I voted for Harris and am disappointed in the outcome, but as I look at the Trump win and I know I'll come out ahead. So chalk one up on owning the libs!

I put 5K down on GEO, a private prison company. It's up 84%. I can see how this is going to go.

1. Illegals- what are they really doing? They aren't taking your jobs. You don't want to dig ditches, clean hotel rooms, be a maid, work in ameat packing plant, and work in a restarant kitchen. Deporting them will simply raise costs of the foods and goods you buy: Bad for you.

2. Tarrifs- These get passed to the consumer. If a Samsung washer that costs 650 now goes to 800, do you really think Maytag isn't going to raise the prices of their 650 washer to 775 to match the rest of the washing machine market? Do you think they are going to pass on the profit in the form of increased wages to their workers or are they going to profit the stock holders. Raises the costs of goods for you and casues inflation: Bad for you.

3. Universal healthcare- Democrats often support universal Healthcare. You voted against it. That makes me likely take a pay cut but but gives you free health care for your family: bad for me and good for you.

4. Corporate taxes- likely cut by Trump again. Last time he did this the majority of cuts went into company share holders and didn't trickle down to wages. Prices weren't reduced. This increases national debt. At some point the lone sharks will come for our kids: May not do much for you, likely screws our kids.

5. Income cuts for rich: Increases national debt. See above. Doesn't effect you other than keeps you making less with no benefits. Worsening wealth distribution. Trickle down didn't work for Reagan. It didn't work when Brownbeck did it for Kansas. The poorest 50% don't pay much anyway. Certainly helps me. Doesn't help you.


6. I want universal education and trade schools. I can pay for private school and my kids college. Trump wants to cut federal education programs: Hurts you.

So after all of this all I can conclude is that I'm crazy for not wanting to benefit from Trumps policies and generally favor taking a pay cut, and paying more taxes.

How is this helping the non college educated, low wage worker do better in this country?

Yes, you may be upset about diminishing religion, abortion, culture wars, dems calling you dumb, etc. Well, I guess you showed us.

Accountability, not amnesty is what is needed. We had multiple people right here on HROT backing (some probably still do) this ridiculous bs. You know who you are and yes you should be ashamed of yourselves.

"The problem was not people's ignorance of the facts, it was the organized antagonism and censorship against anyone presenting data that was contradictory to the mandate agenda. This is setting aside proclamations like those from the LA Times, which argued that mocking the deaths of "anti-vaxxers" might be necessary and justified. After two years of this type of arrogant nonsense it's hard to imagine people will be willing to pretend as if all is well.

The active effort to shut down any opposing data is the root crime, though, and no, it can never be forgotten or forgiven."

"One cannot help but notice that the timing of the Atlantic's appeal for passive forgetfulness coincides with the swiftly approaching midterm elections, in which polls suggest a much greater chance of a conservative upset than Democrats previously expected. Though the Atlantic doesn't admit it, there is a growing political backlash to the last two years of meaningless lockdowns and mandates, and Democrats were instrumental in the implementation of both. A large swath of the population sees one party as the cause of much of their covid era strife.

Perhaps the mainstream media is suddenly realizing that they may have to face some payback for their covid zealotry? “We didn't know! We were just following orders!” It all sounds rather familiar."

In a game where Brendan Sullivan could have solidified himself as the man to beat for Iowa's starting QB position in the spring, he and the #Hawkeyes came up short.

Iowa needs another portal quarterback -- and they need one soon.

STORY:

These EV ‘Battery Belt’ Towns Are Betting Trump Won’t Ditch Them​

Ford, Hyundai, other carmakers cranking up new EV battery factories while uncertainty looms over Biden-era subsidies for them​

By
Christopher Otts and Mike Colias
Updated Jan. 7, 2025 8:39 pm ET



ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky.—Mayor Jeff Gregory stood in the cinder block frame of what is soon to be a new fire station in his 33,000-person town.

