Top is the new offer today. I'll add the other offers we previously reported on here as well.

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The amount of tax revenue collected by the state in the coming budget year will be less than current state spending, according to new projections from the state’s nonpartisan fiscal estimating panel.



The roughly $200 million shortfall, driven largely by less state income tax revenue as a result of recent tax cuts, means when state lawmakers craft the next state budget they will need to either reduce some current state spending or dip into the more than $6 billion in state reserves.


The three-member Revenue Estimating Conference published the projections during its meeting Thursday at the Iowa Capitol.




Iowa is projected to collect $8.7 billion in the 2026 state budget year, which begins July 1, according to the panel’s estimates. In the current state budget year, Iowa is spending $8.9 billion.


If the panel’s projection is accurate, state lawmakers when they craft the next state budget during the 2025 legislative session will need to reduce state general fund spending by roughly $200 million or use unspent money in the state general fund or one of the state’s reserve accounts.


As of May, there was $2.4 billion unspent in the state’s general fund for the current budget year, according to a report from the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency. The state also has another $3.7 billion in its Taxpayer Relief Fund, which was created to cover any potential shortfalls as the result of state tax reductions.


The projected decrease in 2026 budget year revenue is driven largely by reduced tax collections resulting from tax cuts that created a 3.8 percent state income tax rate for most working Iowans starting in 2025.





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The state will see a drop of $687 million in personal income tax collections in the 2026 budget year, a 12.3 percent drop from the current budget year, according to the panel’s projections.


The tax cuts, enacted over multiple bills and starting in 2019, have gradually reduced the number of state income tax brackets and lowered rates. In 2023 there were four brackets ranging from 4.4 percent to 6 percent, and in 2024 there were three brackets ranging from 4.4 percent to 5.7 percent.


In 2025, most working Iowans will pay a 3.8 percent state income tax rate.

What Iowa leaders are saying​

While statehouse Democrats sounded alarms over the projections, Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulsen, an REC member appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds and a former Republican Speaker of the Iowa House, said between the state’s reserve accounts and what he described as a fiscally responsible state government, he believes Iowa tax revenues will grow to support state spending before those reserve accounts are exhausted.


“The trick on that is trying to get where you get that projection correct, so that as you draw that (budget surplus) down, you never get on the bottom side of that,” Paulsen told reporters after Thursday’s meeting. “And I think so far they’ve been making — and by that, I mean the General Assembly (and) governor — been making prudent decisions that will draw that down at a rate that is sustainable, and the state will grow right out of it.”


Gov. Kim Reynolds, in a statement, said the state income tax cuts are “working as designed.” Reynolds has in the past advocated for a complete elimination of the state income tax.


“As I’ve said, the government has been taking in too much taxpayer money. We fixed that by cutting taxes and taking in less. That means Iowans get to keep more of what they earn, and that’s how it should be,” Reynolds’ statement said. “Our state’s fiscal health remains strong, and Iowa’s economy continues to grow.”


Statehouse Democrats criticized the budget priorities of statehouse Republicans, who by virtue of their majorities have complete control of the state lawmaking and budgeting process.


“Today’s negative revenue projections confirm what most Iowans feel: the Reynolds economy is not working for everyday people,” Iowa Rep. Timi Brown-Powers, a Democrat from Waterloo on the House’s budget committee, said in a statement. “Tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy combined with vouchers have created an unsustainable budget while costs keep rising for Iowa families.”


Iowa Sen. Janet Petersen, a Democrat from Des Moines on the Senate’s budget committee, in a statement expressed concern for state public school funding and other Democratic priorities because of shrinking overall state tax revenue and increasing costs to the state’s new private school financial assistance program.


“Republican lawmakers’ and Gov. Reynolds’ priorities put private school vouchers and corporate tax giveaways ahead of our kids in public schools, seniors in nursing homes, and tax relief for working families,” Petersen’s statement said.

