Bannon's "Gladiator School" For Alt-Right Gets Thumbs Down

Derelict coplayer and man in search of a balcony Steve Bannon has been trying to establish a "gladiator school for culture warriors" in Italy (insert Mussolini reference here).  The project was to attract budding populists fascists from all over Europe and the world and train them in the fine arts of populist mob violence fascist politics.  The future of the "school," to be located in the Trisulti monastery, was full of promise last December, but it appears to be doomed now due to =spoiler alert= fraud.

The Italian government has delivered a potentially fatal blow to Steve Bannon’s plans to transform a medieval monastery near Rome into a training academy for the far-right.

Italy’s cultural heritage ministry announced on Friday (May 31) that it would revoke a lease granted to Bannon after reports of fraud in the competitive tender process. The former Breitbart chief and aide to US president Donald Trump was reportedly paying €100,000 ($110,000) per year to rent the 13th Century Carthusian monastery, but now will have to search for another spot. [snip]

Italian newspaper Repubblica reported that a letter used to guarantee the lease was forged. The letter had the signature of an employee of Danish bank Jyske, but the bank said that employee hadn’t worked there for years, and called the letter fraudulent.

That a project associated with Bannon (eg., like Trump) would end badly and in the justice system shouldn't surprise.  But this is just the latest setback for Trump's former sloppy Svengali:

... His funding of extremist parties ended before it even started last year, after the Guardian revealed that foreign donations, like the ones the millionaire was planning to make, would break electoral laws in a dozen European countries.

We've been fortunate, so far, that these would- be Caesars of the far right are the bumbling grifters they are.  But, they also don't give up.  They'll adapt and resurface.  They're relentless, and so must we be.

(Photo: The Eminence Grease; Joel Saget/ AFP/Getty Images)

Schitt Schlapping Away

From the right-wing grifter behind the "Conservative" Political Action Conference and husband of White (Supremacist) House official Volkswagen Mercedes Schlapp:

Tomorrow will be the first day that President Trump will have a fully operational confirmed Attorney General. Let that sink in. Mueller will be gone soon.

— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) February 14, 2019

That won't age well. Some tweeters respond:

You know that the number of sealed indictments, filed with the DC Fed District Court, probably now is in double digits? And that regardless of what happens with Mueller, they're not going away? He's outgamed you guys all along. Chew on that. 😛

— Mike Prevost 🇫🇮🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈 (@MikePrevost3) February 15, 2019

His defenders don’t even pretend to act like they believe he’s innocent...

— Gary Wien (@Lighty99) February 15, 2019

It's hilarious to watch right-wing ideologues cling to the vain hope that Trump can escape justice if they just replace the honest men in law enforcement with cronies.
It didn't work w/ Comey. Or McCabe. Or Sessions. Or Rosenstein.
And now there are 17 other investigations.
Sad.

— Monty "Individual 137,833,257" Boa (@MontyBoa99) February 14, 2019

You're drawing attention to both ineptitude and criminality here.

— joeb (@coleimage) February 14, 2019

The husband of a White House staffer is confessing that the president will be engaging in continued obstruction of justice. Cool cool.

— Great Scott! 🇺🇸 (@GreatScott1991) February 15, 2019

Why? If you believe the President is innocent (lol) why stop them from finding all the other bad actors. There have been many!! Sounds like you are scared of Mueller, just like the President. :)

— Laura Mendoza (@lmendoza222) February 14, 2019

Congratulations to Matt Schlapp for admitting that Trump appointed Barr to obstruct justice.

— Sybill Trelawney (@SybilT2) February 15, 2019

Not to put too fine a point on it:

Schlapp...

Schlapp, Schlapp...

Schlapp, Schlapp, Schlapp, Schlapp, Schlapp, Schlapp pic.twitter.com/2rOAoY9e6c

— BallsOut (@bjcreigh) February 15, 2019

Tweets Of The Day - Trump Just Grifting Along

How godawful clueless do you have to be to run a campaign like Donald "Rump" Trump (h/t Balloon Juice)?

Trump campaign expenses in May, per @FEC report:
Hats: $208k
Online advertising: $115k
Data management: $48k
Communications consulting: $38k

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) June 21, 2016

Need. More. Hats!

And, yes, it's all about him:

Recipients of payments from Trump campaign with “Trump” in name, through May 31. Doesn’t include Mar-a-Lago/planes. pic.twitter.com/JF6skaWYGF

— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) June 21, 2016

Here's a good summary of just what a con job Rump's campaign is (surprise!).  Also, Charles Pierce on the farcical Rump.

