Kevin Christopher

News Anchor turned citizen journalist, author, lyricist. Unbiased truth teller, oenophile and Bill Safire disciple.

[SJohn @Sjohn123Allen]

A letter to our Senators and Representatives.

Gentlemen,
I am a 64-year-old American that has worked and paid taxes since I was fifteen years old. I have never taken any type of handout from anyone, including the US government. After 49 years of working, I have decided to retire, at least partially. According to you, it’s “early  retirement”.  I don’t consider 49 years of working, “early”. Had I been a government employee I could have retired 29 years ago, or had I been a senator, I could have retired, what… 39 years ago? with full retirement pay and free healthcare for life.
Because I retired before reaching my “full retirement age”; which is decided by you, I have a reduced Social Security payment, which you refer to as a “benefit”. I see it as a return of my money that I have paid in for 49 years. This reduced payment is not enough to live on. The payment at full retirement age is not enough to live on. I have to work some, to supplement my income, but low and behold I can only earn a certain amount (which is still not enough to live on) and then you start docking my Social Security.
Apparently, I earned too much at some point because I just received a letter from the SSA stating that my next three SSA payments will be cut in half, and the real kicker is I still “owe” $38.00. I can’t work more to make up the difference because I will only be further penalized.
It is extremely infuriating, as an American citizen, to be treated this way. Look at the amount of fraud, look at the number of people, many of whom have never paid a dime into the system, receiving free benefits from the government. Look at the billions paid to and on behalf of illegal immigrants. All I want is the money I paid in and a chance to retire in peace.

[Woody Whitehurst - Brad Brownell Supporter @woodywhitehurst]

Tough times in Tallahassee

[Amelia @amelia_tweetz]

They took memory cards from us and made us pay for storage. They took CDs and DVDs and made us pay for streaming. They took software you could buy once and turned it into a monthly subscription. They took ownership, convenience, and basically everything that used to be a one-time purchase… then somehow made us pay for it every month.

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

Hmmm.

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@FSUVOCFB Uh. Not so fast said one FSU legend.

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@skipfoster Quick reminder. The lights at Wrigley Field have been working since 8-8/1988

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@kolby_crawford @Noles247 Bet it’s going to be a little stuffy in there. lol

[John Rich🇺🇸 @johnrich]

Ladies, do you agree with this woman?

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@bennyjohnson It’s dead mostly because it’s rap. People realize it’s a thing but not musical and there are no songs you will hear in a commercial. So there’s that.

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@BBNTonight @LEX18News Power and grace in women’s sports. As it should be.

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

Impressive.

[BBN Tonight @BBNTonight]

KENTUCKY TAKES SET 1! It was a nail biter all the way through, but the Cats come out on top, 25-23. Brooklyn DeLeye had kills for UK's final 2 points of the set

DeLeye and Thigpen lead UK's offense with 4 kills apiece. As a team, UK's hitting .265 to Penn State's .190

[Handre @Handre]

Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.

When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.

Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.

Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.

[Oscar @HeyOscarx]

Your glasses cost $5 to make. You paid $300. And one company you've never heard of is the reason why.

Luxottica owns Ray-Ban. They own Oakley. They own Persol. They own Oliver Peoples. They own Costa. They own Arnette. They make the glasses for Prada, Chanel, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Giorgio Armani, and Michael Kors. They own LensCrafters. They own Pearle Vision. They own Sunglass Hut. They own Target Optical. They own the online retailer https://t.co/kRIbMGKUAX. They own EyeMed the vision insurance provider that tells you where to buy your glasses. And they own the lab that makes your lenses.

One company controls the frames. The brands. The stores. The insurance. The lenses. And the price.

A guy spent 11 years working in the optical industry 4 in a lab making lenses, 3 managing a retail optical store, 4 consulting for independent eyewear brands trying to compete with Luxottica.

He told me: "The frame on your face cost between $2 and $5 to manufacture. The lenses cost $1.50 to $3. You paid $300–$700. That's not a markup. That's a scheme. And it only works because one corporation owns every step between the factory and your face and nobody knows it."

"There are 4 billion people on Earth who need vision correction. Most of them are paying a 1,000%–2,000% markup on a medical device they literally cannot live without because the entire industry from factory to face is controlled by one company pretending to be 50 different brands."

"The glasses on your face right now are almost certainly made in the same Italian factory as every 'luxury' brand on the wall at Sunglass Hut the store that Luxottica also owns."

Here are 10 things the glasses industry doesn't want you to know and exactly how to stop overpaying for a product that costs less than your morning coffee to make:
🧵

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

They say we don't teach about socialism in schools. Yes we do: group projects. Where you do ALL the work because your 3 lazy teammates do nothing, but you have integrity and don't wanna fail, but they end up getting the same grade as you for nothing. That's socialism. It sucks.

[Straight Florida @StraightFlorida]

Get your groceries and fill your tank right now. We have exactly four weeks of sanity left before the great plague of Illinois refugees crawls out of the cornfields and infest our coast. 🚗💨🌽

Come October, I-75 turns into a rolling psych ward of rust-bucket crossovers driven by people with the emotional resilience of wet tissue paper. These pasty, calcium-deficient lunatics will white-knuckle a steering wheel for forty straight hours just to get down here and act like Florida personally insulted their ancestors.