The question has hung over New York City politics for months: Would Donald J. Trump pardon Mayor Eric Adams if he was convicted on federal corruption charges?
On Monday, Mr. Trump said he would consider it.
Mr. Trump was asked at a wide-ranging news conference in Florida whether he would consider pardoning Mr. Adams, and he replied yes. The president-elect said that the mayor of New York had been treated “pretty unfairly” by federal prosecutors.
“Being upgraded in an airplane many years ago — I know probably everybody here has been upgraded,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, was indicted on federal corruption charges in September and is expected to go on trial in April. The mayor is accused of receiving thousands of dollars’ worth of travel benefits from Turkish officials over several years, including flight upgrades on Turkish Airlines.
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Mr. Adams has found a political ally in Mr. Trump, a Republican who has defended Mr. Adams and said that both men were “persecuted” by federal prosecutors.
Mr. Adams has praised parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda and said that he hopes to work with him on cracking down on immigrants who are accused of crimes, raising alarm among many Democratic elected officials.
Mr. Adams, a former police officer who was once a registered Republican, recently opened the door to becoming a Republican again. Two of his advisers have been quietly trying to secure a ticket for Mr. Adams to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration in Washington next month.
Mr. Trump said on Monday that he would need to review the details of the case. But Mr. Trump repeated his claim that he had predicted that Mr. Adams would be indicted after the mayor criticized the Biden administration over an influx of more than 200,000 migrants into the city.
Mr. Adams has similarly argued that he was targeted by federal prosecutors because of his public statements about the migrant crisis.

​

In October, Mr. Trump and Mr. Adams attended a charity event in Manhattan where Mr. Trump expressed empathy for the mayor’s situation.
“I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the D.O.J. for speaking out against open borders,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Justice Department. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”
Mr. Trump said in an interview with Time magazine that one of his first acts as president would be to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault.

The purple jabberwocky ate rock candy on a box spring in his mother’s underwear.

tough spot to be the son of a GOAT

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Dec 15. Getting underway. Got two more weeks. New years ”resolution"

Enter the haze

Almost exactly a century ago, in February 1925, Chief Justice William Howard Taft persuaded Congress to grant the Supreme Court an extraordinary power: to pick which cases it would decide.
Most courts do not get to choose the cases they will hear, and their central task is to resolve disputes one at a time. The Supreme Court, by contrast and by dint of the largely unfettered discretion over its docket granted by the Judiciary Act of 1925, understands its job to be quite different: to announce legal principles that will apply in countless cases.
The law effectively changed the court into a policymaking body, and the nation has yet to come to terms with “the immense powers of this new role,” Robert C. Post, a professor at Yale Law School and its former dean, wrote in a new study.
“The transformation has led to an ever-deepening crisis of the court’s authority,” he added.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch made the key distinction — between resolving individual disputes and setting down broad legal principles — when the court heard arguments in April on Donald J. Trump’s claim, as a former president, of absolute immunity from prosecution.
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“I’m not concerned about this case,” Justice Gorsuch said, adding, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.”
Granting the court the power to set its own agenda has caused it to gravitate toward particular sorts of cases, Karen M. Tani, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argued recently in the annual foreword to The Harvard Law Review.
“The vast discretionary portion of the docket is decidedly not an objective representation of the legal questions that matter most to the American people,” she wrote, adding that “the court’s discretion has flowed along particular channels — toward issues that have preoccupied the conservative legal movement.”
Even as the court agreed to hear cases last term that ended up boosting Mr. Trump’s prospects and dealing blows to federal regulators, Professor Tani wrote, it turned down an alternative slate of cases on questions of urgent concerns to many Americans — like consumer debt, child support and fair housing.
At his confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. famously compared judges to umpires, both in the business of calling balls and strikes. The metaphor, Professor Tani wrote, “registers differently when one recognizes that the court also has some ability to field the players, assign the batting order and dictate which pitches can be thrown.”

