I put it at 40% and growing.

I have an iPhone and Apple Watch but have always been curious about the watches offered by Samsung and Pixel.

I noticed recently that you can get a new, older Galaxy Watch4 on eBay for well within my toy budget. So I grabbed one just to play with it. I got the 46mm Classic with LTE for $83. The 40mm version is just $72.

Thought I'd mention it in case anyone else had some itchy money in their toy budget. And also in case some here have good tips on how to get the most out of these watches.

Note to iPhone folks: these don't play nice with iPhones. I have an older Android phone (Motorola) that I use mainly for audiobooks, so not a problem.

Here's a link to the smaller one. Same seller has the bigger one, too. I have no affiliation.

Crystal Mangum, who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape, now says she lied​

Karina Tsui, CNN
Fri, December 13, 2024 at 10:17 AM CST·2 min read
3.2k


Crystal Mangum, who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape, now says she lied
Crystal Mangum, the former exotic dancer who accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006, igniting a national firestorm, now says she lied about the encounter.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum said on the web show “Let’s Talk with Kat,” hosted by Katerena DePasquale.
The interview took place at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum is serving time for a 2013 second-degree murder conviction for stabbing her boyfriend.
“I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” Mangum said.

David Evans, left, Collin Finnerty, center, and Reade Seligmann, right, at a news conference after charges against them were dropped in 2007. - Chuck Burton/AP
On the podcast, she said she hopes the three men will forgive her.

“I want them to know that I love them, and they didn’t deserve that, and I hope that they can forgive me,” she said.
Mangum’s admission comes nearly two decades after she said she was raped by former players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann.
According to the Duke student newspaper, Duke Athletics declined to comment. The university, and the school’s president and head men’s lacrosse coach at the time, did not respond to the student newspaper’s request for comment. There’s been no reported comment from the players.

Party accusations and the fallout​

The three were arrested following the woman’s allegations of sexual assault at a party.
The charges brought broad media attention, forced the cancellation of the team’s 2006 season, and cost coach Mike Pressler his job. The district attorney on the case was convicted of criminal contempt and disbarred.

In April 2007, the state’s then-Attorney General Roy Cooper, who is now governor, reviewed the case and exonerated the three men, declaring that the charges never should have been brought against them.
Duke University and the three players reached an undisclosed settlement shortly after the charges were dropped.
The city of Durham settled a lawsuit by the three men in 2014. As part of the settlement, Durham agreed to pay $50,000 to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.
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They got wide open three after wide open three because he’s completely lost on rotations. Now I understand why he wasn’t a more sought after recruit.

Bwahahahahaha... This is one Boeing delay I'm in favor of...

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One of the biggest and most pressing questions in the aftermath of the 2024 election is just how much President-elect Donald Trump follows through on some of his more authoritarian-leaning proposals.
This is a man, after all, who talked about suspending parts of the Constitution, being a dictator for a day, criminalizing dissent and targeting his political enemies for retribution. Trump’s defenders often dismiss these comments as mere provocations, but only one man knows what’s in the president-elect’s heart. And there will surely be fewer obstacles in his second term if he does go down some undemocratic paths.


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One of those diminished obstacles will be Trump’s own base.

For months, we’ve seen some remarkable findings when it comes to just how much the GOP base is willing to countenance or entertain authoritarianism. And we can now add another poll to the mix.

Monmouth University on Thursday released new data on a question it’s been asking for a while. The question notes that Trump has talked about suspending laws and constitutional provisions, and asked whether people would be bothered if he targeted his political enemies after doing so.
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Trump’s allies are increasingly unbothered.
Just 23 percent of Republicans in the poll said they would be “bothered a lot” if Trump did this. That’s down from 41 percent in July and 25 percent in October. And it’s now less than the percentage who say they would not be bothered at all (36 percent).

(The remainder — about one-third of Republicans — say they would be “bothered a little.”)
The data also suggest that Trump-leaning independents have shifted significantly. Overall, the percentage of independents who say they would be bothered a lot if Trump targeted his enemies has dropped from 68 percent in July, to 60 percent in October, to 55 percent today.

Overall, nearly two-thirds of Americans said in July that they would be “bothered a lot” (65 percent) by such behavior. Now it’s just a slight majority (52 percent).
It’s merely the latest in a long line of data suggesting Republicans aren’t terribly concerned with democratic guardrails, at least when Trump is involved:

• 57 percent of Republicans earlier this year said it would be a good thing if Trump were able to act “without having to worry about Congress and the courts.”
• 52 percent agreed that we need “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.”
• 56 percent of Republicans in April agreed that “we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.”
• 30 percent of Trump supporters last year agreed that we need a leader who doesn’t just break rules but also laws.
• A pre-election poll showed one-quarter of Republicans said Trump should try to seize power if he loses.
• A February poll showed 74 percent of Republicans favored Trump being dictator for a day.

