The Vanity of Plastering Your Ugly Face On Money No One Will Ever Use

Just remember this is all about trump's vanity (via Raquel Coronell Uribe and Gabe Gutierrez at NBC News):

The Treasury Department is preparing to print $250 bills with President Donald Trump’s face on them and is just waiting for Congress’ green light, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday...

I'm going to stop quoting the article right there because I just can't fcking handle the whole situation, this farce of leadership attempting to force trump's ugly mug into everyone's wallets. I'm not going to share any photos of what the planned $250 bill looks like, just to note here that the photo they're using of trump is the one of him scowling at everyone like a sociopath.

Most other depictions of people on our American currency usually have them looking upward or to the side, with stoic and thoughtful expressions implying wisdom, foresight, or peace. No, for trump he's going with the WANTED poster look.

Which is the other thing about this vanity project: It's written into the U.S. Code that bans living people from getting depicted on our coinage / dollars (also stamps, if I'm reading it properly). trump is more than willing to ignore the law, willing to mock a century-plus of tradition, willing to tear down an American culture that tries to avoid idolatry in our politics. But this is trump buying into the false worship of extremists who mock such values in order to promote their own egos. This is the trump who broke laws to desecrate the White House with a gaudy oversized ballroom, this is the trump happily engraving his name over federal buildings that have nothing to do with him.

Even the dollar value is degrading: this is trump trying to tie himself to the 250th year of the United States creating the Declaration of Independence that founded the nation's existence. They're looking to generate a dollar value that's never been used before - not replacing Ben Franklin on the 100, or Lincoln on the 5, or Washington on the 1 - to make it unique, unavoidable, something to stand out in the history books (and coin collecting indexes) for decades to come.

Thing is, almost nobody uses high-value currency in this day and age. Not only due to the commonplace use of banking debit cards to directly pay from our checking accounts, but because handling such large denominations is no longer useful in common (legal) business. Few places are willing to accept even $50 bills for payment anymore, let alone $100s. The risk of those bills being counterfeit are common enough to be a hit on the economy. Putting a $250 into circulation is going to make con artists printing their own fake cash salivate even more.

There is no honest reason in America to create a brand new currency, meaning this whole thing is driven by dishonest reasons. Above all, playing to the greed and vanity of a morally bankrupt thief who lied and bluffed his way into high office.

If the Republicans in Congress do succumb to trump's will on this and give him this farcical honor - something that no one else is really asking for - they will never live it down. They already deserve to get voted out of office for all their failures to rein in trump's crimes and excesses: This will be just one more reason to kick them out these midterms.

P.S. putting yourself on money is the depraved act of movie villains like Jack Nicholson's Joker or Raul Julia's Bison. trump is following the same insane game plan.

How Can Our Own Military Be Running Out of Ammo?

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! And did Italy just beat the US in baseball this week???

As much as the ongoing deaths of civilians and soldiers horrify me as trump pushes the United States into more bombings and more war with more nations, another thing irking me is the revelation that our military is woefully unprepared for most of this, especially in terms of supplies. Susie Madrak over at Crooks & Liars has the details:

Inside the Pentagon, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation. “The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

Senior leaders are worried that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles.

“I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” one source added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

The president’s senior military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, warned the White House last week that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would raise the risk to any operation in Iran and to the U.S. personnel put in harm’s way.

Granted, the government under Biden has been shipping out a lot of reserve firepower to places like Ukraine, but our own military should have been stockpiling newer gear, ammo, defense systems, tanks, planes, helicopters, and other equipment to fill that void. 

I went digging for information about what's going on with our military manufacturing, and by the looks of it there's hundreds of billions of dollars getting pumped into all that (via Jake Kaufman at Defense and Munitions, a trade magazine):

The President’s FY ’26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, a 13% increase from 2025. However, at the moment, Congress has passed $831.5 billion for the Department of War’s Defense's discretionary budget. Outstanding budget considerations going through Congress could bring that final number up toward $893 billion...

You would think $893 billion would pay for a lot of bullets...