​

When the 1925 law was enacted, it was widely viewed as a modest and sensible adjustment that would let the justices focus on important matters.
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Until then, the court’s docket was both dull and crushing. “You little realize the amount of grinding, uninteresting, bone labor there is in writing more than half the cases decided by the Supreme Court,” Justice John Hessin Clarke wrote in 1922 in explaining his resignation after just six years.
But the changes spurred by the law would have deeper effects than workload management, and Chief Justice Taft knew it.
In a 1921 speech, he argued that the Supreme Court was “not a tribunal constituted to secure, as its ultimate end, justice to the immediate parties.” Instead, he said, the court’s job was to make sure the law was uniform across the nation and “to pass on constitutional and other important questions for the purpose of making the law clearer for the general public.”
Just a few years after the law was enacted, Gregory Hankin, a Washington lawyer, identified the deeper meaning of the change in a prescient 1928 article in The Journal of the American Judicature Society. “One might well say,” he wrote, “that the Supreme Court is abandoning its character as a court of last resort, and assuming the function of a ministry of justice.”
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The court led by Chief Justice Roberts has embraced the power granted by the law, Professor Post wrote in his paper, which is still in draft form and will be presented at a symposium next year. “It is this conspicuous lawmaking role, a gift of the Judiciary Act of 1925,” he went on, “that continues to prompt political contention and crisis.”
A new history of the Supreme Court by Stuart Banner, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is called, fittingly, “The Most Powerful Court in the World.” The book devotes nine pages to the 1925 law, saying it empowered the justices to pursue their policy goals.
“The justices were transformed,” Professor Banner wrote, “from passive recipients of cases to active participants in the making of the law.”

🔴MID-ATLANTIC SNOWSTORM - LIVE STORM CHASER

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That. was. Awesome!



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Here's a breakdown of the Tesla FSD V13 upgrades in simple terms:

1. **36 Hz, full-resolution AI4 video inputs** -
- **ELI5**: Imagine your car's eyes (cameras) can now see much faster and clearer than before. Instead of taking a picture every few seconds, they're now taking 36 pictures every second. This helps the car understand what's happening around it more quickly and accurately.

2. **Native AI4 inputs and neural network architectures** -
- **ELI5**: The car's brain (AI system) now speaks the same language as its new eyes (AI4 cameras). This means the brain can understand what it sees more naturally without needing translations, making the car's reactions smoother and more precise.

3. **3x model size scaling** -
- **ELI5**: Think of the car's brain as a library. This upgrade means we've added three times more books to this library. More books (data) mean the car can learn and remember more about how to drive safely and efficiently.

4. **3x model context length scaling** -
- **ELI5**: Now, not only does the car have more books, but each book is three times longer. This means when the car looks at something, it can remember what it saw much longer ago, helping it make better decisions based on more history.

5. **4.2x data scaling** -
- **ELI5**: The car has been given a lot more homework! It has four times more examples to learn from, making it smarter at handling different driving situations.

6. **5x training compute scaling (enabled by the Cortex training cluster)** -
- **ELI5**: Imagine the car's brain now has a supercomputer to teach it. This computer works five times faster than before, so the car learns its lessons much quicker.

7. **Much improved reward predictions for collision avoidance, following traffic controls, navigation, etc.** -
- **ELI5**: The car now gets better at guessing what will make a good or bad outcome. It's like playing a game where you learn how to score points (good driving) and avoid penalties (accidents or traffic violations).

8. **Efficient representation of maps and navigation inputs** -
- **ELI5**: The car now understands maps like you understand your neighborhood. It can find its way and know what's coming up ahead much more efficiently.

9. **Audio inputs for better handling of emergency vehicles** -
- **ELI5**: Now, the car can hear sirens too. If there's an ambulance or fire truck coming, it knows to make way for them, just like you would.

10. **Redesigned controller for smoother, more accurate tracking** -
- **ELI5**: The car's steering, braking, and accelerating are now like having a very smooth, highly skilled driver. It can follow the road's path more accurately and comfortably.

