erid

[David Burge @iowahawkblog]

Seventeen years of college down the drain

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Yoni Leviatan @songsofyoni]

Never again are you allowed to use the anecdote about half your family perishing in the Holocaust.

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

@cowincrisis @aelfred_D No. I see you guys trying to sneak into my yard. Back off, cow.

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

Having lost a job and lost a spouse in my lifetime, they are very, very, so much not the same.

[Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter]

If you define fascism as my people not being attacked by Third World invaders with knives, you’re not gonna like my choice.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

Found this lost picture of the Soviets and Nazis celebrating the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact…

[Weber 🇦🇷 @weberju5]

Every Sci-Fi writer who wants to do travel between different star systems has to deal with a fundamental problem:
The distances are insane.

There are multiple ways of tackling this. The first one is to just go really fast, up to a significant fraction of the speed of light. That's HARD. You have to know physics, deal with time dilation and so on; essentially you're forced to build large parts of your story around relativity.

The other option is to go "faster than light" without actually accelerating in a conventional sense. That's warp in Star Trek or hyperdrive in Star Wars. You can have the space travel without any of those nasty little issues that relativity introduces into your story. Great!

Once you insinuate that you accelerate a mass to near light speed, though, you open up the entire can of worms that comes with it. Your world building then has to deal with the fallout.

TLJ does not. It breaks the rules that were set up earlier. It retroactively destroys the plot of 2 of the 3 original movies by making the Death Star completely redundant: Who needs a giant space lazor when you can just strap a hyperdrive to a large stone and ram it into a planet at near light speed?

The fact that this nonsense ever got made shows how little respect Rian Johnson has not only for the lore, but also for his colleague who then had the near impossible task of cleaning up this mess (not that it mattered that much; the last sequel movie was an insane clusterfuck in is own right).

[Dieter F. Uchtdorf @UchtdorfDF]

Years ago, I flew a brand-new B747 on its first flight from Seattle to San Francisco. It was a clear day, and I was amazed by the beauty of the remarkable lineup of six solitary volcanoes, from Mount Rainier and Mount Hood to Mount Shasta.

Today, along the same route, we find more than six temples proclaiming Holiness to the Lord—the newest being the Willamette Valley Oregon Temple, which I was blessed to dedicate today. The house of the Lord lifts our vision, reorients our hearts, and reminds us who we are and whose we are.

Just as these great mountains mark the landscape, holy temples—and the covenants we make there—mark and connect our lives with the God of the Universe.

When you come to the temple during times of personal trial and great sorrow, you will find sweet peace for your soul. When you come to give thanks and worship God, our Heavenly Father, you will receive a special measure of affirmation and confidence from Him.

The temple will enrich your lives, inspire you to create in your homes and families a spirit of hope and peace, and endow you with blessings from on high.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Mr. Hunter Biden,

You're getting six-digit likes on every post lately. I don't have any hope to ratio you or whatever through traditional "Hello" means.

But for those uninitiated, those who are captivated by your fake-humble persona obviously PR-engineered to capture unsuspecting disaffected Republicans:

You are not some humility, witty guy turning over a new leaf. You are the ultimate proof of nepotism, everything that the so-called "Epstein Class" is supposed to represent.

Let me explain - off the top of my head.

You were a board member of USGLC. U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. The most powerful NGO that nobody's ever heard of. Last year, I documented in several threads, how Liz Schrayer, USGLC lead, took credit for ramming through a 90 billion dollar bill for Ukraine in 2024, even as @mattvanswol demonstrated that Western North Carolina got zero help in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because FEMA threw up their hands and said they ran out of funds.

USGLC, arguably, is the most powerful NGO that nobody has ever heard of. It includes a bunch of corporations, a bunch of nonprofit leads, and ... for some magical reason, I documented, extensively, linked, that Liz Schrayer started pursuing you in 2012. During the Obama years, when you were Biden's son. Are you a former Secretary of State? No. Are you a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? No. That puts you below the average USGLC board member, by a good tier.

So what DID get you on USGLC? The only reason: that you were the son of a sitting Vice President known for corruption, and you yourself were known for corruption.

You are not "folksy." You are the worst of the worst of the elite. Most of the elite, at least, get their credentials through Georgetown/George Washington/Harvard Kennedy. You got yours purely on nepotism. Any photographs you have of yourself at motels is proof that you are so incompetent that you waste all your money, not that you come from humble beginnings. Because others like @MarcoPolo501c3 have thoroughly documented that you benefited a great deal from your nepotism.

