It’s Tuesday and we can’t see the weekend from here [DOT 27/8/24]

27/8/24 bryanlsplinter 49

I’m still covering for RIP today, and we are going to keep formatting to a minimum. That doesn’t mean I have nothing to say though.

It’s all a grift, people. But it’s a really big damn grift.

Trump raises less money than Harris—and how he spends it is a mystery

QUOTE:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign raised less than half as much as Kamala Harris’ campaign during the month of July—and Harris didn’t even enter the race until July 21. That’s an astounding comparison, but there’s something even stranger lurking behind those numbers.

-snip-

Maybe that’s because some of his supporters have discovered that Trump campaign donations are going into a mysterious black hole—a scam so large that it makes Trump University and the Trump Foundation look like peanuts.

As The New York Times reports, during the 2020 election cycle, $516 million of the $780 million spent by the Trump campaign—an astounding 66%—went to one company: American Made Media Consultants. Of the 150 largest bills paid by the campaign, 132 were from AMMC. None of these bills was itemized to explain what the campaign received for these massive expenditures.

American Made Media Consultants is a Delaware-based private company that appears to be carefully constructed for no other purpose than to hide where the money goes once it comes across the threshold. Even Trump’s campaign staff officially doesn’t know what AMMC does with the money. However, ABC News reported in 2020 that AMMC is largely run by former Trump campaign director Brad Parscale. 

In any case, what’s clear about AMMC is … nothing. 

-snip-

However, as the Times reports, it’s not the only such company that benefits from Trump’s campaign funds. A second private company, Red Curve Solutions, has received at least $18 million. According to the Campaign Legal Center, Red Curve is used to pay Trump’s legal bills, with the money that it spends then being reimbursed by Trump’s PACs. The head of Red Curve is also the head of two PACs, so it’s all handled very neatly.

That’s not the last of Trump’s mystery companies. As NBC News reported in June, another Delaware-based LLC named Launchpad Strategies has taken in almost $15 million. Because of the way it’s set up, there is no public knowledge of who owns the company, who works for it, or how any of this money has been spent.

-snip-

The money going into these companies seems to disappear … which certainly makes it hard to discern whether Trump is running his campaign in a legitimate fashion or simply pocketing hundreds of millions in bribes.

Of course he didn’t apologize.

You’ve got to be kitten me: JD Vance stands by ‘cat ladies’ slur

Get him, Randy.

Hoax, my ass.

Heat-related deaths climbed 117% over 25 years

I’m sorry, what? HE’S A CONVICTED FELON

Trump can win on character

I had no idea.

‘Barely surviving’: Some flight attendants are facing homelessness and hunger

Totally on-brand. I mean, is anyone surprised by what this lunatic does any more?

Environmental group calls for RFK Jr. to be investigated for reportedly sawing off whale head

Paleontology is cool.

Dinosaur Footprints on Either Side of the Atlantic Are Matching Sets

Turtle content. Chocolate is back home, but we’re still worried about Jack.

1 turtle returned to Louisville Nature Center; Staff still searching for 2nd missing turtle

Okay, that’s it for me on this DOT. What do you have?

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49 Comments

  2. Rich Lowry is a fucking imbecile. He’s of billions of starbursts fame when McCainiac picked Sarah (At least I don’t fuck couches) Palin.

    A Trump can never run on what they don’t have (but not having money worked out well for them.)

    • This is a great writeup of the mentality of Lowry and the rest of the National Review crowd:

      The Conservatives Who Sold Their Souls for Trump / The rage and shame of the anti-anti-Trumpers is getting worse.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/08/the-conservatives-who-sold-their-souls-for-trump/679623

      In short, the early anti-Trump posturing of Lowry was nothing more than an attempt at legitimizing themselves so they could turn on Clinton after she won in 2016. They thought they were oh-so clever, until Trump won.

      So of course being hacks, they flipped and backed Trump, because all they really care about is hating liberals. And now, as Trump has gotten worse and worse they have doubled down.

      It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame.

      He touches on the ridiculousness of the Times hosting Lowry, and lets them off too easily. It’s not about expanding the debate – the NRO has its own platform – it’s about dumbing the debate down.

