Ashley Nix

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@cmclymer If I'm not mistaken, every county in Alabama shifted left. We held on to a district that was gerrymandered to make Dems lose a seat. We also elected our first openly gay sheriff. We also sent Allison Montgomery to the Alabama House of Reps. Wish we hadn't have been written off.

[CSPAN @cspan]

A Vietnam veteran suing President Trump over his proposed arch tells his story: "I have a duty as a Vietnam vet, as a survivor, to my buddies buried there, to honor their sacrifice and protect their memory from this vainglorious monument."

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@EmbryEthan From Alabama. Jealous.

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@StateFarm Y'all are lowdown. I was told I couldn't get a rental until my car was physically in the body shop and to call when I arrived. I called the specific number I was given when I arrived and can't talk to a soul. I left work to handle this and now I'm stranded.

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

Gadsden, AL. Neat rays coming from the sunset. @spann

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

macabre = “muh-KAHB”

Worcestershire = “WOOSS-ter-sheer”

omnipotent = “ahm-NI-puh-tunt”

reticent = “RET-uh-sunt”

epitome = “ih-PIT-uh-mee”

myriad = "MEER-ee-ud"

Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word.

It means they learned it by reading.

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@Fly_Nashville My husband was the general foreman and then later on was the superintendent when they built the new part on. I'm proud that he had a hand in building something that will honor Dolly!

[Ruben Gallego @RubenGallego]

Massie challenged the Epstein class. Trump and his allies targeted him. That should tell you everything.

[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

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@elmo I'm sorry, Elmo. My Mom passed away.

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

[Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker ♟ @pelositracker]

Well this sucks...

Senator Katie Britt just disclosed a purchase of JP Morgan $JPM while sitting on the Senate Banking committee

$JPM is up now up 27% since her purchase

But the worst part is you couldn't have even followed this.

Because she violated the STOCK Act by disclosing this trade hundreds days late

Her fine? $200

Less than the price of a speeding ticket in most states.

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

*their, ohmygosh.

[Ashley Nix @AMcCNix]

@Mikel_Jollett I think it's also a flex for them. Of course they lie, because they feel they're lies have more meaning than just regular people who tell the truth.

[Stefan Smith @TheStefanSmith]

Mr. Rogers, they’re shooting the helpers.

[Steak-umm @steak_umm]

reminder that “do your own research” means reading actual verified sources, not scrolling until you find a confident user who agrees with you

[Definitely Danny @SemperWry]

ICE shooting someone named "Good" in the face three times is some Nathaniel Hawthorne level of heavy-handed allegory.

[Meathead "BBQ Hall of Famer, Hedonism Evangelist” @meathead]

Your health is at risk. My wife is a PhD microbiologist. She retired from the FDA in 2018. She and her team did vital research on food safety. They developed rapid testing methods for detecting pathogens (one of her tests was adopted by McDonalds). She was involved in identifying the pathogens found in BlueBell ice cream and Jack-in-the-Box and many other cases. There were a dozen or so other teams in her lab working to save lives and make food safer. They all got the axe today. And don't give me the BS that the FDA is corrupt. These are scientists not politicians. She couldn't even accept a box of donuts from an equipment salesman and they made me sell my stock in OXO Good Grips because the FDA regulates kitchen tools. They worked long and hard for you. This is sad.

[James Spann @spann]

Long time followers here know that I don’t do politics, and there’s no political content on this account. I vote; and that’s it. The world does not need another social media nitwit telling people how to think and vote. 

This post is not about politics, but about support for my friends that work for the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, a federal agency.

NWS meteorologists work long, hard hours serving the people of this country, not only during times of severe weather, but on the routine days as well.

Their surface and upper air observation networks along with computer models, radars, and satellites are critical for all meteorologists, including those of us in the private sector. 

Most NWS field offices are currently understaffed right now. I can only imagine morale is not especially high. 

Many high-level politicians follow this page, both Democrats and Republicans. I would encourage them and all of you to support my colleagues at the National Weather Service during this time. Their service is absolutely invaluable. 

If NWS products and services are reduced, we all suffer…especially during times of life-threatening weather. 

[Julian Lennon @JulianLennon]

🙏🏼