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 426 of 479

Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

The Democratic Party, Hollywood and the Legacy Media are the monkey with the gun.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

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6ix, you cut-and-paste the same comment with zero understanding. Here is another example of Trump randomly firing a machine gun in all directions. If he weren't a monkey, he would have carefully and thoughtfully done this either in January 2025 or 2017, but doing it yesterday shows he doesn't make sensible plans. His aim is chaos:

According to Trump, he is ending the Clean Air Act emissions standards and rules for cars and light trucks, power plants, and oil and gas industry facilities. Trump declared that he knows science better than any human scientist and he will end all those unscientific and unnecessary pollution rules.

“This is about as big as it gets,” President Donald Trump said at the White House with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding.”

Zeldin said all greenhouse gas emissions standards on light, medium and heavy duty vehicles that followed the endangerment finding have been eliminated.

If he were reading this, I say: "Very impressive, Mr. Trump. You are the smartest monkey in the room. You machine-gunned down all kinds of EPA rules yesterday. Next week, will more rules be shot down?"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/trump-epa-endangerment-finding-climate
-change-greenhouse-gas.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 MAGA Bubble Is Imploding

Americans aren’t buying Trumpist gaslighting about the economy

By Paul Krugman | Feb 13, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-maga-bubble-is-imploding


Source: Haver Analytics. US is S&P 500, Euro area S&P Euro 350.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s meltdown on Wednesday while being questioned the House Judiciary Committee was exceptional, even by this administration’s rock-bottom standards. Has any high-level official ever before shrieked at a member of Congress, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up, loser lawyer”?

Yet what truly amazed me was her demand that Democrats stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein because the Dow was above 50,000. This plumbed new depths of moral bankruptcy, effectively saying: “How dare you complain about child rape when the stock market is up?”

There was an unmistakable stench of desperation in Bondi’s tantrum. And it fooled no one. The cracks are showing, as some congressional Republicans have now voted against Trump’s tariffs, Justice Department lawyers are quitting en masse or just plain cracking up, and attempts to weaponize prosecutions keep failing.

Now Tom Homan says that the ICE surge in Minnesota will be wound down — an ignominious retreat if true — while Democrats are standing firm on refusing further DHS funding without significant reforms. And Bondi’s yelling isn’t making Epstein go away.

But let’s examine Bondi’s demand that Americans ignore the omni-shambles because stocks are up. It’s morally depraved, but what about the economics?

Yes, stock prices are up. As any economist can tell you, however, the stock market is a poor indicator of the economy’s overall health. Paul Samuelson famously quipped that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Furthermore, stock prices are up almost everywhere — and up more in other countries than they are in the United States. The chart at the top compares stock prices in the U.S. and in the euro area; since the latter is measured in euros, and the euro has risen against the dollar, Europe has substantially outperformed America.

And if we go beyond the stock market and look at what really matters to most Americans — affordability and jobs — the Trump economy isn’t delivering. Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Despite one good month, employment growth has shriveled. And it keeps getting more difficult to find a job.

Here’s one measure I find useful, the Conference Board’s “labor market differential” — the difference between the percentage of Americans saying that jobs are plentiful and the percentage saying that jobs are hard to find:

Source: The Conference Board via Haver Analytics

This is certainly not a great economy. It’s not even a healthy economy. And Americans are not buying the administration’s lies.

MAGA types constantly bash Joe Biden while deifying Trump. Yet it took only a year for Americans outside the Republican base to decide that Biden was actually a better president. Here are results from the latest YouGov poll:

Source: YouGov

That was fast. And it belies the conventional wisdom that still sees Trump’s 1.5 percentage point popular vote margin in 2024 — smaller than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016! — as marking a fundamental realignment of U.S. politics.

What actually happened in 2024 was that low-knowledge voters believed Trump when he promised to bring pric

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Why MAGA Wants You to Think Slavery Wasn’t That Bad

By Thomas Chatterton Williams | Feb 13, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/slavery-matt-walsh-1619-proj
ect/685982/

Matt Walsh would like you to know you’ve been lied to. Last month, the right-wing provocateur appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to discuss his new video series, Real History With Matt Walsh. “When you really start getting into it,” Walsh told Kelly, “you realize that, wow, they really lied about everything.”

