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Mimosa, Bloody Mary, nice flute of champagne — or maybe a favorite tipple in your coffee. Make yourself one and join me at our own Algonquin Round Table, the spirit of Dorothy Parker abides.
Happy Sunday, dear friends! And here we are. Sept 1st, starting the last four months of the year. Today, as college football moves into full swing, you’ll find our brunch table is more tailgate in style … from tried-and-true fried chicken (and waffles!), babyback ribs, carne asada tacos and delicious sides to an assortment of chilled beers, sit back and be entertained by the Left’s usual weirdness this past week. We’re just two months out from election day and I don’t believe they can fully maintain their fantasy position of JOY and VIBE to carry voters. Fill up your plate, lift up your glass, and let’s get to it! À votre santé!
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Not only can’t a mere citizen afford a house for him or herself, but they now have to open their wallet for illegal aliens to get one.
Breitbart, citing screenshots from the citizen journalist X account Oregon Citizen, reported how Hacienda Community Development Corporation (CDC) is offering $30,000 to first-time homebuyers in the state. The catch is that these homebuyers are specifically “DACA recipients, asylum seekers, refugees, green card holders, or otherwise non-citizen,” meaning illegal aliens.
What do you think Oregon friends? Should non citizens and undocumented citizens be given $30,000 for down payments to buy a home here in the state of Oregon? Check out the requirements! pic.twitter.com/riGm6AuMGJ
— Oregon Citizen (@oregoncitizen_) August 9, 2024
California got jealous of Oregon’s $30K and are trying to sweeten the honeypot with a $150K downpayment for illegal aliens.
Assembly Bill 1840, which was approved Wednesday, would grant undocumented immigrants access to the state’s taxpayer-funded home loan program, which provides up to $150,000 in down payment assistance for eligible first-time home buyers.
The legislation easily cleared the state Senate on Tuesday 25-14 and was subsequently approved by the Assembly 45-15. Democrats enjoy supermajorities in both chambers.
It now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for final approval.
Gavin Newsom no longer has to pretend to be a moderate this year, so odds are good he’ll sign it.
He really is U-Haul’s Employee of the Month for the past several years.
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This is pretty nerdy, but fascinating.
These days, a regular Charmin Ultra Soft roll, if you can find one, has 56 sheets. Even the roll they market as “Double” doesn’t have 170 sheets — it has 154. And the 1992 rolls are hardly the largest — the back of the package includes a note from parent company Procter & Gamble explaining these rolls have fewer sheets than a previous version.
Toilet paper is shrinkflation at its absolute worst. Imagine if Chipotle spent decades reducing the size of its burritos until they looked like tacos. (snip)
Back then, Charmin’s regular roll had 650 sheets of single ply toilet paper…650! By 1975, the roll shrunk to 500 and then to 400 in 1979. (snip)
Charmin was far from done, anyway. By 1986, the sheet count had dropped to 380. On eBay, I found nearly identical 1988 Charmin packages — one contained 300 single ply sheets per roll and the other had 280.
Soon, Procter & Gamble would offer Charmin in a double-layered two ply — like my 1992 roll that contains 170 sheets — and has largely shifted away from single ply rolls.
It wasn’t the only brand to engage in shrinkage. Although Scott 1000 must keep 1k sheets per roll to live up to its name, (Edgar Dworsky, a Massachusetts-based consumer advocate) has tracked the toilet paper’s weight. Four rolls, he discovered, weighed about two pounds 10+ years ago. They now weigh barely over a pound.
Much of the article gets into “shrinkflation”, which is one of those cutesy words that become a cudgel in the hands of ostensible pro-consumer politicians around election time (see: Elizabeth Warren). But this pretty much encapsulates why, when faced with higher manufacturing costs, some companies “shrink” their product rather than just raise the retail price:
“They know consumers are not net weight conscious. They know they’re price conscious,” Dworsky says. “So if they can try to avoid raising the price by giving the consumer less, that’s what they do.”
Bingo. Many consumers look more at the bottom line of the grocery bill, not at the net quantity of their purchase. They have X dollars to spend with little to no fudge room. While the success of places like Costco is predicated on buying in volume, budget constraints still rule a lot of families’ purchase decisions. But hey, YMMV when it comes to how much help you want Big Gov to punish you, the consumer, when they play Kabuki Theater over shrinkflation.
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The Left just salivates to make Newsom’s latest a template for the nation.
California has announced the first-ever “partnership” with Google and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) to fund local newsrooms and launch a government artificial intelligence program.
With a price tag of $250 million—$175 million from taxpayers and $55 million from Google—this program will provide direct financial support to newsrooms.
The deal emerged as a settlement between Big Tech and the state government after California Democrats threatened to impose fees on platforms that profit from news content.
Don’t you just love the Democrats’ support of “the press”? Don’t look so shocked at just who will be calling the shots on which “news”rooms get taxpayer money and who doesn’t.
The multi-million-dollar fund will be managed by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and disbursed to newsrooms over five years, with annual approvals required.
