One if bad but 2 similar ones, both with bombs, although the New Orleans ieds didnt go off

Republicans are apoplectic that President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for his son, Hunter, both for his existing gun and tax evasion convictions and potentially any other shady dealings between 2014 and 2024. Meanwhile, Democrats are furious about the conflicts of interest engulfing the president-elect’s entire family.


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So, here’s a suggestion to bring the country together: Pass bipartisan legislation stating exactly what business entanglements are kosher for a president’s family members and which are not.
If a deal is dodgy when a Democratic president’s family member does it, it’s dodgy when a Republican president’s family does it, too. This presumably includes many of Hunter Biden’s sketchy transactions that the GOP has amplified and investigated, including: his payments as a board member for a Ukrainian energy firm accused of bribery; his multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese company; and his late-in-life, astonishingly lucrative turn as a visual artist.



No legal repercussions came of those dealings despite congressional and Justice Department investigations. Even so, some of the particulars do look gross. So, maybe there should be guardrails limiting the ability of family members to capitalize on their relatives in government — or at least requiring more disclosures about when such dealings occur, especially if they involve foreign entities.
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If put into place, of course, such restrictions would also ensnare virtually the entire Trump clan — for nearly every transaction they engage in. The Trumps’ unsubtle quids and quos make Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings look as innocuous as a lemonade stand.
For starters, there’s Jared Kushner’s no-expectations investment fund, which he founded shortly after leaving his father-in-law’s first administration in 2021. At least 99 percent of the roughly $3 billion that Kushner raised has come from overseas sources. Of that, $2 billion was bankrolled by the Saudi government, even though the Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s own advisers had concluded that giving Kushner money would be unwise (because of Kushner’s “inexperience” and “excessive” asset management fees, among other reasons, the New York Times reported).



Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has been slow to make any actual investments with this money — ostensibly the point of the fund — but Kushner has continued to collect annual fees just for sitting on funders’ cash. As of September, Affinity Partners received at least $157 million in fees from foreign clients, a Senate investigation found. Kushner has not yet returned a penny in profits to investors. (“Partisan politics aside, Affinity Partners is an S.E.C.-registered investment firm that has always acted appropriately and any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the company’s legal officer said in a statement to the Times.)


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...d=mc_magnet-optrumpadmin_inline_collection_19

To be fair, Kushner did all this after leaving Trump’s first administration, and Trump has not named him to any formal role in the second. But Hunter Biden never had any government role. Meanwhile, one of the other principals at Kushner’s fund, Kevin Hassett, will serve in both Trump terms: He starts next month as Trump’s top economic adviser.
Kushner also appeared to profit from his role in government back while he was still (supposedly) serving the American people. Recall that the Qatari sovereign wealth fund bailed out a different Kushner investment while he was still overseeing Middle East policy in the White House.



These are hardly the only cases of apparent influence-peddling from Trump’s offspring or their spouses. His sons have been hawking a family crypto project, World Liberty Financial. It was initially a bust, with sales falling 90 percent short of the company’s initial goal. But like the president-elect, World Liberty made a striking comeback last month. Corporate executives have been gobbling up tokens, presumably hoping to curry favor with the Trump kids or the next president himself.
Take Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who recently gained fame for buying a $6 million banana, who was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (His company says the charge “lacks merit.”) Sun announced last week that he had bought $30 million in World Liberty tokens, making him the project’s biggest investor.
“World Liberty Financial can be a beacon to move forward the whole blockchain industry in the U.S.,” Sun gushed to Bloomberg about a crypto product that until recently had been worthless.



These are not the only conflicts of interest afflicting the incoming Trump administration. Plenty of other senior administration picks — including people unrelated to the president-elect by either blood or marriage — have financial entanglements that present serious problems. Trump himself is a minefield of conflicts, with business dealings both in the United States and abroad.
All of these people chose to occupy public office, unlike most family members of presidents (or vice presidents); surely the constraints on their financial concerns should be stricter. At the very least, Republican lawmakers angry about the foreign dealings of the outgoing president’s kid can act on their righteous indignation by holding the next administration to a higher ethical bar. Assuming, of course, that the Hunter Biden inquisitions were ever about ethics at all.

