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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US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency: ‘It’s catastrophic’
"We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion."
https://grist.org/politics/forest-service-firings-decimate-already-und
erstaffed-agency/
“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Destruction of Canada begins tomorrow
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 5:34 am
https://jabberwocking.com/destruction-of-canada-begins-tomorrow/
Donald Trump plans to levy 25% tariffs across the board on Canada tomorrow:
The result, an overwhelming majority of economists agree, would be inflation and supply disruption in the United States, while Canadian industries could face large-scale layoffs.
Whole factories will shut down:
Because 25 percent is far higher than the profit margins on cars and trucks, as well as the parts used to make them, industry executives predict that parts makers would soon stop shipping and factories would quickly close in all three countries, laying off thousands of workers.
“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last month.
Need more details?
Anderson Economic Group, a consulting firm in East Lansing, Mich., estimates that tariffs of 25 percent would add $1,000 to $4,000 to the price of a new vehicle, and as much as $10,000 if manufacturers are unable to take steps to reduce the impact.
....[John] Elkann acknowledged that the tariffs could make a turnaround harder for Stellantis. About a third of its highly profitable Ram pickups are assembled in a plant in Saltillo, Mexico. It also makes two Jeep models at a second Mexican plant, in Toluca. It makes Chrysler Pacifica minivans at a plant in Windsor, Ontario, and is scheduled to begin making the Dodge Charger in the same factory this year. A second plant, in Brampton, Ontario, is being retooled, with plans to make Jeeps there when it reopens.
Needless to say, this was all encouraged by the USMCA treaty Trump himself signed in 2018 and called "the single greatest agreement ever signed." But Trump doesn't care anymore. He wants more, and "Who's gonna stop me?" is his motto these days.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/climate/trump-us-climate-policy-cha
nges.html
President Trump has quickly transformed America’s approach to the environment, withholding funds and stretching the limits of presidential power.
The Biden strategy was to erect legal and other barriers intended to make it tough to undo its work. Trump has already broken through many of them.
In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.
With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.
He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.
To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.
All new presidents have their own agendas, but the speed and scale of Mr. Trump’s efforts to uproot climate policy is unprecedented. “This is not the kind of stately tennis match of the usual switch-over in administrations,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “This is full on Fight Club.”
The Trump administration’s moves have unfolded simultaneously across the sprawling government, affecting federal, state and local agencies and hitting government-funded projects in Africa, Antarctica and around the world. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.
Mr. Trump has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power. He has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
He has fired thousands of federal workers, dismantled programs aimed at helping polluted communities and scrubbed references to climate change from numerous federal websites.
He has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said just hours after being sworn in for his second term.
The United States is producing more oil than any other nation in history, and is also the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry donated more than $75 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump, in turn, promised to weaken environmental regulations in ways that would lower its costs and increase its margins.
The president has repeatedly mocked climate change, criticized regulations and said that more drilling would bring down energy bills.
In several cases, the administration’s actions have flouted the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. In doing so, Mr. Trump has busted through many of the barriers that were erected by the officials during the Biden administration who believed that process and the legal system would slow or deter him.
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Smoke-and-mirrors budgeting is everywhere
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 8:44 am
https://jabberwocking.com/smoke-and-mirrors-budgeting-is-everywhere/
Republicans love smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. They're laying off thousands of workers chaotically even though salary costs are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Elon Musk is pretending to save far more money than he really is. Now Senate Republicans are trying to hide the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts using a new wheeze called the "current policy baseline."
This one is a pistol, but it's a little trickier than the others. Take a look at the chart below:
The cost of the 2017 tax bill has so far averaged a little over $200 billion per year (blue bars). So let's just take that as the new zero! If we do, the apparent cost of extending the tax cut goes down from $3.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion. That certainly makes things easier on everyone.
It's not real, of course. Suppose you're paying off $500 per month on your car. After five years it's done and you decide to buy a new car with the same payments. If you assume that $500 is your "baseline" then the new car costs nothing. It's an exciting thought.
But it ain't true. Call it anything you like, but that car is costing you $500 per month in actual money. If you don't account for that in your household budget you're going to be screwed pretty quickly.
It's the same for extending the 2017 tax bill. Whether you like it or not, it's going to cost about $3.6 trillion and it's going to swell the national debt by $3.6 trillion.
But Republicans don't want it to increase the national debt by $3.6 trillion. They're against debt, you see. But they're also deeply in favor of tax cuts for the rich. What to do?
Pretend and extend, my friends. Can they get away with it under Senate rules? Probably not, but it's worth a try. Stay tuned.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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To Trumptards it doesn't seem stupid for Trump to say he will do it at midnight but maybe he won't . . . it depends on his mood . . . and even if he does do it he might change his mind by next week and undo it.
‘Let’s see how the president weighs that’: Lutnick says Trump will decide today on Canada, Mexico tariffs
Trump’s Commerce secretary said in a CNN interview that Canada and Mexico still need to do more to stop fentanyl flows into the U.S.