You can spot an Illinois tourist from two zip codes away. Zero situational awareness. They walk into a gas station like they’re about to burst into tears if the air conditioner hums too loud.

They treat our wildlife like it belongs in a group therapy session. The average Illinois progressive lands here, spots a prehistoric swamp lizard sunbathing in a ditch, and immediately starts looking for a customer service desk to report the water for being emotionally unsafe.

They spent their entire lives in some sterilized Cook County suburb voting to ban gas stoves, outlaw plastic straws, and tax leaf blowers by the decibel. Then the first freeze hits their delicate skin and they abandon their socialist utopia and swarm our state like frantic barnacles.

Then they have the audacity to stand in our delis looking like unbaked bread dough, loudly whining that our culture is too aggressive and our cheese lacks ethical complexity. You fled a frozen wasteland where your government steals half your paycheck to patch the same crater in the road for thirty-six years, and now you want to lecture a guy in flip-flops about civic zoning?

Look at what they worship back home. Their political savior is J.B. Pritzker, a human beanbag chair stuffed with inherited Hyatt cash who governs like a mob boss operating out of an artisanal pastry shop. That man is a walking cardiovascular emergency who taxes oxygen while lecturing working people about economic justice. These sheep nod along, pay an eight-dollar toll to cross the street, then sprint to Florida the second the wind chill drops below fifty.

Brace yourselves. In thirty days every left-hand lane is dead, the artisanal seltzer is looted, and we’ll be knee-deep in neurotic Midwesterners screaming at the sun for making them sweat. ☀️💀🥪🐊

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

FSU POST GAME: You just heard the Nuke Laloosh version of football interviews. AD should have just said” You know I want to thank the Lord, my high school coaches, my parents and my girl Charlene blah blah blah. Ooh she may be woolly ….

[Tom Egen @tom_egen]

Nick Shirley has 1.8 million followers on YouTube. The Washington Post has 97 thousand subscribers. You tell me who is a journalist and who isn’t!

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

@ClayTravis

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

Andy Beshear just took a dump on his own goddamn state.

Kentucky’s governor, the one still sold as a blue-dog survivor in a red state, sat on national television and calmly called for direct election of the president and vice president. That is abolishing the Electoral College. That is the exact structural change designed to strip mid-sized states like Kentucky of the leverage the Founders deliberately gave them.

Kentucky gets eight electoral votes. Those eight votes are the only reason a place that is not New York, California, or a handful of Texas metros still has any real voice in choosing the president. The Electoral College was built to stop the biggest population centers from simply steamrolling everyone else. Beshear knows this. Every serious politician from a state that is not a coastal megacity knows this.

Yet he still said it out loud. He put the DSA’s favorite institutional wet dream on the table while wearing the moderate costume. He is willing to reduce his own state’s power in the constitutional system so he can stay viable with the national activist base that increasingly runs the Democratic Party.

This is not a policy preference. This is a betrayal of the people he is supposed to represent. A governor of Kentucky endorsing a system that would make Kentucky electorally irrelevant is the purest form of selling out. He is trading the structural protection of his own voters for a shot at looking acceptable to the same radical energy that has already dragged the party’s center of gravity left.

The blue-dog mask does not hide it. The cameras caught it. A Kentucky governor just volunteered to kneecap Kentucky’s leverage so the national left would keep him in the conversation. That is not leadership. That is constitutional treason dressed up as reform.
(article below)

[Kevin Christopher @KChristopher18]

Should be required reading

[DocumentingLibs @USADocumented]

A Canadian who lived their “universal healthcare” system for 32 years just gave Americans the reality check everyone pushing “Medicare for All” needs to hear.

She didn’t rant. She showed the receipts:

• Nearly 200,000 emergency patients waited 48+ hours for a hospital bed last year alone.
• Almost 1 million Canadians now leave the ER without care because the wait is too long (up fivefold in some reports).
• ER doctors warn these delays are lethal.
• 5.9 million adults still have no regular family doctor.
• Specialist waitlists are exploding — median 28.6 weeks from GP referral to treatment. Some doctors are closing practices to new patients.
• Only 2.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people — well below the OECD average. Hallway medicine is routine. Patients die on stretchers.

Her line hits hard:

“We want universal healthcare… until we learn.”

She’s not wrong. Canada’s single-payer model gives coverage on paper but delivers rationing by queue in practice. Long waits aren’t a bug — they’re the feature when government controls supply and prices.

America’s system is also broken: crushing costs, administrative bloat, and real gaps for the uninsured or underinsured. We spend nearly twice as much per person and still have problems.

The solution isn’t importing Canada’s waiting rooms. It’s fixing supply (train more doctors/nurses, cut red tape), adding real competition and price transparency, expanding HSAs/direct primary care, and protecting innovation.

Be informed before you trade one set of problems for another.