It’s possible to overinterpret this data. Perhaps Trump allies don’t really think Trump would do these things and/or view them as unfair questions. Indeed, the new Monmouth poll showed Republicans say, 71 percent to 21 percent, that they don’t actually expect Trump to try to suspend laws and constitutional provisions to target his enemies. (Democrats are far less convinced; they say, 77 percent to 21 percent, that Trump will.)
But we’ve also seen over and over how the Republican Party tends to talk itself into the things Trump wants to do.

He’ll plant a seed of a seemingly shocking idea and then fertilize it gradually over time, all the while bringing his party along for the ride. The most pronounced case is the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, which Republicans gradually came to believe wasn’t that bad and even that those responsible have been persecuted.

We don’t know what Trump’s true intentions are when it comes to targeting his enemies. Trump said over the weekend that members of the House Jan. 6 committee should be jailed, the latest in a long line of foes he’s said things like that about.
But in a new Time magazine interview published Thursday, Trump said that he hasn’t discussed prosecutions of rivals with his choice for attorney general, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (R), and that it would be up to her on whether to proceed. (Bondi last year talked about how “prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones” and “the investigators will be investigated.” Trump has also announced a pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, who has talked about targeting Trump’s enemies.)
Still, if Trump and/or his Justice Department do press forward with such a drastic plan, much of his base will apparently back him up — or at least not object too strenuously.

I have to admit, Fran gets the most out of the athletes that he recruits. Iowa had no business making that a game. ISU has better athletes across the board but Iowa made it a tough game. His brand of basketball always puts points on the board.

Hope Iowa can make a splash in the Big10.

That I will have the homestead to myself. All the kids and wife are going to be gone.

What should I do?

President-elect Donald Trump offered his support to dock workers on Thursday as a looming mid-January strike deadline threatens to bring commercial shipping on the East and Gulf Coasts to a halt days before he takes office.

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In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said that he had just finished meeting with leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the union that represents some 47,000 dockworkers, and signaled to international shippers that their use of automation could cost them.

“For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire our incredible American Workers, instead of laying them off, and sending those profits back to foreign countries,” Trump wrote.

Automation is a main sticking point in contract negotiations between the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents shippers, and the ILA union, which went on strike for three days in early October. The union paused their strike when the Biden administration helped broker a deal that extended the current contract through Jan. 15.

A longer strike in the fall could have further weakened Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, prompting the Biden administration to push for an extension in bargaining between shippers and the union.
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The president-elect’s statement in support of the union is highly unusual for a Republican. Though Trump made inroads with unions and the labor movement this year and recently announced plans to nominate a labor secretary who has broken with the GOP to support pro-union legislation. Trump’s budding relationship with organized labor — combined with his tariff proposals — are also causing widespread anxiety in the business community.

“We appreciate and value President-elect Trump’s statement on the importance of American ports,” a statement from USMX said Thursday evening. “It’s clear President-elect Trump, USMX, and the ILA all share the goal of protecting and adding good-paying American jobs at our ports. … To achieve this, we need modern technology that is proven to improve worker safety, boost port efficiency, increase port capacity, and strengthen our supply chains.”





The ILA did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has previously said that it sees new technology as something that would cost workers their jobs.
Trump said in his statement Thursday that he met with Harold Daggett, ILA’s president. The union had previously confirmed the two share a relationship that goes back decades and Daggett visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, last year.

“There has been a lot of discussion having to do with ‘automation’ on United States docks,” Trump wrote in his post Thursday. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets.”

An extended strike beginning in January could raise prices for households and businesses and wreak widespread havoc on the global economy. A long-term walkout would be the biggest disruption to the flow of goods in and out of the country since the height of the pandemic. Even a short-lived work stoppage would snarl shipping and create havoc in supply chains for weeks. Cargo ranging from cars to electronics, from food to furniture, would be stuck on ships offshore. Each day a strike lasts could cost the U.S. economy up to $1 billion, according to analysts.
Striking dockworkers agreed to go back to work in October after reaching a tentative agreement with port operators for a 62 percent wage increase that extended the current contract, providing more time to bargain over remaining issues. The ILA had initially demanded 77 percent raises but lowered its demands.
The union’s last contract, negotiated in 2018, included raises that have not kept pace with inflation. The union’s president has accused the maritime alliance of trying to “lowball” workers.