He begins the series by examining the practice of chattel slavery, he said to Kelly, “because this is, we’re told, the original sin” of the United States. In Walsh’s account, the left believes that “America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood”; therefore progressives feel they have the “moral justification to just do whatever they want” to white people. Walsh intends to stop this. So in Real History, he relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States.

Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends. But the truest understanding of slavery doesn’t serve any political faction. Rather, it acknowledges the horrors of racial oppression while still allowing us to see beyond them.

In 2019, Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of The New York Times, reportedly described “The 1619 Project” to his staff as “the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken” by a newspaper. Despite its grand ambition, however, the project arrives at a narrow conclusion: “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

This argument, which received ample criticism from historians at the time, seems to have emerged from the authors’ commitment to the ideological mission of the “anti-racist” left. As Baquet himself reportedly said, a major goal of the project was not historical but contemporary: “to try to understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.” In reality, the project and its progressive defenders fed those forces rather than clarified them. Before Walsh could even finish explaining to Kelly why slavery occupies such a privileged place in his series, she cut in to provide an answer: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led “The 1619 Project,” wants people to believe that slavery is, in Kelly’s words, “the whole reason America was formed.”

At the end of Trump’s first term, the White House released The 1776 Report in response to the Times initiative. As the Princeton historian Matthew Karp noted in Harper’s, the document contains a “range of pseudo-patriotic distortions about slavery and the founding era.” Nonetheless, Karp observed, “the report’s authors celebrated Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, praised Reconstruction, and condemned the postbellum South’s descent into Jim Crow, ‘a system that was hardly better than slavery.’”

Whatever modicum of analytical balance that report exhibits is absent in Trump’s second term. Reinterpreting the history of slavery has given way to suppressing its memorialization entirely.

The Trump administration has viewed Juneteenth with particular disdain. Last year, the president used the occasion not to remember emancipation but to complain that America had too many holidays. In December, he ordered the National Park Service to stop allowing free entry on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Trump added Flag Day in their place, which falls on his own birthday.

Back in March, he strong-armed a host of institutions by issuing an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directs federally funded museums, monuments, and parks to remove materials that promote “corrosive ideology.” Last month, the park service obliged, eliminating an outdoor exhibit at

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RFK Jr. made promises to get his job as health secretary. He's broken many of them

February 13, 2026 5:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/13/nx-s1-5712721/rfk-jr-children-vaccines-
cdc-funding-autism-immunizations

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 Washington has become unrecognizable

The nation's capital and America's democracy have become shells of their former selves

By Brian Karem
White House columnist
Published February 13, 2026 9:15AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/13/trumps-washington-has-become-unrecogn
izable/

After several months of being away from Washington, I’d say I was shocked by what I saw upon my return to the White House — but the Trump administration doesn’t want me there and continues to fight my attempts to get into the briefing room. So, no: not shocked.

I’d say I was shocked by what I saw on Capitol Hill, but many of the loathsome legislators there long ago put decency and professionalism in its review mirror. Even young staffers, at least those who understand the concepts of the Constitution, are appalled by what they’ve seen since Donald Trump came back to town.

“It’s like all [members of Congress] want to do is to s**t in each other’s mouth,” I was told. “No one wants to work together to solve problems.”

And after two days of contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, Trump must be jealous. For once, since he returned to office, the president is not the center of attention. His staff, however, is overwhelmingly thankful for the respite. They know the danger of Trump talking. Besides, many members of Congress and Trump appointees are as shallow and demeaning as the president, so their rhetoric sounds the same.

We saw that this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed up on Tuesday to testify before House and Senate committees, and when Attorney General Pam Bondi — “the worst attorney general in history,” as a Republican staffer from Texas described her — appeared the following day before the House Judiciary Committee.

For three hours, Lyons had a hard time defending ICE actions in Minneapolis before a House oversight hearing on immigration enforcement. Across Capitol Hill, Lutnick floundered while testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing broadband funding and budget issues that ended up diving into the cancerous Jeffrey Epstein scandal following detailed revelations about the secretary’s connections to the convicted sex offender. Democrats, and even many Republicans, were left stunned when Lutnick admitted that he took his underage children and his wife to Epstein’s Caribbean island for lunch.

