🙄

@TimStone Guess they found their scapegoat.

@TimStone yes, our plan was to interrogate him by breaking fingers, whipping, stabbing, cutting and electrocuting him. how are we supposed to know that he would have died from that

West Virginia super stoked it edged out three other states

@Frank Indeed. Arguably it's a pretty terrible one since it implies the interrogation is totally normal and cool but I guess since nothing matters the reasonableness of the excuse is neither here nor there

ummm, isn't that still discussing racism?

The Trump administration has spent millions of dollars out of the VA budget on hiring private security to guard confederate cemeteries

tfw you're taking care of your Troops

my mum was saying last night that the US seems to only care for it's veterans if they are killed in action

@Memor-X just like we only care for babies before they are born

August 4 patriot prayer could have been way worse than it was

holy shit

both sides btw

> According to Oregon Live, the police say both right-wing and leftist protestors have carried weapons, although Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw didn’t specify whether or not anti-fascists often took up overwatch positions with sniper rifles.

jfc

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Warren.

> Julian Assange ordered by Ecuador to curb speech, clean bathroom, look after cat if he wants internet

:|

@Yuuki r/nottheonion

Ahhh I see we've reached the "gasp The deficit is increasing?! Better slash social benefit programs!" stage of the tax cuts

@TimStone dammit

paul ryan must be so excited right now

@Unionhawk not even a wiki but apparently a small child who has forgotten to do their chores and is now grounded

@Ash this too

@Unionhawk 6 messages up, though without link to news story.

lol i'm taking my annual money laundering training, and i'm not sure if the person that wrote this is intentionally throwing shade on trump industries or not

but what a fun coincidence that almost all the businesses they are involved with are "ideal for laundering cash"

Which is why I support hiring like, a thousand people at the IRS

whose only job is to constantly investigate rich people

and the top 3 "sources of illicit income" are:

@Unionhawk i'd say more than a thousand but yeah i am definitely for this jobs program

I saw ten get proposed but that feels like A Lot

if the trump admin can double or triple ICE and CBP, why can't we double or triple white collar crime investigators?

@GodEmperorDune This is why I laugh when people say Portland is some kind of weird hippie liberal utopia.

Make the "routine audit" line a real thing

@Yuuki i dunno any place that is 100% a hippie liberal utopia

there are always going to be people that are not as far left as others

There are 11 million millionaires in America so by that metric even if a fractional percentage of them have done financial crimes we'd need a fair few

also you an get too far left and end up antivaxx, anti science, full on conspiracy theorist too

Fuck it let's hire 11 million investigators

@GodEmperorDune Kinda weird how both extremes are anti-science.

1.3 million decamillionaires if you want to start smaller

1.3 million too many imo

@Yuuki gotta take shots at the groups that can discredit your wacky ideas

(cults do this too)

@TimStone tbh we would never get the tax prep industry to agree, but if we did automatic tax prep by the govt (basically when you get your w2 you also get a paper from the IRS that says "here's what we think you owe, contest it and try to do better if you want") that would free up IRS resources to do better things

lol, conservative #nevertrumper confirmed

> Laundering is not new---Robin Hood was classic money launderer---he stole from rich, gave to poor, and thus promoted his underlying crimes.

@GodEmperorDune Like audit me probably :P

lol

@GodEmperorDune That's... that's not what money laundering is...

@Yuuki i think it technically fits the definition, but it's definitely not the modern usage

Well, maybe "giving to the poor" could be considered money laundering. Except the typical objective of laundering money is to be able to use the "clean" money afterwards.

socialism is when you do money laundering,

@Yuuki yeah that's where i'm stuck too

maybe the poor provided goods and services to robin hood in return? or something?

He's raising his image with the poor so that when the uprising comes he'll be positioned to take over

Clearly

@TimStone "mass effect replica weapons for everyone, just remember that @TimStone has your back when the time comes"

See, exactly

Luckily I can't promise that though since Triforce went out of business

maybe the next replica company won't anger you and thus will stay in business

They better shakes fist

@GodEmperorDune Not that IRS resources even need to be freed up anyway since they pay for themselves

The main reason to decrease IRS resources in the first place is literally to facilitate tax dodges and crimes

Like Jared Kushner also not having paid taxes for more than a decade

@puzzlepiece87 yeah, at that high level they do. if congress stopped hamstringing them

@Unionhawk Nice timing on this

Congress is good at turning self-funding agencies into bottomless pits where you throw money.

(see: Post Office)

david cay johnston had a piece about how he literally discovered a tax shelter, took it to the IRS to enforce and they passed on it

The post office rules

so he took it to state tax collecting agencies instead

It's a miracle it runs as well as it does with all the nonsense they have to deal with, and the size of the country

@Unionhawk and the fact that they have all those logistics figured out way before fedex, amazon, etc

and amazon and all can go "this area is too problematic for us to have to deal with, we'll just outsource it to post office", but post office has to make it work

Say what you will about the founding fathers, that they had the foresight to build "figure out nationwide logistics" into the constitution was a smart move

@GodEmperorDune And the fact that they were running a profit up until Congress demanded that they pre-fund every possible employee's retirement.