The best place to begin, as they say, is at the beginning.
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He refused (and still refuses) to accept that loss, claiming that the election had somehow been stolen and grasping at anything that might even hint that this was true. Many or most of his supporters believed him.


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By mid-December of that year, his available options had narrowed. States finalized their electoral votes and submitted them to Washington on Dec. 14. So, a few days later and after meeting with his advisers, Trump summoned his supporters to a rally in the capital on Jan. 6, pledging that it would “be wild.”
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Tens of thousands came. Trump urged them to march to the Capitol to protest the counting of those electoral votes. Thousands did. A riot ensued.

What happened on Jan. 6, 2021, is because of Trump, full stop. That’s different than saying “Donald Trump told people to riot” because, while he assembled the crowd and stoked its fury that day, he didn’t tell his supporters to do what they did. But if perhaps he hadn’t stoked them and particularly if he hadn’t assembled them and certainly if he hadn’t lied to them about the election, there’s no riot.

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Because Trump bears the blame, he and his supporters have looked for alternative explanations. In the hours after the riot, some of them latched onto the idea that the violence — which unfolded at multiple locations around the building — had been driven by leftist agitators. This was obviously baseless and got no traction. So Trumpworld turned to another of its favorite bêtes noires, the government itself.
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For example, Trump allies, including Tucker Carlson, claimed that a man named Ray Epps was involved in triggering the violence, at times claiming that he was working for the government. Epps, a Trump supporter, had no link to the government and did not encourage violence on Jan. 6.

The Epps allegation presented a weakness for the conspiracy theorists: It could be falsified. So the most popular story became a nebulous one, that government actors were seeded in the crowd and encouraged the riot to unfold.

We should again stop and note that this explanation is not needed.
Consider Dominic Pezzola, a member of the Proud Boys who was filmed smashing a window at the Capitol and who was one of the first people inside the building. During 2020, the Proud Boys had increasingly centered their actions around Trump and stood ready to back his efforts to retain power. They (and other groups, such as the Oathkeepers) had planned for and discussed violence at the Capitol well before Jan. 6; in fact, several Proud Boys had engaged in violence after a pro-Trump rally in D.C. the month before.

These people needed an FBI agent to tell them what to do? Not that there was any reason for the FBI to want to create a riot. If the bureau’s leaders disliked Trump (even though the FBI director was appointed by him), they only had to wait two weeks for him to be out of office.

More than 75 Nobel laureates in the areas of medicine, chemistry, physics and economics signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the next secretary of the Department of Health Human Services.


President-elect Donald Trump drew criticism when he named Kennedy — a longtime vaccine skeptic — as his nominee to lead the nearly $2 trillion agency charged with administering health-insurance programs for millions of Americans, approving medications and overseeing vaccine safety.
While the laureates — all whom are American or live in the United States — rarely engage with politics, Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, told The Washington Post that he and others felt “very disturbed by the possibility that RFK Jr. would become head of HHS.”
The letter states that Kennedy does not have the “credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration” to lead the department.
Among the stated reasons for opposing Kennedy: his opposition to “many health-protecting and lifesaving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio,” his criticism of the “well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water,” his promotion of conspiracy theories about successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases, and his “belligerent” criticism of the nation’s health agencies.

Roberts, who organized the letter, said he doesn’t understand how any lawmaker who “cares for the health of their constituents can think that this is a good choice for the head of HHS.”

We can only hope they will overreach:

Red-state leaders emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidential victory are not waiting for him to take office to advance far more conservative agendas at home.
Idaho lawmakers want to allow school staff to carry concealed firearms without prior approval and parents to sue districts in library and curriculum disputes. Lawmakers in Oklahoma plan to further restrict abortion by limiting the emergency exceptions and to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, while their counterparts in Arkansas are moving to create the felony offense of “vaccine harm,” which could make pharmaceutical companies or their executive officers potentially criminally liable.


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But few states have bigger, more aggressive plans than Texas. Ahead of their biennial session, which begins Jan. 14, the Republican legislators who control both House and Senate have proposed a multitude of measures that would push the state further right.


