Ron

Hungry and humble

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff: It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week. And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer, with immense power in positions of public trust. And whether it’s Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth deluding the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings.

The sailors on the Lincoln are fighting his war, a war based on lies, while he plays with his new ballroom, flies around on a jet given to him by a foreign prince, and retreats into this circle of sycophantic aides who tell him every day what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear.

This entire White House is responsible for lying the country into war, and for the rest of their careers, they will be known for having participated in this obscenity.

[CrimsonCast @CrimsonCast]

Thank you to @TheAthleticCFB for asking my thoughts on this matter

[CrimsonCast @CrimsonCast]

What a time to be alive

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

Y’all acting like you’ve never seen an octogenarian drug addict blow 16M on Reflecting Pool reno cause he gave a no bid gov’t contract to a guy who looks like he sold quaaludes to The Riddler & then blame the algae bloom on a 350 ft boxcutter attack by underwater Antifa before?

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Paint was seen peeling from the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, weeks after a $14 million renovation that included a new color President Trump called “American Flag Blue.”

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Chicago, it’s good to be home!

Michelle and I built the Obama Presidential Center to be a place where people of all ages can learn, play, and work – and we can't wait to welcome you all later this week!

[Ron @WiserCrowe79]

@DustinCanFly Congrats, Dustin! Leon is the key to all of this.

[Tom Crean @TomCrean]

OG ALWAYS goes to the Glass and always did
@nyknicks @IndianaMBB

[Alex @ajak1033]

The Spurs know how to TAKE the lead, they just don't know how to HOLD the lead. And that's really the most important part of the lead: the holding

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary outbursts of the President of the United States against female journalists... well, actually against journalists in general and journalism. But it feels like he saves his most childlike behavior and irrational language for female reporters, calling them all kinds of names that kids in kindergarten are given times out for. It’s stunning to me to witness such behavior from any leader, any CEO, any person of influence or importance. I’ve never witnessed someone like this raging, this weekend with @meetthepress host @kwelkernbc, just last week in the Oval Office with @cnn’s @kaitlancollins, calling women stupid or piggy, telling them to “smile”, calling them darling, demeaning their credibility. Every good man should denounce this behavior. Every person should be able to stand up for their colleagues and say “No more.”

Imagine this man screaming like this at your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother... would you stand for it? No, you wouldn’t! And neither should any of us. It’s unacceptable and undignified. Period. End of story.

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Kimmel: "You'd think Trump would be rooting for the Spurs. It's what got him out of Vietnam."

[Rob Perez @WorldWideWob]

god DAMN

[Jeremy Gray @IUJGray]

1) Students in the suit keep the secret until they graduate, then have a reveal. Standard everywhere. We have more than one.

2) Abbey did a great job.

3) we went 16-0 with it & it made us $400K in one year

4) Coaches (Cig included) and athletes love it.

Hoosier stays

[Scott Van Pelt @notthefakeSVP]

Who asked for this?

[Tate Gillespie @TC_Gillespie32]

Confirmed in nearly every convo had this week: The Final Four should be permanently held in Indianapolis.

No other city comes close to embracing it in the same way.

[Jay Bilas @JayBilas]

What an AMAZING finish in the Duke-UConn game 🤯

[Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness @coachajkings]

Ben McCollum shares what it feels like to be around first-place people and a first-place culture.

"I went to Northwest Missouri State, and my first practice with Steve Tapmeyer - best coach I've ever been around - I sat there and I'm like, 'This is what first place feels like. This is what a first-place culture feels like. This is what first-place people feel like.'"

That was the wake-up call. He realized what first-place people have:
"They've got an extreme work ethic. They've got an edge to 'em that other people don't - a competitive spirit."

Then he quoted John Thompson:
"You can tame a fool a lot quicker than you can resurrect a corpse...We want guys with a little edge to 'em."

You can coach skills, but you can't coach competitive spirit. You don't want to consistently coach their effort and attitude.

The last thing they look for: Energy givers.
"Over the years, we found that guys that are moody don't make it in our program."

"If you're moody, if you have low energy, if you suck the life out of the building - you don't make it."

Talent isn't enough. Your energy matters. Your attitude matters.

Successful people have a competitive edge, they bring energy, and they look to consistently get better.

They raise the standard through what they do.
(🎥 Watts Happening Podcast)

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

For the record, the president of the United States is now simultaneously claiming that he has won the war, is currently winning the war, needs help to win the war, and needs no help to win the war. All to destroy the nuclear program he claims to have already destroyed last year.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.