Olivia
Online
Jessie
@jessamina1
Independent thinker, cat mom. Fan of common sense and government by the people.
Colorado, USA
Joined April 2009
517 Following
100 Followers
431 Posts
This is just nuts.
The Resolution failed 😨
Truly unbelievable and telling of how far our society has fallen.
The #NSDAR had to hold two separate votes on this specific resolution.
The first vote was questioned whether there was cheating taking place - YES, at the #DAR … crazy isn’t it?
——
“Daughters,
With heavy hearts, we are sad to inform you that the Resolution seeking to Restore The Daughters of the American Revolution as one for biological women was not adopted by the Assembly.”
Finally. Something about the pool besides TDS.
Let’s talk reflecting pool. Warren G. Harding built it on swampland and the structure beneath it would have been fine - if it had been built on stable ground. The whole thing started sinking slowly.
Presidents all the way up through Carter kept trying to prop it up with little cement pours, and regularly draining and cleaning it. Algae was a problem even then because there was no real circulation system. No pumps. No filters.
Reagan added some more concrete, realizing the entire pool was now 12 or 13 inches lower than it should be. It had sunk over a foot and pulled loose from its structure.
Clinton publicly acknowledged that the entire pool needed demolished and rebuilt, and that it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to do it right.
The Bushes just kept trying to plug leaks and clean it. Every time they had to drain and scrub the thing, it cost around $100,000 to do so. George W. Bush actually had plans drawn up to rebuild it. 
Obama decided to revise and execute the Bush renovation, which was needed, but it was flawed, and he spent tens of millions of dollars on it. He raised the pool up with a timber under-structure so the water ended up being even shallower, which means that’s the point at which the water started getting warmer. He also turned off the chlorinated city water supply into the pool and began pumping water in from the tidal basin - that’s the somewhat stagnant water that comes in from the Potomac River and surrounds the Jefferson Memorial. There was algae before, but with those changes came even more algae. Obama‘s reasoning was that the basin water would be cheaper instead of using the city water supply. He had the pool tiles removed from the bottom and another layer gray cement put in place along with gray-tinted reflective paint, which gradually faded away.
By the time Trump’s first term came around, the cleaning had to be done every three or four months, some of the Obama structural repairs were failing, and the leaks were rampant again.
By the time Biden got into office, Obama’s reflecting pool fixes were cracked and the pool was leaking hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of gallons of water. Biden opted to clean the pool, but performed little maintenance, and did no substantial refurbishment.
Trump’s fix was to try something that the other presidents hadn’t. Whereas Obama had used a gray reflective paint and cement, Trump tried a combination sealant liner - it isn’t paint. Those sealants are similarly light-reflective to what Obama used. Trump switched up to blue from the dark gray. He added nanobubblers.
When we walked around it the other day, there was only a small patch on the middle of the left side that may have been coming up. It was too windy and stormy to see why. It was not as if the sealant was coming up all over the pool and floating to the top because it wasn’t. We did see the algae cleaning going on and the crews, you could tell, were tired of being harassed for doing their jobs. 
Vandals have damaged the grass, they’ve cut into the liner in other places and the knife lines are clear in the videos. We did see the National Guard soldiers coming in. We also saw them placed around the America 250 construction area and in between the museums. Five vandals have been arrested since we walked through. It’s unbelievable to me that they want to destroy something we could all enjoy out of hatred for a president whose policies they don’t even understand.  And the mainstream media is reprehensible. They aren’t reporting. They’re spinning propaganda as usual.
Thirty years after I graduated, and exactly one month after I assumed the duties and responsibilities as the acting Secretary of the Navy, I got to sign my own son’s commission and speak at his graduation. Only God could have orchestrated this.
Today at the U.S. @NavalAcademy, I saw the next generation of naval officers standing ready to take the watch.
While it is one thing to be told they have what it takes, it is entirely another to look them in the eye as they raise their right hand and swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Standing before this incredible class, I was overwhelmed with hope. These aren't just the leaders of tomorrow—they represent the unbreakable resolve of our Nation.
Class of 2026: You have the watch!
Excellent account.
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.
I really like this guy. Great insight.
Forty days of panic by everyone in the shipping industry and the vast majority of media and academic military “experts”, and for what?
The experts said the Navy was scared to enter Hormuz. They called prudence weakness and restraint failure. They reiterated and published freak outs from social media. They were wrong.
