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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Strongmen Can Fail if We Act with Joyce Vance Timothy Snyder
Jun 23, 2026
Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration, to discuss what he sees as the central challenge facing American democracy: the danger of treating authoritarianism as something that will simply pass on its own.
Tim started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a form of collaboration, because it delays the public response necessary to defend democratic institutions. Tim also rejected the idea that democracy inevitably self-corrects, warning that there is no political “pendulum” that guarantees a return to normalcy. Tim stressed that democracies survive. only when citizens actively participate in shaping their future.
The rest of the discussion explored everything from the aftermath of the Iran war to threats against democratic norms at home, including debates over executive power, habeas corpus, voting rights, and the Supreme Court. Tim emphasized, regarding Iran, that authoritarian movements are often fueled by the illusion that force can solve complex problems, while history repeatedly shows that violence creates consequences its architects cannot control.
To me, the most striking part of the conversation centered on what comes next. Tim urged Democrats and democracy advocates to think beyond simply winning the next election. Success, Tim said, requires a broad coalition, a compelling vision of the future, and a willingness to pursue ambitious democratic reforms—from voting rights and anti-corruption measures to structural changes that strengthen democratic institutions.
Throughout the conversation, both Tim and Joyce returned to a common theme: history is not a script. The future remains unwritten. Whether America emerges stronger from this moment depends not on inevitability, but on the choices citizens make now.
As Tim and Joyce put it in their closing messages, the answer is always action.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Meltdown
One day that captures how Trump has gone from unpredictable to chaotic
By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman | June 25, 2026, 7:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-congress-iran-midte
rms/687704/
A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.
At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.
This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.
Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court de
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Trump’s plan to run a bank
What’s next for the Trump family crypto company? More ways to turn a profit.
By Dustin DeSoto and Sean Rameswaram | June 26, 2026, 6:00 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/493284/trump-witkoff-crypto-bank-world-li
berty-financial-uae
In the almost year and a half since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has found plenty of ways to enrich himself and his family and friends. But one scheme in particular, a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial, is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Trump, along with his real-estate-buddy-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff and both his and Witkoff’s sons, launched World Liberty a few months before the 2024 election.
Then, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family had acquired a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump was inaugurated, netting the Trump family at least $187 million.
Now, World Liberty is on the verge of being approved for a national trust bank charter, NOTUS reported last week. If it goes through, the company would be able to issue its USD1 “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar — more freely, without having to go through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, of course, the Trump family would receive a cut through transaction fees.
In addition to the straightforward potential for presidential self-enrichment, critics argue that the charter application itself is a conflict of interest; the application is being reviewed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leadership is appointed by the president. (Trump has said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, while Witkoff has divested outright.)
It’s all fairly complex — so to sort through what we know about Trump’s crypto enterprise and where it could be headed next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Zach Everson of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. Everson is research director of the group’s Trump Accountability Project.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Zach, you’ve followed the Trump crypto business. What is happening here?
What we’re seeing here is making what happened in [Trump’s] first term look ethical. There are essentially three steps: First, in September 2024, shortly before the election, the Trumps and the Witkoffs launched World Liberty Financial. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial: a “stablecoin” and a crypto token.
Now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government.
What is the Trump stablecoin and who has invested in it?
USD1 is a stablecoin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one-to-one by reserves. Think of it as a bank loan, only going the opposite way. You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You’re giving US dollars and they’re giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they’re sitting on your US dollars, they’re investing them in Treasuries and they are keeping the interest.
In spring of 2025 it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security adviser of the UAE had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using US dollars and was investing them in [the crypto exchange] Binance. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stablecoins out there, by way of the UAE national security adviser directing this money towards them.
That’s a lot of what this banking trust license would allow them to do. Right now, the reserves have to be held someplace else — they can’t hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can’t issue their own [crypto] coin in the United States. It has
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and just then she found her 'concerns' the same MSNBC Host who laughed at Republicans attacked, Laughs as She Reports Trump Headed To Jail, mocked Trump getting shot, laughed at violence from the Left on the Rightwings, Schmidt has been inside the machine works for MSNBC and NBC News as a national security contributor, Nicole Wallace a Socialist propagandist and a self-described LGBT fanatic and "Fauci groupie".
she Hates Trump but is concerned about Buttigieg
,
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the divide will continue...media says you must pick your fanatical political teams
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The 13 Steps of a Trump Fiasco
The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates.
By Charlie Warzel | June 26, 2026, 3:31 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/reflecting-pool-america
-250-trump/687716/
If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.
This is the kind of stuff that AI might spit out if you offered a chatbot a lazy prompt for political satire. The shambolic spectacle has captivated the nation, despite the fact that the Obama administration spent $34 million and 18 months renovating the pool with mixed results. The fallout has reached New York Times push-alert status and become grist for the meme and culture-war mills online. Moreover, Poolgate seems to be bothering Trump more than past fiascoes, which is notable given that he’s particularly embattled at the moment and staring down a defeat in Iran, low poll numbers, and a poor outlook for the midterms. He can’t stop posting about the ordeal on Truth Social, accusing unnamed saboteurs of vandalism. At the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, he ranted about the pool.
Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle is, by definition, a national embarrassment. But America is no stranger to self-inflicted humiliation these days. (See: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet to Trump.) Why, then, is Trump crashing out so hard about the Reflecting Pool? Why does it stand out as the enduring metaphor for an incompetent administration that can’t stop providing enduring metaphors of its own incompetence?
