Whiner’s

From an Anon on the internet, regarding tariffs and the like in regards to this statement:
…this policy (tariffs on China, and goods from China via Canada and Mexico), even reduced, is still incredibly destructive and is going to cause chaos. If no exemptions are made on the Chinese front — which I’m pretty sure there won’t be, even though he’s signaled exemptions for certain businesses from the 10% duty, because that would kind of defeat the purpose — then whole supply chains which rely on Chinese imports will collapse overnight & it’ll force retailers to massively reorganize in a short amount of time, risking steep losses & mass layoffs, or forcing them to raise prices, risking inflation
.
.
the answer:
.
The classic “collapse overnight” cope is dressed in verbosity to sound intellectual. Let’s unpack it.

First, Tariffs don’t “collapse” supply chains; they reprice them. What actually collapses supply chains is offshoring your entire industrial base to your geopolitical rival for 30 years. You’re blaming the fire alarm for the fire.

Second: You’re catastrophizing normal market adaptation. High tariffs force the reallocation of capital toward domestic production and allied trade networks. Yes, there’s short-term friction — that’s literally the price of extracting yourself from dependency. It’s surgery, not a spa day.

Third: Your fear of inflation ignores that we’re already in an inflationary spiral because of supply chain fragility and foreign manipulation. Front-loading the pain now is cheaper than terminal inflation down the line.

Fourth: “Retailers will be forced to raise prices” — yes. And the market will respond. Reduced cheap junk imports means fewer dollar-store trinkets but also higher velocity of money domestically. Job creation in manufacturing offsets retail margin shrinkage.

Fifth: Trump wants companies to reorganize. That’s not a bug; that’s the point.

Finally: If you honestly think that Chinese domination of the supply chain is a natural, irreplaceable market outcome, rather than deliberate mercantilist strategy and suicidal Western corporate short-termism, then congratulations — you’ve swallowed the CCP white paper whole.

President Trump’s actions, easily explained for people who aren’t bright enough

Running out of space for all the MAGA pervs.

This is the kind of thing that starts revolutions, the wealthy are hanged, put before firing squads, of just plain disappear. Just ask France and Russia, for starters.
Inside Credit One Bank—And How Two Men Made Billions Exploiting People With Bad Credit
A former Citi and Goldman Sachs banker, 62-year-old Ben Navarro has made an estimated $4.8 billion fortune lending to, and collecting from, people with poor or no credit histories. 
It’s a rough business, one that can involve sticking those who are already struggling financially with onerous fees, badgering them multiple times a day for weeks on end if they fall behind on their payments, and taking them to court over several hundred dollars.
Navarro doesn’t boast about how he got so rich. Most see him mainly as the father of tennis star Emma Navarro or a generous philanthropist. His longtime partner Brett Hildebrand, 63, is worth an estimated $2.8 billion, and is even more reclusive than Navarro. 
They have good reasons for the low profiles. Navarro and Hildebrand, whose role in the business has never before been detailed, have become two of America’s wealthiest people at the expense of some of the country’s most financially vulnerable. The vast majority of their wealth comes from Las Vegas-based Credit One, a credit card bank that targets subprime customers.
Americans are borrowing more than ever, with U.S. household debt (excluding mortgages) hitting a record $5 trillion last year. Many can’t afford to borrow so much. More than 100 million people, an astounding 42% of the U.S. adult population, have bad (or no) credit, according to a 2022 study published by the credit bureau Experian and consulting firm Oliver Wyman. But many still want credit cards.
That’s where Credit One has stepped in, targeting customers from “all walks of life,” including the “one in three Americans considered to be below ‘prime,’ ” as described by a Credit One spokesperson, and turning this risky segment into a cash cow.
WHY IT MATTERS
“By giving subprime borrowers credit cards and loading them up with fees, Credit One Bank has quietly become a cash cow for its shareholders, paying out dividends of $2.4 billion since 2010,” says Forbes staff writer John Hyatt. “While there is a real need being met by providing credit cards to low-income and low-credit consumers, there is an equally real debate about whether the bank’s fee-heavy business model is predatory.”

