Eric N. Winn

Former Flicka sailor, Cruzbike recumbent rider, ultra marathon cycler , computer geek, and reader of science fiction. Cybertruck owner.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

🎯

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Senator Thune,

At 3 AM on Friday, March 27th, in a near-empty chamber, you passed a bill by voice vote that excludes all funding for ICE and CBP.

Let me repeat that: voice vote. No roll call. No record of who was there. No accountability. Just you, Barrasso, and a handful of senators shuffling paper in the dead of night while America slept.

You could have demanded a recorded vote. You chose not to.

You could have held the line for five more days until the House returned. You chose not to.

You could have used the same procedural tools Democrats have used against you for 40 days. You chose not to.

Instead, you gave Chuck Schumer exactly what he asked for, DHS funding minus immigration enforcement, and called it a win. Then you walked to the cameras and blamed the Democrats.

Let's be precise about what you did:

1. You caved to a demand Democrats made on Day 1 of this shutdown. Forty-one days of supposed hardball negotiation, and you settled for their opening offer.
2. You handed them a template. The next time Democrats want to defund any agency — ICE, CBP, or anything else — they now know: just shut down DHS and wait. John Thune will fold at 3 AM.
3. You punted to reconciliation. "Good possibility," you said. Not "we will." Not "guaranteed." Just maybe. Meanwhile, ICE operates on fumes from last year's bill with no certainty of future funding.

The precedent you set:

You have argued for months that the filibuster is sacrosanct. That the 60-vote threshold protects minority rights. That we cannot bend Senate rules for policy wins.

But at 3 AM on Friday, you bent every norm that actually mattered:

• Voice vote to avoid accountability
• Empty chamber to avoid debate
• Midnight deal to avoid scrutiny
• Immediate recess to avoid questions

You'll bend the rules to avoid a fight. You just won't bend them to win one.

What you've actually accomplished:

Democrats demanded ICE restrictions. They got ICE defunded.

Not reformed. Not restrained. Defunded.

And you're out here tweeting about how Democrats are the "Defund the Police" party while you just voted to defund border enforcement at 3 in the morning.
The question you should answer:

Why did this deal have to happen at 3 AM?

Why couldn't it happen at 3 PM, with cameras rolling and every senator on record?

You know why. Because you didn't want your voters to see what surrender looks like.

Here's my message: We saw it anyway.

Stop hiding behind "Democrat obstruction." You're the Majority Leader. You set the schedule. You control the floor. You chose this outcome.

Own it.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

🫡🇺🇸😎

[Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @SecWar]

Today, the first milestone test of Golden Dome for America (GDA) was a full mission success — and I was honored to witness it firsthand.

Cutting edge directed energy was harnessed and the Dynamic Defense Autonomous Defeat (DDAD) system flawlessly and autonomously cued, targeted, and eliminated a multitude of incoming threats. This test was executed on schedule — and dynamically
defeated every threat.

I watched our elite warfighters integrate with next-generation technology to stop incoming drones and cruise missiles dead in their tracks.

Traditional Primes and emerging Primes are competing, collaborating, and winning—delivering on President Trump’s priority.

This historic milestone was only made possible by the One Big Beautiful Bill—giving us the funding to deliver on the ultimate shield to protect America.

President Trump is making President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) vision a reality. With Golden Dome, the War Department will defend our homeland more powerfully than ever before. Golden Dome is real, powerful, and on track.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@hartness_daniel @mattvanswol @ClownWorld Pretty much every single residential home and a few other places… 😏

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@Wanderer071189 @BillMelugin_ Impeach the Pitts

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

This is wonderful.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

A true medical miracle just happened. Daniel Cressy, 23, just became the first person in Louisiana—and the entire Gulf South—to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease using CRISPR gene editing.

Doctors collected his stem cells, edited them with Casgevy to boost fetal hemoglobin production, eliminated the diseased cells, and infused the corrected cells back into his body. The result?
No active sickle cell disease.
No more debilitating pain crises.
No more hospitalizations defining his life.
And perhaps most remarkable of all: his dream of becoming a commercial pilot, once blocked because of sickle cell disease, is now back within reach.

For decades, medicine treated the symptoms. Now we can edit the underlying DNA. Read that again. We are living in an age where a genetic disease can be rewritten at its source. One young man's future was restored.
Thousands more may follow.
Functional cure achieved.
Functional cure achieved.
Future rewritten.
What an incredible time to be alive. 🧬✈️

[SCOTUS Wire @scotus_wire]

🚨 In a 2-1 vote, the D.C. Circuit has restored the Trump administration's 2025 expansion of expedited removal for noncitizens, allowing the DHS to apply expedited removal nationwide to the full extent Congress authorized.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

😎

[SCOTUS Wire @scotus_wire]

🚨 In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court rules that the Helms‑Burton Act itself strips Cuban state‑owned companies of sovereign immunity, allowing Exxon’s billion‑dollar lawsuit over property seized after Castro’s 1960 nationalizations to proceed in U.S. courts.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Fifth decision out of Supreme Court -- Blanche v. Lau. Attorney General can strip non-citizen of green card and permission to return to U.S. if the alien leaves the country to answer criminal charges abroad.

