Skip

And since the 49ers (team colors) are in the cartoon, don’t forget THAT THE WHOLE TEAM is going to work against our Second Amendment rights.

I just reread the accounting of the now infamous NFL meeting in NYC where some of the owners met with some of the players (along with some other NFL staffers and union flacks) ostensibly to “fix” their self-induced problem.  Yes, self-induced and self-propagating issue of “taking a knee” during the national anthem and what it is doing to their Public Relation reputation, their ticket sales, their TV ratings (yes, all in the toilet); the owners are now scared – they have to stop the hemorrhaging and start protecting their substantial investments. In reading the post, this stuck out – a message of surrender to the players (emphasis mine):

It was a very good session; the players were passionate and very impressive; we’ve got a lot of work to do to address their concerns and to use the NFL platform to address these difficult social, racial and justice issues.

So what IS their business model now – lecturing us while only throwing a football once in a while?

Read more

SHOT: San Francisco 49ers Pledge $500,000 to Push Suppressor Ban, Other Gun Control Measures

The San Francisco 49ers pledged $500,000 Thursday to secure a suppressor ban and other gun controls. The push comes in the weeks after the Las Vegas attack. Suppressors were not used in that attack, but the 49ers are dedicated to banning the devices anyway. According to ESPN, the 49ers presented the gun control pledge as part of creating a “more understanding and safer America.” The $500,000 will also be used to push a ban on bump stocks and armor-piercing bullets. The ban on armor-piercing bullets is somewhat ambiguous, but appears similar to a ban which was unsuccessfully pushed by the Obama administration in 2015. The Obama-era actually targeted bullets that would have to be re-categorized as armor piercing in order to be banned.

CHASER: NFL Ratings Continue to Crater As New Numbers Reveal Massive Two-Year Decline

According to Nielsen data obtained by the Sporting News, “League games averaged 15.1 million viewers through Week 7. That’s down 5.1 percent from 15.87 million viewers during the same period last season and off 18.7 percent from 18.35 million viewers during the same period in 2015.” As the Sporting News notes, “Ratings are lagging for a variety of reasons, not least the ongoing protests during the national anthem that former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began in 2016. Fans are still angry about Kaepernick’s continued unemployment as well as what’s seen as the growing politicization of the NFL.

Read more

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY

October 23, 2017 

Guidance for President Donald J. Trump’s Remarks on Combatting the Opioid Epidemic

What:  President Donald J. Trump’s Remarks on Combatting the Opioid Epidemic
Where: The White House – East Room
When: Thursday, October 26, 2017 at 2:00PM EDT

Read more

Yeah, one has to pass a background check to be able to attend after receiving the invitation to attend.  That information was given to them on Tuesday when I first received the invite.  Now at 7:42am this morning, I finally got the authorization that says “come on down”!

Good morning  —

Read more

When I first received the invite, I thought it would be the regular Presser / Briefing that they have every day at the White House.  Briefings – questions!  So I thought, hey, they wouldn’t have asked the ‘Grok to come all that way down without a slight chance of being able to ask a question, right?  So the original invite came in Monday evening – and the left over part of what used to be my mind started racing.  There’s my task for tomorrow!

You all know what its like to lay down for your evening’s sleep – the body says “sure” but the mind goes “eat my dust, dude” and goes off to the races.  Well, at 2:30am, I finally gave up and started in on 4 questions so as to make sure I’d be ready: an obligatory one, the real one, a serious one (that I’ve NEVER heard any of those High and Mighty Cream-of-the-Crop Pompous Journalists that inhabit that place as if they owned it, and then an amusing one. Hey, gotta be ready for anything, right?

Read more

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP IS TAKING ACTION ON DRUG ADDICTION AND THE OPIOID CRISIS

“The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first
place. If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem.” – President Donald J. Trump

DRUG ADDICTION AND OPIOIDS ARE RAVAGING AMERICA: Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their lives to drug abuse, and it will only get worse unless action is taken.