Two U.S. destroyers just made four transits through the Strait. So much for the hysteria and all the hand-wringing about American decline.
And the stories I’m hearing from the 🇺🇸 sailors at sea is one filled with real heroism.
Yes, the US Navy has real problems.
Yes, our Merchant Marine does too.
Yes, Congress can’t even pass the SHIPs act.
Yes, mistakes were made.
Yes the process of clearing the mines will take time.
Yes we are still a long way from normality.
But our overwhelming advantage over every other Navy on Earth is the BIG story. Here.
No other Navy could have accomplished this with so few casualties. None.
To the over the top media and hyperbolic Europeans and all the doomers: shame on you.
And to Beijing: recalculate.
Bravo Zulu to Admiral Cooper and the joint force and every American serviceman in the Middle East.
We have a long way to go but this ship is making way in the right direction.
True
It’s exhausting.
We just had a black man, a woman, a man who overcame an incredible tragedy and, of all things, a Canadian circle the moon. THE MOON.
No land acknowledgements, no pronouns, no Marxist nonsense, nothing weird at all. Just 💯 normal people showing, not telling, what 🇺🇸 can do.
The best. The brightest. But more importantly NORMAL patriotic people. People you’d actually love to invite over for a beer and trust with your kids.
People who can thank god and thank America and experience real gratitude unironically.
Yeah we got problems with race and religion and politics and a million other things. BUT you don’t change the world by going woke on TV or pretending god didn’t inspire your journey to the stars.
You change the world by setting the example. By doing great things with a positive attitude and your head held high.
I’ve never been so bullish on America or so utterly exhausted by Marxist nonsense.
The crew if Artemis is literally showing us the way to heal and too many people (frankly on both sides) refuse to listen.
Great story
🚨 WOW! Artemis II pilot Victor Glover spreads the gospel after a safe return home from space
This dude is a MASTERCLASS!
"I wanted to thank God in public, and I want to thank God again, because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did, and being with who I was with — it's too big to just be in one body." 🙏🏻
Can we all agree that in a world of influencers, Z-listers, TikToks, badly acted ads, brand collabs, people filming themselves crying…the Artemis livestream of 4 middle-aged scientists doing their jobs is genuinely the best most authentic content of the century? Thanks @NASA🌚
Great explanation. Thank God for our great military, all of them.
This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth.
I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy?
Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon.
He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in.
I laughed. I feel a little bad about that.
Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen.
I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.”
Be prepared to duck.
Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop.
My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence.
Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it:
“I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.”
That always broke the ice.
PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out.
They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman.
The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey?
What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest.
Have you deployed?
Have you seen combat?
In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio.
“Medic.”
Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights.
That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ.
He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that.
And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven.
The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in.
This is the quiet math underneath American violence.
Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot.
Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.
Truly beautiful
I took this picture on April 5, 2015, the last time my birthday fell on Easter. It was not a great day for me. I fought back tears at church, and not in the overwhelmed-by God's-great-mercy way. Little did I know at the time, my year was going to take much worse turns. But I was newly pregnant with my second child, and though very sick and feeling pretty sorry for myself that Easter morning, I knew I was blessed with this new life and a Savior who loves me. I took this photo because it was a reminder of new life and bread of life, and the light of the world.
Later that year, I would lose my husband while 7 months pregnant. He died in September. My daughter was born in November. A lot of people wonder, and have asked me, how does one keep her faith through those dark days. I always wondered, how could I have made it through without it?
I was angry and scared and so, so thankful I had met Jesus before that moment. I met Him while reading one of those 90s teen study bibles with neon graphics, in my childhood bedroom. In my sad, grey adult bedroom, I woke up panicking in the night, but He was always with me.
I prayed Jeremiah 29:11 to calm myself down: "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord. 'Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.'" I prayed it even though I didn't really believe it at the time.
It's not that Jesus solved all my problems in this fallen world or fixed my immediate pain right up. But I was in it with Him and with His promises. And he put the kind of brother in my life who would move in with me to help raise the kids for six months. He put parents in my life who showed up every weekend. He put a neighbor in my life who mowed my lawn every week and another who was a SEAL wife and understood grief like few do, and a best friend who could work out my paperwork (death is so much paperwork) when I couldn't.
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world," C.S. Lewis writes in "The Problem of Pain." I learned a lot while I was being shouted at.
