Russia is making massive offensive progress while Ukraine's supplies dwindle as Republicans continue to refuse to supply aid. Can this be perceived any other way beyond the Rs wanting Russia to win?

Do you post while high ?

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It's about time we speak up and do better! Wait.. wat?

36 pack of Diet Coke at Sam’s is $18. 50 cents a can in bulk is pretty insane.

Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
It’s official — we have a rematch.
This week, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially secured the delegates needed to win renomination in their respective primaries. This will be the first contest since the 1892 race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland where a former challenger, now incumbent, faces off against a former incumbent, now challenger, for a second term in the White House. Cleveland won his challenge, but this does not tell us anything about our situation.
Truth be told, there is a pervasive sense floating around this election that there is nothing new to discuss — that there’s nothing new to learn about Biden and certainly nothing new to learn about Trump.
But while it’s fair to say that we already know quite a bit about the two men — their strengths and weaknesses, their perspectives and views, the character of their administrations and their records while in office — there is still a great deal to say about what they intend to do with another four years in the White House.
Both Trump and Biden have far-reaching plans for the country, either one of which would transform the United States. Of course, one of those transformations would be for the worst, the other for the better.
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Let’s start with the worst. We already know that Donald Trump’s main targets for his second term are American democracy and the American constitutional order. For Trump, the basics of American governance — separation of powers, an independent civil service and the popular selection of elected officials — are a direct obstacle to his desire to protect himself, enrich himself and extend his personalized rule as far over the country as possible.
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My colleague Carlos Lozada has already taken a deep dive into Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term. The overall thrust of the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is an authoritarian remodeling of the executive branch, designed around Trump. “It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds,” writes Lozada, who also notes that the Heritage vision “portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance.”
In practice, one of the things this would mean is that Trump would be empowered to use the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies, or use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them with audits and other forms of heightened scrutiny.

But a second Trump term wouldn’t just be about the abuse of power, the erosion of checks and balances and the elevation of assorted hacks and apparatchiks into positions of real authority. It would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.
Both Trump and Republicans in Congress want to extend his 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $3.3 trillion, the large majority of which would benefit the highest income earners. Trump also hopes to slash the corporate tax rate, reducing the government’s revenue by an additional $522 billion. To pay for this, both Trump and Republicans would almost certainly take an ax to the social safety net, targeting Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for low-income and working Americans. Trump has even said he is open to cutting Medicare and Social Security, a move that might be necessary if Republicans manage to starve the federal government of nearly $4 trillion in taxes.

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We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as try to unravel as much of the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act as possible.
Biden wants something very different for the country. His first goal, to start, is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order. He would not subvert American democracy to make himself a strongman along the lines of Viktor Orban, who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
What Biden would try to do, if his proposed budget is any indication, is reinvigorate the social insurance state. His proposal, released on Monday, calls for about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade. This would pay for, among other things: a plan to extend the fiscal solvency of Medicare, a plan to restore the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan at the start of his administration, a plan to guarantee low-cost, early child care to most families, and a plan to expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In short, Biden hopes to make good on longstanding Democratic priorities.
There is a larger point that flows from this capsule summary of each candidate’s priorities. Americans are accustomed to thinking of their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framework that is only encouraged by the candidate-centric nature of the American political system as well as the way that our media reports on elections. Even the way that most Americans think about their country’s history, always focused so intently on whoever occupies the White House in a given moment, works to reinforce this notion that presidential elections are mostly about the people and personalities involved.
Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
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The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.

Her Providence Academy team is in action tonight in the Minnesota Girls Tournament. She dropped 49 points in their opening round win and will play again tonight(Fri) at 6pm. Here's a link to watch the game live.... https://kstp.com/live-video/

Iowa should look at him as their next head basketball coach when they fire Fran McCaffery. I always thought it was funny that the McCaffery boys thought they were always better than A.J. Green.

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Guess trying to have him murdered might have soured their relationship a bit.

Me thinks so.

For you dregs who have never had the sweet taste of Doroty Lynch tickle your taste buds, I just pity you.

According to company lore, Dorothy Lynch was named after the woman who developed the recipe in the late 1940s. While working at a Legion Club in St. Paul, Nebraska, Dorothy and her husband mixed up the first batches of sweet, tomato-based dressing that drove Nebraskans to the club in droves. Gordon "Mac" Hull bought the patented recipe in 1964 and opened up the original factory in Columbus, Nebraska, where the corporate headquarters remain (the dressing is now manufactured in Duncan, Nebraska, pop. 351).


For this article, I reached out to Dorothy Lynch (to be clear, I called the corporate office and did not seance the spirit of its creator) for insight into current trends and was surprised to receive a call from the owner herself. Marilea Hull, Mac's daughter, took over the CEO role in 2021. She had formerly worked in the Chicago area in corporate finance but had fond memories of her father's hard work. Family vacations, she remembered, included many stops at grocery stores to connect with grocers, encouraging them to stock the product. After much thought, she moved to Columbus to take up the rein of "Dotty Lynch" upon her father's retirement to keep the company based in Columbus and keep the brand strong. When I asked her how the transition from Chicago to Columbus went, Marilea noted she loved that, true to small-town form, everybody knows everybody else. "And," she added, "you can get anywhere in 10 minutes."

