H R Pickens
@hrpickens.bsky.social
520 followers 250 following 1.4K posts
I don't expect to be followed back. When I find your stuff interesting, I don't necessarily expect you to find my stuff interesting. That photo is fake. It's not me. But also, basically, it is.
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Reposted by H R Pickens
“My congressional aide’s cubicle swastika has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my congressional aide’s cubicle swastika.”
I'm quite certain I've never heard a curse word used in anger at this workplace, in over a decade of working there. I can't remember ever seeing a colleague treat a colleague disrespectfully. Not sure I've even heard raised voices. It's just not the done thing

Very Montessori. And very successful.
Also? WTF is wrong with a Montessori kindergarten? I've had a kid in one, recently. Everyone is expected to treat one another with kindness and respect.

I work for one of the most successful organizations ever. You've heard of it. And it has a strong culture of kindness and respect.
I wouldn't actually have a good answer. "He was drawing on a much larger population. And the technology of his day allowed him to organize on a larger scale."

Kind of a snoozer, really.
Maybe the more interesting question is: just on its face that seems certain to be true, but what do you think is interesting about that fact?

Suppose, for instance, I were to insist that Grant led a far larger army than Washington did. You might reasonably ask why I think that's interesting.
I immediately regret this decision
Reposted by H R Pickens
Again, it is a full-blown federal felony crime for anyone in the White House or Executive Office of the President to order tax investigations into anyone.

And it's not just a crime to DO it, it's even a federal crime for an employee not to REPORT such an order to the Treasury Inspector General.
26 U.S. Code § 7217 - Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations
U.S. Code
Notes
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(a)Prohibition
It shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.

(b)Reporting requirement
Any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service receiving any request prohibited by subsection (a) shall report the receipt of such request to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

(c)Exceptions
Subsection (a) shall not apply to any written request made—
(1)to an applicable person by or on behalf of the taxpayer and forwarded by such applicable person to the Internal Revenue Service;
(2)by an applicable person for disclosure of return or return information under section 6103 if such request is made in accordance with the requirements of such section; or
(3)by the Secretary of the Treasury as a consequence of the implementation of a change in tax policy.
(d)Penalty
Any person who willfully violates subsection (a) or fails to report under subsection (b) shall be punished upon conviction by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.

(e)Applicable person
For purposes of this section, the term “applicable person” means—
(1)the President, the Vice President, any employee of the executive office of the President, and any employee of the executive office of the Vice President; and
(2)any individual (other than the Attorney General of the United States) serving in a position specified in section 5312 of title 5, United States Code.
I always feel better when it's the other side desperately looking for a working strategy.
How about a simple "purporting to" so that you don't look like a bunch of hacks?
Reposted by H R Pickens
Every time a Democrat gets caught on tape saying like “Some Trump voters are racist” we have a national scandal and JD Vance demands an entirely new kind of apology and meanwhile every Republican group chat is like “Good morning fellow SS members. Who’s ready to respect Hitler today?”
It'd be an entirely unsurprising, if disappointing, result, and there'd be no need to look for nefarious explanations.
She has won statewide elections in Maine a couple times, I guess. That tells me she's popular there. In the regrettable event that she wins the primary, I think we'd have to conclude that the people of Maine who've voted for her more than once already have just done so again.
The point of the "bad apple" metaphor is that the rot in one apple very quickly spreads to all the others.

So often people get it exactly backwards, and use it to suggest that we shouldn't presume that the rot has or will spread.
Enemy is that way.

There's no benefit in you two going at it over nothing
The end of Dianne Feinstein's life and career were a disaster for all involved.
Old enough to remember Pete Rose.
you can do "it's only money" and "better he have the money than the billionaire" until the cows come home, and you're wrong, because teams are never capable of figuring out in real time when players are completely cooked, and he will likely play for many years at negative value before being benched
There's gonna be a great movie someday in which some handsome young actor explains this shit to Steve Carrell who just sits there gobsmacked.
They're gonna have a devil of a time hiding. Such a wide paper trail. IRS. Social security admin. State tax boards. Mortgage applications.

And whichever of their comrades turn state's evidence. These guys better hold on to some evidence so they have something to offer prosecutors down the road.
Goddamn slave-catchers. May they never know a moment's peace.
Yeah, best get at it. Those bases aren't gonna load themselves.
Posters wear vests with special sensors so that judges can tell, to an accuracy of five milliseconds, who said 'privilege' first and thereby won the exchange.
That was some little-league bullshit right there.
Ah well. Two stanzas of timeless genius ain't bad.