No real info on him; but, it is announced

A bill proposed by an Iowa representative would establish a raccoon bounty program where the state would shell out $5 per raccoon tail turned into the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.



In 2006, the Iowa DNR reported 2,417 raccoons in its spring “spotlight” survey, which counts wildlife along rural roads in all Iowa counties. In 2023, it counted 5,526 — a surge of nearly 130 percent, and the fifth year in a row of “relatively high” population sizes. State residents, including wildlife control specialists and the lawmaker himself, label them as pests of crops, farm equipment and homes.


Between 2021 and 2022, the statewide harvest for raccoons was 34,529 — the lowest harvest since 1958, according to the Iowa DNR.






Rep. Dean Fisher, R-Montour, who chairs the House’s environmental protection committee, introduced the bill for the raccoon bounty program, House Study Bill 636, in hopes of spurring more take of the species.

Rep. Dean Fisher R-Montour
“Population is going up because we're just not harvesting enough,” he said in a Tuesday subcommittee hearing surrounding his legislation. “That's the impetus behind this bill.”


In the 2022 session, he proposed legislation that would allow people to kill certain animals — including raccoons — without permission for nuisance control. That bill passed the Senate but was ultimately stalled. A 2023 attempt at a similar rule was eventually signed into law.


Under Fisher’s new proposal rule, the Iowa DNR would establish and administer the raccoon bounty program. Participants would be able to redeem a $5 voucher for each raccoon tail they turned in at “a monthly raccoon tail pick-up event” in each county. The Iowa DNR would be appropriated $0.50 for each raccoon tail relinquished.


The bounty rewards would come from a new fund in the state treasury, which Fisher proposed would be filled by a state appropriation of an unknown amount. He also suggested the fund could be filled by “donations and gifts” from organizations like Pheasants Forever or Ducks Unlimited, which could be motivated to protect bird eggs from raccoon depredation.


The bill would require participants to check their traps every 24 hours, and licensed fur dealers would not be able to participate. The bill would also create a maximum fur dealer license fee of $50.


Trappers who attempt to turn in a raccoon tail that wasn’t harvested in Iowa would be guilty of a simple misdemeanor and subject to other penalties, like a trapping suspension and a fine up to $250. Unlawfully taken raccoons, like those harvested out of season, could result in at least $200 in fines. Those fines would be deposited into the raccoon bounty fund.


The Iowa DNR would be charged with investigating potential fraud and monitoring trapping data “to ensure excessive harvesting does not occur,” the bill reads.

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Fellow House environmental protection committee member Rep. Josh Turek, D-Council Bluffs, called the proposed bounty program ineffective and irresponsible.


“In a state where we're defunding water quality sensors … it's fiscally irresponsible to put any sort of appropriation on something like this,” he said. “This is what people get frustrated about with national level, in the state level, is us putting funding towards this and not addressing larger issues.”


Turek voted no on the bill and suggested instead putting such resources toward habitat for natural predators of raccoons that would help control the nuisance population.


Committee member Rep. Jon Dunwell, R-Newton, voted yes with Fisher to move the bill forward: “I’m willing to move ahead and do further study on it,” he said.

Expel these treasonous Clowns


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First you guys do a very good job! I really enjoy the content!

About half way through you guys were talking about the receivers specifically the X position. Bostick was mentioned.

Have any of you put thought with a loaded running back room that Jazz, Washington or Moulton might get looks to supplement the receiving group?

Thanks for insight in advance.

The most disruptive year in golf ended Tuesday when the PGA Tour and European tour agreed to a merger with Saudi Arabia's golf interests, creating a commercial operation designed to unify professional golf around the world.
As part of the deal, the sides are dropping all lawsuits involving LIV Golf against each other effective immediately.






Still to be determined is how players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, who defected to Saudi-funded LIV Golf for nine-figure bonuses, can rejoin the PGA Tour after this year.
Also unclear was what form the LIV Golf League would take in 2024. Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that a thorough evaluation would determine how to integrate team golf into the game.
The agreement combines the Public Investment Fund's golf-related commercial businesses and rights — including LIV Golf — with those of the PGA and European tours. The new entity has not been named.

