GldnRetrvr7

[SCOTUS Wire @scotus_wire]

BREAKING: The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume its expanded voter citizenship verification program, which lets states use Social Security records to check voters' citizenship. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

Today is the 21st of September.

[Siaxares 🇮🇷 🇺🇸 @siaxares]

The Greenland resolution is the best outcome for United States.

The Greenland drama ended the only way it should have ended. Greenland keeps its internal life. Denmark keeps the flag and the legal shell. The United States keeps, and now hardens, the one thing that actually mattered: exclusive security rights on the island that sits between North America and the Arctic approaches.

Permanent access. Bases. Overflight. A veto on Chinese and Russian bases and “sensitive” investment. No transfer of sovereignty. No cartoon annexation. A 1951 Cold War arrangement dragged into the present and locked so it survives even if Greenland someday becomes independent from Denmark.

That is not a humiliation of Greenlanders. It is the adult version of what they and Copenhagen said was available from the start. Thule air base did not become Pituffik space base because United States needed a souvenir. It became an advanced base because the North Atlantic and the GIUK gap do not care about press conferences.

The United States once staffed a real presence there, then treated the collapse of the USSR like a permission slip to go home. China and Russia noticed. Mineral maps and dual-use ports are not folklore and the error was not wanting Greenland in the Western security system. The error was pretending 1991 canceled geography. Russian threat never went away.

The ugly part was the theater. Threatening the sovereignty of a NATO ally is not strength. It is a gift to every European who wants to call America a predator instead of a patron. Stephen Miller and that whole annexation carnival overstepped. It made the United States look like it was shaking down Denmark for a colony. That is bad strategy and worse optics. Alliances rot when the junior partner has to explain to its own public why Washington sounds like a landlord with a gun.

Trump still closed it the way he often closes Republican messes: take the maximal noise, then settle on the instrument that actually works. He did not need the title deed. He needed a pact with no expiry date, Greenland in the room as a party, and language that keeps adversaries off the land.

Denmark and Greenland can say sovereignty and self-determination without lying. United States can start building without inventing a new war. That is the WWII-to-Cold-War policy restored, not abandoned because a flag changed in Moscow.

Greenland stays Greenland. America stays on the ridge line. The people who wanted a purchase ceremony can sit down. The map did not change. The security architecture did, and that was the only part worth the fight. God bless America. 🇺🇸

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@kaw1_ Yes. Will not load on iPad

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.

So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.

They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.

More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.

That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.

The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.

She was the last.

After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.

Nobody.

Day after day.

The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.

A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.

It was breaking them.

An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.

They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.

The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.

Picture that.

A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.

And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.

And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.

They called them mock finds.

They did it for the dogs.

They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.

One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.

But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.

One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.

Corliss asked where his friend was.

The man pointed at the pile.

"He's in there somewhere."

He kept petting the dog.

Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.

On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.

Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.

They draped her in an American flag on the way out.

Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.

They found one.

And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.

That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.

Nobody could save the dead.

So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

[Adam Kramer @KegsnEggs]

If you'e never read The Falling Man, you should do so. I post this on September 11th every year, and I find time to read it on this day every year. Still, in my eyes, the greatest piece of journalism I have ever read. https://t.co/gZgwzRoSgX

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@Super70sSports From the Peter Gunn theme song on, this was an excellent game

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@redsteeze The end of the original Creepshow with the cockroaches.

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

Attempting to buy with cash in Iran now resembles Weimar Germany.

Money has lost all value and is practically worthless. You'll need wheelbarrows of it to roll around. And it's only getting worse.

The rotten islamic regime caused all of this.

[Miad Maleki @miadmaleki]

Nate Swanson is a friend and a former colleague I deeply respect, and his new @ForeignAffairs piece is a serious argument that deserves a serious response.

Here is where I think it goes wrong, point by point.

(1/17) On "Trump has become yet another U.S. president facing a dangerous humiliation related to Iran."

The largest humiliation in this file is the 2021–2025 record, when in fact Nate was the Director for Iran at the NSC. The regime was begged for a deal, Biden team offered the regime unprecedented sanctions relief if they accepted a deal, did not enforce sanctions, and let Iran earn ~$144B in three years (roughly $100B more than the last two years of Trump-era pressure per EIA data) rolling 120-day Iraq electricity waivers worth hundreds of millions, and a near-final draft nuclear text in August 2022. Tehran still walked away laughing asking for more.

What stopped this team from begging the regime for a deal was when Iran's funded and armed proxy group Hamas invaded Israel, slaughtered and kidnapped 1,450 Israelis including 100s at a music festival.

Six months of pressure isn't the failure of maximum pressure but four years of relief was.

[Ron Rule @ronrule]

The new mail-in ballot procedure isn’t something to be afraid of. It works like this:

1. The state provides a list of the ballots they intend to mail out.

2. USPS assigns a unique barcode to each.

3. When the ballot is mailed out, this barcode is scanned to ensure uniqueness and that it matches. If there is no match or it’s a duplicate, it is not delivered.

4. When the voter mails the ballot back, the USPS scans it again and checks to make sure it matches what went out and isn’t a duplicate. Any ballots that don’t match won’t be delivered.

5. This is all done on the exterior envelope. The USPS isn’t determining eligibility or deciding who gets a ballot. They can’t see the actual votes. They are essentially just ensuring there are no duplicates, that the number mailed in isn’t greater than the number mailed out, and that the person mailing one in was the same person who received them.

