Steven Hejmanowski

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@Melda1384191 Yes. Just had a rental a month ago and they offered up the “manual transmission” Ford Bronco for the weekend. I said … “YES, please!!”

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@CynicalPublius Amen! Couldn’t agree more on this take and it’s 💯on point!

[Leslye ♥️ Texas @LMozisek]

As someone who’s been singing the National Anthem at rodeo events for over 20 years, I’ll just say….
There’s a way it was intended to be sung, without your own spin. This was 💯the way! Bravo!

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Dear People Visiting the U.S. for the World Cup:

Much ado has been made about Freddy from Germany and other visitors from Europe, Asia and elsewhere delighting in quintessential American chain dining establishments such as Buc-ees and Texas Roadhouse.

Please allow me to make ten other American chain dining recommendations:

1. Go to Krispy Kreme and get a dozen Original Glazed donuts when the neon “HOT” sign is turned on in the window.
2. Go to Jersey Mike’s and order a #2 for an authentic Jersey Shore experience (“Tramps like us, baby we were born to run”), or get a #17 for an authentic South Philly experience ("Yo, Adrian!”).
3. Go to Chick-fil-A and get an Original Chicken Sandwich with Waffle Fries and a lemonade. (Don’t go on Sunday, they are closed so everybody can go to Church.)
4. Go to the Cheesecake Factory and order whatever you want, it’s the biggest menu you will ever see anywhere. They have everything. I’m not exaggerating, the menu is SOOO many pages. And get a slice of cheesecake—it’s the most decadent cheesecake imaginable, and all the many flavors are great.
5. Olive Garden. It’s not real Italian food, it’s some Americanized version of quasi-Italian food. Go for the endless breadsticks and salad.
6. Taco Bell. Order the Crunchwrap Supreme. Best at 1 a.m. while drunk. (Don’t drink and drive though—American police frown on that.)
7. Chain burger joints are contentious even here in America. Some are mostly regional: Shake Shack, Smash Burger, In-n-Out Burger, Five Guys (those are all great). Probably the best chain burger you can find everywhere in the USA is Wendy’s. Try the Pretzel Baconator with fries and a Coke.
8. Go to Dairy Queen and order a Blizzard. (It’s a dessert, get whatever flavor strikes your fancy. It’s a lot of calories.)
9. Breakfast? McDonald’s. Yeah I know you probably have McDonald’s back in your home country but there is something about a McDonald’s drive thru off an interstate highway that is quintessentially American. Egg McMuffin, hash browns and a coffee (tell them if you want cream and/or sugar, they will add it for you).
10. Buffalo Wild Wings. All the games will be on the many televisions. Get the bone-in wings with the Original Buffalo Sauce.

I’m pretty sure you’ll get a lot of recommendations from other folks on this post. Thanks for enjoying our country. We love that you love it.

Safe travels,
CP

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

With Afghanistan still fresh in the nation’s memory and D-Day upon us again, I’ve been thinking about a piece of paper that weighs more than most leadership books ever written.

On this day in 1944, the night before the largest amphibious invasion in human history, Eisenhower sat staring into uncertainty. The weather was bad. His intelligence was incomplete. Thousands of ships were moving. Tens of thousands of men were preparing to climb down cargo nets into a black and angry sea. If the invasion failed, history itself would have bent in a different direction.

So Eisenhower wrote a little known note. Not because he expected failure, but because he understood command.

In a few short lines he accepted responsibility for a catastrophe that had not yet happened. No caveats or qualifiers. No carefully crafted language designed to spread blame across a dozen desks.

If the operation failed, it was his fault.

That was it. That was the entire note.

What strikes me is not the courage required to launch D-Day. Everybody understands that part. What strikes me is how completely alien that level of accountability feels today.

Somewhere along the way we built a culture where authority became a right and responsibility became optional. Everybody wants the title, the influence, the prestige. The moment things go wrong, however, the hunt begins for circumstances, systems, misunderstandings, subordinates, budgets, politics, weather, timing, or anyone else willing to stand still long enough to absorb the impact.