​

“They were going down their path, we were going down ours, and after a lot of introspection you realize all this tension in the game is not a good thing,” Monahan said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
“We have a responsibility to our tour and to the game, and we felt like the time was right to have that conversation.”
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will join the board of the PGA Tour, which continues to operates its tournaments. Al-Rumayyan will be chairman of the new commercial group, with Monahan as the CEO and the PGA Tour having a majority stake in the new venture.
The PIF will invest in the commercial venture.

Monahan said the decision came together over the last seven weeks.
___
AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

The 90 year old Grassley is in the hospital and receiving intravenous antibiotics.
https://www.kcrg.com/2024/01/16/us-sen-grassley-hospitalized-infection/

Asking for a friend.

Say a 30 year old down syndrome guy meets a 15 year old chick at a party and they hook up. The downs syndrome guy is well built, verile, and madly handsome. But you know, mentally retarded. No more capable than a mid-range 10 year old.

So it's like, mind of kid, with body of a man. What does that get you? Is that rape, or should they even bother reporting to the authorities?

I'll preface this by saying I usually don't like horror shows/movies and I don't know why I started this one but I kinda like it. I've watched the first 3 and I'll probably finish off the series eventually.

Obviously based off the Poe story of a pharmaceutical head obviously based off the Sacklers who seems to have made a deal with the devil maybe who is now killing off his heirs one by one. Each episode telling the story of one of the heirs death (which also seems to be based on a Poe story)

It's not something I'll binge but probably watch an episode every few days

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Former president Donald Trump claimed Friday that he peacefully surrendered power at the end of his term in office, despite having urged a crowd of his supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol, where some staged a deadly attack that interrupted Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021.


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Trump’s comments came during an interview with conservative syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt in which the former president was asked for reassurance that he would not be a dictator if he returned to the White House and whether he would peacefully surrender power at the end of his second term.
“Of course — and I did that this time,” Trump said, before repeating his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. “But I did. I did it anyway.”

Trump’s response omits the fact that he urged his supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while Congress was certifying Biden’s electoral win. Many in the pro-Trump mob that overran the Capitol that day had chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” in the misguided belief — pushed by Trump — that the then-Vice President Pence could have stopped Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.


In video of the Jan. 6 attack, law enforcement officers outside the Capitol were shown being harassed, beaten and sprayed with noxious liquids by members of the mob. In one video from the attack, a rioter can be seen bashing a fallen police officer with a pole flying the American flag. The unprecedented attack left five people dead, including a police officer and a woman shot by police. Two other officers who were on duty that day later died by suicide, and more than 100 officers were injured.
Trump says he wouldn’t be a dictator ‘except for Day One’
Trump and his supporters have consistently downplayed the severity of the Jan. 6 attack, but the former president’s insistence that he engaged in a peaceful transfer of power in 2021 has sparked new alarm in light of his recent authoritarian rhetoric.

Last week, Trump approvingly quoted autocratic leaders — including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary — and again demonized immigrants, saying they were “poisoning the blood of our country.”


Also this month, Trump was widely criticized when he said during a televised Fox News town hall event that he would not be a dictator if he returned to office “except for Day One,” when asked about whether he would abuse his powers to seek retribution against his political adversaries.

During the town hall, Trump said he would close the U.S.-Mexico border and expand oil drilling on his first day back in office, if reelected, adding: “After that, I’m not a dictator.”

On Friday, Hewitt pressed Trump on whether he intended to rule as an authoritarian or a dictator.
“Not at all. No, I’m going to rule as somebody that’s very popular with the people,” Trump responded.
A representative of Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about his interview with Hewitt.
Trump’s role in encouraging his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, also continues to have repercussions for his reelection campaign. On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump was disqualified from the state’s presidential primary under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.



The Colorado decision comes as courts in other states consider similar cases. If other states reach the same conclusion, Trump would have a difficult — if not impossible — time securing the Republican nomination and winning in November.
Biden, who also is running for reelection, said Wednesday that Trump “certainly supported an insurrection” but declined to comment specifically on the Colorado case.
“Certain things are self-evident. You saw it all,” Biden told reporters, referring to the Jan. 6 attack. “Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. No question about it. None. Zero.”

