Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

2 miscreants, a few years and 100 pounds ago.

But now it looks like Steve Bannon won't be speaking at the bigly tremendous Republican Goon Death & Swindle Fest this week, but, not to worry. He will be there in spirit. Who knows, maybe he'll just throw on a sheet and hood and blend in with the rest of the crowd. And fear not, there's a steady parade of other goons to behold and you still have time to tune in and watch some of them. The additional meme below shows just a few. Don't you wish your TV came with a controller that sent shocks directly to the speakers? I know I do. And it wouldn't just be shocks!

Hmmm, I wonder if Trump still hopes to wear his buddy's monogrammed speedo again someday. Does he keep it around? Ah, memories!

Special thanks to the DWT Dept. Of Things You Can't Unsee.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Add Comrade Trump's "former" top personal advisor and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to the list of Trump indictees! He's been arrested and indicted for fraud in connection with the scheme outlined in the above meme. Yeah, he might get pardoned or whatever. Hell, at this point he might "commit suicide" or suffer a strange accident of some sort. Look out for bonesaws, Bannon!

We can now add We Build The Wall, an apparent private multi-million dollar grift centered around building the failed and unnecessary border wall boondoggle, to the list of Republican endorsed Trump-style scams including Trump University, the "diversion" of money from The Trump Foundation for personal uses and more, including things that will likely be uncovered in the coming years. Maybe not every scam to be uncovered will directly implicate Trump but the Trump Crime Family and Associates is a very large enterprise with long tentacles that would make any mafia Don proud. I'll leave out the Trump/Ryan 2017 Tax Scam. That involved a much bigger group of con artists. Meanwhile, below is a short list of miscreants who are associated with We Build The Wall. These goodfellas make the NRA look on the up and up by comparison. If any of any of them were planning on participating in the Republican Con-Vention, it'll be interesting to see if that has suddenly changed.

1. Former Kansas Secretary Of State Kris Kobach who appears to have been We Build The Wall's top advisor. Koback is a prominent Midwestern Republican who has fortunately failed in runs for the U.S. Senate and Kansas Governor appearing on his resume. He often appears in promotional videos for the We Build The Wall project.

2. Bannon

3. Retired baseball player Curt Schilling, now a far right crackpot radio host of spectacularly low intelligence.

4. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's brother Erik Prince who founded Blackwater and made attempts to establish a backchannel communications operation with Russia on behalf of Comrade Trump. Yup, nothing to see here folks!

5. "Sheriff" David Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County and one time regular talking head bizarro on FOX "News" until he proved to be too insane even for them or maybe just too black for them. Clarke has been frequently considered for top White House positions. Had he played his cards right, he coulda been Kanye West.

6. Goofball evolution denier and former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo who got his start under Ronald Reagan, worked on the Romney presidential campaign and said the Obamas should go back to Kenya.

It took the White House less than 30 minutes to take the "Bannon was just a coffee boy" approach by saying that Bannon hadn't worked at the White House in 3 years, it's "not a White House issue," nothing to see here, blah, blah, blah. I can't wait to see what Kayleigh McEnany has to say over the next several days and weeks about this. I almost feel bad that she's being diverted from her probable true love-- selling Florida swampland to suckers.

The We Build The Wall project took in millions of dollars. Among the uses the money was put to was plastic surgery and other lavish lifestyle habits for its founder Brian Kolfage. Apparently the other participants in the scam such as Steve Bannon received hundreds of thousands of dollars as their cut. According to Kris Kobach, the scam had the blessing of Comrade Trump himself, Kobach says:

I talked with the president and the We Build The Wall effort came up. The president said 'The project has my blessing and you can tell the media that.'"

As news of the indictment of Bannon and others broke, Trump immediately began tap dancing faster than we've ever seen him dance before. One has to wonder about the correlation of response speed and depth of connection and denial. The tap dancing was a thing to behold as he said "It was only done to make me look bad" and "I don't know anything about the project at all." He also claimed he had "disagreed with the ideal in the first place." He also says he "feels badly" about the news which, being as he's not capable of feeling for other people, is indication enough that this case ties him in in some greater way that may or may not be revealed in the near or far future. Stay tuned. There will of course be much more news to come on this case for a very long time.

Bannon Arrested For Scamming Dull-Witted Trump Supporters

Asked this morning by a reporter what this says about his judgment, Señor Trumpanzee replied. "Well, I have no idea."

At one point when I was in high school, my family moved from the Kings Highway area (Madison High School) to the Sheepshead Bay area (Lincoln High School-- before Sheepshead Bay High was built). My transfer from Madison to Lincoln lasted one day. I was in academically-accelerated (Honor) classes at Madison and on my record that was sent over to Lincoln, the classes were marked with an "H" to indicate that. The person in the records office at Lincoln interpreted the "H"s as "M" for Modified, meaning the intellectually-impaired kids who still couldn't read in high school. One day in the Modified classes was enough for me, thanks. I transferred back to Madison the next day, and got back to Dostoevsky instead of... coloring books. My sister married someone from the modified regime. He's a walking talking Trumpist; not a brain cell firing in his skull.