• In 2016, more than two million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids.
  • Since 2000, over 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids.
• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.
• In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdose deaths – 33,091 of those deaths, almost two-thirds, involved the use of opioids.
  • According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics, the national age-adjusted rate of opioid overdose deaths in 2015 was 10.4 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
• The situation has only gotten worse, with drug overdose deaths in 2016 expected to exceed 64,000.
  • This represents a rate of 175 deaths a day.
  • This exceeds the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War.
  • The rise in overdose deaths is largely due to the proliferation of illicitly made fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, and fentanyl analogs.
• In 2016, more than 11.5 million Americans ages 12 and older reported misuse of prescription opioids in the past year, and nearly 950,000 Americans reported heroin use in the past year.
• In 2014, the number of babies born drug-dependent had increased by 500 percent since 2000, and children being placed in foster care due in part to parental drug abuse is going up – now it is almost a third of all child removals.

A PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY: President Donald J. Trump is mobilizing his entire Administration to address drug addiction and opioid abuse by directing the declaration of a Nationwide Public Health Emergency to address the opioids crisis.

Read more

On Senator McCain’s Trump bashing (emphasis mine):

Because of you, they think, we got identity-politician Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, not another Neil Gorsuch-type justice instead. We had to read steady reports of “the emerging Democratic majority,” which told us our days were numbered, these conservatives fume. When we voiced other beliefs, cowering Republicans handed us the condescending, inclusive language they’d adopted to adapt to the Obama era. Those other beliefs — God and country, family and home — “That’s not what we’re all about,” conservative members were told.

Read more

But loves Government. Once again, it’s all about “inequality” and how to “fix it – at Davos.  Think about inequality at the annual “aren’t we rich and Elite” party they throw for themselves?  The AP decided to weigh in on this report from Oxfam (1/16/17):

Sidenote: Oxfam – weren’t they the folks that were just concerned about getting food to hungry people?  Oh, right, once a charity, everybody’s morphed into a some kind of Social Justice Warrior – and once an SJW, you become a full spectrum SJW because: INTERSECTIONALITY (where SJWs play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with every issue where “We good, everyone else needs a hearty verbal lashing and internet mobbing”)

So how did it start (reformatted, emphasis mine)?

Read more

That would be gay Ray “Bomb the Hague” Buckley of the militant LGBTQRSTUV (and whatever other letters have been added this week – I’m too busy to keep up) wing of the Democrat Party that will use any and all issues.  In this case, he decides to use the Democrat Cultural Marxism tactic of  “you’re either with us or you are GUILTY AND CULPABLE” tactic back on Aug 4 in the Concord Monitor against Gov Chris Sununu.  You know, that collective guilt (emphasis mine, reformatted) should stick when thrown against the wall of his desire.

My Turn: Sununu’s position on transgender Granite Staters is dangerous

Read more

Concord Monitor (the ink-stained den for Progressives who have hard times stringing two coherent thoughts together) – on Jan 21, former CongressCritter Paul Hodes said that NH has to raise its entry labor costs in order to attract new businesses to NH (Yeah, as a former business owner, that gets my motor started on that idea again).  In his Op-Ed, he’s taking a slap at Sununu for using the Federal minimum wage instead of upping NH’s costs to all the other New England (Democrat) States.  But this is what caught my eye:

New Hampshire is the only state in New England that does not have a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage dictates. Gov. Sununu opposes setting a higher state minimum wage, which is set to remain at $7.25 through 2018. For a full-time minimum wage worker in New Hampshire, that means $15,080 per year, which is slightly above the poverty line of $14,570 per year for a family of two. Gov. Sununu accepted a bigger pay raise than a New Hampshire minimum wage earner makes in a year. That’s not just bad politics. It’s bad policy.

Yeah, sure thing, Paul. No, that line is just Stupidity writ large.

