Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 385 of 479
Republicans Are Damaged by Their Own Cruelty
They’re pathologically unwilling to help Americans in need — and Democrats should hammer this home
By Paul Krugman | Nov 11, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/republicans-are-damaged-by-their
Like almost all progressives, I was infuriated and disheartened by Senate Democrats’ cave on the shutdown Sunday. The party won stunning election victories Tuesday — and its leaders responded with yet another preemptive surrender? (Chuck Schumer may have voted no, but he didn’t manage, and may not even have tried, to prevent defections.)
Yet while the immediate politics displayed Democratic tactical weakness, the larger story highlighted a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty. They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power.
Consider the grounds on which the shutdown fight took place. Democrats made it about the enhanced subsidies that have kept premiums for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act fairly reasonable for millions of Americans — Americans who are now facing huge premium hikes that will create intense financial distress and force many to go uninsured.
Before the big cave, Democrats proposed a deal in which they would provide the votes to reopen the government in return for a one-year extension of those enhanced benefits. Republicans should have jumped at this deal. It’s true that Republicans are determined to destroy much of the social safety net. The One Big Beautiful Bill will impose savage cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. But these big cuts are set to happen after the midterm elections.
Drastically increasing health care costs at the beginning of 2026, causing millions to lose insurance, certainly looks like a massive political blunder. My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works.
And polling suggests overwhelming public support for extending the enhanced subsidies: 74 percent overall, including half of Republicans.
So Republicans should have been eager for a chance to postpone the pain. Instead, by rejecting Democratic proposals, Republicans have placed the onus for soaring premiums squarely on themselves.
But the thought of doing something decent, even cynically and temporarily, doesn’t seem to have crossed Republican minds. John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, immediately declared the proposed deal a “nonstarter,” insisting that his party would only negotiate about healthcare after the government is reopened — which everyone understands means that Republicans will agree to nothing.
Why reject a deal that could have protected Republicans from their own mistakes? Part of the answer is sheer ignorance. Here was Trump’s response:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare. Unrelated, we must still terminate the Filibuster!
Nov 08, 2025, 9:04 AM
Substance aside, think about the idiocy of the timing here. The health insurance crisis is happening right now, as Americans open letters from their insurers and discover that they are facing huge increases — more than 100 percent on average, much more in many cases — in the cost of coverage beginning in just a few weeks. This is not exactly the time to propose immediately scrapping our existing health care system, replacing it with … something
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Fictional Intelligence: Imagining Trump and the Future of (Nuclear) War
I’ve just watched “A House of Dynamite”, the new suspense movie where the US gets attacked by an ICBM, that has drawn criticism from the Pentagon. The movie has been subject to some controversy in the nuclear nerd community as well, especially regarding the likelihood of the scenario. I thought it was a great movie precisely because it didn’t choose a scenario that we would commonly think likely, but one that asks the important questions: What if our adversaries don’t act and react at all the way we expect them to? What if our systems fail in the critical moment and nothing works as exercised? What if the decision-maker on the very top makes the wrong decision? Sort of what Vladimir Putin should have asked himself before marching into Ukraine in February 2022.
Perhaps the most ridiculous criticism I read somewhere was along the lines “Nuclear war? At a time like this, with everything else going on in the US? Really?”. I have to say I couldn’t disagree more. It’s precisely because of everything else that is also going on in the US that American voters should ask themselves next time they get to choose a president: Is this a person I would like to entrust the nuclear codes to wreak global havoc to? The same applies (to a somewhat lesser but not insignificant extent) to French and British voters as well. And the biggest elephant in the room is obviously that the movie features a professional US administration. My recommendation to Americans reading this is to watch the movie and imagine Trump and Hegseth in the respective roles. Makes the thriller even more thrilling.
More at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/fictional-intelligence-imaginin
g
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:Signym and 6ix, you remind me of peeling paint. I got off the road last week and stopped the car near some natural gas processing equipment to get a closer look. One piece was peeling because there was no primer under the top coat of paint. The other was peeling because the paint was sprayed on rusty metal that should have been sandblasted and primed. Then I opened the door to get a closer look. There was lubricating oil dripping from gearboxes. When I walked to the other side, downwind from where I had been, I could smell hydrogen sulfide gas. It is poison. Signym and 6ix, you are poison. What you two write is the peeling paint, but there is far more wrong with you than what you write, your surface appearance. You should be shut down, as should Putin and Trump, the two biggest and most poisonous gas-emitting sources in the world.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND:
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".
Which is funny bc I've been a registered Democrat almost as long as I've been voting.
IDK why you blew your stack at me all of a sudden. It was right after I responded to your article about Alzheimer's. Must be personal for you.
Very personal.
----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Tell me you're Hitler without telling me you're Hitler.
You are everything you claim to hate, buddy. You always have been.
Have a great day!