Migrants are a particular focus, with bills to create a “Texas border protection unit” and to repeal instate tuition for undocumented students, requiring colleges to notify law enforcement if they learn a student is undocumented. They also would require state police to DNA-test migrants taken into custody, allow troopers to return undocumented immigrants to Mexico if they are seen entering Texas illegally, fingerprint and track migrant children in a database and bar immigrants who are in the country illegally from accessing public legal services.
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“Red state legislatures and governors are chomping at the bit,” said Craig DeRoche, a former Michigan House speaker who is now president of the influential conservative Family Policy Alliance. The group has chapters in 40 states where, he said, conservatives are sending a message to likely members of the incoming Trump administration on a variety of issues: “Don’t fix it there. Send it back to us so we can fix it here.”
“There’s going to be an extraordinary accountability. And red state governors and legislatures are going to lead on that,” DeRoche said.


Of 27 states with Republican governors, 23 are backed by GOP legislative majorities, all of which will reconvene in the New Year. Republicans flipped Capitols in Michigan and Minnesota this election, breaking Democrats’ trifecta control, and they hold a supermajority in Kansas that will allow them to override any veto by Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat.


“The alignment of a Trump-Vance administration and the beginning of legislative sessions is a looming perfect storm of conservative policies in red states,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a legal group that has marshaled more than 800 lawyers to counter an anticipated onslaught of conservative legal battles on multiple fronts, from reproductive health to labor rights, free speech and public education.
Still, it’s not clear where or how or how fast Trump will try to capitalize on his state allies once he’s back in the White House. “We don’t know if they will target communities in red states quicker than in blue states,” Perryman said. What she and others do know: that those allies hope to find much success given the momentum of Trump’s win, not just with new proposals but with some that previously fell short.
Simone Leiro, spokeswoman for the Democratic-aligned States Project, sees GOP lawmakers already pursuing two types of legislation: those that fan the culture wars and those that give more power to corporations. “It feels like they can get away with a lot more without scrutiny,” she said Wednesday.


Nowhere is GOP activism more visible than in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott hosted Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan last month at a state-run base established just minutes from where many migrants cross the Rio Grande. Homan called Operation Lone Star, Texas’s $11 billion border enforcement program, a “model” for national immigration enforcement.
Since the Nov. 5 election, Texas has added more barbed wire along the border and buoy barriers in the river. A state police unit patrols daily on horseback. Abbott has asked the legislature for another $2.8 billion for the program in 2025.
“We’re going to be doing more and faster than anything that’s ever been done to regain control of our border, restore order in our communities, and also identify, locate and deport criminals in the United States of America who have come across the border,” he said during Homan’s visit to Eagle Pass.

Biden came into office denying Hunter's laptop and claiming it was Russian misinformation, backed by 51 former CIA and FBI officials.

Biden is ending his term by pardoning Hunter for charges that stemmed from said laptop and started the investigation into Hunter.

To me it's not a good way to end a 50+ year political career.

“[Rep. Adam Schiff] won’t tell you that he just voted to send $100 billion to foreign countries. We have a $35 trillion national debt in America.”
— Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, in a social media post, April 20

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As the House on Saturday approved long-stalled aid packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, one of the top contenders to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration posted that lawmakers had voted to “send $100 billion to foreign countries.” His jab was a common talking point among opponents of the bill.

The implication is that foreign aid is just a no-strings-attached gift. It isn’t. About two-thirds of foreign assistance is spent via U.S.-based entities, according to the Congressional Research Service. For instance, food aid must be purchased in the United States and by law must be shipped on U.S. carriers. Except for some aid given to Israel, all military aid must be used to purchase U.S. military equipment and training.


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Since these bills — for Ukraine, for Israel and the Pacific region — are mostly about military aid, that means they are really jobs programs in the United States, which in turn bolsters the U.S. economy. The Senate approved the spending package on Tuesday and President Biden signed it into law on Wednesday. Let’s explore.

The Facts​

The full package was estimated to cost $95.25 billion. But information provided by the White House budget office and a detailed review of the bill shows that nearly 80 percent went either to weapons manufacturers in the United States to replenish stocks or supply weapons or to fund Defense Department operations in the United States and overseas (including the training of Ukrainian soldiers).

Just over $20 billion was reserved for humanitarian or economic assistance, which, as noted above, can often require that the funds go to U.S.-based organizations. About $8 billion of this amount is reserved to assist the Ukrainian government, including $50 million to address food shortages. Another $5.6 billion is for general international disaster assistance and $3.5 billion for refugee assistance.


While previous Ukraine-related bills provided funds to help the government maintain old-age pensions, this bill prohibits the direct payments for pension support. Indeed, the bill calls on Biden to negotiate an agreement with Ukraine to repay economic support, though 50 percent of the debt could be waived after Nov. 15 with congressional notification, with the remaining 50 percent able to be waived after Jan. 1, 2026.

