Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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Trump Is Rewriting History to Justify His Sketchy Pardon of a Crypto King
Trump directly tied his pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao to the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.”
By Matt Sledge | October 24 2025, 6:41 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/24/trump-pardon-crypto-binance-cz/
After Donald Trump pardoned a billionaire crypto king on Thursday, he claimed that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was “persecuted” by Joe Biden’s Justice Department as part of what the White House called a “war on cryptocurrency.”
On one level, that assertion was an attempt to explain away a pardon that many see as a naked quid pro quo with a man whose business used Trump’s crypto tokens in a transaction that benefited the president’s family firm.
On another level, observers say, that claim is simply wrong. Zhao willingly pleaded guilty under a carefully negotiated deal with former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, which ultimately saw his company pay $4 billion in fines and serve only four months in prison. At the time, one analyst saw the overall package as a clear “victory” for Binance and Zhao, who is also known by his nickname CZ.
There’s a sense of bitter irony for longtime critics of Biden Justice Department. They had long complained in general about Biden’s approach to corporate crime, and Binance in particular was accused of facilitating everything from terrorism to child sexual abuse images before it received a deal that allowed its founder to spend a few months in prison. He also paid a fine worth a small percentage of his wealth.
“He got to keep all his money, control of Binance, and was allowed to handpick his successor CEO,” Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the financial reform nonprofit Better Markets, said in an email. “Even a quick read of the charging documents detailing the actual facts and violations of law would reveal that Binance and CZ got a sweetheart deal from DOJ.”
Choosing Club Fed
Progressive critics have maintained a drumbeat of criticism of Biden and Barack Obama’s Justice Departments ever since the Great Recession, when top bankers avoided jail time for their role in the housing market crash.
Prosecutions of corporate criminals fell to a record low during Biden’s final year in office, according to a report released by Public Citizen earlier this year.
“Biden is certainly not anybody to hold up as an exemplar of people ‘persecuting’ people,” said Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate with Public Citizen.
Binance was one of the thinning ranks of companies to find itself in court, but critics say it may be the exception that proves the rule. Three years ago, it was one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, as it effectively thumbed its nose at U.S. anti-money-laundering laws designed to prevent terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminals from making their dirty money look clean.
In statements around the time of the November 2023 plea deal, Biden Justice Department officials laced into Zhao. Still, the deal they crafted allowed Binance to remain one of the leading players in the field.
Unlike the bankers who escaped jail time, Zhao was the rare executive to see the inside of a prison’s walls, but not for long.
Prosecutors sought a three-year sentence for Zhao, but a federal judge dipped below that request to hand him the months-long term. He served his time at a low-security prison in California. Since then, he has returned to serving as something of an oracle to crypto industry fanboys.
“If you set the bar at response to the great financial crisis, then yeah, bar cleared. It was more than was common in the past,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit Revolving Door Project. “But if you consider how seriously the establishment of both political parties takes issues like terrorism, I think a four-month prison sentence is comically inadequate.”
Even at the time of the settlement, observers believed that it might not dent Binance’s business by much.
“While the massive penalty
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These Judges Are Warning Us We’re on the Fast Track to Martial Law
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | Oct 25, 2025 5:45 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-news-judges-warning-
martial-law.html
If there is one question everyone in America is trying to game out at this moment, it’s this one: Can the judiciary impose meaningful checks on President Donald Trump’s ability to deploy the National Guard in American cities to retaliate against political protests? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit grappled with that question over the past week, although it failed to reach anything approaching consensus. On one side, Judge Ryan Nelson (a Trump appointee) argued that courts have no authority at all to halt the president’s domestic mobilization of the Guard. Several of his colleagues believe that courts must give immense deference to the executive branch’s decision that an “emergency” necessitates the use of troops. Still others have warned that judges have a duty to carefully review—and, when necessary, block—any unlawful deployment within the United States.
On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed this increasingly heated dispute, and why some members of the court have warned that it amounts to a trial by fire for American self-governance. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: I want to flag some of the language from Judge Susan Graber’s dissent. And it’s shocking because, in a deep sense, she’s not just talking to her colleagues, to other judges on the 9th Circuit. She’s talking to us. Toward the end, she wrote: “I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/10/20/25-6268.pdf
This is very much in the key of judges trying to tell us that they are pinned under a heavy collapsed refrigerator and that we — the rest of us — have to put some skin in the game. It is literally a judge telling Americans who are shrugging—who say, “Well, there’s nothing the courts can do”—to pull it together.
