Laura M Florence

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it! So much world to see and experience, so little time... Mother. Leader. Polymath. Musician. Traveler. Thalassophile.

[Laura M Florence @LMFlorence]

“One #life on this earth is all that we get... we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can” -F. Buechner #purpose #inspiration #noexcuses

[Pierre Perrett @Stratrovare]

@TheJFreakinC @beyondvamp

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: In Chicago, ICE agents were filmed hitting the car of a U.S. citizen, assaulting a bystander who was filming, pointing a taser at innocent people, and driving away before local police could even verify their identities.

And we’re supposed to believe they’re making our communities safer.

The video shows ICE agents chasing a man through Albany Park.

Two agents grab him and rip his shirt off during the chase, while one of the agents drops a fully loaded magazine… and leaves it there.

The man manages to get away and runs across a street, where cars are stopped at a red light.

An ICE agent then drive a black SUV into a U.S. citizen’s vehicle in an attempt to cut off the man running.

The man is eventually surrounded by agents, when one agent suddenly grabs the man and aggressively throws him to the ground, as multiple agents immediately pile on top of him as he screams for help.

As this is happening, residents begin recording what they are witnessing.

That’s when another agent enters the scene with his taser already drawn.

Despite another agent already standing next to a person filming, he walks directly toward the bystander, shoves them backward, and screams, “Back the fuck up.”

The person filming isn’t attacking anyone… or interfering with the arrest.

In fact, you can see them nodding and saying “okay.”

Yet, the agent continues advancing toward them with a taser.

Which all raises some serious first and fourth amendment concerns.

And let’s talk about the woman whose car was hit…

Her vehicle gets run into, during a federal operation… and then they threatened to arrest HER.

And afterward, local police told her they were not given proof of the agents’ identity at the scene.

One officer reportedly said, “[The agents] didn’t want to show us proof of that,” when speaking to the woman whose car was hit.

AND THEN, according to reporting from the scene, one of the ICE agents had a Jerusalem cross sticker on the back of his phone.

The Jerusalem cross is a Christian symbol dating back to the Crusades that has more recently gained popularity among some far-right and white supremacist groups.

Maybe that’s something DHS would like to explain.

So, if federal agents can crash into civilian vehicles, leave loaded ammunition in public streets, point tasers at bystanders, and aggressively confront, and assault, people exercising their constitutional rights…

Then the people holding the cameras aren’t the problem.

The cameras are documenting the problem.

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: Right-wing streamer Cam Higby was caught on video walking up to a group of protesters and pepper spraying multiple people, outside the Newark ICE Facility.

Then, as people reacted to being sprayed, an armed man pulled him away, telling him, “It’s not worth it… it’s time to go.”

Last time I checked… walking up to a group of people and spraying them with a chemical irritant is commonly charged as assault or battery.

And then, after spraying the crowd, the video show Higby, and the armed man, running into the ICE facility while agents allowed them inside.

Imagine the outrage if a left-wing activist walked up to a group of conservatives, pepper sprayed them, and then disappeared behind federal gates.

The headlines would never stop.

The law is supposed to apply equally to everyone.

[Laura M Florence @LMFlorence]

@bluemontauk Thank you ❤️

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?

Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”

Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term.

Silence.

Every single one of them refused to say it.

Trump is appointing judges who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment to his face.

Never stop connecting the dots.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

Hitler's Führerbunker began as a ballroom extension to a building called the Old Chancelley to which an air raid shelter was added, eventually transformed into a luxurious bunker 50 feet underground that could be hermetically sealed to protect the VIP occupants from chemical weapons.
T***p's fanatic emphasis on ballroom/bunker might indicate that he anticipates, or will precipitate, a nuclear exchange of some sort, from which he, his staff, & (probably) selected billionaire donors might be protected.
otherwise, it is hard to explain how important this ballroom has suddenly become.
#WhenIsABallroomNotABallroom?

[Terra 🌍 ☮️ ✌️ @Iget2bme72]

King Charles…an actual king…basically came into Congress and said: your system works because power is limited, shared, debated, and checked.

Then the White House account posting “TWO KINGS” with Trump and Charles is either breathtakingly tone-deaf or intentionally trolling the exact point Charles was making. And honestly, with this administration, “tone-deaf” and “intentional troll” are not mutually exclusive.

The funny part is that Charles understands his own constitutional limits better than Trump’s White House seems to understand ours. An actual monarch came here respecting the republic, while the elected president’s account is out here playing dress-up monarchy with a crown emoji.

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Americans can now sign up to reserve spots at “Removal Parties” across the country to see Trump’s name wiped away from federal property where it doesn’t belong.

RSVPs open now at https://t.co/ohPPT5nSV2

[RC deWinter @RCdeWinter]

this is not a joke

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE violently detain father legally working in U.S.—injure daughter's leg & rip out her nose piercing.

"I told them that I was a U.S. citizen," she said.

"We don't care," agents retort. "That doesn't matter.

Agents were "dressed in everyday clothing"—and refused to show ID.

Father was then put in a white van and taken to an unknown location—his family still can't be sure who took him or where.

Rutilio Rosales is living legally in the U.S. with a work visa—that doesn't expire until 2029.

He was simply attending to a routine traffic violation at the Wilson County Courthouse in Lebanon, Tennessee.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

GOP Senator Kennedy admits Trump is the reason for TSA shutdown: "He said said 'No deals with the Democrats.' We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week. But the President said 'No deal.'"

[Boston Smalls @smalls2672]

Ret. Major Genetal reacts to Pete Hegseth

[Travis Akers 🇺🇸 @travisakers]

Sen. John Kennedy admits on Fox News that the Republicans and Democrats reached a deal to fund TSA, but Trump said, “No. No deals with the Democrats.”

Kennedy says, “It would have worked. We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week.”

This is the Trump shutdown!

[Democrats @TheDemocrats]

Republicans control all 3 branches of government.

Democrats introduced 7 bills to fund TSA.

Each one was blocked by Republicans.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Feeling Blue 💙 @Lindatini]

@TheRickWilson

[sick_of_it_all @Ruffinator85]

@stuzi_pants