#feeling'

In love with the idea of love

So true -

Me-

In love with the idea of being 

In love

With you

{[]}

I have spent years in this room

Warm, golden sun 

Looking out the window - my view

Daydream about home

My arms wrapped around you

Daydream about love

When I’m looking at you

Holding me up

When my legs collapse from use -

You

I’m growing up 

And everything looks different now -

New

{[]}

I miss when I looked outside 

And saw the possibilities 

Of tomorrow

I guess when you get older 

Your sadness gets stronger

You drown in your sorrow

Eighteen years of trying to live for tomorrow

{[]}

I have spent years in my mind

Shaking breaking broken

Shatter

In pieces 

Dream about leaving 

My arms clutched around my body 

Breathing, gasping, suffering 

Dream about goodbyes 

Nightmares in my eyes

Waking -

{[]}

Fear still does not

Stop me from hoping 

When will my mind numb me?

I’m struggling with coping

{[]}

Older, tainted, in love 

With the idea 

Of being in love

With you 

{[]}

I have spent years

in this cage

Shaking from the pain -

Crippling

{[]}

I have spent years waiting 

For love 

Home

You

{[]}

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/mikie-sherrill-is-not-feeling-the-pressure/

Mikie Sherrill Is Not Feeling the Pressure

KINNELON, N.J.—The retired high school social studies teacher in the light blue polo shirt stood up in the town hall clutching a clipboard to say what he wanted to say to his first-term, first-year congresswoman, Mikie Sherrill. “Thank you, Representative Sherrill,” Gary Schraft began. “We appreciate what you’re doing to make this district a much better district. And we applaud you for having these town hall meetings because our last congressman refused to have them.” Many of the people in the tightly packed crowd last week clapped and cheered at this assessment. Sherrill let the ovation subside. “I sense abutcoming,” she said with a smile.

She was right. But thebutwas less a question and more a warning. Schraft invoked the name of an ill-fated congressman from this area who won in 1972, defended Richard Nixon in 1973 and lost in 1974. “And President Trump, I believe, and a lot of people believe, is 10 times worse than President Nixon,” Schraft told Sherrill. “That’s why we really would like you to support—like many other members of Congress—an impeachment inquiry.”

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This drew another roar of approval, and again Sherrill let the noise die down. And in this moment of relative quiet, in this overwhelmingly Republican borough in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, a district that hadn’t voted for a Democrat in 3½ decades before it voted for Sherrill last year, the low, firm voice of a woman floated from the rear of the room.

“Don’t do it, Sherrill.”

This is the political fault line that has emerged for centrists like Sherrill. All August, as lawmakers spent time at home during the late-summer recess, and as Trump’s often erratic behavior only intensified, moderate Democrats heard from their more liberal constituents increasingly insistent calls to impeach. As a majority of House Democrats have saiddo it, Sherrill steadfastly has saidwait—not yet. The past month’s storyline has revolved around the question of whether Sherrill and her ilk can withstand the pressure.

Sherrill and fellow district-flippers, more than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of the other headline-generating members of “the Squad,” allowed Democrats to wrest back control of the House, and Sherrill won not only with a perfectly suited biography—Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, mother of four—but by laser-focusing on less sexy topics that nonetheless foster more bipartisan agreement—taxes, health care, infrastructure. This deliberate approach facilitated a deft and necessary balancing act in which Sherrill appealed to an ardent base of Democrats activated by the stunning election of Trump, of course, but also to a wide enough array of more quietly unsettled independents and Republicans. Voters to her right were just as responsible for her victory as those to her left, and they will have a similar say over whether she keeps her seat.

To this point in her term, signs are strong that she can and will: Nobody is filed to run against her—not a GOP hopeful, not a primary challenger. Prognosticators look at her district that Republicans held for 34 years and now rate it “likely Democratic” or no longer even up for grabs. “Sherrill,” according to Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, “is not really vulnerable.”

Eight months into her congressional tenure, Sherrill looked at Schraft and spoke into the microphone, conspicuously on brand as a parent, as an attorney, as a soldier-turned-legislator.

She acknowledged people’s anger and anxieties. She said she shares them. Then she pivoted to the crux of her wait-and-see stance: “We now have about 29 investigations going”—that’s across the board—“and when you are conducting an investigation, you get as much information as possible. We are still getting information.”