The question posed is what amount of evidence is needed by a Border Officer to deny re-entry to a permanent resident alien with regard to the alleged criminal conduct abroad?

A very liberal 2nd Cir. opinion had held that Immigration Officials must have "clear and convincing evidence" of the past criminal activity abroad at the time of re-entry.

That is normally the standard for removal of a permanent resident alien, and the 2nd Cir. -- because the immigration is silent with regard to re-entry by a permanent resident alien -- concluded the same standard should apply to deny re-entry as to order removal.

The alien had pled guilty while out of the country, and SCOTUS found that was more than sufficient evidence for the decision of the border officer to deny re-entry to a permanent resident alien.

6-3 decision with Justice Thomas writing for the majority, and three liberals all dissenting.

Just another example of a comment I heard yesterday on a podcast -- it seems like there is simply no criminal alien that the liberal/progressives won't defend against the Trump Admin. efforts to keep criminal aliens out of the country.

[The Misfit Patriot @misfitpatriot_]

Unless you truly believe Trump spent the past 40 years saying Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, and then bombed the fuck out of them for three months, destroyed all their enrichment sites, killed every one of their leaders, then killed their replacements, then killed the replacements replacements. Unless you truly believe he destroyed their navy, and Air Force, took over the straight of Hormuz, and threatened to take out Kharg island if they didn’t come to the table, just so he could make a deal that helps the IRGC continue doing all the shit that made him go Don Wick on them, then you have nothing to worry about.

It’s perfectly reasonable not to trust the Iranian terrorist regime honoring any deal they make with the U.S.

It’s not reasonable to start attacking the administration unless you truly believe Trump felt the same as you do for over 4 decades and all the sudden turned into Obama overnight.

Let the man cook.

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

BREAKING: Starlink is helping power education for hundreds of girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 🇨🇩

• School provides free education to 430 girls
• Community programs reach 5,000+ people annually
• Installed at the Malaika School in Lubumbashi
• Supports digital learning and internet access for students

The Education Minister Raïssa Malu visited Malaika School and Community Center where Starlink is being used to expand access to online learning.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

😎

[America First Legal @America1stLegal]

🚨MAJOR VICTORY🚨

AFL and @KenPaxtonTX just secured a federal court order PERMANENTLY ENDING an illegal Biden-era backdoor amnesty program that allowed immigration judges to indefinitely freeze removal proceedings against illegal aliens.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

Time for pillories to make a come back for those guilty of vandalism.

[Kerry McQuisten’s Common Sense Sanctuary @KerryMcQ4Oregon]

Let’s talk reflecting pool. Warren G. Harding built it on swampland and the structure beneath it would have been fine - if it had been built on stable ground. The whole thing started sinking slowly.

Presidents all the way up through Carter kept trying to prop it up with little cement pours, and regularly draining and cleaning it. Algae was a problem even then because there was no real circulation system. No pumps. No filters.

Reagan added some more concrete, realizing the entire pool was now 12 or 13 inches lower than it should be. It had sunk over a foot and pulled loose from its structure.

Clinton publicly acknowledged that the entire pool needed demolished and rebuilt, and that it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to do it right.

The Bushes just kept trying to plug leaks and clean it. Every time they had to drain and scrub the thing, it cost around $100,000 to do so. George W. Bush actually had plans drawn up to rebuild it. 

Obama decided to revise and execute the Bush renovation, which was needed, but it was flawed, and he spent tens of millions of dollars on it. He raised the pool up with a timber under-structure so the water ended up being even shallower, which means that’s the point at which the water started getting warmer. He also turned off the chlorinated city water supply into the pool and began pumping water in from the tidal basin - that’s the somewhat stagnant water that comes in from the Potomac River and surrounds the Jefferson Memorial. There was algae before, but with those changes came even more algae. Obama‘s reasoning was that the basin water would be cheaper instead of using the city water supply. He had the pool tiles removed from the bottom and another layer gray cement put in place along with gray-tinted reflective paint, which gradually faded away.

By the time Trump’s first term came around, the cleaning had to be done every three or four months, some of the Obama structural repairs were failing, and the leaks were rampant again.

By the time Biden got into office, Obama’s reflecting pool fixes were cracked and the pool was leaking hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of gallons of water. Biden opted to clean the pool, but performed little maintenance, and did no substantial refurbishment.

Trump’s fix was to try something that the other presidents hadn’t. Whereas Obama had used a gray reflective paint and cement, Trump tried a combination sealant liner - it isn’t paint. Those sealants are similarly light-reflective to what Obama used. Trump switched up to blue from the dark gray. He added nanobubblers.

