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 462 of 479
Pogroms, American Style
Paul Krugman / Jun 1, 2026 at 7:20 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pogroms-american-style
There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.
If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.
To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”
As the article explains,
For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.
According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,
has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee
So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:
Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.
So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?
Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.
We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.
Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.
According to one detainee, a guard told him that
It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.
Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurat
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Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?
As his signature efforts falter, the president is pleading with his critics to pipe down and pay less attention.
By David A. Graham | June 1, 2026, 5:59 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-iran-kennedy-cen
ter-weaponization-fund/687395/
For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.
Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.
The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.
Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.
Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.
Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the cent
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Two Senators Just Blew Up Trump’s Boat-Strike Justifications
Sens. Kaine and Paul say that the military’s targeting criteria don’t include the presence of drugs or arms.
By John Haltiwanger | June 2, 2026, 4:05 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/02/kaine-paul-rubio-trump-drug-boat-
strike-justification-latin-america/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921
For months, the Trump administration has justified carrying out lethal military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific by asserting that the United States is targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists” transporting illicit drugs that kill Americans. But two U.S. senators say that, according to classified briefings they’ve received, the U.S. military doesn’t require a boat to have drugs or weapons on board to be targeted in a deadly strike.
It’s a stunning revelation that, if true, raises huge new questions about the administration’s already controversial campaign and could undermine the White House’s public rationale for the deadly strikes.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Republican Sen. Rand Paul made the claims during a Tuesday Senate hearing where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying. During his questioning of Rubio, Kaine said that he knows what the administration’s targeting criteria for the boat strikes are because of briefings he’s attended but that he could not publicly share that information because it’s classified. However, he said that he didn’t think he was prohibited from sharing what’s not included in the criteria.
“Here’s one that’s not so obvious, and that surprised me,” Kaine said. “There’s evidence of narcotics on the boat—that is not a targeting criteria.”
Kaine, who said there are “three elements” to the targeting criteria but did not offer specifics, said this struck him as “odd” given the Trump administration “always announced this is against narcotraffickers, we’ve attacked narcotraffickers.”
Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, told Kaine that he was not involved in conversations on the targeting criteria because “those are largely legal decisions.”
“Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,” Rubio said. “There have been strikes that they’ve walked away from, because it doesn’t meet the criteria, or because there’s doubt.”
Kaine did not dispute that the strikes met the targeting criteria, but he repeatedly emphasized how notable it was that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria.” He then encouraged his colleagues to “get the same briefing I’ve got, take a look at the strike files, you’ll be as surprised as I am.”
The fact that evidence of the presence of narcotics is not listed “is very contradictory to the administration’s public messaging and the way that they have framed Operation Southern Spear,” said a Senate source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.
The White House, Defense Department, and Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kaine has been among the most vocal critics of the strikes on alleged drug boats, among other military actions taken by U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term, and he has decried them as illegal. The strikes have not been authorized by Congress. But congressional lawmakers have so far failed in various efforts to prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes, which are also linked to the military operation in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Top legal experts have also contended that the strikes violate both domestic and international law and that drug trafficking does not constitute grounds for the use of lethal military force. Counterterrorism experts have also underscored that drug traffickers, while dangerous, should not
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You have no desire to pay income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You're goddamned right.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:You are Trump, in a smaller package. He doesn't pay taxes. He doesn't work. All Trumptards I know strive to be like you and Trump. Some can't go to your extreme behavior because there are others around them who occasionally force them to be better than their worst selves.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You have no desire to pay income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You're goddamned right.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Trump Has Given Up
No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge
Paul Krugman | Jun 03, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-has-given-up
Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.
Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.
The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.
But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.
For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.
Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”
The Times goes on to note that These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.
How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?
Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.
Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte concocted false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:6ix, there is no ownership of a thread. And you and Trump are the most anti-American Trumptards in America, neither of you paying your taxes, and both of you on the side of evil as blatantly as were the Confederate slave-owners.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Trump’s New ‘Forced Labor’ Tariffs Are a Fig Leaf
The new import duties are “a solution in search of a problem.”
By Keith Johnson, a staff writer at Foreign Policy covering geoeconomics and energy.
June 4, 2026, 12:04 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/04/trump-forced-labor-tariffs-ustr-t
rade-section-301/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921
The Trump administration this week unveiled its latest plan to hike tariffs, this time focused on the ostensible harms that the prevalence of forced labor in global supply chains do to U.S. commerce.
The latest action would levy tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 59 countries and the European Union (making up 99 percent of all U.S. trade), all of whom, the Trump administration says, are lax about regulating forced or compulsory labor in their supply chains.
