JayneJEB

[Niall Harbison @NiallHarbison]

https://t.co/w2TeNzH7wg

[Ron Wyden @RonWyden]

Called this in October

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

Adam Hoffman raped his son’s best friend for 3 years

First-degree felony. Life without parole.

Ken Paxton’s office gutted it to 60 days. He walked free after 30.

No sex offender registration. His record scrubbed clean.

I think every single person in America has a stake in being very loudly against this.

[Dralone&_DR145 @draloneboy]

MAJOR BREAKING: Epstein survivors just announced they will release their own list of names.

“We know who abused us. We saw who came and went. This list will be survivor-led—for survivors.”

The government stalled.

Now the victims are doing it themselves.

[Mike in Houston (Tariffs are taxes on consumers) @Mike_in_Houston]

Fun facts: Neither Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz were born in Texas. James Talarico is an 8th generation Texan.

[Covie @covie_93]

pam bondi can throw todd blanche under the bus all she wants but it doesn't change the fact that she was AG and saw those videos and images of powerful men raping kids and decided to protect the men.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

The family of a child who was repeatedly raped by a man who Ken Paxton let off with no new jail time is speaking out:

“The fact that Attorney General Ken Paxton allowed this man to get away with molesting and sexually abusing [our] son for three years is completely disqualifying.

Adam Hoffman could have faced life in prison. Instead, Ken Paxton and his office offered him a deal that kept him off the sex-offender registry and included no new jail time.”

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

If you get a payout from Trump’s January 6 slush fund, California will tax it at 100%.

People who assault cops and overthrow democracy don’t deserve a taxpayer-funded payday.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Ruth Coker Burks was 25 years old when she was visiting a friend and noticed something that made the hospital staff stop cold: a red biohazard bag hanging on a patient’s door.

She watched the nurses gather in the hallway, drawing straws to decide who would have to go inside.

Ruth had a gay cousin. She knew what that red bag meant in 1984. AIDS. The disease that was killing thousands, turning families away from their own and filling hospitals with fear. A diagnosis that often meant a person would die alone.

Ruth did not wait for the straws to decide.

She opened the door and walked in.

Inside was a young man, maybe 80 pounds, reduced to bone and barely conscious. He was dying in pain. Terrified. And he kept whispering one word again and again:

“Mama.”

Ruth went back to the nurses in the hallway.

“Call his mother,” she said.

They actually laughed.

“Honey, we’ve been calling for six weeks. She’s not coming. Nobody’s coming.”

Ruth made them give her the number anyway. She tried one last time.

The mother’s answer was cold and final. Her son was sinful. He was already dead to her. She would not come to watch him die.

So Ruth returned to that room.

She took his hand.

And she stayed.

For thirteen hours, she held the hand of a dying stranger, promising him he would not leave this world alone.

When he died, his family refused to claim his body.

Ruth decided right then that she would bury him herself.

She owned plots in her family cemetery, Files Cemetery in Hot Springs, where her father and grandparents were buried. “No one wanted him,” she later said. “I promised I’d take him somewhere beautiful, where my family would watch over him.”

The closest funeral home willing to handle an AIDS death was seventy miles away. Ruth paid for it herself. A local potter donated a chipped cookie jar to use as an urn.

Ruth used posthole diggers, the kind farmers use to build fences, and dug the grave with her own hands.

She buried him and spoke kind words over the soil, because no minister would come to pray over a man who had died of AIDS.

Ruth thought that would be the end.

It was only the beginning.

Word spread through the quiet, desperate networks across Arkansas: there is a woman in Hot Springs who is not afraid. There is a woman who will sit beside you when you are dying. There is a woman who will make sure you are buried with dignity when your own family will not claim you.

They began to come.

Dying young men from rural hospitals across the state, abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them most.

Ruth became everything for them.

Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks personally cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS, mostly young men rejected by their families the moment their diagnosis became a death sentence.

She buried forty of them with her own hands in Files Cemetery.

Her young daughter would come with her, carrying a small spade while Ruth worked with the posthole diggers. They held their own funerals because still, no one else would speak over those graves.

Of the 1,000 people Ruth cared for, only a small number of families did not abandon their dying children.

Ruth would call parents. She would beg them to come say goodbye. To claim their child’s body. To attend the funeral.

Most refused.

“Who knew there’d come a time,” Ruth said years later, “when parents didn’t want to bury their own children?”

But while Ruth saw the worst of humanity, families turning away, churches closing their doors, entire communities ruled by fear, she also saw the best of it.

She saw gay men care for their dying partners with a devotion that broke every cruel stereotype. “I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die,” she said. “You tell me that’s not love.”