      William F. Buckley himself was a fake, but the National Review has found a brand in fakes who have a desperate need for authenticity. It appeals to people who desperately want intellectual validation, but are too dumb to see what they’re writing. It tries to be cheeky, but it appeals to people with no real sense of humor. And its foundation is just snobs with reflexive hatred of people like Clinton and now Harris and Walz.

      And as he points out, they’re people who can’t bring themselves to do the basic things needed to get out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

      • And this is also why the Democrats should welcome never Trumpers but never bend the party in their direction one iota — these people will always be looking for a reason to go back and if they can’t find one, many of them will simply make one up.

        All these dudes still jerk off to Ronald Reagan and the only difference between him and Trump is that he was slightly less embarrassingly racist in public.

        • I think there is potentially grounds for agreement with Never Trumpers on some good government issues – fixing the election certification process, anti-corruption laws, reestablishing voter rights.

          Traditionally those people opposed things like that because they saw them as anti-GOP measures. But I think that particular wing of the conservative movement correctly sees there is no hope for them in the party as long as people like Trump, Paxton and DeSantis are running the GOP. They could be convinced the best way to get them out would be to make an alliance with liberals.

          I think there would be a benefit to liberals as well in weeding out the Cuomo and Adams types from the party.

          Of course an obvious question is whether there are enough true Never Trumpers out there to fill a spit bucket, let alone make a difference in public opinion. But if the stars are kind and rainbows point the way to pots of gold, conservatives in larger numbers will finally wake up after November to how attacking democracy is bad for them too.

  3. When I flew home from Vegas in June, I was seated in the aisle next to Stew’s station. I overhead them discussing a possible strike with /airline known for treating its Asian passengers like shit/ in the fall.

    One of them was pretty damn militant while the other stew was worried. Don’t blame either though.

  5. I wouldn’t cross Kerry Kennedy, even if she were my own sister. After all, she managed to make it out of a Cuomo divorce alive, but of course the Kennedys have their own way of taking care of business, just like the Cuomos. I picture the divorce mediation proceedings taking place in the conference room of a super-high end law practice and a security guard coming into the room and saying, “Alright, guns on the table,” and the two principals and their many attorneys making a small pile of firearms in a plastic bucket.

      • “And don’t try to get cute, Handsy,” says the security guard. “Ms. Kennedy, could I see that ring?” “My wedding ring?” “No, the ring that’s the size of a small ping-pong ball.” The security guard opens it and dumps the poison in a Hazardous Waste Materials container that the building management had so presciently provided.

    • We have municipal golf courses in our public parks:

      https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/golf

      But they were mostly put in many decades ago to improve public health and promote the game of golf. As far as I know, we don’t have many other options in the 5 boroughs (these would be private or require membership fees.) Of course, we don’t have so many failed ones and there’s no real commercial activity attached to the public ones.

      • One of the reasons the Adirondack State Park is what it is today is that a few developers got the idea for animal preserves, theme parks and — of course — a bunch of golf courses all over the place and people got so infuriated over the idea that they closed the door basically forever on development.

  8. I always wonder if right-wingers care that they’re getting grifted. I really don’t think they’re completely unaware it’s happening, because it’s so blatant in that universe. And it happens at every level — Trump’s grifting the business owners and car dealers who are grifting their employees and customers, who are grifting their families and kids, etc. etc. I think they see it as the price of admission so they could eventually be the grifters (or the belief that this get-rich-quick scheme will be the one that lands unlike those other ones).

    • I had the same thought, because of evangelists. I mean, these widows giving them $5 a week, and families with limited funds, have to know their money is spent on mansions, jets, cocaine, and pool boys, right? But I came up with some theories:

      1. No, they don’t know that. They willingly put themselves into an information vacuum.

      2. They’re buying a seat in heaven.

      3. They’re buying into a community, where they can go and see other people, and a bit of a safety net, though I can tell you from experience that once you’re not giving, you’ll never see another church member.

      4. The younger ones are either in on the scam or are trying to be (which is where you landed).

      • I think religion is slightly different because it’s its own set of neuroses (community/feeling superior to others, belief and buy-in into a simple God-driven order, getting into heaven, it’s status quo of their parents and grandparents etc., it’s all they know), though the overlap has grown as evangelicals have thrust themselves into politics. And there’s a certain amount of desperation for those people, who have been told their whole lives being good is the path to success while guys like Trump rob them blind.