I don't know if he was one of the people who bought into Bannon's scam to defraud low IQ Trump supporters out of their money, but I bet he was. He isn't the kind of guy to miss out on this type of opportunity.

Early Thursday morning, Bannon was arrested by investigators for the Southern District of New York-- along with postal agents-- after being indicted and charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors just like my brother-in-law with his "We Build the Wall" con-job. They raised over $25 million to build a wall along the southern border, a scam that put huge sums into the pockets of Trump regime crooks and hangers-on-- Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, who Trump snuck into the Drug Enforcement Administration as the top guy, by making him "acting" administrator, so as to avoid a Senate investigation into his shady past.

The 24 page indictment reads "To induce donors to donate to the campaign, Kolfage and Bannon... repeatedly and falsely assured the public that Kolfage would 'not take a penny in salary or compensation' and that '100% of the funds raised... will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose because, as Bannon publicly stated, 'we're a volunteer organization.' The representations were false. In truth, Brian Kolfage, Stephen Bannon, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, the defendants, collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall." Bannon pocketed over a million dollars and Kolfage stole at least $350,000.

Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Straus: "The defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction. While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it." 

Straus and her team could certainly start rooting and a prosecuting fraud by following the stench and looking closely at the organization's board of directors which is absolutely overflowing with sewage from the Trump orbit: bottom-of-the-barrel crooks and degenerates like Erik Prince, Kris Kobach, Tom Tancredo, "Sheriff" Dave Clarke, Curt Schilling, Air Force General Robert Spaulding (ret), John Moran, Jr., Tiffany Ruegner... And, of course, Trump, Jr. spoke at a We Build the Wall fundraising event, helping these horrible people soak the suckers. And then there's the little matter of Trump ordering the Department of Homeland Security to give Bannon's group $400 million. That needs to be looked into more carefully than it has been.

This morning, the Washington Post reported that "Bannon had told associates he was on a boat all summer off the U.S. coast but has stayed connected to the president’s orbit, talking to Trump allies and offering campaign advice even though he no longer holds an official position in the president’s organization. Until earlier this year, he hosted a show with Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller that the president sometimes listened to. A White House spokeswoman said, 'This is not a White House matter' and referred questions to the Justice Department... After learning of authorities’ investigation from a financial institution in October, prosecutors alleged, Kolfage and Badolato began communicating on encrypted messaging apps and added a statement to the campaign’s website that Kolfage would be paid a salary starting in January. On Wednesday, Kolfage tweeted that he had deleted the campaign from the GoFundMe site, alleging it had blocked a separate attempt to by him to raise money for those wanting to sue the Black Lives Matter group."

A Culture Of Corruption-- Republican Oligarch Buying Shameless Democrats

Yesterday, I purposely left a major-- maybe the major-- Bloomberg drawback out of the early morning post on Bloomberg's drawbacks. That's because it deserves a post of its own. I wanted to call it "Bloomberg Buys Whores" but using the word "whores"-- even if you're referring to men and clearly not to sex-- always gets some people going-- including, of course, the incredibly flagrant whores of Ohio. In this case there is some sex involved from time to time and women as well as men. Like EMILY's List, which has taken at least $6 million from Bloomberg and helped him cover up his misogyny and his antipathy to the #MeToo movement. Obviously, EMILY's List doesn't sell sex; it sells itself to rich donors like Bloomberg in other-- more consequential-- ways. And it isn't just EMILY's List. Which Democratic-aligned groups hasn't blown Bloomberg for a couple of checks? He gave to crooked Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush's scam-church-- which Rush uses as a source personal enrichment-- and Rush endorsed him. Is every elected official who endorses Bloomberg a crook? Probably most of them. They sure are a slimily group, that's for sure. I mean Queens Democratic Party boss, Congressman Gregory Meeks has been named the most corrupt member of Congress. So no one was in the slightest bit surprised that he's on Team Bloomberg, despite the Stop and Frisk policy that badly impacted Meeks' own constituents. Mini-Mike spent over $4 million on anti-NRA candidate Lucy McBath in 2018, a key to her victory over incumbent Karen Handel, who had outraged McBath $8,685,781 to $2,673,521. A few weeks ago, she endorsed him.

In 2016 the Republican Party sold itself to Donald Trump and their base-- for one reason or another-- went right along with it with barely a peep. This year the Democratic establishment is welcoming Bloomberg and his checkbook-- primarily to help save them from Bernie and his unwashed masses-- but will their base's hatred of Trump be enough to force them to go along with it. The party establishment links so, but I haven't spoken to any progressive voters who said they would hold their nose and vote for Bloomberg if he's the nominee. Bloomberg will be Trump's ticket to ride, a John Lennon song-- and the Beatles' 7th consecutive U.S. #1 song-- "about" Hamburg's certified-clean whores.