But every trade expert and lawyer understands that the latest use of Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act—even more than the use this spring of Section 301 to combat “excess capacity” in other economies—is simply another way for U.S. President Donald Trump to levy tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping global tariffs earlier this year.
“The ‘findings’ are in many ways what many of us expected: an excuse to levy across-the-board tariffs,” said Inu Manak, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Why not just target tariffs on those specific products where forced labor is present? It seems to be a solution in search of a problem.”
What is especially noteworthy about the latest broadside from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) against trade is how unsubstantiated it is, as was made clear during days of hearings earlier this year, written comments by affected countries and industries, and the USTR’s own tortured report on its “findings.”
In a nutshell, the USTR claims that no other country polices the import of goods that may have been made using forced or compulsory labor the way the United States does, and that that surely means that U.S. companies are being harmed somehow, either being disadvantaged as exports or hurt by imports into the U.S. economy. It just can’t say exactly how.
“The effects of unfair competition from forced labor goods on the sales, revenues, exports, and profitability of U.S. producers are evident but may be difficult to distinguish from other factors or discern in data,” the USTR wrote in its final determination.
The argument the USTR makes is that countries that use compulsory labor sell their goods at lower cost into markets that don’t police the provenance of imports, thereby crowding out higher-priced U.S. imports. At the same time, the USTR argues that companies in those economies then export their own stuff to the United States, adding to the woes of beleaguered U.S. firms. It pointed to a range of possible examples including tobacco from Malawi, frozen beef from Brazil, and rice from Myanmar as unfairly competing with U.S. products.
The overarching head-scratcher with the new tariffs is that the USTR said in its final report that the cost of compliance for U.S. firms with provisions meant to trace supply chains for any evidence of forced labor amounts to the equivalent of a 2.5 percent tariff, and yet proposes a tariff four to five times higher as a remedy.
But trade and labor experts point to a number of other problems with the latest batch of tariffs.
For starters, the entire premise is that the U.S. approach to regulating the import of products m
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Trump’s attorney general pick has exactly one qualification
Todd Blanche passed his loyalty test to Trump.
By Ian Millhiser | Jun 4, 2026, 11:55 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/490959/todd-blanche-attorney-general-trum
p-goon
In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, arrived at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked for a tour. Though he was initially let inside the facility’s gate, he was soon confronted by about a dozen federal law enforcement officers and asked to leave. And so he did.
For a moment, that seemed like it would be the end of this incident, but then one of the officers had a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows this officer turning to his fellow law enforcers after the call and informing them, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.”
That deputy attorney general was Todd Blanche, who is now the acting leader of the Department of Justice. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Blanche to become the Senate-confirmed attorney general of the United States.
The practical stakes of this nomination are fairly low. Federal law provides that if the attorney general’s job is vacant, “the Deputy Attorney General may exercise all the duties of that office.” And the Senate already confirmed Blanche as deputy AG (or “DAG” as the job is known within the DOJ). So, Blanche has already been leading the Justice Department since former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s exit in April, and, one way or another, he will continue to do so.
But Trump’s decision to nominate Blanche reveals the president’s confidence in a man who has distinguished himself solely by his willingness to act as Trump’s toady. If he’s officially confirmed, that is not likely to change.
Blanche is Trump’s goon
Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer before he arrived at the Justice Department. As DAG, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s criminal investigations and prosecutions, including the DOJ’s 93 regional US Attorneys’ offices and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.
That means that Blanche’s involvement in the Baraka arrest wasn’t an isolated incident — at a hearing formally dismissing the charges against Baraka, a federal magistrate judge scolded the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Blanche was the senior Justice Department executive overseeing political prosecutions targeting a wide range of Trump’s perceived enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump reportedly decided to remove Blanche’s predecessor, Bondi, in part due to the president’s belief that Bondi “was not moving forcefully enough against the White House’s supposed political enemies.” Since taking over Bondi’s job duties, Blanche appears to have worked hard to reassure Trump that he will not make the same mistake.
Although a federal court dismissed the first round of federal charges against Comey, the Blanche-led department reindicted Comey for posting a picture of seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47.” “86” is restaurant slang often used to say that an item should be removed or is unavailable. “47” is a reference to Trump, the 47th US president.
A message saying that the sitting president should be removed is obviously protected by the First Amendment, but Blanche’s Justice Department claims that the former FBI director was threatening Trump’s life.
Similarly, under Blanche’s leadership, the Justice Department reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, a magazine writer who won $88.3 million in damages against Trump after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Blanche’s primary qualification for the attorney general job, in other words, appears to be his eagerness to use the awesome power of the Department of Justice as a weapon against people who have previously slighted or fought Donald Trump.
Blanche
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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