Kyle Stokes

I am the wild rover! Husband to @KCrawford116, Dad x 3, Football and Hockey lover. Browns, Cavs, OSU, Tribe, Red Wings, & Shoremen fanatic. CLE OVER EVERYTHING!

[McNeil @REFLOG18]

Back down to two pages 😂

Ohio High School Regional Semifinals

[𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐂𝐇 @pr0ud_americans]

REMEMBER WHEN LIFE WAS THIS SIMPLE?🍻

No fancy plans, no expensive nights out. Just friends gathered around a fire, enjoying the evening. Sometimes the simplest times were the best.

Anybody else miss this? 🔥

[Bender @Benderxxx7]

At 16, Brian Banks was one of the best high school linebackers in America. USC had offered him a full scholarship. Pete Carroll personally called him.

One afternoon at school he made out with a classmate. Consensual. By the end of the day he was in jail, charged with kidnapping and rape.

She said he dragged her into a stairwell. It never happened.

The DNA came back negative. His mother sold her house and her car to pay for a lawyer.

He couldn’t make bail. He spent a year behind bars waiting for trial.

His lawyer told him: plead no contest, or risk 41 years in prison. He was 17. He took the deal.

He did 5 years in prison. Then 5 more on parole. Registered sex offender. GPS monitor on his ankle. Couldn’t go near schools or parks. No one would hire him.

Meanwhile, the girl and her mother sued the school district for not keeping her safe. They won $1.5 million.

In 2011, a Facebook friend request popped up on his screen.

It was her.

She wanted to “let bygones be bygones.”

Brian went to a private investigator. They hid cameras in the office and invited her to talk. She came by bus.

On tape, she admitted it. He never raped her. He never kidnapped her.

Then she said she still wouldn’t tell prosecutors the truth. Because she’d have to give back the money.

In May 2012, a judge cleared his name. The hearing took less than a minute.

10 years of his life. Gone in one lie. Erased in 60 seconds.

A few days later his phone rang. “I’m looking for a linebacker. You know where I can find one?”

It was Pete Carroll. The same coach who recruited him 10 years earlier.

He finally signed with the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. At 27. The dream he had at 16.

She was ordered to pay $2.6 million back.

What should happen to someone who steals 10 years of your life with one lie?

[Ed Werder @WerderEdNFL]

The character of both quarterbacks is revealed in this comment from Fernando Mendoza.

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

Gary Sinise explains why Forrest Gump was a hit with veterans. Lieutenant Dan did something no Vietnam veteran in a movie had done before.

He got his life BACK.

“Forrest Gump was the first time that a story about a Vietnam veteran was a happy ending story.

We'd never seen a Vietnam veteran come home, process all his anger, isolate himself through booze and loneliness, all the things that were going on with Lieutenant Dan.

But what happens at the end of that story? He's standing up again. He's got legs. He's moving on. He's successful in business. He forgives himself.”

“That's the story we want for anybody who goes off to war. We want them to come home and be okay.”

[Milan Busk @KarolusWangus]

"The bastard son fathered with a serving girl is the only one who is anything like him, while the legitimate heirs are aristocratic fops" sounds like the plot of the last Conan movie. But it's actually the plot of Arnold's life.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

THE O.C. (2003–2007) had an opening theme that made you nostalgic for a place you hadn’t even been to. Phantom Planet’s CALIFORNIA, those Newport Beach visuals and that unforgettable “California, here we come!” Pure early 2000s television magic.

[P @PPFleegrr_87]

The power $20 could wield at Taco Bell was unholy

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

The 5 levels of “The South”

[John Watches Horror @Y2John84]

This is how good 1990 was.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

The Office after Democrats won on Tuesday. AI is getting scary good. This episode could have existed.

[Arizona Cardinals @AZCardinals]

Always remembered. Forever honored. 🤍

Today, we celebrate the life and legacy of Pat Tillman on what would have been his 50th birthday.

[Sage Steele @sagesteele]

I get it if you don’t want to listen to republicans about @AbdulElSayed & what far left dems like him stand for. But please, for the love of God, listen to @VanJones68. And then buckle up, bc this is what you voted for.

[DetroitSportsPodcast @DetroitPodcast]

Powerful and impactful message from Detroit Lions DC Defensive Coordinator Kelvin Sheppard about Jack Campbell, moving forward
Via: @Lions

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

History was made last night.

For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes.

Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.

2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?

When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.

We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.

Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both.

Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.

Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that.

Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.

Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.

The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.

Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago.

In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.

And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.

That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.

Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.

There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.

Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain.

So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.

Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.

We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.

And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.

Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI.

The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.

In the next two years, we need to do two things.

One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.

So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution.

And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost.

There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.

For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around.

And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.

Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.

People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.

But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.

We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.

When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.

It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.

[JD Vance @JDVance]

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

[Cliff Vines @CliffVines]

I received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in the Great Battle of Eddington Cove. Lots of carnage that day, but we saved the neighborhood.

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

TO THE GREAT PEOPLE OF OHIO, GET OUT AND VOTE for these Great Patriots! They have my Complete and Total Endorsement and will never let you down! President DONALD J. TRUMP https://t.co/MdKG6cpcWd

[McNeil @REFLOG18]

Rough weekend

[Growing Up Retro @GrowingUpRetro]

Son: Hey Dad, what was your favorite song when you were in high school?

Dad: Son, let me take you back to 1995 for a minute. This will give you goosebumps.