If the public, daylight kidnapping of Tufts University student and Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk didn’t bother you… or even worse, if you thought she deserved it… read this incisive, brilliant Op-Ed piece by ex-Republican political operative Rick Wilson.
Mr. Wilson helped create the Lincoln Project and is a big believer in Freedom and Democracy. He knows Republicans and Republican politicians because he worked for them for over 30 years.
He knows exactly what he is talking about.
He’s doing everything he can to destroy Trump, MAGA, Musk, and their ilk.
“Three days ago, Tom Homan — Donald Trump’s self-styled Reichsminister des Innern — ordered the arrest of a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk. A Turkish citizen here on a valid F-1 visa, she had the audacity to publish an op-ed in a campus newspaper last year calling for divestment from Israel.
I read it. I disagreed with it. It had the usual markers of campus-age earnestness—passionate, absolutist, and naïve. The kind of thing most of us grow out of. But that, apparently, was enough to justify her arrest and disappearance into a Louisiana detention center. No attorney. No due process. Just gone.
This is the shape of the new American police state. Call it what it is.
Arresting and deporting foreign students on valid visas for political speech isn’t law enforcement. It’s authoritarianism, a state flex of pure intimidation. And before anyone dismisses this as an isolated incident or justified outlier, imagine—just for a moment—if the Obama or Biden administrations had started rounding up right-wing students for op-eds about “white genocide,” the “great replacement,” or January 6th revisionism.
We’d be drowning in lawsuits, Fox chyron font would need to be resized, and half the GOP would have set up hunger strikes on the Capitol steps.
But now? Silence.
Because the rule of law is so far behind us it’s just a speck in the rear-view mirror. This country is sliding, fast, into a regime where masked agents can disappear people off the street without due process. Not in theory. In fact.
Because here’s what chilled me to the bone: the ICE agents who arrested Rumeysa weren’t wearing uniforms. They had no visible identification. They were masked. Fully anonymous. As if they knew, on some basic level, that what they were doing wasn’t just wrong—it was illegal. And destined to provoke blowback.
In a functioning democracy, law enforcement does not arrive in secret, in disguise, to abduct people for speech. That is not border enforcement. That is not national security. That is fear as policy. It is performance authoritarianism for the MAGA base, a red-meat sacrifice for the Fox News altar.
Part of the message: these migrant kids are first. Keep running that mouth, and you’re next, citizen or not.
Mark this down: if we claw our way out of this descent, Tom Homan is going to prison. And he won’t be alone. His cosplay comrade Gulag Barbie Kristi Noem may well join him. Because none of this is normal, and the courts—though battered and increasingly weary have warned them to stop, again and again.
They haven’t. Their defiance of court orders is no longer exceptional—it’s routine. Their contempt for legal boundaries isn’t a bug; it’s the point.
Because this isn’t about immigration. It never was. It’s about propaganda and punishment.
The raids, the arrests, the press releases—they’re all staged for one audience: 65-year-old white men glued to their 80-inch TVs, raging about migrants while nursing the flaccid thrill of imagined retribution. The MAGA base demands blood, and Homan is eager to provide theater—however ineffective so far, however unconstitutional, however grotesque.
The so-called “solutions” haven’t worked. Shipping Venezuelans to El Salvador’s for-profit prisons, ending TPS status for Haitians and Cubans—none of it has created the deportation porn Trump promised them.
It’s cruelty without result, violence without enough pain porn for their dulled tastes. So now, Homan will demands more. Bigger raids. Bloodier optics. Masked men and midnight arrests. Cosplay fascism slipping into the real thing, with real human stakes.
And for what? Does this make America safer? Are we stopping fentanyl? Did you catch a cartel kingpin by throwing a college sophomore into a concrete cell in Louisiana? Did your masked agents protect a single American life?
Or are they just the willing fists of a political machine that cannot solve real problems, and so must invent enemies to punish?
To the ICE agents out there enforcing this grotesque agenda—how far are you willing to go? Will you rough them up more, as Trump once begged police to do?
Will you obey when Homan demands escalation? Will you trample the Constitution for a man who would forget your name the moment it became inconvenient?
Because when this ends—and it will—you’ll be asked why. Why you followed illegal orders. Why you ignored the courts. Why you wore a mask while you arrested a 20-year-old girl for writing words.
And I’m sure you’ll have your answer.
Just following orders.
It’s a hell of a defense.
It worked out so well for these guys…”
Martin Casella

