partly cloudy with a chance of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
mighty Midwest
Joined September 2009
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And so, MAGA is not about greatness whatsoever, it is about ignorance: the luxury to ignore. It is about fantasy: the luxury to pursue a dream in which consequences of our actions do not exist; the luxury to pretend; the luxury to go back in time to
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Was literally explaining the, "society falls when old men don't plant trees they will never sit under" to my neighbor (boomer)
He said he didn't get it and why would he plant trees if won't be around to see them
sharpemcelroy retweeted
i think a complaint im noticing a lot from older people is "younger people aren't taking our dishonest, consequence-free, misinformation-dense, hypernormalised society very seriously"
sharpemcelroy retweeted
This quote from Rob Delaney is the perfect response to the viral Seth Rogen clip about how much happier he is than his friends with kids. Not because one is better than the other (there are a million ways to be happy or miserable, and people should do what they want!), but because it's true that while the things that are hard about parenting are easily imaginable, the joys are pretty unknowable until you're in it. I say this a recently happy childless and now happy childful (2+ months) person.
"Whenever someone tells me they’re expecting their first baby and they’re nervous, I tell them the following: “Oh my goodness, that’s wonderful. I am so happy for you. Listen, of course you’re nervous but here’s the deal: you’re ready for all the bad stuff. You’ve been very tired before. You’ve been in pain before. You’ve been worried about money before. You’ve felt like an incapable moron before. So you’ll be fine with the difficult parts! You’re already a pro. What you’re NOT ready for is the wonderful parts. NOTHING can prepare you for how amazing this will be. There is no practice for that. There is no warm-up version. You are about to know joy that will blow your fucking mind apart. Happiness before this? HA HA. Mystery? LOL. Wonder? Fuck off! You are about to see something magical and new that you have no map for! None! This is it. Are you ready for that? Are you? No! No, you’re not!"
sharpemcelroy retweeted
El-Sayed: "People don't trust our party because too often we're funded by the very same people who fund Republicans... Can we actually cut the cord that we've had to corporate money and start governing like we give a damn about working people?"
sharpemcelroy retweeted
In 1942, a drunk German officer sat at dinner and bragged about the Jewish woman he had selected from the brothel the Nazis had forced open in town. He said her name out loud. The Tunisian Arab sitting across from him stayed calm, smiled, poured more wine, and finished the meal. Then he drove the officer home, sped through the dark streets, and knocked on a door close to midnight. That night, he hid 25 people for four months. He never spoke about it again.
His name was Khaled Abdul-Wahab. He was 31 years old, a wealthy Muslim Tunisian who had studied art and architecture in New York and spoke fluent German. Nazi officers trusted him. They invited him to their dinners.
Tunisia was the only Arab country directly occupied by Nazi Germany during the war. Jewish families were pushed from their homes. More than 5,000 Jewish men were sent to forced labor camps. Yellow stars marked every chest.
That December night in the coastal town of Mahdia, Khaled listened as the officer boasted. The woman he named belonged to a family Khaled had known all his life.
He left immediately. He drove through the night. He knocked on their door at midnight.
Pack nothing. Come now.
He gathered 25 people — mothers, fathers, cousins, and children — and drove them nearly 20 miles to his family farm, hiding them inside the olive press, stables, and storage buildings.
This was not one brave act. It was four straight months of courage.
He fed them while supplies grew scarce. He kept babies quiet. He trusted his servants to stay silent. When German soldiers arrived to count Jewish families, the hidden people pinned yellow stars onto their clothes and stood motionless. When the soldiers left, the stars came off again.
One night, a drunken soldier wandered onto the farm and discovered them. An eleven-year-old girl hiding under a bed watched him laugh and threaten to kill everyone there. Then Khaled appeared. She remembered him her entire life as a guardian angel. He calmly walked the soldier outside, took away his weapon, and sent him off the property.
Nobody on that farm died.
In May 1943, British forces liberated Tunisia. All 25 people returned home alive.
Khaled went back to a quiet life. He married, raised daughters, painted, and worked in government service.
He never told anyone what he had done. Not his wife. Not his children. No one.
He died on September 4, 1997, at the age of 86. His story was buried with him.
Ten years later, his daughter Faiza was sitting in a café in Paris reading a Sunday newspaper when she came across an interview with an American historian describing a Tunisian Arab who had hidden 25 Jews in 1942.
The historian mentioned her father by name.
She was 45 years old and had never heard the story before.
She contacted the historian. One of the children saved on the farm had left behind 83 pages of testimony before her death. Every detail matched.