And she saw how a frightened community protected its own, and protected her too.

“They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money,” Ruth remembered. “That’s how we bought medicine. That’s how we paid rent for people who couldn’t work anymore. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”

The drag queens raised money. The gay community stood around the dying. Ruth kept digging graves and holding hands, making sure no one died believing they were worthless or forgotten.

By the mid-1990s, new treatments finally appeared. Awareness slowly grew. AIDS began to move, painfully and gradually, from a certain death sentence to a condition that could be managed.

Ruth’s urgent work became less desperate.

And then, like so many heroes of the AIDS crisis, Ruth Coker Burks faded from public memory.

Her story became whispered history, remembered mostly by those she had served and by those who knew what Arkansas, and America, had been like when dying of AIDS often meant dying abandoned and alone.

But Ruth never forgot.

She never forgot the forty graves in Files Cemetery. The cookie jars and ceramic urns holding ashes. The promises she had made that these men would be remembered. That they mattered.

For years, she dreamed of a memorial. Something permanent that would say: this happened. These people lived. They deserved dignity. They received it.

Through crowdfunding, that memorial is finally being built.

Ruth wants it to say: “This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They kept coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and cared for, that someone would say a kind word when they died.”

Ruth Coker Burks is now in her sixties. In 2019, she wrote a memoir called All the Young Men because she needed people to understand what happened in Arkansas. What happened across America. What happens when fear convinces people to abandon their own children.

And what happens when one person refuses to walk past a door everyone else is too afraid to open.

She did not have medical training. She did not have institutional support. She did not have money, resources, or a team behind her.

She had compassion. Courage. Posthole diggers. And a family cemetery with space for people who had nowhere else to go.

That was enough to make sure 1,000 people did not die believing they were disposable.

That was enough to turn forty graves into sacred ground.

That was enough to prove that sometimes love is as simple as refusing to let another human being die alone.

The next time someone says one person cannot make a difference, remember Ruth Coker Burks.

Remember the red biohazard bag on the door that made trained nurses draw straws.

Remember the thirteen hours she stayed with a stranger calling for his mama.

Remember the forty graves she dug with posthole diggers meant for building fences.

Remember the drag queens who raised money every Saturday night so Ruth could buy medicine.

Remember the young daughter with a small spade, learning that love means showing up when everyone else walks away.

Remember that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply refuse to let another human being die alone and forgotten.

Ruth Coker Burks saw a red biohazard bag in 1984.

The nurses drew straws.

She walked through that door anyway.

And 1,000 lives, and an entire community, were changed forever because of it.

[𓂀 𝕋𝔼𝔸ℍ 𓂀 @TeahCartel]

“We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country, they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”

– James A. Garfield, May 30, 1868, Arlington National Cemetery

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

When they were just 19 years old, they fought at Iwo Jima. Now Billy Byrd (100) and Don Graves (101) are serving as Honorary Grand Marshals for the National Memorial Day Parade and started cracking jokes with each other when they arrived at the airport

[Senator Mark Kelly @SenMarkKelly]

For 25 years I served alongside men and women who were willing to give everything for the country we all love. Some did. As a Navy veteran, I think about them not just today but every time I visit a military base, every time I meet a Gold Star family, every time I come home to Gabby.

Memorial Day is for them and for the families who carry that loss every day. Thank you for your service. It’s not forgotten.

[Jimmy Rushton @JimmySecUK]

There is now a long line of people waiting patiently to buy coffee from Yevhen and Olena’s cafe, which opened yesterday and was heavily damaged in last night’s attack on Kyiv.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

A WWII veteran returns to Utah Beach, the Normandy shore where D-Day unfolded. This Memorial Day, we remember the Americans who never came home, the heroes who gave everything so we could be free.

[Laurie @Laurie0801]

Trump has not been exonerated of anything. He’s a pedophile.

[🇺🇸 David J. Urban 🇺🇸 @DavidJUrban]

Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C.
November 21, 1864

Dear Madam,
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln

[Joe Biden @JoeBiden]

On Memorial Day, let us pause to remember and honor the brave women and men who made the ultimate sacrifice so we could live our lives in peace and possibility. Today we also honor the families they left behind whose hearts still carry the weight of absence.

[jaysea @cosmicfirepeace]

i still can not get the image of baby eaglets sitting high up n trees in a nest that may be decades old, out of my head 🦅 ... getting doused with #roundup as parents fly around lookn' for food that's also getting doused w/ roundup ... this bs NOT Great America ... #BaldEagle's habitat need protection ... 😢😕🤨 do better

[Scott Dworkin @funder]

Buttigieg brings the fire 🔥

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