And she continued toward her conclusion. Work on so many other pressing issues, and on other committees—the House Armed Services Committee, for instance—needed to go on as well. “Because Congress doesn’tjusthave an oversight responsibility,” she said. “It has a responsibility to be responsive to the people. … That’s why I’ve taken the position I have.”

This cautious case for patience elicited not boos, or even grumbling or groans, but another wave of applause.

After the town hall, I caught up with Schraft, the social studies teacher, and his wife.

He was disappointed. “She’s ducking the issue,” he said.

“But you’re going to support her, anyway, right?” I asked.

“Well, we’ll vote for her,” he said.

It’s something I’ve heard over and over from voters like Schraft in this district. They’re varying degrees of frustrated with Sherrill on this front—but almost certainly not so much so they’ll make her pay with their votes. There’s just too much at stake.

The next afternoon, riding in the back of a staffer’s car from a meeting with employees at the office of BASF in Florham Park to a tour of the small airport in Morristown with business leaders and mayors (one Democrat, two Republicans), Sherrill told me about her prisoner-of-war training on the top of a mountain in Maine when the overnight temperature dipped to 65 degrees below zero. The 40 or so men she was with huddled to conserve body heat. She was the only woman. She got frostbite. That felt dangerous. She told me about being blindfolded and strapped into a helicopter that was flipped upside down in a giant tank of water. She had to swim her way out. That felt dangerous.

“I guess I’m not feeling that pressure,” she said.

If she perceives danger, she suggested, it is not in her district, with which she feels “fairly well aligned,” but in the wider political terrain. She was a key part of the way Democrats got their main toehold against Trump last year, and to lose that next year, she said, to give up any ground in this fraught fight, would be disastrous.

“If this president wins reelection, we need to have the House of Representatives. I think he’s been very bad for this country. And I think the only backstop right now is the House. And so I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”

***

Impeachment buzz built slowly in northern New Jersey. As recently as late May, when I attended Sherrill’s town hall in Bloomfield, a much more liberal part of the district, the subject barely came up. The first time I heard it mentioned that evening was as the meeting was ending and one of Sherrill’s most recognizable constituents asked her about it. Jack Gavin, a 59-year-old IT professional, is tall—“5-foot-17,” he once told me—and wore a tan mesh vest and a bushy white beard and often hands out pocket-sized editions of the Constitution. His blue Subaru Forester is covered in bumper stickers, including one that says “MAKE THE BAD MAN GO AWAY,” and has a license plate that says, “FACTS.”

On this particular Sunday in a middle school auditorium, special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report had been out for a month. Based on his reading, Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, then a Republican, had concluded Trump’s actions met the “threshold for impeachment.” Gavin asked Sherrill what her holdup was. “What will it take?” he said. She wanted, she told him, to hear from Mueller—that wouldn’t happen for another two months—and she wanted, too, to be able to read “the full, unredacted report.”

“I think we’re in a good spot right now,” Sherrill told Gavin. “I think what we’re doing right now is what we need to be doing.”

By August, though, more and more progressives in the 11th saw this stance as unacceptably circumspect.

“We are writing as your constituents with growing fervor and alarm over the lack of urgency,” Laura Valente and three other Nutley residents wrote in a letter to Sherrill dated August 1. It called Sherrill’s statement after Mueller’s testimony “tepid.” It quoted Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe: “To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader.” It beseeched Sherrill “to do what ONLY you can do for us”—“bold, decisive support for impeachment proceedings.” It was signed by 128 other like-minded voters in the district. It was an apt kick-start to the month.

The next week, in Sherrill’s district headquarters in Parsippany, the often calleed the “Crossroads of North Jersey,” Valente and the other letter-writers met with her for half an hour.

“I told her that growing up, being a student of history, I always imagined that I would have the courage to have hidden Anne Frank or to have marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” Valente told me, “and that this moment in time in the history of our nation once again calls for that level of courage.”

Sherrill responded, Valente recalled, with her belief that probable acquittal in the Senate would embolden Trump and amount to implicit and precedent-setting approval of his conduct. She would change her mind, Valente heard Sherrill say, if and when the majority of Americans supported impeachment, which continues to not be the case.

