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the 2023 speaker of the house voting thread of implosion


henrygandorf

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5 minutes ago, texasdago said:

Would I be reflecting on this glorious memory if I was?

Whatever glorious memory you have about what I can only imagine was a beautifully crisp Autumn Day in Midtown East.  The breeze was coming in from the south off Lower/Jamaica Bay.  The sunlight peering through the buildings of LIC.  And there he was, that kinda flowing afro mullet thing he was rocking back then, with the sweet 'stache to boot.  And he did that little head twisty bob thing he did in the videos just as a few leaves rustled by his feet.  Sure you almost got hit by a cab in your sense of awe.  But you'll remember it for the rest of your days.  

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23 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

Whatever glorious memory you have about what I can only imagine was a beautifully crisp Autumn Day in Midtown East.  The breeze was coming in from the south off Lower/Jamaica Bay.  The sunlight peering through the buildings of LIC.  And there he was, that kinda flowing afro mullet thing he was rocking back then, with the sweet 'stache to boot.  And he did that little head twisty bob thing he did in the videos just as a few leaves rustled by his feet.  Sure you almost got hit by a cab in your sense of awe.  But you'll remember it for the rest of your days.  

Ok... here's the letdown.  The stache was gone but that mane was still there and flowing. I may be out of touch but my private eyes told me he was with a rich girl who was more of a maneater.  That right there was my adult education in the . method of modern love. 

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FTC----------Dude, if your bingo card didn't have closeted homosexual in bizarre porn-monitoring tryst with son and black cabana valet with no banking records who became famous in the legal community for defending the legal rights of a fake Ark in Kentucky to receive actual tax exempt status like it was an actual habitat for endangered actual animals now serving as the 3rd highest ranking member of our government, all in service to rebooting the vaunted musical career of Messers Darryl Hall & John Oates......well then I can't help you close-minded sinning buffoon.  

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21 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

FTC----------Dude, if your bingo card didn't have closeted homosexual in bizarre porn-monitoring tryst with son and black cabana valet with no banking records who became famous in the legal community for defending the legal rights of a fake Ark in Kentucky to receive actual tax exempt status like it was an actual habitat for endangered actual animals now serving as the 3rd highest ranking member of our government, all in service to rebooting the vaunted musical career of Messers Darryl Hall & John Oates......well then I can't help you close-minded sinning buffoon.  

Honestly, if you didn’t have this on your bingo card, I’d say you were a political/simulation idiot and I’d feel sorry for you. 

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1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

Honestly, if you didn’t have this on your bingo card, I’d say you were a political/simulation idiot and I’d feel sorry for you. 

I can't say this on the "have you ever yearned" thread because there's two regulars on there that'd be butthurt, but whom I still enjoy the contributions of.  

But I was thinking of those stories last month that Jerry and Larry are working on another kinda "meta reunion" for Seinfeld.  I didn't think much of it, I'll believe it when I see it kinda thing (for the record, I love how they did it on 'Curb'). 

And then a couple weeks later this weird thing with Mike Johnson comes out where his son is his masturbating to online porn accountability partner, and several of his friends/churchgoers are also in on it.  And they have this new digital version of the "confines of the honor system."  And instead of paying in cash with odds (because banking and gambling are sinful), they have to pay up with digital currencies.  I mean this is fucking it.  This is "The Contest 2.0"  But in real life.  My most bizarre Seinfeld dream reboot is happening in my Republic.  For real.  And it's horrifying, but also elegantly comedic.  Larry wrote that episode based on a real life experience.  But nobody believed him even decades after the episode.  And now there's a real masturbation/abstinence contest happening in the home of our Speaker.  

Go ahead and tell me there's no simulation and go watch that episode.  This is absolutely fucking insane.  Tomorrow morning, Mike Johnson is gonna suggest all the House Reps. wear nametags so they'll be more friendly to one another.  Just watch.

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38 minutes ago, Zepol87 said:

Pretty late here but holy shit that porn monitoring thing with your “son” is sick

Yeah, the thing is that neither one of them is going to use a device that is being monitored to look at porn - if I had to guess, at some point maybe one (or both) of them had a problem with porn, or at least got caught looking at it, and the wife put her foot down and forced them to go through the motions with the app.  

Nobody does that voluntarily and on their own, and the 1% of men who don't look at porn never wake up one day and think "I should just put this porn monitoring app on my phone, because I have nothing to hide and I can show the whole world how good of a person I am!"  Every person who has heard about this just assumes that either he or his son had a problem with porn, or if he was so openly talking about how it keeps him honest, then he's covering up something.

It's like a cop pulling you over for speeding and he asks for your license and registration and you blurt out "I don't have a body in the trunk!"

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When the Morning Comes is #1 

She’s Gone #2 

the rest don’t matter they are good - I celebrate H&O’s catalog emphatically - but those two run away with top honors imo.

btw rich girl was supposed to be about one of them I can’t remember which but the changed the lyrics because it sounded better than rich boy.