--------------------------------------------------
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 misunderstand what Washington DC, or even George Washington, did to the Redcoats, the Confederates, the Nazis, the Japanese Imperialists? It was not a process of calm discussion and finding common ground between antagonists. It was a wordless process, summarized as kill them, kill them all until the survivors surrender. After surrender, the process can switch modes to a calm discussion between adults, but to get there requires Kill Them All. If the wars never leave calm discussion mode, the wars would never end, which is why the war on Trumptards won't end until the Democrats switch modes. I am very sure that 6ix and Signym can't understand, and I know Democrats don't want to go to the Final Solution of the Trumptard Infestation because it feels very uncivilized. "Why can't we talk away our problems?" lament the Democrats. You can't because Trumptards are incompatible with American life continuing in a recognizable form, just as the Nazis ruling over the Atlantic was incompatible with American life continuing as usual.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Tell me you're Hitler without telling me you're Hitler.
You are everything you claim to hate, buddy. You always have been.
Have a great day!
Today, King Charles III would be the monarch of North America, as he is of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, if George Washington had not killed the Redcoats. In the 21st Century, it is kill the Redcaps. If you want King Donald Trump III as monarch, don't fight the Trumptards today.
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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Signym and 6ix, you remind me of peeling paint. I got off the road last week and stopped the car near some natural gas processing equipment to get a closer look. One piece was peeling because there was no primer under the top coat of paint. The other was peeling because the paint was sprayed on rusty metal that should have been sandblasted and primed. Then I opened the door to get a closer look. There was lubricating oil dripping from gearboxes. When I walked to the other side, downwind from where I had been, I could smell hydrogen sulfide gas. It is poison. Signym and 6ix, you are poison. What you two write is the peeling paint, but there is far more wrong with you than what you write, your surface appearance. You should be shut down, as should Putin and Trump, the two biggest and most poisonous gas-emitting sources in the world.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND:
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".
Which is funny bc I've been a registered Democrat almost as long as I've been voting.
IDK why you blew your stack at me all of a sudden. It was right after I responded to your article about Alzheimer's. Must be personal for you.
Very personal.
----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Tell me you're Hitler without telling me you're Hitler.
You are everything you claim to hate, buddy. You always have been.
Have a great day!
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
SECOND, you're weird.
Why don't you do something useful and fix that equipment instead of working yourself up into a lather ever day, with your five
-----------
"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 have repeatedly crossed this line, Signym, the same one Trump does all the time. Trump keeps insisting, as does Signym, that he is not guilty of anything, in this particular news story, of being a goddamn rapist, so long as he won't confess, despite lower courts saying he is a rapist.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're weird.
Why don't you do something useful and fix that equipment instead of working yourself up into a lather ever day, with your fiveminuteshours of hate?
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Democrats should give Trump a two-way choice: either pay the rape victim $88 million or kill him, but Democrats will take the third way, which is to wait forever for Trump to confess his guilt and voluntarily pay what he owes. Who knows? Maybe the Supreme Court, in a 6 to 3 decision, will let Trump go free, as the Democrats are allowing him to go free and break any law as many times as he pleases.
Trump requests Supreme Court overturn E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse and defamation verdict
An appeals court last year upheld a lower court's judgment that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the 1990s, and later defamed her after she went public with her allegations.
By Garrett Haake, Tara Prindiville and Zoë Richards | Nov. 11, 2025, 7:54 AM CST
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/trump-appeals-supreme-c
ourt-e-jean-carroll-judgement-sexual-abuse-rcna243124
President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to review a $5 million civil judgment that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26222396-trump-carroll-scotus/
#document/p1
. . . A federal appeals court last year upheld the judgment after Trump argued that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the case, had erred in allowing testimony from two women — Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff — whose allegations of sexual abuse Trump has denied.
A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in December last year that Kaplan had not “abused his discretion” by permitting their testimony.
Trump had also asked the appeals court for a rehearing of the case in June, which was denied.
Trump has repeatedly sought to have the judgments in Carroll's cases against him overturned. A separate appeal that Trump filed to overturn Carroll’s $83 million defamation judgment last year, in a case tied to his defamatory comments about her while president and after the $5 million verdict, failed in September.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump, 79, Panics About Losing His Supreme Court Fight in Late-Night Rant
TRILLIONS NOT BILLIONS
The president apparently isn’t very confident about the case his solicitor general argued.
By Janna Brancolini | Nov. 11 2025 7:19AM EST
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-79-panics-about-losing-his-
supreme-court-fight-over-tariffs-in-late-night-rant/
President Donald Trump was up late Monday night trying to bully the Supreme Court into upholding his signature economic policy by warning of a national “drubbing” if it went against him.
Two key justices had sounded skeptical during oral arguments about whether Trump’s sweeping tariffs on imports from dozens of U.S. trading partners are valid under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
But conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett also noted during her questioning that reimbursing almost $90 billion in tariffs already paid by American businesses would be a “mess.”
Trump has previously acknowledged in interviews that the government would have to pay back businesses if the Supreme Court strikes down the duties, and now he’s trying to argue it would be even worse than Barrett realized.
