Rex Tillerson is apparently reconsidering his new job as Secretary of State, several anonymous sources told CNN over the weekend. (They call it “Rexit,” but I refuse to call it that, because that’s a horrible pun).
So, Hillary colluded with the Russians to put Trump in the White House (and probably get a whole bunch of senators, Reps and Governors elected) as a way to put the Republicans in charge of everything, knowing that they're clueless, disconnected assholes who would do nothing but argue each other into their own political graves?
Donald Trump has been on a major tweeting binge over the past day, and Monday morning he issued what looks an awful lot like a strong hint to Attorney General Jeff Sessions:
x
So why aren't the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?
In translation: Hey Jeff. You want to get back on my good side? Be a little less beleaguered? You could start by targeting Hillary Clinton to help distract from my Russia problem.
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told lawmakers in a statement on Monday that he “did not collude … with any foreign government.”
Kushner met behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday and will talk with the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. Both panels are investigating Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election and whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
NPR journalists have annotated Kushner’s statement, in which he describes his contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer, among others, but denies any wrongdoing.
Reblog if you are an alpha woman who are unable to love, you support alpha women who are unable to love, or you just laughed really hard at the article title
I think they might have mistaken ‘unable to love’ with ‘unwilling to shoulder the entire emotional burden in a relationship’
Or perhaps “unwilling to tolerate being abused or taken for granted in return for marital or financial security.”
Or perhaps it’s simply “More and more women are finding out that they have options.”
Today, I was working at my computer, with my earbuds on, when someone tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a post-it note that say "Have a great day! " Then they shot around the corner before I even saw who it was.
I’ve been having a really bad day, so I thought I’d make this gifset in case any of you out there are feeling at your worst and need a little something to make your day brighter.
To recap: these vicious idiots have been promising for SEVEN YEARS that they would DESTROY OBAMACARE, and today – after a week of staggering, almost farcical incompetence in the face of public outrage – they couldn’t even get a vote on their incoherent bill so they’re literally crying about it. Also, Donald Trump couldn’t negotiate a fish into the fucking ocean.
We are smart enough to know hot things should be hot.
We are sorry if you don’t
fun story about the reason they do that (at least in America)
once this lady spilled her McDonald’s coffee on herself and ended up getting like 3rd degree burns and since there was no warning on the cup she was able to claim she didn’t know it would be hot (or at least that hot) and won a lawsuit against McDonald’s for $1 million
That’s what the media smear campaign against her would have you believe, anyway. The truth of the matter is that the McDonald’s in question had previously been cited - on at least two separate occasions - for keeping their coffee so hot that it violated local occupational health and safety regulations. The lady didn’t win her lawsuit because American courts are stupid; she won it because the McDonald’s she bought that coffee from was actively and knowingly breaking the law with respect to the temperature of its coffee at the time of the incident.
(I mean, do you have any idea what a third-degree burn actually is? Third-degree burns involve “full thickness” tissue damage; we’re talking bone-deep, with possible destruction of tissue. Can you even imagine how hot that cup of coffee would have to have been to inflict that kind of damage in the few seconds it was in contact with her skin?)
Yeah I’m tired of people joking about either the “stupid” woman who didn’t know coffee was hot or the “greedy” woman making up bullshit to get money.
She was hideously injured by hideous irresponsibility, it was an absolutely legitimate lawsuit and the warning on the cups basically allows McDonalds to claim no responsibility even if it happens again. Every other company followed suit to cover their asses.
So they can still legally serve you something that could sear off the end of your tongue or permanently demolish the front of your gums and just give you a big fat middle finger in court. “The label SAID it would be HOT, STUPID.”
obligatory reblog for the great debunking of the usual ignorance spouted about this case
obligatory mention that the media smear campaign to twist teh facts on this case and get public opinion against the victim was deliberate and fueled by the right wing tort reform movement
it was seized upon to limit the rights of consumers to hold giant corporations accountable for wrongdoing
watch the documentary Hot Coffee, it lays out all of the facts and examines the response to this case and explains why everything you think you know about this case is bullshit, and explains why tort reform is bullshit in an entertaining and informative manner
The woman injured in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants was 79 years old at the time of her injuries, and suffered third-degree burns to the pelvic region (including her thighs, buttocks, and groin), which in combination with lesser burns in the surrounding regions caused damage to an area totaling a whopping 22% of her body’s surface. These injuries that required two years of intensive medical care, including multiple skin grafts; during her hospitalization, Stella Liebeck lost around 20% of her starting body weight.
She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation.
The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.
Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.