“I rediscovered my father,” Faiza later said.
Khaled was nominated for Israel’s highest honor given to non-Jews who saved Jewish lives. He would have been the first Arab to receive it.
The committee declined, saying he had not risked his own life enough.
Faiza answered with a line history should never forget:
“My father opened his home to Jews. They did not open theirs to us.”
Today, the 25 people Khaled saved have hundreds of descendants living across Israel, France, America, and Tunisia. The little girl hidden beneath the bed grew up, moved to Paris, and built a family of her own. None of them would exist if Khaled had stayed silent that night.
He had everything to lose. He acted anyway. Then he spent the rest of his life saying nothing about it.
The world nearly forgot him twice. Now you know his name.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
If young men were being systematically raped by women in sororities, those sororities would have been shut down on day one.
Women deserve the same respect, care and Due Process that men get.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
I haven't read into all this yet but the reality is we all benefit from art. It makes life worth living. There isn't regular and reliable income. Art takes time and thought, often without regular and reliable income. There's a long history of support for the arts in Canada.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Accountability 🤝 affordability
Why should Congressional Democrats investigate corporate America if their mandate is to deliver real economic change? Because investigations are a key catalyst for securing reform and legislation. For much of the last century, Congress used to be the main institutional player working to secure an economy that serves working people. A key tool was oversight. Lawmakers routinely investigated complex markets and major corporations, identifying problems and exposing wrongdoing. A major goal of these investigations was to learn what was driving certain problems and figure out how to fix them.
After Democrats took back the House during the first Trump administration in 2019, I joined the House Judiciary Committee as a staffer on the Antitrust Subcommittee. Under the terrific leadership of @RepJerryNadler and then-Rep @davidcicilline, we pursued an 18-month investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, securing key evidence of how their business practices were undermining competition and harming people, setting the basis for both lawsuits and proposed legislation.
A few lessons from that experience:
1. The quality of legislative oversight depends on the staff and the support of top members to confront power. Committee and Subcommittee Chairs that are focused on getting answers and unafraid to take on powerful corporate interests will make the difference between oversight that doesn’t surrender to their evasion tactics and oversight that aims low or flames out.
Even a relatively small number of dogged, talented lawyers ready to dive in can make a big impact. In the 1930s a single congressional lawyer, Ferdinand Pecora, helped reshape our entire banking system by subpoenaing records and interrogating top financiers, including J.P Morgan. The investigation exposed self-dealing, market manipulation, and tax avoidance, and laid the groundwork for foundational New Deal legislation, including the Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities Exchange Act.
2. Eliminating bottlenecks to moving investigations forward is key. For example, the House should make sure that Subcommittee Chairs can issue subpoenas rather than needing the sign-off of the full Committee or its Chair. A credible threat of sending subpoenas is critical for credible oversight.
3. Ensuring that members can develop the muscle to effectively interrogate CEOs requires investing in real preparation. In the lead up to the hearing with Bezos, Pichai, Cook, and Zuckerberg, the Antitrust Subcommittee spent months reviewing millions of documents collected from the firms, interviewing affected parties, briefing members on key evidence, and conducting practice hearings. Members came into the hearing deeply informed and able to rebut and call out CEO dissembling. The result was some of the most effective member questioning of executives we’ve seen in decades. @TheProspect wrote up a great overview: prospect.org/2020/07/30/triu…
4. For decades, institutional capacity in Congress has been extremely weak. Much of this traces back to the Gingrich Revolution, which was effectively the 1995 DOGE-ing of Congress. Republican leadership fired over 600 professional staffers, eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, and gutted research capacity. None of that capacity was ever meaningfully restored.
As a result, members have way fewer resources to develop serious expertise or go deep on a new topic. Members should start rebuilding that capacity so the institution can fully play its Article I role, where Congress can again do serious policy development and legislating and serve as a real check on the executive and judicial branches.
5. AI markets should be high on the list of investigations. The business decisions of the major AI firms have huge public ramifications, yet the public is at a severe informational disadvantage when it comes to how these markets work and the choices these firms are making. A congressional investigation will help ensure future legislative action is based on a more complete view of what is going on rather than selective and partial corporate disclosures.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
We just gave Democrats a history making victory because Republicans were killing us by a thousand cuts.
And Hakeem Jeffries first order of business is to find common ground with those same Republicans.
I can't do this again.
