"Command will need to be better in 2025, but some buzz on @WVUBaseball RHP Robby Porco, who was up to 99 mph in a recent scrimmage. Also keep an eye on RHP Bryant Yoak, who was up to 97 mph recently. Yoak's velo was down a little last season, but is now back. "

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Shew!

who is implicated in NSA unmaskings of Trump campaign officials.

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Numerous shirts, pullovers, crew necks, and hoodies available in store front right now. They said they will be getting black jerseys delivered but don’t know the anticipated date yet. Just a FYI.

Opinion: Mad about the economy? Blame Donald Trump.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, most voters in battleground states believe that former President Donald Trump would do more for the economy than President Biden in a second term.

A new poll shows Trump leading in all swing states except Wisconsin (where Trump and Biden tie), with 56 percent of voters saying the former president would do a good job on the economy versus just 40 percent for Biden.

These voters are sadly mistaken. Trump’s first term and current policy proposals are dire warnings that a second round of Trumponomics would be devastating to everyday Americans.

Trump is promising to give big tax cuts to everybody, and to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But the truth is that his proposed tax cuts will benefit the wealthy at the expense of low- and middle-income Americans, and he will cut entitlements to cover any lost tax revenues.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2016, Trump promised his tax cuts would favor working- and middle-class Americans. The cuts he delivered, however, favored the wealthy, widened income inequality, and encouraged massive tax fraud (which Trump may view as normal practice, given his own bogus tax write-offs).

By the time they expire next year, Trump’s tax cuts are projected to have boosted after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of earners by 3 percent, to an average of $2.1 million. But they barely affect the bottom 60 percent of earners, increasing their 2025 incomes just 1 percent, to $41,800.

By 2025, average tax savings will amount to just $70 for the bottom 20 percent of earners, $61,090 for the top 1 percent, and $252,300 for the top 0.1 percent. If extended to 2027, the tax cuts would actually make low- and middle-income earners worse off.

Trump promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating robust economic growth. But that never happened, so they ended up adding between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to the federal debt.

Republican leaders blamed this on Democrats for borrowing too much, and they use this talking point to push for cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Trump himself signaled openness to cutting entitlements before walking his comments back and promising to protect them. But unlike the party elites, most rank-and-file Republican voters actually want to expand them.

Rising entitlement spending isn’t our real fiscal problem. In fact, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office dramatically lowered its forecast for growth in healthcare costs. Our deficits are due primarily to Trump’s tax cuts. Extending them would add another $4.6 trillion to the federal debt, CBO found.

Rather than confront that reality, the Republican Study Committee, which represents a majority of congressional Republicans, keeps proposing big cuts to Social Security. So when Trump vows to “never…hurt” entitlements, or that extending his tax cuts will benefit the majority of Americans and pay for themselves, voters would be ill-advised to believe him.

Ditto for Trump’s claims about tariffs. He is threatening to slap new ones of at least 10 percent on the $3 trillion in goods we import annually. He insists exporting countries would pay for this, but it’s actually American consumers and businesses who would pay.

Universal 10 percent tariffs would cost U.S. households an average of $1,500 a year as companies raise prices to absorb them. They would trigger additional inflation, further increasing the cost of necessities like food, housing and healthcare, hitting working families hardest. And they’d endanger American jobs by hampering U.S. companies’ ability to compete.

Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, for example, led to higher costs for U.S. manufacturers when Chinese suppliers cut their exports to the U.S. to avoid the tariffs. And when China switched to importing soybeans from the European Union, Argentina, Brazil and Russia, U.S. soybean exports plummeted by more than $10 billion. China also retaliated against Trump’s trade war by lowering tariffs on other trading partners to lure their imports away from the U.S.

Donald Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim economies including the U.S. and, importantly, excluding China. The TPP would have eliminated 18,000 tariffs on made-in-America exports including every type of U.S.-manufactured product and most agricultural products. It would also have imposed stronger labor and environmental standards on Asia’s state-owned enterprises, leveling the playing field with U.S. businesses, particularly small businesses, which make up 98 percent of U.S. exporters and employ millions of American workers.

Walking away from the agreement made imported goods from Asia more expensive for Americans, hampered our exports to the southeast Asia, and hit Americans’ wallets, lowering average U.S. incomes by $131 billion through 2030.

By scuttling the TPP, Trump ceded the field to China, which stepped in and replaced the U.S. with a Chinese-led trade agreement among 15 Asia‐Pacific countries, boosting trade among them and offering them greater access to China’s vast markets. That left Washington with fewer enticements to convince other countries to adopt U.S. trading rules.

