BridgetMerk
4.3K posts
I’d vote for @DataRepublican—for any office
Who’s with me?
DataRepublican (small r)@DataRepublican
@Manhattva How can I become more involved in Utah politics? Would Utah GOP even want me?
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BridgetMerk retweetledi
My blood is boiling man... I've got to let loose here
She was fucking 18 years old man.
Just out watching the Northern Lights with friends.
Then a VIOLENT, EVIL Venezuelan illegal alien,
a) caught at the border,
b) RELEASED BY JOE BIDEN INTO OUR COUNTRY
c) arrested AGAIN,
d) protected by Chicago CITY POLICIES,
e) released AGAIN
...approached her with a mask and shot her TO DEATH while she ran FROM HIM
AND YOU WANT TO TELL ME RIGHT NOW THAT SHE STARTLED HIM AND THAT'S WHY HE SHOT HER WHILE SHE WAS RUNNING AWAY?????
STARTLED??????!!!!!!
THESE FUCKING PEOPLE WILL TORCH THE REPUTATION OF AN INNOCENT PERSON TO PROTECT EVERY SINGLE ILLEGAL ALIEN IN THIS COUNTRY.
They will blame a dead teenager for her own murder.
DO. NOT. FORGET. THIS.
Vote accordingly.
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Denise and I are thrilled to announce the birth of our first granddaughter Charlotte Ann (Charlie) Smith. Charlie joined our family on Feb 13. Proud parents are Mattie and Connor Smith.
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BridgetMerk retweetledi
I always found it “odd” that Robert Mueller’s partisan team of hacks wiped their phones after the sham Russigate hoax failed
Same thing happened with the sham Jan. 6th committee
Same thing happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails, servers and her team’s blackberries (before& during investigations)
Prodigal@ProdigalThe3rd
“Clinton crony Charles Dolan Jr lied about source of Steele dossier…that wound up in discredited anti-Trump report” “Mueller team denied requests by FBI agents to investigate Democrat operative Charles Dolan for ties to Kremlin” nypost.com/2022/10/14/cha… foxnews.com/politics/muell…
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@BuzzPatterson Maybe Baby😁. I didn’t see that Atlantic fault kicking out such velocity, but it did shift.🤷♀️
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@HarmeetKDhillon Easy peasy, and fun to grill! I made a few T-bones on Thursday. When the weather warms up (Yay!), I’m excited to grill out.
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Simple but satisfying meal at home tonight — T-bone steak on the grill, finished with a sear; green beans with almonds and garlic; potatoes a gratin with a bacon cheddar from WI; and sautéed shiitake mushrooms! On the good china!
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BridgetMerk retweetledi
This is how a professor at Delta College in Michigan reportedly defines conservatives.
According to this handout, conservatives “do not like change,” are “fearful of the future,” “not supportive of minorities,” and believe climate change is a “hoax.” It also claims they are “less tolerant and open minded” and mostly older, white, working-class Americans.
No matter where you stand politically, is this really how half the country should be described in a classroom?
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@timburchett @Pismo_B Bernie could disperse home ownership to all of them. It’s the best way to support the workers who are in between jobs.
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Why don’t you give 1 of your 3 mansions to the workers?
Bernie Sanders@BernieSanders
Jeff Bezos, worth $234 billion, plans to replace 600,000 Amazon workers with robots. Now, he wants to spend $100 billion to fully automate not just his warehouses, but factories in the U.S & other countries. Oligarchs are waging all out war against workers. FIGHT BACK.
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@derrickvanorden Valid questions. I think enquiring minds want to know.
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The real issue is you are upsetting the Military Educational Complex.
Here are real questions that need to be answered:
How many $100,000,000 do we spend staffing and maintaining these facilities?
How many officers have multiple graduate degrees that were funded by tax payers?
How many 1000’s of man hours do officers spend away from their units to attend these institutions?
What is the actual ROI for all of this time and money spent?
