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 336 of 479
Quote:A Rogue Nation on the High Seas
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good luck taking Trump to court on this. It will make its way up to SCOTUS and it will be another loss for Democrats in Ted's court case thread.
And in the meantime this will be Democrats on the wrong side of yet another 80/20 issue that will be on full blast.
The People are sick of your bullshit. You're finished.
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The Democrats are the party of Murder.
Trump is treating the military like his personal mercenaries.
By Tom Nichols | September 19, 2025, 10:02 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/rogue-nation-high-se
as/684272/
Donald Trump is being cagey about how many people he’s ordered the U.S. Navy to kill on the high seas. The official toll from American military strikes on two boats suspected of running drugs from Venezuela is now 14, but a few days ago, Trump teased the possibility that a third boat had been “knocked off,” presumably on his orders.
The Trump administration’s justification for these strikes, such as it is, seems to be that any shipment of drugs connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a direct threat to the United States. These “narco-terrorists” may therefore be destroyed on sight, and without the fuss of asking permission from the U.S. Congress. This argument reflects the president’s childlike but dangerous understanding of his role as commander in chief. The United States, once the leader of a global system of security and economic cooperation, is now acting like a rogue state on the high seas.
The White House position is wrong on many levels. I taught the rules and theories that govern the use of force to military officers at the Naval War College for many years, and every summer for two decades to civilians at Harvard; I always reminded students that international law and traditions require states to show that they are acting in some form of self-defense, either in response to an attack or to forestall more violence. Moreover, American law does not permit the president to designate people as terrorists and then declare open season on them in defiance of international agreements and without any involvement from Congress. Perhaps Trump’s people are watching too many Tom Clancy movies, but he cannot legally send the Navy out onto the world’s oceans as though they are seagoing sheriffs with satchels full of death warrants.
No one in the White House seems to care very much about the rules that govern killing people, at home or abroad, but these rules actually exist. International law allows interdicting contraband—drugs, weapons, captured human beings—under many circumstances, and countries execute such missions legally every day. These activities require great care to limit the danger to the military and the loss of civilian life, including diligently identifying suspect vessels, warning them to stop, and sometimes boarding them to identify and seize their cargo.
Military ships can engage these targets in combat under limited conditions. If they open fire on American vessels, for example, no one would deny that they’re signing their own death warrant. But in general, when states want to initiate the use of force in the international arena, their arguments are subject to what international law calls “the Caroline test,” an 1837 case that led the U.S. to agree that to employ force, a threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This is an elegant way of saying that nations can use violence in self-defense when they have neither the time nor ability to do anything else. What constitutes an “imminent” threat is an ongoing debate among international lawyers, but the recent Venezuela strikes do not appear to fall even remotely under any of this doctrine.
To understand just how far off the rails Trump has taken the military, imagine an alternate example. If the
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The actual trajectory of the Russian summer offensive and the strategic air war has made claims for Ukrainian inevitable defeat seem decidedly parochial. As such, it was interesting to see both Trump and General Keith Kellogg this week speak about Russian losses (in Trump’s case) and Ukrainian successes (in Kellogg’s).
During a press conference during Trump’s visit to the UK, he spoke of losses being disproportionately on the Russian side. The “he” below is Putin.
"He's killing a lot of people and losing more people than he's killing himself."
"Frankly, Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than Ukrainian soldiers."
Kellogg spoke even more about Russian failure. He said in Kyiv that in August when Trump asked him about the state of the war, Kellogg was clear that Russia was not winning.
Btw, I take nothing at face value that either Trump or Kellogg say. What is interesting, however, is that they are moving away from the Russian steamroller, Ukraine has no cards, narrative. It might be a sign that the intelligence that they are getting is rather different than it was earlier.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-151-the-most-rev
ealing
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Housing costs have also surged, with the annual income needed to buy a median-priced home now reaching $114,000 — a 70 percent jump since 2019.
The labor market is also showing strain. Employers added just 22,000 jobs in August, following a loss of 13,000 in June — the first monthly drop since late 2020. The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent, the highest since 2021, as businesses adjusted to tariff-related disruptions.
To make matters worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down job growth from April 2024 to March 2025 by 911,000 jobs, the largest downward revision on record.
Trump has sought to pin economic woes on his predecessor, saying the U.S. “went to hell” under Joe Biden and that his administration inherited “an inflation nightmare.” But polls suggest the message is losing traction. A new Cygnal survey shows more Americans now blame Republicans than Democrats for rising inflation.
Affluent Voters See Economy Differently
However, polling suggests that this economic uncertainty may not be a major concern for the wealthiest voters.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/donald-trump-s-approval-rating
-suddenly-shifts-with-richest-americans/ar-AA1MZOR7
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America.
I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr made against networks, involving a little-used doctrine called “news distortion,” show how easy it is to weaponize vaguely worded statutes and the executive’s discretionary powers against the president’s enemies. Such tools can also be used to reward friends — to provide regulatory favors, like merger approvals and exemptions from tariffs — who toe a politically correct line.
