Whitney

yankees-loving; nats-cheering; politics-working; lehigh-alumning; beach-bumming; corona-drinking; jersey-girl in va/dc

[Bernadette Breslin @bernbreslin_]

This is Susan Collins & Troy Jackson’s 4th debate

Jackson has gone from rolling his eyes at Collins, to burping while she speaks, to telling her to “shut up”

Classless. Disrespectful. Unacceptable.

[Team Collins @TeamCollins207]

https://t.co/jLaV0AA8V6

[Whitney @twitclark]

Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits!!! 🎃🎃🎃

[Whitney @twitclark]

Absolutely outrageous that they would close Integration Station.

[ARLnow @ARLnowDOTcom]

APS parents rally against elimination of pre-K program for kids with disabilities https://t.co/nW2093JrVE

[ESPN College Football @ESPNCFB]

One-handed pick to seal the game for Lehigh, WOW 😮

[Sen. Susan Collins @SenatorCollins]

Without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the Administration.  This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse. 

This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law. 

Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers.  OMB is an agency of the executive branch.  It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.

The independent Government Accountability Office has concluded that pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act. Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.

I will work with my colleagues to address these illegal actions.

[Annie Clark @annieclark25]

The seven-year-old allegations made against Senator Collins and her staff in this piece are categorically false. There have never been any allegations of wrongdoing by the Collins for Senator campaign, and the campaign was never the target of the FBI investigation.

ProPublica took the word of someone who pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC. As Martin Kao was awaiting sentencing, he began making outlandish charges about the Collins office, deflecting blame from himself and placing it on Senator Collins, including alleging that our office required contributions before taking meetings and engaged in extortion, pay for play, and bribery. The FBI and the Court obviously did not believe Kao, and in 2025 he was sentenced in two separate cases to prison terms of seven years and three years to be served concurrently, as well as an additional five years of supervised release at the end of his prison term.

It is important to note that during the Biden Administration the FBI and the Department of Justice thoroughly investigated the Navatek matter. The Collins campaign cooperated fully with the FBI throughout the investigation, producing all of the documents it requested and serving as fact witnesses in official settings. In response to the allegations in the ProPublica piece, the FBI clearly stated that a suggestion of wrongdoing by Senator Collins or her staff is “totally false.”

These issues were resolved in 2021, and the FBI has not contacted us about Martin Kao since then.

[Sen. Susan Collins @SenatorCollins]

For years, I have worked closely with New Balance to strengthen its manufacturing presence in Maine. Under this new Defense Logistics Agency contract, the company’s highly skilled employees in Skowhegan will help outfit more of our nation’s servicemembers with Maine-made athletic shoes. It is a major win for Maine manufacturing and the greater Skowhegan area.

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

New cat species discovered in over 100 years

Scientists have identified Leopardus tilcayo, a tiny wild cat found in Bolivia’s Yungas forests. The discovery began with a wildlife sanctuary reporting a “weird cat” and was later confirmed through genetic research

[Sidetalk Sports @sidetalksports]

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE 🏆

[Sen. Susan Collins @SenatorCollins]

GREAT NEWS: After last month’s unanimous Senate passage of my bipartisan Kay Hagan Tick Reauthorization Act, the House of Representatives passed the bill unanimously today, sending it to the president’s desk for his signature.

Maine reported a record 4,257 cases of Lyme disease last year, underscoring the urgent need to continue our work to combat tick-borne illnesses.

These diseases can take a serious physical and emotional toll on patients and their families, and they can also be costly. That is why Senator Tina Smith and I authored the original Tick Act in 2019. By reauthorizing these efforts, we can help improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of tick-borne diseases so that more Mainers can get the care they need sooner.

[New York Jets @nyjets]

get steppin'

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.

Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.

They were looking for people.

The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.

Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.

Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.

He drove back.

The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.

The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.

Here is how it worked.

At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.

At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.

And then the sorting began.

The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.

Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.

And along the belts stood the detectives.

NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.

When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.

A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.

A piece of a person.

The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.

The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.

A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.

You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.

Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.

Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.

The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.

By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.

When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.

It is a park now.

Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.

Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.

Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.

Here is what you should know.

Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.

Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.

Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.

Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.

They did that for ten months.

Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.

They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

[Whitney @twitclark]

❤️🤍💙

[Barstool Baseball @StoolBaseball]

“Don’t bounce it, they’ll boo ya”

Derek Jeter to President Bush before he delivered the perfect strike

[Rory Cooper @rorycooper]

Still hits the same

[Vic Vela @VicVela1]

More than 300 dogs helped search for survivors on 9/11. In fact, the last person rescued at ground zero was found by a search and rescue dog.

The search was mentally and physically taxing on the dogs, who walked across huge piles of debris and smoldering rubble. As the days went by, dogs became sad when they were no longer finding people alive. So, to keep their spirits up, their handlers staged mock rescues. They would have people hide under debris for dogs to find. This boosted the dogs’ morale as they continued their work.

In addition to rescue dogs, therapy dogs were brought to the scene to provide comfort to emotionally drained and traumatized police officers and firefighters.

Dogs are the best thing in the world and we do not deserve them.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Unlucky: 6th Grader Flunks Geography After Trump Renames Everything In Middle Of Exam https://t.co/2C1L4ClQlx

[Whitney @twitclark]

Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits!!!

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

His friend from upstream who called him to warn him about the flash floods and his quick thinking and decisive leadership saved the lives of everyone. He basically saved a generation of Nepalese 🙏