Mr.TaterSalad

If you want one of Hutch or Thibedeaux you've got to be picking #1 or #2 most likely. I'm not blaming anyone if they lose. They got off the 0-17 snide which I wanted, now I just want a top 2 pick so we can get one of the two elite pass rushers in this draft.

Welp, who do we like at #3? Kyle Hamilton? George Karlaftis? Matt Corall?

We're going blow this and be drafting #2 or #3 now.

I don't know if this post is supposed to be a gotcha post or what, but I'll address it. Yes, more people have died in 2021 than 2020 from Covid because we've had an entire year of a full blown pandemic versus 9-10 months of one as we had in 2020. It isn't for a lack of trying on Biden's part to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. His administration has carried out a nationwide vaccine rollout, tried to implement a vaccine mandate, offered free vaccines to every American who wants one, encouraged everyone to mask up and get vaccinated, and more. In-terms of deaths, where they are happening, and who they are happening, it is still true that older people, those with pre-existing conditions, and those at higher risk factors because of health problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking, and more are dying at a higher rate. You know who else is starting to get seriously sick and die at a higher rate, then unvaccinated. You know who make up a big number of the unvaccinated in this country, Republicans and people who voted for Donald Trump. Have you looked at the data showing whose dying from Covid at a higher and higher rate as time goes on? Trends are tragically showing it is Republicans and Trump voters. New York Times: Red Covid Akron Beacon-Journal: COVID Killing 2.3 Times Faster in Trump Counties in Ohio Urban Milwaukee: How Republicans Are Killing Their Supporters

Many of those same people you are referencing above are staunch opponents of public assistance and social welfare programs like TANF/AFDC, WIC, SNAP, Section 8 housing vouchers, increased funding for public health and mental health, universal pre k, universal childcare, Medicaid, and wrap around services at school. They are also against using government funding for anti-recidivism programs like job and skills training and drug addiction services. So the lack of care and concern in regards to urban violence on the streets is compounded with the fact that they are against most government-sponsored programs that can be used to lift people out of poverty and out of the hopeless situations they face. They also support public school vouchers that take money out of already failing and resourced starved schools and have generally opposed increases in K-12 funding. Other than the tired narrative of "give people the chance to get a good job so they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps" they aren't offering solutions on the right side of the fence. How is someone supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they don't know there their next meal is going to come from or if they are a child born into a home with a drug-addicted, unemployable parent? How can you pull yourselves up by your bootstraps if you're working 2-3 jobs and over 40 hours a week just to get by and keep a roof over your families heads? How do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps in an area where the free market has all but abandon any commerce and development? What job opportunities will there be for folks in those economically challenged communities? Throwing around words like opportunity, freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility offer no tangible solutions to the problem. Rather they are just empty talking points. So thevery resources needed to help people prosper or get a leg up, and ultimately help end urban violence, are broadly opposed by the right and some centrist Democrats in this country. Also, this narrative from the right that direct cash assistance programs like TANF or food assistance programs like WIC or SNAP somehow lead to increased dependency which ultimately somehow helps fuel urban violence is ridiculous. In fact, socio-economic data and research shows by in large if you take away any level for people to subsist, by drastically reducing public assistance programs, you'll increase extreme poverty rates and with higher rates of extreme poverty, can come increased crime as hope about the future and opportunity fade with despair.

When people on the left say they want more Democrats to take a page out of the Bernie playbook when campaigning and politicking, this is what some of us are talking about. Bernie came to Battle Creek today and gave a speech in support of the striking Kellogg workers. Joe Biden should be in town doing the same thing. There's no reason Biden couldn't have come in, stood on the picket lines and made a show of it with a big speech. Where's that middle class kid from Scranton at right now? If Democrats want to win back white working class voters, standing on the picket lines in support of them is a great place to start.

I once honked my horn at someone because their car had a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on it and I smiled and gave them a thumbs up for it. But that's about the extent of my rowdy behavior for Bernie in public.

What are the odds that Donald Trump even knows who Robert Taft is?