Mark Joseph Stern: She’s breaking the fourth wall, which is something judges do only in case of emergency. She’s reaching out directly and asking us not to lose faith in the judiciary. And I get it, because I am actively losing faith in the judiciary. But I think Graber is urging us to hold on, not only because she believes that the full 9th Circuit can correct this error, but because she knows that the judiciary is the last buffer between us and tyranny. This is the paradox you and I have been living with since Jan. 20, right? The judiciary is badly corrupted by Trump and his appointees. There are real limits on its ability to enforce the law. The Supreme Court itself is frequently in Trump’s pocket. And yet, in so many cases, the only real check on Trump’s abuses of the law is the courts. It’s the federal judges who are going to either step up or shrink from their duty. That’s true at least until Congress reasserts itself, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
So I really admired the way Graber closed this dissent. Frankly, I think more judges need to do this kind of thing. People are losing faith in our judicial system. They’re questioning why federal courts even exist if they aren’t going to stand up to the worst abuses of executive power in American history. And I guess Graber is telling us to hang on—that if we keep the faith, soon enough the courts will show us why they still deserve to be trusted as guardians of liberty.
This dovetails so nicely with the conversation Joyce Vance and I had on the main show, which is that giving up is not an option—as vindicating as it would feel to say: Hey, why do we need Article 3 judges in the first place? Now, weirdly, we all face this
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Quote:Trump can shit on the Constitution and still get 6ix's vote.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't see a problem with this at all.
There is a Plan for a Third Trump Term
By Catherine Bouris | Oct. 24, 2025
https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-reveals-theres-a-plan-for-t
hird-donald-trump-term/
Steve Bannon openly shared that there are plans to help Donald Trump circumvent the 22nd Amendment and secure a third presidential term.
In an interview with The Economist, Bannon told the magazine’s editors, “He’s gonna get a third term, Trump ’28, Trump is gonna be president ’28 so people just ought to get accommodated with that.”
When asked about the 22nd Amendment, Bannon replied, “There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ’28.”
Bannon continued, arguing that Trump had “longer odds in ’16 and longer odds in ’24? than he does looking ahead at the 2028 election, adding that “the country needs him to be President of the United States. We have to finish what we started.”
He went on to call Trump an “instrument of divine will” despite not being “churchy” or “particularly religious,” explaining that “you can tell this from how he’s pulled this off.”
“We need him for at least one more term, and he’ll get that in ’28.”
Bannon’s rhetoric echoes that deployed by others in Trump’s orbit, including Trump himself, with the president frequently alluding to the possibility of a third term despite the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to a maximum of two. On Sunday, the president posted a video to Truth Social that showed him ruling not just through 2032, but forever.
In a March interview with NBC News, Trump said that “a lot of people” wanted him to seek a third term, and that while he was “focused on the current [term],” there “are methods which you could do it.”
Asked by NBC about those methods, including a scenario where Vice President JD Vance runs for president and then passes the role to Trump, the president said, “That’s one, but there are others, too.” He declined to provide examples of other potential methods.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:JD Vance went on his seventh vacation in 6 months and 2 weeks at a $28,000 per week Scottish estate as inflation soars and prices skyrocket yet not a peep from right wing media. Meanwhile, this was Fox News when Kamala Harris bought cookware for $500.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't see a problem with this at all.
Kamala Harris reportedly spent over $500 on cookware in Parisian shop amid US economic uncertainty
Cost of Thanksgiving dinner has reportedly increased more than 14% from 2020's average.
She spent her own money. He's on the public's dime.
https://www.threads.com/@sugarpusher/post/DNZedtZsXEJ/500-isnt-even-that-much-for-cookware
Where’s JD Vance? On Vacation!
Vice President JD Vance has been in office since January, and already he’s racked up more vacation days than most Americans could dream of in a decade. The man who built his brand railing against “elites” has basically become one — living like the very people he claimed to stand against.
https://thehill.com/opinion/lindseys-lens/5462066-jd-vance-vacation-da
ys-criticism/
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:JD Vance went on his seventh vacation in 6 months and 2 weeks at a $28,000 per week Scottish estate as inflation soars and prices skyrocket yet not a peep from right wing media. Meanwhile, this was Fox News when Kamala Harris bought cookware for $500.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't see a problem with this at all.
Yeah. And they talked about Bill Clinton's $250 haircut when I was in middle school, and they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.
I don't give a fuck about Harris' $500 cookware. I'm surprised it was that cheap, to be honest. I know Nancy Pelosi doesn't have any pheasant-worthy $500 cookware in her house. Her $24,000 refrigerator would disown her.
Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?
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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:Did you know that is false? But this is true: A February 2019 report by the GAO investigated four specific trips Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in early 2017. The total cost for the four trips was approximately $13.6 million, or about $3.4 million per trip. That is a fortune for a game of golf. Cost to the taxpayer for Trump not playing? Zero. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-178
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
. . . they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.
Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?
