Rory O'Neill retweeted
The results in Florida's statewide races are as much a story of money as voter registration.
Florida Republicans outspent Florida Democrats more than 6-to-1.
Byron Donalds alone raised and spent more than $160 million to win the governor's race.
Florida Republicans outspent Florida Democrats more than 6-to-1.
Byron Donalds alone raised and spent more than $160 million to win the governor's race.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
NY-21 Congressional Candidate and Trump loyalist Anthony Constantino declared victory in a profanity-laced speech last evening.
Constantino scolded members of the media for not reporting his successes.
He had WWNY Reporter Garrett Dombleski removed from his watch party, " repeatedly.
Constantino scolded members of the media for not reporting his successes.
He had WWNY Reporter Garrett Dombleski removed from his watch party, " repeatedly.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
History was made last night.
For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.
2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?
When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.
We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.
Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both.
Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.
Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that.
Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.
Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.
The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.
Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago.
In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.
And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.
That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.
Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.
There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.
Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain.
So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.
Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.
We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.
And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.
Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI.
The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.
In the next two years, we need to do two things.
One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.
So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution.
And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost.
There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.
For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around.
And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.
Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.
People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.
But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.
We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.
When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.
It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.
For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.
2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?
When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.
We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.
Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both.
Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.
Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that.
Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.
Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.
The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.
Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago.
In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.
And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.
That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.
Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.
There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.
Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain.
So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.
Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.
We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.
And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.
Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI.
The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.
In the next two years, we need to do two things.
One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.
So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution.
And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost.
There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.
For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around.
And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.
Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.
People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.
But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.
We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.
When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.
It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
BREAKING: Florida State has FIRED Mike Norvell after a 3-5 start to the season and a 10-22 record in the last three seasons.
(First reported by @aadelsonESPN)
(First reported by @aadelsonESPN)
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Five swastikas painted on trees outside an Orange County early voting site.
Disgusting.
Supervisor of Elections Karen Castor Dentel (@voteorangefl) spotted them herself. Deputies are investigating.
Voter intimidation has no place in Florida. Period.
Don't let hate win. Vote.
Reporting by @GabrielleRusson
#FlaPol
buff.ly/Wn82QWw
Disgusting.
Supervisor of Elections Karen Castor Dentel (@voteorangefl) spotted them herself. Deputies are investigating.
Voter intimidation has no place in Florida. Period.
Don't let hate win. Vote.
Reporting by @GabrielleRusson
#FlaPol
buff.ly/Wn82QWw
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Your next trip: a flight to another world. 🪐
Send your name aboard NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan and get a personalized boarding pass for the journey.
Become a Dragonflyer today: go.nasa.gov/dragonfly-names
Send your name aboard NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan and get a personalized boarding pass for the journey.
Become a Dragonflyer today: go.nasa.gov/dragonfly-names
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 48 hours..
> PHP, the code behind 69% of all websites, got 2 holes rated 9.2 out of 10, and the US, the UK and Japan told site owners to patch or go OFFLINE.. 4 days after hackers had already started trying the flaw..
> Japan's Prime uest late at night.. the Finance and Health ministries pulled pages, MUFG Bank and JR West went into emergency maintenance, and Onamae shut ALL Desktop Cloud plans after malware hit up to 26,739 customer servers..
> India's eMudhra was caught with 8 intermediate certificate keys so weak one of them was literally the number 4.. the 60,000,000+ certificates it has issued can't be trusted..
> GitLab disclosed a 10.0 severity hole in every version since 2014.. the maximum score there is..
> criminals were caught using a literal AI hacking tool on 1,200+ sites.. it broke into more than 100 companies including John Deere and Cummins..
> LiteLLM, an AI tool with about 23,000,000 downloads a week, was secretly poisoned with a password stealer.. the bad version sat on PyPI for about 2 hours..
> State Bank of India, the country's biggest bank, confirmed 3,897 customer records on the dark web..
