when the national debt was only $27 Trillion.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Shut the fuck up.
This has been a both parties fucking us problem for generations now.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Explain this away by blaming both sides: Today, a major criminal who made Trump richer is pardoned for criminal activity by Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.
This has been a both parties fucking us problem for generations now.
President Donald Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who created the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and served prison time for failing to stop criminals from using the platform to move money connected to child sex abuse, drug trafficking and terrorism.
The pardon caps a monthslong effort by Zhao, a billionaire commonly known as CZ in the crypto world and one of the biggest names in the industry. He and Binance have been key supporters of some of the Trump family’s crypto enterprises.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-pardons-binance-founder-changpeng
-154114256.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Explain this away by blaming both sides
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.
This has been a both parties fucking us problem for generations now.
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing. Trump is falsely claiming Canadians put lefty bullshit words into Reagan's mouth: “The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Trump says he’s ending trade talks with Canada over this TV ad
President Donald Trump said late Thursday that he was ending “all trade negotiations” with Canada because of a television ad opposing U.S. tariffs that he said misstated the facts and called “egregious behavior” aimed at influencing U.S. court decisions.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-canada-trade-tariffs-a0cfd202ef6f2205
2827b784be708fd6
Trump claims that Reagan never said the words, but Canada has the unedited speech to prove that Trump is a lying sack of shit.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Good for him.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Trump claims that Reagan never said the words, but Canada has the video of the unedited speech proving that Trump is a lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Good for him.
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 Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic
Tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand
By Paul Krugman | Oct 24, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-gilded-ballroom-and-the-fall
I assume that everyone reading this newsletter knows that Donald Trump is in the process of destroying a large part of the White House so he can construct a 90,000 square foot gold-encrusted ballroom. And this is being done without any historical or architectural review, treating a national treasure that belongs to the people as if it were his own personal property. In true Trumpian style, this act of vandalism is being paid for by large corporate donors — mostly tech and crypto companies — seeking to buy Trump’s favor.
But let me digress momentarily from the norm-breaking, the outrageous sense of entitlement, and the implicit corruption to talk about Trump’s execrable taste, as shown by the renderings of the inside of the ballroom. Yes, taste.
Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?
Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?
But these aren’t separate issues, because tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.
I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-style-dictator-a
utocrats-design-214877/
York was shown photos of a New York apartment, at first not knowing who owned it. His reaction:
I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold …
The apartment was, of course, Donald Trump’s. The purpose of all this excess wasn’t personal pleasure: dictators’ palaces generally look very uncomfortable. Instead, it was to project a kind of power that bypasses all the boring checks and balances of collaboration and mutual responsibility and first-among-equals. It is about a single dominant personality.
So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?
This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is gen
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Quote:Trump claims that Reagan never said the words, but Canada has the video of the unedited speech proving that Trump is a lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Good for him.
I don't know what you're even talking about and I don't give a shit.
Nobody else does either, and a month from now you won't ever think about whatever it is that's got sand in your vagina today.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:You have not prospered in America for reasons you don't know. No surprise that you don't know why you are doing badly. Trumptards don't know much. Fatso Trump doesn't know much, either, which is why he has had endless troubles in court for decades. Trump can't even watch a one-minute commercial without getting confused about what it means:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't know what you're even talking about and I don't give a shit.
Nobody else does either, and a month from now you won't ever think about whatever it is that's got sand in your vagina today.
US President Donald Trump has said he will halt all trade negotiations with Canada immediately over an advert in which his predecessor Ronald Reagan says tariffs "hurt every American".
The ad, sponsored by Canada's province of Ontario and released last week, features excerpts of an address Reagan gave in 1987 focusing on foreign trade.
Trump called the advert "FAKE" while The Ronald Reagan Foundation said it "misrepresents" the former president's address.
Below is a comparison of the advert and the original address.
Here is what Trumptards can't comprehend in a one-minute commercial: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz1e201r8o
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 6ixStringJack:Quote:Trump claims that Reagan never said the words, but Canada has the video of the unedited speech proving that Trump is a lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Good for him.
I don't know what you're even talking about and I don't give a shit.
Then why don't you shut the fuck up?
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:Trump claims that Reagan never said the words, but Canada has the video of the unedited speech proving that Trump is a lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump did the same thing you are doing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. Go fuck yourself.
I don't even read your Lefty bullshit.
Good for him.
I don't know what you're even talking about and I don't give a shit.
Then why don't you shut the fuck up?
T
Because he keeps quoting me and replying with unrelated and irrelevant shit.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Nothing is relevant to Trumptards, not even Trump saying he can kill anybody, anywhere. The United States is not outside Trump's kill zone.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Because he keeps quoting me and replying with unrelated and irrelevant shit.
At a White House event on Thursday, October 23, 2025, President Donald Trump stated that he would not seek a declaration of war from Congress to conduct military strikes against drug cartels. He told reporters, "I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be, like, dead".