Based on past news reports, the claim that the Obamas spent $1 million on a Broadway show is false. While their Broadway outings received media attention, the "million-dollar" figure is a misinterpretation of a separate 2015 fundraising event. https://www.google.com/search?q=+The+Obama's+spending+%25241+Milli
on+to+go+see+a+Broadway+show
The origin of the $1 million figure
• In July 2015, former President Obama took his daughters to New York for a weekend that included seeing the musical Hamilton.
• The same weekend, Obama attended a Democratic National Committee fundraiser that generated $1 million. The event was held separately from the family outing, and the money was raised from attendees, not spent by the Obamas.
The real cost of a Broadway “date night"
In May 2009, an earlier date night for the Obamas that included a Broadway show was heavily criticized by Republicans.
• Initial media speculation of the travel and security costs ranged from $25,000 to $250,000.
• Some reports, including one from The Telegraph, put the aircraft cost at roughly $24,000, with the Obamas reportedly paying for their own dinner and show tickets.
Conclusion
The $1 million figure is associated with a political fundraiser that occurred during the same weekend as a personal family trip to New York. The Obamas did not spend $1 million on tickets for a Broadway show.
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:Did you know that is false?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
. . . they talked about The Obama's spending $1 Million to go see a Broadway show.
Don't you have better shit to do this weekend, loser?
No. It's not.
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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:In two sentences, 6ix explained why his life fails. Denial of truth has messed up the lives of many Trumptards: "My wife will never know." "I can drink and drive." "I can afford this." "That is not skin cancer." "The boss won't discover my embezzlement because I'm clever."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. It's not.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Shutdown Is a Knife at a Gunfight
The two sides in Congress may forge a deal, but what difference will it make to a president who doesn’t respect Congress at all?
By David Frum | October 24, 2025, 5:18 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/weird-shutdown-tr
ump-congress/684685/
That real issue is Trump’s challenge to Congress’s constitutional taxing and spending powers. The president has refused to spend funds that Congress appropriated, and he is raising revenues that Congress never approved. Just today, for example, the Pentagon announced a so-called gift of $130 million from an unnamed Trump supporter** to fund military pay during the shutdown. Raising funds from plutocrat allies in defiance of the legislature is something that the authors of the Constitution might have cited as a death spasm of republics. It follows Trump’s plan to pay for a new ballroom by extracting $300 million or more from donors who surely expect something in return.
Trump is also raising about $30 billion a month in tariff revenues, again without a vote in Congress. He plans to spend those revenues on grants to his favored constituents, once more without a vote. The Supreme Court has given Trump at least temporary permission for some of his recent moves. Republicans who control the House and the Senate have largely acquiesced to his abuses. But the president’s underlying view is abundantly clear from his words, deeds, and petty deepfake videos mocking Democratic leaders: Trump does not respect Congress.
This government shutdown, then, should be understood as a protest against Trump’s bid to tax and spend without Congress’s consent. But how do the president’s opponents make a budget deal when the president does not regard anything that comes out of Congress as binding? Any concessions will mean little when they are so likely to be abandoned on a whim.
The president’s allies in Congress seem keen to help him sideline lawmakers by keeping the House of Representatives closed through this fight. The Senate has remained in session, but the House has met on only 42 days since July 3. Trump’s opponents accuse House Speaker Mike Johnson of keeping the lights off to protect the president from procedures to release materials from the Jeffrey Epstein sex-abuse case. Although Johnson denies this, he has yet to offer a convincing excuse for extending the House’s summer vacation through the fall. Just as Trump devalues the work of Congress, Johnson is reinforcing the House’s irrelevance.
Which brings us back to the larger predicament faced by congressional Democrats. They are trying to negotiate with a president who does not accept Congress’s constitutional role—or his own constitutional limits.
Democrats chose Affordable Care Act subsidies—which benefit mostly Republican areas of the country—as their battlefield because they believed that ground to be uniquely favorable to them. So far, that instinct has proved correct. Polls unanimously report that Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for this shutdown.
Trump and the Senate Republicans may soon have to hand the Democrats a victory on ACA subsidies. But that “win” will not change what actually sent Democrats into this battle. Trump rejects constitutional limits on his power. His party in Congress will heed his desires even if it means defying the Constitution and disempowering itself. These threats are bigger than health subsidies—bigger, even, than this shutdown. Every day, Trump comes to work to advance his bid for an American autocracy. That effort will continue, even after this weird shutdown finally ends.
** Billionaire Who Gave $130M to Trump Identified
https://www.newsweek.com/billionaire-who-gave-130m-to-military-during-
shutdown-identified-report-10939372
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Regarding his boat bombings, Trump said: “Every boat that we knock out we save 25,000 American lives so every time you see a boat and you feel badly you say, ‘Wow, that’s rough’…It is rough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people.” There is a video of Trump saying the whopping big lie.
Trump’s Lies Get Bigger
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/trumps-lies-get-bigger/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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