If so let me know I will be there for the huddle and the game.

AP Top 25 (12/16)
1. Tennessee (50) (10-0)
2. Auburn (12) (9-1)
3. Iowa State (9-1)
4. Kentucky (10-1)
5. Duke (8-2)
6. Alabama (8-2)
7. Florida (10-0)
8. Kansas (8-2)
9. Marquette (9-2)
10. Oregon (10-1)
11. Connecticut (8-3)
12. Texas A&M (9-2)
13. Gonzaga (7-3)
14. Oklahoma (10-0)
15. Houston (6-3)
16. Purdue (8-3)
17. Mississippi (9-1)
18. UCLA (9-1)
19. Cincinnati (8-1)
20. Michigan State (8-2)
21. Memphis (8-2)
23. San Diego State (7-2)
24. Michigan (8-2)
25. Clemson (9-2)

Others Receiving Votes
Mississippi State, Arkansas, Missouri, Baylor, Illinois, Drake, St. John's, Utah State, Pittsburgh, Maryland, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Arizona State, Creighton, North Carolina, Penn State, Indiana, Texas, St. Bonaventure

Dropped Out
Wisconsin (#20), Mississippi State (#25)

========================

Coaches Top 25 (12/16)
1. Tennessee (22) (10-0)
2. Auburn (9) (9-1)
3. Iowa State (9-1)
4. Kentucky (10-1)
5. Duke (8-2)
6. Florida (10-0)
7. Alabama (8-2)
8. Kansas (8-2)
9. Marquette (9-2)
10. Oregon (10-1)
11. Texas A&M (9-2)
12. Houston (6-3)
13. Connecticut (8-3)
14. Gonzaga (7-3)
15. Oklahoma (10-0)
16. Mississippi (9-1)
17. Purdue (8-3)
18. UCLA (9-1)
19. Michigan State (8-2)
20. Cincinnati (8-1)
21. Michigan (8-2)
22. Memphis (8-2)
23. San Diego State (7-2)
24. Dayton (9-2)
25. Mississippi State (9-1)

Others Receiving Votes
Clemson, Baylor, Illinois, St. John's, Drake, Utah State, Arkansas, Maryland, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Missouri, North Carolina, West Virginia, Creighton, Texas Tech, Penn State

Dropped Out
Clemson (#16), Wisconsin (#22), Baylor (#25)

Jordan Battle of the Bengals today became the latest dumbass to have a touchdown nullified by dropping the ball just before crossing the goal line. He picked up a Titans fumble and ran 61 yards for what should have been a TD. Except that for some reason at about the 5 yard line he decided to switch the ball from one hand to the other, but instead bobbled it and lost it out the back of the end zone for a touchback.

It wasn’t quite as egregious as most instances because it didn’t appear he was blatantly showboating, but the end result was an unforced error that wiped out a score and gave the ball back to the opponent.

I know these guys have seen this happen many times, either on television or in person. And at the time they had to be thinking “I don’t ever want to be that guy.”

But then they inexplicably become that guy.

Democrats have been caught doing the very thing they’ve been accusing President-elect Donald Trump of doing: Cutting Social Security.
On Wednesday, the U.K. Daily Mail reported Senate Democrats are trying to push through a Social Security reform bill they want to see signed by President Joe Biden before Trump takes office.
The Social Security Fairness Act aims to repeal provisions that reduce payouts to public sector employees who have their own separate pensions.
The CRFB also states, “As a result, we estimate a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033 would see their benefits cut by an additional $25,000 over their lifetime.”
The think tank says if Social Security runs out of money under this bill, as much as $400,000 in benefits would be lost for the average couple. CRFB states the cost for the bill over the next decade — citing the Congressional Budget Office — would be $190 billion.

MSNBC ratings collapse postelection, Fox News surges as cable faces an uncertain future​

When a sports team loses, its fans don't hang around for the postgame show.

The same goes for the tribal habits of cable news audiences.

Viewers have fled left-leaning MSNBC since Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential race to former President Trump on Nov. 5. The audience for the Comcast-owned channel is down 46% compared to the first 10 months of 2024, according to Nielsen data.

CNN, which has long battled ratings swings dictated by news coverage, is down 33% after the election.

Fox News, which last week presented Trump with its “Patriot of the Year” honor, has seen its audience surge. In November, the Murdoch family's network captured a 70% share of the cable news audience in the weeks since the president-elect won another term in the White House; that's the largest in its history.

The ratings tumult comes at a time when the cable business is facing an existential crisis, as more consumers are forgoing the pay-TV subscriptions that provide most of its revenue.