This is a common sense solution and is completely reasonable.

Why would anyone oppose it unless their intention is to cheat?

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@Polymarket

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@karekenj @EliLake Filet Mangione is genius.

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@caltract @ohhoe Any idea what is going on?

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@BroncoTx73067 @EricLDaugh I was waiting for this clip

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I needed to move a sofa.

I mentioned this to an American. He said, "You know anybody with a truck?"

I did not know anybody with a truck.

He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.

"You gotta know somebody with a truck."

I asked how one acquires such a person.

He said, "You just do."

This is the third time I have received that answer in this country. It is the answer to everything here. You just do. There is no process. There is only the eventual fact of having.

He said, "Ask Kevin."

I do not know a Kevin. He said Kevin like I should. He said it the way you say a shared uncle.

I met Kevin four days later. Kevin owns a truck. Kevin does not own a truck for himself. Nobody owns a truck for themselves. Kevin owns a truck for a fifteen mile radius.

Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS TAKEN A VOW. HE DID NOT ANNOUNCE IT. HE SIMPLY PURCHASED A BED AND ACCEPTED THE CONSEQUENCES.

Kevin arrived on Saturday. He brought the truck. He also brought a second man.

I had not asked for a second man.

The second man's name is Tony. Tony came because Kevin came. Tony did not know me. Tony did not ask what we were moving. Tony brought gloves.

They moved the sofa in eleven minutes.

I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.

I asked what I owed them.

Kevin said, "Buy the pizza."

That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.

Inside I said: THE FEE IS FIXED ACROSS THE ENTIRE NATION AND WAS SET BY NO ONE.

We ate on the floor because the sofa was against the wall and none of us wanted to be the first to sit on it.

Tony told me his daughter plays soccer. I asked if she is good. He said, "She's aggressive."

I still think about that.

Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.

"You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge."

He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.

Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CALLED UP. I DID NOT ENLIST. THE PAPERS WERE FILED ON MY BEHALF.

I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.

Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.

I said, "Yeah, I got a guy."

I have a guy.

I am somebody's guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.

He describes me as "the guy who's strong for his size."

I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@Gritty522 @BillMelugin_ This is a delaying tactic.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

My colleague from South Dakota suggests here that the talking filibuster hasn’t been used in a century, and that it was not used to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

He’s mistaken.

As I’ve explained to the entire Senate GOP on multiple occasions, the talking filibuster *was* used effectively to break the weeks-long filibuster mounted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Leader Thune and others point out that the Senate ultimately invoked cloture on the Civil Rights Act, and on that basis wrongly conclude that the talking filibuster was *not* the tool used to achieve that victory.

This argument ignores the fact that this is *how* the Senate closed a staggering 30-vote cloture deficit in 1964. After many weeks of fighting a losing battle, filibustering senators predictably started to lose their resolve to hold up the bill indefinitely, especially when they realized how hard they’d have to work to keep the effort alive.

So they started proposing and supporting amendments to the bill to make it more palatable and help them save face.

I still maintain that this is a viable approach that could work well—even better—in the context of the SAVE America Act, especially considering that the bill is less complicated and less controversial with voters than was the Civil Rights Act, and currently has a cloture deficit of only 10 votes—tiny compared to the 30-vote deficit faced by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

My colleague also mistakenly suggests that Senate Republicans would have to vote to enforce the talking filibuster. That simply isn’t true; no vote is required for this step. All we need is a majority leader willing to announce that we’re getting on the bill and that we will continue to debate it until it passes—all with the understanding that if filibustering senators fail to show up to debate it, we can “call the question” and pass it with a simple majority.

That understanding, in turn, is what motivates the filibustering senators to show up and speak, but it’s also what naturally causes them to tire of the exercise after a few weeks, at which point they start looking for a face-saving off-ramp.

Finally, Leader Thune suggests that the talking filibuster would be thwarted by being “reset” every time Democrats offered an amendment. There’s a valid point in there, but it’s not a good reason not to invoke the talking filibuster. It appears he’s referring indirectly to paragraph 1(a) of Senate Rule 19 (the two-speech rule). While offering a new amendment can create a new question under longstanding practice, the September 25, 1986 precedent narrowed how rigidly the two-speech rule is applied by clarifying that many procedural actions do not count as speeches at all.

Particularly in light of that 1986 clarification, it’s been a long time since I’ve suggested we consider rigid enforcement of Rule 19’s two-speech limit as part of a talking filibuster strategy for the SAVE America Act. We don’t need it!

Nor was that rule aggressively enforced during the Senate’s consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield correctly focused on requiring actual debate from filibustering senators rather than looking for technical ways to shut the debate down.

To give credit where it’s due, I appreciate what Leader Thune said in this interview about the possibility of passing some iteration of SAVE America using budget reconciliation—a procedure in which there is no 60-vote cloture hurdle. I’ve been skeptical of this approach in the past, but I’m starting to believe the SAVE America Act has more budgetary features than I initially considered possible.

That said, reconciliation is fraught with all kinds of problems, challenges, risks, and uncertainties. Also, failure can be far too easy to blame on the parliamentarian.

I’m open to considering the reconciliation path, but we should make this decision with our eyes open. To do that, we need to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the talking filibuster.

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@AndrewDesiderio Please. This is ridiculous.

[GldnRetrvr7 @GRetrvr7]

@flying_miners @sethjlevy I was waiting for this. Well done.