Didn't hop on Fran's Zoom availability this morning, as I was heading over to bowl practice. Haven't listened to the whole thing yet, either.

Heard he said that Seydou Traore is back to 100% and he'll play against New Hampshire.

Rest of the availability here:
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The pressure campaign against U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst is mounting — including from some Iowa Republicans — as she has so far refused to commit to supporting Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Defense.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird penned a column in the conservative website Breitbart urging the Senate to confirm Trump's Cabinet nominees. Although it doesn't call out Ernst by name, she castigates the "D.C. politicians" who "think they can ignore the voices of their constituents and entertain smears from the same outlets that have pushed out lies for years."

"What we’re witnessing in Washington right now is a Deep State attempt to undermine the will of the people," Bird, a Trump endorser, wrote. "We must not let Washington kill nominations before the Constitutional confirmation process even begins."

Bird's spokesperson, Alyssa Brouillet, said in a statement the article was meant generally to encourage "the entire U.S. Senate" to confirm Trump's appointees. She accused the Des Moines Register of "always trying to pit Republicans against each other."

POLITICS

Backlash to Iowa Republican US Sen. Joni Ernst mounts amid Pete Hegseth nomination fight​

Brianne Pfannenstiel Sabine Martin
Des Moines Register








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(This story was edited to add new information.)

The pressure campaign against U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst is mounting — including from some Iowa Republicans — as she has so far refused to commit to supporting Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Defense.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird penned a column in the conservative website Breitbart urging the Senate to confirm Trump's Cabinet nominees. Although it doesn't call out Ernst by name, she castigates the "D.C. politicians" who "think they can ignore the voices of their constituents and entertain smears from the same outlets that have pushed out lies for years."


"What we’re witnessing in Washington right now is a Deep State attempt to undermine the will of the people," Bird, a Trump endorser, wrote. "We must not let Washington kill nominations before the Constitutional confirmation process even begins."

Bird's spokesperson, Alyssa Brouillet, said in a statement the article was meant generally to encourage "the entire U.S. Senate" to confirm Trump's appointees. She accused the Des Moines Register of "always trying to pit Republicans against each other."


"It is no secret that Attorney General Bird has been supportive of President Trump and his cabinet picks from the very beginning," she said. "Just this week, Attorney General Bird sent a letter to U.S. Senate leadership, urging them to confirm Pam Bondi as U.S. Attorney General. President Trump needs his team in the field to ensure Washington works for America — not the other way around."

Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative commentator and media personality, posted on the social media website X that he would be willing to run against Ernst in a Republican primary if she seeks reelection in 2026.

"Defeating an incumbent US Senator takes high name ID, connections, and funding potential," he wrote. "I'm one of the few people in Iowa with all three. I don't want to be a Senator, but I am willing to primary her for the good of the cause if I'm assured I have Trump's support going in. Or I am willing to throw my support and network behind someone else President Trump prefers to primary Joni Ernst instead."

Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson defended Ernst in a call with Iowa reporters Friday morning, calling her a "fierce conservative fighter."

"She has dedicated her life to serving our Iowans and her country, and it is her constitutional duty to vet all of these nominees thoroughly, and I think that's what she is doing," Hinson said. "That's what she has pledged to do."


In a statement Friday evening, Hinson said Hegseth is a strong pick to lead the Department of Defense.

"I was able to hear him speak earlier this week and think he will be a disruptor, end woke DEI infecting our military, and cut through the endless bureaucracy at the Pentagon," she said. "I’m counting down the days until Trump is in the White House and we can get to work to Make America Great Again.”

In the hours since Ernst's Fox News interview, there has been intense blowback online from the right.

In Iowa, the right-wing Iowa Standard blog has been vocal about calling for a primary challenge to Ernst, highlighting past stances she's taken that were in opposition to Trump.

And Donald Trump Jr. posted on X a list of Republican senators, including Ernst, who voted for Democratic President Joe Biden's defense secretary pick, Lloyd Austin, saying it's "a disgrace" for any of those senators to now withhold support from Hegseth.