From the same article I shared above,

The website itself is focused on Wisconsin, but the graphs plotted out below from the site show just how damning a partisan lean Covid has. The MAGA movement and Republicans are killing their own base. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2021/12/08/data-wonk-how-republicans-are-killing-their-supporters/

Right, which is why you can look at county maps of the state and see where new case loads are exploding and where death, as a percentage of the counties entire population, is highest among red-areas and growing higher. https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98163_98173---,00.html

It's not that I don't care for human life and value it, I most certainly do. But when I see these Herman Cain Award pages on Twitter that spotlight people who mocked those of us who believed Covid was real and then later died from it, how bad am I supposed to feel? I can't help but think about the disinformation spread by the right wing media and social media sphere that took their lives and how they fell pray to pseudo-science and nonsense. It's a hoax, it's no worse than the flu and hardly anyone dies from it anyway are some of the original greatest right win hits. Vaccines supposedly have 5G microchips in them or aluminum siding or whatever in them. Bill Gates is then using them as a way to formulate a new world order. And then an entirely different crowd of people who think Covid is real, but want to take horse paste or other scientifically unproven treatments instead of a more sure thing with the vaccine. Sorry to break it to you Hollywood Hogan, but many of us new this was bullshit because we didn't listen to right wing media and follow along with the social media death spiral. We just listened to our doctors and public health experts smarter than ourselves and took it seriously from the start by masking up, social distancing and most of all, vaccinating ourselves. The New York Times Red Covid piece is one of the most insightful publications I've read on just how ideologically and partisan biased Covid has become due to people on the right not taking it seriously. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states-vaccinations.html

LOL! Jordan was literally speaking with Trump on January 6th and forwarded over a text the night before from a Republican Lawyer on how Pence could stop the certification of the election. GTFO Jim Jordan.

I don't see how with Goff as our starting QB, playing as he is right now, we can be substantially better next year. I mean maybe through another good draft class and free agency we can net ourselves 3-4 more wins and become a 4/5/6 win team next season. Speaking in baseball terms though, as our starting QB, Goff has provided us with a negative WAR this season and if he doesn't somehow turn it around or get replaced as the starter, I can't see us making big strides next year. All of this is to say, it is probable that we'll be drafting in the top 10 yet again next season and setting ourselves up to get one of Stroud or Young.

Great victory speech by the winner Helen Morgan.

I guess Boris won't be throwing or attending any more Covid parties anytime soon.

When there will be better QBs in next years draft, Bryce Young and CJ Stroud, there is just no need to trade draft capital to get a (perceived) lesser QB in this year's draft. I'd hate to lose a 2nd round pick just to move up for someone inconsistent like Malik Willis or Sam Howell or a one year wonder like Kenny Pickett.

His second round pick doesn't look like a complete waste of space. So by drafting Onwuzurike and him having thus far looked like a football player and not a dud, he's a step ahead of Quinn. It's great to see everyone has been a contributor, even if being a a generationally bad team forced everyone into playing time.

Yep! Not only did people on the right call them crisis actors, I saw this meme being WIDLEY shared on social media in the aftermath of several different mass shootings.

Life throws things at you and it gives you choices. How could I sit there and watch my dad lose his home and literally live off of government-sponsored programs and still go on about the very programs keeping him subsisting. The other thing that was really important for me was getting outside the echo chamber of libertarian/right wing media and the group think that comes along with any ideology or form of indoctrination. The echo chamber effect hurts people on both sides of the aisle and cuts through all political ideologies to be sure. That said, the amount of misinformation, disinformation, straight up lies, and meaningless anecdotes that seem to get spread in the right wing/far right echo chambers seems to be far worse and far more damaging to the individuals exposed to it than those on on the left/far left. Getting out of the echo chamber and allowing myself to gather news and information from a new host of sources, allowing myself to go out there in the real world and see how others live, those were important for my own personal growth and ability to make different choices. When you watch Fox News/OAN every single night, read Breitbart articles, and listen to right wing talk radio all day you aren't doing your own research and information gathering, you are merely regurgitating what you heard or saw that day without any critical thinking involved. The same can be said if you sit around and watch MSNBC, Vice News, read the New York Times, and listen to Pod Save America. The key difference that even though these news sources (MSNBC, NYT, Vice, Pod) may get details incorrect from time to time or offer a slanted opinion on something, they aren't outright lying or manufacturing a story to drum up fear or fake outrage. I'm somewhat of a unique case in that I did escape the right wing/libertarian echo chamber. Thanks to years of Republican misinformation, Trump, Fox News, right wing talk radio, social media, attacks on academia and school teachers, cuts to public education, and a lack of critical think skills being taught in schools many will be unable to escape. It's a phenomenon that is dragging this entire country down. On a global scale you've seen entire countries like Belarus, Hungry, Russia, and Poland across Eastern Europe get drug into the same far right vortex.

Remember when right-wing media and Republicans mocked the kids that survived the Parkland school shooting.

