U Iowa PolSci prof. Author of Supreme Court Agenda Setting: The Burger Court, Iowa Votes, & Prelaw Advisor. My views not those of the UI. RTs not endorsements.
Iowa City, Iowa
Joined September 2011
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Tim Hagle retweeted
WHAT THEY'RE SEEING IN DES MOINES, IOWA --
*50* political ads on NBC affiliate WHO between 5-7 am this morning!
Senate Leadership Fund (negative hitting Josh Turek on illegal immigration)
Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund (negative hitting Zach Nunn on health care/drug prices)
Rob Sand campaign (negative hitting Zach Lahn on health care/living out of state)
WinSenate (negative hitting Ashley Hinson on drug prices)
Christina Bohannan campaign (negative hitting Mariannette Miller-Meeks on support for data centers)
Hinson campaign (positive featuring Democrat voting for Hinson)
WinSenate (negative hitting Hinson on voting for the war in Iran and tariffs)
Nunn campaign (positive on being bi-partisan/going against his own party)
Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund (negative hitting Miller-Meeks on voting to cut cancer research funding)
Fight On Iowa (negative hitting Turek on illegal immigration)
Miller-Meeks campaign (negative hitting Bohannan on siding with sex predators)
Congressional Leadership Fund (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
Iowa Democratic Party/Mike Tupper campaign (15-second positive on being independent voice)
Turek campaign (contrast hitting Hinson for voting against the release of the Epstein files)
Congressional Leadership Fund (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
Brenna Bird campaign (positive on record as AG)
Iowa Democratic Party/Amy Tagliareni campaign (15-second positive on cancer rates/pollution)
Heather Sievers campaign (15-second negative hitting Bill Gustoff on corruption)
Lahn campaign (contrast hitting Sand on illegal immigration/supporting Green New Deal)
Nunn campaign (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
Turek campaign (contrast on personal background/change in Washington)
Republican National Committee/Hinson campaign (positive “food fight” ad on being bi-partisan)
Nate Boulton campaign (15-second positive on fighting corruption)
Iowa Democratic Party/Tupper campaign (15-second positive on lowering costs)
Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund (negative hitting Miller-Meeks on voting to cut cancer research funding)
Hinson campaign (response on the Epstein files)
Turek campaign (positive on border security on fighting illegal immigration)
Sand campaign (positive featuring Republican voting for Sand)
Iowa Democratic Party /Mandy Newton Rosenow campaign (15-second positive on support for military/public service)
Senate Leadership Fund (negative hitting Turek on illegal immigration)
WinSenate (negative hitting Hinson on voting for the war in Iran and tariffs)
Fight On Iowa (negative hitting Turek on illegal immigration)
Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund (contrast boosting Trone Garriott, hitting Nunn on slashing funding for law enforcement/giving tax breaks to corporate donors)
Nate Willems campaign (contrast hitting Bird on prices/taking money from polluters)
Turek campaign (contrast on personal background/change in Washington)
Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund (contrast boosting Trone Garriott, hitting Nunn on slashing funding for law enforcement/giving tax breaks to corporate donors)
Republican National Committee/Hinson campaign (positive “food fight” ad on being bi-partisan)
Senate Leadership Fund (negative hitting Turek on illegal immigration)
Nunn campaign (positive on being bi-partisan/going against his own party)
Sand campaign (negative hitting Lahn on health care/living out of state)
Hinson campaign (positive featuring Democrat voting for Hinson)
Senate Leadership Fund (negative hitting Turek on illegal immigration)
Mike Naig campaign (15-second negative hitting Chris Jones’ comments on farmers not working hard)
Congressional Leadership Fund (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
NRCC/Nunn campaign (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
Naig campaign (15-second negative hitting Chris Jones’ comments on farmers not working hard)
Paul Pate campaign (positive)
WinSenate (negative hitting Hinson on drug prices)
Republican National Committee/Hinson campaign (positive “food fight” ad on being bi-partisan)
No Going Back PAC (negative hitting Trone Garriott on trans issue)
Tim Hagle retweeted
University of Iowa student and TPUSA chapter VP Isaac has worked tirelessly to build one of the strongest chapters in the Midwest.
