Iowa +6.5 with o/u 159.5 as of 5:30 Wednesday.

Interesting, and heartwarming story, but I have questions. Michael Black left his home in Wyoming, and somehow made it several hundred miles to Salt Lake City. Police believe he went up into Idaho, then down to SLC by hitchhiking. Black suffers from dementia, so wouldn't someone have called the police after encountering him? He must have been in distress. The final person he interacted with at least got him to the homeless shelter. Also, it's quoted by the local PD that this isn't the first time he's gone wandering. Is his wife capable of handling him, and wha are the larger implications about how we handle our elderly and vulnerable citizens?
https://people.com/missing-man-with...e-spots-him-on-tv-over-200-miles-away-8756519

President-elect Trump’s mass deportation proposals threaten to gut the U.S. economy, shrinking growth and the labor force while juicing inflation, according to a report released Thursday by Democrats in the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC).

Sourcing data from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the report found that deporting 8.3 million immigrants in the country illegally would reduce GDP by 7.4 percent and reduce employment by 7 percent by 2028, likely resulting in zero overall growth throughout Trump’s second term.




Trump has proposed deporting all such immigrants in the United States — currently an estimated 11 million — and millions more currently protected by humanitarian programs such as Temporary Protected Status, who could lack legal status if those programs were cut.

According to an American Immigration Council (AIC) estimate sourced by the JEC report, deporting at a clip of 1 million people per year — echoing a proposal by Vice President-elect JD Vance to “start with 1 million” — could generate a 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent loss in GDP. The U.S. economy shrank by 4.3 percent during the Great Recession, the report’s authors noted.

“Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants does absolutely nothing to address the core problems driving our broken immigration system. Instead, all it will do is raise grocery prices, destroy jobs, and shrink the economy. His immigration policy is reckless and would cause irreparable harm to our economy,” JEC Chair Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said.



'Mass deportation will crash US economy': Senators clash on Trump’s illegal migration curb plans

Beyond the economic fallout of mass deportations, the AIC estimates Trump’s plan would cost upward of $88 billion, about four times the budget of NASA.

And the JEC report cites multiple studies that mass deportations are likely to reduce employment for U.S.-born workers by virtue of reducing the country’s customer base, removing a population that’s on average more entrepreneurial and gutting a labor force uniquely qualified to work in certain industries.

Between 4.4 percent and 5.4 percent of the overall labor force is made up of workers who are in the country illegally, and industries such as construction, agriculture, health care and hospitality depend on their labor, according to the report.

Many of those jobs, though categorized as unskilled labor, require specialized training and physical stamina that is not readily available in the existing U.S. workforce.




Livestock farmers, for instance, have long fought to expand the visa process to keep their existing, specialized workforce of immigrants lacking legal status.

“The labor shortages that result from mass deportations would raise costs for all Americans. With unemployment near a historic low, employers in sectors like agriculture and construction would produce less, resulting in shortages and higher prices,” the JEC report reads.

“Economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate that deporting 1.3 million immigrants would raise prices by 1.5% by 2028, while deporting 8.3 million immigrants would raise prices by 9.1%. Additionally, mass deportations would reduce consumer spending, as undocumented workers are not just workers but also consumers. If demand for certain goods and services slows enough, demand for workers in those sectors may also slow, and some businesses may be forced to lay off workers.”

Yet Trump’s rationale for mass deportations, as explained to Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, is that the immigrants “are costing us a fortune.”

The JEC report contests that logic, citing a Brookings Institution report that found foreign-born people pay on average $1,300 more in annual taxes and over a lifetime pay $237,000 more in taxes than they receive in services from federal, state and local governments.

And a New American Economy study cited by the JEC Democrats found that, between 2012 and 2018, the average immigrant contributed $166 more to the Medicare Trust Fund than they received in return. Over that time, U.S.-born residents cost the fund $51 on average.

Immigrants in the country illegally who work pay into Medicare and Social Security but are not eligible to withdraw benefits, a factor in driving the programs’ surplus among the group.


Heinrich, who has pushed for immigration reform, won reelection to a third term in November.

“As a son of an immigrant, I know how hard immigrants work, how much they believe in this country, and how much they’re willing to give back. They are the backbone of our economy and the driving force behind our nation’s growth and prosperity,” he said.