The budget includes an additional $1.3 billion for industrial-based supply chain improvements and an additional $2.5 billion for missiles and munitions production expansion. The budget also includes significant new investments of $200 million for automation and artificial intelligence (AI). It breaks down to shipbuilding, munitions and defense supply chains, and air and missile defense alone accounting for 50% of the total enhancements...

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Where's the fucking money, Lockheed Martin???

Republican Congress Working As Promised: Which Is, They're NOT DOING A DAMN THING

We're here again, railing against the real source of our national woe: the broken dysfunctional Congress led by Republican factions that refuse to do their damn jobs.

Which recess session are we in now? The one that lasts two weeks or the one that lasts two months? I've lost track, our Congressional officials have SO MANY WEEKS OFF ANYMORE.

Sigh, okay, let's go to someone else's current observation of how messed up our Legislative Branch is at the moment. To Norm Ornstein at the Atlantic, take it away:

...The truly cringe-worthy failures started when both the House and Senate refused to even acknowledge the president’s budget, an unprecedented step, and the House and Senate Budget Committees followed by refusing to hold the usual annual hearing when the president’s top economic advisor comes to the Hill to discuss the budget and the economy. It was a sign of disrespect that was simply shocking...

...What about the congressional budget? Remember, back when Democrats controlled the Senate, Republican congressional leaders used to laud passing a budget as the single most significant action government could take? This time, the April 15 deadline passed without a murmur, much less an actual budget plan, from either house...

...Now add the embarrassment of the unprecedented failure of fundamental fiduciary responsibility by the Senate to even acknowledge the right of a president to nominate an individual to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court with eleven months to go in his term... The awful lapse on the Supreme Court nomination was part of a larger outrage, the failure to confirm a much larger number of nominees to both judicial and executive branch posts, a record for this Congress far more dismal than its comparable predecessors...

There are very legitimate arguments about the appropriate role and scope of the federal government. But few except nihilists and the most extreme libertarians would argue that protecting public safety in the face of catastrophe or epidemic should be off the government’s books or sharply constrained in scope. And right now, there are three such examples: the horrible Flint water debacle, a man-made (mostly state government-made) disaster; the Zika crisis, a classic disease epidemic; and the Opioid crisis...

Ornstein also fails to mention another crisis, slightly tied into the Zika health crisis, and that's Puerto Rico. As a territory, it's in the legal gray area of being supported by the federal but also running its own affairs, but a series of financial crisis over the decades have led to this point where Puerto Rico is billions in debt and requiring massive financial aid.

Financial aid that this Congress would likely choke on because it would mean A) giving social aid and B) the likelihood they'd have to raise taxes to pay for it. It could also mean that our federal government would have to finally get off its collective butt and fast-track the process of bringing Puerto Rico in as a full-fledged state in order to merge the debts into the federal government's.

So as you can see, the Republicans are treating these problems as the priorities they are...

...by completely ignoring them and focusing on crap issues. Like denying people who look transgender from ever using public bathrooms again. Even when there's no damn evidence that there's an epidemic of transgender people attacking anybody in bathrooms, this is now suddenly a SCANDAL / HORROR beyond all reckoning. Alongside the usual fearmongering over illegal immigrants, gay sex, abortions, Muslim pool halls, and Hillary's Death List.

PRIORITIES.

This is what drives me up a goddamn wall. That elected officials from one party - Republicans - are so obsessively destructive and yet nearly everybody else watching this are just "oh well, it is what it is."

We're going to be stuck like this until the crises all explode, one at a time or altogether, and in ways so catastrophic that lives will be lost. I'm worried we're facing another Katrina moment, only instead of the mismanagement coming from an inept Bush administration it'll be coming from an inept Republican Congress.

How many times do we have to go through this dance of death before Americans figure out the real threat are these anti-government buffoons intentionally wrecking their own institutions all for their dead-ender zealotry?