The Liebeck case was absolutely not an example of litigation-happy Americans expecting corporations to cover their asses for their own stupidity, but we seem determined to remember it that way. It’s an issue of liability, and the allowable lengths of capitalism, and even of the way in which our society is incredibly dangerous for and punitive towards the uninsured, but it was not and is not a frivolous suit. Please check your assumptions and do your research before you turn a burn victim’s suffering into a throwaway punchline.
Hell is staring at a computer screen listening to 300th recorded message of the day left by yet another person who needs to be saved from the institution you work for, realizing that you really are starting to hate them all.
hell is your room in the dead of night and forgotten lyrics to songs that once felt like our entire soul
hell is wandering the trailer park at one in the morning with a cold can of ginger ale in your hand and no shoes on, staring into the trees and getting this strange notion that something is dragging you in.
Hell is sitting on the fire escape stairs and filling your body with poison while remembering how many friends you’ve pushed away.
Hell is looking into the eyes of those you care about and realizing they’ve always been that cold.
hell is knuckle deep in the ashes of the city you burned burned burned to the ground as you try to find the remnants of what once was before the fire came
hell is crying my eyes out underneath the stars, screaming out questions that will never be heard or answered, feeling this sinking feeling that the rest of your life will not get any better
hell is realizing that this place is a truly dog-eat-dog world, with even ones you thought as friends disappearing faster than you can kill them
hell is walking through the doors of the home you thought you’d burned down, wearing a smile and looking at all the masks that greet you
Hell is the first time you question if when he says “I love you,” he really means it, and the doubt that creeps over your mind as you ask yourself again and again.
hell is a constancy of sickness with just enough coherency to remember how it all fell apart over and over and over
Hell is exile from your peers when you defy their rules. It is the lonliness of being left for dead for the price of mistakes or slips of the tounge.
hell is the constant feeling of emptiness and loneliness. it is pushing everybody you care about away and locking yourself in your room. it is looking in a mirror and only seeing fragments of what you used to be.
Probably the best use for pennies at this point, but I'm curious whether this is actually legal?
When a barber shop owner, Rich Holtham, got an estimate of £1000 for the new shop floor, he decided he can do better. So instead, he exchanged 700 pounds to 70,000 pennies and covered the whole floor with them.
Show Full Text
“We wanted a new floor but the cost of getting it done was expensive and we wanted to do something a bit more unusual, so we looked at a few different ideas online,” Rich told Daily Mail. The whole barber shop crew spent a full week gluing the coins to the ground, and that’s excluding the gap grouting that was done after.
“We had to take our own cash to the bank and we had to take hundreds of pennies out a day,” explained the owner of 4 barber shops across the UK. “In the end, we took out £700 worth of pennies. That’s 70,000 coins.”
In the end, the barber shop got not only the coolest floor in town, but also some free advertising: “We have had a lot of interest in the floor, to be fair. Passers-by keep coming into the shop to take a few photos. We have gained a lot of business from it.”
OK, but does anyone remember that Iron Fist spoof I shared from Tumblr, where an Asian girl's plane goes down over america, and she's saved by a band of cowboys, ans she learns their ways and becomes the greatest cowboy of cowboys?
The next Kingsman movie is going to examine the very special relationship shared by the U.S. and the United Kingdom... mainly by having both country’s spy agencies, the Kingsman and the Statesmen, take the piss out of each other. But on top of that, it’s going to give us some truly spectacular action, too.
Eating live octopus is common in Korean and certain Japanese cuisines — but not without controversy. Animal rights groups are against the practice and according to scientists, octopi are highly intelligent and feel pain.
There’s this thing we tend to do when we hear the awful news that people we know or admire have cancer or other dire diagnoses. We transform them into courageous warriors, ready to battle and conquer the forces of the evil disease. They’re suddenly heroes. Fighters. It can feel odd to them because just a bit ago, they…
Woohoo, I'm safe! State offices are still on Windows 7. Considering how long it took them to get off XP, it's gonna be a while before I have to worry. (I only use it for a few things, but I do use it. I can't see the state shelling out actual money for a art program when they won't even acknowledge I need Acrobat, not just Reader.)
Nearly four years after tax refund anticipation loans were all but removed from tax preparation offices, similar costly financial products continue to be offered to many low-income consumers in need of a cash infusion before their tax refund actually hits the bank. This appears to be the case for a loan company accused of providing thousands of refund anticipation-like loans with hidden fees to people living in and around the Navajo Nation.
The Claims
• A couple took out a Holiday Loan from T&R Market in Nov. 2016.
• The loan was issued based on an estimate of the couple’s future tax refund.
