The Never-ending Grift
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Agree.
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That’s when you say no. Unless you’re the kind of woman for whom it’s always just a question of price.
When you shake someone's deep sense of self-worth, leaving a scar in their ego, they will persistently try to diminish you through petty arguments & obsessive captious criticism of your actions, just to soothe the wound.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Thousands of copies of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible were printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices — China.
Global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press show a printing company in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States between early February and late March.
The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that use customs data to track exports and imports. The minimum price for the Trump-backed Bible is $59.99, putting the potential sales revenue at about $7 million.
https://fortune.com/2024/10/09/trump-god-bless-the-usa-bibles-printed-in-china/
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I wonder if his 60% tariff on china will have an exception for bibles…
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Not a shock at all. But if you publish a book entitled ‘here’s how we’re going to rebuild American industry’ you’d pay the extra few bucks and have it made in the US.
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Donald Trump announced last month he is selling “truly special” Trump Watches priced up to $100,000 and constructed with “premium, Swiss-made” materials.
But wait, there's more:
Now, the watchmaker's origins are in question after CNN tried to track down the company behind the devices. They aren't based in Switzerland, but their address returns to a strip mall. In Wyoming. Next to an HR&Block and a Wendy's.
Even the address for TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC was questioned by CNN's report. The address the watchmaker listed is a daycare. It's also the same address used by a lobbying firm that represents Montenergo's Government. The location is also tied to an LLC that sells male enhancement honey.
It’s also the address given for the company behind Trump’s golden sneakers.
I supposed they could be importing them from Switzerland, but my guess is that they come from a country across the Pacific Ocean.
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It has hardly been a month since presidential candidate Donald Trump started hawking digital tokens in something called World Liberty Financial, a loosely defined lending business that mimicked some of the more spectacular failures of the last crypto bubble.
Basic questions about the business — What exactly is it? How does it work? What is newly matriculated NYU freshman Barron Trump doing as one of the company’s “Web3 Ambassadors”? — have gone unanswered.
And if the point of World Liberty Financial is simply to raise a ton of money through unregistered securities offerings, historically a pretty lucrative business in cryptoland, even that has gone awry. In the opening hours of trading, a period of maximum hype, the company has raised a paltry $12 million or so, falling far short of its $300 million goal.
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President-elect Trump used a photo first lady Jill Biden to sell his new line of perfumes and colognes in a post on Sunday.
The image was taken from when they sat one seat away from each other at the reopening ceremony for Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral on Saturday with his new "Fight, Fight, Fight" fragrances superimposed on it and the caption "A FRAGRANCE YOUR ENEMIES CAN'T RESIST!"
"Here are my new Trump Perfumes & Colognes!" Trump wrote above the image on his Truth Social platform.
"I call them Fight, Fight, Fight, because they represent us WINNING. Great Christmas gifts for the family," he added, with a link to the fragrances' retail site as he wished people Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/08/trump-jill-biden-photo-perfumes-colognes
BTW, they are selling for USD$199.
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Just so y'all remember what started the thread...
The old saying goes, “You can’t polish a turd.” Apparently, however, you can still milk it for money out of dumb people because, as another famous saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” Or put another way, “There’s a sucker born every minute. Case in point: the Lincoln Project.
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The people behind the Lincoln Project are geniuses, at least in one sense - they recognized that Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) was real and largely impacted wealthy liberals. When you’ve got leftists with more money than they know what to do with worked up about something, it’s pretty easy to get a nice chunk of it. All you have to do is pretend to care about or have the ability to address whatever it is they are worked up about, make your pitch and watch the checks roll in.If you’re someone like a David Geffen - more money than you know what to do with and a raging hypocrite when it comes to personal behavior (a supporter of climate change legislation who owns a $590 million diesel-guzzling yacht) - virtue signaling is far more important than actually doing anything substantive. Virtue signaling requires nothing but cutting a check, large to normal people but insignificant to them and probably covered by the amount of wealth they accumulated in the time it took to instruct their accountant to write out the check.
When leftist billionaires will happily let you check their couch cushions for a few hundred grand in loose change, why not do it? There are a lot of leftist billionaires and a lot couch-sniffers ready to beg. The Lincoln Project found its natural home.
