How sweet was that??? Awesome…

McVay’s culture can win important games on the road…

When the rain stopped, Stafford and the offense delivered with 3 or 4 50 yard drives in the 2nd half …. while the Rams D forced Purdy to throw a lot of incompletions… and when the 49er offense finally got close.. they picked him off… they forced Deebo to play like shit….

A lot of punts and FGs.. Special teams didn’t break, With the exception of Deebo’s last kick off return that was aided with the horse tackle.

SF top 5 defense…

next week the Jets…# 4 in defense with a lot of sacks… Gastineau’s recent feud with Farve might inspire them.

GO RAMS…

dozens of years ago i wrote a college paper on how import tariffs helped Harley Davidson recapture US market share in the late 80’s and beyond.

Quick summary

Harley Davidson; started by 2 brothers by mounting a combustible engine to a bicycle with beefy suspension in the early 1900s
HD got big quick contracts with US Army to use these motorized bikes in combat during WWI and WWII.

Harley Davidson bikes gained popularity in 20s and 30’s for bootleggers.

Harley Davidson evolves in 50 and 60’s to become premier bike in the US for both image and quality.

in the late 60’s or early 70’s Harley Davidson family sells company to AMF… (AMF, the sporting goods company that made shitty volleyballs, basketballs that were mainly used in school playgrounds and sold through retailers) This was the bike that Kelly Leak rode in the Bad News Bears in 1976…., ….. Harley Brand goes to shit under AMF

Meanwhile, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki, made reliable dirt bikes and transitioned them to very cool looking fast bikes in the late 70s and 80s through today….. (i owned a Yamaha YZ 600, it was fast and handled like a dream) for about $1500 to 2,000 bucks. …the Tom Cruise bike in Top Gun)

Harley Davidson family buys the brand back from AMF in the late 70’s to early 80’s but can’t compete with these superior Japanese imports.

Harley Davidsons asks the US gov’t for a protection tax on these Japanese imported bikes… and overnight, these Japanese imports double in price. This bought Harley time to retool and reimage their bikes to everyone, from yuppies, the bikers, to the casual rider and more importantly to compete on price. …and the rest is history for HD.

in addition, I’ve been managing global pricing offerings for the past 20+ years to support hi-tech business. Transactions on cross border business have related import fees, freight, import duty, import taxes to ship products between “County A to Country B” based on commodity type. These actual incurred fees are passed on to the end use customer.

Mac, is this true and correct?

Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

I am enjoying the hell out of the 49ers window slamming shut.

w
v

Me, too, although I would love to hear more crying on the radio during my commute. Unfortunately, the NoCal talkers wrote the season off a week or two ago, so they’ve pretty much already moved into the Acceptance stage.

I’ve been hoping to stick a fork in SF for the past several seasons…… but those bastards never seem to go away….John Lynch always finds tough players to field a team and Shanahan’s game plan is always solid…..

But yes, KNBR callers have been sulking… BTW, KNBR canned Tom Tolbert… he was my favorite host on that station and he grew up a Rams fan… and deep down, I think he still is…

Rams had won 4 of their last 5

Today they look like a team that lost 2 of their last 3

You’re right, they don’t measure up.

Kyren is a fumbler

Karty inconsistent
Tackling is inconsistent
Oline is inconsistent

So is the entire NFC West… inconsistent

The Rams can still win the division…

sorry i misunderstood….yes, Miami has had the Rams number….   I have never liked Miami….

ONE! HUNDRED! AND! THREE! YARDS TO THE HOUSE!

📺: @NFLonFOX | #RamsHouse pic.twitter.com/EYAuaOPI4D

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) November 4, 2024

anyone know why a flag was thrown on this play?

Zooey, are you voting for Steve Garvey?

What’s your recommendations on the following?

