@AnnCoulter And yet only two FL airports have privatized TSA and he’s been gov for 8 years. Always easier to say what should be, than actually delivering it.
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Reid Ribble
11.9K posts
Reid Ribble
@RepRibble
Just a private citizen who for a while looked behind the curtain of government. Husband, father, grandfather. These are the titles of life.
Sparta, TN Katılım Ocak 2011
2.6K Takip Edilen9.9K Takipçiler
If only we could wave a wand and make him president!
Chris Nelson 🏝️🇺🇸@ReOpenChris
🚨Governor Ron DeSantis calls to ABOLISH the TSA! Says it should be handled by the airports so politicians can’t play games with our air travel. Do you agree?
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@JustinWStapley Yes. The country needs a long, hard look in a mirror.
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Donald Trump is a reflection of what's wrong with America.
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One of the odd thing about the folks trying to excuse Trump's comments is that they have completely fabricated what Mueller did. You can criticize how he handled the investigation (which he did not start) but, in the end, he did not find wrongdoing by Trump. Somehow this has transmogrified into "a coup." I guess we're all snowflakes now.
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Wow. This is worth every minute of time it takes to read. Bravo!
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
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@AdeleScalia Likely you will remember those things as one of your children hold your hand, and the others sit by your side.
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@RepRibble Yup. I just know I’m going to be thinking about these little moments when I’m on my deathbed and they’re going to bring me peace.
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As I stepped out of my uber last night a window from my sons’ room opened and my high schooler yelled outside “Mom! You’re back!”, then turned around and yelled “Mom’s home!” to his younger siblings amid shouts of “MOOOOOM!!!” and general merry making. What is this life? 😭😭❤️
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@AdeleScalia Well it’s fun to see your children react that way. What a moment.
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There is something deeply wrong with Trump, and if you cannot see it, well the rot runs deeper every year,
Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social@TrumpDailyPosts
Donald J. Trump Truth Social Post 01:26 PM EST 03.20.26 Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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@RepRibble Members of Congress don't get TSA PreCheck?
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I realize, in this populist outrage moment, it’s all the rage to claim members of congress get escorted to the front of the TSA lines. In my six years in congress I never even asked to. Those former members claiming this is a perk, must have been the only ones doing it. I was in line like everyone else, including many of my colleagues when flying back and forth from DC.
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Hardly anyone, and I didn’t know of any, that were even aware of this. I know I wasn’t. You have to be a person who totally lacks self-awareness, or are so ego driven and elitist that you would use it at all. The proper response is outrage, and yet everyone will be reelected. Just watch. So how real is the outrage?
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@RepRibble Ok,
But if you have to identify a few special privileges that these elected members are being given even when the public is suffering.. where will you start?
Certainly, the answer is not - there is nothing to be outraged about!
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Another populist move members of congress are doing, is to pretend they will pass a law to stop paying themselves if there is a total or partial government shutdown. They ALL know that they cannot do this because the 27th amendment to the constitution prohibits it.
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I can pretty much guarantee that people are not as willing to place blame for the slowdown at TSA to one side or the other. Most people IMO just want congress to grow up and do their job.
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@blutarskyOG Yup. And ok with it. Nothing to hide here. People will read it and laugh like I did.
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These are all fair questions. We are now spending over a trillion dollars a year on interest alone. Long term debt is being rapidly converted to short term in an attempt to reduce interest payments. At some point investors lose confidence that the money will be paid back which drives interest rates up as an inducement for more investment. This causes a debt spiral where governments turn to inflation by printing more money to pay off the interest.
This inflation decreases the life style of every American as they decide what they can afford week to week. We are perilously close to that now.
Finally we risk losing the dollar’s status as the global currency which can have significant impact on the overall economy.
When does all this happen? It depends on when Congress begins to take the risk seriously. But that would require not just truth tellers, but those who would also vote to turn the tide.
Sadly the vast majority of the deficit spending is on entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans care. All difficult constituencies to say no to.
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@RepRibble It seems that neither party cares about the deficit anymore. What are the ramifications of this? Is it really that big of a deal? Who is going to foreclose on the United States? Does the government just print more money and say "here you go"? I'm confused.
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To my previous point…they seem surprised that voting for another $22.5t in debt over the next ten years results in deficit spending in excess of $2t a year. 🙄
Joint Economic Committee Republicans@JECRepublicans
🚨U.S. National Debt just reached $39 trillion! Over a trillion was added in just 147 days, at a rate of... $6.78 billion every day $282.6 million every hour $4,709,703 every minute $78,495 every second Make every moment count. #ddm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">jec.senate.gov/public/index.c…
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@RepRibble Will Ron Johnson vote no on the $200 billion supplementary request for the DOD?
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Fascinating to me watching my former colleagues posting about the national debt reaching $39t, when just a few months ago they were celebrating the One Big Beautiful Bill, (which they pretty much all voted for,) that adds $22.5t of debt over the next ten years. It’s an amazing disconnect.
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