Have less Americans and more of our enemies been killed because of all of the time and money invested?
How many officers leverage these tax payer funded degrees for personal gain?
I can name one for sure.
@CynicalPublius @DataRepublican @NWC_NDU
Cynical Publius@CynicalPublius
My American Greatness article on the War Colleges sure has upset the status quo. Their primary argument against what I wrote is that I am somehow advocating for revamped curriculums that focus on the tactical level of war while deemphasizing the strategic level of war. That's a weak strawman and a lie. The purpose of the War Colleges is and remains to train our senior military leaders for service at the highest strategic levels. In fact, one of my more obsessed critics sees the broad problem the same way I do: ". . . [we] have produced a highly tactically competent joint force that struggles to link tactical actions to achievement of strategic objectives." I could not agree more with what that particularly unhinged author wrote in that passage. But the REASON for this is that the education on how to achieve strategic objectives is filtered through a prism of War Colleges that are wannabe civilian institutions. OF COURSE the War Colleges must feature all of the DIME-FIL at appropriate levels, and they must produce leaders who can perform in a dynamic environment of global strategy. But that cannot happen when the woke priorities of civilian universities and the likes of non-warrior instructors like Tom Nichols are so prevalent. When you read the mission statements of the War Colleges and the underlying statutory authority, all of that sounds right. The problem is that we have let the worst inclinations of civilian universities invade the JPME, and that fact alone is preventing us from achieving those mission statements and fulfilling the intent of those statutes.
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Hello Mr. Evans,
Today, War on the Rocks published a "rebuttal" which disclosed the real-life identity of @CynicalPublius . What the article did not mention: you had already posted his name on Bluesky before the WOTR piece published. The WOTR article cited his being “already known” as justification for printing his name. The person who made him “already known” was you. You manufactured the predicate for your own publication’s decision.
You then blocked me. And then called me out. Repeatedly. You engaged me, mentioned me, tagged me — even said publicly that you were looking forward to what I had written about War on the Rocks.
Blocking someone on a platform and then continuing to publicly engage them is not what a person who wants to be left alone does. It is what a person who wants the attention without the accountability does.
You're framing your own just desserts as a “mass witch hunt” initiated by a Hello post I addressed to Brad Duplessis, your contributor, who named Cynical Publius in his debut WOTR piece without disclosing that Anderson’s recommendations for War College reform included eliminating the kind of permanent civilian faculty position Duplessis holds.
You are being dunked on because of what you did to Cynical Publius, not because of anything I wrote. Blaming the letter for the blowback is like blaming the smoke alarm for the fire.
Cynical Publius wrote that military institutions had drifted from their original professional mission toward ideological conformity and required reform. You responded by publishing his name. The question your letter to me does not answer — and the question a lot of people are now asking — is why an outlet that once existed to challenge that kind of institutional behavior became the one enforcing it.
You yourself provide answers to that question.
You launched War on the Rocks because you understood something true: the United States had spent two decades losing wars it shouldn't have lost.
Twelve years later, when a pseudonymous retired Army officer argues that the War Colleges have drifted from warfighting competence toward ideological conformity, the platform you built publishes his name in the opening sentence.
That is not an accident of character. It is how institutions stop being able to learn. Armies that cannot receive criticism cannot conduct honest after-action review. Institutions that cannot correct what they're getting wrong keep losing — and keep being surprised that they're losing, because the people tasked with explaining the failures are the same people defending the institutions that produced them.
In short: Mr. Evans, you have been captured by the foreign policy expert class has presided over Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. And you don't even realize it.
Wake up.
And be on the lookout for a Substack article where I explain your history more thoroughly.
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On the left is a White man who got caught cheating during a fishing tournament and is currently facing 10 years.
On the right is a Somali in MN who raped 2 little girls between the ages of 4 and 9 and only got 180 days in jail.
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Hello Professor Nichols,
You spent twenty-five years at the Naval War College. You taught the officers who would go on to run America's wars. Famously, you never served in any of them.