Consumer confidence is at a 12 year low, inflation is up, stock market collapsing, but don’t worry the trump administration will get right to it after they finish their plans to invade Greenland.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Donald J. Trump…again.We know Trump’s pattern by now.

1. It never happened.
2. Some say it happened. I don’t know. If it did happen, it was someone else’s fault.
3. It did happen but it didn’t matter.
4. It happened in previous administrations and it was bad then but it’s fine when we do it.
5. It did or didn’t happen and I knew or didn’t know but this possibly true thing is a made-up story by the fake news media and a witch hunt targeting a very good (insert white man’s name here) who I know very well and trust.
6. I’ve never heard of the guy the fake news media said did this. If I have heard of him, it’s only because he made coffee runs. (We’re not quite at this stage yet.)

Ryan, aka FF, aka ( ͝° ͜ʖ͡°) must be in 5E again. He hasn’t posted anything for a few days.


This is an eye-opening look at why today’s GOP is so hatefully anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-woman. Their masculinity is so fragile because so many of them are deeply closeted gays.

The Pink Mafia – Part 1The Hidden Power Structure of Closeted Gay Men in the Republican Party
By Stuart Stevens
When I see the explosion of sexual orientation hate coming out of the Republican Party and the false pretense of it being limited to anti-trans hate, I can’t help but think of the powerful role closeted gay men have played in the modern Republican Party. Below is the first of a series of pieces I’m writing reflecting on my experiences with what was widely known as the GOP’s Pink Mafia.
My first entry into politics was through the hidden world of gay Republicans. I didn’t know it, but looking back, odds are I never would have become a political consultant if it were not for what I later learned was known as the “Pink Mafia.”
It started when I was 16 and a Congressional page for a Mississippi Congressman named Charlie Griffin. My boss was the guy who ran his office. At that time, the top aides in Congressional offices were called “Administrative Assistants” or “AAs.” Later, probably because having AA on your resume didn’t help your earning power as a lobbyist once you left for K. Street, that title was elevated to the august Chief of Staff. His name was Jon Hinson.
Jon was a country boy from Tylertown, Mississippi, who had also been a page and spent most of his adult life working on Capitol Hill. He was smart, funny, and profoundly respected Congress and the institutions of the American government. My first week, he gave me a tour of the Capitol that could not have been more reverential if he had been a Cardinal describing the Vatican.
Coming from Walthall County, Mississippi, in rural South Mississippi in an area known as the “piney woods,” Jon embraced life in Washington, DC, with the delight of Holly Golightly coming to Manhattan. The DC he knew wasn’t “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm” as JFK once described Washington. It was a cosmopolitan city on a hill, with ethnic restaurants, theater, music. It was the JFK Center of Performing Arts, Arena Stage, Clyde’s Bar and Restaurant in Georgetown, the Hawk and Dove on Capitol Hill, and the Sans Souci for special occasions. It was a place with enough gay bars and restaurants that 8th Street Southeast was known, among those in the know, as the Gay Way. Barracks Row was the home of the Marine Barracks and a hub of gay life. Sixteen and straight, I knew nothing of this other world. But for a man who was bisexual like Jon Hinson, it was an open door from small-town Mississippi to a rich life lived in color.