After Sherrill expressed similar sentiments in the middle of the month on “The Daily,” the popularNew York Timespodcast, a man from Parsippany admonished her in a letter to the editor in a local publication. “You once held the controls of a U.S. Navy Helicopter where at any time your commanding officer could have sent you into harm’s way, risking your life, your future, and basically all that you have right now—all for the sake of your country,” he wrote. “We need at least some of that same courage right now. Rep. Sherrill, stand in the way of autocracy and stand up for the rule of law when you return to Washington.”

The scene was set for what happened three days later at Sherrill’s town hall in Verona. Valente was there. She kept holding her hand up but wasn’t called on.

Toward the end of the evening, she turned to people around her, she told me.

“If I start chanting, ‘Impeach now,’ will you follow me?”

Their chanting lasted approximately 10 seconds—watch it starting with about 10 minutes to go here—and they held signs saying the same thing. Sherrill stood still, smiling, her hands calmly clasped. She heard them, of course—“about four people in a 150-person town hall,” she told me later—but it’s not all she heard. “Other people said, ‘Quiet down, you’re wasting time,’” she said with a laugh, “so it wasn’t like the whole room adopted this like, oh, you know,pitchforksmentality.”

Still, with the topic in the air, a different woman asked Sherrill to explain her position, again, and she did, again.

“If we don’t make a strong enough case to the American people, and right now I don’t think we can do that without more, the president will be acquitted,” she said, “and we will now havetwobranches of our government that have said that his behavior is acceptable and that is how we want our president to act. So we have to be incredibly thoughtful.” She said a “bright line” for her would be if Trump and his administration flout final decisions from courts. Until then, though, she reiterated her conviction in the prudence of restraint. “I think,” she said, “we are building a very strong investigation, and I think we’re doing the right thing.”

I’ve been to four of her town halls this year. Each time I’m reminded that the sorts of issues Sherrill ran on in 2018 are the sorts of issues that matter the most to the most people here still. In spite of the recent, attention-getting uptick in clamor for impeachment, the vast share of what she hears at these public forums has been about gun control and climate change and prescription drug prices and wearying commute times on deteriorating bridges, tunnels and roads, and property taxes, and the funding of elections, and the exasperating numbers of robocalls—a range of issues that gets next to no time on cable news but makes up the humdrum backbone of any functioning—or nonfunctioning—public sector. In my estimation, for whatever that’s worth, Sherrill has been a pretty quick study, getting more comfortable with each appearance at saying what she wants to say and how she wants to say it.

And in Kinnelon, from my seat in the front row, I watched her give her answer to Schraft’s question about impeachment and found it clinical to the point of almost practiced. It was different, though, when she was asked about gun control. Sherrill is as constitutionally measured as she is politically moderate, but she got unusually emotional. She didn’t cry, a la Andrew Yang, but there was a discernible anger and a thickness in her voice. She emphasized the bipartisan bill she co-sponsored calling for universal background checks during gun purchases and decried a recalcitrant Republican Senate. She cited aUSA Todayop-ed she recently wrote with Democratic Representative Jason Crow of Colorado. She lauded New Zealand’s fast actions after a single mass shooting. And she related a story of a kindergartner who was scared to change schools because she didn’t know “which closet to hide in” in her new school. “How is this OK?” she said sharply to the crowd. “How are we living and normalizing this level of violence in our communities? I don’t think it’s acceptable, and I’m fighting very hard to end it.”

Over the course of the hourlong affair, she did what she almost always does. She started with the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. She honored local veterans. She said the word “bipartisan” with practically comedic frequency, and people noticed it and said they liked it. The most boisterous cheer of the night, by far, was for a seventh-grader who asked what could be done to make politicians from different parties get along and work together. The Republican mayor of the borough declared himself “starstruck” by Sherrill.

I looked at the man on the other side of the room in the blue blazer standing against the wall with his arms crossed studying Sherrill and the dynamics of the room and couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking.

***

Keith Dakin, a Republican, is thinkingabout running against Sherrill. Late the next night, I met him at the bar of the Parsippany Sheraton, which looks like a castle and hosted Sherrill’s victory party last November and sits across the street from her headquarters now. Dakin, 53, is a fit, divorced father of two middle school-aged sons who works in the irrigation business and has never run for any office of any kind. He and I talked for 2½ hours until the bartender turned the lights on bright. Shrunk to size, the theory of the case for his notional bid is that Sherrill is not far enough to the left to be a Democrat.