This is how authoritarianism has taken root in other democracies, most notably Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. And from the get-go, President Donald Trump’s second term had been moving the United States down this road. But for much of the time his efforts appeared too haphazard and poorly planned to produce a consolidated authoritarian regime — meaning one that could durably compromise the basic ability of its opponents to contest elections under reasonably fair conditions.
But in the past few weeks, a series of developments — most notably, but not exclusively, the authoritarian energies unleashed after Charlie Kirk’s death — have revealed a disturbingly credible policy pathway to power consolidation. We can now see how American Orbánism could take full root before the 2028 elections. We now know what a Trump-led authoritarian state in America would look like — and how we would get there from here.
Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.
More at This Is How Trump Ends Democracy
https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk
The past week has revealed Trump’s road map to one-party rule. Will Americans let him follow it?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Continuing from above.
Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.
First, using hiring and firing powers to purge career civil servants from key agencies, like the Justice Department, and erode the traditional barriers preventing undue political influence on law enforcement and regulatory decisions. We saw this in the DOGE cuts, in the appointment of political hacks like Carr and Pam Bondi to top positions, and (most recently) Trump’s move to fire a federal prosecutor who refused to file politically motivated charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Second, using the power of these newly Trumpified agencies to target dissent in civil society — a broadening of the assaults on Ivy League universities. This would include following through on threats to use racketeering charges against liberal NGOs and going after other prominent critics the way they went after Kimmel.
Third, bullying and bribing large corporations until significant economic power is concentrated in the hands of regime allies dependent on the president’s goodwill for their survival. To a degree, this is already happening — see Trump’s habits of granted tariff exemptions to connected companies or using the threat of antitrust enforcement to bend CBS to its will. In an authoritarian America, such politicization would be expanded and deepened to the point where any corporation that crossed the White House would expect to pay a crippling financial cost.
Fourth, turn this accumulated power against the political opposition — turning elections into facially free contests where, in fact, Democrats face enormously unfair hurdles (and would likely be unable to govern even if they managed to succeed). This began with a nationwide push for mid-cycle redistricting, but would require further steps (like turning the Justice Department investigation into the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue into actual criminal charges).
At this point in the Trump administration, only the first has been accomplished to any significant degree. The efforts in other areas have been of limited effectiveness, stymied both by the courts and the Trump team’s incompetence.
But recently, and especially in the immediate wake of Kirk’s death, the administration has taken startling new swings in the second and third areas. If these efforts succeed, the fourth will become a live possibility: That is, we could be living in a country whose elections are no longer free and fair in any meaningful sense.
There is still plenty of time to prevent this future. Much depends on whether the Trump administration can get better at the nuts and bolts of lawfare, developing tactics that avoid legal hurdles or provoking a potent backlash. Acts of courage in Congress, the courts, the streets, and even corporate boardrooms could stymie Trump until at least the midterms.
But the risk of authoritarian consolidation is real and growing. Now that the endgame is clear, it’s time for all of us to start thinking about how to stop it.
More at https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes
His demand came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of his most-reviled adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey.
President Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at the Justice Department.
By Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman, Devlin Barrett | Sept. 20, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/trump-justice-departmen
t-us-attorneys.html
President Trump demanded on Saturday that his attorney general move quickly to prosecute figures he considers his enemies, the latest blow to the Justice Department’s tradition of independence.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post addressed to “Pam,” meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Mr. Trump named James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California; and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, saying he was reading about how they were “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”
Asked later by reporters about his message for Ms. Bondi, Mr. Trump said, “They have to act. They have to act fast.”
Even for a president who has shattered the traditional norms of maintaining distance from the Justice Department, Mr. Trump’s unabashedly public and explicit orders to Ms. Bondi were an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal.
His demands came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of the adversaries he most reviles, Ms. James and Mr. Comey, showing how far Mr. Trump has gone in exerting personal control over the Justice Department and breaching the longstanding norm about keeping politics at a distance from law enforcement.
In a different social media post later on Saturday, Mr. Trump defended Ms. Bondi, saying she was doing a “GREAT job,” but that she needed a “tough prosecutor” in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Erik S. Siebert, was abruptly forced from his post atop the U.S. attorney’s office on Friday. Mr. Trump said he would nominate Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president who was on his personal legal team, to fill the role.
Ms. Halligan, who spent much of her career as an insurance lawyer, has never been a prosecutor.
Mr. Siebert’s exit deepened troubling questions that have arisen in recent months about the politicization of the Justice Department’s supposedly self-governing satellite offices.
But it also raised a blunter and more immediate issue: Which of the nation’s U.S. attorneys might be next?
Beyond their efforts to push out Mr. Siebert, whose inquiries into Ms. James and Mr. Comey effectively fizzled out, administration officials have also ramped up pressure against Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr. Trump: Mr. Schiff, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr. Trump’s allies; and John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.
Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.
Mr. Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys, who oversee offices in 93 federal d
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Quote:Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time
Originally posted by second:
Trump Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes
His demand came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of his most-reviled adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey.