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-directs-pete-
hegseth-inform-congress-targeting-drug-traffickers-rcna239461
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:Nothing is relevant to Trumptards, not even Trump saying he can kill anybody, anywhere. The United States is not outside Trump's kill zone.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Because he keeps quoting me and replying with unrelated and irrelevant shit.
At a White House event on Thursday, October 23, 2025, President Donald Trump stated that he would not seek a declaration of war from Congress to conduct military strikes against drug cartels. He told reporters, "I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be, like, dead".
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-directs-pete-
hegseth-inform-congress-targeting-drug-traffickers-rcna239461
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I don't see a problem with this at all.
You'd think after 7 boats got vaporized that they'd stop trying to pull the same bullshit.
Venezuelan gang members must be stupid like you and Ted.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:In all American history, drug dealers have been arrested, never executed before arrest, until Trump gave orders to execute everyone. But that is too subtle for you to understand.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't see a problem with this at all.
You'd think after 7 boats got vaporized that they'd stop trying to pull the same bullshit.
Venezuelan gang members must be stupid like you and Ted.
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 $230 Million DOJ Shakedown Has One Absurd Twist
Trump filed claims insisting that he deserved this taxpayer-funded windfall because he’d been "persecuted" by various federal investigations.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | Oct 24, 2025 2:50 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-doj-shakedown-230-mi
llion-dollars-explained.html
President Donald Trump has profited off his second term to an unprecedented degree, making hundreds of millions of dollars through a variety of financial schemes, kickbacks, and shady business deals with his allies and acolytes. But he currently stands poised to cut out the middlemen and collect $230 million directly from his own government. Before returning to the White House, Trump filed claims insisting that he deserved this taxpayer-funded windfall because he’d been persecuted by various federal investigations, including the Russia probe, the Mar-a-Lago search, and the classified-documents prosecution. On Tuesday, he indicated that the government would hand him the money, while claiming (dubiously) that he’d donate it “to charity or something.”
On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern talked through Trump’s outrageous demand—and its surprising, ironic implications for many actual victims of his own administration’s legal abuses. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: Before we leap into the many layers of gross here, can you explain how it is that Trump thinks he is entitled to have the taxpayers fund this small fortune for him?
Mark Joseph Stern: Trump has filed a claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which—in theory—allows victims of certain official misconduct to collect damages from the government. Not directly from the individual who violated their rights, but essentially as a government payout. Trump is arguing that these investigations were, in fact, violations of his rights, specifically under Florida law. He alleges that his rights against “intrusion upon seclusion” and “malicious prosecution” were violated, which is pretty rich. So he is demanding, cumulatively, almost a quarter of a billion dollars in payouts—from his own Justice Department.
The reason he’s able to do so is that under the FTCA, you don’t go straight to court; you have to file an administrative claim first, and the government gets the first crack at either paying it out or saying no. Most of the time, it says no. But right now, the people in charge of deciding whether to pay Trump’s complaint are Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his hush money trial, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents prosecution. So the guys who will decide whether Trump gets this quarter of a billion dollars are the guys who were appointed because of their loyalty to Trump and for their legal defense of him and his co-defendants during some prosecutions that he now argues were blatantly illegal.
It would be kind of funny if it weren’t so appalling. Because if he gets this payout, it’ll be one of the largest in history. And he will have inverted the FTCA not to compensate him for legitimate injuries that the government inflicted, but to enrich himself because his own government thinks he deserves even more cash.
Let’s stick with that for a minute, because the New York Times had a really good piece this week on that topic. The huge majority of people who seek compensation for official misconduct will never, in their lifetimes, see a dime.
The problem is that the FTCA has a massive escape hatch known as the “discretionary function exception.” The premise is that you can sue a government agent for acting negligently on the job, but you can’t sue a government agent because they were devising, implementing, or following an official policy of the government. So, for instance, if you get hit by a park ranger driving a Jeep ne
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Bodies wash ashore in Trinidad after U.S. strikes
October 23, 2025
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/10/23/bodies-wash-ashore-in-trin
idad-after-u-s-strikes/
The first body washed ashore on Trinidad’s northeastern coast soon after the United States carried out its first strike in September on a boat in the Caribbean. Villagers said the corpse had burn marks on its face and was missing limbs, as if it had been mangled by an explosion.
The tides deposited another corpse on a nearby beach days later, drawing a wake of vultures. Its face was similarly unrecognizable, and its right leg appeared to have been blown off.
The bodies have fueled a mystery that is gripping parts of Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean nation that is within sight of Venezuela’s coast: Who were they? Did a U.S. strike kill them? Will more bodies appear on Trinidad’s beaches?
The intrigue lays bare how the fallout from the U.S. military campaign targeting Venezuela has reached Trinidad. In contrast to other Caribbean leaders, Trinidad’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, is explicitly supporting the strikes on boats that U.S. officials say are carrying drugs.
