I wonder how that would have changed things.
The get it and go style probably wouldn't work.
And how would it have affected recruiting?
Would post players have looked elsewhere as might those that like to run?
She is skilled but I don't think for an Iowa-styled offense.

A common opinion in the transfer portal threads is that Iowa should throw a large sum of money at a top QB transfer.

This seems like an easy answer. However much like City Boyz changed KF's opinion on recruiting after his top 10 recruiting class in 2003(?), I think Cade and Kaleb Brown will really shape which transfers the Hawkeyes bring in via the portal.

Big money comes with big ego and bringing in players like that to a team without top NIL resources will likely affect team unity. I don't think we will see any high profile guys transfer to Iowa, and I honestly think it's a smart move by the coaching staff.

What if you need to tell someone that they are bad at their job in a harsh, direct tone?
I’m stuck inside watching Parks & Rec, and their ads are running constantly.

It was a heck of a game. It was the 1st time I got to watch Iowa this season and I was impressed. That game was even closer than the final score indicated. When the shots are falling Iowa is hard to deal with. If they get hot in March look the hell out. Good luck the rest of the season it's a lot funner when 75% of the in State teams are good and make it to the dance.

Worth your time.

Trust me.

Yesterday, I met a 77 year old gentleman that worked high up for a government agency. He's retired now...great guy. He's not a medical doctor but has a PhD in biology, I think. He did tons of scientific research and is probably pretty famous in his field.

I was talking to him and he asked if I had any covid vaccines. I proudly said I've had 7 covid vaccines.

He replied: "I've had 8."

I loled and told him I'd catch up.

CSB.

From the transcript of Trump's interview with Time magazine:

If the prices of groceries don't come down, will your presidency be a failure?

"I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It's broken. You see it. You go out to the docks and you see all these containers. And I own property in California, in Palos Verdes. They're very nice. And I passed the docks, and I've been doing it for 20 years. I've never seen anything like it. You know, for 17 years, I saw containers and, you know, they'd come off and they'd be taken away—big areas, you know, you know, in that area, you know, where they have the big, the big ships coming in—big, the port. And I'd see this for years as I was out there inspecting property and things, because they own a lot in California. And I look down and I see containers that are, that are 12, 13, 14 containers. You wouldn't believe they can hold each other. It's like crazy. No, the supply chain is is broken. I think a very bad thing is this, what they're doing with the cars. I think they lost also because of cars. You know, there are a lot of reasons, but the car mandate is a disaster. The electric, the EV mandate."

Losing last night was a shame. The Hawkeyes controlled that game from the opening tip to 2.5 minutes to play. And then all that great work for 37.5 minutes went for nothing. But ISU is the #3 team in the damn country. So maybe unranked Iowa did a helluva job to stay on the same floor with such a great team.

I was ready for Fran to leave years ago. I hope we have a new head basketball coach for the men's program for next season. I'm tired of Iowa being soft on the boards and constantly getting outrebounded. But last night Iowa was playing the #3 team in the country, and Iowa outplayed them for 37.5 minutes. Those are the facts.

Izzo's MSU teams generally play tough nonconference schedules, and they lose many of those games against Duke or Kentucky or other top 25 teams, and they don't always play those teams as well as Iowa played ISU last night. But MSU almost always is competing for the BIG title and plays well in the NCAA tourney, unlike the Hawkeyes. So I can understand where people are coming from, but just based on last night itself, the Hawkeyes were great. ISU, finally, was greater. So based on that, if ISU is #3, Iowa must be a top ten team.

Iowa has lost by 2 @ #14 Michigan. It lost last night to #3 ISU by a score that in no way reflects the overall game. What matters is what happens the rest of the way. If Iowa continues to improve and continues to play hard and learns from such losses, then the season could end up being a good one. But it would be a revelation if the Hawkeyes could get after it on the boards.

Another major win for Iowa's 2025 recruiting class in PWO running back, Braeden Jackson. Story coming shortly.

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Very well-written article from The New Yorker:

Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero​

The support for the alleged shooter is rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw.

By Jessica Winter
December 13, 2024

He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago. His reading and podcast habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism,” according to Max Read, who writes on tech and Internet culture. In other words, a typical-enough diet for a contemporary twentysomething computer-science guy, and certainly not the stuff of alarm.

He is, by consensus, handsome, and jacked. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” Stephen Colbert enthused, over an en-plein-air portrait of a shirtless and beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is. “You know that guy’s Italian, because you could grate parmesan on those abs,” Colbert went on. (His fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Would.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiselled and defiant, appears ready for his closeup in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” He wears a hoodie well. On Monday night, a friend texted me a photograph of police escorting a dramatically backlit Mangione to his arraignment, and added, “Even the cops are trying to get him acquitted.”