• Proposition 2, a bond measure placed on the ballot by the state legislature that would issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and upgrades to public schools and colleges.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-1″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-20″ class=”reference”>[20]</sup>
• Proposition 3, a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the state legislature that would repeal Proposition 8 and declare in the state constitution that that the “right to marry is a fundamental right”, effectively allowing same-sex couples to once again marry.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-2″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-21″ class=”reference”>[21]</sup>
• Proposition 4, a bond measure placed on the ballot by the state legislature that would issue $10 billion in bonds to fund various water infrastructure, energy, and environmental protection projects.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-3″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-22″ class=”reference”>[22]</sup>
• Proposition 5, a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the state legislature that would lower the supermajority vote requirement from 66.67% to 55% for any county or local bond measure that would fund affordable housing projects and public infrastructure.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-4″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-23″ class=”reference”>[23]</sup>
• Proposition 6, a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the state legislature that would repeal the line saying, “Involuntary servitude is prohibited except to punish crime”, replacing it with language saying that involuntary servitude is prohibited absolutely.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-5″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-24″ class=”reference”>[24]</sup>
• Proposition 32, a state statute initiative placed on the ballot via petition that would raise the state minimum wage to $18 per hour by 2026, then annually adjust it for inflation.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-6″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-25″ class=”reference”>[25]</sup>
• Proposition 33, a state statute initiative placed on the ballot via petition that would repeal the Costa–Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995, allowing cities to once again establish their own rent controls on single-family dwellings, condominiums, and residential properties completed after February 1, 1995.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-7″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-26″ class=”reference”>[26]</sup>
• Proposition 34, a state statute initiative placed on the ballot via petition that would require health care providers that have spent over $100 million in any 10-year period on anything other than direct patient care, and operated multifamily housing with over 500 high-severity health and safety violations, to spend 98% of the revenues from federal discount prescription drug program on direct patient care.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-8″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-27″ class=”reference”>[27]</sup>
• Proposition 35, a state statute initiative placed on the ballot via petition that would make permanent the existing tax on managed health care insurance plans, currently set to expire in 2026. It would also require the revenues generated by the tax to only be used for specified Medi-Cal services, and prohibit the revenue from being used to replace other existing Medi-Cal funding.<sup id=”cite_ref-CASOS_19-9″ class=”reference”>[19]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-28″ class=”reference”>[28]</sup>
• Proposition 36, a state statute initiative placed on the ballot via petition that would increase the penalties and sentences for certain drug and theft crimes, which currently are only chargeable as misdemeanors. It would allow, among others, felony charges for possessing fentanyl and other certain drugs, and for thefts under $950, with two prior drug or theft convictions, respectively

Yes, that was cool…. Puka and Kupp… huge! Team looked different…

6 days ago they were 1-4…

Today they’re 3-4 with 10 days to rest to play in Seattle…Seahawks host Bills this Sunday.

Fuck the Raiders.

I seen the Rams lose twice in Oakland…  2010 with Sam Bradford and 1997 with Tony Banks.

URL = Through The Years: Raiders vs. Rams

Raiders lead series 8-7, but the Rams have won 5 of the last 6 games vs the Raiders…. including the 2022 prime time game that revived Baker Mayfield’s career….

GO RAMS

Rams are next to last in average yards allowed (385)… Colts are last with 399

Rams are next to last in TD’s allowed (14)…..Panthers have allowed 15.

Rams last against the pass

the Rams defense sucks

Rams red zone offense is much different without Kupp, Puka and Higby..

Shula’s defense bends and breaks again, but they came up big in that last two bear drives of the 4th.

Stafford got head slapped on his pick…. that’s a 15 yarder in most cases… I wanted to see a game winning drive.

I’m surprised that the Rams continued to play Stafford in the 4th.

Arizona was way overdue to beat the Rams in Phoenix.

3rd straight “road game” next week at SoFi vs 49ers… .. SF will be wearing their home reds next week in LA.

“You Don’t Know Bo”   the ESPN 30 for 30 is excellent and a must see.

it’s a shame that he got his hip ball socket ripped against the Bengals…  he was a phenomenal athlete with a high level of skill to play baseball and football.

Zooey wrote:

joemad wrote:

just curious… which local channel in your area was showing the Rams game? Was it a CW affiliate? I’m asking because when the Rams first moved back from STL to LA, a local independent station KRON4 in SF (now a CW affiliate) was showing Rams programming in 2016 on Friday evenings. Perhaps Kronke was trying to stake claim or draw interest in California markets outside of So Cal. BTW, last year the CW network took over the broadcast of the long running HBO series, Inside the NFL.

Interesting…  perhaps the Spanos Charger clan still has ties to Stockton, CA…  he went to UOP….

but I think the CW Network filled in programming hours across their affiliates to broadcast the game…..   Damn, i could’ve pointed my antenna to Monterey, CA

How to Watch Chargers at Rams on August 12, 2023

URL  = Letters from an American | Heather Cox Richardson | Substack

Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnick wrote that “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process. The email went on to say that once then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko understood this “message” from the United States, the process “will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia.

Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day.

Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there).

Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party.

Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.

Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.”

This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”

The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban.

Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters.

Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention.

The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.

In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.”

Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”