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12 minutes ago, troph said:

When the Morning Comes is #1 

She’s Gone #2 

the rest don’t matter they are good - I celebrate H&O’s catalog emphatically - but those two run away with top honors imo.

btw rich girl was supposed to be about one of them I can’t remember which but the changed the lyrics because it sounded better than rich boy.

Goddamn it. We'd just gone 7 hours with no Hall and Oates chat. 

You know I still love you troph, but I don't love your behavior right now. 

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5 hours ago, troph said:

 

btw rich girl was supposed to be about one of them I can’t remember which but the changed the lyrics because it sounded better than rich boy.

I thought it was about a guy they knew, not one of them personally, but I could be wrong. It was about a guy though and they changed the title

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/07/mike-johnson-speaker-bank-account-mystery/

 

Quote

A teeny fraction of American households don’t have a bank account. In recent days, it appeared that one such household might belong to the man second in line for the presidency: House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Johnson’s recent launch from obscure congressional backbencher to one of the most powerful people in the country has come with a wave of scrutiny. Reporters are combing through his past and finding weird stuff — his curious arrangement with his son to monitor each others’ digital devices for porn, for instance.

 

Quote

One less salacious but perhaps more consequential discovery involves his finances. In his most recent annual financial disclosures, released last year, Johnson (R-La.) reports no assets at all.

Zero.

There are no retirement accounts, no money-market funds, no stocks, no crypto, not even a basic checking or savings account. Even more peculiar, his disclosures have never listed any checking or savings accounts on any of the forms he has filed going back to 2016, the year he was elected to Congress.

 

 

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This is confusing. Where is his congressional salary being deposited? How is he paying his bills?

Johnson was asked on Sunday about his lack of a bank account during an interview on Fox News. “I’m a man of modest means,” he replied, deflecting.

 

Spoiler

He said he had previously worked at nonprofits. He noted that he also has either four or five children (which is a whole other story). “We have a lot of expenses,” he said, citing multiple tuition bills for those kids. He then pivoted to talking about his upbringing as the son of a firefighter and declared that these humble financial circumstances help him “relate to every hard-working American family.” The Fox News anchor asked no follow-up questions.

This bizarre exchange raised more questions than it answered. Such as, how is he paying those school tuition fees? With cash he keeps under his mattress? Sacks of doubloons?

There was speculation, including via late-night TV jokes, that Johnson might be completely “unbanked.” This seemed improbable. The unbanked are disproportionately very low-income — people who can’t make minimum balance requirements or afford bank fees. Rank-and-file federal representatives, by contrast, draw a sizable congressional salary of $174,000 (which gets bumped up to $223,500 for the speaker).

That’s not Johnson’s only income, either, as he earns another $30,000 annually for teaching at Liberty University. His wife receives multiple salaries, too; the exact amounts of her salaries were not disclosed in Johnson’s most recent financial reports, but based on prior years’ data, the household is likely pulling in at least $211,000 total. That’s close to the 90th percentile. And note that other members of Congress of “modest” backgrounds still somehow report having bank accounts.

Or maybe he had bank balances so low that they’re below the required reporting threshold — which is $1,000 for any given account, so long as the combined value of all bank accounts (including those of spouses and dependent children) is over $5,000.

This would suggest that the speaker was living hand to mouth. That is, whatever money comes in might be going right out the door.

Those reporting thresholds matter only for a brief snapshot in time: the account’s balance at the end of the calendar year. So, if a savings account exists and was flush on Dec. 1 but got cleaned out by Dec. 31, he doesn’t have to disclose it in these annual filings, explains Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

Libowitz noted another detail supporting this hypothesis: When Johnson first came into office, he had a retirement account. That account has since disappeared, while he has taken out another loan.

“The retirement fund was slowly going up and is now gone, which kind of points to having money problems,” Libowitz says.

Johnson’s office did not respond to questions I sent about his financial disclosures by publication time. Then, early Tuesday morning, Politico reported that his office told its own reporter that Johnson does indeed have a bank account. His account does not pay interest, though, which makes it exempt from House disclosure rules.

Holding your family’s entire savings in a non-interest-bearing account is a strange choice for a high-income household, particularly during a period of high inflation. But more important, this arrangement still leaves voters in the dark about Johnson’s financial well-being. Whatever Johnson’s motivation for managing his money this way, the effect is to obscure what his resources actually look like and whether he’s under the kind of financial strain that other parts of his disclosures might suggest.

People of all levels of income have money troubles, of course, and it’s usually no one’s business. But those who hold the public trust are different. Whether it’s the leader of the free world or the leader of the people’s house, the public has a right to know whether their elected officials are facing serious financial difficulties — particularly ones that might make them targets for unsavory characters and influence-buying or that might tempt them to misuse campaign funds. This is not exactly unprecedented.

This is why we have financial disclosures in the first place: so Americans can judge whether public servants are truly serving the public interest or their own. Yes, a loophole allows Johnson to keep secret the value of his financial assets. If Johnson wants to prove he’s worthy of his unexpected promotion, though, he should release more information about what’s really happening with his finances.

 

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