Of course, because this is from the NYT, it ends with a "both sides" shot at Democrats. The pitchbot lives!


“The Church of Donald Trump”

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Oh baby it’s gonna be a party 🎉

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A bill in Iowa that would allow the state to arrest and deport some migrants is stoking anxiety among immigrant communities, leaving some to wonder: “Should I leave Iowa?”

The legislation, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, would make it a state crime for a person to be in Iowa if previously denied admission to or removed from the United States. It mirrors part of a Texas law is currently blocked i n court.


Across Iowa, Latino and immigrant community groups are organizing informational meetings and materials to try to answer people's questions. They’re also asking local and county law enforcement agencies for official statements, as well as face-to-face meetings.

As 80 people gathered in a Des Moines public library community room last week, community organizer Fabiola Schirrmeister pulled written questions out of a tin can. In Spanish, one asked: “Is it safe to call the police?” Another asked: “Can Iowa police ask me about my immigration status?” And: “What happens if I’m racially profiled?”

Erica Johnson, executive director of Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice, the organization hosting the meeting, sighed when one person asked: “Should I leave Iowa?”

“Entiendo el sentido,” she said. I understand the sentiment.

Schirrmeister, who hosts a local Spanish-language radio show, explained how long organizers have worked to build a bridge with law enforcement.

“It’s sad how it’s going to hurt the trust between local enforcement, pro-immigrant organizations and the immigrant communities," she said.

Des Moines Police Chief Dana Wingert told The Associated Press in an email that immigration status does not factor into the department's work to keep the community safe, and he said it would be “disingenuous and contradictory” to incorporate it at the same time law enforcement has been working to eliminate such bias.

Erica Johnson, executive director of Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice, the organization hosting the meeting, sighed when one person asked: “Should I leave Iowa?”

“Entiendo el sentido,” she said. I understand the sentiment.

Schirrmeister, who hosts a local Spanish-language radio show, explained how long organizers have worked to build a bridge with law enforcement.

“It’s sad how it’s going to hurt the trust between local enforcement, pro-immigrant organizations and the immigrant communities," she said.

Des Moines Police Chief Dana Wingert told The Associated Press in an email that immigration status does not factor into the department's work to keep the community safe, and he said it would be “disingenuous and contradictory” to incorporate it at the same time law enforcement has been working to eliminate such bias.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/m...S&cvid=14ac26c9aab84870b6460204e9f29dd0&ei=22

$1,250 by end of year? Seems to be no stopping it at this point. The Bears have fled.

I thought they played a good game. But more importantly, they conducted themselves with poise and class, especially with all of the nonsense directed their way.

It is unfortunate how our elements of our fan base has reacted to this rivalry. It is just a game, and the young people on the court seem to understand that better than a lot of grown fans.

Great game, great adversary.

A bill creating a new crime of “looting” could soon become Iowa law, outlining new criminal and civil punishments for group theft.



House File 2598, passed by Senate lawmakers on Monday, would define looting as two or more people entering a home, place of business or vehicle and stealing or damaging property.


Looting would be a Class C felony — punishable by up to 10 years in prison — if the combined value of stolen property is more than $10,000, the person has previously been convicted of looting, or the looting is done with a dangerous weapon.




Looting property valued between $1,000 and $10,000 would carry a prison sentence between one and a half years and five years. If the property is between $300 and $1,000, the looting would be an aggravated misdemeanor and carry a prison sentence of up to two years.


The bill would also allow somebody whose business or property is directly or indirectly damaged by an act of looting to bring a civil action against a person who engaged in the looting.


The bill passed the Senate 42-6. The bill is now eligible to be signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican.


Sen. Tony Bisignano, one of the six Democrats to vote against the bill, said he was concerned about the broad language allowing someone who is “indirectly” injured by looting to sue the offender.





Sen. Scott Webster, R-Bettendorf, the bill’s floor manager, said that although looting is rare in Iowa, lawmakers should be “proactive” and prepare to respond to organized theft.


“This is going to help our small business, our small retail, mom-and-pop, grandma and grandpa stores, to make sure that those particular cases have an avenue besides just shoplifting or retail theft,” Webster said.

Bill would increase trespassing penalties​

The penalties for trespassing while hunting would be increased under legislation approved by the Iowa Senate.


The various fines for trespassing while hunting would be increased from $260 to $500 for a first violation, from $645 to $1,000 for a second violation, and from $1,285 to $1,500 for all other violations.