Let me tell a family story before I dive into answering the rest of your question. In the picture above is my mom's brother, my uncle. My uncle suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He is 64 now and has had the diagnosis since he was discharged from the Army at age 22. He was in and out of psych hospitals and on and off medication for a period of approx. 25 years between the late 1970's and around the year 2001. In 2001 my mom's dad, my grandfather passed away, and ever since then something clicked in my uncles mind and he's been better about taking his medication, he's received injectable medication once a month, and has been a responsible member of society, living his best life. For the 20 years prior to 2001, his life was a mess. The only reason he wasn't homeless during that time period is because he had VA benefits from the Army that gave him money to subsist and because people like my mother, chased every mental health professional and social worker in the State of Michigan around to ensure her brother had a place to live. When he was doing ok and on his medication he'd go stay at my grandfather's house. When he was off his medication and in a state of paranoia or delusion or having an episode, he'd have to get kicked out of the house because he'd get angry, aggressive, belligerent, unstable, and violent. He threatened suicide on a couple of different occasions and also threatened violence against others in his family living in my grandfather's household, most notably my grandfather himself, his older sister who lived there and his younger brother who lived there. He used to pace the hallways at night with a baseball bat, knife, lead pipe, whatever he could get his hands on, forcing my family to have to barricade their doors at night time just to hide from him. Guess what, like a bunch of irresponsible morons, my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt who all lived over at the house owned guns. A house full of people ranging from a child with my aunts son on up to my grandparents owned guns with a mentally ill and unstable person living with them. One day, back in the mid-1980s, while my one of my mom's other sisters was up visiting from the Atlanta area, my uncle had a violent episode at my grandfather's house right in front of everyone living their, including my visiting aunt. He came up from the basement, where his temporary room was at, and had a double barrel shotgun in his hand. Right in front of my grandfather, grandmother, and my mom's two sisters, he racked that shotgun and started cackling with laughter. He looked over at my mom's sister (the one visiting from Atlanta) and said to her "I'm not going to shoot anyone, but I bet I scared you all didn't I." Thank god he didn't shoot anyone. But in the wake of that incident and many like it that families and people all across our country have had to deal with, why in the hell was a gun allowed to be unlocked, much less in the home, where a mentally ill person lived? Now onto your question, what Australia did in 1996 is what needs to be done here in America. We need a gun buyback program. But since you asked the question and said without doing a gun ban/buyback as Australia did, you need rigorous background checks, red flag laws, and mental health screenings among other things to prevent mass shootings from happening. I'll go through this one by one though. Longer, tougher background checks that include a social media sweep First, we need longer background checks. I mean background checks that take weeks to complete and are inspected by multiple individuals, not just a guy behind the counter at a gun store. Law enforcement and legal experts should review each and every background check. The check needs to be long enough in length so that an adequate professional has had the time to run a full and complete investigation into your past. That includes a sweep of your social media and online postings, which should be required to be reviewed. Any criminal past that comes up on your record that involved violence or violent behavior should prohibit you from owning that gun. Any social media posts that are deemed threatening or violent in any nature should also prohibit you from owning a gun. Additionally, if you want to own a gun, every single person listed at your residence should have to go through a background check and if anyone living at your home address has a criminal background that involves a violent past, that would prohibit you from being a licensed gun owner. As well, if someone new moves into your domicile, they are required to have a background check and if they fail the background check, you would be forced to turn your guns over or have that person leave and no longer live at the residence. Those individuals social media should also be required to be swept and if their social media contains violent or threatening posts, again, either you give up your guns or they must leave the residence and no longer live there. Registration requirements and criminal liability Every gun you own should have to be registered to you directly and you should have to be fingerprinted at the time of purchase. If that gun gets used in a crime, by someone other than the owner, than the owner of that gun should also be held criminally liable. If the gun was stolen than it needs to be reported to proper law enforcement agencies as stolen. Failing to do so would make you liable in that person's crime as well. Mental health evaluations Everyone living in your residence as a gun owner, including you, should be required to take a comprehensive mental health evaluation from a licensed mental healthcare doctor or professional. If you have a son or daughter or someone at your residence who has a brain health issue related to mental illness, you would be prohibited from buying and owning a gun. Adam Lanza, who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary, had a diagnosable mental illness, Asperger's Syndrome, as well as suffering from anxiety and depression. His mother was reckless and irresponsible with her guns and as a result, 28 people lost their lives that day in Newtown at Sandy Hook. Adam Lanza, Ethan Crumbley, my mom's schizophrenic brother, and many others like them should not be living in homes with such ease of access to guns. Requirement for gun safes with combination or key locks and locks on all guns Guns stored in a home should be required to be locked up in a combination or key safe where only one to two persons have access to that safe. If your gun is used in a crime than law enforcement would have the right to inspect your home and see what, if any, gun safes there are in the home. They would also be able to look at any and all gun locks. Any gun not currently in use should be required to have a lock on it at all times, without exception. If someone breaks into your home, well then, you're going to have to get the lock off your gun first. Again, as with the safe issue, if you are found to have guns not under a lock at your home, you will be held criminally liable for your negligence.