A group of Eastern Iowa residents met Tuesday in Cedar Rapids with a staff member from U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst’s office to urge the Iowa Republican to vote against the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary for his role in spreading misinformation about vaccine safety.
The group, organized by the advocacy organization Progress Iowa, said Kennedy is unfit to lead to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to oversee the federal agencies that play a central role in directing U.S. public health policy, including vaccine development and immunization activities.

The renowned vaccine skeptic told NBC News last month that he would not “take away anybody's vaccines,” and has insisted he's not "anti-vaccine" despite his involvement with Children's Health Defense, a leading anti-vaccine group, and repeating debunked claims that vaccines cause autism. Kennedy also undermined confidence in the measles vaccine ahead of a deadly outbreak in Samoa in 2019 and promoted AIDS falsehoods, according to reporting by the New York Times.

​

Diana Siguenza, a retired nurse who lives in Cedar Rapids, and Sue Cahalan, a retired physician assistant from Norway, Iowa, expressed strong opposition to RFK Jr.’s nomination, citing his lack of experience in health care and his anti-vaccination stance.

They highlighted his history with the Children's Health Defense, his involvement in lawsuits against vaccines and his travels to promote anti-vaccination views. The pair said Kennedy’s confirmation could undermine public health by eroding trust in vaccines and evidence-based medicine.
Siguenza said she fears dire consequences of his potential policies, particularly for cancer research and global health. She noted that many cancer treatments are based on vaccines that help the body recognize and fight cancer cells.

Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer diagnoses in the nation, behind Kentucky. It also has the distinction of being the only state to report a notable increase in cancer rates in recent years.


Siguenza and Cahalan said they hope their concerns will influence Ernst’s decision.

“President Trump trusts RFK Jr. to bring more transparency to our federal public health agencies, and Senator Ernst looks forward to meeting with and vetting him,” Ernst’s office said in a statement to The Gazette.

Iowa AG urges confirmation of Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general​

Republican Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird joined a letter signed by 29 other state attorneys general to U.S. Senate leadership urging swift confirmation of Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s new pick for U.S. Attorney General.
Iowa Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met Monday with Bondi. The 59-year-old Trump ally was part of a team of lawyers that defended the then-president during his first Senate impeachment trial, where he was accused — but not convicted — of attempting to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate then-former Vice President Joe Biden.


Bondi, who served as Florida Attorney General from 2011 to 2019, also was involved in efforts to delegitimize the results of the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost to Biden, falsely claiming that Trump had “won Pennsylvania” at a news conference in Philadelphia and claiming voter fraud, according to reporting by the Tampa Bay Times.

She also served on a federal commission during Trump’s first term focused on combating drug addiction and the opioid crisis.
“President Trump made an exceptional choice with Pam Bondi for U.S. Attorney General,” Bird said in a statement. “Attorney General Bondi is tough, smart, and fierce. She has been a historic leader in the fight against drug abuse and human trafficking, and she will restore integrity to our federal justice system. I’ve known Attorney General Bondi both as a friend and fellow prosecutor, and I have full confidence that she will serve our country well as U.S. Attorney General.”


Iowa joined the South Carolina and Florida-led letter signed by attorneys general and attorneys general-elect from 27 other states.

Tristan has been dominant this season.

On Sunday, he dominated Khalil Mack.

Check this out & Watch:

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Michael Brewer, half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, who scored an unlikely Top 10 hit in 1971 with “One Toke Over the Line” — one of the most overt pop odes to marijuana of the hippie era and presumably the only one to be performed on the squeaky-clean “Lawrence Welk Show” — died on Tuesday at his home near Branson, Mo. He was 80.
His death was confirmed in a social media post by his longtime recording and performing partner, Tom Shipley. No cause was given.
While often categorized as a one-hit wonder, Brewer & Shipley actually notched two other singles on the Billboard Hot 100: “Tarkio Road,” which climbed to No. 55 in June 1970, and “Shake Off the Demon,” which sneaked in at No. 98 in February 1972.
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Mr. Brewer, left, and Mr. Shipley met in a coffee house in Kent, Ohio.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The duo, who recorded many albums in the 1970s and a few more in the ’90s, were known for their songs’ socially conscious lyrics on topics like the Vietnam War. But it was their sunny signature tune, with its indelible line “One toke over the line, sweet Jesus,” that etched them into pop-culture history.
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At the outset, Mr. Brewer and Mr. Shipley considered the song anything but a potentially career-defining composition. “We wrote it literally entertaining ourselves and to make our friends laugh,” Mr. Brewer recalled in a 2022 interview on the music podcast “A Breath of Fresh Air.”
The two were between sets during a gig at a nightclub in Kansas City, Mo., when inspiration, fueled by some potent cannabis, hit.
“We were getting ready to go onstage for our fourth set,” Mr. Brewer said, “and a friend came by with some really good Lebanese hash. We stepped out back and took a couple of tokes and came back in to tune up for our last set, and Tom said, ‘Man, I’m one toke over the line.’ And I just cracked up.”
Mr. Brewer began improvising a melody around that line, and the next day the two banged out the song in about an hour.
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At the time, they were recording their third album, “Tarkio” (1970), and considered “One Toke” too trifling to commit to wax. They performed it live only out of necessity when they opened for the singer-songwriter Melanie at Carnegie Hall not long afterward.
“We went over really well, had a couple of encores, and then we basically ran out of songs,” Mr. Brewer told Rockcellar magazine in 2012. “We said, ‘Let’s do that new song. Nothin’ to lose.’ So we did, and everybody loved it.”
To their surprise, their record label insisted that they include it on their forthcoming album. The next thing they knew, it was a single, which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard singles chart in April 1971. But as Brewer & Shipley would soon find out, that was a fraught era for drug songs.

Charles Michael Brewer was born on April 14, 1944, in Oklahoma City, the eldest of four children. He played drums and sang in a rock band in high school before switching to guitar. After graduation in 1962, he began performing his own songs in coffee houses around the country and eventually met Mr. Shipley, who grew up near Cleveland, at one in Kent, Ohio.
Settling in San Francisco in 1965, Mr. Brewer formed the duo Mastin & Brewer with the singer-songwriter Tom Mastin, whose song “How Do You Feel” would be recorded by Jefferson Airplane. After moving to Los Angeles, the two signed with Columbia Records and formed a band that opened for top acts like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.
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Mr. Mastin, who suffered from depression, left the band before they could cut an album. Mr. Brewer then joined forces with Mr. Shipley, who by then was living near him in Los Angeles, and they signed on as staff songwriters for a publishing arm of A&M Records.
“Michael and I were both Midwesterners, Midwestern values,” Mr. Shipley said in “One Toke Over the Line … and Still Smokin’,” a 2021 documentary about the duo. “Neither one of us were looking for stardom.”
Still, they started playing their own compositions around town and recorded their first album, “Down in L.A.,” released by A&M in 1968.
The success of “One Toke Over the Line,” recorded after the duo returned to the Midwest, brought complications. In September 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, in a speech in Las Vegas, warned that drug use was threatening “to sap our national strength” and called out a number of pop songs, including the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” as “latent drug culture propaganda.”
Within a year, under the Nixon administration, the Federal Communications Commission warned broadcasters about playing songs with lyrics that might promote drug use. As a result, “One Toke Over the Line” was banned by radio stations in Buffalo, Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Brewer & Shipley, Mr. Brewer said, came to embrace the crackdown as “a badge of honor.”
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
The duo continued to perform for years, and Mr. Brewer also made a few albums as a solo artist.

The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.

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Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate — a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.

“Kamala said, 'Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”


Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”
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The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments, has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”
In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.
“If you take Trump and all his characteristics, it’s almost exactly as any prosperity gospel preacher,” said Tony Tian-Ren Lin, an Asian-Latino pastor in New York who wrote a book on Latino Americans and the prosperity gospel. “The big personality, talking a big game, saying things like ‘no one can do it’ but him … If for years you’ve been listening to someone like that, you’re not surprised when a political leader says those things.”