Between studying economics and pursuing his goal of working in government efficiency, he never stops leading on campus.
Thrilled to award him a $5,000 scholarship! 🇺🇸
@Realalexclark @DonaldJTrumpJr @tpusastudents
Tim Hagle retweeted
I'm gonna need someone, someday, to explain why this woman is the focus of near psychopathic hate for a small but vocal group of lunatics
Tim Hagle retweeted
Just drove through Clinton, Iowa, and stopped at @Culvers. After Lara finished taking my order, she looked at my sweatshirt and said, “I’m old enough to know who Walter Payton was.”
I told her, “That’s my dad.”
She freaked out!
Then 17-year-old Ze lost it, too. He told me WP was his favorite football player.
Before our food even came out, I took pictures with everyone. What a special, unexpected moment.
Thank you, Lara & the entire team for making my day. 🙏🏽
@WalterPayton, you have no idea the impact you left down here. Your legacy continues to touch people in places you never imagined. 🙏🏽
🐻⬇️ #Bears
Tim Hagle retweeted
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Tim Hagle retweeted
She was 27 years old.
Twenty-seven.
An age when you are supposed to be planning what comes next, not making peace with the end.
Her name was Honor Elizabeth Wainio.
Everyone called her Lizz.
And on September 11, 2001, in the final minutes of her life, Lizz did something almost incomprehensible.
She tried to comfort everyone else.
Just two days earlier, she had been in Paris.
She had walked the Champs-Élysées. She had attended a friend’s wedding in Florence. She had stepped inside a church and lit a candle for her grandmother.
She once told her mother that if she ever got to see Paris, she could die happy.
She had no idea how haunting those words would become.
On September 11, Lizz boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark, headed for San Francisco.
She had a career. People who loved her. Plans waiting for her on the other side of that flight.
Then, at 9:28 that morning, everything changed.
The cockpit was overtaken. The aircraft plunged. Passengers were forced toward the rear.
Then the people aboard Flight 93 began making phone calls.
And they learned the truth.
Other aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. Another had struck the Pentagon.
Suddenly these ordinary Americans understood something terrifying.
Nobody was coming to negotiate their way out of this.
Their airplane itself was the weapon.
Someone handed Lizz a phone and told her:
“Call someone you love.”
Think about that sentence.
Not call the police.
Not call your employer.
Not call somebody who can fix this.
Call someone you love.
Because time was disappearing.
Lizz called her stepmother, Esther.
And somehow, with everything happening around her, this 27-year-old woman turned her attention away from herself.
She said:
“This is going to be so much harder for you than it is for me.”
That sentence wrecks me.
Because imagine the love required to stare directly into your own final moments and think first about the people who will have to wake up tomorrow without you.
Lizz wasn’t asking to be comforted.
She was comforting them.
She told Esther:
“I’m gonna be with Grandma.”
The same grandmother for whom she had lit a candle in Europe only days earlier.
There is something almost numinous about that.
Then, aboard Flight 93, ordinary people began doing something extraordinary.
They understood what was happening.
They understood what the hijackers intended.
And they made a decision.
If they could not save themselves, they might still save people they would never meet.
Parents.
Children.
Secretaries.
Police officers.
Tourists.
People walking through Washington who would never know the names of the strangers fighting for them thousands of feet above Pennsylvania.
Flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw told her husband she was preparing boiling water.
Todd Beamer prayed the Lord’s Prayer.
Then came the words America would remember:
“Let’s roll.”
These were not soldiers boarding that airplane that morning.
They were ordinary Americans.
They had luggage.
Appointments.
Families.
Wedding memories.
Vacations.
Coffee cups.
Plans for Wednesday.
And suddenly history placed an impossible burden upon them.
They carried it anyway.
Lizz returned to the phone one final time.