Last week, Internet citizens were making dark, cathartic jokes about the fatal shooting, on December 4th, in Manhattan, of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which is the insurance arm of the world’s largest health-care company. Now that Mangione has been provisionally identified as Thompson’s assailant, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the terminally online are decorating Mangione’s picture with glittery graphics and heart emojis, sharing fancams of Mangione scored to Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers,” and editing Mangione into time-stamped snapshots to try and provide him with an alibi. (A sympathetic death-metal band posted to X, “Free Luigi who on December 4th around 6 AM helped us load our trailer and drive with us to play a secret set in California which is about 2.8k mi from Manhattan and at the show he bought merch from every band except for the hoodies because he said he hates them.”)

In trying to establish a motive for the alleged murder, authorities have cited a note that was apparently found on Mangione when he was arrested at a McDonald’s, in central Pennsylvania. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it read. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” The note also stated that UnitedHealthcare’s size and power have permitted it to “abuse our country for immense profit.” Thompson, who became C.E.O. in 2021, increased UnitedHealthcare’s profits by five billion dollars in just two years. Between 2019 and 2022, UnitedHealthcare more than doubled its denial rate for prior-authorization requests for post-acute care. One of Thompson’s signature innovations was to use a predictive algorithm to kick ailing and disabled Medicare patients out of nursing homes and rehabilitative programs, causing untold misery and penury. And UnitedHealthcare has increasingly demanded—and often denied—prior authorization for any number of ordinary necessities: colonoscopies, or insulin, or pain medication following major surgery, or physical, occupational, or speech therapy.

As of now, Mangione remains in Pennsylvania, where his legal team is fighting his extradition to New York. The support and affection for him that predominates online—its photo negative is the fear and loathing directed at our health-care system—appears to extend to the jail where he is being held. On Wednesday, Mangione’s fellow-inmates could be heard calling out of their windows, “Free Luigi!” and “Luigi’s conditions suck!” Meanwhile, Luigi merch is already hitting the market.

More than forty years ago, Richard E. Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, noted the essential difference between the outlaw—which Meyer defined as “a distinctively, though not exclusively, American folktype”—and the mere criminal. He wrote that “the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience.” (The italics are Meyer’s.) The outlaw-hero’s persona is that of a “good man gone bad,” not unlike the oncology patient Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” who started cooking meth because his insurance didn’t cover his cancer treatments. To remain in good standing as an outlaw-hero, a man’s crimes must “be directed only toward those visible symbols which stand outside of and are thought of as oppressive toward the folk group,” Meyer writes. In exchange for both his audacity and his discretion, “the outlaw-hero is helped, supported and admired by his people.”

In the Reconstruction-era South, the outlaw-heroes Jesse James and Sam Bass “robbed banks and trains, symbols of the forces which kept the common man in economic and social bondage,” Meyer wrote. The bank robber and murderer Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd, whose crimes spanned Ohio, Oklahoma, and Missouri during the Great Depression, idolized James as a Wild West spin on Robin Hood. Floyd took in possible tall tales “about how Jesse and his boys shared their bounty with widows and orphans,” Michael Wallis writes in “Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.” “Adoring fans said that when Jesse plundered a train, he examined the palms of the passengers and took valuables only from the ‘soft-handed ones.’ ”

Floyd likewise shared his loot with those in need; according to several accounts, Wallis writes, “when Charley robbed banks, he sometimes ripped up mortgages in shreds before the banker had an opportunity to get the papers recorded.” This magnanimous gesture, though it burnished Floyd’s legend, would have also considerably slowed his escape from the scene of his crime. He hid in plain sight: attending weddings and funerals, crashing with family and friends, and getting treated as a dreamboat celebrity wherever he went.

By contrast, Mangione lasted all of five days on the lam, and appears not to have redistributed any of UnitedHealthcare’s revenues. In other ways, though, he comfortably fits into Meyer’s taxonomy of the antihero. The U.S. health-insurance system is both “oppressive” and quintessentially “peculiar” to America, as the only developed nation in the world that does not provide universal health care. It has been widely speculated that Mangione’s alleged descent into violence may have been spurred by a debilitating back injury and subsequent spinal-fusion surgery. A health-care C.E.O. who receives ten million dollars in annual compensation is likely disqualified from membership in a “folk group,” and another note that Mangione reportedly wrote indicated that he did not want to endanger that group. (“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.”)

Like Floyd, Mangione may also have a knack for the myth-building flourish. Bullet casings left behind at the murder scene read “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” borrowing from the obstructionist nomenclature of the health-insurance industry—as if its bureaucratic weapons were being turned against one of its own. And, although the manhunt for Mangione came to an ignominious end, early on, he hinted at being a more artful dodger, as when he allegedly left the perfect gag gift for the N.Y.P.D. in Central Park: a backpack stuffed with Monopoly money.