The Unintended Consequence of All That SuperPAC Money

Update: Hello again Crooks & Liars readers linking in through Mike's Blog Round Up today! P.S. I'm trying to think up a good title for a pro-Obama book, if anybody's got suggestions please let me know in the Comments or Tweet me at @PaulWartenberg danke and bitte

With thanks to Infidel753 who linked to this article from The Hill regarding the current status of unlimited fund-raising in political campaigns thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling.

We're into the second Presidential cycle where the effects of that Citizens United ruling is in play, which means we're getting to see the patterns of consistency how something is going to work. If the stories we're starting to hear about the frustration and messiness are accurate, then the Law of You Get What You Paid For is in full effect. As Jonathan Swan writes for The Hill:

Major GOP donors and fundraisers are wondering whether they’re wasting their money on superPACs.

They say they’re not ready to abandon the superPACs, but they’re starting to look for ways to make them more effective during a presidential cycle that has challenged conventions about how to spend political donations. 

GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s relatively cheap campaign — contrasted with the millions of dollars spent on behalf of Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Scott Walker and Rick Perry — has left  donors, fundraisers and conservative leaders questioning the value of superPACs, which got a boost from the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed independent groups to raise unlimited cash.

“People are upset about the Citizens United decision; people are upset about all this money flowing into politics, but at the end of the day it has no impact,” said New York financier Anthony Scaramucci, who was a national finance co-chair for Scott Walker’s presidential campaign before moving to raise funds for Bush when Walker quit the race...

The plan, apparently, was that the richest people in America would set up external Political Action Committees in such a way as to back specific candidates (it still has to be done without "direct" coordination with the actual candidate, but yeah right THAT'S ever gonna stick) and to a size that would dominate the fund-raising landscape (hence the Super- prefix). Those candidates could then, in theory, survive the rigors of a prolonged national campaign by having those deep-pocket SuperPACs pay for the more expensive things like television ads and Get-Out-The-Vote efforts.

Just saying: Theory and Practice are two separate things. Back to Swan's article:

The cautionary tale cited by nearly every donor or fundraiser interviewed on or off the record has been Bush. He has fallen in polls despite the more than $50 million already spent on his behalf by the group Right to Rise, which far out-raised every other superPAC with its mid-year haul of $103 million.

“I think the whole idea of superPACs has been overrated,” said Fred Malek, finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association.
“SuperPACs can only do so much,” Malek added, pointing out that they pay vastly higher rates for TV ads than campaigns do, meaning that eye-popping super-PAC bank accounts might not have as much buying power as they appear to.

In conversations over the past six weeks, a number of major Right to Rise donors have privately told The Hill that they are holding on to hope that the political action committee can turn things around.

And, while doubts are mounting, none of the superPAC’s largest donors interviewed was willing to publicly abandon the group’s leader, Mike Murphy. Murphy has been trying to reassure them that his is a winning strategy and that their six- and seven-figure checks are being judiciously spent.

One great Irony of the Citizens United aftermath is how the lack of regulation is harming the business model of SuperPACs. If you look at the points I put in bold, this is where that deregulation comes into question. Without proper legislation monitoring and controlling costs of a campaign, vendors or providers like the television networks can charge whatever "the market" allows (which means they can charge through the roof knowing how much money is at play). And without proper oversight of the SuperPACs themselves, there are no real guarantees all that money is being spent (if at all).

If we're looking at trends, look back to 2012. Karl Rove had set up a massive SuperPAC for a wide range of Republican candidates and reportedly spent about $103 million on attack ads alone. As the report I'm linking to notes, the backers for Rove's committee got a ONE PERCENT Return On Investment (ROI) with that effort. Do you know a lot of rich people who enjoy a one-percent ROI? If you perform that poorly, those rich people will be suing you for fraud trying to get their money back.

Think about that 2012 Election Night. Rove was on Fox Not-News, insisting that the incoming results were "wrong" and that the candidate his SuperPAC backed - Romney - was going to win Ohio. During live broadcast, he got his ass handed to him by the back-room reporters who actually did their jobs and who confirmed that the early prediction models for Ohio wasn't going for Romney. The final results proved them right and Rove a fool.