When, during floor debate in the Senate, a Democratic senator questioned the need for the legislation, Sen. Tom Shipley, R-Nodaway, said trespassing is a serious issue in his district, and that current fines do not appear to be a sufficient deterrent.


With its passage out of the Senate on a 39-9 vote, House File 2310 — having previously passed the House — heads to Gov. Kim Reynolds for her consideration.

Public funding for church-managed programs​

Counties and townships would be allowed to devote money to religious organizations for public services under a bill approved by the Iowa Senate.


The bill would allow church-managed organizations to receive public money if it is for a project “that benefits the public and does not require any religious or secular services, educational programs, or participation requirements.” The bill’s supporters have said such services could include food pantries, homeless shelters and child care.


The bill, House File 2264, passed the Senate on a 38-10 vote, with four Democrats joining Republicans in support. The bill previously passed the House with even stronger bipartisan support, 93-2. It must return to that chamber for second approval because it was amended Monday by the Senate. From there, it would move to Gov. Kim Reynolds for her consideration.

Iowa AG joins brief in case seeking to overturn gun law​

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird joined a multistate coalition that weighed in support of a lawsuit seeking to overturn Illinois’s assault weapons ban.


The lawsuit was brought by a national gun rights group seeking to overturn gun restrictions Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law in 2023. The law bans the sale of AR-15s and other assault weapons as well as large magazines and other attachments.


A federal appeals court upheld Illinois’s law last year, arguing the assault weapons banned by the law are “militaristic” and more closely aligned with machine guns, allowing them to be regulated under the Second Amendment. The appeals court determined that “Arms” in the Second Amendment does not include weapons used primarily for military purposes.


The National Association for Gun Rights is appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.


In a court brief joined by Bird, the 27 Republican-led states argue that the appeals court decision was mistaken and lacks historical precedent. They argue that the Supreme Court’s past decisions show the law is unconstitutional.


“Illinois’s gun ban is an outright assault on Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” Bird said in a statement. “Every American has a fundamental right to protect themselves and their loved ones. My office is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to do the right thing and protect Americans’ constitutional rights.”

It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!

Couple notes from today prior to articles coming.

-Cooper DeJean has been hearing a lot about both corner and safety. Believes he's an NFL corner. He's also heard a lot about Jason Sehorn (the last notable white corner in the NFL).
Login to view embedded media -He's as close to 100% as he has been in a while. He's gradually getting back into on-field work.
-Joe Evans is getting reps at both Edge and fullback during the process.
-Logan Lee has caught passes and snapped a few balls over the process, too. He's seen primarily as a DT, though -- scouts are just checking in on his versatility.

We'll have more in-depth info over the next couple days regarding what we learned.

Nebraska's May 14 primary election looks a little different this year. For the first time, voters will need to bring an ID in order to cast a ballot.

The ID law officially goes into effect Monday.

Around 69,000 Douglas County voters have requested an early ballot. Those voters were the first to provide ID by writing their driver's license or state ID number on the application. Thousands more will have to bring their ID in person.

Under the new law, you'll need to show poll workers your ID before you cast your ballot in Nebraska. Voters approved the constitutional amendment in 2022. State senators then crafted the law.

To be allowed to vote, you'll need to bring one of these forms of ID:

• Nebraska driver's license or state ID
• Passport
• military ID
• Tribal ID
• Hospital, assisted living or nursing home record
• Nebraska political subdivision (state, county, city, school, etc.)
• Nebraska college or university ID

And if your form of ID is expired, it is still accepted.

"The law states it just has to have your name and a photo of you on it," Douglas County Election Commissioner Brian Kruse said.



THIS TYPE OF LEGISLATION NEEDS TO BE IMPLEMENTED NATIONWIDE ASAP!!!

"Although there's a set of rules, uh, or policies that the ship may, may have followed, they followed those rules to rigidly."

8 cruise ship passengers stranded in Africa after missing all-aboard​

Why do I enjoy that so much?