> WIRED now calls the PHP flaw "broadly exploited".. nearly 55,000,000 web properties still run PHP..
every single government on this list told PHP site owners the same thing within the last 48 hours.. patch it or take it offline..
all of this.. 48 hours..
if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..
it's only getting crazier from here..
> PHP, the code behind 69% of all websites, got 2 holes rated 9.2 out of 10, and the US, the UK and Japan told site owners to patch or go OFFLINE.. 4 days after hackers had already started trying the flaw..
> Japan's Prime uest late at night.. the Finance and Health ministries pulled pages, MUFG Bank and JR West went into emergency maintenance, and Onamae shut ALL Desktop Cloud plans after malware hit up to 26,739 customer servers..
> India's eMudhra was caught with 8 intermediate certificate keys so weak one of them was literally the number 4.. the 60,000,000+ certificates it has issued can't be trusted..
> GitLab disclosed a 10.0 severity hole in every version since 2014.. the maximum score there is..
> criminals were caught using a literal AI hacking tool on 1,200+ sites.. it broke into more than 100 companies including John Deere and Cummins..
> LiteLLM, an AI tool with about 23,000,000 downloads a week, was secretly poisoned with a password stealer.. the bad version sat on PyPI for about 2 hours..
> State Bank of India, the country's biggest bank, confirmed 3,897 customer records on the dark web..
> WIRED now calls the PHP flaw "broadly exploited".. nearly 55,000,000 web properties still run PHP..
every single government on this list told PHP site owners the same thing within the last 48 hours.. patch it or take it offline..
all of this.. 48 hours..
if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..
it's only getting crazier from here..
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Hackers raise the temperature of refrigerators and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets to as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, causing fires and spoiling food. nbcnews.com/world/europe/h…
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
ALERT: Live data showing that #GasPrices appear to be rising to $4.29/gal in #Florida today.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Hurricane Isaias Update | Jeff Byard, Chief Programs Officer, Team Rubicon
Team Rubicon’s Hurricane Isaias response is underway in Florida’s Panhandle, where our Greyshirt volunteers are working to restore access and help communities begin the recovery process.
Go to teamrubiconusa.org/volunteer to join us or help fuel our response with a donation at trusa.co/47G55FR
#TeamRubicon #BuiltToServe #DisasterResponse #Isaias
Team Rubicon’s Hurricane Isaias response is underway in Florida’s Panhandle, where our Greyshirt volunteers are working to restore access and help communities begin the recovery process.
Go to teamrubiconusa.org/volunteer to join us or help fuel our response with a donation at trusa.co/47G55FR
#TeamRubicon #BuiltToServe #DisasterResponse #Isaias
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Court rules prohibit me from sharing audio of this hearing.
But I've never heard a judge scream at full voice at a lawyer before.
Not like this.
Trump Admin lawyer is getting excorciated
But I've never heard a judge scream at full voice at a lawyer before.
Not like this.
Trump Admin lawyer is getting excorciated
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
📢 Our initial Post Tropical Cyclone Report for Hurricane #Isaias is available here: weather.gov/media/tae/Trop…
📊 Downloadable data here: weather.gov/tae/TropicalEv…
⚠️ Note: The data provided are preliminary. They are subject to updates and corrections as appropriate.
📊 Downloadable data here: weather.gov/tae/TropicalEv…
⚠️ Note: The data provided are preliminary. They are subject to updates and corrections as appropriate.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
It's now real - from @pnj: "Waffle House confirmed to the News Journal that all Escambia and Santa Rosa County locations will close today at 10 a.m."
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
BREAKING: Gov. DeSantis has withdrawn William Thompson’s death warrant.
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Good morning. Here's the big news that broke over night. Prosecutors are 5-0 in their losses to the so-called "clean team interrogation" challenges. The government is still deciding whether to appeal this one.
nytimes.com/2026/10/07/us/…
nytimes.com/2026/10/07/us/…
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Rory O'Neill retweeted
Hurricane #Isaias Advisory 7 (4 AM CDT, Thu Oct 8): NOAA Hurricane Hunters Indicate That Isaias Continues to Intensify. hurricanes.gov
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