Even before the cement dries, this small community in central Kentucky already is planning two more firehouses. A $150 million upgrade of the city’s wastewater treatment plant is also in the works, and dozens of apartment buildings are going up on former farmland.

The town is gearing up for a population boom from a pair of electric-vehicle battery factories rising nearby in rural Glendale, Ky., one of which is scheduled to start production in the coming months. Ford Motor is building both of them. Like many automakers, it is anticipating some aid from the U.S. government as it gets into the battery business.

“We have invested, banking on their success,” Gregory said, referring to the town’s preparations for the new factories.
Now, tens of billions in federal money to support more than a dozen new U.S. battery plants similar to the Elizabethtown project are at risk, as President-elect Donald Trump and some Republicans in the GOP-led Congress threaten to eliminate federal funding for EVs.

The complex Ford is building with Korean battery partner SK On is part of the biggest automotive construction binge in the U.S. in a generation, after carmakers and suppliers spent decades steering more factory work to Mexico and other countries.

A collective investment of around $133 billion is expected to create more than 109,000 American jobs, much of it at battery factories across the South and Midwest, according to data from the Center for Automotive Research. The string of battery sites stretching from Georgia up to Michigan has even earned the moniker “the Battery Belt” from some elected officials.

Helping fund these projects are federal tax credits meant to build an EV battery supply chain in the United States. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s landmark clean-energy law, set aside tens of billions of dollars in tax credits for companies that make EV batteries.

The federal subsidies reduce the cost of making batteries domestically by about $4,000 per electric vehicle, based on the average battery size of EVs available in the U.S., said Sam Adham, head of battery materials research at CRU Group, a consulting firm. The government is expected to pay companies an estimated $78 billion in tax credits through 2028, with additional outlays into early next decade.

Competing with China​

Some D.C. watchers and Wall Street analysts say they expect the battery funding to survive because it is nurturing U.S. manufacturing jobs, an objective shared by both parties. While no Republicans voted for the IRA, some GOP lawmakers who represent states with big EV projects have defended aspects of the law.

“These are huge investments going into places that have been the backbone of automotive manufacturing for decades,” said Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which represents Tesla, Rivian and several battery makers.

Trump said on the campaign trail that he wants to scrap the IRA, although that would require congressional action. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, the president-elect’s close adviser, has said he would like to see all federal subsidies for EVs eliminated.

A spokeswoman for the Trump transition team said the president-elect would support the auto industry, both gas-powered cars and EVs.

Some automakers laid out their plans to get into the battery business before the IRA had been floated, during a burst of consumer and investor enthusiasm early this decade. But EV demand has slowed, and executives say they need the federal subsidies to help erase heavy losses.

General Motors said it received about $800 million from the IRA battery credits in 2024 and expects bigger sums in coming years. The federal subsidies are part of the company’s plan to turn a profit on EVs, said GM Chief Executive Mary Barra in December.

If they are eliminated, “it’ll be just additional work we need to do,” she said during a media event in Detroit in December. GM hasn’t disclosed how much it is losing on EVs. It expects to shrink its losses by $2 billion to $4 billion in 2025.

In Kentucky, the fragility of the EV market is evident at the Ford site, where two plants have been built side-by-side. Ford has put the second plant on indefinite hold, citing weaker-than-anticipated demand for electrics.

BlueOval SK, the Ford-SK partnership, has been on a hiring blitz as it prepares to launch the first plant, which will employ 2,500 in all. Local officials are convinced both plants will eventually come online, providing all 5,000 promised jobs.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS​

Are subsidies for electric vehicles a good use of taxpayer funds? Join the conversation below.
“It is full steam ahead,” said Daniel London, head of a local economic-development agency.

Mickey Townsend, 55 years old, recently left her job packing orders at an Amazon warehouse and will soon join the battery plant as a production operator. The $21-per-hour starting pay at BlueOval SK represents a good raise, she said.

