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 394 of 479
Another day at the office, huh Second?
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Quote:Just another day at the White House: Trump’s guest is a murderer, but Trump denies it all because the guest brings $1 trillion for Trump
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Another day at the office, huh Second?
(Photo of Trump and Mr Bone Saw staging love-in as Saudi’s $1 trillion wipes the bloody slate clean. The two men laugh about the reporter’s murder while holding hands. Special note: if Trump's guest raped children, Trump won't mind.)
What happened to Jamal Khashoggi? Trump resurfaces memories of journalist’s brutal murder
President’s claim that Mohammed bin Salman had nothing to do with 2018 killing contradicts US intelligence
By Andrew Roth | Wed 19 Nov 2025 05.41 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/19/what-happened-jamal-khas
hoggi-murder-trump-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman
Donald Trump on Tuesday said that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, had nothing to do with the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose assassination in 2018 left the Saudi leader an international pariah.
But Trump’s own intelligence services, as well as a 2019 UN investigation, have painted a very different picture. The assassination took place inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where a 15-person team led by a close associate of Prince Mohammed was said to have drugged, murdered and dismembered Khashoggi in order to hide evidence of the crime.
“Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” Trump said when asked about the killing by a reporter during an Oval Office appearance with Prince Mohammed on Tuesday. “But [Prince Mohammed] knew nothing about it,” continued Trump. “And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
That is not what the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded in 2021, when a report by the agency laid the blame for Khashoggi’s death directly on Prince Mohammed, who on Tuesday made his first visit to the US since the assassination.
“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the 2021 report read.
The crown prince denied ordering the operation but acknowledged responsibility as the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
The motive for Khashoggi’s murder was clear: the journalist was a leading critic of Prince Mohammed, who had amassed power under his now-deceased father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whom he sought to succeed.
When Khashoggi entered a Saudi consulate in Turkey to certify divorce papers, he was not aware that a 15-person team, including members of Prince Mohammed’s elite personal bodyguard, as well as his close adviser Saud al-Qahtani, had been dispatched to capture or kill him. Inside, one of the men asked whether the “sacrificial animal” had arrived. “He has,” another answered.
What happened next became public only because Turkish spies had bugged the premises, allowing them to listen in as the hit squad prepared and then carried out the gruesome murder.
Inside the embassy, Khashoggi was told by Saudi officials that there was an Interpol warrant for his arrest and that he would be taken back to Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi protested before a struggle began in which he was overpowered.
“Assessments of the recordings by intelligence officers in Turkey and other countries suggest that Mr Khashoggi could have been injected with a sedative and then suffocated using a plastic bag,” read a report prepared by Agnès Callamard, who was the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
Before Khashoggi entered the consulate, a Saudi doctor was said to be describing an operation by which he would dismember Khashoggi’s body so it could be secretly transported out of the premises.
The process would “be easy”, the doctor said. “Joints will be separated. It is not a problem. The body is heavy. First time I cut on the ground. If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces
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The Five Stages of MAGA Scandal
(1) Denial
What?! That’s fake news!
Trump had nothing to do with Epstein!
(2) Denial
What a nothing-burger!
So he knew Epstein!
He knew a lot of people!
(3) Denial
It's a Democrat hoax!
Just like Russia, Russia, Russia!
Trump said so!
(4) Denial
All this stuff is phony!
They're fake documents!
Probably A.I.!
(5) Acceptance
So what!
No one said he was perfect!
And it's not like the girls were eight!
Repeat for next horrifying scandal.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/19/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-five-stages-
of-maga-scandal-grief.html
First Bonus Comic: Do you have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Dementia?
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/12/tom-the-dancing-bug-do-you-have-deme
ntia.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Trump Steamroller Is Broken
Infighting. Bad polls. Party divisions. Midterm fears. It’s all back.
By Jonathan Lemire | November 19, 2025, 7:49 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/11/trump-has-lost-control/68
4987/
President Donald Trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election.
That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.
Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original. And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead.
This was not the plan. Trump and his inner circle used their four years out of office to create a policy blueprint—drawn substantially from Project 2025—and form a disciplined team of true believers who used their experience with the levers of power to dominate their political opposition. The beginning of Trump’s second term was marked by an unprecedented display of executive authority, as the president dominated a subservient Congress and defied the courts, brought to heel some of the nation’s most formidable institutions and wealthiest people, fulfilled long-held conservative wishes to dramatically shrink the size and influence of the federal government, reoriented the nation’s relationship with the rest of the world, and rammed through legislation that benefited the rich over the working class and the poor. Trump has been a steamroller.