You even tried to bait those in with saying you prefer to keep immigration "legal" - but we all know the trap that keeps illegal immgrants here: outlaw deportations, and make every immigrant case "asylum", and magically, everyone who might've been here illegally a few years ago is legal.

You may get 175K likes on your semi-subverting, PR-designed photographs. But those of us who know, know you're fake.

https://t.co/vMml22uCbu

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Just a reminder that the ONLY Republican running for Mecklenburg County (Charlotte NC) District 1 dropped out of the race...

...BECAUSE NOT A SINGLE PERSON WAS ARRESTED FOR FIRING SHOTS AT HIS HOME WHILE HIS WIFE AND KIDS WERE INSIDE!!!!!

Local police SPECIFICALLY CONFIRMED the attack was targeted at Aaron Marin.

Bullet holes can be seen in trees, cars, mailbox, and his kid's basketball hoop. Marin's ENTIRE FAMILY was forced to leave their home and Aaron says they live in, "constant fear."

He says his kids no longer even feel safe to play outside and they are moving now.

CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN WHY ZERO MAINSTREAM MEDIA OUTLET COVERED THIS??????!!!!!!

REPUBLICANS ARE LITERALLY BEING SHOT AT AND THERE IS SILENCE FROM THE MEDIA!!!!!!

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?!!!!!!

[Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield]

It’s pretty different actually.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

John Thune has become a punching bag for good reason but there is a more insidious force at play nobody can talk about. Let me explain…

The staffers in Thune’s office have been asking Trump Naval and Maritime appointees questions about me before confirmation hearings.

I doubt John Thune knows who I am. His staff absolutely does. They track me. They hate me. And they will quietly bleed pushing out any appointee I’m friends with.

Someone close to PPO told me a Trump staffer commented that “Konrad should be a HBS case study on someone every in the administration respects but has zero chance of any appointment.”

It’s probably because I’ve called out congressional staffers numerous times before.

This is how Congress actually works.

It’s always the staffers. When we first floated the SHIPS Act, Mike Johnson’s hometown delegation were strong supporters.

The minute he became Speaker, his hometown people got bulldozed by the Speaker of the House staff he inherited.

Same man, different staff, different priorities.

Why do you think they wanted Mitch McConnell propped up after the freezing episodes? It wasn’t McConnell.

It was the cartel of people on his staff who needed his chair filled by someone they already controlled.

Members can’t read their own bills anymore. Thirty years of capped staff, frozen pay, and brain drain to K Street has left rank and file senators functionally illiterate on the legislation they vote on.

Leadership staff fill the vacuum. They are not entrenched because they are corrupt. They are entrenched because nobody else in the building can move a 1,500-page must-pass bill through conference.

That is the cartel. And it has rules. If you want anything in the NDAA, the omnibus, the CR, or any vehicle that actually moves, you do not piss them off. You do not name them. Break either rule and you do not get a second omnibus.

I’m not even willing to name individual staff.

John Phelan is the case study nobody is reading correctly. Phelan was not fired because he was a bad secretary. Phelan was fired because his chief of staff Jon Harrison had deep knowledge of the pentagon that Phelan lacked. Without him, Phelan was walking around the Pentagon naked and he knew it. He pulled back from media events and became too cautious.

Then there is Susie Wiles. I don’t know her. Never met her. From everything I can piece together she is doing a great job. The point is not Susie. The point is the Vanity Fair article.

It’s not even the article itself, that article contained a lot of BS, it was the reaction that came after. Every single republican & a few democrats stood behind her.

Now contrast that with the flood of negative articles about Mike Waltz, Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi.

When a politician is the subject of a hut piece is dragged over the coals, the system shrugs. But when it’s a senior staffer, the system closes rank. It is safer to trash Trump in print than to be perceived as trashing Susie. Trump is used to it. Susie controls the schedule, the access, and the door.

Multiply Susie by every leadership chief of staff, every NDAA conference staffer, & you have the machine. It is not partisan. Schumer’s staff & Thune’s staff protect each other from outside critics more reliably than they protect their own bosses from each other.

Leaders come and go but leadership staff is entrenched.

Congress is broken because leadership staff on both sides want it to remain broken. A Congress that can only legislate through 2,000-page must-pass bill is a Congress where the staff who draft the bill run the country. Regular order is their extinction event. They will never let it come back voluntarily.

You can call out politicians all day. They are used to it. Call out the staff and you don’t get frozen out of one bill. You get frozen out of every bill, by every office, on both sides, for as long as the cartel decides to remember your name.

They remember mine. Now you know why.​​​​​​​​​​​​​ even Luna can’t vall them out.