By Doug Palmer | 03/03/2025 11:39 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/03/lutnick-trump-canada-mexico-t
ariffs-00207238
President Donald Trump has yet to decide whether to go forward with tariffs on Canada and Mexico that are scheduled to go into effect just after midnight, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on CNN Monday morning.
Trump has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico beginning Tuesday morning over complaints that the countries are not doing enough to stop undocumented migrants and fentanyl coming across their borders, keeping the North American economy and financial markets on edge as the deadline fast approaches.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
The US promised to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nukes.
Ukraine never "had" nukes. They were Russian nukes stationed in Ukraine, Moscow had command of them.
Makes as much sense as saying Turkey has nukes, even tho they're ours.
No matter hiw many times you lie abiut this, it's still not true, and you're still a liar.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, as with all Trumptards I know, although I don't know all of them, you think you know something that you don't know. Telling you what you don't is not going to enlighten you even a tiny bit. An example is your signature:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
The US promised to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nukes.
Ukraine never "had" nukes. They were Russian nukes stationed in Ukraine, Moscow had command of them.
Makes as much sense as saying Turkey has nukes, even tho they're ours.
No matter hiw many times you lie abiut this, it's still not true, and you're still a liar.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
The original Kissinger quote does not have the same meaning as your condensed version:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
But will Signym ever know the difference between the fake Kissinger quote and the real one?
As for Signym's opinion that Ukraine never "had" nukes, you are full of shit, Signym, and will never know the difference.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Air Travel’s Getting Dangerous
The Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse.
By Jeff Wise | March 03, 2025 10:30 AM
https://slate.com/business/2025/03/safe-to-fly-plane-crashes-trump-faa
-air-traffic-control.html
Understaffing
The problem of understaffing at the FAA is one that has troubled experts for years. In 2023, the New York Times revealed that near misses between airliners have become endemic at airports across the country, “a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress,” with a leading cause being “mistakes by air traffic controllers stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage.”
Understaffing is not a problem that worries the Trump administration, however. As part of its project to massively slash the size of the government, it laid off some 400 FAA workers starting on Feb. 17. At the time, it said that none of the firings involved air traffic controllers. But five days later Musk posted to X that any federal employee that didn’t write an email explaining what they’d done during the previous week would be fired. If enforced, this diktat will likely ensnare some air traffic controllers from towers that can hardly afford to lose them.
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But there’s a broader issue, which is that a great many FAA employees—not just air traffic controllers—positively affect aviation safety. Some of the FAA employees fired earlier this month, for instance, were charged with updating the navigational charts that help keep pilots clear of danger. If the prime motive of the Trump-Musk alliance is to gut the federal workforce as thoroughly as possible, that’s going to have all kind of deleterious effects, up to and including twisted smoldering wreckage.
Much more at https://slate.com/business/2025/03/safe-to-fly-plane-crashes-trump-faa
-air-traffic-control.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Thanks to Trump
Atlanta Fed posts alarming new economic projection of Trump's first quarter
By Brad Reed | March 3, 2025 12:58PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-economy-2671254430/
The Atlanta Federal Reserve on Monday produced a new projection that the American economy would shrink by nearly three percent in the first quarter of President Donald Trump's second term.
Specifically, the Atlanta Fed now projects that the economy will shrink by 2.8 percent in Q1 2025, which actually marks a deterioration from the projection it made last week that the economy would shrink by 1.5 percent on the quarter.
The projection comes as President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk push to fire thousands of federal employees and as Trump is threatening to slap hefty 25 percent tariffs on the goods of Mexico and Canada, which are the United States' two largest trading partners.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If he is not willing to send troops to fight on Russia's side, there is only so much Trump can do to help Putin conquer Ukraine. Trump is doing it:
Trump plans to halt arms to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 1:34 pm
https://jabberwocking.com/trump-plans-to-halt-arms-to-ukraine-sanction
s-on-russia/
The other shoe drops:
The Trump administration has stopped financing new weapons sales to Ukraine and is considering freezing weapons shipments from U.S. stockpiles, moves that threaten Kyiv’s ability to fight at a critical time in its battle against Russian forces, current and former U.S. officials said.
The shutdown of financing new weapons sales began before Friday’s acrimonious meeting.... But the meeting to consider suspending ongoing weapons shipments to Ukraine drawn from U.S. military inventories emerged after the Friday blowup at the White House.
And the third shoe:
The United States is drawing up a plan to potentially give Russia sanctions relief as Donald Trump seeks to restore ties with Moscow and stop the war in Ukraine, a US official and another person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The White House has asked the state and treasury departments to draft a list of sanctions that could be eased for US officials to discuss with Russian representatives in the coming days.... The White House asked state and treasury officials to come up with a possible sanctions relief plan before Trump last week extended a state of emergency over the situation in Ukraine, the US sources said.
So: No more arms shipments to Ukraine, and sanctions relief for Russia, something Trump had in mind well before his staged blowup with Zelensky. Go ahead and solve for what this means. The algebra isn't hard.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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