Eric Rose 🔶

@archer_rs Not to mention the damage he has done to the rest of the world

The US President who comes after Trump will likely have to spend nearly all his first term repairing the damage that Trump has done to America.

I do not know how many times this needs to be said, Jeremy, but there is very little appetite for your commentary. You were a central figure in a Conservative government that held power for fourteen years. The damage done to the National Health Service, together with the economic mismanagement, particularly in the final year, has left this country in a deeply vulnerable position when faced with challenges such as these. It would therefore be far more appropriate to reflect on that record than to continue offering commentary that carries little weight. Do the country a favour and keep your observations to yourself.

@RobertJenrick Are you bonkers, stupid, or just nasty ?

I’m fearful for our next few years. On issue after issue - migration, energy, welfare and the war - Polanski and Rayner are running Starmer.

@RobertJenrick I've seen you come out with some horseshit in your time: Your explanation for why you intervened to save your mate a £40 million tax bill Your explanation for painting on a mural to help desperate children feel safe. But this might top the lot.

I continue to follow the situation in the Middle East with dismay. Like other regions of the world, it is torn apart by war and violence. We cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of so many defenseless victims of these conflicts. What wounds them wounds all of humanity. The death and pain caused by these wars is a scandal for the entire human family and a cry that rises to God!

An indignant Laura Kuenssberg asks Communities Secretary Steve Reed. "why would Israel say something that is not true." Give me strength, where do you even start with this? #BBCLauraK

Reminder: There was never an imminent nuclear threat from Iran. Netanyahu’s been crying “weeks away” for more than 30 years. Iran wasn’t any closer to a bomb than Trump is to producing a fucking healthcare plan.

Right. Let’s just pause there for a second! Iran is not Germany in 1936. Iran cannot invade Poland. Iran does not have a mechanised army rolling toward the English Channel. Iran has ballistic missiles, a few proxy militias, and an economy that looks like a particularly sad car boot sale. The actual country currently occupying sovereign European territory, bombing civilian infrastructure and being actively assisted by the largest nuclear power on earth is Russia. And the man who just decided to stop arming the people fighting it is sitting in the Oval Office. If you’re looking for your 1936 moment, it already happened. It was called February 2022. And half of the people now invoking the Holocaust to talk about Iran spent that year arguing we shouldn’t provoke Moscow. Europe isn’t looking away from Iran. Europe is watching Washington hand Russia the wheel. That’s your history lesson.

@RslewisSally I fear it is too late Sally Sadly the rot started with the 2004 contract and the last Labour Government. The current Labour Govt with Streeting in charge seems bent on pursuing their own unevidenced ideas and completing the destruction.

In so many ways I mourn for general practice. We must rescue it before it is too late.

Wordle 1,737 4/6 🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Bob Mueller was one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, transforming the bureau after 9/11 and saving countless lives. But it was his relentless commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our bedrock values that made him one of the most respected public servants of our time. Michelle and I send our condolences to Bob’s family, and everyone who knew and admired him.

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

🚨NEW: Former FBI Director Robert Mueller has died at the age of 81. A Purple Heart recipient in Vietnam, he dedicated his life to standing up for democracy. RETWEET to honor Mueller’s life of service ❤️

@ronsterd89 Head cook and bottle washer

Has anyone ever heard the term: Chief cook and bottle washer?? My Dad said it all the time!! 🤣

@StefanoGig11344 @paullewismoney @Moneybox @BBCRadio4 Yes i couldn't remember the exact figure which is why i said "around 2s"

@DoctorAngry @paullewismoney @Moneybox @BBCRadio4 Same year but 1/10d for a brown & mild.

Why am I showing you this? All will become clear @moneybox starting just after midday @BBCRadio4 but you must wait til the end to find the answer! Meanwhile - and don't look it up - how many of these to the pound then?

That’s nonsense because many of the people who get what he calls welfare do in fact Work. And much of this total is paid to pensioners in return for their national insurance and they would certainly not consider it welfare. But it’s fake statistics like these that can influence peoples beliefs.

As a Kharkiv citizen, this is the least informed take I've read about my city in years. ​Here, russian missiles often arrive without warning. Our first "alert" is usually the first explosion, which is often too late. They are destroying homes and supermarkets, killing people on the sidewalks. Those of us who stay do so despite the danger, not because the danger doesn't exist. ​My own home has been damaged twice. Thankfully, it wasn't destroyed. Kharkiv remains alive because we continue to live in it. It looks tidy because we repair it, sometimes several times over. ​Then come the russian drones. They used to be loud, but now they arrive silently, out of nowhere, to kill. This happens every day, several times a day. They are sometimes intercepted, but not always. ​When the russian army stood outside Kharkiv, they shelled the city nonstop. They killed my parents' neighbor in his yard while he was fixing his car. They killed another neighbor, an elderly woman, in her kitchen while she was having her morning tea. They damaged my parents' house, and my parents only survived by hiding in their basement for months. ​The most vicious attacks were the aerial bombs; they leveled entire buildings and blocks at once. Russia tried to level Kharkiv with them, but that required flying directly over the city. A few weeks into the full-scale invasion, our air defense made those flights impossible. Russia didn't level Kharkiv because they were stopped. ​Stop with these uninformed, moronic takes. Kharkiv is alive because we live here despite the danger, it is alive because we clean and rebuild it, and it is alive because our army defends it.

It’s still staggers me that anyone can look at Donald Trump and think: - There’s a man to admire - There’s a man to trust - There’s a man to believe in - There’s a man who cares about me Because all I see is a rotting carcass of failed humanity, wrapped in paper-thin orange skin

@Jennife10651535 @paullewismoney @Moneybox @BBCRadio4 Aged 8 my mum used to send me to the bakers for a loaf which cost 7pence &three farthings. The woman always took 8d and said "I have to owe you a farthing as I haven't got change " So one day I gave her 7d and pointed out that she owed me 3 farthings for the last 3 loaves.

@DoctorAngry @paullewismoney @Moneybox @BBCRadio4 Got there as well, Eric. But, after all,we're old enough to remember!