The corporate parents of the major news outlets are facing business challenges as well.

CNN is expected to make significant workforce cuts early next year as its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, tries to reduce debt.

Comcast is spinning off MSNBC and its other cable networks into a new company so that the declining business does not drag down its stock price. Some of MSNBC's biggest stars, including Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Stephanie Ruhle, have been asked to take pay cuts, as revenues and profits come under pressure.

While Fox News is more dominant than ever in the ratings, its corporate parent, Fox Corp., also faces uncertainty.

Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to give control of his media empire to his son Lachlan was rejected by a Nevada probate commissioner this week. The proposed change in the family trust, which aimed to cut out the more liberal-leaning Murdoch siblings, has led to speculation that there could be a conflict over the network’s conservative direction after the 93-year-old mogul dies.

While those factors loom, the networks also have to fight the ongoing trend of consumers cutting the cable cord. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are all currently available in around 66 million pay TV households, according to Nielsen data, a 28% decline from 2016, the year Trump’s unpredictable presidential candidacy turbocharged their ratings.

Despite the steady erosion of pay-TV coverage, Fox News and MSNBC have maintained their popularity among viewers still using cable.

Fox News will finish the year with an average of 1.5 million viewers over the full day, an increase of 5% from 2016. MSNBC has 820,000 viewers, up 35% from that year.

CNN, which has faced management changes and a shift away from opinionated hosts, has not fared as well, dropping 34% over the period to 493,000 viewers.

All of the cable news channels saw growth over 2023 thanks to major political events as the party nominations and debates brought in larger audiences. Through Dec. 10, Fox News is up 21%, MSNBC gained 5% and CNN increased 3%.

Trump remains a ratings driver for Fox News, and the network was again the main destination for viewers following his campaign.

From June 27, the date of President Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump, through July 12, Fox News saw its audience increase 51% compared to the period a year earlier, far higher than its competitors.

The levels spiked after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump through July 21, when Biden dropped out of the race — a turning point many Fox News commentators had speculated about for months. The network saw a 147% year-to-year increase over that span.

Just as Trump performed better this time with voters in liberal states such as New York and California, Fox News is seeing ratings lifts in Democratic cities as well. The gains began in October 2023 after Hamas launched its attack on Israel.

While the evidence is anecdotal, Fox News executives believe pro-Israel viewers in Democratic-leaning markets came to the network for its Middle East coverage. Some of them have stuck around.

Fox News also has pointed to Nielsen data that shows that a growing number of Democrats and self-described independent voters are watching.

“There is no doubt we are getting new viewers,” Fox Corp. Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic said at a recent UBS investors conference. “People think Fox News is just the conservatives of the United States. It’s not.”

But the biggest fan of Fox News will be found in the Oval Office starting in January. While Trump occasionally grumbles about the network's news coverage of him, he has dipped deep into its roster of hosts and contributors for cabinet posts, including his embattled defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth.

While Fox News is polarizing in the public discourse, its fans are loyal. A recent study of election night viewers by media research firm Magid showed Fox News viewers had the highest satisfaction level among those surveyed, followed by audiences for MSNBC, YouTube and local TV stations.

The Fox News audience grew the most after a tough year in which the network paid a $787-million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems over false fraud claims made during coverage of the 2020 election. Just a week after the decision, top-rated host Tucker Carlson was dumped by Murdoch, which led to an overall ratings decline.

But the network has long been successful at bouncing back from disruptions to its program lineup. Jesse Watters, a veteran personality on the network, replaced Carlson in his high-profile time period and is exceeding his ratings performance in total viewers and the 25-to-54 age demographic sought by advertisers.

Before the exodus of viewers post-election day, MSNBC's was on track for a second consecutive year of audience growth, a rarity in the cable business these days.

Nielsen data shows that most of those viewers — likely fatigued or depressed about the election's outcome — are tuning out news altogether. Many of them have headed for outlets that provide escapist entertainment, such as the Hallmark Channel.

The postelection dropoff has happened before. When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, MSNBC saw its prime-time ratings decline by 41% in the following weeks.

Fox News saw an audience decline in 2020 after Trump lost to Biden, with viewers particularly irked that the network had called Arizona for the Democrat days ahead of its competition.

MSNBC executives, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, are counting on the network's devoted viewers to return as well, especially as disappointment over the Democratic loss fades and Trump makes news with his campaign promises such as mass deportations of migrants. The hope is the viewing will bounce back in January and return to its pre-election levels by spring.

While liberal fans are said to be angry that MSNBC "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made peace with Trump in a Mar-a-Lago visit last month, the ratings drop on their influential Beltway-focused program is no larger than the declines occurring across the rest of the network.