“The U.S. Supreme Court was given the wrong numbers. The ‘unwind’ in the event of a negative decision on Tariffs, would be, including investments made, to be made, and return of funds, in excess of 3 Trillion Dollars,” he wrote at about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday in a Truth Social post. “It would not be possible to ever make up for that kind of a ‘drubbing.’”
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The U.S. Supreme Court was given the wrong numbers. The "unwind" in the event of a negative decision on Tariffs, would be, including investments made, to be made, and return of funds, in excess of 3 Trillion Dollars. It would not be possible to ever make up for that kind of a "drubbing." That would truly become an insurmountable National Security Event, and devastating to the future of our Country - Possibly non-sustainable!
1.13k ReTruths 3.49k Likes Nov 11, 2025, 6:37 AM
Truth Social/ Donald J. Trump
The president has repeatedly claimed that the tariffs are responsible for companies pledging to invest trillions of dollars in U.S. manufacturing, though he hasn’t provided any evidence that the number is anywhere near $3 trillion.
It’s also not a given that those investments, which include Apple’s planned $600 billion domestic manufacturing program, depend on the tariffs.
If they do, Congress could always approve the policy, since the central question in the case is whether Trump exceeded his authority by unilaterally imposing the duties.
Trump has nevertheless described the tariffs in existential terms and previously claimed that an adverse Supreme Court ruling could reduce the U.S. to “almost Third World status.”
In his latest post, he wrote that striking down the tariffs “would truly become an insurmountable National Security Event, and devastating to the future of our Country - Possibly non-sustainable!”
The post, however, undermined the legal argument that Solicitor General D. John Sauer tried to make Wednesday during oral arguments: that raising revenue was “only incidental” to Trump’s tariffs.
The duties are a type of import tax paid by American companies, which must eat the costs or pass them on to their customers. Last month, a report from Goldman Sachs found that consumers are shouldering as much as 55 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Given that the Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to impose taxes, the administration has argued that the case is really about the president’s ability to regulate foreign powers, and not about raising revenue.
In the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s oral arguments, the administration had tried to downplay the policy’s money-making potential, The New York Times reported. The court is not expected to hand down a definitive ruling until next year.
After first claiming that the tariff revenue would offset the president’s $4 trillion tax cut—most of which benefits the w
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Signym and 6ix, you remind me of peeling paint. I got off the road last week and stopped the car near some natural gas processing equipment to get a closer look. One piece was peeling because there was no primer under the top coat of paint. The other was peeling because the paint was sprayed on rusty metal that should have been sandblasted and primed. Then I opened the door to get a closer look. There was lubricating oil dripping from gearboxes. When I walked to the other side, downwind from where I had been, I could smell hydrogen sulfide gas. It is poison. Signym and 6ix, you are poison. What you two write is the peeling paint, but there is far more wrong with you than what you write, your surface appearance. You should be shut down, as should Putin and Trump, the two biggest and most poisonous gas-emitting sources in the world.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND:
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".
Which is funny bc I've been a registered Democrat almost as long as I've been voting.
IDK why you blew your stack at me all of a sudden. It was right after I responded to your article about Alzheimer's. Must be personal for you.
Very personal.
----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Tell me you're Hitler without telling me you're Hitler.
You are everything you claim to hate, buddy. You always have been.
Have a great day!
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
SECOND, you're weird.
Why don't you do something useful and fix that equipment instead of working yourself up into a lather ever day, with your fiveminuteshours of hate?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Yup. Dude has brain damage and he has taken up the Democratic Party pastime of day-drinking now.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You have repeatedly crossed this line, Signym, the same one Trump does all the time. Trump keeps insisting, as does Signym, that he is not guilty of anything, in this particular news story, of being a goddamn rapist, so long as he won't confess, despite lower courts saying he is a rapist.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're weird.
Why don't you do something useful and fix that equipment instead of working yourself up into a lather ever day, with your fiveminuteshours of hate?
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Democrats should give Trump a two-way choice: either pay the rape victim $88 million or kill him, but Democrats will take the third way, which is to wait forever for Trump to confess his guilt and voluntarily pay what he owes. Who knows? Maybe the Supreme Court, in a 6 to 3 decision, will let Trump go free, as the Democrats are allowing him to go free and break any law as many times as he pleases.
Trump requests Supreme Court overturn E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse and defamation verdict
As I said from day one, that lying slut isn't going to get a dime.
Why are you littering theses boards with assassination plots, telling people that they should kill themselves and your desire to murder everyone you don't agree with everyday?
--------------------------------------------------
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 6ixStringJack:
The entire atmosphere surrounding all of this is completely different than it was in 2016 and 2020.
Things just kind of feel normal again.
It's like all the loudest voices either screamed themselves out or they aren't being platformed anymore and/or we just finally, collectively tuned them out for a change.
It's kind of nice, innit?
Happy Inauguration Day!
I warned ya dipshit. Hey I know, ask the children if they think it's nice.
T
Mar-a-Lago unveils seafood spread and ice sculpture while Trump defunds food for children
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