DID YOU TAKE YOUR TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER YET? Today is the day to get it in the fridge, where you probably don't have any room because you went shopping for Thanksgiving this weekend. You don't want to the bird to be frozen solid on Thursday!
MAYOR MIKE JOHNSTON OPENED A CAN OF WORMS LAST WEEK And now Denver and the Mayor is the BIG STORY when it comes to immigration in this country. After the Mayor said this last week:
“More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” Johnston told Denverite. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right? You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them.”
He tried to walk back those comments in an interview Friday night on 9News which you can watch by clicking here.
Start at the 2:20 mark to hear the stuff about immigration though the first part about homelessness is interesting too. Did you hear the part where he said this:
"Would you be willing to go out and protest these things?" 9NEWS Reporter Marc Sallinger asked Johnston.
"I would if I believed that our residents are having their rights violated," Johnston said. "I think things are happening that are illegal or immoral or un-American in our city, I would certainly protest it, and I would expect other residents would do the same."
So when the government tries to stop immigrants from coming here ILLEGALLY he views THAT as illegal and he's bestowed rights on people who are NOT citizens while saying America doesn't have the right to defend its borders. This is insane. At least he walked back the stupid Denver PD at the county border nonsense. Rand Paul picked this up and had comments of his own. He said this on Face the Nation:
'I would say, the mayor of Denver, if he's going to resist federal law - which there's a longstanding, standing history of the supremacy of federal law - [if] he's going to resist that, it will go all the way to the Supreme Court, and I would suspect that he would be removed from office,' the Kentucky senator told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday morning.
'I don't know whether or not that would be a criminal prosecution for someone resisting federal law,' he continued. 'But he will lose.
Paul is right. Johnston compared legal US citizens being interned in camps during WWII with defending our borders. This is insane. Just insane.
IT'S ALMOST TIME FOR OUR FAVORITE HOLIDAY! American LOVE Thanksgiving and you don't have to take my word for it, there's been a poll. Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday for all groups except for Baby Boomers who love Memorial Day and Veterans Day the most. It really is the perfect holiday because there are not gift requirements and no religious requirements and there is so much food. So much, much food. Is that proper grammar? Probably not but it's accurate. Super interesting that Memorial Day came in second, while Christmas brought up third place. There is a lot of pressure at Christmas, plus religious obligations so there's that.
WELD COUNTY PAINTS THE TOWN RED and Barb Kirkmeyer is spot on when she says the Weld County GOP is the face of the Colorado GOP. Sherrie Peif started her story perfectly with this:
After recognizing that the Colorado Republican Party leadership had neither the money or inclination to help Republicans get elected to office on November 5th, Weld County candidates and their supporters went ahead and pushed forward on their own, with remarkable results
They went on to help candidates win FIVE very important races in Weld county. Read the rest here.
THIS THREAD ON MATT GAETZ IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE but in today's world it's completely believable. I'm going to dip my toe into this today EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN'T FACT CHECKED MUCH OF IT. The small part I did fact check was accurate so I'm going with it because it's too crazy to not share. By the way, you can get a holiday greeting or pep talk from Matt Gaetz on Cameo this year.
THIS IS A WAR ABOUT OIL RARE EARTH MINERALS Did you know this? I didn't.
CASA BONITA WORKERS VOTED TO UNIONIZE And this isn't surprising to me as workers in general are feeling left behind right now. There are a LOT of industries where workers would probably look kindly on a union to represent them right now. The workers voted unanimously to begin working with a union to represent onstage and backstage workers. We'll see what this means for Casa Bonita. One thing I know is that when the unionize, the worst employees will be protected. Yay.
BOULDER ISN'T THE UTOPIA IS ONCE WAS Because unfettered homelessness has taken over. Read this story, though you already know what it says. The Big Question is what do the super compassionate liberals do with this now? How bad does it have to get before they have the courage to stand up and demand their community back? I mean that, because without those demands from the citizens, who are all afraid of being painted as meanies, nothing will change. This part caught my eye:
In a perfect world, Brockett would like to see a 100-bed inpatient treatment facility in Boulder.
“If I could will something into existence in this town, that would be it,” he said, but he added that such a facility would require financing from the state or federal government “because there’s just not enough money locally.”
So you're telling me that in BOULDER where the median income is about $100k a year you can't find enough people with money to fundraise to get this done? That is absurd. I wonder if the Mayor has even tried? I used the Google and found such a facility could be built for about $30 million bucks. Boulder has that kind of money, but will they have the fortitude to force people into it and off the streets? Not yet, but I get they get there soon.