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As is often the case with appropriations bills, there are different ways to run the numbers. To look at the package another way, about $60 billion will support Ukraine, $14 billion will support Israel and about $8 billion is directed to help countries in the Indo-Pacific region, especially Taiwan. Another $9 billion is for humanitarian assistance in conflict zones (including beyond Ukraine and Gaza) and $2.5 billion would support Central Command operations. Nearly $500 million is for refugee resettlement of Ukrainians in the United States.

60 percent will not leave our shores​

Nearly $57 billion — about 60 percent — is never leaving the United States. Instead, these funds are being invested with weapons manufacturers located in dozens of states. (So far, according to the Pentagon, manufacturers in all but 11 states have received Ukraine-related weapons contracts.)



About $24.5 billion is for stock replenishment for weapons given to Ukraine, Israel and other countries, such as 155mm ammunition rounds. The United States has been providing defense items to Ukraine and Israel via presidential drawdown authority, under which Biden can authorize the immediate transfer of articles and services from U.S. stocks. Now, those stocks will be rebuilt, meaning U.S. weapons factories will be working nonstop.
Nearly $14 billion will pay for purchase of advanced weapons systems for Ukraine, such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, a light multiple rocket launcher built by Lockheed Martin in Arkansas.
Another $1.6 billion will be to replenish U.S. military stocks that are located in Israel, including artillery shells and missiles. These are pre-positioned for U.S. military use, but also available for Israel if necessary.



Nearly $5 billion is to expand military production capacity to manage the needs to Ukraine, Israel and other countries. For instance, the production rate of 155mm-caliber artillery shells was about 10,000 a month, and the administration wants to boost that to 1 million a year — a substantial increase that will include buying additional casing, explosive charges, warheads and fuses.
More than $7 billion — half directed to Israel — is for a State Department program called Foreign Military Financing, under which U.S. grants or loans are provided to countries to buy U.S. military equipment. (The bill also amends that program’s loan authority provided in a previous Ukraine law to allow for up to $8 billion in direct loans and $8 billion loan guarantees for NATO and major non-NATO allies to buy U.S. military equipment.)
Nearly $3.3 billion will be used to boost production of submarines, such as Virginia-class submarines, from an average of 1.3 per year to two per year. Each Virginia-class submarine costs about $4.3 billion.



Finally, the bill provided $1.6 billion to build additional missile defense systems for Israel.

19 percent will go to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence​

The bill has nearly $18 billion for defense spending to help the Pentagon and intelligence services fund the cost of managing the fallout from a war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Gaza. The bill both replenishes money that already has been spent and money that will be needed for the rest of the year, officials said. The bill specifically references $2.4 billion for U.S. Central Command, which overseas operations in the Middle East, $1.9 billion for additional maintenance, and $2.4 billion for combat expenditures and other spending, including at U.S. bases in the United States. But money for intelligence activities is classified, so it is not possible to provide a detailed breakdown of all the spending.

21 percent will mostly go to aid and diplomacy​

This line item includes the $8 billion to assist the Ukrainian government, $5.6 billion is for general international disaster assistance, and $3.5 billion for refugee assistance. The bill has many other smaller spending categories, such as additional money for the State Department to bolster diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and increased funds for inspectors general.

Allies are refilling their shopping carts here​

An underappreciated aspect of the Russian war in Ukraine is how NATO allies have also spent significant funds buying advanced U.S. weapons to replace materiel they have given to Ukraine. Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland have flooded U.S. manufacturers with orders since the war started. For instance, Poland gave 250 older tanks to Ukraine and then signed more than $6 billion in deals to buy nearly 370 Abrams tanks (made in Ohio). Warsaw also gave Ukraine Soviet-made attack helicopters and in turn signed a $12 billion deal to replace them with Apache helicopters (made in Arizona).



Between 2019 and 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the percentage of arms purchases from U.S. companies has spiked to these percentages: the Netherlands (99 percent), Italy (89 percent), Norway (89 percent), Britain (89 percent), Denmark (70 percent), Germany (63 percent) and Poland (45 percent).
Grenell did not respond to a request for comment.

The Pinocchio Test​

The one thing Grenell got right is that the bill cost nearly $100 billion. It was emergency spending and thus not paid for with offsetting revenue, which if you are a deficit hawk may be troubling.
But it’s highly misleading to say these funds are going to foreign countries. Nearly 80 percent will be spent on weapons made in the United States or by the U.S. military. This spending may be for the benefit of foreign countries — such as Ukraine in its war against Russia — but the money is mostly being used to create jobs in the United States.