He's on his morning show, he's on the NFL Thursday Night show...

When does this man get any sleep?

Man point: they couldn't or wouldn't distance themselves from unpopular far lefty progressive viewpoints.

The party went into an election with policies it couldn’t defend—or even explain.
By Helen Lewis

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

(Gray News) – Gypsy Rose Blanchard is revealing new details about her life in her new memoir “My Time to Stand.”

The new book details the painful abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom, discusses the night her mom was killed, and offers new insight on Blanchard’s time in prison.

According to People, Blanchard writes in her book about how years in prison nearly cost her sanity.

She said her various cellmates all had strange ticks of their own – one howled at the moon, one talked to the wall, and one would hit her own head against the wall while cursing to herself.

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I had a 150k surgery to remove a benign nerve (schwannoma) tumor from my neck (on the vagus nerve near skull base) at Vanderbilt and only paid about a thousand out of pocket.

Blue cross blue shield of Illinois. (United kicked in a bit; was double insured at the time)

Wasted hardly any time worrying about insurance; was able to get one of the top doctors in the nation for this within BCBS network.

Great information! If you added and updated a section for who is visiting would be appreciated!

I really wish this was a headline from The Onion or the Babylon Bee. It's not.
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Just Hyundai for now.

I like the way they display info on the car and the financing. Pick a specific car and you can see what I'm talking about. They even show you how your interest rate changes based on your credit rating.

I can see people printing off those pages when negotiating with other car dealers.

Top is the new offer today. I'll add the other offers we previously reported on here as well.

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Can’t find the correct thread to post this but Iowa is not alone in suffering effects of the settlement requiring programs to shed spots.

LAS VEGAS — Arizona and Arizona State are expected to lose 140 combined roster positions across their sports teams if the settlement terms of a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the NCAA are approved this spring.

Wildcats athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois and her ASU counterpart, Graham Rossini, revealed the downsizing moves on Wednesday during a seminar in Las Vegas.

Each stated their department would lose 70 participants — not scholarship athletes but participants. That’s an important distinction competitively but doesn’t make either athletic director feel better about the situation.

President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East adviser, Massad Boulos, has enjoyed a reputation as a billionaire mogul at the helm of a business that bears his family name.
Mr. Boulos has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions. Mr. Trump called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.”
The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker.”
In fact, records show that Mr. Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. The company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show.
There is no indication in corporate documents that Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. The truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price. Mr. Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, is worth $1.53.
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As for Boulos Enterprises, the company that has been called his family business in The Financial Times and elsewhere, a company officer there said it is owned by an unrelated Boulos family.
Mr. Boulos will advise on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions — a region that Mr. Boulos said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval.

The confusion over Mr. Boulos’s background — and his failure for years to clear up misunderstandings until questioned this week by The Times — raises questions about how thoroughly Mr. Trump’s team vetted his nominees. The team was caught by surprise by allegations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth, the pick for defense secretary.
A spokeswoman for the Trump transition team declined to comment.
Mr. Boulos, a Christian from northern Lebanon who emigrated to Texas as a teenager, has risen in prominence since 2018, when his son Michael began dating Tiffany Trump.
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This year, Massad Boulos helped Mr. Trump woo Arab-American voters, and in the fall served as a go-between for Mr. Trump and the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
In October, The Times asked him about his wealth and business dealings.
“Your company is described as a multibillion-dollar enterprise,” a reporter said. “Are you yourself a billionaire?”
Mr. Boulos said he did not like to describe himself that way, but that journalists had picked up on the label.
“It’s accurate to describe the company as a multibillion-dollar—?” the reporter followed up.
“Yeah,” Mr. Boulos replied. “It’s a big company. Long history.”
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Versions of this history have been recounted in The New York Times, The Economist, CNN and The Wall Street Journal.
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But in a subsequent interview on Tuesday, Mr. Boulos said that he had only meant to confirm that other news outlets had written — incorrectly — that he runs such a company.
In another call, on Wednesday, he said he was referring to his father-in-law’s companies, which he said were collectively worth more than $1 billion, though the company he runs is not.
“I’ve never really gone into any details like that about the value,” he said.
He confirmed that he has no relationship with Boulos Enterprises. Asked why he had never corrected the record, he said that he made a practice of not commenting on his business.

Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
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Mr. Wright also skates past the climate impacts from burning more fossil fuels. Climate change is already having a disproportionate impact on poor nations, which are less able than rich countries to handle the rising seas, extreme weather, drought and other consequences of global warming.
“It’s pretty self-serving by the fossil fuel industry to assume the future is going to look exactly like the past,” said Joseph Curtin, a managing director on the power and climate team at the Rockefeller Foundation, which is working on expanding clean energy access in poor countries.
“That’s not based on any analytical rigor,” Mr. Curtin said. “It’s perhaps based in the need to sell fossil fuels and shroud it in a moral framework.”
Jody Freeman, the director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law, called Mr. Wright’s position “misleading, warped and selective.”
“It is not an intellectually serious argument,” she said. “It’s about creating a permission structure for not pursuing a more responsible energy policy.”

​

But by sheathing fossil fuels in humanitarian language as a solution to global poverty, Mr. Wright has emerged as one of the right’s most savvy salesmen for oil and gas.
“His is the newest and freshest point of view I’ve seen,” Jeff Peeples, the host of “Mission Zero.” He said the oil and gas industry has been on the defensive when it comes to climate change.
“If a lot more executives in the oil and gas industry would make this argument, and make this intellectual case for the use of fossil fuels, I think the energy industry as a whole would have a lot better PR success,” Mr. Peeples said.
A self-described “nerd turned entrepreneur” and outdoor enthusiast who is often photographed in a fleece vest, Mr. Wright runs a fracking services company and frequently talks about his travels through Africa as informing his desire to tackle poverty.
“People that are burning wooden dung in their huts and want to have a propane stove, they want to get off their feet, ride on a bus or a motor scooter,” Mr. Wright said on the podcast “PetroNerds” last year.
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The Trump transition team did not make Mr. Wright available for a telephone interview.
Mr. Wright’s views on developing nations are important; as energy secretary, he would not only oversee oil and gas exports from the United States but also partnerships with poor countries to create renewable energy.
The share of people gaining access to electricity has steadily grown globally, and fossil fuels are largely responsible. About 800 million people now lack access to electricity, down from more than 1.5 billion in 1998.
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But Ian Muir, head of insights at Catalyst Energy Advisors, a consulting firm, pointed out that renewables were now cheaper than fossil fuels in most countries where people lack electricity. Moreover, a solar array can start producing electricity in months, while it can take more than two years to build a gas-powered plant, he said.
The World Bank has found that solar mini grids could provide basic electricity to 380 million people in Africa by 2030 who do not currently have access to power. A Rockefeller Foundation study in 2021 found that investing in distributed renewable energy like rooftop solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and home battery storage systems could create 25 million jobs by the end of the decade in Asia and Africa. That is about 30 times the number of jobs that would be created by investments in oil, gas or coal in that period, the study found.

If you want a one-stop location for all of Iowa's activity in the portal, check out our transfer portal tracker post.

We'll be tracking all of the Iowa players who enter the portal there, as well as the players that Iowa adds from the portal, once those additions are confirmed.

In the meantime, we'll be updating this post regularly over the next three weeks.

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I tried to subscribe when prompted to the new btn plus changes and pricing recently. I received a msg that the bank would hit my account on Dec 5. On Dec 6 it had not. I eventually unsubscribed and received confirmation and the msg said they retained my info to make it easy to re subscribe. So, I tried to subscribe putting in my email, name, etc and get a msg that my email is already in use, and I thus I can not proceed. I've contacted btn plus and cleeng and of course cannot talk to a person, but just messaging and they do not understand my problem. I would like to have them remove all of my info, email address, name and bank info so that I can start over, but I've exhausted everything I can think of. Any ideas?

Clowns 81 Hawks 74


This will be a good progress check

Burger King and Sonic now have real breaded fried chicken sandwiches. Popeyes started the wars but which is the best?

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A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change.

The Postal Service is slated to purchase 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles,” or NGDVs — mostly electric — from defense contractor Oshkosh, which has a long history of producing military and heavy industrial vehicles, but not postal trucks. Congress provided $3 billion for the nearly $10 billion project in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, one of Biden’s chief legislative accomplishments.

