Christine Schuster

Live every moment. Laugh every day. Love immeasurably. And never ever  follow a playground bully to Mars.

[Congresswoman Chellie Pingree @chelliepingree]

Hi, Donald. Midcoast Mainer here.

You did not, in fact, “have to go to Japan” to get a Maine lobster before you. We sold millions. Our lobster fishery is one of the most valuable in the U.S.

It’s a big reason why people come here, in case you didn’t know!

If anything is hurting our lobstermen, it’s inflation (which you apparently “love”).

Also, exactly *zero* Maine fishermen run their boats at three knots. More like 30 knots—and some go even faster. You should check out a lobster boat race sometime!

I think it might be time for one of your famous Oval Office naps, because you have ZERO idea what you’re talking about.

[Covie @covie_93]

BREAKING: FIFA peace prize recipient is bombing Iran a day before the start of the FIFA World Cup.

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

🇺🇸Trump has stated 55 times that he defeated Iran.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 35 times that Iran is destroyed.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 38 times that a deal is imminent.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 25 times that the Strait of Hormuz is open.

Elect a clown, expect a circus.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Greene: If they were paralyzed and didn't know what to do about releasing the Epstein files, they don't deserve the American people's trust. They should be considered traitors.

Collins: Are you saying that that that applies to the president?

Greene: I’m saying exactly that.

[HarveyGoguen @GoguenHarvey]

@atrupar This is the Secretary of Energy. The guy in charge of all fuel for energy, including nuclear energy. So, he cannot disclose petroleum shipping data, how are we to know how he handles nuclear stockpiles? He has the credibility of a soil sample from Mars.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Albanian protester: “It’s our country. I don’t want it to be sold to somebody else. It’s DIRTY money. They discovered this island, what do you mean? It’s BEEN discovered, it’s ours…it’s bull crap honestly.” 😳

[Niall Stanage @NiallStanage]

This is a devastating interview.

Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.

Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened.

[Christine Schuster @robinandsparrow]

@markessien Mark, are you a Nigerian who gets paid by people who want to disrupt German and European democracy?

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I don't know why any of you haters are surprised I'm the one actually engaging here.

You're the ones who've obsessively pored over the 10,000 photos, the 30,000 text messages, and the 128,000 emails from my hacked iCloud and stolen devices.

If I am anything, I am prolific.

You know what you won't find? Any of the most heinous, hateful things you keep posting about me.

What you'll find from me here is the same thing you found there.

Total transparency. Finally on my terms. Not yours.

[Christine Schuster @robinandsparrow]

@SingnRing @NiallHarbison Yes, I absolutely love it.
He is sooo sweet with them 😍

[Christine Schuster @robinandsparrow]

@NiallHarbison She’s very sweet ❤️

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

@Kenn321705 I’ve never stolen an erection in my life.

[Patrick Heizer @PatrickHeizer]

Wait... Hunter Biden's art is actually good?

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Glorification? There was zero glory in my addiction. It was truly the most excruciatingly humiliating and degrading experience you could possibly imagine. I wanted to commit suicide almost daliy, but didn’t have the courage for even that. Instead I’d reach for the pipe or the bottle. The cowards way out. The guilt. The shame. The hurt. The absolute misery of it. Yet here I am. And I am not alone. There are millions upon millions of us. We don’t all agree on politics or people or who we root for on Sunday. But we all have the shared experience of walking through that fire and surviving. I chose to live. That’s not a joke.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

@Kenneth_Belkin Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class. This was taken at a super 8 motel off I95 by the way.

[Shane @shaneferro]

I too am enjoying Hunter Biden being a great poster, but some people are a little too surprised that the son of a President is smart, well-informed, and good at communicating, as if they think addiction only happens to idiots

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I'm Hunter Biden. You've never actually heard from me.