Three Pinocchios​

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I know the must have been a thread on this somewhere, but I kept finding the Morgan Wallen says the N word thread.
The judge should have insisted on a stint in rehab.
https://apnews.com/article/morgan-w...erment-chair-f1d7b55a97afa35a510b852b6e31ca97

Unless the Trump administration is a disaster, I assume JD Vance will head the R's 2028 ticket. But who else might challenge? Rubio? RFK? Tulsi? Thune? MTG? Don, jr?

It's much less clear from the Dem side. I'll be watching AOC but I don't see any clear leaders. Pete? Newsom? Whitmer? Shapiro?

Americans may have recently elected Donald Trump to a second term, but that doesn’t mean they have high confidence in his ability to choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet — or effectively manage government spending, the military and the White House, according to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

As Trump names his appointees for key posts in his administration — some of whom could face difficult confirmation fights in the Senate even with Republicans in control — about half of U.S. adults are “not at all confident” in Trump’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and other high-level government positions.

The appointment process and its breakneck speed have represented a manifestation of Trump’s pledge to voters to be a disruptive force in the country and a return to the chaotic era of governance that defined his first four years in the Oval Office. But only around 3 in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” confident that Trump will pick qualified people to serve in his administration. A majority of Republicans say they do have high confidence.

Trump has promised to shake up Washington with an aggressive approach that includes the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nongovernmental task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, to be helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Beyond his appointments, though, the survey finds a similar level of confidence in Trump’s ability to manage government spending and perform other key presidential tasks, including overseeing the military and the White House — which, in Trump’s first term, experienced significant high-level staff turnover, particularly in its early days.

That’s not quite the same challenge faced four years ago by President Joe Biden, who came into office with higher levels of confidence in some areas than others.

Democrats and independents are most likely to doubt Trump’s leadership​

That low confidence is generally driven by Democrats and independents. A large share of Democrats are suspicious of Trump’s abilities on all of these fronts — about three-quarters say they are “not at all confident” that he will be able to effectively manage the White House, government spending or the military, or choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet.

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About 4 in 10 independents, meanwhile, say they are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in Trump’s capacity to execute each of these responsibilities, while about 2 in 10 are “extremely” or “very” confident.

Republican confidence is higher, but it isn’t overwhelming​

Confidence among Republicans is higher, but not as overwhelming as Democrats’ doubts. About 6 in 10 Republicans are “extremely” or “very” confident in Trump’s ability to choose well-qualified people to serve in his Cabinet and manage the White House, the military and government spending. About 2 in 10 Republicans are “moderately confident,” and another 2 in 10 are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in each case.

Biden had similar hurdles at the start of his term​

When Biden took office in 2021, people also harbored some doubts about how he’d carry out some major responsibilities — but unlike with Trump, where concern is fairly even across different tasks, they were more confident in Biden’s ability to do some things than others. When he entered the White House, Biden had served eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president, as well as decades in the U.S. Senate, and he ran the 2020 campaign largely on those years of experience.

A separate AP-NORC poll conducted shortly after Biden took office — which asked the question slightly differently — found a higher level of confidence in Biden’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and manage the White House than his ability to manage the military and government spending.

The first evidence was the feathered bodies washing up on Alaskan beaches. They were common murres, sleek black-and-white seabirds that typically spend months at a time away from land. But in 2015 and 2016, officials tallied 62,000 emaciated corpses from California to Alaska.
Since then, scientists have been piecing together what happened to the birds, along with other species in the northeast Pacific that suddenly died or disappeared. It became clear that the culprit was an record-breaking marine heat wave, a mass of warm water that would come to be known as the Blob. New findings on its effect on murres, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are a stark sign of the perils facing ecosystems in a warming world.

The Blob
A Warning From a California Marine Heat Wave
Dec. 1, 2024
“What we learned was that it was just way worse than we thought,” said Heather Renner, one of the study’s authors and a supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

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About half of Alaska’s common murres, some four million birds, died as a result of the marine heat wave, the scientists found. They believe it is the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild birds or mammals. The state is home to about a quarter of the world’s common murres, scientists say.
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Murres were the victims of a domino effect of oceanic changes tied to the warm water, according to a growing body of research. It affected marine life from plankton to humpback whales. Critically for the murres, it led to a collapse in the fish they depend on.
One of the most sobering revelations in the new study is that the birds have not even begun to rebound.