Sherrill, for example, is leery of “Medicare for All,” instead advocating for more incremental improvements to the health care system as constituted. So is Dakin. “I don’t differ all that much,” he said.

He’s also for universal background checks during gun sales and commonsense gun control. “Right,” he said. “I’m a moderate Republican.”

“We are a two-party system,” he said. “I don’t believe that Mikie Sherrill aligns solely with either one of them.” Perhaps he detected on my face my confusion. “What she’s doing is—you can call it brilliant by moving and appealing to Republican voters,” he said, “but they’re Republican voters, right?”

He told me about a conversation he had had with three voters after the Kinnelon town hall. “Two women walked up to me,” he said. “‘What’s your name?’ ‘Keith Dakin—hoping to run for Congress.’ And the third walked up to me and said, ‘I’m from Kinnelon borough, and I’ve been a registered Republican now for 40 years, and if you can’t take a position on gun rights and health care right now, you don’t have a chance, because we’re going with her.’”

I asked what he said in response.

“I didn’t really get the opportunity. She kind of walked away from me,” Dakin said.

“Maybe I’ll lose,” he granted.

“If she switched parties, I’d get out of the race right now—before I even get in it,” he added.

“If you’re a leftist Democrat,” he said at the tail end of our time together, “you’re not with Sherrill.”

I’m not so sure.

At a town hall last week at the Cedar Crest retirement home in Pompton Plains, Nat Arkin, 93, asked the first question. “The Mueller report was released four months ago,” he said. “I know you’re opposed to impeachment now, and I’d like to know: If not now, when?” Sherrill answered the way she answers. “I wasn’t fully satisfied,” Arkin told me later. In Sherrill’s last campaign, working through the home’s Democratic club, Arkin gave money to her, phone-banked for her and wrote letters to the editor supporting her. And he voted for her. And he’ll vote for her again. “There’s no way in hell I would vote for a Republican at this time in my life, with what’s going on in the country,” he said.

When I talked to Valente, the woman who wrote Sherrill the letter and met with her in her office and stoked the chants at the Verona town hall and hollered that focusing on anything other than impeachment at this point is akin to mowing the lawn while the house is on fire, I asked if she still would still vote for Sherrill next year. “Well,yeah,” she said. “I mean, it’s the fullblue no matter whomentality right now because of the existential threat.”

And then there’s Gavin. When I first met him in January, he handed me buttons he plucked from the pockets of his vest—FACTS MATTER, BE THE CHANGE, etc … —but he also sounded a pragmatic note. “She has to work within the district,” he said. “She can’t—what’s the word I’m looking for?—she can’t disenchant her supporters. On either end. But the people on her left are, in my opinion, so grateful to have this tremendous improvement. We never expect it to be perfect. I never expect to agree with her 100 percent.”

I usually see him on my trips to Sherrill’s district. I didn’t see him last week. I gave him a call.

“I cut her some slack,” Gavin told me. “On impeachment … less so.”

He wishes she would join the list of House Democrats calling to—as that bumper sticker of his puts it—”MAKE THE BAD MAN GO AWAY.” If somebody challenged her in a primary, he said, he’d give that person a look. For now, though, would he vote again for Sherrill?

Gavin hesitated not at all.

“I would go for her rather than any Republican I can conceive of,” he said. “Abraham Lincoln is dead.”

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/ben-stokes-says-ashes-saving-ton-was-an-amazing-feeling/

Ben Stokes says Ashes-saving ton was an 'amazing feeling'

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Highlights: Ben Stokes keeps Ashes alive for England

Men’s Ashes: Third Specsavers Test, Headingley (day four of five) Australia 179(Labuschagne 74, Archer 6-45)& 246(Labuschagne 80) England 67(Hazlewood 5-30)& 362-9(Stokes 135*, Root 77, Hazlewood 4-85) England won by one wicket Scorecard

England all-rounder Ben Stokes says scoring a match-winning century to square the Ashes series was an “amazing feeling”.

Stokes’ 135 not out, six weeks after his heroic display in the World Cup final, dragged England to a one-wicket win over Australia at Headingley.

“To still be there at the end and keep our Ashes hopes alive was a pretty special feeling,” said Stokes.

“Moments like that don’t come along very often.”