But as of November, the Postal Service had received only 93 of the Oshkosh trucks, the agency told The Washington Post — far fewer than the 3,000 originally expected by now. Significant manufacturing difficulties that were not disclosed to the Postal Service for more than a year have stymied production, according to internal company records and four people with knowledge of the events, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisals.

Among the problems: Engineers struggle to calibrate the vehicles’ air bags, according to two people familiar with the manufacturing process. When workers ran leak tests on the vehicles’ bodies and internal components, water poured out as if their oversize windows had been left open in a storm, three people said.

Currently, Oshkosh can produce just one truck per day at its South Carolina factory, according to internal company records and five people with knowledge of the production process. Company records, including emails among executives and internal progress reports, show Oshkosh originally planned to be manufacturing more than 80 vehicles per day by now.

The wide-ranging production problems have not been previously reported and were not mentioned in an inspector general audit published in October. A senior company executive tried to alert the mail agency to the problems in 2022, but was blocked by superiors, four of the people said.

“This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,” said one person involved in production.

The massive delay means a project once hailed as a hallmark of Biden’s industrial and climate agenda may not take shape until long after he leaves office on Jan. 20 — or could never materialize. Republicans in Congress have pledged to repeal key funding sources for Biden’s climate investments with the GOP in power next year on Capitol Hill and at the White House, and Trump-aligned officials with designs on cutting government spending have circled the Postal Service as an area of interest.

“The days of a bailouts and handouts are over. The American people spoke loud and clear. I worry about that EV money sitting around, that it may be clawed back. I think there are lots of areas where there’s going to be significant reform over the next four years,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in a hearing this week.

This report is based on nearly 21,000 pages of government and internal Oshkosh records obtained by The Post through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. It is also based on interviews with 20 people familiar with every phase of the truck project, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss proprietary information.

In June, the Biden administration honored the mail service’s EV commitment with a “federal sustainability award.”

In a statement, an Oshkosh spokesperson said the company was “fully committed to being a strong and reliable partner” for the Postal Service and “we remain on track to meet all delivery deadlines.”

“Since we were selected to fulfill the NGDV contract in 2021, Oshkosh and the USPS have worked closely together to design and deliver a modernized fleet with a flexible mix of American-made electric- and gas-powered vehicles that will connect every home and business across the country. New vehicles are in service today, which have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from postal carriers,” the spokesperson said.

The company did not respond to a list of detailed questions.

John Pfeifer, Oshkosh’s chief executive, told investors on Oct. 30 that the company was “really happy with where we are” and called the NGDV a “revolutionary vehicle.”


“We’re today ramping up production,” Pfeifer said. “When you go through — you take a brand-new vehicle to market, we believe, together with the Postal Service, that a prudent production schedule is better than trying to start by sprinting. So we’re ramping up today. We’ll be at full production throughout 2025.”

A Postal Service spokesperson said several issues with the NGDV program were detailed in the inspector general audit and “resolved directly with our supplier.” But the agency declined to comment on specific questions or identify which issues the report helped resolve. The spokesperson called the truck procurement “a large, successful program that for a variety of reasons had many moving parts.”

It said that any major production of a purpose-built vehicle has unique engineering requirements, and its contract with Oshkosh allows for robust performance monitoring. The Postal Service said it expects to receive 6,484 NDGVs in the current fiscal year.


“Our relationship with Oshkosh is defined by our contract, and we intend to hold Oshkosh to its contractual obligations, while recognizing the normal interplay that will need to take place in the execution and performance of an agreement of this magnitude,” the spokesperson said.

“We’re moving forward in modernizing our vehicle fleet — which will bring tremendous benefits to our organization. Under our plan, letter carriers in every state will be able to deliver mail and packages using new and modern vehicles within the next five years,” DeJoy said in a statement. “The work being done on this program demonstrates electrification and sustainability efforts can coexist — not conflict — with cost savings, efficiency gains and operational transformation priorities.”

The agency is also purchasing tens of thousands of other vehicles, including EVs, from mainstream automakers.

Biden administration officials declined to comment.

But watching women's basketball without Caitlin Clark is like watching women's basketball.

For all the hate she gets she sure can recruit!

Tid bit of intel regarding bowl prep I thought I'd share.

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