Such perverse tax and trade policies are likely to lead to a recession, which in Trump’s hands could spiral into depression. Tax cuts and extensive tariffs deepened the Great Depression. But in the 1920s the U.S. was a major creditor nation, with the flexibility to borrow and provide liquidity and stimulus. Today Republican tax cuts have driven U.S. debt to 116 percent of GDP, hobbling our ability to engineer our way out of a crisis.

Unlike Presidents Bush and Obama, who tapped highly qualified leaders to manage the recovery from the 2008 recession, Trump will avoid anybody who isn’t a sycophant or who has the backbone to disagree with him. Instead he’ll hire enablers who are likely to preside over a new crisis and find ways to profit from it while the rest of the country suffers. It will fall hardest on low- and middle-income earners who haven’t shared in the wealth Trump’s tax cuts generated for elites.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The Mountaineer Ticket Office has announced that tickets are now on sale for the West Virginia University men's basketball exhibition game against Charleston inside the WVU Coliseum on Friday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m.

Fans are able to get their first look at the 2024-25 Mountaineers, meet the team and get autographs for a limited time following the conclusion of the game.

Ticket prices for the exhibition matchup will be $15 for upper-sideline and $10 for upper-baseline and can be purchased at WVUGAME.com.

Tickets for the WVU-Charleston game are included as part of the men's basketball season ticket package.

Information on Big 12 Conference mini-packages and single-game ticket sales for nonconference home games will be announced in the coming weeks.

To order 2024-25 men's basketball season tickets, visit WVUGAME.com or call 1-800-WVU GAME.

Now if I could only convince PFF that a list should say linemen and not lineman. 😅

Striking port workers to return to work Friday as negotiators reach an agreement on wages

Trump can't stop lying and as usual MAGA can't stop believing and repeating every Trump lie.

No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants — but Trump did

Trump has been trying to weaponize the Hurricane Helene relief efforts, accusing the Biden administration of failing to provide adequate assistance. As part of his critique, he claims that there is no money available for hurricane relief because it was spent already to handle the surge of migrants at the southern border.

“They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank,” Trump charged, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, adding in the additional falsehood that Vice President Kamala Harris wants illegal immigrants to vote for her. As we have explained many times before, this would be against the law and there is no evidence to support this claim.

Trump’s claims have been echoed by his supporters, such as billionaire Elon Musk. But Trump is completely wrong.

Even though Trump was once president, he still appears to have little clue about the appropriations process. What’s even richer is that when he was president, he did exactly what he claims Biden did — take money from FEMA’s disaster fund to fund migrant programs at the southern border.

The Facts​

FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters: “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

He emphasized there was plenty of money to deal with the current disaster. “We are meeting the moment,” he said, adding: “We have the immediate needs right now. On a continuing resolution, we have funds, but that is not a stable source of supply, if you will.”

Congress, as part of a short-term spending bill, recently provided $20 billion to the FEMA disaster relief fund. But Mayorkas noted: “That doesn’t speak about the future and the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that these extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity, and we have to be funded for the sake of the American people. This is not a political issue.”

In other words, Trump falsely claimed that there is no money left for Hurricane Helene survivors. That’s the opposite of what Mayorkas said.

“FEMA has what it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts,” FEMA spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said on X. “As FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell has said, she has the full authority to spend against the President’s budget, but we’re not out of hurricane season yet so we need to keep a close eye on it. We may need to go back into immediate needs funding and we will be watching it closely.”

So how does Trump link this to migrants? A Trump campaign spokesman pointed to FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which gives grants to local governments and nonprofits to take care of undocumented immigrants. Congress boosted the budget from $360 million in fiscal year 2023 to $650 million in fiscal year 2024. The program’s 2023 annual report says it provides shelter, such as hotel/motel services, food and transportation, including plane tickets up to $700 a person.

As we said, Congress appropriated this money, just as it did the disaster fund. There’s no evidence that any money from the disaster fund was used to help migrants.

“These claims are completely false,” DHS said in a statement Thursday night. “As Secretary Mayorkas said, FEMA has the necessary resources to meet the immediate needs associated with Hurricane Helene and other disasters. The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”

Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would. So we wondered why he would accuse Biden of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants.

It turns out that’s because he did this! In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico. “The U.S. is facing a security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border,” the administration said in its notice that it was redirecting the funds.

The monthly reports issued by the FEMA disaster fund show $38 million was plucked and given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August that year — just before the prime storm period of September and October.

The Pinocchio Test​

Trump falsely claims FEMA has run out of disaster money — and then falsely says that’s because money instead was spent on migrants. There is no evidence the Biden administration spent FEMA disaster money on migrants. Rather, that’s what Trump did.

He earns Four Pinocchios.

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Tell a lie often enough and it becomes modern journalism.