This Midwestern, bright-side-ism completely aligns with the brand of Dorothy Lynch and the people who love it. Some may consider the sunny orange dressing a bit too sweet, but drizzled over spinach (or, Marilea promises, incorporated into wing sauce), showcases its flavor profile. Since taking the reins, Marilea has been awed by the devotion people feel to Dorothy Lynch. This past December, while working after hours, she fielded a call from someone whose family hadn't been together for Christmas in two years because of COVID. Though scattered throughout the country, the family wanted some Dorothy Lynch memorabilia – the dressing was a point of connection for all of them. Marilea sent them a box of shirts and related swag and got a note back about how amazed the family was and how much joy it brought them. On vacation herself (though not selling the product to stores like her father), she's run into fans of Dorothy Lynch in Hilton Head and Chicago who hear that she works for the company and can't help but describe their love for the dressing.

That's what we were told when I was a kid. I never understood how clearing my plate was supposed to help starving children in Europe, but since adults were saying it, I figured it must be true . . . somehow.

In retrospect I suppose the message wasn't "you can help them by finishing your food" but more along the lines that "you can show your gratitude that you aren't among the starving by finishing your food."

I'm guessing there aren't a lot of starving children in Europe any more. So clearly I and the kids from my generation did a good job.

I'm now a fat old man living in an increasingly obese America. Food is plentiful and fairly cheap. Do kids today have to be told to clear their plates? If so, which starving children are we saving (or glad we aren't them) these days?

Go Clones

Yeah, I said it

France’s President Macron had a plan to make millions of electric vehicles a year. Chancellor Scholz planned to put 15 million on Germany’s roads by 2030. President Biden trumped the lot with a $174bn (£138bn) plan to make the US the world leader. Even Boris Johnson – remember him – had a £1bn plan to beef up our charging network.

Rewind only a couple of years, and almost every president or prime minister was making electric vehicles the cornerstone of an industrial strategy. And yet, this week we have learned that Renault is abandoning plans to separately list its electric vehicle (EV) and software business, while Volvo is winding down its Polestar electric sports car subsidiary.

In reality, amid an onslaught of Chinese competition, and falling sales, the West’s electric vehicle dream is quickly unravelling – and we need to relearn all the lessons in why grand, state-led industrial strategies never work.

It was not so long ago that countries were competing furiously to launch battery-powered visions of the future. With Tesla riding the wave of green demand to become the world’s largest car manufacturer, measured by market value if not volume, and with ambitious net zero targets to meet, they all wanted to make sure they could compete in electric vehicles.

We would reduce carbon emissions, create many jobs, and shore up our industrial base. Sure, governments would have to commit a few billions – or tens of billions – to make it happen. But it would pay for itself many times over.

And yet, right now, plans for an EV-led industrial revolution are in full-scale retreat.

Renault, despite the programme of state support, has this week scrapped the separate listing of its EV unit Ampere, which has been scheduled for the first half of the year. It was a “pragmatic decision” according to the company’s chief executive Luca de Meo, arguing that falling sales for EVs across Europe meant the market was more challenging than forecast.

Likewise, Volvo announced that it would stop funding its EV unit, Polestar, and might even offload its 48pc stake on other shareholders, including China’s Geely. Last September, Volkswagen said it was cutting production of two of its flagship EV models, while in November, Ford said it was scaling back its battery plant in Michigan.

It looks like all those “well-paid green jobs” are going to take a little longer to arrive than anyone anticipated. As for the payback on huge sums various governments have “invested” in the industry, it looks like the returns on that money will take a while to come through as well.

There is nothing wrong with EVs themselves. They are often great as run-arounds for dense urban environments, and as long as the raw materials are sourced correctly, and the chargers are not powered by coal-burning generators, they are probably a little better for the environment than the petrol version.

If people want them, then that’s great. The trouble with the industry right now is that demand is falling because the vehicles cost far more than anyone expected, and what market there is will be captured by Chinese manufacturers such as BYD that can make vehicles far more cheaply than anyone in the West can. The result? A lot of government money will be wasted.


There is a lesson in the humiliating climbdown. State-led industrial strategies never work. Indeed, the failure of the drive into EV is a textbook example of everything that goes wrong.

First, it backs the wrong industries. No one really has any idea what products people might want in five or ten years time, which is why it is best to leave it to private companies and their investors to make their own bets, reap the rewards when they get it right, and bear the losses when they don’t.

Politicians and bureaucrats are no better at making those decisions, as usually a lot worse. Don’t believe me? Just ask consumers. Hertz in the US is disposing of the 20,000 EVs it bought with great fanfare in recent years, and is replacing them with petrol models, due to lack of demand. Over the past year, figures from the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders revealed a steep fall in EV interest from private buyers.