Parents Defending Education founder Nicki Neily called the Biden administration's decision to spend over $1 billion on diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programming and training in America's schools "heartbreaking" and a disservice to America's students.

"We're at a time when 40% of American students can't read, and this is how the Biden-Harris administration chose to fritter away hard-earned American taxpayer dollars. It's really a slap in the face," Neily told "Fox & Friends First" on Friday.
Researchers at Parents Defending Education looked through nearly four years of grants awarded by the Biden administration from 2021 to present and found that the Biden administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity, equity and inclusion grants for students and schools.

According to the report, $489,883,797 was spent on grants for race-based hiring; $343,337,286 went toward general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 went to DEI-based mental health training and programming, totaling $1,002,522,304.81 spent in all.



Examples in the report include a $3,974,496 grant given to the School District of Philadelphia for a restorative justice program headed by a former Communist Party USA member; a $4,000,000 grant given for a 3-week residential "culturally responsive" computer science summer camp for 600 11th- and 12th-graders; and a $38,000 grant to a Michigan school district for a one-day professional development training by an equity consultant, along with copies of the consultant's book.

Neily argued that DEI is harmful because it "pits people against each other" and labels people as either "oppressed" or "oppressors."

She cited a recent study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University which found that there were significant increases in hostility and punitive attitudes among participants exposed to DEI pedagogy.

"So these are hurting American children, it's not helping anyone. It's hurting them," she told Fox News.

Texas, Florida and several other states have introduced or passed legislation banning DEI in higher education. Neily said universities should be aware that DEI is on its way out with the incoming Republican administration.

"These programs need to be completely eradicated. And I think over the next four years we're going to have a major clean-up effort," she predicted.

Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped to help lead his incoming advisory board for cutting government waste, also reacted to the report on X.

"This is worse than just wasteful," Ramaswamy said on X.

Musk and Ramaswamy have both signaled support for dissolving the entire Department of Education, an idea that Trump ran on during his presidential campaign. Linda McMahon has been nominated to lead the department in 2025 by Trump.

Former president Bill Clinton said he hopes Joe Biden doesn’t issue preemptive pardons for his wife or others as Trump prepares to take office.


Has he finally decided to put a ring on it?

After a couple lack luster years with Kansas State, Keagan Johnson is back in the portal.
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Just got off the phone with Hank. Quick note from him that I think is important enough for its own thread.

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Horrible idea:

Before President-elect Donald Trump can move “aggressively” to kill workforce protections for thousands of federal employees, as he has promised, he could face a vigorous court challenge.
He’ll be ready.

Get the latest election news and results

But so will his opponents.
Trump will return to the White House better prepared than during his first term, and with the backing of a Republican-controlled Congress and a generally friendly Supreme Court majority. Potentially, critics of his workforce policies could have a tough fight in all three branches of government.

A key element of Trump’s preparation on federal employment issues is the work done during his four years away from Washington by James Sherk, the self-described shepherd of Schedule F, a contentious, but short-lived, federal employee workforce category. Biden revoked Schedule F when he took office, and later his administration adopted a regulation designed to thwart a reissued Schedule F.


A year before Trump’s reelection, Sherk, Trump’s first-term domestic policy special assistant, outlined a defense of the policy that Trump announced during his first term.
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It could upend the traditional nonpartisan nature of the civil service.
Schedule F would make certain feds “at-will” employees, meaning they could be fired without the due process protections that allow appeals of adverse employment actions against government employees. In addition, the policy would allow agencies to fill those positions with political loyalists by skipping competitive hiring rules for career civil servants in positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating character.”

It’s important to note that while due process protects individual federal employees from arbitrary terminations, the public is the main beneficiary. The current rules protect everyone from partisan politics unduly infecting government services. Likewise, competitive hiring prevents a government workforce from being overpopulated with political pawns. While presidents and their political appointees set policies for agencies, career civil servants are charged with implementing those policies without political favoritism. Making many of them at-will employees threatens the nonpolitical nature of the federal workforce and the public services they provide.

While Schedule F opponents are marshaling their arguments, they are aware that Trump has powerful allies on his side. With Republicans controlling Capitol Hill next year, MAGA legislators could seek to make Schedule F law, if that seemed a faster route to implementation. That would require a Senate supermajority of 60 votes, however, meaning some Democrats would have to agree. Even if opponents won early judicial battles against the policy, they eventually could face a Supreme Court dominated by Republican-nominated justices, who are more inclined to favor Trump’s schemes.
Instead, it’s more likely that Trump reinstates the plan through another executive action, which is what the president has promised. During the presidential campaign, Trump vowed to “immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

Sherk outlined his Schedule F defense last year in writings from his perch as the Center for American Freedom director at the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute. Then, he targeted the Biden administration’s regulation aimed at preventing Schedule F from returning. Sherk, who declined interview requests, claimed, oddly, in a September 2023 issue brief that President Joe Biden “is trying to protect the bureaucracy from accountability to the president.”