Eisenhower understood that command is not a reward, but a burden. The rank exists because somebody must stand at the end of the line and say, “This belongs to me.”

That little note may be one of the most important leadership documents ever written because it captured a truth that every generation eventually has to relearn: the higher you climb, the fewer excuses you are allowed to make.

The men who landed on those beaches carried rifles.

Eisenhower carried all of them.

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@HawkEmDownChris Steve “Lefty” Carlton

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@realmikeglynn Yes. That’s how it all started …

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@_iamlougotti Rick Dempsey

[Justin Lever ❤️⚾️ @JustinLever3]

Dan Vladar Appreciation Tweet 👏👏👏

[Jamey Baskow @JameyBaskow]

Dan Vladar on playing in Philly:

"I’m so happy I got a chance to experience it, and I’m hungry for more.”

From every Flyers fan, thanks Dan for a great season

#Flyers

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@shadewulf11 @RSE_VB VF-84 was the original Jolly Rogers

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@Semper_Ute @RSE_VB The Sluggers? With the bat and clover? Seriously?

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@RSE_VB @swank88 Agreed. It was terrible …

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@RSE_VB VF-1 / VF-142 / VF-84 … the first, then the Ghostriders (because that is simply a badass nickname and logo) and the ORIGINAL Jolly Rogers …

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

The United States capital is in Washington D.C. for one reason almost nobody learns in school.

Congress got run out of Philadelphia by its own army.

In June 1783, just months after the Revolutionary War ended, around four hundred unpaid Continental soldiers marched on the Pennsylvania State House where the Continental Congress was meeting. They surrounded the building, jeered through the windows, jabbed bayonets at the doorway, and demanded their back pay.

Congress turned to Pennsylvania's state government and asked them to call out the militia to disperse the mob.

Pennsylvania refused.

The most powerful legislative body in the new nation realized, in real time, that it had no land of its own, no soldiers of its own, and no protection from the very state that hosted it. So they did the only thing they could do. They fled in the night.

That single humiliation, called the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, is the reason there is a federal district at all. The framers later wrote into the Constitution that the seat of government would never again belong to any one state. It would belong only to itself.

But before that fix arrived, the capital wandered like a refugee.

Including Philadelphia, which served on and off five separate times, the capital of the United States has officially sat in nine different cities.

Baltimore, Maryland. Congress fled there in December 1776 when the British army was closing on Philadelphia and Washington's troops were freezing along the Delaware. They met in a tavern.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The capital was here for exactly one day in September 1777 before Congress decided to keep running.

York, Pennsylvania. They settled across the Susquehanna River for nine months. The Articles of Confederation, the country's first constitution, were drafted there. York is the only city outside the original thirteen state capitals that can credibly claim to have hosted the birth of American government.

Princeton, New Jersey. After the soldiers' mutiny, Congress relocated to Nassau Hall on the Princeton College campus, where the building still has a cannonball hole from the war.

Annapolis, Maryland. In December 1783, in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, George Washington walked in, removed his sword, and resigned his commission as commander in chief of the army. He could have made himself king. Instead, he handed the war back to Congress and went home to farm. King George III, when he heard about it from across the Atlantic, reportedly said that if Washington really did that, he would be the greatest man in the world.

The Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, was ratified in that same Annapolis room a few weeks later.

Trenton, New Jersey. Congress met there for a few weeks in late 1784.

New York City. From 1785 to 1790, this was the seat of government. George Washington was inaugurated there on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in April 1789. The Bill of Rights was drafted there. The first Supreme Court convened there. New Yorkers fully expected to be the permanent capital forever.

Then politics happened.

In June 1790, Thomas Jefferson hosted a private dinner at his rented New York home. Alexander Hamilton attended. James Madison attended. Hamilton needed Southern votes for his plan to have the federal government assume the war debts of the states. Madison and Jefferson, both Virginians, wanted something in return.

They wanted the capital out of the North.