I think about Jeremiah 29:11 and 11 years ago today. I think about how my little girl who was not yet born then baked my birthday cake today. I think about how she has three siblings now and the most amazing dad— I remarried in 2020 and he adopted the girls. He took all four of our kids to the store to pick out something for my birthday and then let them each choose a walkout song on the karaoke machine as he gave them a Bruce Buffer announcement call when they came down the stairs to present them to me.
I think about how they've gained grandparents and cousins and love and faith. (Our first holiday with Steve's family was Easter, and I took it as a good sign.) I pray they've watched our lives and gained trust in their Lord.
I think about how my patience was tested by them several times today, as the patience of a parent always is, and how infinite my Father in heaven's patience for me must be. I think about how much I love each of them, and how much my heart grew when each was born just to fit it all in, and how much greater still is my Father's love for me. I think about how much I have to learn and how my faith is still not as mature as it should be at this point (occasionally illustrated on this app).
Today in the car, my kids requested "No Fear" by @jonreddick , "Your Way's Better," by @forestfrank , and "Jesus Is Alive, It's a Happy Day" — that one came with sign language by the 3- and 4-year-old, which I recommend for making your heart soar on a Sunday. They listen to secular music, too, but those are their favorites.
One time, reading the Christmas story with my kids, I read "Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people," and my eldest (about 5 at the time) said, "Mom, the angel always says that!"
She's right, the angel always says that! It is so hard not to be afraid, but we have a Good Shepherd. Our lives were touched by death, but He has conquered it.
My kids like new worship songs, but I love the classics, and today as on every Easter, I sang "Blessed Assurance," because Jesus is mine. And in the darkest times, He is new life and bread of life, and the light of the world. I am remembering to rejoice in that every day.
@Johnny_Joey Meant to add that in so much of nature, we see God’s greatness, and in the miracle of his resurrection, we see his love for all of us. Blessed Easter to all.
@Johnny_Joey Monument valley
Bravo. About time someone said this.
NASA pilot Victor Glover CLAPS back after being asked what it means to be the first black man to visit the moon: “It’s the story of humanity, not black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”
“I also HOPE we are pushing the other direction that one day we don’t have to talk about these first. That one day, this is just—and listen to this—that this is the human history.”
Pretty profound.
One of the best visuals of the US vs Canada's military strength.
I had no idea just how ill-equipped we really were. We should be incredibly thankful that they are our neighbors.
Bravo.
Sad loss.
The victim of the terrorist attack at Old Dominion has been identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah-- who was a Professor of Military Science and the leader of the university's ROTC program.
He was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Atlantic Resolve.
His awards included two Bronze Stars, Senior Army Aviator Badge, Combat Action Badge, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal with Valor, Joint Service Commendation Medal, Army Commendation Medal, and the Joint Service Achievement Medal.
RIP. 🙏
“When we were first invited to Milan for the Olympics, we said no. It felt like more than we could handle. But we kept thinking about what John and Matty would say if they knew we turned it down. We knew the answer.
John loved representing his country. From the time he was little, he dreamed of competing at the Olympics. In that final summer, he was working harder than ever, pushing himself with everything he had to earn a spot on that roster. He was going to be there.
Sitting with that knowledge while watching these Games was not easy — but being present for them, surrounded by people who truly cared about John and Matty, made it something we will always treasure.
Every person we encountered took the time to ask about the boys — who they were, what they meant to us, the kind of people they were away from the ice.
What struck us most was realizing that John and Matty's impact reaches so much further than we sometimes see in our own grief.
They are carried by so many people — in locker rooms, in conversations, in quiet moments we will never even know about. That means everything to us.
And then Team USA won gold. When Zach, Auston, and Matthew carried John's jersey around that ice, we were overwhelmed — they made sure he was there. And then to see Noa and Johnny — on Johnny's second birthday — carried out onto the ice to be part of that gold medal photo — there are no words for what that felt like.
John and Matty should have been there, and in that moment, they were.
Thank you to every member of that team for loving John & Matty - and for making sure they were part of something historic. And thank you to everyone at @NBCOlympics and @usahockey for your kindness, your generosity, and for bringing our family to Milan to witness it.
You gave us a gift we didn't know we needed.
With love and gratitude,
The Gaudreau Family"
MASSIVE Iranian, Pro-USA demonstration shutting down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles just took a moment of silence for American service members who have died and then chanted "USA! USA!" Predominant pro-Trump sentiment.
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