This is Garlandism.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
"I don’t want Jared Kushner to be investigated because he’s the president’s son-in-law. I want him investigated because he’s potentially laundered and embezzled $2 billion dollars in funds from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. I don’t want Stephen Miller investigated because he’s a racist ghoul who’s at the center of the Trump brain trust. I want him investigated because he’s a racist ghoul who has violated the due-process rights of millions of people and, potentially, directly violated court orders. I don’t want Pete Hegseth investigated because he’s a toxic psychopath who is unqualified to lead America’s military forces. I want him investigated because he’s a fucking murderer who needs to spend the rest of his life in jail, either in this country or The Hague." thenation.com/article/politi…
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Dude is doing this after a generational rout on the back of an affordability agenda. He’s gotta fucking go.
NEW: Chuck Schumer is preparing to lead the Senate with a network of former aides lobbying for private equity—including two former policy chiefs and his top health adviser. Their clients include Blackstone, Apollo, and the industry’s top trade group. readsludge.com/2026/11/06/th…
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Get the fuck out of our government.
President Trump today advanced an important discussion with several European leaders about the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish the conditions for lasting peace.
Building on his leadership and the substantive work undertaken this week in Brussels with Ukraine, NATO, and our European partners, @SEPeaceMissions and I wanted to share some of the objectives guiding our ongoing discussions.
For more than 30 years, Europe and Russia have struggled to establish a sustainable security framework. Decades of mistrust, competing security concerns, and the devastating consequences of this war make this an extraordinarily difficult challenge, but one that is essential to lasting peace.
Our objective is to develop practical arrangements that address the security concerns of all sides, reduce the risk of future conflict, and create a more stable and predictable security environment.
We are exploring five principal goals: permanent security consultations, reliable crisis communications, greater military transparency, reciprocal measures to reduce escalation risks, and an enduring framework for long-term European security and stability.
Any arrangements must fully respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independent decision-making of every nation. Each country will retain authority over its own security and alliances, and no country would have a veto over another’s sovereign choices. NATO will remain central to European collective defense, and this initiative would build upon existing institutions and commitments.
We will continue consultations through the Shell Bay format with Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and our European partners, expanding engagement to ensure that all relevant perspectives and ideas are considered. We will also engage Russia as part of the peace negotiations.
Next week in Abu Dhabi, the United States will convene the first trilateral peace discussions with Ukraine and Russia since February. All parties remain intensely engaged in preparing for substantive and productive negotiations. We will consult closely with our European partners on the sidelines and, if progress is made, aim to move toward a broader multilateral format with their direct participation.
These ideas continue to evolve, and we welcome thoughtful input. Creating the right structure will be critical to ending this war and transitioning from conflict toward conditions that make possible a durable peace.
This is difficult, detailed work. There are no easy solutions. But the opportunity to help end this devastating war and build a foundation for a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous Europe for generations to come makes it a challenge well worth undertaking.
We will see how these discussions develop and continue working intensively with all parties toward President Trump’s objective of a comprehensive and lasting peace.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
For years, my dad battled Parkinson’s disease. On Election Night, I got to tell him, “Pop, we won.”
This morning, he passed away.
A part of me believes he held on just long enough to see his son make it to Congress.
He won’t be there when I’m sworn in. But I know he’ll be standing right beside me.
Rest easy, Daddy. I’ll take it from here. These next two years are for you ❤️
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Jeffries is and always will be the hand picked successor of a generation of leadership that attempted to strangle the progressive populist movement in the cradle. The mandate Democrats have been given deserves competent leadership.
Reality check: Pretty much every member I've talked to says Jeffries will get the gavel.
Rep. Himes: "Jeffries absolutely will be speaker."
"Anybody talking about a challenger is just selling tickets to a circus with no tent," Rep. Liccardo told @axios axios.com/2026/11/06/jeffrie…
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Underrated life advice: Decide in advance what you will not care about. Drama. Scorekeeping. Manufactured outrage. Tiny inconveniences. Whatever. The world will pressure you to care about everything. To have opinions on everything. Fight back. Focus on a few. Ignore the rest.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Republicans make Missouri feel like the back room of a frat house or the back seat of their car.
We keep saying "no" over and over, and these pig-headed misogynists won't take no for an answer. "No" is just another word they don't like so they ignore it, like "democracy" and "integrity."
sharpemcelroy retweeted
Excellent! Sen. Jon Ossoff is calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. It should never be allowed for billionaires/oligarchs like Musk, who pumped almost half a billion dollars into the midterm election, to buy our politicians and government.
sharpemcelroy retweeted
In the piece I'm working on, I'm arguing that what drives a lot of AI recklessness and anti-humanistic sentiment is an inability to accept limitation (perhaps especially mortality) as an essential and valuable aspect of a human life. (1/2)