Report: Stokes leads England to epic Ashes-saving win

TMS podcast: Another Headingley Ashes classic

Stokes century ‘one of the great innings’ – Paine

The home side still needed 73 to reach their target of 359 – an England record – when Stokes was joined by last man Jack Leach.

At that point Stokes was on 61, but he began a stunning assault on the Australia bowling to ensure England still have a chance of regaining the Ashes.

When asked if it was a bigger achievement than his display in the World Cup final, Stokes responded: “It’s certainly close.

“To still be in with a chance of getting the urn back is an amazing feeling.”

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Watch the moment England keep the Ashes alive

Stokes’ effort meant England won the third Test despite being bowled out for 67 on Friday; becoming only the third team to win a match after being dismissed for less than 70 in their first innings.

“In terms of where we were at, I’m over the moon we managed to stay in the series,” said the Durham man.

“Walking off at the end was a time to take everything in and realise what we had just achieved as a team, not just me as an individual.

“Bouncing back from being bowled out for 67 to be chasing down 359 was brilliant.”

England captain Joe Root praised Stokes as a “freak” and “incredible”.

“The message at the start was to just keep believing,” Root told Test Match Special. “If we had two people out there still breathing then we have a chance.

“After Ben got to 60 or 70 he looked like he wasn’t going to get out. To win a game on your own from there is just amazing.

“It was just incredible to watch it unfold.”

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‘Amazing stroke’ – Stokes reverse sweeps Lyon for six

Former captain Alastair Cook heaped further praise on Stokes, saying it was “the most extraordinary Test innings ever played by an England batsman”.

Cook, speaking on Test Match Special, added: “To do that after the World Cup final – these are once-in-a-lifetime innings. He’s done it twice in six weeks.”

Another ex-captain, Michael Vaughan, said that Stokes had pulled off “something extraordinary”.

“That shouldn’t happen,” said Vaughan. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.

“I’ve never seen a better Test innings. Ever.”

Although England are level in the series, they will lose the chance of regaining the urn if they are beaten in either of the final two Tests.

“Can they do it again at Old Trafford (4-8 September) and The Oval (12-16 September)?” said Vaughan. “If they can, they have a great chance to win the Ashes again.

“But they can’t rely on an innings like that again.”

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‘Lyon has dropped the ball’ – Spinner fluffs run-out chance

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/liverpool-striker-divock-origi-says-gut-feeling-told-him-to-stay/

Liverpool striker Divock Origi says 'gut feeling' told him to stay

Divock Origi is set to start the season in attack, with Liverpool’s front three all in Africa Cup of Nations or Copa America duty this summer

Divock Origi says “a gut feeling” told him to stay at Liverpool and the striker is ready to kick on from the Champions League-winning goals which have changed his life.

The 24-year-old did not start a league game last season before December and could have left the club in January.

But now – fresh from goals against Barcelona and Tottenham which helped Liverpool to their sixth European Cup – he has signed a new long-term deal.

He is set to start the season up front.

First-choice attackers Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino have all missed Liverpool’s pre-season trip of the US after long summers with their nations.

Mane is not due back at the club until after the Community Shield on Sunday, 4 August.

“It is a lot to happen in a year,” Origi said. “And that’s the beauty of football.

“Winning the Champions League is a boy’s dream so it changes a lot in a player’s career. I finished last season very well and again in training I feel well. It is on me to show it on the pitch.”

Origi spent the 2017-18 season on loan at Wolfsburg and was linked with moves to Huddersfield and Wolves during the first half of last season.

He scored a winner against rivals Everton on his first league appearance, and followed up with another late goal at Newcastle as Liverpool finished a point behind champions Manchester City. The Belgian, who scored in Sunday’s friendly defeat by Sevilla, says it was a gamble to stay at Anfield but one that he feels has paid off.

“I just sat down and I felt like I wanted to stay and help this team,” he said.

“I felt good, I just had to keep performing in training and I knew my chance would come. I felt like we could do something special.

“I just had to block everything out on the outside and focus on the right things. In football you never know 100%, it could have gone another way as well but that’s the choice I made.”

Liverpool conclude their three-match trip to the US with a match against Sporting Lisbon on Wednesday evening in New York.

http://baronoffreeport.com/autonews-now-restoring-that-feeling-to-acura/

AutoNews Now: Restoring 'that feeling' to Acura