But that has begun to change. Voters punished Trump’s party in this month’s elections, seeming to condemn his presidential overreach and the abandonment of his central campaign promise to rehabilitate the nation’s economy. A rare Republican rebellion on Capitol Hill rattled the West Wing and embarrassed the president. And although the White House likes to project a political image of never surrendering, a pair of retreats in the past few days has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility.
Few things have frustrated Trump like his inability to make Jeffrey Epstein go away. The disgraced sex offender and financier, of course, has been dead for six years. But questions about the powerful men with whom he associated—and the mystery around his death in prison, which was ruled a suicide—created a conspiracy theory in the MAGA base that has overwhelmed the White House. Trump angrily ordered his supporters to let the matter go this past summer but was largely ignored. And then, last week, four GOP lawmakers—some of whom have been among Trump’s most ardent acolytes—triggered a full House vote to release Department of Justice records related to Epstein.
Revolt was in the air. One of those defiant lawmakers, the MAGA icon Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, did not buckle, even as Trump called her a traitor. “Let me tell you what a traitor is,” she responded yesterday. “A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves.” GOP leadership signaled to the White House that most lawmakers could not put their name to a vote to protect a pedophile and that the measure would pass easily, two officials told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump was furious, but he didn’t want to be seen as getting rolled by his own party.
Trying to save face, he begrudgingly posted on social media that he would support Republicans who voted to release the files. The measure passed the House yesterday 427–1. It then cleared the Senate by unanimous consent. Trump announced tonight he had signed it. (Questions persist as to whether the Justic
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Rubio Says Maduro Is Terrorist-In-Chief Of Venezuela’s “Cartel De Los Soles.” Is It Even A Real Group?
The Trump administration’s push for war on Venezuela includes alleging Maduro controls a government-run “narcoterrorist” conspiracy.
By Noah Horowitz | November 20 2025, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/20/rubio-maduro-venezuela-cartel-de-l
os-soles/
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week his intention to declare the so-called Cártel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization, ratcheting up the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela.
In a statement Sunday, Rubio described an organized cabal of Venezuelan military officers and politicians working hand in glove with drug traffickers to oversee the shipment of massive quantities of cocaine to American shores, all overseen and managed by President Nicolás Maduro.
“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” Rubio said.
The announcement came months after the Treasury Department issued its own sanctions against the group, known in English as the Cartel of the Suns, which it accused in July of “using the flood of illegal narcotics as a weapon against the United States.”
It’s a troubling image: a state captured by ideologically motivated drug lords hell-bent on the destruction of the American way of life.
Rubio’s push to label Maduro and his allies as terrorists, though, is just the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s fusion of America’s two forever wars: the war on drugs and the war on terror.
Since February, the State Department has slapped the foreign terror organization label on more nearly a dozen street gangs and drug-trafficking networks across Latin America, and Trump has used the highly fungible phrase “narcoterrorists” to justify a series of dubiously legal strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.
There’s just one giant problem: There is little evidence that Cartel of the Suns exists. The organized communist plot to poison Americans with drugs doesn’t remotely resemble the reality of Venezuelan corruption or the country’s drug trade.
“The idea that this is a narcoterrorist cartel, and that Maduro is directing the traffic and sending drugs and dangerous criminals to the U.S. to undermine the U.S. government — that’s really wide of the mark,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“The war on drugs is not really about drugs.”
To critics of American drug policy abroad, the move against Cartel of the Suns is the latest display of how the U.S. uses anti-drug policies as a smokescreen to bully its neighbors.
“The war on drugs is not really about drugs,” said Alexander Aviña, a professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University. “It’s a way of extending the U.S.’s geopolitical interests and a way to hit at governments deemed to be antithetical to imperial designs.”
How Corruption Works
References to the Cártel de los Soles date back to the 1990s, when local reporters used the term to refer to a handful of generals in the Venezuelan National Guard accused of collusion in the drug trade, according to Gunson, who has lived and worked in the country since 1999.
A former journalist, Gunson also happens to be a co-author of a 2005 Miami Herald article that appears to be one of the earliest English-language reports to use the name.
“It was kind of a jokey label,” said Gunson. “The press started calling it ‘Cártel de los Soles’ because of the sun insignias on their epaulets.”
Like many countries around the world, corruption runs rampant in Venezuela.
“It’s pretty well known and accepted in Venezuela that the government has been collaborating with drug traffickers and other criminal organizations in the country,” said José De Bastos, a Venezuelan jo
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Trump Steamroller Is Broken
Infighting. Bad polls. Party divisions. Midterm fears. It’s all back.
Uh huh...