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“If the foraging conditions are good, I think there’s hope,” Ms. Renner said. “Our fear is that events like this are predicted to become much more common, and we haven’t seen any signs of recovery at all yet, eight years after the event.”

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For decades, the world’s oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat produced as humans burn fossil fuels and destroy ecosystems like forests. That heat has taken a severe toll on coral reefs, kelp forests and other marine ecosystems. Last year and into this year, the ocean’s surface temperature shattered records.
For the murres, earlier mortality estimates from the Blob were lower. In 2020, a team of some of the same scientists estimated that half a million to a million of the birds had died in Alaska. But the new research uses a different and far more reliable method, leveraging earlier data to analyze before and after counts at 13 breeding colonies throughout the Gulf of Alaska and the Eastern Bering Sea. The authors then extrapolated those declines across the entire population.
“We saw exactly the same really clear signal at every single colony,” Ms. Renner said. “It wasn’t some of them, it was all of them.”
Avian flu has had huge impacts on some bird populations around the world, but researchers have not seen much to date in Alaska, Ms. Renner said, so it does not appear to be playing a major role.
Notably, while various species were pummeled by the Pacific marine heat wave, including some fisheries stocks, not all showed declines. That suggests the oceanographic changes created “pinch points” in the food web rather than, say, taking out all predators.

Summit Carbon Solutions has demanded that opponents of its carbon dioxide pipeline project retract certain “false and defamatory” statements and cease further similar comments about the company.



Those statements “have now exposed you to significant legal liability,” according to a letter the company’s attorneys sent to Jess Mazour, of the Sierra Club of Iowa, in November. “Summit Carbon Solutions and its investors have invested over $1 billion in this project to date.”


The Sierra Club said Thursday that Summit has sent at least six of the letters, but it declined to reveal the other recipients.




“This isn’t going to stop us from doing what we’ve been doing for the last three years because we haven’t been doing anything illegal,” Mazour told The Gazette. “We’ve been working with impacted Iowans to protect our state from hazardous carbon pipelines, and we have every right to do that.”


Summit wants to build a sprawling pipeline system in five states that would transport captured carbon dioxide from more than 50 ethanol plants to North Dakota for underground sequestration.


It has gained route permits in three of them — including in Iowa — but not in South Dakota, where voters recently squashed new legislation that would have made it easier for Summit to gain a permit in that state. The company reapplied for a South Dakota permit last month after being denied last year.


The letter sent to Mazour targets her quote about the company in a newspaper article last year, in which she said: “Summit is using its power to take away democracy and people’s rights. They are in collusion with the Iowa Utilities Board to do so.”





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Pipeline opponents have accused the three-member board — now called the Iowa Utilities Commission — of favoring Summit over the public in its permit proceedings, which were accelerated after Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed a new chair and the previous chair resigned from the panel.


They also allege the use of eminent domain to force landowners to host the company’s pipe violates their constitutional rights, which is the subject of ongoing litigation.


Summit said Mazour’s statements are “factually incorrect and defamatory” and caused the company to “suffer significant economic and legal harm.”


The letter was not more specific about the harms suffered, and a company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


Trent Loos, a Nebraska farmer, said last week on his podcast “Across the Pond” that he had also been threatened by Summit in a letter dated the day before Mazour’s.


Loos admitted he had no proof that Summit had been recently threatening landowners on its proposed route with eminent domain, as he had claimed, but said two of his other statements the company objected to were accurate. That included his claim that the “kill zone” near a carbon dioxide pipeline breach extends for 3 miles.


“I stand by that,” he said.


Safety concerns about the pipeline system have led to numerous county ordinances that attempt to restrict the placement of Summit’s pipe. The company has sued six Iowa counties that adopted them, including Bremer.


“Summit is just really frustrated that the opposition group continues to grow, and they’re trying to hamper our free speech rights,” Mazour said.


Summit’s proposed system would span about 2,500 miles and cost an estimated $8 billion. The company had initially hoped to have it operational this year but has delayed that goal to 2026. Construction cannot start in Iowa until South Dakota issues the company a permit.


Two other companies that also proposed CO2 systems withdrew their permit requests in Iowa.

On summer and fall nights, Connie Mutel likes to sleep on a cushioned patio sofa on her screened-in porch.



She listens to the hooting of owls, the crickets’ chirps, and the soft sound of leaves brushing together in her wooded backyard.


But over time, much of the noise stopped.




