Bottom of the Main Line

Why did I read this in your voice, @DebGrahamWarren?

@littleredyarn I hope this doesn't mean it's the end of your crocheted hippo career though.

58 days until graduation! And, I picked up a part-time gig as a GIS tech consultant with a local conservancy group last week. And there's a state-funded fellowship that I'm going to apply for. Yeah, I'm going down the public service road after graduation. I have to.

@verybadintel @SenMcCormickPA @TSA x.com/RpsAgainstTrum…

@SenMcCormickPA @TSA Who blocked tsa, Dave?

Senate Democrats have blocked DHS funding 5 times and our @TSA officers are bearing the cost. Many have been forced to leave the job, work second jobs, or stay home. On Sunday alone, PHL and PIT saw over 24% callouts. At both airports, TSA officers are depending on food pantries and community donations for meals. Enough. Fund DHS. Pay TSA.

@ParodyAoc @RonFilipkowski @atrupar You’re missing the point. Trump criticized Joe Kent for remarrying after his wife died. He’s in no position to judge.

@RonFilipkowski @atrupar Why do you care who Trump had sex with in a hotel room 25 years ago? He’s just a politician you don’t like. Try to keep it in perspective.

Just a reminder that Trump hooked up with Stormy Daniels four months after Melania gave birth.

@JenGatta1 @atrupar He says outrageous things like this so that we’ll redirect the attention back on him, instead of talking about what the person has accused him of.

@MainLineSpy @atrupar This motherfucker has some nerve…people who live in glass houses…

Trump on Joe Kent: "I'm not a fan of the guy ... His wife was killed. He remarried fairly quickly."

@atrupar TRUMP: Maybe me. I might do it. I could. I won the golf championship at my club, not that you’d ever report on that, nasty piggy from fake news. Stop looking at my perfectly cute, little hand.

COLLINS: Who's gonna be in control of the Strait of Hormuz? Who's gonna be in control of that? TRUMP: Uhhhh it'll be jointly controlled COLLINS: By who? TRUMP: Maybe me. Maybe me. Me and the next ayatollah, whoever that is. There will also be a serious form of regime change. Look at Venezuela.

@MargoMartin47 @realDonaldTrump Why would he point out that Joe Kent remarried quickly after his wife’s death? Hurtful and petty, especially when this is his history.

President @realDonaldTrump takes questions from the press before departing to Memphis, TN 🇺🇸

@SenMcCormickPA @DavidJUrban Please read this, Senator McCormick. x.com/Microinteracti…

Pittsburgh helped build the arsenal of freedom and the U.S.S. Pittsburgh carries that legacy forward. Proud of our city, our workers, and the men and women who defend America. I’m also grateful to my friend @DavidJUrban’s incredible family for helping carry this proud Pittsburgh tradition forward 🇺🇸⚓️

Please read this.

@CherryDani83453 @Microinteracti1 Please read it.

@Microinteracti1 I’m never going to read all that. I did read until you said he had integrity and that made me stop. He lived every day with the purpose of prosecuting Trump based on a LIE he created. Maybe revisit what you understand about integrity because you are wrong.

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

@alonso_says @JETLABX @athenaeumbc And that guy’s Penelope sleeps on another island most of the time.

@JETLABX @athenaeumbc Lmao. Umm no. That guy is fighting like hell to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. Sorry. Not at all the same story. Not sorry.

A powerful scene in the Odyssey happens when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering. You would expect the story to end with celebration, with the hero coming home, the family reunited, and order restored. Homer does something far stranger. Odysseus arrives disguised as a beggar, because Athena warns him that the palace has been taken over by more than a hundred suitors who have been living there for years, eating his food, drinking his wine, and pressuring his wife Penelope to marry one of them. They believe Odysseus is dead and in their minds the kingdom is already theirs. So the king of Ithaca walks through his own halls dressed in rags while the men stealing his house sit comfortably at his tables. They mock him, throw scraps at him, and one of them even strikes him, and Odysseus takes it. That is the remarkable part, because the same man who blinded the Cyclops and survived twenty years of disasters now stands quietly while strangers insult him in his own home. Homer tells us his heart burns inside his chest and that he wants to attack them immediately, yet he restrains himself and waits. Instead of striking, Odysseus studies the room carefully. He counts the men, watches their habits, and quietly observes which servants remain loyal and which have betrayed him. The hero of the Odyssey does something most people cannot do, which is delay revenge until the moment is right. Eventually Penelope announces a contest and brings out Odysseus’ great bow, declaring that she will marry the man who can string it and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads lined up in a row. One by one the suitors try and fail, because none of them can even bend the bow. Then the beggar asks for a turn. The suitors laugh at first, but the bow is eventually handed to him. Odysseus takes it in his hands and strings it effortlessly. Homer says the sound of the bowstring tightening rings through the hall like the note of a swallow. Then he places an arrow on the string and sends it cleanly through all twelve axe heads. In that moment the beggar disappears. Odysseus turns the bow toward the suitors and reveals who he is. What follows is one of the most brutal scenes in Greek literature. The doors are sealed and the suitors realize too late that they are trapped inside the hall. Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and two loyal servants begin killing them one by one. There is no escape, no mercy, and no negotiation. The men who spent years consuming another man’s house die inside it. It is a violent ending, but Homer wants you to understand something important. The real danger to Odysseus was never just the monsters and storms on the long journey home. It was the possibility that someone else might take his place while he was gone. When Odysseus finally returns, he reminds everyone in Ithaca of a simple truth: a man’s home is not truly his unless he is willing to fight for it.

@deannaveg He wants to distract us from Mueller said about him. Sadly, it’s working.

@MainLineSpy It’s real. I joined his social media site so I could fact check him in real time. 🙁

If that post from Trump is real, it’s more proof that he doesn’t have a single, genuine friend who will tell him when he’s being an a-hole.

@chrisoIIey Good point!

@GoodNews_Please Weird. Meanwhile, the image I just posted was labeled as AI, which I’m fine with, but I’ve never seen that on anyone else posts before.

Interesting. If I try to quote a post with the word “trump” in it, a message prevents the post saying it appears automated.

@TCara65 Good point. Followed you back. Didn’t realize I wasn’t.

@MainLineSpy Or................his friends air as bad as him?

@PoliticalBumps @MySylvii @RpsAgainstTrump *misinformed

@MySylvii @RpsAgainstTrump Depends where you get your information. If you rely on mainstream Corporate media....then yes, you are severely mis-informed.

BREAKING: Robert Mueller, former FBI Director and Special Counsel, has died at 81. Trump immediately took to Truth Social to celebrate his death: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

@gbunny @DrOzCMS Yup.

@MainLineSpy @DrOzCMS Yes he’s such a 🦆

Oh.