On a couple of weekends, Jon Hinson invited me to accompany him to a beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. He and a few friends, all male, shared the rental as a DC retreat. The guys were a lot like Jon: in their thirties, working on Capitol Hill, full of inside gossip about Members of Congress and Senators. Now I realize they were likely all gay, but no one ever hit on me or said anything that made me uncomfortable. I had met and was “dating” another page, which mostly meant we were regulars on the Capitol Hill receptions with free food, who later helped pay for her PhD through beauty pageants, and they kidded me some about her attractiveness. But it all felt harmless, like older brothers.
Years later, when I was in graduate film school at UCLA, Jon Hinson called and told me he was running for Congress. He was now AA to Mississippi Congressman Thad Cochran, who had decided to run for the US Senate following the retirement of Senator John Eastland. Jon was running for the Republican nomination in the race to replace Cochran. The Democratic nominee was John Hampton Stennis, son of Mississippi’s all-powerful Senator John Stennis. It was assumed that John Hampton, as he was known, would easily win. Hinson explained that he had no money, no campaign organization, and no one to make television commercials. “You have to make my ads,” he said, “I can’t afford to hire anyone.” I explained that I had no idea how to make commercials, that I only made these stupid little films, but Jon was insistent.
So, I became a political media consultant.
I spent a lot of time in those pre-election months riding around with Hinson in the then Fourth Congressional District that stretched from Vicksburg on the Mississippi River across to my hometown of Jackson and dipped down to include some of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Then Mississippi had five Congressional districts, now reduced to four. It was the chitlin circuit of local politics: fish fries, Kiwanis, Lions and Rotary clubs, Friday night high school football games. Jon’s dad was a Democratic Supervisor in Walthall County and had deep connections with the powerful network of county supervisors. The guys – and they were all guys – you called when you wanted a pothole filled on your street or a dirt road to your deer camp graded with fresh gravel. (Later, as one more act in a Shakespearean-like tragedy, Jon’s parents would die in their home in a New Year’s Eve fire.)
We spent hours talking about everything and nothing. Not once did I get any hint that Hinson was interested in other men, but there was one moment that, looking back, should have flashed a red warning signal that he had a predilection for risky sex. One of the New Orleans television stations had a morning “exercise” show hosted by a twenty-something former Ole Miss cheerleader who led her audience through aerobics. Think early Jane Fonda workout days. I knew she and Hinson had dated some, but I wasn’t prepared to walk into a back room of our Jackson headquarters shortly before its official opening to find them having sex on a tattered couch.
I never mentioned it to him, and he never said anything. The official opening a half hour later was a big success.
Jon Hinson won that Congressional race primarily because he was in the right place at the right time. Thad Cochran swept to victory in the Senate race with the help of the third-party candidacy of Charles Evers, brother of slain Civil Rights hero Medgar Evers, who drained most of the Black vote from the Democratic nominee. As is usually the case when a popular Member of Congress runs state-wide, Cochran over-performed in his former Congressional district, pushing Hinson to victory over John Hampton Stennis.