Despite the Biden administration’s roadblock, Sherk isn’t worried.
“What is done through executive action can be undone through executive action,” he wrote. Once Trump takes office in January, “Schedule F could be reissued with full force and effect. The Biden administration’s regulations can slow down — but not block — Schedule F.”

Sherk, an economist by training, contends any delay would be only a few months and “if Schedule F were reissued today, opponents would have virtually no legal basis to challenge it.”
Federal employment law attorneys, however, disagree on his timing and his legal analysis.
Even if Trump reissues his directive on Day One, it will still take more time than Sherk predicts for the necessary rules and regulations to be implemented, predicted James Eisenmann. He is a former executive director and general counsel of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial agency that deals with allegations of unfair personnel actions against federal employees. Plus, he added, “they have to have a good reason for reversing the Biden regs.” Eisenmann now represents feds as a partner with Alden Law Group.


Sherk said appellate court rulings indicate positions with a “‘confidential, policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating character’ cannot be reviewed in court.” That’s a key phrase in the order. But for legal purposes it means “Schedule F is extremely, extremely broad,” Eisenmann said, perhaps too broad for legal muster.
The employees Schedule F defined as policymakers covers those whose jobs include “viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations.” That could cover “even administrative staff,” said Nick Bednar, a University of Minnesota associate law professor and political scientist who researches federal bureaucracies. “I question whether Congress intended the phrase to extend to employees in the competitive service that help superiors draft policy or simply view and circulate policy as part of their jobs.”
By expanding “the phrase to cover positions that merely ‘view’ policy documents,” he said Trump’s policy “would sweep positions held by non-appointees, such as scientists, administrative assistants, and IT professionals” into employment categories with easier termination policies. “This broadened definition goes beyond Congress's intent and exceeds the plain meaning of ‘policy-determining.’”


Sherk’s insistence that the order “retained protections against politically motivated” dismissals isn’t convincing. “The mere threat that the Trump Administration might use Schedule F as cover to fire these employees has already injected unfair political influence into the civil service,” Bednar said.
Feds have reason to worry about Schedule F mission creep.
In a long, November 2023 letter to the Office of Personnel Management opposing the Biden regs, Sherk said “Schedule F would cover a maximum of 50,000 positions — about 2 percent of the federal workforce.” His issue brief, however, said “Schedule F would apply to between 2 and 4 percent of the overall federal workforce,” pushing the number closer to 100,000.

The number of employees affected, however, could be much larger than the number of positions.

A Government Accountability Office report said the policy-heavy Office of Management and Budget under Trump sought to place 136 types of jobs in Schedule F. But that would hit 415 employees, 68 percent, of OMB’s workforce, according to the auditors’ analysis.
Further, the America First Agenda for the next administration portends a much broader application of the policy. It declares: “Return the federal civil service to at-will employment — the original vision for a professional merit service.”
That’s one reason Randy Erwin, National Federation of Federal Employees president, vigorously opposes Schedule F, even if his members would not be immediately affected by it.
“They’re making it sound like it’s limited,” he told me recently. “The problem is once it is established, there is a very strong concern that they’ll continue to expand and expand what federal employees Schedule F applies to.”

I like him being in there, I think we should stay with the small lineup.

NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of UnitedHealth Group conceded that the patchwork U.S. health system "does not work as well as it should" but said Friday that the insurance executive gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk cared about customers and was working to make it better.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was killed last week, was described as kind and brilliant by UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty in a guest essay published in The New York Times.

Witty said he understood people's frustration but described Thompson as part of the solution.

Thompson never forgot growing up in his family's farmhouse in Iowa and focused on improving the experiences of consumers.

"His dad spent more than 40 years unloading trucks at grain elevators. B.T., as we knew him, worked farm jobs as a kid and fished at a gravel pit with his brother. He never forgot where he came from, because it was the needs of people who live in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first in finding ways to improve care," Witty wrote.

Witty said his company shares some responsibility for lack of understanding of coverage decisions.

"We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people's frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It's a patchwork built over decades," Witty wrote. "Our mission is to help make it work better."

What would happen? I think one of our board billionaires should do that.

Trying to get more omega 3s in my life. Salmon and tuna salad seem like the best ways to do it. I've not settled upon a surefire method or recipe for salmon. Part of me says go sous vide because it is idiot proof, but then I'd be missing out some of the char/crispiness. Wactcha got HORT?