Read more

LifeHacker is a place I go to because, well, tips on how to “hack” your life to save time and money – and cute tricks and sometimes just nerdy type stuff in a pop culture kinda of way. Or, at least that’s what it used to be. As SWJs are taking over as writers at the site, there are less hack posts and more political ones.  It’s clear that there is one class of commenters that decry the politics (like me as it used to be an escape from politics) but it is clear that a majority of the commenters are Republican haters (it is rather amusing to see how many Progressive talking points I see) depending on post I’m reading.  Like this one this is masquerading as a hack but really is agit-prop (Aug 17):

Your Insurance Premiums Could Be Huge Next Year, and Here’s Why

This week, the White House announced that the government would indeed make this month’s required payments to health insurance companies. We kinda dodged a bullet there, because those CSRs directly affect the price of your insurance if you buy an individual plan. But the threat is only temporarily paused, and your premiums could still spike next year.

But the author left out ONE REALLY IMPORTANT piece of information of these Cost Sharing Reduction / Insurance company bailout payments so I tried to enlighten her and her readers just a wee bit.

Read more

We don’t have a revenue problem – we have a spending problem that gives us these huge annual deficits leading to a $20 Trillion national debt (reformatted, emphasis mine).

Real federal spending in fiscal 2017, which ended on Sept. 30, was higher than in any year in the history of the United States other than fiscal 2009, which was the year that President Barack Obama’s $840 billion stimulus law was enacted. Fiscal 2017 also saw the second highest real federal individual income tax totals of any year in U.S. history, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.  Total federal tax revenues were the third highest in U.S. history.

Read more

…and xenophobe and (reformatted, emphasis mine)…

No one can fail to be amazed by the courage of the people who protested segregation and bigotry in the 1950s and 1960s. Those who endured physical injury justifiably stick in our minds the most.

Today’s educated liberals lack the courage they admire in their forebears, at a time when it is needed more than ever. Namely, too many liberals in power lack the guts to sanction those dedicated to shouting down speakers from the right. Instead, they let pass a state of dialogue as choked as the one that Berkeley’s Free Speech movement resisted.

To hurl the N-word at someone is an attempt to shut down discussion. Today, the word “racist” serves the same function. Or, today’s fashionable new version is the now grievously overused “white supremacist.” Such that, for example, liberal man of letters and Columbia professor Mark Lilla is accused of making white supremacy “respectable” — for suggesting that Democrats emphasize identity politics less with the goal of winning the White House from Donald Trump. . . .

It has become clear over the past few years that

Read more

One example (emphasis mine):

According to the Los Angeles Times, Newsom said the ban will “help prevent the occurrence of high-fatality gun massacres, and … [will] reduce the bloodshed when these tragedies occur.”

Note that Newsom’s claim contains an admission that the ban will not stop “high-fatality” attacks altogether. Rather, it is yet another in a long list of California controls that is promulgated in the name of safety, only to result in diminished freedom.

Read more

Well, I am now, as they say, between opportunities.  So my time is going to be a bit more flexible.  Fortunately, I have a TON of bookmarks on stuff that I marked “use this” that I never got around to posting (perhaps a couple of years worth). Sorta like “reverse prepping” – couldn’t stockpile my time and now I have plenty!

Here’s a snippet from “Stossel” the Fox Biz News show that he left a while ago.  Here, he has a guest on that, well, shows that free markets should always have govt regulation:

Read more

Back on Jan 7, Katharine Gregg wrote an Op-Ed in the Concord Monitor that showed that she has definitely forgotten how trust works. That it takes a long time to build up trust and it has to be consistent in order to maintain it.

What Trust? She wants us to “try to trust government again.” Yeah, sure thing, ma’am. Coming right up, ma’am.  Just after I forget that its folks like your husband that put us $20 trillion in the hole and have made our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids indentured servants IF it is even mathematically possible for “the richest country in history” to pay off that debt.

Read more