Millard Fillmore White House Library

Abigail & Millard wanted good reading at White House. Voila! Home of Ed Darrell & Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, History, science, govt

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Kylo Ren almost died in a Marine training accident before Hollywood knew his name. A white phosphorus round meant for the target came down on Adam Driver's platoon, and the wind blowing the other way is the only reason they lived. He says he had two thoughts as everyone ran.

He wanted a cigarette, and he wanted to be an actor once he got out.

Which is kind of funny, because acting had already turned him down. Juilliard rejected him right out of high school in Mishawaka, Indiana. He tried driving to LA to make it on his own, his car broke down halfway there, and he ended up back home selling vacuums door to door.

Then 9/11 happened, and he was one of the first people to walk into a Marine recruiter's office. He signed up for the infantry and ended up as an 81mm mortarman with 1st Battalion, 1st Marines at Camp Pendleton.

Getting out came a lot sooner than he planned. He wrecked his sternum in a mountain bike crash and still talked his battalion into deploying him. They put him back in training, he went on a hike with a 90-pound pack, and the injury got worse. He left the base hospital on a stretcher with his whole platoon standing around him. His unit went to Iraq without him, and the Marines medically discharged him after two years and eight months.

"I felt like I hadn't completed my four years," he told Military Times. "That always kind of bothers me."

He spent a year at the University of Indianapolis getting his grades up, tried Juilliard again, and this time he got in. His first year, he made classmates cry just by talking to them the way you talk to guys in a mortar platoon. Joanne Tucker, a classmate who later married him, called Juilliard boot camp for actors and said he never once showed up late or unprepared. Driver has said the Marine Corps was some of the best acting training you could get.

What stuck with him was his buddies. They were overseas while he was in New York doing scene work, and the plays he read in class started putting words to stuff he'd felt in uniform and never could say.

So while he was still a student, he pitched the USO on a little troupe that would perform for troops. They said no. His actors weren't famous, and he was told Marines would rather see the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

In 2008 he did it anyway. He brought about a dozen actors back to Camp Pendleton, his old base, for a bare-stage show of monologues and jazz, and that night turned into a nonprofit called Arts in the Armed Forces.

Girls came four years later, and after that it was three straight Emmy nominations, Kylo Ren, and two Oscar nominations. He and Tucker kept the nonprofit going through all of it, doing shows on bases overseas and for wounded troops at Walter Reed.

He never got to deploy with 1/1, so he spent 15 years sending actors out to the Marines who did.

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

BBC asks court to permit Jack Smith to sit for deposition in Trump's $10 billion defamation suit vs the media organization:

Smith has "strong evidence" that the January 6th violence was "foreseeable to Trump, that he caused it, and that he and his co-conspirators leveraged it”

[Michael Beschloss @BeschlossDC]

Tonight let's please honor the memory of Medgar Evers, World War II veteran and NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, who was murdered at the age of 37 outside his home in June 1963 and gave his life for civil and voting rights in Mississippi:

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

The ten largest American companies now account for more than 37% of the entire stock market.⁣
⁣
We haven't seen concentration like this since 1932. ⁣
⁣
That's an extraordinary amount of wealth that moves from just a single affair. https://t.co/uT5CMvd6TX

[Carissa Byrne Hessick @CBHessick]

Guy showed up in my mentions to tell me that there was never any such thing as a federal common law crime and that the Founders were disgusted by the very idea of common law crimes.
Poor guy didn’t know how excited I’d be to point him to the historical literature on the matter!!

[Sidsy @GrumpyOW]

For any of the Brand defenders still struggling with the concept of consent - THIS is what consent means.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

Imagine telling a pilot you don't believe in aerodynamics.

Or a structural engineer that gravity is just a theory.

Now imagine telling a chemist that chemicals are dangerous because they have complicated names.

Welcome to my comment section.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Blumenthal: US foreign policy has been skewed in the wrong way, and we need to restore our alliances.

Ukraine, which I have championed, really deserves more military aid and enforcement of the sanctions bill. 3X

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Blumenthal: I'm hoping to uncover the corruption that exists perhaps in Steve Witkoff's trips to Russia, where he tries to make deals.

Corruption has consequences. Those deals come with Putin called a humanitarian and fawned over, to get more access to deals. 2/

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Blumenthal: We still have no adequate explanation as to why Starlink was suspended for Ukraine.

Elon Musk says it was his doing, but Starlink is under the control of the Pentagon. No clarity. No disclosure. 1/

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen, claiming he matched the description of their target, and refused to check his ID, in Brownsville, TX.

He offered to show them his ID, and they handcuffed him anyway…

Then the agent had the audacity to say, “All you had to do was show an ID.”

Except that’s not how constitution works...

Agents need a legal basis to detain someone. They cannot manufacture one because someone doesn’t immediately comply with a demand to identify themselves.

You don’t have to surrender your rights to make ICE’s job easier.

It’s time to abolish ICE.

[Traces of Texas @TracesofTexas]

My dad, James Wright, joined the Army right after he turned 18 in 1942, just two months before he would have finished high school, but he still received his diploma. He served in the South Pacific with a unit focused on fighting mosquito-borne malaria. Back then, more troops were dying from malaria than from combat in that region.

Not every battle is fought with guns.

In his later years, he often remembered his Army days. He told a story about a day on one of the islands when a Japanese soldier joined their chow line. That soldier and his group had been hiding in the jungle and caves, starving. They started killing each other by rank for food. The Japanese soldier was next in line to die, so he chose to surrender to the Americans instead.

Once, he took a sword from a dead Japanese soldier, but later felt guilty about it. He realized that this man had loved and been loved, and taking something from him didn’t honor his life.

