ICE Barbie lies about citizen arrests in immigration sweeps

 

If you paid attention to NeverTrump, you knew Charlie Kirk was a phony ten years ago, which is why he promoted fellow phony J. D. Vance to be VP

 

 

Kirk hated Trump but saw an opportunity, claims ex-employee...

 

Well no shit.

The GOP today is riddled with sycophants who formerly opposed Trump but support him now. Those of us who supported Trump in 2015-2016 took great pleasure in pointing it out as they came crawling back.

Many who changed their minds about supporting Trump defend themselves today by saying they changed their minds because they were persuaded by reflection on the Trumpist agenda, but none of that is becoming the law of the land today through the GOP Congress. It's all by executive order and lawfare. None of this will last, except for the ka-ching ka-ching.

In Charlie Kirk's case, flipping to Trump has been bery bery good for Turning Point USA, which went from a lousy little $2 million operation in 2015 to an $80 million one by 2022.

I mean, how many dollars will it take before we actually get some of that fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government which it is supposed to promote, seeing that we're headed for a $2 TRILLION deficit by September 30th?

 

Considering how awful Trump is now on just about everything compared with his first term, it must be that they all flipflopped only for the money, the power, and the influence.  

 

 

  

Friday night news dump: IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, 38, charged with leaking tax records in New York Times and ProPublica incidents in 2018 and 2020

 Littlejohn, 38, provided the public official’s tax documents to an unnamed news organization, and the tax information concerning other wealthy individuals to another unidentified news organization between 2018 and 2020, prosecutors said.

In 2020, The New York Times released a bombshell report saying that it had obtained more than two decades of Trump’s tax information and that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.

 

More. 

 

The story has already been scrubbed from the lineup by the weekend kids crew at CNBC.

I thought they didn't have any money in Mississippi, and now I know why: The IRS torments black folks the most

 

Democrats Funded Libertarian In MT Senate Race As They Did In AZ For Rep. Giffords

The m/o in AZ in 2010 was Democrats spending money to portray a libertarian as the true conservative in order to bleed-off votes from the Republican candidate and Iraq War veteran Jesse Kelly and thus re-elect the Democrat, Rep. Gabby Giffords, who went on to get shot by a lunatic with libertarian ideas named Jared Loughner. To add insult to injury, liberals nationwide then went on to blame her shooting on Republicans and the Tea Party.

I reported on this in early January 2011, here, showing a mailer for the libertarian paid for by the Arizona Democrat Party.

Now it turns out the same strategy was used in Montana in 2012 to boost the libertarian candidate as the real conservative, funded by liberal money, in order to bleed-off votes from the Republican Rehberg and re-elect the Democrat Senator Tester.

Propublica has the in-depth story, here.

Everyone thinks the Republicans are the stupid party when in two recent elections it's the libertarians who got played for fools and tools. But the Republicans really are the stupid ones for thinking an alliance with libertarians isn't just possible but natural when far more often than not libertarians view themselves as successful when they prevent Republicans from getting elected, as they themselves say here (h/t Chris).

We know whose side they are on. Libertarians are natural liberals, not conservatives.

Big Banks Got Rock Bottom Cheap Loans of $1.2 Trillion on Worst Day in Dec. 2008, and Limbaugh Denies They Were Bailed Out

TARP was meant as a diversion from the real action going on behind the scenes, and the diversion is still working on the dunderheads like Rush Limbaugh.

He continues to be fixated on TARP, but ignorantly so. TARP was at least 10 times smaller than the real bailout which put taxpayers at risk.

Just today we have learned that the biggest banks made $13 billion in profits from the Federal Reserve's emergency loans, profits which small, well-run banks all over America did not get to enjoy. In fact, contrary to Limbaugh, the well-run banks got the shaft, having to pay advance premiums for FDIC insurance to cover all the failures, which last time I checked have cost $80 billion, mostly on the backs of the customers of the banks, you and me, who will end up paying the bill as banks pass their cost of doing business on to us. Part of that cost of doing business has been subsidizing the bad behavior of the top five or six 800 lb. gorillas like Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Our fascist government picked winners and losers both through TARP and the Fed's emergency lending programs. We do not have a free market in banking. And Rush Limbaugh aims to keep it that way.

What is more, TARP recipients continue to be delinquent in paying dividends under the TARP program, as reported here in The Chicago Tribune in October:

[M]ore than 170 U.S. banks ... have missed approximately $275 million in TARP dividend payments to the government through August.

It is a myth that TARP has been "successful" in the sense that everything has been "repaid". It has not. TARP funds alone still not repaid come to $93 billion as of right now. Add in $183 billion more for Fannie and Freddie.

I nominate these as Rush Limbaugh's most ignorant comments to date:

European banks are teetering on the edge. The Italians went out and they sold bonds and they can't pay them now as they're maturing. The euro might collapse. It is real trouble. And, meanwhile, US banks did not get bailed out. Not the big banks, not the Wall Street banks. They did not get bailed out. 

We have so many lies and myths being told that people believe. Most of the big banks were forced to take TARP money so as to avoid there being a stigma. The banks that needed TARP money were the local mom and pop banks all over the country that were in trouble. The big banks, Wells Fargo, these guys were forced to sign a paper agreeing to take X numbers of millions of dollars, billions, maybe, I forget the number, but whatever it was, just to make it look like everybody was in the same boat. But the big banks paid it all back. These Occupy people are protesting something that never happened. The big banks did not get bailed out. Taxpayers made a profit on the money they were forced to borrow. Other banks did get bailed out, the little mom and pops, but the big ones did not. 

Europe is teetering, Italy, Spain, you name it, and what do we get on the Sunday shows?

It is the ignorance of the Tea Party about state-sponsored banking and the bailouts which has allowed Occupy Wall Street to occupy the vacuum the Tea Party has left about this most important of unresolved attacks on American capitalism. Unfortunately the attack on American style capitalism is now a two-front attack. On the left are the socialists of the Democrat Party who want effectively to nationalize the banking system and outlaw risk. On the right we have the liberal consensus from the era of Franklin Roosevelt which is an ad hoc echo of European fascism which pretends that banking is free enterprise while making the taxpayer responsible for its many and frequent excesses.

Too bad for America that the demagogues of both the right and the left keep you from hearing the truth.