You might have heard some panic in Rove's voice. I do, when I replay that scene. There was definitely denial, but I can picture in my mind Rove was freaking out over how he was going to be getting a lot of angry calls from billionaires who were likely promised that Romney was going to win, and that Ohio was one of those key states to prove it.

Part of that was a result of the echo chamber the Republicans exist as a group. They kept re-enforcing their beliefs to where they thought it was fact. But the other part of it was Rove's apparent laziness to keep up with the actual mechanics of campaigning, and what seems to be an ill-informed idea that money alone can buy win elections. Rove acted as though all he needed to do was raise money, pay himself handsomely with the consulting fees, spend just enough on ads and signs, and let the overall size of the PAC do its job.

Didn't exactly work out, eh deep-pocket donors?

If I were one of those deep-pocket rich people, I'd be taking a closer look at how all these SuperPACs are really run. There are far too many reports like this one out of the LA Times that point out how the money going in is not going to where the donors think:

...When Juanita McMillon saw his (Ben Carson's) name, she was eager to get out her checkbook.

“I think he is sincere, and I think he is honest, and I think he is exactly what we need,” said McMillon, 80, from the small town of De Kalb in northeast Texas. She gave $350.

Her money went to the American Legacy PAC, an organization with ties to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. With Carson as the face of its Save Our Healthcare campaign, American Legacy raised close to $6 million in 2014 — and spent nearly all of it paying the consultants and firms that raised the money. Just 2% was donated to Republican candidates and committees, financial reports show.

“I’m really careful who I give money to, but I guess I did not read it close enough,” McMillon said, adding that she had never heard of American Legacy. “I prefer to give money to individuals, and I assumed, I guess, that Dr. Carson was getting my money...”

...The fundraising operation also has proved rewarding for the consultants running it. The founder and treasurer of American Legacy, a Virginia-based direct-marketing consultant, is now a senior finance advisor for Carson’s campaign, which has paid his firms $2.8 million.

The story behind the creation of Carson’s fundraising network is another example of the way that super PACs, which are supposed to be independent from campaigns, have become more entangled with candidates than ever before. It also illustrates how effective the checks of tens of thousands of small donors, many of them of modest means, can be at enriching campaign consultants...

It's a hell of a racket, from the looks of things. Get people - the wealthier the better - invested behind a candidate or cause, get them to cough up some money - 50 bucks, a thousand, tens of thousands spread out through other third-party groups to avoid the regulations still requiring massive payments be reported - for that candidate/issue, and get paid by whatever salary or fee you set for yourself and your consulting agency.

I mean, look at that. TWO PERCENT of the finances raised actually went to campaigns. Where the hell did the other 98 percent go? Some of it to ads, some of it to the operational costs, but how much of it went to the top-tier "founders" of those SuperPACs?

If I'm putting money into something, I'd expect results. I'd expect that money going to where I'd wanted it to go, not a meager percent that's less than bread crumbs. I wouldn't want my money to go to someone else's bank account who does a half-assed job and then retires to a life of speaking engagements and cable news appearances.

This is the overriding reason for regulations to exist in the first place: to protect people from fraudulent or hazardous practices. Even for rich people who should know better, and especially for regular/low-income folks like McMillon. Without proper regulatory guidelines for how PACs and SuperPACs should spend their money, it can turn into a free-for-all with no accountability from that PAC.

You'd think that after the 2012 debacle that no one would be donating to Rove's SuperPAC again, but there he is fund-raising as though he's never been inept or disastrous running that thing. Granted, his Crossroads group isn't raking it in like before, but after last election's disaster he should have been banned from the country club dinners and charity functions.

Here's what we need to see after this coming November: a final tally of that Returns On Investments. If those SuperPACs rack up millions of dollars and end up with the same losing results for those deep-pockets that were promised wins, that will be two Presidential cycles in a row. That's the start of a trend, and part of me thinks that's far enough along for those billionaires to step back and say "we're better off with straight-up bribes to the candidates AFTER they win instead of this waste."

We'll see.