While my dad was on the ship heading to Japan for the planned invasion, he was out on deck and narrowly avoided being hit by a kamikaze pilot.

As the ship sped toward Japan, the Americans found out that the Japanese had surrendered. Everyone on board was overjoyed. When the ship arrived in Japan, my dad and another soldier walked into town. Later, he wondered why they took such a risk, since they could have faced hostility or even death, but instead, they were welcomed warmly. I’m sure the Japanese people were elated that the war was finally over, especially after the devastation caused by the atomic bombs.

He passed away at 91 in November 2015 at the VA Veterans’ Home in Temple, Texas.

Thank you, Dana. What a wonderful recollection!

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

why's Trump so blase about Nvidia CEO/Chinese-spy affair?
-He admires richer people, like Huang.
-He fears stronger people, like Xi.
-He thinks cheating on spouses, like he's done, is normal.
-He doesn't really care about national security - just himself.

https://t.co/gvKuGZHXb9

[The Washington Sun @washingtonsun]

Rep. Thomas Massie has successfully forced a second House vote to facilitate the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. https://t.co/4eF92Yt3Sh

[The Associated Press @AP]

Democrat Scott Colom defeats Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, becoming Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since 1881.

[National Wildlife Federation @NWF]

Colorado wildlife crossings have been amazingly successful. 🐻🦌🫎

In fact, a 10-month-old wildlife crossing over I-25 has reduced animal-vehicle collisions by 91%, giving everything from elk, deer, pronghorn, and many other species a safer way to cross. 🚧

[CantStopPoppin @CantStopPoppin]

For anyone who hasn't heard about this yet: ICE showed up at the front door of Dr. Ann Lawani in Lodi, California, while she was still in her pajamas, shackled her at the wrists, waist, and ankles, and shipped her all the way to a detention center in Louisiana.

She’s a frontline nurse who worked through the worst of COVID, directs the master's nursing program at the University of San Francisco (overseeing 230+ nursing students), and takes care of her 83-year-old dad.

When her family and lawyer tried to find out where she was taken, ICE’s online locator came back with "0 results." It turns out ICE quietly changed its policy the day before her arrest to stop listing thousands of detainees in the public database, so her family had no idea where she was for days while she was bounced from Stockton to Bakersfield to El Paso to Louisiana.

DHS put out a statement claiming she had a 2013 removal order, but they conveniently left out that on the *exact same day* in 2013, an immigration judge granted her Withholding of Removal blocking her deportation to Nigeria because she faced persecution there.

She has zero criminal record, has checked in with ICE for 13 years, and has a valid federal work permit through 2029. Because they legally can't send her to Nigeria, Rep. Josh Harder says ICE has been trying to quietly deport her to an undisclosed third country behind her lawyer's back.

Full write-up and breakdown of what happened here:
https://t.co/cu2O8Gz0Md

Support independent coverage & frontline updates:
https://t.co/cRnzhrQHyV

[PLGC @PL67712441]

@WUTangKids On brand

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

Longer clip….they did a full blown photo shoot out there smh

[Dr. Alice Frost @PoliSciChick84]

Some thoughts regarding the talks between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia in Abu Dhabi.

1. Ending the war in Ukraine: Unlikely. Ukraine should not and is unlikely to formally surrender territory to Russia. Moscow will continue its military campaign because it believes time is on its side and that sustained military pressure and attacks on civilian infrastructure will eventually weaken Ukrainian resistance. Kyiv, meanwhile, may calculate that Trump is a lame-duck president and that holding out until 2029 could produce a more sympathetic administration in Washington. Although a Democratic victory in 2028 is far from certain, Ukraine has good reason to believe that the political environment could eventually become more favorable.

2. Postwar security guarantees: Ukraine has little reason to trust security assurances offered by the United States under Trump, whose foreign policy has been inconsistent and unpredictable. Any meaningful settlement would require credible, enforceable security guarantees, at a minimum comparable to NATO's Article 5 commitments. These would likely need to involve NATO members directly, potentially including the permanent stationing of troops, air defense systems, and military equipment in Ukraine. The difficulty is that the guarantees Kyiv would consider credible are precisely those Moscow is likely to reject.

3. De-escalation measures: Substantial progress is unlikely. Meaningful de-escalation would require reciprocal concessions, potentially including troop withdrawals, restrictions on military operations, or an end to attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure. Neither side currently appears willing to make significant concessions that could compromise its military position. Limited arrangements concerning particular targets or geographic areas are conceivable, but a broader ceasefire remains improbable.

4. A broader European security framework: Largely meaningless without full European participation. The United States and Russia cannot legitimately negotiate the future of Europe's security architecture on behalf of European countries. Any agreement affecting NATO deployments, European defense arrangements, or the sovereignty of individual European states would require their direct participation and consent. Allowing Moscow to use the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to renegotiate Europe's security arrangements would also risk rewarding Russian aggression.

5. Humanitarian issues: This is probably the one area where meaningful progress is possible. Prisoner-of-war exchanges, the repatriation of remains, and the return of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to Russia could produce tangible agreements. Such outcomes would be worthwhile regardless of whether the broader negotiations succeed.

6. Trump will announce a peace deal like no other in history.

My conclusion: These talks are likely to be an abject failure, producing little or no meaningful progress toward peace. Russia and Ukraine have fundamentally incompatible objectives, and neither currently appears to believe that continued fighting is less advantageous than a negotiated settlement.

Compounding the problem is the choice of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as the principal American negotiators. Both come primarily from real estate and finance, and neither has the depth of diplomatic, military, or geopolitical expertise that negotiations of this complexity demand. More troubling are their commercial connections and discussions with Russian interests, including negotiations over potential business arrangements involving Russia. They are far from independent and impartial and almost certainly lack credibility as negotiators.