[David Burge @iowahawkblog]

I wish I got royalties from this one

[Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield]

Anyone who has ever extracted themselves from a relationship with a narcissistic abuser knows it isn’t clean or easy.

I cringe remembering how many times I tried to play the “cool girl” or fawn in response to what was clearly abusive, coercively controlling behavior by Graham.

I also know how dangerous it is to become the target of a narcissist — so even long after our relationship ended I continued to be upbeat any time he reached out, though I would also immediately shut down any attempts on his part to initiate flirting or romanticizing of the past.

Yes, the day I saw him announce he was running I wanted to make sure people knew he had a Nazi tattoo — and I was terrified he would find out it was me.

But of course he knew it was me.

What’s ironic is I absolutely never would have shared my story if he hadn’t been relentlessly attacking my character behind the scenes for months once the tattoo story came out.

I tried to signal that I wasn’t the source and stayed completely silent about him on social media even as most of my friends posted regularly about what a bad person he is.

But then in early April the New York Times came to me. I asked how they got my number. I said I was not interested in sharing my story. They said but wait—there are other women. Women terrified to tell their stories, too, and you need to band together. WE will help you. We will protect you. Men can’t keep getting away with this.

Hours before their first call to me I saw Eric Swalwell’s name plate get removed from his office door in Cannon. It felt like fate.

I welcomed the two journalists into my home days later, nervous and overwhelmed. Justin Fairfax had just murdered his wife and himself the previous day and even conservative pundits were conjecturing that “if only those women hadn’t accused him of abuse, this never would have happened…”

But I told them my story. I let them take pictures of my diary pages. I sent them screenshots of messages and gave them phone numbers and contacts. It was excruciating. I was surprised by what details I remembered, and as I poured through old messages I was horrified by how much I had forgotten.

I explained very clearly that, like many women abused by their partners, I had not told anyone about his violence at the time—I had covered for and defended it. I accepted his earnest apologies. They said that’s fine because the diary entries and my on the record story was enough.

They connected me to two of the other victims so we wouldn’t feel so alone. I insisted to each of them that I trusted the NYT journalists and that we were doing the right thing despite their (sadly very accurate) sense that something was wrong.

One of the victims and I realized our relationships with Graham overlapped completely - he had been cheating on both of us the entire time we were together.

I should note here that my life is just… beautiful. These are the best years of my life. Raising two young girls in a safe, beautiful neighborhood where I work from home and shuffle my children from dance classes and soccer to church events — I am blessed far beyond what I deserve with wonderful friends and family and the most loving, brilliant husband in the world. Why would I blow my life up like this? Why would I risk the psychotic doxxing from violent leftist activists?

Because while I have been terrified to come forward I decided this was the “hard right thing” to do. The guilt of staying silent has nagged me.

Most therapists recommend a “gray rock” approach to extracting yourself from narcissistic abuse — it works really well, but it is a gift to the abuser, allowing them to persist in their delusion that they’ve done nothing wrong.

I couldn’t stay silent as he continued to lie and lie and lie. I want my daughters to boldly speak out if they’re ever abused as I was.

[Coach Tommy Tuberville @SenTuberville]

It is beyond EMBARRASSING that “Republicans” continue to block the SAVE America Act.

@SenThomTillis, @LisaMurkowski, @SenMcConnell, and @SenatorCollins have not only betrayed their constituents — they are ACCOMPLICES in Democrats’ “Illegals First” agenda.

The people of North Carolina, Alaska, Kentucky, and Maine deserve better.

[Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield]

I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists.

As they left my home they asked that I not talk to any other outlets and I insisted then and repeatedly over the following weeks that I would keep my word and only share this story with them.

But then the weeks dragged on. They kept coming back to us saying the editors needed more. I needed to go on the record (okay). We need more screenshots (okay). I met every bench mark they set, eager to provide more sources or evidence as needed.

After the story went up I began to ask them … wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?

Why does it say “nobody could corroborate” when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?

Why did they include an out of context quote from a friend joking “do not call Graham” after I called off my wedding? (Because she knew I would never).

Where were the screenshots they’d said they would use? Or the mention that I’d supported local democrats and that most of my family (and husband) are liberal?

The editors said it was too much, they explained.

The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.

It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.

And at the end of my call with them I reluctantly accepted their insistence that this was still a powerful story and that I had done a brave thing. And I thanked them for all the hard work they had put into it.

Still fawning after all these years.

[Fusilli Spock @awstar11]

Eric Swalwell must be fucking furious watching the Dems continue to support Platner for roughly the same thing he did but with a Nazi tattoo.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Vote them out

[Sunny @sunnyright]

So not the Epstein list huh?