The president is gambling that he can consolidate authority before the public turns too sharply against him.
By David Frum | September 21, 2025, 11:49 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-bondi-edva/684
292/
President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator. If he loses the race, he will be pulled ever deeper below—and the escalator keeps moving faster against him.
Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?
As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.
Trump’s hold on power is indeed loosening. His standing with the voting public is quickly deteriorating. Grocery prices jumped in August 2025 at the fastest speed since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation in 2022. Job growth has stalled to practically zero.
Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of higher tariffs, Trump’s signature economic move. His administration’s attack on vaccines for young children is even more unpopular. This year has brought the highest number of measles cases since the Clinton administration introduced free universal vaccination for young children in 1993. Parents may be rightly shocked and angry.
Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted, “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure. As of early August, nearly two-thirds of Americans regarded Trump as corrupt, 45 percent as “very corrupt.” More than 60 percent think the Trump administration is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case. Almost 60 percent regard Bondi personally responsible for the cover-up.
The MAGA project in many ways resembles one of former businessman Donald Trump’s dangerously leveraged real-estate deals. A comparatively small number of fanatics are heart-and-soul committed. Through them, Trump controls the Republican apparatus and the right-wing media world, which allows him to do things like gerrymander states where he is in trouble (50 percent of Texans now disapprove of Trump, while only 43 percent approve) or wield the enforcement powers of the Federal Communications Commission to silence on-air critics. But overleveraged structures are susceptible to external shocks and internal mistakes.
Trump in his first term mostly avoided screwing up the e
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A New War Department Policy
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/21/department-of-war-pentagon-press-f
repete-hegseth/
Under new rules, the Department of War said it would forbid reporters from gathering any information that had not been approved for release and would revoke press credentials from any journalists who did not obey.
A 17-page document laying out the new guidelines says that journalists who wish to report from the Pentagon must sign agreements restricting their movement in the building and stipulating that they will not obtain or possess unauthorized material.
“DoW remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust,” the department’s Orwellian memorandum states.
One defense official called the new policy a “mockery of American ideals.” Another likened it to policies seen in some of the most repressive and unstable nations on the planet. “The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic not the United States,” that official told The Intercept. A third said it was Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest assault on accountability, referencing his earlier efforts to kneecap the military’s lawyers.
Agreeing not to print what the government doesn’t want you to print, is propaganda, not journalism.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Hey, Let’s Undermine America’s Technology, Education and Research!
H-1B visas: The latest front in a campaign of destruction
Paul Krugman | Sep 22, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hey-lets-undermine-americas-technol
ogy
It often seems as if Donald Trump and his minions are engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine America’s preeminence in the world.
We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.
We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.
And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.
H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.
The rollout of Trump’s new $100,000 fee for holders of H-1B followed what has become a familiar pattern. First, without warning, the White House announced a drastic policy change that, on its face, looked catastrophic for many workers and businesses. As NBC put it, the announcement set off “panic and chaos” among workers, companies and governments. Businesses and universities advised their foreign workers not to leave the country, because they might not be able to return to the United States. In at least one case, large numbers of passengers demanded that they be allowed to get off a plane about to depart San Francisco for Dubai.
Then — a day late and $100,000 short — the administration scrambled to limit the damage, announcing that this was a one-time fee that didn’t apply to those holding previously issued visas. Needless to say, the initial proclamation didn’t state any of these later clarifications. Magnifying the chaos, the clarifications were announced by posts on X — which does not, as far as I know, constitute an official channel for statements of U.S. policy.
And there is an outstanding legal question: does Trump even have the legal right to impose these fees? Probably not, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. The lawsuits are being filed as I write. However, it’s all too possible that a supine Supreme Court will let him get away with hammering yet another nail in coffin of the American rule of law.
The chaos of the announcement aside, Trump’s new policy on H-1B visas is a disastrous move. It will damage American leadership in the network of sectors — tech, education and research — that has driven our economic success for decades. And it will probably backfire even in its stated goal, which is to create more good jobs for native-born workers.
Normal economic analysis suggests that allowing highly educated foreigners to work in the United States is highly beneficial to the U.S. economy. Most directly, these workers add to America’s GDP. Consequently, highly educated foreign workers increase U.S. tax revenue, thereby helping to pay for Social Security and Medicare without claiming benefits. Moreover, by increasing the supply of high-education labor relative to less educated workers, they also help mitigate income inequality.
There is an additional bonus arising from the fact that H-1B workers are largely employed in the tech industry. For tech is an industry characterized by strong “positive externalities”: Every successful company helps create an environment favorable to other companies. As a result, more high-tech comp
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After cuts to food stamps, Trump administration ends government’s annual report on hunger in America
By PAUL WISEMAN
Updated 5:01 PM CDT, September 20, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ending-america-hunger-report-snap-cut
s-750f90757f50ab2d8bc97dfca5a917dd
The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”
The decision comes two and a half months after President Donald Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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