MSNBC has a viewer panel it uses for research purposes. According to people familiar with the data who were not authorized to discuss it publicly, there have been only a handful of complaints about the network's election coverage. The network's programming has remained popular on YouTube, where it reaches younger viewers who likely don't have a cable subscription.

CNN improved on the lows it hit in 2023 but fell behind MSNBC for third place for the second consecutive year. As the pay-TV market deteriorates, CNN has stressed that it's focused on digital distribution of its journalism, adding a paywall to its web site, which Comscore says is visited by 147 million people a month. More subscription-based offerings are expected to be launched next year.

Caught up with James Dunnigan for some follow up on @Greg Smith's intel he shared yesterday.

Playing for Phil Parker appears to be a potentially strong pull for him to Iowa City.

This is premium content. Please subscribe to view.

A willful president claiming expansive executive power clashes with the Senate, including over his unorthodox appointments. The president’s clever allies point to a constitutional clause he might invoke to unburden himself of the recalcitrant upper chamber. Language tucked away in Article II, Section 3 says that if the House of Representatives and the Senate disagree “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”


Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

Voilà, say proponents: If the Senate goes too far in defying the president, he can summon the more pliant House to call for Congress to adjourn. When the Senate disagrees, the president can send them both packing. The president’s opponents, of course, warn of a constitutional crisis: “What principle of morality — what code of laws — what provision of the constitution,” one newspaper asks, would this president “not sweep away like a cobweb?”


This state of affairs could, of course, describe Washington in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2024 election. It actually describes Washington in 1834, during President Andrew Jackson’s second term, as his battle with the Senate over the Bank of the United States reached a crescendo.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...?itid=mc_magnet-cartoons_inline_collection_20

The 1834 debate over the scope of the president’s power to adjourn Congress has been largely forgotten. But it can shed light on a troubling constitutional clause that a bold or desperate president might try to exploit. The history also contains broader lessons for America’s current era of populist politics and constitutional hardball: that fears of a dictatorial presidency extend far back in the country’s history, and that any quasi-monarchical powers the Constitution does afford American presidents are best left untested at their limits.

Unlike Trump, who in 2020 explicitly threatened to adjourn Congress, Jackson never did so. But early in 1834, newspapers began to circulate rumors of a purported plot to bring the Senate to heel. “The Kitchen Cabinet” — a derisive term invented for Jackson’s band of partisan political advisers — “have a scheme for shortening the session,” claimed a dispatch in the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer.


“It has been the talk here for some days past that the President intends to prorogue Congress about the first of April, provided the House will agree to adjourn, and the Senate prove refractory,” said a letter in the Columbian Centinel. But the writer added that this was unlikely: Jackson “would not dare to play the part of a Cromwell and Napoleon.”
Some Jackson opponents weren’t so sure. Congressional records show that on March 12, 1834, John Quincy Adams — the former president and Jackson foe who was then a representative from Massachusetts — warned in a speech of “whispers within this Hall” that “a disagreement is to be gotten up between the two Houses of Congress” so that the House could serve Jackson’s “royal prerogative.”
He expressed alarm that “a question of presidential power, which, until this memorable day, has slept undisturbed in the constitution” was now up for debate. Another representative, George McDuffie of South Carolina, said in April: “We are not, indeed, without some very significant indications that this royal mandate will be executed.”

ADVERTISING


The Globe, a paper close to Jackson’s administration, published a forceful defense of presidential adjournment power two days after Adams’s speech. It accused senators of threatening to stay in session until the Bank of the United States — which Jackson had vowed to destroy — was rechartered. Jackson could preempt this supposed senatorial extortion: The Constitution, the Globe insisted, empowers “the Executive, whenever the two Houses, on any occasion, cannot agree as to the time of their adjournment, to interpose and untie for them the Gordian knot.”




Though the Senate infuriated Jackson by censuring him in March 1834, the two houses of Congress ended their session voluntarily without rechartering the bank. Jackson didn’t need to act against the Senate, but he probably thought the Globe was right that he had the constitutional power to do so. A veto message on unrelated legislation in the last year of his presidency asserted “the contingent power of the Executive” to intervene in Congress’s adjournment decisions in the future. No president has ever exercised that power, and its scope remains unknown.
Jackson’s political opponents, the Whigs, advanced two interpretations that would limit the president’s adjournment prerogative. The first was that the prerogative applied only during extraordinary sessions of Congress called into being by the president. After all, as Maryland Sen. Robert Henry Goldsborough noted in an 1836 rebuttal to Jackson’s veto, the Constitution mentions adjournment “in the same breath” as it mentions the ability to convene special sessions. The president, says Article II, Section 3:

may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.

