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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SECOND

Thursday, December 4, 2025 9:20 PM

Murderers claim it is perfectly legal to murder criminals instead of arresting them.

Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan said, “If there is intelligence to 'absolutely confirm' this, the Congress is ready to receive it.”

By Nick Turse | December 4, 2025, 10:41 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/boat-strike-venezuela-war-departme
nt-pete-hegseth-kingsley-wilson-chrissy-houlahan/

After Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson declared the War Department was certain about the identities of supposed drug smugglers killed in boat strikes, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., had some questions about the intelligence. When Houlahan called on Wilson to appear before Congress, however, the outspoken and controversial spokesperson suddenly went silent.

“I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Wilson said on Tuesday during a pseudo Pentagon press briefing where attendance was limited to media that have agreed to limits on the scope of their reporting.

Houlahan expressed her doubts and demanded proof.

“If there is intelligence that ‘absolutely confirms’ this — present it. Come before the House or Senate Intelligence committees and let Congress provide the proper oversight and checks and balances the American people deserve,” said Houlahan, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Put the whispers and doubts to rest once and for all. If there is intelligence to ‘absolutely confirm’ this, the Congress is ready to receive it. Until we all see it, you can surely understand why we are skeptical.”

Both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which Houlahan serves on, routinely receive classified briefings from the military.

Wilson – who touted a “new era” of working to “keep the American people informed and to ensure transparency” on Tuesday – did not respond to questions or requests for comment from The Intercept about Houlahan’s remarks or appearing before Congress.

In past classified briefings to lawmakers and Congressional staff, the military has admitted that it does not know exactly who it’s killing in the boat strikes, according to seven government officials who have spoken with The Intercept.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.

“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate,” she added, using shorthand for “designated terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration’s term for the secret list of groups with whom it claims to be at war.

Twenty-One Attacks

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September and killing at least 83 civilians. It has not conducted a strike on a vessel since November 15.

Since the strikes began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The summary executions mark a major departure from typical practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, where law enforcement agencies arrest suspected drug smugglers.

A double-tap strike during the initial September 2 attack — where the U.S. hit an incapacitated boat for a second time, killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — added a second la

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SECOND

Friday, December 5, 2025 5:56 PM

Trump Is Trying to Legalize Corruption by Abusing His Pardon Power

The president has issued over 2,000 pardons since taking office, many to loyalists convicted of serious crimes

By John Avlon | December 4, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-pardo
n-abuses-legalize-corruption-1235477609/

You’ve probably heard that cosplay Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from Venezuela in extra-judicial killings that give new meaning to the phrase “war on drugs.”

But you might not have heard that his boss just pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for abusing his office by leading what prosecutors called “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

If the cognitive dissonance gives you whiplash, that’s because you’re paying attention.

For a guy who talks a lot about how much he hates drugs — and is now floating it as a pretext for knocking off the odious Maduro regime — Trump has developed a strange habit of giving pardons to drug dealers. A day after his latest inauguration, Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road website, which was notorious as a dark web drug den. This was followed by the strange commutation for the founder of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who flooded the Windy City with cocaine.

This weirdness is part of a wider pattern. Because Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year — 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term.

The presidential pardon is written into the Constitution, but Trump is not aiming for mercy or addressing objective injustices, as the founders intended.

He is abusing the power to reward partisan political allies, enabling pay-for-pardon schemes, and attempting to decriminalize corruption.

Right out of the gate, Trump offered pardons to all the January 6 MAGA minions who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This list included violent individuals who assaulted police officers and those with criminal records. Last month, he added blanket pardons for the white-collar instigators and fake electors who advanced those election lies — including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. The rule of law doesn’t apply to Trump loyalists.

A boatload of connected big businessmen have also been getting presidential pardons. A former nursing home executive who was set to report to prison for tax crimes found himself off the hook after his mother attended a $1 million fundraiser for Trump that promised face-to-face access with the president. As The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reported, the curiously timed pardon spared Paul Walczak from “having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the rich.’”

The judge spoke too soon. There are get-out-of-jail-free cards available to Trump supporters, for the right price.

The CEO of the failed EV Truck company Nikola, a Utah billionaire named Trevor Milton, received a full pardon after being convicted for defrauding investors. It was surely just a coincidence that Trevor Milton and his wife gave almost a million dollars each to a Trump-backing Super PAC less than a month before the 2024 election. That’s expensive but pardons are priceless.

More notorious is the case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost the Trump family’s crypto venture, which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year … far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

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THG

Friday, December 5, 2025 9:12 PM

Yes he is. States need to charge him so the supreme court can't protect him from going to jail.

T

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SIGNYM

Saturday, December 6, 2025 12:46 PM

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Top Obama DEA Official Charged With Laundering Money For Mexican Drug Cartel

Friday, Dec 05, 2025 - 03:50 PM

A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official appointed as deputy chief of the Office of Financial Operations during the Obama administration - and who still holds a security clearance - was indicted on Friday on charges of agreeing to launder $12 million for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) - which was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February of this year.

Paul Campo, who oversaw the FBI's money laundering operations and resigned in January 2016 ahead of Trump's inauguration, laundered around $750,000 for the cartel by converting cash into cryptocurrency, and agreed to launder far more - totaling over $12 million, according to the indictment.

Campo's hoome was raided by federal agents on Thursday.