But as the attacks draw claims in Latin America that the United States is violating international law by killing dozens of people who don’t pose an immediate military threat, some in Trinidad are questioning whether Ms. Persad-Bissessar’s hesitance to cross the Trump administration is keeping them from getting answers about the corpses being stored by their government.
“There’s no question in my mind that these men are casualties of war,” said Lincoln Baker, 63, an employee of Trinidad’s water and sewage company in Cumana.
Like many others in Cumana, a sleepy outpost with an Anglican school, food stores and Christian and Muslim houses of worship, Mr. Baker said he was convinced that the two corpses came from the first attack, on Sept. 2, that left 11 people dead.
Since then, the bodies have emerged as part of the puzzle involving the U.S. military deployment in the region. The Trump administration publicly says the mission is to combat drug trafficking out of Venezuela, which is a relatively minor player in the global drug trade compared to Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia or Peru.
But American officials have privately made clear that the objective is to drive President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from power. The campaign has led to the largest U.S. deployment in Latin America in decades, and it has expanded from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean, with the official death toll from the strikes standing at 37.
Trinidad and Tobago, with about 1.5 million people, has faced various ramifications from the U.S. campaign, including attacks that may have killed its own citizens and heightened tensions with Venezuela.
Separately from the unidentified corpses, the authorities are investigating reports that two Trinidadians were among those killed in a U.S. strike this month. Relatives of the men, identified as Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, have disputed claims that they were involved in drug trafficking.
Condemnation of the attacks is spreading, based on the assessment of legal specialists and independent United Nations experts that it is illegal for militaries to target in international waters civilians who do not pose an imminent threat.
Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, over the weekend accused the United States of murdering a Colombian fisherman in an attack on a boat that the American authorities claimed had been carrying drugs. President Trump responded by halting aid to Colombia and saying that Mr. Petro, a leftist, had a “fresh mouth toward America.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump deploys aircraft carrier strike group to South America amid Venezuela tensions
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/24/us-aircraft-ca
rrier-deploying-south-america-venezuela-tensions/86878837007/
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deployed a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its complement of guided missile destroyers to the South American coast Friday, according to his top spokesperson.
The Ford and its accompanying destroyers — the USS Winston Churchill, the USS Bainbridge, and the USS Mahan — have spent the past few weeks in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the U.S. Naval Institute's fleet tracker. They will join at least eight Navy ships, thousands of Marines, special operations forces, and the land-based fighter jets already deployed to the Caribbean.
Carrier strike groups represent the pinnacle of U.S. seapower. The Ford carries four squadrons, each with 10 to 14 F/A-18 fighter jets capable of bombing targets hundreds of miles inland from the ship. The three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers each can carry more than 90 Tomahawk guided cruise missiles, though it's unclear how many are loaded aboard the strike group destroyers or aboard the three Burke-class destroyers already in the Caribbean.
Sean Parnell, who is Hegseth's assistant defense secretary for public affairs, announced that the USS Gerald R. Ford, its on-board warplanes, and the other ships in its strike group are deploying to "dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations ... and counter narco-terrorism" in the region.
In recent months, President Donald Trump's administration has destroyed at least 10 suspected drug boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. The deployment of a carrier strike group represents a significant escalation in that campaign and could foreshadow the beginning of airstrikes against targets in Venezuela. U.S. officials have accused Venezuela's leadership and President Nicolas Maduro of running drug cartels and facilitating mass migration towards the U.S. southern border.
Trump also recently authorized CIA operations on land in Venezuela. Air Force bombers have flown near Venezuela twice in recent days as well.
Faced with the prospect of being overthrown or killed, Maduro has alternated between pleading for peace and warning the United States about his country's defense capabilities. According to The War Zone, the Venezuelan military has small numbers of modern anti-ship missiles and long-range anti-aircraft missiles, in addition to a large supply of portable Igla-S anti-air missiles that Maduro said are scattered throughout the country.
The counter-drug campaign, which legal experts argue could violate the law, has faced criticism from regional leaders such as Colombia's President Gustavo Petro. The admiral who leads U.S. Southern Command and oversees the campaign, Adm. Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his early retirement on Oct. 16.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a war powers resolution recently that seeks to restrain the Trump administration from conducting attacks on Venezuelan land; it is yet to receive a Senate vote. A previous vote seeking to block the boat attacks failed 48 to 51.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I for one think the Epstein Ballroom will be magnificent. I love the decor theme of "what if Uday Hussein ran a Ramada Inn." And giving it a theme song everyone will associate with it is a stroke of brilliance! "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" is very catchy.
It is very French Revolution to build a golden ballroom while people can't afford groceries and health insurance.
Just remember that the Epstein Ballroom is brought to you by all of the mega-corps and billionaires who have now stepped in line in order to take advantage of the American citizenry. They know they can bribe Trump for favors, so they're doing just that.
What donors to Trump's White House ballroom stand to gain from the federal government
Updated on: October 25, 2025
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ballroom-donors-white-house-stand-t
o-gain/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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