Townsend said she doesn’t believe in electric vehicles, but Ford’s multibillion-dollar investment gives her confidence the job will last.

“I just don’t see them putting that kind of money out, and then not being able to keep on going,” she said.

Looks legit, but we haven't received anything from UI, and the award's website hasn't been updated with the 2024 winner.

We'll have a story up if/when it gets announced officially.

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John G. Roberts Jr., in his year-end report on the federal judiciary, didn’t call out JD Vance by name. But the chief justice took an unmistakable — and well-deserved — swipe at the vice president-elect over his reckless suggestions that it is sometimes acceptable to defy the rulings of federal courts.


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Roberts has multiple concerns when it comes to defending the imperative of an independent judiciary: violence or threats of violence directed against judges; efforts to intimidate them, fueled by the rise of social media; and disinformation, including by foreign actors. But on the eve of the inauguration of Vance and Donald Trump, Roberts’s most compelling warning involved the prospect of government officials defying court orders.
Judicial independence, he wrote, “is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.” He cited, of course, the response to the court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, when governors throughout the South sought to defy court orders to desegregate public schools.


“The courage of federal judges to uphold the law in the face of massive local opposition — and the willingness of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations to stand behind those judges — are strong testaments to the relationship between judicial independence and the rule of law in our Nation’s history,” Roberts observed.
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And in case you missed the pointed reference to the role of both Republican and Democratic administrations in enforcing court orders, Roberts went on, and he’s worth quoting in full.
“Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” Roberts wrote. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...=mc_magnet-opmarcuscourt_inline_collection_19

These words cannot be read in a vacuum — nor, I suspect, were they written in one. Because of all the “elected officials from across the political spectrum” who have toyed with defying court orders, the most prominent by far — and the one who ought to know better — is JD Vance, Yale Law School Class of 2013, whose wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
And yet defying the courts is something Vance has repeatedly suggested. “If I was giving him [Trump] one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance said on a 2021 podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
This was no casual, one-off comment.


Vance reiterated his position — although he tried to soft-pedal it — in a February interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.”
Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?”
Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this, but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”


Then, in an interview with Politico Magazine the following month, Vance made clear that he meant defiance of the federal courts, and not just in the narrow case of the president’s authority over the military.
“If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis,” Vance said. “It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on.”
So, here we are. Trump and Vance are about to be sworn in. The prospect of a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts is not theoretical — it is real. Trump’s contempt for the courts and the rule of law has long been evident. Now, he will have Vance by his side, seemingly ready to egg him on.


When the Trump administration loses an important case before the Supreme Court — and its first-term record implies that is likely — will Vance counsel defiance and what Roberts called “open disregard”?
That would be, as Roberts warned, a dangerous suggestion. Usha Vance should urge her husband to mind the Constitution and the chief justice. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to brace for what Roberts might have to report a year from now.

oops

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Donnie suggests he may immediately order them lowered despite the precedent for previous presidents and veterans being honored for 30 days.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...g-half-staff-carter-inauguration/77436106007/

Ban democrats and watch murder rates crater.

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Not sure the word modern is needed tbh but still a "well earned" title for the big guy. This list did include Jimmy Carter as well, so technically this does put sleepy joe into contention for worst ever, regardless of recency bias.

Thoughts?

We've seen some really bad playoff games in ten years. Mainly Oklahoma and Notre Dame every time they've made it. Michigan State got dogwalked in their lone appearance and Florida State got Winstoned in their appearance.

With the playoff expanding and a GO5 school guaranteed a slot, I think we're going to see somebody get folded. I think Clemson and Indiana get that treatment this weekend. I think SMU and Tennessee keep it tight but ultimately lose.

As an Iowa fan would you rather make the field and get treated like Cowboy at a Taylor Swift concert, or win a competitive Bowl against an Alabama or Miami? The obvious answer would be to just win it all, but that's too easy.