Today's Cartoon and Reading: The Republican Grift Grows

(click to enlarge)

(Jen Sorensen, via gocomics.com;  www.jensorensen.com)

As we continue to pay the price for the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby decisions (among the most egregious), and as we watch the grifts of penny-ante con artists like Sarah "Word Salad Shooter" Palin, Charles P. Pierce musters two recent examples of Republican wingnut fraud and corruption on a somewhat larger scale.  First, there's a tea party-linked scheme con group named "Move Forward America" that runs its grift at the expense of American soldiers:

In a fundraising email sent earlier this year, the charity included a photograph of a smiling soldier holding up a care package, his uniform nametag smudged out. But Move America Forward had taken the picture, which originally featured four other soldiers alongside the one in the email, from the website of the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. The soldiers were in Iraq, and not, as Move America's email suggested, in Afghanistan. And the package the soldier held was not from Move America Forward. (our emphasis)

Then there's this fraud (reported by Politico and picked up by Mr. Pierce, Digby and others) perpetrated by a scheme con group called the Republican State Leadership  Committee:

Never disclosed until now, the document detailed an investigation into alleged misconduct by multiple RSLC officials during the crucial 2010 election cycle: It charged that national RSLC leaders conspired improperly with the leader of the Alabama Republican Party to use the RSLC as a pass-through for controversial Indian tribe donations, essentially laundering “toxic” money from the gaming industry by routing it out of state and then back into Alabama.  (our emphasis)

If you don't recognize in this the clear outlines of the Jack Abramoff/ Ralph Reed money laundering scandals from about a decade ago, you may have been born yesterday, or you're a die-hard Republican (same diff).

As Mr. Pierce points out, none of this should surprise us, because

(A) "... a substantial portion of the unofficial Republican party -- and of the movement conservatism that is its primary fuel -- exists primarily as a means for people to make comfortable careers out of fleecing the rubes, the country and their party be damned;" and

(B) "This is yet another example of what happens to democracy when Anthony Kennedy has a bad day on the bench. It opens up the whole system not only to the defrauding of the people through the corruption of their elections, but also opens it up to the kind of basic fraud customary to those who run telemarketing scams and real-estate schemes."  (our emphasis)

All That Glitters

Some of Goldline shill Glenn "Boo Hoo" Beck's sheeple are feeling a little light in their portfolios today:

Gold prices fell again Monday, keeping the metal on track for its first annual loss since 2000.

The actively traded February contract edged down $6.70, or 0.6 percent, to settle at $1,197 an ounce.

Gold is down 29 percent this year. It has been falling as fears have dissipated that the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies would cause inflation and weaken the dollar.

That 29 percent drop in gold?  That's the worst in more than 30 years, and the deepest drop since 1981, according to Quincy Krosby at Prudential Financial.

Buying gold as a "hedge" against an inflationary boogeyman is a line that Beck and others =cough= Heil Hannity = cough= have been pitching for both political and personal profit reasons.  Naturally, as grifters, Beck, Hannity, et al. have no particular concern about the potential financial impacts of their endorsements on the credulous, paranoid bunker-builders that comprise a large portion of their audience.  (Beck's attitude is likely, "If they're stupid enough to take investment advice from me, well...")

By the way, here's what one former Goldline insider had to say about its business practice:

“Goldline specifically targets vulnerable consumers with sales tactics designed to pressure those consumers into buying products that would often result in the consumer losing over one-third of his or her investment the instant the purchase is made meaning that, even when the price of the precious metals increases, because these consumers were deceived into purchasing coins with mark-ups exceeding 50 percent, it could be years, if ever, before the consumer recoups, much less makes any profit on, the investment.”

So, anyone who invested in Goldline products at Beck's urging got the double whammy of over-paying for a commodity that was sinking like a, um, stone.  But, don't worry.   Beck got paid.

(Image:  "Trusted and Used by Glenn Beck."  Yeah, if you trusted Beck, you might be feeling used about now.)

Evening Sublime Reading

A belated welcome back to the great tbogg, who's plying his craft over at Raw Story these days!  No one (with the possible exception of Mr. Charles P. Pierce) has quite the same way with words in describing the plankton otherwise known as the Republican base and their shearers.  Here's his lead-in to a piece about wingnuts running afoul of the Federal Elections Commission:

It is a fact of life that there is no sheep on God’s green earth more willing to be sheared than a god-fearing  flag-waving pocket-Constitution-owning being-kept-down-by-the-black-man middle-aged flyover-country white-American. It is said that, if God didn’t want these good people shorn of their disposable income that would  otherwise be spent on salty fattening high-fuctose-infused snacks  purchased in bulk from large warehouse stores,  He wouldn’t have given them Fox News for free on basic cable.  Add to that, the fact that no one ever went broke telling old folks that the government is sticking its nose in their Medicare in order to buy Obama phones for the New Black Panther Party. In fact, many have enriched themselves doing just that, thankyewverymuch.

A tingle is currently running up our legs.