Nationally, network exit polls showed that between 2020 and 2024, Trump gained 14 points in support among Latinos, although a bare majority favored Harris, the Democratic nominee. In that same period, he gained 25 points among Latino Catholics and 18 points among Latino evangelical Protestants.




The shift is evident here in Lehigh County, in the eastern part of pivotal Pennsylvania. It is the county with the highest proportion of Latino voters — 29 percent, according to the U.S. Census. The Democratic Party’s margin in presidential contests shrank in Lehigh by 4.9 percentage points, from 7.6 percentage points in 2020 to 2.7 percentage points in 2024. But in majority-Latino Allentown, the county’s biggest city, the move toward Trump was even more pronounced. The 10 city precincts with the highest-proportion of Latino voters shifted to Trump by an average of 20 percentage points since Trump faced eventual winner Joe Biden in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of precinct results from Lehigh County and demographic data from L2, an election data provider.
The prosperity gospel is rooted in American Pentecostalism and evangelical Protestantism, but experts say it’s become huge across faith in general, and especially among unaffiliated, often online spiritual influencers. Trump grew up in the church of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, whose book “The Power of Positive Thinking,” was a huge bestseller and is considered a classic of the prosperity gospel.
A Pew Research Center survey in 2014 found wide majorities of Protestants and Catholics in almost all of Latin America agreed that “God will grant wealth and good health to believers who have enough faith.” In the Dominican Republic — the ancestral or birth home for many in Allentown — 76 percent of Protestants agreed and 79 percent of Catholics did. The firm PRRI asked a similar question in March and found 44 percent of U.S. Latinos overall agreed, higher than any other group except African Americans. What that means politically is that wealthy candidates like Trump are seen by some as both faithful and worthy of emulation.


The movement started in the United States with healers and televangelists such as Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn, who told followers that giving them money would lead to divine blessings, conjuring a transactional God. By extension, personal wealth was seen as a goal for the faithful. It focused on the power of the self, and the idea that God would reward positivity, hard work and confidence.

"She" [It] so Hawt!!



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Couple quick things before I write or post any more videos.

-Aaron Graves is for sure coming back next season -- thought he was going to.
-Hank Brown and Jimmy Sullivan are joining the team for bowl prep. Haven't practiced with the team yet, but they will be starting today and going with the team to Nashville.
-Sounds like Sully is fully healthy and good to go. Stratton said he and Brendan are splitting reps right now, though.
-KF was also super critical of everything going on in the portal and across the NCAA right now.

More to come story-wise.

Here's KF's availability:

Player of the Week
Serah Williams, Wisconsin
Junior – Forward – Brooklyn, N.Y. – Niagara Prep
• Registered a career-high 36 points in Wisconsin’s double-overtime win over Butler
• Tallied 14 rebounds, three blocks, three assists and a pair of steals
• Her 36 points ranked fifth among the Badgers’ single-game scoring list and were the most points since Jolene Anderson scored 42 during the 2007-08 season
• Earns the second Big Ten Player of the Week award of her career
• Last Wisconsin Player of the Week: Serah Williams (Jan. 29, 2024)

Freshman of the Week
Kiyomi McMiller, Rutgers
Guard – Silver Spring, Md. – Life Center Academy
• Averaged 27.0 points, 10.5 rebounds, 5.5 assists and 2.5 steals during Rutgers’ 2-0 week
• Chipped in 30 points, 11 rebounds, five assists and three steals against Fairleigh Dickinson
• Added 24 points, 10 rebounds, six assists and two steals versus Wagner
• Collects her first Big Ten Freshman of the Week laurel
• Last Rutgers Freshman of the Week: Jillian Huerter (Feb. 5, 2024)

And the Hawkeyes showed they want nothing to do with it.

50/50 balls, too.

Effort and execution were good until the end - when it matters most.

My wife has an extremely difficult time sleeping some nights.

She has never smoked pot in her life and probably won't, but I think she would try a pot gummy if it helped her sleep.

Suggestions on something to try?

Live in Iowa, do we have to drive to IL to buy something?

Went in there to get a printer. Kind of a ghost town in there. I don't know how they stay in business. Used to be well stocked. Kind of an upscale better version of a radio shack minus all the resistors and wiring.