When we walked around it the other day, there was only a small patch on the middle of the left side that may have been coming up. It was too windy and stormy to see why. It was not as if the sealant was coming up all over the pool and floating to the top because it wasn’t. We did see the algae cleaning going on and the crews, you could tell, were tired of being harassed for doing their jobs. 

Vandals have damaged the grass, they’ve cut into the liner in other places and the knife lines are clear in the videos. We did see the National Guard soldiers coming in. We also saw them placed around the America 250 construction area and in between the museums. Five vandals have been arrested since we walked through. It’s unbelievable to me that they want to destroy something we could all enjoy out of hatred for a president whose policies they don’t even understand.  And the mainstream media is reprehensible. They aren’t reporting. They’re spinning propaganda as usual.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@OverReactor1776 @isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics It’s freaking awesome.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

Well said.

[Matthew Boyle @mboyle1]

This is not rocket science:

- No, Donald Trump is not and never has been controlled by Israel (or frankly anyone or anything else) and he made the decisions on his own to strike Iran’s nuclear program

- Yes, Operation Epic Fury was (like Midnight Hammer before it) a smashing success and by all accounts Iran’s nuclear program is completely decimated as is Iran’s navy and Air Force

- No, Donald Trump has not capitulated to Iran by negotiating a deal to end the war. Trump has never been an endless war guy, had a clear objective at the outset of this, upon achieving that clear objective he began efforts to move on. The objective was never “regime change.” It was to eliminate the nuclear weapons program, plain and simple.

- Yes, Donald Trump still supports Israel. He’s (as Benjamin Netanyahu told me last year!) the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House. It’s time for the Israelis to trust him in this critical moment.

- No, Donald Trump should not turn against all the other countries in the region because they are led by Muslims. The Qataris, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Pakistanis, the Bahrainis, the Kuwaitis (and more I’m sure I’m leaving out of this list) have all done some important things for the interest of the United States here in this particular conflict and many of them at the direction of the United States. There are majorly important opportunities available moving forward for the region and the whole world and the gulf Arabs know this. They have openly embraced this idea from Trump — and Trump has likewise embraced them as a major part of his worldview, even going to Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia as his first foreign trip back in the White House. Expansion of the Abraham Accords is not only possible but likely but even that is thinking too small. The opportunities for global trade routes through the Middle East (from India to Europe and then to the USA) are immense. Read up on IMEC. It’s no accident Trump held a bilateral with Qataris, Emiratis, and India’s MODI at the G7.

- Yes, it’s okay to not be in “either camp” in this whole mega online fight and it’s okay to think the globalist neocons are wrong on a bunch of stuff and the anti-war crowd are wrong on a bunch of other stuff — while both camps are right on some things. Wow, shocking, isn’t it that maybe the president is neither an anti-war guy or a globalist neocon? Maybe the people around him like the Vice President and the Secretary of State don’t fit into these neatly carved cubby holes either? Trump and his crew — Vance, Rubio, et cetera — are very much PRAGMATISTS. Go do the job, get it done, get it over with, move on.

- No, do not expect any of these people on either side to tell the truth when inconvenient facts disrupt their stories. They are too pot committed to their narratives and winning their arguments. It’s a sad state of affairs that we live in, but frankly at the end of the day I’m very used to it with many stories. It’s really, as I opened this up, not rocket science guys: Trust the man we elected to be the president. It’s not complicated. It’s really that simple.

- Yes, Republicans are better than Democrats. Arguing that you’re done with the GOP because you disagree on this thing or that thing is not the answer. Taking your ball and going home is not the way to win the argument or the fight. Engage, engage, engage. But the notion that “sitting this one out” is a good idea or something is frankly very dumb and also will hand power to the left. Until someone can show me a viable pathway to a credible alternative, we live in a two party system in this country. That means a Republican will win or a Democrat will win. So being all like, “oh I regret supporting Trump,”— what did you want Kamala to be President? Because surely that would not be better than anything happening right now. Trump on his absolute worst day is a million times better than Kamala would have been on her absolute best day. Easily. So, in summation, engage in primaries and try to move voters your way. All those fights for freedom of speech we had the past several years were for this exact moment.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@esherifftv Congratulations!

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

.@MLB needs to get right with @AAGDhillon and our civil rights laws.

[Josh Hawley @HawleyMO]

.@MLB Commissioner writes to me and admits they were wrong to threaten the Giants players over Bible verses and promises never to fine or discipline these players - or any players for their religious beliefs

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@nikitabier 🙏

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@CynicalPublius 🙏

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

I just have the @cybertruck with purchased FSD for now but whenever Tesla n+1 roll in, this would be a well appreciated feature.

[Pharts @Phartsig]

I think it would be a great idea if Tesla offered family FSD plans. We don’t drive both cars everyday and I have a hard time paying $200 a month for both when one is barely used. $99 for one and $25 a month add-on to an existing car would be great!

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

😎

[Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor]

Good morning.

Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night.

This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

[Eric N. Winn @enwinn]

@rhensing Ah, but which success sound is active? 🤨