Mike Mattson

Husband, Father of three, Chairman Thornbury Twp Board of Sups, Attorney, mediocre golfer, Delco Republican, lover of liberty. “Love will see you through” -GD

[Philadelphia Phillies @Phillies]

A record that stood for 115 years now belongs to Cristopher Sánchez

[MLB @MLB]

Cristopher Sánchez finishes off a scoreless MONTH 😳

He joins Orel Hershiser (Sept. 1988) as the only two pitchers to go an entire calendar month without allowing a run since 1913 (min. 30 IP)!

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Please do a quick read of this. It’s short, well written, and will remove a bit of wool from over your eyes.

[PGA of America @PGA]

If you're looking to tee it up in Philadelphia, these are some fun public courses to play! ⛳️

[GOLF.com @GOLF_com]

Philly fans are one of a kind, heckling Scottie Scheffler for being a Cowboys fan.

(via Frank_Mcfillin3)

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@AdamSchefter Philly just has Pittsburghs number this week. #letsgoflyers!

[Brit Hume @brithume]

This is interesting.

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

I support this 100% but also a true leader acknowledges the mistakes that were made just a short 6 years ago. This is a reaction to failed big government covid policy that affected millions of children. What will you do to ensure that never happens again?

[Governor Josh Shapiro @GovernorShapiro]

The best thing we can do for our kids right now is to just let them be kids.

Kids are getting cell phones sooner than any generation before them, screen times are up while real human connection is down, and foundational skills aren’t being taught enough these days. We need to take a step back.

It’s why I just signed a bipartisan bill into law, requiring cursive handwriting to once again be taught in PA public schools. It’s also why I’ve called on the legislature to pass a bill requiring schools to both implement a bell-to-bell cell phone ban and guarantee recess for every Pennsylvania student. 

Let’s continue our work to set young people on a path to success — and let our kids be kids.

[Matt Mehan @MTMehan]

Just a small note: former presidents, until Obama, did not engage in active politics after office as he is now doing. The reason: once someone has been given centralized and unified control of government power as the head of the country and of all military, clandestine, and diplomatic powers, it is considered tyrannical to attempt to use that power once out of constitutional office, even by means of soft power influence over either those powers or the people in general.

It was the custom, from Washington to George W. Bush, to avoid using the glamour of highest office over the people after having served in the office of presidency.

So when people get angry about norms being violated, just remember: there are crude ways to violate norms, but there are also very gentile and silky ways to violate them as well.

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation."

A timely reminder from Ronald Reagan.

[Joshua Rauh @joshrauh]

If his team wins, Darnold will receive $178k and pay $249k to California in taxes for his time here, losing $71k. If his team loses he gets $103k and still pays over $235k in taxes, losing $135k. I presume California is declaring victory, as his incentive to win is preserved.

[Joseph Kruger @JosephKruger58]

Dr. Charles Krauthammer on Churchill:
It is just a parlor game, but since it only plays once every hundred years, it is hard to resist. Person of the Century. Time magazine offered Albert Einstein, an interesting and solid choice. Unfortunately, it is wrong. The only possible answer is Winston Churchill.

Why? Because only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.

Without Einstein? Einstein was certainly the best mind of the century. His 1905 trifecta—a total unknown who published three papers (on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and the special theory of relativity), each of which revolutionized its field—is probably the single most concentrated display of genius since the invention of the axle. (The wheel was easy; the axle hard.)

Einstein also had a deeply humane and philosophical soul. I would nominate him as most admirable man of the 20th century. But the most important? If Einstein hadn’t lived, the ideas he produced might have been delayed. But they would certainly have arisen without him. Indeed, by the time he’d published his paper on special relativity, Lorentz and Fitzgerald had already described how, at velocities approaching the speed of light, time dilates, length contracts and mass increases.

True, they misunderstood why. It took Einstein to draw the grand implications that constitute the special theory of relativity. But the groundwork was there. And true, his general theory of relativity in 1916 is prodigiously original. But considering the concentration of genius in the physics community of the first half of the 20th century, it is hard to believe that the general theory would not have come in due course, too.

Without Churchill
Take away Churchill in 1940, on the other hand, and Britain would have settled with Hitler—or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.

The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are undeniably powerful, almost determinant. Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. Such a man was Churchill. After having single-handedly saved Western civilization from Nazi barbarism—Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary—he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.

Churchill is now disparaged for not sharing our multicultural modern sensibilities. His disrespect for the suffrage movement, his disdain for Gandhi, his resistance to decolonization are undeniable. But that kind of criticism is akin to dethroning Lincoln as the greatest of 19th century Americans because he shared many of his era’s appalling prejudices about black people.

Who Else?
In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th century man parachuted into the 20th. But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself. The story of the 20th century is a story of revolution wrought by thoroughly modern men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and above all Lenin, who invented totalitarianism out of Marx’s cryptic and inchoate communism (and thus earns his place as runner-up to Churchill for Person of the Century). And it is the story of the modern intellectual, from Ezra Pound to Jean-Pierre Sartre, seduced by these modern men of politics and, grotesquely, serving them.

The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. The 20th century was no more scientifically gifted than the 19th, with its Gauss, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell and Mendel—all plowing, by the way, less-broken scientific ground than the 20th.

No. The originality of the 20th surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity.

And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century. Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of seventy-five years, neatly nestled into it. That is our story.

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@ryanhallyall @grok what does this mean for the Philadelphia area?

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@PHLEaglesNation Coaching and offense. All day.

[X @XaviercMiller]

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.

People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.

This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.

If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@camskattebo5 God bless you, young man!

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

Ooooh, this is bad

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@ZachGelb @Conroy1178 This is to blame. This and really only this.

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@Ike58Reese @SportsRadioWIP Four terrible at bats by Trey. Inexcusable

[Mike Mattson @DelcoMike610]

@RealSkipBayless This didn’t age well….