The deal struck over that dinner table is now called the Compromise of 1790. The federal government would absorb state debts. In exchange, the permanent capital would move to a brand new city built on the Potomac River, near Virginia, on land that did not yet exist as a city, on swampy farmland and forest that would have to be carved out of Maryland and Virginia and built from scratch.

While they built it, the capital would temporarily move back to Philadelphia for ten years.

George Washington personally chose the exact site. It included his own neighborhood. Mount Vernon was just down the river.

The boundaries of the new district were laid out as a perfect ten mile by ten mile diamond by Andrew Ellicott and a free Black astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, the son of a former slave, who calculated the survey points using the stars. There is a quiet historical irony in the fact that the city of American government was mapped, in part, by a man whose own grandfather had been kidnapped from Africa.

A French engineer named Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed the streets, the broad avenues, the placement of the Capitol on a hill and the President's House nearly two miles away connected by a long ceremonial road. He was fired within a year for being impossible to work with. His plan was used anyway.

The federal government moved into Washington in November 1800. The Capitol building was unfinished. The White House was unfinished. John Adams, the second president, moved into the unfinished mansion, and his wife Abigail famously hung the laundry to dry in the empty East Room because she had nowhere else to put it.

Then in August 1814, during the War of 1812, a British army marched up from the Chesapeake Bay, fought a brief and embarrassing battle at Bladensburg in which American militia ran for their lives, and walked into Washington unopposed.

They burned the Capitol. They burned the White House. They burned the Treasury. President James Madison fled into Virginia. His wife Dolley refused to leave until she had cut a full length portrait of George Washington out of its frame and rolled it up to save it. That painting still hangs in the East Room today.

When Congress returned to the smoking ruins of the city, a serious motion was put forward to abandon Washington forever and move the capital permanently back to Philadelphia. The vote failed by nine votes. Eighty three to seventy four.

Nine votes. That is how close Washington D.C. came to ending in 1814.

The diamond shape of the original district is also gone now. The Virginia side, which included most of Arlington and part of Alexandria, was given back to Virginia in 1846 because residents there felt ignored by the federal government and wanted to vote in state elections again. That is why the modern map of D.C. has a clean square edge cut out of one side. It was once the rest of the diamond.

During the Civil War, Washington sat on the front line. It was surrounded on three sides by slave territory. Confederate forces came within sight of the unfinished Capitol dome at Fort Stevens in July 1864, the only time in American history a sitting president, Abraham Lincoln, came under direct enemy fire on a battlefield. He stood on a parapet to watch the fight in his stovepipe hat. A Union officer reportedly shouted at him to get down before he was shot. That officer, by some accounts, was a young captain named Oliver Wendell Holmes, who would later sit on the Supreme Court for thirty years.

The Washington Monument, started in 1848, sat as an unfinished stump for over twenty years because the country ran out of money and then had a war. If you stand at the base today and look up, you can still see a faint horizontal line where the marble changes color. The bottom third was quarried before the Civil War. The top two thirds came from a different quarry decades later. It looks like a healed scar on the skyline of the city.

So the next time someone asks why the capital of the United States sits where it does, the answer is not really about geography, or compromise, or Washington's hometown.

The answer is that in 1783, an army of unpaid soldiers chased the United States Congress out of its own building, and a state government shrugged and watched it happen.

Everything after that, the diamond on the Potomac, the burning of the city in 1814, the cannonball hole in Nassau Hall, the resignation in Annapolis, the dinner deal in New York, the missing piece given back to Virginia, the scar on the Washington Monument, all of it traces back to that single summer in Philadelphia when the founders learned the hard way that a government without ground of its own is a government on the run.

They never wanted to run again.

[Sage Steele @sagesteele]

This is awesome.

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@astro_reid @elonmusk BZ, Tonto! Phenomenal leadership and teamwork. Awe-inspiring is an understatement.

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

@elonmusk Thank you, @elonmusk - the four of us glimpsed the red hues of Mars far in the distance as the sun slipped behind the Moon and there was zero doubt in our minds that the creative genius of our greatest minds will have us there very soon. LETS GO

[Steven Hejmanowski @f14sonic]

@RSE_VB We bought the light kit too. It is cool.