Brian Fulmer

AOC has a new accent in Memphis.

Thankfully I have numbers rather than opinions. The average number of days per year in the U.S. reaching 95°F was ~18% lower during the 60-year period 1961 to 2020 compared to 1901 to 1960. The number of days reaching 100°F and 105°F have also declined since 1895.

A US senator killed a 28 year old woman, left her to drown, spent zero days in jail, and then served 40 more years in the Senate. 57 years ago tonight. Almost nobody remembers her name. 57 years ago tonight, July 18 1969, on a tiny island called Chappaquiddick that most Americans could not find on a map, the most infamous car accident in US history happened while the entire world was staring at the sky waiting for men to walk on the moon. Senator Ted Kennedy left a cottage party for the "Boiler Room Girls," the young women who had worked themselves to exhaustion on his brother Bobby's campaign the year before Bobby was shot, and he drove off with 28 year old Mary Jo Kopechne around 11:15 pm. He said he was taking her to the ferry. Instead the car went off the Dike Bridge, a narrow wooden bridge with no guardrail, and flipped upside down into the black tidal water of Poucha Pond. Kennedy got out. Mary Jo did not. And here is the part history never forgave: he did not knock on the lit up house just yards away that had a phone, he did not call police, he walked back to the party and then he went to bed. He reported it roughly 10 hours later, the next morning, only after two fishermen had already found the car and her body. The diver who pulled her out, John Farrar, said she had likely survived for a while inside an air pocket and might be alive today if anyone had simply called for help that night. Two days later Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and so the greatest achievement in human history shared the front page with a drowned woman and a senator who waited until sunrise. The punishment for all of it: a guilty plea to leaving the scene, a two month suspended sentence, not a single day served. He kept his Senate seat for 40 more years until he died in 2009, one of the most powerful men in the country. Strip away the famous last name and you are left with something painfully simple. A young woman trusted the wrong man to drive her home, and he chose himself. Say her name tonight. Not his. Mary Jo Kopechne.