Pay no heed to the Berzerkoloid behind the curtain … we’ve got DEMOCRACY to be saved! One Mini-True at a time.
Bolsheviks smile.
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BREAKING: Gold Star Family Member confirms Biden and Kamala were invited to the Arlington Memorial service
"We never heard back from them"pic.twitter.com/HrwgnJhXme
— Jack Poso (@JackPosobiec) August 30, 2024
No wonder the full-scale push, first from Arlington staff to try and get the families of the Abbey Gate 13 not to have a ceremony, then to the Pravda media lies about Trump’s attendance.
Potemkin Kamala bragged that she was the last one in the room when the decision to precipitously withdraw from Afghanistan was made. Lady Macbeth has got nothing on Kamala’s hands stained with the blood of 13. Could wish she was as tormented by her deed as Lady Macbeth, but Kamala and a moral conscience have never been observed together in the same room.
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I happily voted for this guy when I lived in California.
California sheriff demolishes Governor Newsom and the woke agenda.
This is the kind of leadership we need:pic.twitter.com/Fr6CPqVpOs
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 30, 2024
I admire how Bianco has been a thorn in Newscum’s side for the last several years. Bravo!
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My team never sleeps pic.twitter.com/THH4MiMMMI
— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) August 29, 2024
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My father forward deployed in 2018. Tomorrow is his birthday, he would have been 96. He taught me so much and I miss him every day. Boy howdy, how he’d be in the thick of it this election year!
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Today’s word: Persistence
The story of how Bryan Hance became one of the most celebrated and cynical investigators of multinational bike theft began in the spring of 2020, in the dark heart of the pandemic. (snip)
Hance is co-founder of a site called Bike Index. It’s a nonprofit where cyclists can register their bikes and contact information, making it easier to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners. (snip)
But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of bikes reported stolen from locations across the Bay Area were turning up for sale on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram pages attached to someone in Mexico, thousands of miles away.
Hance, an avid cyclist, couldn’t let it stand. From his home in Portland, he set out to crack the case — and in the process, he and others say, exposed disappointing lapses in the reach of U.S. law enforcement and the systems that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has set up to prevent trafficking in stolen goods.
He has spent the better part of the last four years hunting down theft rings and goosing law enforcement into finally acting. As we’ve seen time and again, property crime in places like California are just not a high priority. “Hey, insurance will cover it, relax” seems to be the pat (and cynical) response to every victim of theft or burglary. Such attitudes erode the high-trust society we are/were used to.
It takes people like Bryan to work to get it back. Bravo and let’s pray for his continued success.
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I’m sad to say our time together has slipped away. But this Sunday morphs into a holiday Monday, so time for family, food and friends! See you next week. Cheers!
featured image, original graphic by Darleen Click
ScottS says: I thoroughly look forward to waking up every Sunday to Sunday Morning Cafe Cocktails! Great info this week and it always great to end on a “Sunday Smile”.
One small note…I believe the 4th quarter of the year starts Oct. 1.
Darleen Click says: Oops! Good catch, sir. A silly mistake on my part (I believe my brain had already moved on to football and “4 months” became “4th quarter” as the fingers lagged behind HA!). Now fixed.
Thanks for being a brunch regular!
[…] Victory Girls Blog has Sunday morning cafe cocktails linkage. […]
Cameron says: Oh look, “A Reader.” The President and the Vice President were invited as well. You poor little thing; I’m sure once you sober up and your reality filter kicks in, you’ll be back to telling us Orange Man Bad or something.
So they don’t respond to an invitation, don’t contact the families and don’t make an appearance to the gravesite. But you still insist that dems are the good guys in all this.
Darleen Click says: I’m purposely avoiding reading that comment thread because the Abbey Gate 13 is too close to home. My twin grandsons, active Navy and deployed overseas, attended the same high school AND were in the same JROTC program as one of the 13. The callousness of Harris and Biden shown to these families — even to Biden claiming “no one” in the military died during his reign — is unforgivable..
Cameron says: Understood. No sense in spiking your blood pressure. I’ve just lost my tolerance for folks like him and Kevin.
GWB says: One thing to ponder on that bit about TP: comparing different formulations is problematic. Remember that, aside from changes in the number of sheets, TP has reformulated constantly since the 60s or so. Doubly ply replaced single ply. We even had triple ply for a bit. Then they made them stronger (more weight?), then they made them fluffier (less weight?). They quilted them, and have even made the tear perforation not square on some. It’s a lot more complicated, I think, than merely sheet counts and weight.
(BTW, if you’ve never consciously thought about it, do try and compare a roll of institutional toilet paper – like a school might have – and a roll of your stuff for at home. The industrial will weigh more, but certainly won’t be as pleasant to use. And if there’s anyone cost conscious about TP, it’s going to be institutions. So, weight might not be the factor that author thinks.)
GWB says: “Hey, insurance will cover it, relax”
People don’t seem to understand that really means, “YOU can afford to buy another one.”
The number of people in today’s America who think money magically appears from nowhere is a LOT higher than a healthy society can stand.
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