* * * *

“There’s something I should have told you,” Congressman Jon Hinson said flatly. This was before cell phones, and he had somehow tracked me down by phone in a Midas Muffler shop in Vermont, where I was spending my summer working on an MA in English from Middlebury College. Later, as my career developed, I would learn these are among the worst seven words a client can utter. Whatever follows will be somewhere between the merely disastrous and the fatal. This was in the summer, a few months before Hinson would appear on the ballot for the first time as an incumbent Congressman running for re-election.
Hinson proceeded to tell me that when he was working as Congressman Thad Cohran’s chief of staff, he had been arrested at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, for indecent behavior. That was how he phrased it, “indecent behavior.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what he was trying to say. This couldn’t have made it easier on him. “What do you mean?” I asked. There was a pause, and then, to his credit, he laughed. “You’re not joking just to make this harder, are you?” And then, for some reason, it connected. I digested it the way I was beginning to learn to do as a consultant, without any thought of the incident itself or any sympathy for the client but in a clinical analysis of the various options moving forward. Then he said what I have learned are the absolutely worst three words: “But there’s more.” And there was.
The newly elected congressman went on to describe how as a Congressional staffer, he had left his job In the Longworth Congressional office building one afternoon and walked over to a gay porno theater, Cinema Follies, in the then-seedy part of Southeast Washington. It was upstairs over a storefront. During the film, a worker was cleaning the carpet on the stairs while smoking and accidentally ignited the cleaning fluid, engulfing the stairs in flames. Only one of the ten men inside the theater survived—Jon Hinson.
He was calling to tell me this because he believed that his Democratic opponent had learned of both incidents, and it might come out in the press. I vividly remember the moment. Waiting for the muffler of my ancient Volvo to be repaired, I felt exhilarated, like a field goal kicker called on to win the game. I hope I expressed some sympathy for his near-death experience, but I’m sure that’s not what I was thinking about. This was an election problem, and it needed to be solved.
I had little experience in campaigns at the time, but I had a natural feel for the combat of campaigns. I knew instinctively that the only hope of survival was for Hinson to come forward and preempt any revelations by telling all to the press. Hinson was terrified of defeat and naturally felt very vulnerable on multiple fronts. So, he listened and followed my advice.
Since being elected, he married a long-time girlfriend, a former beauty queen from Georgia who worked on the Hill. (There seemed to be a lot of American beauty pageant graduates working in Washington.) With her standing by his side, he gave what quickly became a legendary press conference in which he told the Iwa Jima and Cinema Follies stories. It was one of the few times I have seen a group of reporters speechless, as if a UFO had landed and they were trying to come up with the right questions for the first alien interview.
The Mississippi Republican establishment stood by Hinson, including the rising star Trent Lott, the Congressman from Mississippi’s Fifth district. Trent and Jon had been chief of staff to Mississippi Congressmen at the same time and had a natural bond. The district’s major donors, including one of Ronald Reagan’s prominent donors, held firm, moved by a meeting in which Hinson ended it with a prayer asking for forgiveness and strength. I had heard a lot of prayers in my life, but never one pleading for help to overcome being gay to win an election. I imagine God had more important issues than the outcome of an election in Mississippi’s Fourth Congressional District, but it worked. Hinson was reelected.
Later, a prospective client I was pitching in a big governor’s race told me admiringly, “Stevens, anyone can get a heterosexual elected in Mississippi, but it takes talent to win with a homosexual.” He hired me.
A few months into his second term, Jon Hinson was arrested in a men’s bathroom on the sixth floor of the Longworth Building, a floor that then was mainly storage areas. The Congressional police force had heard it was a meeting place for gays and had staked it out, assuming, I would imagine, they would catch only staffers. Instead, they caught a newly reelected Congressman from Mississippi, Jon Hinson, and Massachusetts Congressman Gary Studds. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil protected Studds and kept it quiet. No powerful Republican did likewise for Hinson. He resigned from Congress shortly after his arrest. Years later, he would tragically die of AIDS.
My big consulting break came shortly after when I got a call from a famous and powerful Republican pollster asking if I was interested in working together. It was like being an aspiring starlet plucked from a 1950s Schwaabs drug store stool in Hollywood and asked to screen test for Paramount. I, of course, jumped at the chance.
That call came from Arthur J. Finkelstein, a legendary pollster and strategist who was famed for electing hard-core right-wing candidates like North Carolina’s Jessie Helms. He founded the first major conservative political action committee, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, known as NICPAC. Arthur had installed Terry Dolan as Executive Director, the younger brother of Reagan speechwriter Tony Dolan, credited with the famous “Evil Empire” speech.
Arthur lived in New York at the time. Later, he would move to Massachusetts to take advantage of liberal gay adoption laws, allowing him and his partner to adopt. Terry Dolan would die of AIDS.
At the time, I had no idea of Arthur’s sexual orientation. But I was in the beating heart of the Pink Mafia. My entry into big-time Republican politics had begun.