Next, the state over-invests. Even if there is a small market for EVs, there certainly wasn’t space for huge new industries in France, Germany, the US, or in a dozen smaller countries. The car industry was awash with over-capacity already, and that was before the Government started throwing billions at electric vehicle plants. All that happens is that prices collapse, and no one makes any money.

Finally, it distorts the market with subsidies. Governments start out spending a few billion on new EV factories, then they have to start subsidising the EVs so that people actually buy them, then they have to impose tariffs and quotas to stop imports from countries where other government have invested too much.

Finally, they have to pay out even more to keep alive the factories making a product that no one wants. It’s a vicious cycle, and once it starts it is very hard to stop.

The one relief for the UK is that our political and administrative class was too inept to pour even more money in, despite the best efforts of the former PM’s Theresa May and Boris Johnson to splurge a few tens of billions into the “race for EVs” and the endless warnings that we risked “getting left behind’”. We will be spared the worst of the pain ahead.

In reality, the volte-face on the electrification of the auto industry is underway. Major manufacturers have started to pull back, but all the grand projects for battery factories, for shiny new EV plants, and for charging infrastructure, will inevitably be scrapped very soon.

Billions of taxpayer’s money will have been wasted. We should draw the lesson from that, as bitter as it might prove. The Government never knows what the industries of the future will be – and should leave it to entrepreneurs and customers to work that out.

Adeel Mangi has been nominated by Joe Biden who would be the first ever Muslim appeals court judge in the US. Timothy Lewis was a federal judge for 7 years, and has decried the treatment that Mangi has received during the confirmation process, Mangi has the subject of deeply racist and Islamophobic attacks by such notable senators as Ted Cruz.
Mangi has been highly vetted, and is supported by many Jewish groups, who would seemingly have a voice if Mangi's record and credentials were questionable, and as anti-Jewish as alleged.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adeel-mangi-muslim-judicial-nominee_n_65f486e1e4b0651fa4a2b1ec

Spoke with Cael's head coach Jon Carlson about his recruitment and the growth of his game.

STORY:

Plasti-Dip, Hyperdip, Rustoleum Vinyl Wrap, Dupli-Color Custom Wrap, etc?

I'd like to change the color of the shark fin antenna on the Tradmobile from body color to black. These products are peelable so if I screw it up, I can peel it off and do it again. And if I don't like it? Change it back to the original color.

Anyone have experience using any of these products? The Dupli-Color has a really good-looking gloss black product which would be perfect for my application.

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I asked g/f (no pic) what she'd do if her daughter, when she was 5/6 years old, was caught making fun of a classmate that stuttered. she "I'd beat as so hard she couldn't sit down for a week" and yet this is the GOP front runner. They should be so proud.

That was the last time the Hawks made it to the sweet 16. Tom Davis was in his last year as the head coach. I think back to Davis' first year when the Hawks won 18 straight (30 total), we were ranked #1 at one point. He was a great coach but not so great as a recruiter. If the good Doctor would have been head coach and Raveling an asst., Iowa would have stayed really good. George wasn't much of a bench coach but man could he recruit.

Not Alfraud, nor Lickliter, nor Fran have taken us through the first weekend of tourney play. A 25 year draught. It's no wonder CHA is seldom full anymore, Wonder when declining attendance and revenues will force Beth to make a change. Barta did us no favors by extending Fran's contract, although he is on the low end of the pay scale.

In another "stunning" revelation, the University of Minnesota is reinstating it's relationship with the Minneapolis Police Dept.

University President Joan Gabel " The reason we're reinstating is because MPD has made great progress the last couple of years". LOL! Oh? They can't find anyone wanting to be a cop in Minneapolis and are way understaffed, but "they've made progress"! LOL!

Yeah Joan, in true Liberal fashion they just can't pull their head out of their ass to say what the real problem is. Here's what Joan should have said: "We're a crime infested Liberal Shithole and realized we made a piss poor decision to have less Cops available to our students. Everyone on planet earth could see this coming, but we're idiots and we didn't". (Look for Governor Walz and Mayor Frey to release similar statements in the near future............LOL! While forgetting that NOBODY wants to be a part of their collective "reimagining policing", except for the criminals, they're fully on board!)

Looks like Matt Gaetz wants to be on the record with Mike Huckabee?

What has happened to the America I was raised in?

Who are these people?

Hang them!

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A harsh but realistic assessment of college athletics today as the PAC-12 reaches the end. Plenty to talk about.

This is so strange. Would you go?

The man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 later became a singer and songwriter. But it turns out no one wants to hear him do either. Shocker.

Last year, the now-68-year-old released his debut album, appropriately titled Redemption—and, over the last couple of years, he’s tried to tour. However, according to the Hartford Courant, Hinckley's shows keep getting postponed.



https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/john-hinckley-jr-shot-ronald-194027890.html

The story of "Reverend" Mark Harris who was involved in an actual election fraud case, conceded that the election was tainted after his own son testified against him, and dropped out of the re-do....yeah, he's back. And he's telling everyone who will listen that the 2018 election where his operative was filling in absentee ballots for him...was actually stolen just like Trump. He won his 2024 primary and, in NC, that means this lying sack of filth will be heading to DC.

It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!