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SECOND

Saturday, December 6, 2025 5:58 PM

5 Excuses MAGA Makes for Its Toddler President

By Ed Kilgore | Dec 5, 2025

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/5-excuses-maga-makes-for-toddl
er-trump.html

Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/04/trump-presidency-chi
ld-renovations-entertainment-attention-00676183 Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.

Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.

But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree.

Martin is just scratching the surface here, of course. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.

But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:

Trolling the liberals
Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administ

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SIGNYM

Saturday, December 6, 2025 6:53 PM

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"Widespread Misconduct": Trump Admin Orders All Beneficiaries Of Nation's Largest DEI Program To Surrender Financial Records

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SECOND

Saturday, December 6, 2025 7:43 PM

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters," said Donald Trump. And so he did:

Pentagon Pete’s Claim Drug Boat Was Headed to U.S. Blows Up

By William Vaillancourt | Updated Dec 6, 2025

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-hegseths-claim-drug-boat-was-headed
-to-us-blows-up/

The Navy admiral who oversaw lethal strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in September told lawmakers that the vessel was not headed to the U.S., contradicting claims made by President Donald Trump.

Frank Bradley said in a Thursday briefing that the boat was heading to transfer drugs to a larger boat, which was bound for Suriname, CNN reported Friday, citing two sources with direct knowledge of his comments. According to the report, Bradley said the drugs could have ultimately ended up bound for the U.S. from Suriname, which warranted striking the boat.

Yet drug trafficking routes that go through Suriname are mainly for European markets, according to U.S. drug enforcement officials.

In a Truth Social post shortly after the strike, Trump, 79, wrote: “The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”

All 11 passengers were killed, including two survivors of the initial strike who were clinging to the wreckage for more than 40 minutes, The Atlantic reported. Sources told CNN that Bradley told lawmakers that the two individuals were waving at the air after the first strike, meaning they could have been surrendering.

Killing shipwrecked individuals who are surrendering is widely considered a war crime.

“The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military,” Democratic Reps. Jim Himes and Adam Smith said in a statement Thursday after Bradley’s briefing.

“Regardless of what one believes about the legal underpinnings of these operations, and we have been clear we believe they are highly questionable, this was wrong.”

Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, however, called them “righteous strikes.”

“These are narco-terrorists who are trafficking drugs that are destined for the United States to kill thousands of Arkansans and millions of Americans,” Cotton claimed. “I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over, so they could stay in the fight.”

The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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SIGNYM

Sunday, December 7, 2025 2:43 PM

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21 States Are At Risk Of Losing SNAP Funding Amid Fraud Investigation
Saturday, Dec 06, 2025 - 02:30 PM
Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,

The federal government said it would withhold Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program (SNAP) funds for states that do not report user data.

The news came from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins earlier this week, following months of requests and investigations into instances of fraud within the program.

Here’s what to know about the change to the nutrition program.
The Announcement

Rollins made the announcement on Dec. 2 during a White House cabinet meeting, saying that states that have not complied with the federal request have only a few days to fix the issue.

The USDA secretary said the administration “has begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states” next week ”until they comply.“

According to Rollins, 29 Republican-leaning states have already provided SNAP data to her department. However, 21 ”blue states continue to say no” to the federal request.

The federal response to the lack of cooperation comes months after an early May request by the administering department, calling on states to hand over data detailing how and to whom the taxpayer funds are distributed.

The USDA noted that the intent behind the request was to ensure that no fraud or abuse existed in the program, frequently referenced as food stamps.

“President Trump is rightfully requiring the federal government to have access to all programs it funds,” said Rollins, “and SNAP is no exception. For years, this program has been on autopilot, with no USDA insight into real-time data. The Department is focused on appropriate and lawful participation in SNAP, and today’s request is one of many steps to ensure SNAP is preserved for only those eligible.”

Of the 28 states that have sent the data, all except for North Carolina have Republican governors.
Billions at Stake

SNAP costs federal taxpayers around $100 billion per year, $94 billion of which goes to actual food benefits, and the rest is spent on administrative costs.

Administrative costs are currently shared by federal and state governments, with states covering roughly half of SNAP’s administrative expenses. That share is set to shrink soon, as the federal government plans to reduce the state contribution to 25 percent.

How much each state receives varies, as does the portion of the fund that goes to administrative costs. The state of California alone received more than $1.2 billion for SNAP administration fees, which was around 10 percent of it’s total SNAP funding allocation.

Florida received $84 million for administration alone, which was just over 1 percent of it’s total SNAP funding. However, Wyoming received less than $9 million for administration fees, which was 12 percent of its SNAP dollars received.

This means that in addition to the loss of nutrition support funding, billions that go to state administration fees will be lost for those states that refuse transparency requests from the Trump administration.

The administration will likely face legal hiccups, as the attorneys general from 21 states have already been the subject of a lawsuit over concerns that the states allegedly illegally blocked the authorized food aid to certain legal immigrants.
Current Fraud

Since the beginning of the USDA information gathering in May, there have been more than 120 individuals arrested for food stamp fraud, according to the agency’s report last month.

The USDA worked with the Office of the Inspector General, which has resulted in 63 convictions and fines and fees exceeding $16.5 million.

This is due to data from 29 states alone, which found that more than 180,000 deceased individuals were receiving food stamps, and another 500,000 people were getting twice as much as they should have been.

“We believe there’s even more fraud and abuse,” Rollins said following news of the fraud discovery.

She later added that “we

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