Click to expand...

That context arguably limits the president’s power, as one writer argued in May 1834 in the Richmond Whig & Public Advertiser. The adjournment prerogative, he observed, is triggered “‘in case of disagreement between them’ — between whom? The two Houses — what two Houses? The two Houses extraordinarily assembled — the only two Houses alluded to in the section.”
This narrower view of the clause made pragmatic as well as linguistic sense. Extraordinary sessions of Congress were common during the first half of American history, when the national legislature was a part-time body. As an article in the National Gazette and Literary Register observed, “no great injury can result from permitting the President” to dismiss a Congress he himself convened.
But allowing a president to combine with one house of Congress to suppress the other in a regular session would undermine the legislative branch’s ability to check the executive. The Gazette piece claimed that if the president’s power applied even to ordinary sessions of Congress without limitation, “it would virtually establish a Dictatorship.”


The Globe insisted that the president’s adjournment prerogative applied to all congressional sessions, no ifs, ands or buts. The pro-Jackson editorialists even appealed to the Constitution’s drafting history to support their point. They noted that in an early draft of the Constitution, the president’s power to call special sessions and his power to adjourn Congress “were written separately, in distinct sentences.” It was only in a later draft that they were “condensed into one sentence.” That suggested that the president’s adjournment prerogative existed independently of his power to convene Congress, the Globe argued. The Framers ultimately linked the two powers together “from mere taste as to punctuation and euphony in the structure of the section.”

President Joe Biden plans to create two new national monuments in California in the coming days, according to two people briefed on the announcement, aiming to cement his environmental legacy before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

The two individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet public.

Biden will sign a proclamation establishing the roughly 644,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park, the people said. The move would bar drilling, mining, solar-energy farms and other industrial activity in the area. It also would honor the wishes of several Native American tribes that have revered the landscape for thousands of years, and would expand local Latino communities’ access to outdoor recreation areas.


The president also will sign a proclamation creating the roughly 200,000-acre Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California near the Oregon border, the people said. The Pit River Tribe has spearheaded the campaign to protect that area from energy development.
🌱
Follow Climate & environment
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Biden has already used his executive authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create six new national monuments and expand four others. After signing the proclamations, he will have protected more public lands than any other president in a single term, with the exception of Jimmy Carter.
Trump, in contrast, significantly shrank two national monuments in Utah during his first term. He slashed more than 1.9 million acres in total from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments — known for their stunning desert vistas and wealth of Native American artifacts.


Three Democratic lawmakers from California — Rep. Raul Ruiz and Sens. Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler — have introduced legislation to create the Chuckwalla National Monument. Padilla has also championed a bill to protect Sáttítla.
But neither measure has advanced in the divided Congress. The Antiquities Act authorizes the president to protect lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans without congressional approval.

‘A hugely significant milestone’​

The Chuckwalla National Monument will be named after the chuckwalla lizards that roam the junction of the Mojave, Sonoran and Colorado deserts. The region is also home to bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and iconic bird species such as golden eagles and greater roadrunners.

Chuckwalla would be immediately southeast of Joshua Tree National Park, which ranked as the ninth most-visited national park in 2023, attracting more than 3.2 million people that year, according to the National Park Service.


The area is part of the ancestral homelands of several Indigenous peoples, including the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mohave, Quechan and Serrano tribes. The Quechan people say their ancestors emerged from a sacred mountain in Nevada — Avi Kwa Ame, which Biden designated as a monument in 2022 — and then migrated through this stretch of desert, dropping pottery shards as trail markers and leaving petroglyphs as guidance for future generations.
“If someone went and bulldozed the Vatican, that would be the equivalent of desecrating this desert for us,” said Donald Medart, a council member of the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe.

For the Cahuilla people, the reddish hue of the rocks and mountains comes from the blood of Mukat, the Cahuilla creator god who was exiled to this area. They say that when Mukat died, his remains became vegetation to sustain his people, including mesquite trees whose beans can be cooked or ground into flour.
A monument designation “would be a hugely significant milestone,” said Thomas Tortez Jr., tribal council chairman of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians. “It’s the best way that we can protect our original homelands.”

Let's fight on a Monday. Who's your mid year POTY and WPOTY?

Also if this is a pepsi someone please link me the thread, I didn't even look.

Before giving a semi time to merge back over after passing? The extra 15 seconds you’ll save on your drive isn’t worth getting road splattered. Well maybe you deserve it idiots. Happy holidays