Friends can be honest with each other without holding a grudge, without ego, without fear of retaliation. It’s how friends help friends.
Former Canada Prime Minister Jean Chrétien: "I have message for American friends...never mistake our generosity for weakness. Never mistake our tolerance for lack of determination. And never, never mistake our kindness for softness...We bow to no one."
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$5,000 for every adult American?
President Trump made the extraordinary pledge at the GOP's first midterm convention, saying he would issue a "Trump dividend" to every adult citizen if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate.
Trump compared the proposed payment to a very successful company distributing cash to its shareholders, citing what he described as strong economic performance.
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He’s the most irrational, overbearing, uncouth, and disastrous ‘president’ the world has ever known…shame on him for destroying this relationship
NEW: President Trump explains the reason why he's renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," and takes aim at the Canadian government.
"They want to be treated like a state. But they're not a state. "
"We lose on average over the last 15 years, $60 billion a year carrying Canada. So we just can't do it anymore."
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More proof this man has no morals, no empathy and no ability to build relationships. I was born in Canada and now I legally live in the U.S., I have disagreed with the administration and know the majority of Americans do as well. Time for real change
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I’ve always been a fan of @davidaxelrod but Democrats poking holes in the dam for even the most obscure “missteps” is what degrades the important part of the messaging. This has been a well used @FoxNews strategy…no need to give them credibility. @ossoff made many valid points.
No one has been more consistently eloquent or incisive in exposing @realDonaldTrump than @Ossoff. The paragraph from his weekend speech that has gotten so much attention was a brutal takedown.
But two words in it, "with Natalie" seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.
They juiced the virality of it, I'm sure. Probably thrilled some in the base, who figured it was just giving Trump a taste of his own nasty medicine.
But they distracted and detracted from the power of the message.
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So while we are “all concerned” that Iran doesn’t get nukes, everyone else is….strategery @jimsciutto
Pay attention to this trend from Europe to Asia:
Question: As the U.S. reduces its commitment to South Korea, how seriously does it consider acquiring nuclear weapons?
Ret. General @InBum_Chun: “Yes, it is becoming a very serious discussion, especially with the recent very surprising announcement by President Trump…the uncertainties created by such announcements only accelerate the kind of thinking that we need an independent deterrent.”
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“They don’t have the right to health…” more proof current leadership has no idea of how to understand humanity, or be compassionate. They continually prove they neither have the heart nor the intellect to lead…instead, they aim to lead the unwashed masses to camps.
So other than some obvious cultural differences, what is the physical difference between a British Colombian and a Manitoban? Why wouldn’t medical standards be somewhat consistent between provinces?
‘I shouldn’t even be here’: Man with Stage 4 cancer sees dramatic improvement with new treatment, at a high cost
cp24.com/news/canada/2026/05…
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It was more than an evil comment, it was a reflection of what has evolved
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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JOIN US!
pa.exchange/marketplace/1cb2…
You can also purchase tickets to the home opener against Orange County SC and $8 will also be donated! We hope to see you there!
Economics, Empathy and the Egregious Inequity of Cancer Treatment - read for free!
substack.com/@robertpanacci/…
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Every dollar helps! Join me as I take steps to end #pancreaticcancer #phoenixpurplestride
secure.pancan.org/site/TR/Pu…
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Oblivious to facts. The comparison is not even close. Do better.
Appt’d Reps Robert Gates (Def), Ray LaHood (Transp.), and Chuck Hagel (Def).
Endorsed and expanded Bush's TARP bailout.
Held a bipartisan health care summit
Deficit plan w/ Boehner.
2011 Budget cutting $1T in spend
One of the reasons Obama was such a polarizing is, contrary to our system, he governed like the political minority party has no right to exist, no part to play in government. Same as Trump does, on a far slimmer majority.
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Is the U.S. and the world really going to hell? It doesn’t have to…but we need truth and empathy to rise up if we want to survive. open.substack.com/pub/robert…
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Replying to @ddale8
@ddale8 your work is truly valuable…this administration is void of all integrity and believes the American public (or at least their supporters) are total idiots. They (trump et al) can’t handle the truth.
President Trump’s post threatening to block the opening of a major new US-Canada bridge was filled with important omissions and misleading claims.
- Trump professed astonishment that the Canadian government would expect him to support the project. He didn’t mention that he explicitly endorsed the project in a 2017 joint statement with then-PM Trudeau, calling it a “vital economic link” and saying he looked forward to its quick completion.
- Trump, complaining about Canada, said “we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset.” But the state of Michigan already owns half of the bridge.
- Trump said, “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them.” But Canada paid for the entire bridge construction.
- Trump complained about a Buy American waiver Obama granted the project, then claimed the waiver let Canada “not use any American products, including our Steel.” But the waiver actually allowed Canadian and US steel to be treated equally in consideration for the project, and numerous Canadian officials and Republican former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder say some American steel was indeed used. (Also worth noting the Obama administration said it was granting the waiver out of a “basic notion of fairness” because the project was a “unique circumstance…under which Canada is assuming all financial liability and risk for the construction.”)
Fact check: cnn.com/2026/02/10/politics/…
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Sober perspectives on a changed world: the audacity to speak this truth out loud, from his perch, is both admirable and necessary. I don’t believe Trump will ever truly understand the chaos created, or the irreparable damage that may never heal weforum.org/stories/2026/01/…
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“He’s gonna sell Ukraine to Russia…” I get the negotiating, it’s the Freudian slips that are concerning.
Q: Have you heard this audio that Bloomberg has of Witkoff coaching the Russians on how to appeal to you?
TRUMP: That's a standard thing. He's gotta sell this to Ukraine, he's gonna sell Ukraine to Russia. That's what a dealmaker does. I haven't heard it but I heard it was standard negotiation.
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