“They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Good-bye.”
Read those words slowly.
“I have to go.”
She knew where she was going.
She knew what those passengers were preparing to do.
And still:
“I love you.”
At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
It never reached Washington.
Forty passengers and crew did not come home.
But countless other Americans did.
That distinction matters.
Today, at the Flight 93 National Memorial, the Tower of Voices contains 40 wind chimes.
Forty individual voices.
Forty human beings.
Not statistics.
Not merely names carved into stone.
Sons.
Daughters.
Mothers.
Fathers.
Husbands.
Wives.
Friends.
Tim Hagle retweeted
Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.
Tim Hagle retweeted
Happy 81st birthday to Steve Martin! 🎂
48 years ago, he hosted SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and introduced the world to his iconic “King Tut” performance. 👑
Tim Hagle retweeted
In 2003, the most hated team in the NBA did the kindest thing anyone has ever done on a basketball court.
April 25, 2003. Rose Garden, Portland. Game 3 of the first round against Dallas. The Blazers are down 2-0 and facing elimination from the moment they wake up.
That Blazers team had a nickname. The Jail Blazers.
They were, at the time, maybe the least likable team in professional sports. Arrests. Suspensions. A roster full of guys the national media treated as villains. Portland fans were exhausted by them.
Before the game, a 13 year old girl named Natalie Gilbert walks to center court to sing the national anthem in front of 19,980 people.
What nobody in the building knew is that she was sick. She had the flu. She later said she just didn't feel like herself at all that day.
She gets a few lines in.
And then her brain goes blank.
She sings "star's last gleaming" instead of "twilight's last gleaming," realizes it instantly, and stops. She looks around. She puts her hand to her face.
Thirteen years old. Twenty thousand people. National television. Frozen.
There is no worse feeling available to a human being.
And then a man walks out of the Portland huddle.
Maurice Cheeks, the head coach, minutes away from a playoff elimination game, leaves his team, walks across the floor, puts his arm around her shoulder and says, "C'mon."
Then he starts singing with her.
Now understand something. Maurice Cheeks cannot sing. At all. He is not remotely trying to rescue the performance.
He's just refusing to let a kid stand there alone.
He keeps his arm around her the whole way. He feeds her the next words. And within a few seconds, all 19,980 people in that building stand up and sing it with them.
A moment that was going to define a little girl's life in the worst possible way became the exact opposite.
Dan Patrick wrote at the time that Cheeks' simple actions had become the defining moment of the entire playoffs.
They went on Jay Leno together. CNN. Good Morning America. It became one of the first truly viral NBA moments, years before that word meant anything.
Portland lost the game. They lost the series. Cheeks finished his Blazers tenure with a fairly ordinary record and was eventually let go.
Now here's the ending.
In March 2025, almost 22 years later, Maurice Cheeks came back to Portland as an assistant coach with the New York Knicks.
The Blazers found Natalie Gilbert.
She's 35 now. Married. Goes by Natalie Zito. She's also, as it turns out, a Blazers season ticket holder.
They brought her back to sing the anthem again.
She nailed it. The whole building erupted. And the camera cut to Cheeks on the sideline, beaming like a proud father.
The two of them met before the game and hugged.
What she said afterward is why this story matters. She explained that she'd been made fun of a lot as a kid, and that in the moment she felt most helpless and hopeless, a stranger walked right over with no hesitation.
"This moment changed my life."
And then she said something even better. That she wouldn't go back and change any of it. That seeing him again and finding out he's still the same standup guy proved it was all real.
Twenty two years. One arm around a shoulder.
Follow @thesportsontap, we post a story like this every day.
Tim Hagle retweeted
Total star… Gorgeous, charismatic, great sense of humor and fun, stands up for herself…
xitter.cf/Gitmo99/status/2083589…
Tim Hagle retweeted
Grateful to have taken part in one of the greatest traditions in sports - the wave to the University of Iowa Children's Hospital💛
@Firefighters_BB @BananaBall_