DRINKSGIVING IS A REAL THING Did you know that the busiest day of the YEAR for bars is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving? It's known as Drinksgiving and is widely fueled by young people coming "home" for a visit and hooking up with high school chums for a night out before an entire day with family. I've participated in the past. This article says that this just encourages binge drinking and unsafe behaviors which is accurate and frankly the point. Just take an Uber and don't drink and drive because nothing ruins a family holiday more than having to come get you from jail. This is a sobering stat from the article:
Young people are particularly at risk: Drivers ages 21-24 represented the largest percentage (44%) of alcohol-impaired drivers involved in fatal crashes between 2016-2020 on Thanksgiving Eve.
Go have fun and go home in an Uber. It's not that hard.
THE WOMAN WHO STARTED THE HAITIAN CAT EATING STORY MAY BE CHARGED As a Haitian group has asked for her to be prosecuted in Ohio. From this story:
Under Ohio law, a private citizen seeking to “cause an arrest or prosecution” can file an affidavit with “a reviewing official” — a judge, prosecuting attorney or magistrate — to have them review the facts and decide if a complaint should be filed. A similar affidavit was recently filed against Donald Trump and JD Vance.
On Sept. 5, Lee made a post in a local Facebook group with the title “Warning to all about our beloved pets and those around us,” claiming that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and later found it hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home, being carved up to be eaten.
The court memorandum alleges that posting “a baseless claim recklessly without evidence that an action occurred that caused fear, panic, and financial burden when others acted on the baseless claims, justifies an act of inducing panic.”
The woman has admitted, though far too late, that she made the whole thing up. So far no prosecutor has been willing to pick up the case however.
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS BILL FOR THIS YEAR I kind of love this if I'm honest. This year if you were to buy or hire every gift given in the neverending Twelve Days of Christmas song it would cost you a whopping $50,000! Read more here from PNC Bank, who puts this together every year. The price has gone up dramatically in recent years.
LOTS OF HOLIDAY EVENTS THIS YEAR And you can find a list of them for this week and beyond here.
WHEN MINIMUM WAGE BECOMES EXCLUSIONARY For all the guff I give Jon Caldara one place Jon always shines is advocating for his kids, especially his son Chase who has Down's Syndrome. This column is another example of that and it is about how minimum wage laws prevent someone with Chase, who may not be the most efficient employee ever, get steady work.
THIS STORY MAKES YOUR HEART GROW THREE SIZES TODAY You're welcome. GO ARMY! It could make you ugly cry so you've been warned.
A NEW YORK TIMES "FACT CHECK" OF RFK JR LEADS TO HILARITY The New York Times did a story on Friday designed to show you how DANGEROUS RFK Jr's positing on food additives is. It is paywalled, sorry about that. Except in doing so they beclowned themselves instead. See if you can figure out what's wrong with these paragraphs:
Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many ingredients. In an interview with MSNBC on Nov. 6, he questioned the overall ingredient count: “Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it has two or three?” Mr. Kennedy asked.He was wrong on the ingredient count, they are roughly the same. But the Canadian version does have natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.
Are those things the same? No they are not, and the internet had a field day. This column also lays out the concerns doctors and scientists have about the dyes used in food and it should convince you that we don't need these in our food. They have NO nutritional value and are simply there to help Big Food sell more of it to us.
DEAR ELON, PLEASE BUY MSNBC O. M. G. This may be the funniest thing I've seen in forever. Donald Trump, Jr. asked Elon Musk on X to buy MSNBC and now Elon is trolling MSNBC on X about it. I hope he does. It's gonna be cheaper than X was for sure.
CAR COMPANIES WANT EV STANDARDS LEFT ALONE This is a perfect example of how government distorts the markets and hurts consumers. Biden's idiotic EV mandates that are designed to force Americans to buy electric cars by forcing car manufacturers to build them whether we want them or no has created a situation where carmakers, who are losing BILLIONS on EVs right now, have asked the Trump admin to keep them in place! The New York Times has this article (paywalled) about how GM, Chevy, and Ford have asked Trump to keep the mandates in place because it needed “stability and predictability in auto-related emissions standards.” The whipping back and forth between the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump White Houses shows why policy made via Executive Order is BAD POLICY and bad for business. Now that the carmakers have invested so much into building EVs no one is buying they don't want to have to go back to competing with gas engines that we do want. I get why they are doing this, but I'd rather see no President get involved in carmaking instead. I think this will drive carmakers into bankruptcy and they will expect the American Government (read: taxpayers) to bail them out.
HOW WORRYING ABOUT SLEEP KILLS YOUR SLEEP I've been very open about my lifelong struggle with insomnia. I, like many in this article, tried EVERYTHING except the three things that seem to have made the biggest difference for me as an adult. I stopped drinking alcohol (I still indulge but recognize it will wreck my sleep) and not eating for the three hours before I go to bed, along with regular exercise. But those revelations came after the main revelation, which is the more you worry about sleep the worse it is, and it's really amazing how highly you can function on very little sleep at least for a little while.
ADVICE FROM A 90 YEAR OLD And I love this but I'm not sure how to do it.
IF YOU MISSED THE BRONCOS GAME Here are the highlights and you're welcome!