        I don’t think it’s 100% right-wing buy-in that it’s all a scam and you get what you can get out of it. But I do think it’s a much higher share than people on the outside understand. There’s some cognitive dissonance, of course, but I also think people are just happy to have someone who hates what they hate and don’t care, ultimately, about the details.

        • It really is impressive. Trump has tremendous scope. He’s clearly stealing millions upon millions in campaign funds, but, by God, he’s still got time to execute another petty scheme that couldn’t possibly net him a fraction of what he’s already stolen.

          But does he let that stop him? No, he does not. There is no scam that is beneath him. There’s no basement to his grifting. He would literally steal coins from a blind man’s cup without the slightest qualm — he’d never say, no, it’s not worth my time to steal quarters. He’d just steal them.

        • The sunk cost fallacy is a huge part of the thinking for a lot who have committed time, money, and careers to the cause.

          It can be either a bad economic calculation or just shame at admitting how much they’ve invested so far that keeps a lot digging even deeper.

          It’s one of the reasons why simple logical argument rarely works to break people away. A straightforward long term cost/benefit spreadsheet only makes the shame worse.

          The worst case scenario is it can take something catastrophic to break people away. A slightly more hopeful opportunity is distracting them into something completely different, like fad diets or fostering kittens.

          • My parents faithfully gave 10% of their income their entire lives to their church. It honestly hurts my brain to think about how much that money would have meant to my family if they’d even just saved it instead of giving it away. The pastor of the church took European vacations every year, lived in a giant five-bedroom house, and gave all three of his kids sports cars to drive to high school. And honestly, he was actually one of the good ones.

            And then for the last years of her life when my mom was in a care facility, I think she got visited maybe three times by church members.

            • My parents always tossed a few bucks in the church basket, but growing up the Catholic Church didn’t really push for money here.

              Mainly because they own a fuckton of real estate they rent for revenue.

              Anyways, when I was in high school my mom lost her shit when the parish priest was like why aren’t you donating and my mom said well she’s paying tuition to a Catholic school, that’s more than enough and the priest had the fucking audacity to say that wasn’t tithing and she still should give.

              • So the priest is conducting a shakedown. It’s not unusual. I’ve actually heard of evangelical churches demanding to see tax returns.

                As a corollary to that, you’re basically admitting your income when you tithe 10%. It’s not hard to multiply your annual donations by 10 to show your total earnings. So every staff member, minister, deacon, and church board member knows exactly how much you make. Which means ultimately that every church member knows how much you make. I mean, rich people are snooty, but it goes to a whole different level in an evangelical church.

                • Yeah theoretically Catholics are supposed to tithe 10%, but even the envelopes the parish mailed out were premarked with amounts that were like weekly $25, $35, $50, “other” and most folks just tossed a few bucks into the collection baskets. I don’t know anyone who actually gave 10%.

  9. Here’s a Bluesky thread on Nate Silver’s new book. It’s not positive.

    If the poster, Dave Karpf, sounds familiar, he’s the guy who first called Bret Stephens a bedbug.

    JFC Nate Silver’s new book is over 450 pages. Was the advance not big enough to afford an editor?!?

    — Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) 2024-08-17T20:21:41.339Z

    You can get a sense from this thread just why Stephens got so worked up and went so far as to go behind Karpf’s back to his provost to try to get him in trouble. Karpf is smart and funny, and Stephens is neither.

     

    • It should be noted that they’re always afraid of Texas flipping; it’s a toss-up state with a very powerful voter suppression machine.

      Not that I don’t think Harris could do it, but she would need to win pretty big to actually carry it (Florida is a similar case, though it’s closer and the suppression is maybe slightly less heavy-handed.)

      If Texas went blue, though, it would break the modern GOP’s spine maybe for good, which is why they know they can never allow it.

  13. The NY Times not too long ago claimed Elon Musk’s politics were too complicated to call him a conservative.

    Now they’re labelling RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard as “progressive Democrats” who have joined Trump because nothing has any meaning anymore.

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