The guy who set up the Ashli Babbitt fund reportedly stole all the money. pic.twitter.com/emAsUe5s0h
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 29, 2023
Every cult needs its martyrs — no better tool for milking the rubes!
I’ve been following this for a while from the people directly and others. They also got swindled out of the proceeds from the ‘J6 Choir’ song with Trump.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 29, 2023
john (not mccain)
Excellent. May it ever be so.
eclare
Is this surprising to anyone?
Tony Jay
What in the actual vicinity of fuck? Is this a joke? They better not attempt to Gospel-up this unholy abortion of concentrated Don’t Even. If I didn’t think they’d just steal it I’d lay down some big money on a sub-Peter Cetera style cringefest.
Okay, I take it back. This needs to happen. Biden would landslide in all 53 states and the CIA’s secret Moon colonies if that uncoordinated smear tried to Christopher Walken his way through a music video.
eclare
@Tony Jay:
There is some song the prisoners recorded that TFG plays at rallies. It’s real.
Rocks
Can we refer to this as a “George Santos”, in honor of George raising money for a dog of a homeless vet that required cancer surgery and then stealing it all, which caused the poor untreated animal to die?
opiejeanne
Are we supposed to feel sorry for these people who keep getting scammed?
Chetan Murthy
@opiejeanne: i don’t know about you, but I’m jubilant. Fucking jubilant. Bottled MAGAt tears would fly off the shelves. And if some of them were impoverished to the point where they needed to go on public assistance, maybe they would learn why a robust welfare state is a good thing! Teachable moment!
sukabi
@opiejeanne: don’t think so…snickering is allowed though.
Tony Jay
For The Glory Of Me – Lyrics, Music and All Goodly Things – John Barron
Tonight, it’s very clear
‘Cause you’re in jail, I’m here
There’s so many things I wanna tweet
I will always love you
But now I gotta leave you alone
Sometimes, I just forget
Say things I might regret
It breaks my heart to see you on trial
I don’t wanna lose you
But y’gonna have to make it alone
I’m not the man who will fight for your honor
I’m not the hero you’re dreaming of
You’ll lose forever
Knowing together
That you did it all for the glory of Trump
You keep me standing tall
You help me through it all
I’m always strong when you’re beside me
I have always needed you
I could never make it alone
I’m not the man who will fight for your honor
I’m not the hero you’re dreaming of
You’ll lose forever
Knowing together
That you did it all for the glory of Trump
Just like a nightmare griftorama
From a crap TV show
Just in time, I will run away
Hide in Mar El Lago, there I’ll stay
I not the man who will fight for your honor
I’m not the hero that your dreaming of
You’re gonna jail forever
Knowing together
That you did it all for the glory of Trump
You’ll live forever
Knowing together
That you did it all for the glory of Trump
You did it all for Trump
You gave your all for Trump
You lost it all for Trump
You owe it all to Trump
Tony Jay
@eclare:
Is it that one?
eclare
@Tony Jay:
Hahaha….nice lyrics.
Chetan Murthy
@Tony Jay: Tony, curious what you think of this: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2023/05/why-conservative-stance-on-immigration.html
It really reminds me of what’s happening in the US: the GrOPers held hostage by their worst faction, and eventually bit-by-bit all of the pretending-to-be-decent ones turned into members of that faction, too.
mrmoshpotato
LOL!
Also, I will remember that the dead bitch is a traitor who tried to overthrow the US government. I will remember that every time I see her traitorous name.
Memorial Day has nothing to do with her.
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Nominated.
Shalimar
I can’t say I’m unhappy that the money she was going to use to glorify her traitor daughter got stolen to pay some grifter’s bills instead.
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Who told him? Remember – loose lips
sink shipstell furreners about our 2 secret states and our Moon colonies!Tony Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
I have no issue with anything the author says in that piece. The Hard Right of the Conservative Party chose Immigration as their wedge issue because, as long as consecutive UK Governments refused to use the clearly available powers they had to restrict cheap EU labour (as every other major European economy did) because it allowed them to mask deficiencies in the UK’s educational and economic infrastructures caused by decades of Thatcherite policy, then there were going to be lots and lots of people who could be easily convinced by a predatory Media that everything wrong in the country was the fault of The Bloody Foreigners rather than The Greedy Rich.
This could all have been sorted out years ago if politicians had just been honest about what was going on and a modest slice of the country’s wealth diverted from shareholders and corporate bonuses into addressing the poverty and social degradation caused by Continuity Thatcherism, but with consecutive Tory and New Labour Governments running the show, that was simply never going to happen.
So it all got out of hand and was, in turn, picked up and exploited by forces who saw the artificially engorged issue of Immigration as a useful tool to lever the UK out of the EU and leave it naked and defenceless for one final orgy of asset-stripping.
It could, possibly, maybe, have been delayed if 2017 or 2019 had seen the Tories swept out of office, but a backward-looking majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party worked their arses off ensuring that that wouldn’t happen, and so we ended up in this deep hole with no visible means of climbing back out.