Some reasons are obvious. As my colleague Jonathan Chait notes, uncontrolled algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial are lower stakes and, frankly, much funnier than, say, a war, a self-dealing cryptocurrency scheme, or the destruction of a wing of the White House. (One photo in particular gets me: Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.) Lately, the saga has taken a more serious turn: The National Park Service alleges that the liner of the pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor earlier this month, causing damage to the pool’s foam sealant. Trump has claimed that at least six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for damaging the pool, and a spokesperson from the Interior Department reiterated to me today that “there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed.” According to a report yesterday by MS Now, public records show that only David Hearn, a former Olympic canoer, was arrested. (Hearn has said he was touching a floating piece of paint that had peeled off the pool.)
The spectacle has also been straightforwardly ridiculous, such as when Park Service workers were photographed dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the pool one at a time to quell the algae. But Poolgate is something more—a textbook example of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a way that one can explore the anatomy of Trump debacles, which tend to unfold in a (roughly) 13-step process. The Reflecting Pool drama is not all the way through this process yet, but I’d bet good money we’ll get there. It goe
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Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=67619
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
CN-Fucking-N: Takeaways: Supreme Court hands Trump massive wins on immigration agenda
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/takeaways-supreme-court-hands-tru
mp-massive-wins-on-immigration-agenda/ar-AA26xZqV
You hear that? Straight from CNN.... MASSIVE.
And that is now SET IN STONE, BABY!
How long have I been predicting all of this now, losers? I know it was probably after the 2024 Election, but I can't be sure about that.
Stay Tuned.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY more incoming.
You lose again. You will always lose. You are losers.
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... Hey... That reminds me...
Haven't really been keeping up on politics for 2 or 3 days, and I was just wondering if we ever got that whole Reflecting Pool thing sorted out yet, or what?
That Trump is a big fucking idiot, huh losers?
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... And enjoy your Democratic Socialist picks that are going to destroy the city and state of New York.
You were warned.
Now suffer the consequences.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Trump knows his Trumptards can't remember the previous scandals. There is a new one every week, forcing the older scandals out of memory.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.
A Watergate Every Week
J. D. Vance contends that the scandal would be “a 12-hour news story” today. He’s probably correct, but the lesson isn’t what he claims.
By David A. Graham | June 29, 2026, 7:01 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/vance-watergate-news-c
ycle-comments/687742/
Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
For most people, “cynical asshole” would seem pejorative, but perhaps Vance meant it as something to aspire to. Late last week, the vice president visited the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, California, and quipped, “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”
Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.” (As the journalist Ed Kilgore notes, the same revisionism has been peddled by the Vance-allied propagandist Christopher Rufo.)
Once again, Vance is right to draw a comparison but takes the wrong lesson. Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.
More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now sta
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The Supreme Court just came one vote away from a constitutional catastrophe
The 5-4 vote in the birthright citizenship case is a warning that all of US law is in terrible danger.
By Ian Millhiser | Jun 30, 2026, 12:00 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/culture/493694/supreme-court-birthright-citizenshi
p-trump-barbara
No question in US law is clearly or more firmly settled than the question of whether people born in the United States are citizens of this country. The Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
“All persons” means all persons. And, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed on Tuesday, the amendment’s limited exception for people not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States refers only to the small subset of people, like the children of ambassadors, who are not bound by US law at all.
And yet, the decision upholding birthright citizenship, known as Trump v. Barbara, was only 5 to 4, a shocking near-miss that leaves the door open to further challenges if future appointees pull the Supreme Court further to the right.
While Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the extraordinary claim that the Constitution’s meaning has changed because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868,” he ultimately concluded that a federal statute prevents Trump from canceling people’s citizenship. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
Still, that’s four votes against reading the Constitution according to its unambiguous text. And it’s four votes for overruling a Supreme Court opinion that’s been on the books since the 19th century.
Barbara is the most alarming decision that the Court has handed down since it declared that Trump is allowed to commit crimes in 2024. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
And, if not for the Trump immunity decision, the dissenting justices’ opinions in Barbara would be the gravest judicial attack on the rule of law since the Court upheld Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214
And that means that, if Donald Trump gets to replace just one member of the Barbara majority, the United States enters a very dark place.
The majority opinion in Barbara is a straightforward application of existing law
When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country, announced that decision, he said that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
It’s not just that the Constitution is clear. The Supreme Court also held more than a century ago, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that the Constitution means what it says. The question in Barbara, which was whether Trump can simply cancel the citizenship of people born in the US, may be the easiest question that has reached the justices in anyone’s lifetime.
The majority opinion in Barbara was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all three of his Democratic colleagues, plus Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is fairly short, clocking in at 26 pages, and it faithfully recites this orthodox view of the Fourteenth Amendment and its history.
As Roberts explains, early US citizenship rules derived from the English common law, which held that children born within the King’s “dominions” were “natural-born subject[s]” of that King and thus were citizens. This rule prevailed in the United States until the Supreme Court’s “odious decision” in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that “all those descended from slaves” were not citizens.
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in large part to overrule Dred Scott and to restore the English rule. And what of the amendment’s exception for persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the
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The Trump Vibe Shift Was Just a Mirage
The Vibe Has Shifted Back
By David Wallace-Wells | June 29, 2026
Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.
A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.
It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.
The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.
But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.
Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.
Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and
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