• When the couple returned to have their taxes prepared and then to collect their refund, they found they had been charged for undisclosed fees and an interest rate higher than disclosed in the contract.
• While they were told the interest rate worked out to be $264%, it was really 385%.
• Undisclosed fees also included a more expensive tax prep fee, credit check fee, and document fee.
A class-action seeking lawsuit [PDF], filed last week in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque, claims that T&R Market, Tancorde Finance, and T&R Tax Service deceived consumers about the terms of their refund anticipation-like loans, saddling users with hidden charges and excessively high interest rates.
Refund anticipation loans (RALs), which were largely prohibited in 2012, are loans secured by and repaid directly from the proceeds of a consumer’s tax refund from the Internal Revenue Service.
As we’ve previously reported, companies have turned to offering non-bank and “no-fee” RALs. Such is the case for T&R Market, Tancorde Finance, and T&R Tax Service, which offers Holiday Loans and Instant Cash Loans.
According to the lawsuit, the companies — part of a business venture serving towns situations on the border of the country’s largest Indian reservation — allegedly imposed hidden charges, deceptively understated [the interest rate], and engaged in other unlawful and deceptive conduct when providing customers with RAL-like loans.
The Loan
In the case of the plaintiffs, a couple sought a Holiday Loan in Nov. 2016 in order to travel and buy food for Thanksgiving.
In order to obtain a Holiday Loan, a customer first visits the T&R Tax Service office, where a T&R Market employee prepares a loan application with the customer. That application is then transferred to a T&R Tax Service employee.
Because W-2s have not been issued at the time a Holiday Loan is offered, the tax return can not be prepared and the T&R Tax Service employee must estimate the amount of the refund.
In this case, the couple was notified that their estimated refund would be $8,000, and that they were approved for a Holiday Loan of $1,250.
The contract identifies Tancorde as the creditor for the loan, stating that customer is obligated to repay the loan proceeds plus a finance charge.
Under this specific contract, the couple was required to make two payments of $762.50, the first on Nov. 23 and the second two weeks later, for a “Total of Payments” of $1,525. The Total of Payments consisted of the return of the principal $1,250 loan, a $250 finance charge, and a $25 document fee.
The Costs
The lawsuit claims that the document fee was a change imposed as an incident to the extension of credit, making it a finance charge under the Truth In Lending Act. However, the companies disclosed the fee as part of the amount financed, meaning it was subject to interest charges.
Additionally, when the couple returned to have their taxes prepared, they were told they would be charged $145, which would be taken from their refund.
When the refund arrived, the couple returned to the business. There they were told they were owed a refund of $849.20 after various deductions.
While the deductions included the $1,525 total of payments from the contract, it also included a tax preparation fee of $157.05, more than the previously stated charge of $145, as well as an undisclosed “credit check fee” of $9.75.
The lawsuit claims that the companies had no contractual right to charge more than $145 for tax prep or charge the $9.75 credit check fee. As a result, the interest charge in the contract of 264% was significantly lower than the actual interest charged of 385%.
The suit claims that the couple unwittingly paid more for the loan than they anticipated because the charges were not properly disclosed.
The lawsuit seeks actual and punitive damages for the couple and those who have also been deceived by the companies’ misrepresentation of fees.
My cats understand and will obey a number of verbal commands, one of which is “go away”. I don’t use it often, but if they’re bugging me and I’m trying to work or doing something that could be dangerous for cats, I can tell them to go away, and off they go - they’ll only keep pestering me if there’s a serious problem they need me to look at.
That said, their idea of a serious problem that requires my attention is somewhat eccentric. Previous instances have included:
There was an unfamiliar car parked across the street
Their water bowl was four inches to the left of its usual position
One of them had puked on the stairs and they didn’t want to walk past it
It was raining
One of them saw a weird bug
These are all very important things that required your attention. They’re doing a good job.
Dogs really aren’t much better. I teach all my dogs the command “show me”. How it works is if the dog needs something but I’m having trouble understanding what exactly they’re trying to tell me, I say “show me” and they lead me to whatever the problem is. Usually they lead me to a real problem (like a toy that got stuck under the couch, their water bowl is empty, etc). But sometimes they want me to fix things like this-
They pulled the covers off my bed and now they want me to put the covers back
They put their ball on top of the ottoman but the ottoman won’t throw it for them
The cat is sleeping and won’t chase them
A flower fell off the potted plant
The cat is sitting in a box and they don’t like it
One of them lost their bandana
The cat won’t take the toy they’re trying to give her
The cat DID take the toy they gave her and now they want it back
"
"