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Soon after a huge container ship struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, bringing it down, President Biden pledged that the federal government would “pay the entire cost of reconstructing” the bridge. This would clearly be the right thing to do, not just to help the state of Maryland but also to limit the economic damage from a disaster that has blocked both a major road artery and a major port. Among other things, the Port of Baltimore plays a key role in both exports of coal and trade in farm and construction equipment, so the bridge disaster will have direct adverse effects on the heartland as well as the East Coast.
And if America were still the same country that enacted the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 — passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by a Republican president — which gave rise to our Interstate System, there would be little question that Congress would approve funding soon after it returns from Easter recess.
But we aren’t that country anymore. Biden will probably be able to get funds for rebuilding, but it’s by no means a sure thing.
The rise of MAGA Republicans is only part of the problem. I’ve seen several people citing the response to the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota as an example of what things were like in a better political era. Indeed, within days, Congress voted unanimously to provide $250 million in aid.
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But that was a one-off. The Minnesota bridge collapse highlighted the decaying state of America’s infrastructure, and one might have expected the disaster to lead to real action, but it didn’t. President Barack Obama pleaded with Congress to approve broad increases in infrastructure spending and was able to sign a highway funding bill in 2015, but for the most part he was stymied by G.O.P. opposition. As president, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to revamp America’s infrastructure — “it’s infrastructure week” became a running joke — but never delivered.
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Major action on infrastructure didn’t happen until late 2021 with the enactment of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — which, despite the name, received only 13 Republican votes in the House. And that was with Democrats in full control of Congress. It’s not foolish to worry that MAGA hard-liners will block aid to Maryland in much the same way that they’ve blocked aid to Ukraine.

But, again, MAGA is only part of the problem. Let’s talk for a minute about why it took 14 years after the Minnesota bridge collapse for us to finally take major action on infrastructure.
Extreme partisanship, which took hold long before Trump took control of the G.O.P., is part of the answer. It was clear through most of the Obama years that Republicans wanted to prevent good things from happening on a Democratic president’s watch. Under Obama, G.O.P. legislators squeezed federal spending after they took control of the House, supposedly because they were worried about government debt, only to open up the taps once Trump took office.
There was also an element of reflexive opposition to government spending in general, no matter how obvious the need. Mitch McConnell, as Senate majority leader, didn’t do much to oppose Trump — but he did put the brakes on infrastructure spending.

​

Finally, to the extent that Trump had anything like an infrastructure plan, it was very, well, Trumpian. Even before he took office, I predicted that he wouldn’t actually do much to build infrastructure, because he and his associates clearly weren’t interested in producing a clean plan for government investment. Instead, they were floating a roundabout scheme involving tax credits that wouldn’t have generated significant new investment but probably would have offered huge opportunities for cronyism and corruption.
The history here is reason enough to worry about rebuilding in Baltimore, even if the bridge collapse hadn’t been caught up in culture war politics. But of course it has.
MAGA politicians and media figures wasted no time after the bridge collapse trying to cast blame on the usual suspects, including funds meant to be spent on green energy and, in particular, diversity initiatives: In the immediate wake of the Key Bridge collapse, a Republican state legislator from Utah replied to a post on X disparaging a member of the Maryland Port Commission, writing, “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens”; a Republican former state legislator from Florida posted a video clip of the Key Bridge collapsing with the caption, “DEI did this.” Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, has been a special target on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’s Black.
As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent points out, some of the MAGA reaction to the bridge collapse is reminiscent of Trump’s behavior during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when he whined about “bailouts” for states that didn’t support him politically.
So will partisanship and conspiracy theorizing get in the way of rebuilding the Key Bridge? I’d like to dismiss that risk. But not that long ago, if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have expected Republicans to stonewall aid to Ukraine, either. So this is no time to be complacent.

STFU!

Not to say that Iowa is above transfers, but I LOVE the fact that Iowa was able to build the majority of this team with no hired guns. In a world where NIL is rampant, it is nice to see it done the old fashion way. Probably won't ever happen again. I do think Iowa is probably in the market for a transfer next year. Ironically, both Van Lith, Louisville, and Morrow, DePaul, could have been on Iowa's roster this year.

All five starters have been at Iowa their whole careers.
Clark = Des Moines, IA - Sr
Martin = Edwardsville, IL - Grad Student
Marshall = Cincinnati - Fifth Year
Affolter = Chicago - Jr
Stuelke = Cedar Rapids - So

LSU
Reese - Jr. transfer from Maryland
Van Lith - Grad - Transfer from Louisville
Morrow - Jr - transfer from DePaul
Poo - Jr - JUCO transfer
Johnson - So -