11. **Integrated unpark, reverse, and park capabilities** -
- **ELI5**: The car can now do a three-point turn, back into a parking spot, or even park itself without your help, making parking much easier for you.

12. **Support for destination options including pulling over, parking in a spot, driveway, or garage** -
- **ELI5**: When you tell your car where to go, it can now decide how to get there in the best way possible, whether that means pulling over, finding a parking spot, or driving into your garage.

13. **Improved camera cleaning and handling of camera occlusions** -
- **ELI5**: If something like rain, mud, or a leaf covers the car's cameras, it now knows better how to clean them or work around the problem, keeping its vision clear.

These upgrades collectively make the car's AI system more capable, more aware, and more responsive to the driving environment, aiming to enhance safety and convenience for users.

From 60% in 2020 to 35% today. I blame our relentless (and often stupid) politicization of everything. (owed in large part to our problematic politics-as-entertainment habit)

Sharp decline in confidence in judiciary is among the largest Gallup has ever measured

Drug traffickers, crack dealers, cartel leaders and fraudsters appear on President Joe Biden’s list of nearly 1,500 individuals who he granted clemency Thursday, court records reveal.

As part of his record-setting clemency grant, Biden announced Thursday he would commute sentences for individuals “who were placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities.” The list of commutations released by the White House includes several high-profile criminals.

One individual, Francesk Shkambi, was initially sentenced in July 2014 to 27 years in prison for leading a criminal organization to “smuggle cocaine and marijuana into the United States from Albania,” according to court records.

“Shkambi also negotiated with a foreign source to traffic cocaine from Mexico to Europe,” the records show. “The jury found Shkambi responsible for trafficking 85 kilograms of cocaine, 4 kilograms of heroin, approximately 122 pounds of marijuana, and 4,000 pills of Ecstasy.”

Shkambi was later set to be released in 2029, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

Jose Valdez, whose sentence Biden commuted, “coordinated the distribution of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana for a drug-trafficking organization based in El Paso, Texas, from March of 2015 through July of 2016,” per court records.

Valdez also “recruited numerous individuals to deliver narcotics to cities throughout the United States.” His scheduled release date was previously set for November 2026, according to the BOP.

David Morrow, who was convicted of “conspiracy to distribute over 50 grams of crack cocaine” and for “maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing crack cocaine,” also had his sentence commuted by Biden. His expected release date was set for November 2031, per the BOP.

Two of the “most notorious fraudsters” in the Chicago-area — former Dixon, Illinois Comptroller Rita Crundwell and former Sentinel Management Group, Inc. CEO Eric Bloom — also made the list, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Crundwell, who was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 20 years in prison, stole $53.7 million from Dixon over the course of a decade in what many called the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. Bloom was convicted for defrauding “hundreds of victims” of over $665 million.

“Today, President Biden announced that he is granting clemency to nearly 1,500 Americans – the most ever in a single day – who have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer,” Biden’s Thursday announcement stated. “The President is commuting the sentences of close to 1,500 individuals who were placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities.”



WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 8: President Joe Biden delivers remarks as he hosts the 2024 Kennedy Center honorees in the East Room of the White House on December 8, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Pete Marovich/Getty Images)

Biden also commuted Daniel Monsanto Lopez’s sentence, whose request for release to home confinement a court denied in 2020, noting he was “the organizer and leader of a sophisticated, years-long narcotics smuggling and distribution conspiracy that trafficked at least 20 kilograms of cocaine from Puerto Rico to the Bronx.”

“While Mr. Monsanto Lopez’s motion is long on statistics — he emphasizes in support of his motion that COVID-19 has more strongly impacted Hispanic males such as himself — it is short on specifics, and he has failed to demonstrate extraordinary and compelling reasons for his release,” the court held. Lopez’s release date was set for Dec. 25, 2024, according to the BOP.



The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.