She no longer hears the hooting of young owls — only the adults. She doesn’t hear the chirping of redhead birds in the mornings, signaling to their parents that they’re hungry. She doesn’t see as many eggs in her backyard hatch.


When the silence started to come this past summer, it was hard for Mutel not to notice.


“It just made me so sad,” Mutel said.


Mutel, who authored the Iowa conservation books “Sugar Creek Chronicle” and “Tending Iowa’s Land,” has been studying conservation and environmental issues for most of her life.





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The retired University of Iowa hydroscience and engineering historian and senior science writer has been studying ecology and conservation since the late 1960s.


Nature has been ever-present in Mutel’s life. From her youth in Wisconsin, to living in an “idyllic” cabin in the Colorado mountains, to building a home in Solon with her husband in the 1970s, nature has always been in the front of her consciousness.


Mutel didn’t keep her love for the natural world to herself. When her children were young, she sat with them on the back deck of their home and watched insects and nighttime birds fly around and hoot. The Mutels would congregate at one of the lights outside their home and watch insects be reeled in and listen to them buzz. Mutel watched her three sons try to catch nighttime moths in their hands.


That’s why, when she heard the silence in her backyard and across her land, it filled her with sadness.


“Not hearing some of these birds at night or knowing that they didn’t make it fills me with so much grief,” she said.


Mutel is just one longtime researcher and conservationist facing environmental grief head-on as Iowa’s environmental landscape continues to shift.


Only 0.1 percent of prairie land — once plentiful in Iowa — remains in the state. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources said grassland birds, like the Eastern Meadowlark or the Henslow’s sparrow, have declined by 53 percent since 1970. Statewide, forested land decreased by about 250,000 acres between 2012 and 2023.

‘Like a cancer’​

Dennis Schlicht spent 55 years and countless hours studying the skipper butterfly, traveling throughout Iowa and into Minnesota to document its habits, population and movement patterns.


About 10 years ago, he stopped. With the butterfly species in decline, it became too painful to keep going.


“It’s just in your face,” said Schlicht, 76. “We thought we were helping the process by doing surveys, but it turns out we were just overseeing the funeral.”


By 2000, Schlicht came to believe the species’ decline was irreversible. But he’d started seeing decline years before that.


According to the Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental organization, the Dakota skipper is “imperiled” across its habitat. It is on Iowa’s endangered species list, and has not been recorded in the state since 1992.


In general, there are about 115 butterfly species in Iowa and about 47 of them are skippers, Schlicht said. The skippers are disappearing faster.


Schlicht said the Dakota skipper — one of the species he studied the most — “is not a typical butterfly.” It’s smaller — the wingspan is two to three centimeters — and has rounded wings, more hair on its body, and almost appears mothlike.


The species has historically lived in tall-grass prairies. So, when the prairies started to disappear, so did the skipper.


Schlicht authored “The Butterflies of Iowa,” a manual for identifying butterfly species in Iowa and the Plains states.


But after publishing the book in 2007 and no longer being able to document the species in its native habitat, Schlicht said he “gave up.”


“It's just so depressing to go there and see nothing, you know?” Schlicht said. “Losing these native species is kind of like a cancer. How long do we wait before we do something?”

‘A grief that never ends’​

Mutel has experienced other formers of grief — like losing both of her parents. But the loss she feels over Iowa’s habitat and landscape changes, and the effects of climate change overall, is different.


“It’s because it’s ongoing,” Mutel said.


When she was writing “Sugar Creek Chronicle,” which published in 2016, Mutel weaved into the story her two bouts with breast cancer as a metaphor for climate change, showing that “they’re both invisible substances that can kill.”


Mutel, who has lived in her Solon home for more than 50 years with her husband, Robert, said she knows the woods surrounding her home. She knows where Eastern Phoebe birds nest and has watched the number of hatchlings dwindle. Every season brings a reminder of her “environmental grief.”


“It's a grief that never ends,” she said. “I think it's like picking off a scab. The scab heals. It's getting better. You pick it off, and the scab starts over again.”

anyone know where to find these?

We spend a shitload on the military and could use the ROI.
We are wasting military resources in far away places.
Feds need a massive infusion of wealth and cutting costs (while necessary) isn’t nearly enough.
Canada has what 30M people sitting on a landmass that should be supporting at least 10-20 times as many.
Canadians mostly live on 2 small slivers on their coasts and might not even know leave alone miss the middle 2-3 provinces after we take over. We could populate those places and massively drive GDP up and even give canadians a cut.

I know how to make Carver a better environment. FIRE FRAN!!