In February 2003, you were at your desk in Newport when you wrote this, about Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations: “There is only one thing to say about Secretary Powell’s presentation at the U.N.: If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.” You were confident. You were expert. You were wrong. You acknowledged this twenty years later in The Atlantic — the invasion was, in your own words, “one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history.”
You wrote that from the same institution you are now defending.
The Senior Service Colleges produced the officers who managed the Afghanistan withdrawal. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. General Kenneth McKenzie, CENTCOM commander. On September 28, 2021, both testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that they had recommended keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.
The recommendation was not followed. They did not resign or say a word publicly. Then 13 American service members died at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021. Only after that did they testify.
Your response, in The Atlantic, August 16, 2021: “Afghanistan Is Your Fault.”
Not the generals your institutions trained and credentialed. Not the curriculum that built the career-preserving, NSC-deferring officer class that drove those decisions to their conclusion. The American public, with our short attention span and our SUVs.
General Milley, whose career your institution shaped, secretly called his PLA counterpart twice, October 30, 2020 and January 8, 2021, and assured him the US would not strike China, and that Milley would warn him personally if an attack were ordered. You wrote “Trump Put Milley in an Impossible Position.”
That's not all. Secretary Austin concealed a cancer diagnosis from the White House and Congress for weeks while incapacitated; the DoD Inspector General documented it. At his farewell address in September 2023, Milley publicly called his former commander-in-chief a “wannabe dictator.”
You found none of this worth a column.
Anthony Tata is a retired Brigadier General. He commanded forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. He led soldiers in both wars. And now he has been asked to conduct a 90-day curriculum review of the Senior Service Colleges. Your objection is that he lacks the credentials for the job.
You wrote a whole book about credentials. The foundational knowledge of the average American is, in your assessment, “plummeting to aggressively wrong.” Institutions must be insulated from the ignorant. Expertise must not be questioned by those who haven’t earned it.
The men who earned your institution’s credentials - over twenty-plus years of your tenure - presided over two of the longest military failures in American history. They managed those failures in line with everything the War Colleges taught them: subordinate military judgment to civilian direction, preserve the relationship, testify about it later. They retired with honors.
That is what "expertise" means to you.
The question Pete Hegseth is asking isn't whether the War Colleges have credentials. It's whether the credentials mean anything. After twenty-five years on your faculty training generals who only know how to lose war, Professor Nichols, you are the wrong man to answer that.
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PS: The guy who's been tapped to lead this 90 day nonsense is Anthony Tata, whose bonkers conspiracy ideas (Obama is a Muslim, Brennan's a commie, etc) were so extreme that the Senate rejected him for a senior job during Trump 45. This time, the GOP caved, and here we are.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth@SecWar
Professional Military Education should produce warfighters and leaders—not wokesters. That’s why we are establishing a Task Force to evaluate our Senior Service Colleges and ensure the focus is where it belongs. No distractions. Just warfighting.
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We love you so much and cannot wait to meet you.
Angelina is going to be a big sister!
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Mr. Olbermann, @JoshuaLisec and I would be honored to use this comment as a jacket blurb for our upcoming book, Unelected. Preorders available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books a Million.
Can you please reach out to @PassagePress to finalize?
Keith Olbermann@KeithOlbermann
@DataRepublican God you guys are just fucking nuts
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Marco Rubio sits down with the new supreme leader of Iran 😭
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I’ve been doing a Mediterranean style ground beef and tomato braise with green olives. Sauté onions, then add ground beef, brown and finish at the end with chopped garlic, then add crushed tomato, chopped green olives, some capers, a touch of anchovy or Worcestershire, tons of fresh herbs. Simmer until ragu-like then finish with a ton of fresh Parmesan and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Serve w toasted sourdough.
The🐰FOO@PolitiBunny
I need a recipe for ground beef that isn’t burgers, tacos, spaghetti, or meatloaf. I feel like I’m making the same things over and over again … what’s for dinner this week? HALP.
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