@Yuuki yep

which we don't even do with social security since the nixon admin

Hmm... "profit" is probably the wrong term. "Surplus"?

@Yuuki good point, i understood what you meant though

@Unionhawk if only someone had warned them of this beforehand

like every sex worker

@Unionhawk Never could have foreseen this

good thing it was highly controversial in the senate which means most senators are good

oh what's that it passed nearly unanimously

oh

yepppppppp

@GodEmperorDune yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep yepyepyepyepyepyepyepyep

Somebody's who good with vocab: what is a good word for a self-evident saying that is necessarily true but means very little? (If you need inspiration, think of something Jordan Peterson would say lol) There's a word for it but it's not coming to me. Something means like the same as vapid aphorism or something like that.

@puzzlepiece87 cc @ash, they are extremely good with words

@GodEmperorDune Thanks for calling in the experts.

@puzzlepiece87 Platitude?

@Yuuki Yes exactly what I was looking for, thanks Yuuki and @ash!

English skill intensifies

Ah, now I'm seeing the "Elizabeth Warren took a DNA test to show how special she is" hot takes.

This is why you don't play stupid games with Republicans, you idiot Democrats.

@Yuuki yep, there was literally no upside to this

PEN America sues Trump for allegedly stifling free speech: cbc.ca/news/world/…

Trump is apparently sexually into horses. America was really Equus all along.

I'm a fool for thinking Uber was on 5 year deathwatch, apparently.

@puzzlepiece87 wut

is this a pence quote refrance?

@puzzlepiece87 Please delete this.

@GodEmperorDune Only read if you don't value your brain cells

@Yuuki If you're serious, I would but it's 3m. Feel free to mod delete it.

oh yeah that is an extremely weird conclusion to draw from that

i mean its well known that trump does a lot of misogynist things and his base loves him for it

Yeah, generically insulting the appearance of a woman he doesn't like is entirely in character

@GodEmperorDune Oh, I didn't even read the Avenatti quote until just now when trying to figure out what the weird conclusion is. But Avenatti and I were thinking in the same direction - if you liken a person you've had sex with to an animal as an insult, the natural follow up is to say that the insulter is sexually into that animal.

Sure, it's a good comeback if you're on a schoolyard, but it's clearly not the actual intent or meaning behind what he said

In any case, this entire conversation was intended to be a side comment about the latest round of Trump misogyny, I didn't mean to wade into the reeds. @Yuuki, if you were serious about deleting, feel free to mod-delete all of it.

Nah, that comment was mostly a joke.

But you do owe me a gallon of brain bleach.

@murgatroid99 Similar to Avenatti, I couldn't care less about Trump's actual intent or meaning, which is "vulgarly distance myself from someone I closely associated with by pretending I didn't". I'm happy to entirely disregard that meaning and stick with the truth that the association happened, whether it's Stormy Daniels, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, or anyone else.

@Yuuki True. My English teacher owes me a gallon or 5 for including fucking Equus in our curriculum as well. No redeeming value in that one imo.

And it messes with me often, every time I see "Dos Equis" I think of that story.

@puzzlepiece87 Either way, the other truth here is that Trump clearly isn't actually sexually attracted to horses

@murgatroid99 I'm sorry, it's too late, that data was already accepted. I don't have delete access on the table.

The row is one below the one for Ivanka.

I'm hearing it from so many people, everybody's saying it. Just tremendous.

As @Unionhawk would say:

good friend

:)

😐

@Unionhawk but is it because there's more of it now? or just it's now more visible

Like this is infinitely more senseless than pretending like it was a rogue element but we're gonna go there because not only does nothing matter we must suffer as a result

@TimStone christ he's going to make this about kavanaugh isn't he

and by extension, about himself

The full quote did indeed mention Kavanaugh

This is just mind-numbingly bad. It was going to end with zero consequence for Saudi Arabia anyway but now it's going to do that and be really, really absurd

@TimStone Trump wouldn't be himself if he didn't make everything worse.

The comments about the Central Park Five would be pretty on point if anything meant anything anymore

@TimStone dafuq

@Frank This is a remarkably reliable truth

@TimStone saudi arabia definitely did it then

Oh yeah, 100% even without this

@TimStone The one constant of Trump.

@TimStone only if its in the shape of the electoral map

eyes narrow mmmm

Yeah, I'm kinda 🤷 on it too so I'm not 100% sure we need a movie adaption just for kicks?

@Ash ham-il-ton!

or the new all star one

yes, this is a good idea

@TimStone ... huh?