Good luck getting anyone in the UK News Media to talk about any of this, though. It’s simply not allowed.
Tony Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
Three secret states. West Dakota doesn’t have the institutional heft of Sub-Appalachia or New Haudenosaunee, but they all have Electoral College votes, and Luna One has its Space Senator to break ties.
p.a.
Is the title “We Aren’t the World”?
Chetan Murthy
@p.a.: The snark is strong in this one.
rikyrah
@opiejeanne:
Not me.
Every $$$ given to the grifters is money they can’t send to the GOP
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
😂😂😂😂😂
OzarkHillbilly
@Tony Jay: Huh. And here I thought Luna One was using Jewish space lasers to break ties.
NotMax
With apologies to the Fab Four.
Tony Jay
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Agency can neither conform nor deny that query.
However for just the bargain price of $499.99 a night you can enjoy the Silverado Class Mar El Lago Experience with all-inclusive access to the stolen top-secret documents of your choice. And for only an additional $100.00, those documents will be turned over so that you can actually read them!
geg6
@Tony Jay:
Was reading an article about some polling over there yesterday (don’t ask where; it was in my Apple News feed). Something like a whopping 60+ percent have Brexit regrets and even 50+ percent if those who voted “yes” wish they hadn’t.
NotMax
@Tony Jay
Now flashing on Mike the TV.
:)
Rebel’s Dad
@Chetan Murthy: Bottled MAGAtears would be great. Like holy water, imagine all the stuff you could do with it. Car won’t start? Pour some MAGAtears on the engine! Husband cheating on you? A little MAGAtears in his coffee and he’ll dump his mistress that same day!
Rebel’s Dad
@Shalimar: the real trickle-down economics.
Rebel’s Dad
@rikyrah: “A fool and their money are soon parted.” Better the pockets of some grifter than the GOP.
rikyrah
@geg6:
It was the way that the shills for Brexit all got the Hell outta there as soon as the vote came through. Phucking cowards😠😠
Tony Jay
@geg6:
Oh yeah, once Flobalob was given a free hand to “Get Brexit Done” it lost its cachet as the great unrealised event that would liberate Greater Britain from the strangling yoke of Johnny Foreigner and became a thing that could be judged on its (non existent) merits. The only people still bound to it now are the complete racist bastards for whom it was only ever a first step along the road to a White Free State anyway, while an ever growing number of the morons for whom ‘Brexit’ was a stand-in for punching back at whatever unrelated problems their communities were suffering are now looking around and realising that they were well and truly conned.
You’d think that the people who spent the vast majority of Corbyn’s leadership literally screaming 24/7 that Labour needed to be ignore the 1/3 of Labour voters who supported Brexit and sweep into power by harnessing the huge Remain majority would now be doubling down on that policy and hammering on the Rejoin (or at the very least “Brexit Has Failed”) drum, but no, they’re not. Instead they’re concentrating solely on pandering to the worst instincts of that 1/3 who were pro-Brexit in 2016/19 and insisting that they’ll somehow “Make Brexit Work”.
Apart from this underlining the central fact that the Labour Right’s Brexit-era absolutism was an exercise in short-termist, anti-Corbyn cynicism and internal sabotage, it also spotlights how politically inept they are. Always fighting yesterday’s battle with their father’s mouldy old weapons.
RevRick
While it seems likely that we’re going to get past the craziness of the debt ceiling nonsense, we need to think about the craziness of all the pearl-clutching hysteria over our national debt, in the first place.
You see, U.S. Treasuries are the gold standard of the financial world. Literally, they are as good as gold. Everything in the global financial system is benchmarked against them. But before we even consider that, we need to ask ourselves who owns the debt? Because that debt is somebody’s asset.
In 75% of the case, we do. Treasury bonds are the foundation of our banks, insurance companies, institutional investors like Fidelity and our pensions and 401ks. In fact, by law, they are required to hold a certain percentage of fixed rate assets in the safest instruments, which are U.S. T-bills. Paying off the debt would a). amount to shifting $s from one pocket to the other; and b). greatly complicate investment decisions.
The other25% is held by foreign companies and nations, who eagerly gobble them up. And, since the current ten-year yield on T-bills is 3.754%, they are effectively paying us to hold their money. Because T-bills are the world’s gold standard and lubricate the world’s economy. The last thing these nations and companies want is to have dollars shoved down their throats. Except maybe in Ecuador, Lebanon, and Zimbabwe, where dollars are replacing their own currencies.
Now, according to classical economics, the debt we should be concerned with is our foreign trade deficit, that we purchase more goods and services from the rest of the world in imports than we sell in exports. At some point, this is supposed to be brought into balance. Because when it doesn’t, bad things are supposed to happen, like the crises that hit Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Thailand and that chronically afflicts much of Africa. But not with us!
Since 1980, we’ve run a chronic deficit. It’s like you and I walking into the supermarket with $100 and leaving with $106 worth of food and groceries and the store saying, “Okay, we’re good!”
And why are we getting away with this theft?