By Tina Smith
Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.
A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news in 2024, and that should terrify anyone who supports reproductive freedom. Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 was referenced on three separate occasions during oral arguments in a case dealing with access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in medication abortions.
Anti-abortion activists like to bring up the Comstock Act because one of its clauses prohibits sending through the mail “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” that could possibly lead to an abortion. Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t take the bait, a newly re-elected President Trump could order his Department of Justice to start interpreting that line to mean that it is illegal to mail mifepristone — a safe, effective, Food and Drug Administration-approved drug — to doctors and pharmacies, as well as to patients directly. The same could go for medical supplies that are used in performing surgical abortions. That could effectively make abortion impossible to access even in places like Minnesota, which has affirmatively protected a woman’s right to choose by passing reproductive freedom laws.
In response, I’m prepared to fight back — including by introducing legislation to take away the Comstock Act as a tool to limit reproductive freedom.
Let me take a step back and explain how ridiculous it is that we’re even talking about this legislative relic today. The Comstock Act hasn’t been broadly enforced since the 1930s. The Biden administration considers it utterly irrelevant. Many legal experts consider it dead letter law. And once you know its back story, it becomes clear why no one has paid much attention to it in nearly a century.
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Back in the 1860s, a former Civil War soldier from rural Connecticut named Anthony Comstock moved to New York City for work. He was shocked and appalled by what he found. Advertisements for contraception! Open discussions of sexual health! It all struck Comstock as terribly lewd and anti-Christian.
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So he made it his mission to clean up society, creating the loftily named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and gathering evidence for police raids on places that distributed material he thought was obscene or promoted indecent living. In the early 1870s he took his crusade to Washington, lobbying for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock’s criteria for being “obscene,” “lewd” or just plain “filthy.” Morality, as determined by Comstock, would be the law of the land, and Comstock himself would be its enforcer, appointed by Congress as a special agent of the post office.

In a fit of Victorian puritanism, Congress passed the Comstock Act into law. But it quickly became apparent that Comstock’s criteria were unworkably vague. In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories.
The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that’s why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history.
But conservative activists recently revived it from obscurity as part of their playbook for a potential second Trump term: The 887-page plan nicknamed Project 2025 being promoted by groups like the Heritage Foundation explicitly calls for a newly elected second-term President Trump to use this zombie law to severely ratchet back abortion access in America without congressional action.

​

Legislation to repeal Comstock could take many forms, and we need to do it the right way. That’s why I’ve begun reaching out to my colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate to build support and see what legislation to repeal the Comstock Act might look like. Anti-abortion extremists will continue to exploit any avenue they can find to get the national ban they champion, and I want to make sure my bill shuts down every one of those avenues. Once the Supreme Court has had its say (and many legal analysts speculate that the mifepristone case heard last week should be thrown out on procedural grounds, and may well be), I’ll be ready to have mine.
Here’s the bottom line: We can’t let anyone — not the Supreme Court, not Donald Trump and certainly not a random busybody from the 19th century — take away Americans’ right to access medication abortion. We must protect the ability of doctors, pharmacies and patients to receive in the mail the supplies they need to exercise their right to reproductive care.
As the only former Planned Parenthood executive serving in the Senate, I feel I have a special responsibility to protect not just abortion rights but also abortion access.
Very few Republicans will admit to wanting to see a total, no-exceptions ban on abortion in all 50 states, but the Comstock Act could allow them to achieve that in effect, if not in so many words.
Americans deserve better. The Constitution demands better. And common sense dictates that we stop this outrageous backdoor ploy to eliminate abortion access in its tracks.

That's all. No discussion needed.

https://godblesstheusabible.com/

Thankfully, they link to a youtube video on how to properly break in your God Bless the USA Bible. I suspect this youtube video is not unlike what middle aged congressmen from Kentucky watch to properly break in their child brides.

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It is also helpful to know that this bible is the ONLY bible endorsed by both Donald J. Trump and Lee Greenwood.

Also, what makes this bible unique is that it is the ONLY bible inspired by America's most recognized patriotic anthem, God Bless The USA.

The Bible also features a copy of:

Handwritten chorus to "God Bless The USA" by Lee Greenwood. (LMFAO)
United States Constitution
Declaration of Independence
Bill of Rights
The Pledge of Allegiance

This was so avoidable.

A game involving a 31-5 team vs a 32-4 team, having played in last year's title game, with this much backstory and worldwide interest, should not happen in the Elite 8.

What were they thinking?

Greedy corporations... I suppose so long as my investments are going up, I can deal with getting less fat.

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As I get older I’ve noticed I drop BOMBs in the morning. Some of my proudest farts have been in the morning lately.

Question for the HORT olds, do my farts get even more awesome as I age?

TIA

The Civil War, Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination, 9/11, COVID.

These events changed the country forever and drew dividing lines between the before and after times.

What will be the next big turning point? I'm guessing it's when AI becomes self-aware.

Statue of Liberty? Lincoln Memorial? Corn Palace?