Still, nothing was as odd as Bondi’s performance, which was unprofessional and combative. She lashed out at legislators, telling them they had no right to accuse her of breaking the law, and called Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a “washed up loser lawyer.” Many Democrats and even some Republicans told me privately that her testimony will probably help the Democrats during the fall midterm elections.

But every one of Trump’s people so far this week have probably helped Democrats. Republicans are wallowing in overconfidence, ignoring reality and are their own worst enemies.

When a dog gets busy chasing a moving tire, it’s easy to miss the car attached to it until it is too late. That’s what the Republicans look like to me. And in the process, they’ve made the very city of Washington unrecognizable. At least that’s the thought that occurred to me as I walked in the snow to the White House, and then from Union Station to the Capitol and Supreme Court.

Trump has told us on numerous occasions how safe the District of Columbia is these days due to the presence of the National Guard and how he’s “cleaned up” the city. He’s told us it is safe to go to restaurants — “like never before” — and how people can walk the streets safely now.

Having lived in the area for the last 30 years, I can tell you that Washington has always been safe to travel through — especially near the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court and most dining establishments. Where there are pockets of poverty there is crime, but that’s not unlike any other large city.

When

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In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

The Democratic Party, Hollywood and the Legacy Media are the monkey with the gun.


Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Book Review: Trump's Ten Commandments, Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox

The Method Behind Trump’s Madness | Opinion

By Tom Rogers | Feb 13, 2026

https://www.newsweek.com/the-method-behind-trumps-madness-opinion-1149
2150

Every day seems to bring a new story epitomizing Donald Trump's norm-breaking behaviors, his narcissism, his tendency to make outrageous demands and his idea that all issues are about what personal gain he can wrestle from the situation.

The latest such news is that the president rescinded federal funding for a major tunnel infrastructure project that would vastly improve train commuting connections between New York and New Jersey. Trump has stated he would reinstate the funding if Penn Station, where the trains come into, was renamed for him. Oh, and by the way, Dulles Airport outside of Washington D.C. must be named for him as well. Clearly this demand reflects a super-sized egotism, but it is not all that surprising after Trump unilaterally put his name on the most significant national site honoring President John F. Kennedy.

To help make sense of stories like these, I want to focus this column on a soon-to-be published book about Donald Trump: Trump's Ten Commandments, which points out that in Trump's universe everything is about him and revolves around him—a god complex, thus the Biblically inspired title.
https://www.amazon.com/Trumps-Ten-Commandments-Strategic-Leadership-eb
ook/dp/B0G3DZ9TMQ
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Trumps-Ten-Commandments/Jeffrey
-Sonnenfeld/9781637635568

What makes the book such a fascinating read is not only its distillation of the Trump playbook down to ten clearly delineated and oft-repeated Trump behaviors, but the unique relationship of the writer to the president, which drives a lot of its insight and authoritativeness.

The author is Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management and head of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and the book is co-written by his associate Steven Tian. Having been a participant in a number of the institute's gatherings, I can attest first hand to the fact that Sonnenfeld is a completely unique figure in the business world—combining top academic expertise in leadership management with personal relationships with a vast array of CEOs and government leaders around the world - further combined with a highly refined understanding of politics, all packaged together with very substantial media savvy. Professor Sonnenfeld has also had many personal interactions with Trump over the course of Trump's business and political career, giving him a vantage point on the president's style no one else can occupy.

Sonnenfeld entered Trump's orbit as a media sparring partner when the TV show The Apprentice began. He believed the show was giving young viewers a horrendously inaccurate view of what real leadership is about. But Trump warmed to Sonnenfeld to the point that he offered him the presidency of Trump University. Very wisely, Sonnenfeld declined the offer. While Sonnenfeld admits to being charmed by Trump personally, he has become a significant organizer of business opposition to Trump's policy initiatives. Yet the book reads very objectively about how Trump returns to certain stratagems over and over again regardless of context, and by no means a set of policy rebuttals.

A recent column in the Daily Beast labeled Trump "a dangerous lunatic moron," devoid of any attributes that would indicate a rational thought process behind his actions. This is not an uncommon way of viewing the president. But as Sonnenfeld argues, dismissing Trump's strategic acumen is a serious mistake.

As the title indicates, Sonnenfeld and Tian's book identifies ten "commandments"—strategies to which Trump returns over and over again regardless of context. Three are worth highlighting here.

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