Because our debt is the rest of the world’s gold.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
“You knew I was a snake when you took me in”
lollipopguild
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: In trump’s teeny tiny world everyone is a liar and a thief, Everyone. He sees himself as simply better at stealing and lying than anyone else. He also understands how to con his own followers on a never ending basis.
sdhays
@Tony Jay: It was clear to me that the leading faction of the Labour Party didn’t want to ever win again, except maybe by accident, when they only promised better austerity when running against David Cameron and excusing his double dip recession for him.
“Well, yes, PM Dick-in-Pig’s-Mouth had basically the right policy and can’t be blamed for all the people out of work, but we would have allocated the cuts a bit differently around the margins – Vote Labour!” was, surprisingly, not a compelling critique.
Tony Jay
@sdhays:
And the same people are back with the same policies, except this time they’re systematically stripping away any possibility that they could ever again lose their grip on power to anything as gauche as a democratic election where the opinion of the Party’s fee-paying membership is taken into account.
But, hey, at least they saved the country from Red Hitler and his Bolshevik Blitzkrieg. That’s got to be worth a directorship or two once they lose the 2029 Election to the Nat-C Partei.
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Dammit. You’re on to us!
EarthWindFire
You’d think but no. Any conservative I’ve known who’s been on any form of welfare is its only deserving recipient in history.
They tell me so, so it must be true.//
Rebel’s Dad
@EarthWindFire: It’s only considered welfare if you’re one of those blah people. If you’re yt, then it’s just getting back some of the taxes you paid.
Mina Kessern
I knew Ashli Babbitt, I served concurrently with Ashli Babbitt, and you should thank heaven every day that you aren’t 1/10th the garbage human being Ashli Babbitt was.
For context: despite her 12 years in, Ashli only ever made E-4. To those who’ve served in the USAF, this is a shocking amount of time-in-grade and is really only possible if your commanders are both actively recommending against your promotion and allowing you to transfer before you’re automatically drummed out. She went from active -> reserve -> guard on precisely the schedule one would need to avoid that happening.
Put simply, she was a terrible soldier whose commanders were willing to make her someone else’s problem. She was a lousy soldier who avoided being drummed out of the USAF on technicalities and died committing treason.
evodevo
@RevRick:
Best explanation I’ve seen yet…is it possible to subscribe to your newsletter?
evodevo
@EarthWindFire: Yes, this….just like with abortion…MY abortion is the only justifiable abortion. All the rest of the women in the waiting room are just sluts…
RevRick
@evodevo: Lol
VOR
Time to re-post Rick Perlstein’s classic, “The Long Con”, an essay showing that grifting has been central to the modern conservative movement for decades.
Glidwrith
@Rebel’s Dad: I rather think bottled MAGAts tears are the opposite of holy water: like the blood from Aliens, that shit will eat right through the engine block. Touch it, and what would have been an amicable divorce turns into a murder-suicide.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: *clap clap clap clap*
Well done, you!
wenchacha
@Tony Jay: Points for New Haudenosaunee
Edmund dantes
@EarthWindFire: they are also pissed at how hard it is to qualify for and all the hopes you have to jump through. They then get mad about the super duper secret welfare that the niclangs get so easily that they are living off t-bones and lobster while driving their Cadillacs.
zhena gogolia
@Mina Kessern: Very interesting.
Tony Jay
@Miss Bianca:
There’s a few errors on the last chorus and I’m sure more could be done with verse three, but otherwise I’m quite happy for the J6 Traitoriat to have it as an ear worm all the way through their long and miserable sentences. Because I’m just that nice a guy.
@wenchacha:
First Nations just biding their time, waiting for the Paleface tribes to reach their own finding out stage. Also, reliable Dem votes until that happens.
Scout211
Wow. Thanks for posting this.
It’s not surprising that her background is so sketchy for her to end up as one of the insurrectionists. But it’s very interesting to get actual background information.
Daoud bin Daoud
@Mina Kessern: Ashli Babbit’s military career reminds me of the career of a certain young Austrian who only made it to lance corporal.
Tim C.
@Tony Jay: I teach geography here in the US. I’m not making this up, I’ve had multiple students label Minnesota as “East Dakota” on a blank 50 state map.
I wish I was lying.
Tony Jay
@Tim C.:
Did you give them half marks and report them to the Department of Cartographical Secrets as demanded by the United States/Hy-Brasil Treaty signed by President Burr in 1807?
Tony Jay
Deleted
rikyrah
@RevRick:
Thank you for this.
Tim C.
@Tony Jay: I will now!
Paul in KY
@mrmoshpotato: Agree! Fuck her & her MAGA family.
Paul in KY
@NotMax: Well Done, NotMax!
Paul in KY
@Mina Kessern: Thank you for your sober recounting of the worthless sack of shit that Ms. TraitorBabbit was.
Paul in KY
@Daoud bin Daoud: That racist crazy murdering nut did get an Iron Cross and was supposedly brave when delivering messages under allied fire. So, he had a better career than her, sad to say.
Parfigliano
Ha ha. Fuck em.
RevRick
@rikyrah: You’re welcome.