Florida, I'm so shocked

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This was made up news for the liberal media

We know she had NIL up and running on Day 1 when she was the Athletic Director at Ball State. @Tx_Hawk, CEO of SWARM, has to like that.

And this is a pretty good endorsement, coming from Brad Stevens.

The story from the Gazette:

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The irony of Donald Trump’s assertion that he would seek to have dictatorial powers for the first day of his presidency is that he was supposed to be saying he had no authoritarian inclinations at all.

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Trump’s original formulation of the idea came during a conversation with Fox News host Sean Hannity in December. Hannity aired clips of observers offering warnings about Trump’s embrace of authoritarian rhetoric and offered Trump a chance to tamp down any such concerns. But Trump didn’t want to.

“I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?’ I say, ‘No, no, no — other than Day One,’” Trump said at the time. “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I’m not a dictator, okay?”

Those two issues, immigration and fossil-fuel production, were simply picked up from a bit earlier in the conversation. But Trump discovered that people liked the line — dictator for a day! — and so he has at times sprinkled it into his patter at rallies. That’s how his politics work: He angles for applause and, if the crowd likes something, it’s on the path to potential policy implementation.
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On Wednesday, UMass Amherst released the results of a poll conducted by YouGov in which respondents were asked about the concept. The framing of the comment was stark, excluding Trump’s specific plans for using his theoretical dictatorial power. It was just, “Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term. Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?”
A plurality of respondents said this was “definitely bad” with 6 in 10 saying it was “definitely” or “probably” bad. Among Republicans, though, a third said it was “definitely good” with three-quarters saying it was at least “probably” good.

Again, this isn’t “Trump wants temporary absolute powers to build a wall on the border.” It is “is it good or bad if Trump has absolute powers for a fixed time period.” And three-quarters of Republicans responded that this was probably a good idea.



This response isn’t surprising as such. It’s been obvious for years that there is a non-insignificant part of the American public, largely on the right, that is supportive of the idea of suborning democracy to absolute executive power. There is unquestionably a gap between “supporting a dictatorship in theory” or “as a way to indicate anger at the system” and “approving of an actual implementation of dictatorship.” But it seems safe to assume that the more people you have in the theoretically accepting group, the larger the literally accepting group would turn out to be.

Past analyses of acceptance of authoritarianism in the U.S. have found a correlation to hostility to diversity. In the UMass Amherst poll, the groups most supportive of Trump’s “dictator for a day” idea are men (26 points more approving of the idea than women on net), and White Americans. There was not as wide a difference between respondents with and without a college degree.

Of course, Trump’s formulation also doesn’t really make any sense. He can’t be “dictator for a day” except to issue mandates that could then be challenged in court. He can try to mandate that a wall be built on the border with Mexico, but he tried that when he was president, too, declaring a state of emergency that allowed him to shift funding around to pay for it.



Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked him what he meant by it in an interview on Sunday, again framing it in the context of the concerns raised by outside observers. Trump said that he’d offered the idea “in jest.”
But also: “I’m going to close the border and we’re going to drill, baby, drill, that’s all,” he said. “And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator.”
Did he mean executive orders, Bartiromo pressed? In response, Trump praised executive orders in general and suggested that President Biden was the one undercutting democracy.
In other words, he doesn’t really know. Think of it less as a plan than as an aspiration.
One that most of his party views positively.

Amazon delivered my sweet new leather key fob cover today. The colors and the contrasting stitching makes it look almost like it was designed for my CX-5 Carbon Turbo. Matches with the interior nicely. No trouble engaging the buttons through the cover. Very happy with this.

Do you have a key fob cover?

Surprisingly it's not Trump this time

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In case you are interested., since nobody else (I think) has mentioned this...
Max Murin did the color commentary last weekend for the Penn - Brown match.
It's still available on ESPN+ if you have that.
For a beginner, I think that he did very well.

Just saw that Jesse Minter is leaving Michigan to go to the Chargers and assume the same role there. Along with him, the defensive line coach Mike Elston is leaving too.

So that leaves Michigan with losing their head coach, OC (who is now HC), DC, and defensive line coach along with a whole boat load of players. I kind of feel sorry for Sherrone Moore because he is totally being set up for failure. But then again it is Michigan and I don't feel sorry for them at all.