Trump's Favorability 43.5%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump
Republican Party Favorability 40.6%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/republican-party
Democratic Party Favorability 34.1%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/democratic-party
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Donald Trump Made the Worst Statement of His Presidency
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is About One Thing
Donald Trump may have cleared the high bar of uttering the most appalling remark of his presidency on Tuesday. “Things happen,” the leader of the free world said with a shrug when asked about the assassination of American-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi while seated next to the man who ordered the murder, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and American resident who frequently criticized the Saudi regime, was brutally murdered—his body hacked with a buzz saw—in 2018 during an interview with officials in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. At the time, even Trump, then in his first term as president, said MBS (as the prince is often called) should be held responsible if he played a role in the assassination. Soon after came the leak of a CIA report concluding that MBS approved of the operation—an assessment that the entire U.S. intelligence community reached in a public report in 2021. Even before then, Joe Biden, during his 2020 campaign for the presidency, declared Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state.
No case can be made for simply brushing the murder aside, as Trump did during the press conference that started off this week’s summit. When ABC’s White House correspondent, Mary Bruce, asked the two men about the intelligence report charging MBS with the murder, Trump interrupted her, denounced her network as “fake news.”
The crown prince, who has plenty of blood on his hands quite aside from the Khashoggi killing, rose to the occasion with a veneer of class. After Trump’s brusque dismissal of the issue, MBS solemnly recited the answer that he had no doubt rehearsed, in anticipation of the quite natural question:
“It’s really painful to hear anyone losing his life for no real purpose or not in a legal way. We’ve improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that [in the future].”
This was a ruse, of course, but at least the Saudi autocrat pretended to condemn the murder; he wanted to convey the impression that he knew the murder was contemptible and criminal. This was more than the current American president could bring himself to do.
Trump’s show of disrespect stood out, because it concerned a foreign head of state’s politically motivated assassination of a legal U.S. resident (Khashoggi was married to an American woman) working for an established U.S. newspaper on the soil of a NATO ally.
The “things happen” remark, and in fact the entire MBS summit, clarifies, in case matters weren’t clear before, that U.S. foreign policy under Trump is simply about the aggrandizement of Trump’s ego, his wealth, and the wealth of his richest corporate donors. Period, full stop.
The centerpiece of the summit was MBS’ aspiration to rebuild Saudi Arabia as a global tech capital. Trump agreed not only to sell the kingdom an unspecified number of F-35 stealth aircraft (over the objections of Israel, which is now the only Middle Eastern country that has those planes) but also to let the Saudis buy a large number of A.I. chips manufactured by Nvidia (which followed the news by announcing yet another quarter of bar-busting profits and revenue). The subsequent state dinner was attended not only by Jensen Huang (Nvidia’s CEO) but also Elon Musk, Tim Cook (Apple), Michael Dell (Dell), Chuck Robbins (Cisco), Lisa Su (AMD), David Ellison (Paramount, which owns CBS and may soon own CNN), as well as, for old times’ sake, the heads of various oil, construction, and financial firms.
Also in attendance was Trump’s son Don Jr., who has recently been discussing private investment deals in Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Trump Organization. (Remember when Jimmy Carter had to put his peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid possible conflicts of interest in his agriculture policy?)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/donald-trump-worst-stateme
nt-mbs-meeting.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.p
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald TrumpMade the Worst Statement of His Presidency
Oh yeah. It must be a day that ends in day.
Go fuck yourself.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:U.S. foreign policy under Trump is simply about the aggrandizement of Trump’s ego, his wealth, and the wealth of his richest corporate donors. Period, full stop.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Made the Worst Statement of His Presidency
Oh yeah. It must be a day that ends in day.
Go fuck yourself.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:U.S. foreign policy under Trump is simply about the aggrandizement of Trump’s ego, his wealth, and the wealth of his richest corporate donors. Period, full stop.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Made the Worst Statement of His Presidency
Oh yeah. It must be a day that ends in day.
Go fuck yourself.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
This dumbass take brought to you by Slate:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/donald-trump-worst-stateme
nt-mbs-meeting.html
Quote:
And so a big question, asked several times in many contexts, gets raised again: What is Trump’s foreign policy—what is his vision of American interests and ideals, much less the balance between the two—about?
The “things happen” remark, and in fact the entire MBS summit, clarifies, in case matters weren’t clear before, that U.S. foreign policy under Trump is simply about the aggrandizement of Trump’s ego, his wealth, and the wealth of his richest corporate donors. Period, full stop.
You can't even manage to string a single sentence together on your own, dipshit?
You both are so fucking retarded.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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