The funny thing about the Lincoln Project is it was created and run by people with a long history of failure. Two of the founders were veterans of the embarrassingly bad 2008 McCain campaign. Who would give them a dime? Suckers, rich and poor. And it turns out there are a lot of suckers in the country.
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What did they get for the almost $100 million they gave? Really nice stuff for the people who created the Lincoln Project. They also got some web videos and a few ads run on cable on the cheap, plus a lot of free publicity for people who live for publicity, but mostly they got the people running the show very wealthy.It’s good work, if you can get it. Well, I should say it’s good work, if you can live with yourself. It’s not all that hard to get it, all you have to do is commit yourself to conning others to give and pocketing as much of what you take in as possible.
They took in a lot of cash, then set about taking out as much as they could and disappearing it into companies they owned that weren’t subject to federal disclosure laws. The New York Post reported, “The vast majority of the cash was split among consulting firms controlled by its founders, including about $27 million paid to a small firm controlled by (Reed) Galen and another $21 million paid to a boutique firm run by former Lincoln Project member Ron Steslow.”
Further, the Post reports, “That leaves tens of millions of dollars that went toward expenses like production costs, overhead — and exorbitant consulting fees collected by members of the group.” Again, good work, if you can live with yourself.
But this is politics, there isn’t much anyone does they can’t live with…if it pays well enough.
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That limit, however, was tested when one of the co-founders of the grift was outed as having a long record of sexually proposition and harassing the young men working for the group.John Weaver, one of the aforementioned McCain alums, allegedly really likes young boys, including at least one young enough to be his grandson, still four years away from being able to vote.
When the Weaver news broke, everyone else riding the cash cow all the way to the bank spoke out in shock at what they claimed no knowledge of to that point. Reporting at the time exposed almost everyone involved knew and Weaver had been quietly allowed to recede into the background for “health reasons.” You don’t want to rock a rickety boat loaded with cash.
Once the dam broke, and after the election (naturally), the Lincoln Project wasn’t really necessary to the left anymore, so additional reporting “discovered” what most of us knew - the people running the show were running to the bank with bags of cash.
These are just the scams and perversions we know about, who knows what is yet to be discovered.
Once the lights were turned on and people saw the roaches scurrying for cover, those with swollen pockets quickly backed away; distancing themselves from the group as quickly as possible.
Michael Steele, George Conway, Kurt Bardella, and pretty much every third guest on CNN and MSNBC removed references to their role in the pervy-grift from their social media bios, as if they’d hired Servpro to go through their history - like it never even happened.
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But it did happen. They were all there. Who knew what when, and who got how much from where is something we don’t know yet, but it takes a saint to be involved in a nearly $100 million organization and not know what’s going on while simultaneously not making any money, and D.C. has more honest politicians than saints.Now the Lincoln Project is trying to mount a comeback. The “brand” still has resonance with dumb people, and dumb people still have money. Rather than simply admit they had a good run, made more money than their intelligence would ever allow them to and got away with it, for the most part, some are still beating that dead horse hoping a few more dollars fall out of it.
A guy named Fred Wellman is the current executive director, which must be a bit like being the guy in charge of plunging the toilets on the Titanic, is pimping their new line of Lincoln Project “gear,” even modeling their new hat. It’s not recommended to be worn within 100 feet of schools or playgrounds.
The attempt to keep the grift going is reminiscent of a skit on the HBO series “Mr. Show” titled “The New KKK,” in which the new Grand Wizard is a black man who announces the Klan is now inclusive. The agency that created an ad for the new KKK was competing for the “most improved image” award against groups like NAMBLA, whose new slogan was “NAMBLA: We’re not killers.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide which of those jokes more closely resembles the Lincoln Project, but given their brief history, there are no wrong answers.
- Derek Hunter
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Mik’s cousin. He’s enjoyable. The Lincoln Project is big on BlueSky. They came in handy for me recently when they made a meme picture there with some bullet points about Tulsi being a compromised operative. They were so weak, and I trust the Lincoln Project enough to at least compile the best arguments for their side, that I was able to conclude with some confidence that the opposition to Tulsi is tribal hallucinations.
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Im reminded of a comment Cokie Roberts made last time around.
Between his election and inauguration some were saying that maybe he’d rise to the office and become presidential.
Her comment was ‘whenever people say he’ll change I ask them how many 70 year old men they know’
So the question now would be ‘how many 78 year old men do you know?’