Yesterday, NY Times reporters Alexander Burns and Nick Kulish, writing on the Bloomberg Money Machine, noted 5 takeaways on his political spending. They wrote that Bloomberg's "unusual strategy... is betting more than anything that his fortune will enable him to run a national campaign. His campaign is a test of the degree to which a candidate can use his vast wealth to impose himself on the political system." Their New York Times exhaustive look at his spending found that Bloomberg "had given away or spent more than $10 billion on a combination of charitable and political donations," including a great deal of money that helped him "build an influence network on a scale rarely if ever seen. Bloomberg gave away $3.3 billion in 2019. It was by far the most he had given away in a single year-- more than in the previous five years combined-- and most of it has not been publicly disclosed."

Bloomberg has long mingled support for progressive causes with more conservative positions on law enforcement, business regulation and school choice. He has often given voice to views that liberals find troubling: Over the past week, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign was on the defensive over past recordings that showed him linking the financial crisis to the end of discriminatory “redlining” practices in mortgage lending, and defending physically aggressive policing tactics as a deterrent against crime.

...In less than three months as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg has poured more than $400 million, and rapidly counting, into the campaign. But that figure pales in comparison with what he spent in prior years, positioning himself as a national leader with presidential ambitions.

A Times examination of Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic and political spending in the years leading up to his presidential bid illustrates how he developed a national infrastructure of influence, image-making and unspoken suasion that has helped transform a former Republican mayor of New York City into a plausible contender for the Democratic nomination. If anything, his claim-- and his support among anxious moderates-- has grown stronger with the ascent of the “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders in early voting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes... [I]n 2019, the year he declared his presidential candidacy, Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable giving soared to $3.3 billion-- more than in the previous five years combined. His campaign disclosed that total in response to inquiries by The Times, but the donations were not itemized and most of it does not fall under public disclosure requirements.

...His political and philanthropic spending has also secured the allegiance or cooperation of powerful institutions and leaders within the Democratic Party who might take issue with parts of his record were they not so reliant on his largess.

In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration-- a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress [notorious political whores, as bad as EMILY's List and whom the media keeps referring to as], a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.

When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg’s name.

Yasmine Taeb, an author of the report, said in an interview that the authors had been instructed to make drastic revisions or remove the chapter, and opted to do the latter rather than “whitewash the N.Y.P.D.’s wrongdoings.” She said she found it “disconcerting” to be asked to remove the chapter “because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg.”

...[A]t least one senior official wrote at the time that there would be a “strong reaction from Bloomberg world if we release the report as written,” according to an email reviewed by The Times. And three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Mr. Bloomberg was a factor.

Alienating him might not have been a cost-free proposition. When the report came out, he had already given the organization three grants worth nearly $1.5 million, and in 2017 he contributed $400,000 more.

...It was during his 12 years at City Hall that Mr. Bloomberg wrote the playbook for propping up allies and co-opting opponents with a mix of political and charitable giving. Even as he spent $268 million on his three campaigns and made $23 million in campaign contributions to others, his philanthropy gave away $2.8 billion, much of it to civic and cultural groups around New York.

...His spending on electoral politics has also steadily increased, from about $11 million in 2013, his final year as mayor, to the more than $100 million during the 2018 midterms.

All of those funds flow not just from Bloomberg Philanthropies and Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, but through an array of advocacy groups that rely on him for donations in the tens of millions of dollars. A number of them are cornerstones of liberal politics, including the Sierra Club, one of the country’s most influential environmental groups, Planned Parenthood and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The foundation, along with Mr. Bloomberg’s other entities, has become something of a talent stable for people he admires-- public officials, business leaders and political strategists, among others. The foundation’s board looks almost like a shadow administration, including luminaries like former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and current or former executives from companies including American Express, Disney and Morgan Stanley.

...His domestic philanthropy has also overlapped with his political agenda, tying him closely to powerful progressive interest groups and amassing reservoirs of gratitude, admiration and influence across the country.

His relationship with the Sierra Club is a case in point. While he was still mayor, Mr. Bloomberg began expressing a keen interest in climate change. The Sierra Club had been working for years to block the construction of coal-fired power plants but wanted to go on the offensive, forcing aging plants offline. In the summer of 2011, Mr. Bloomberg stood on a barge on the Potomac River with the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, to announce a $50 million gift to the group’s Beyond Coal initiative, a figure that has since grown to over $100 million.

Separately, Mr. Bloomberg has deployed his political apparatus to advance the same agenda. In 2015, he announced that he would spend more than $10 million running ads against state attorneys general who were litigating against the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate emissions. In 2018, he gave $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters, and partnered with the group to identify targets for his political giving, including elections for an obscure New Mexico panel that regulates energy utilities.

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, said the former mayor tended to approach his large-scale causes by seeking out trusted partners-- political leaders or organizations-- and using various parts of his operation to support them... That model of concentrating political and philanthropic spending has defined Mr. Bloomberg’s approach in other arenas.

A champion of charter schools, Mr. Bloomberg has used his wealth in numerous ways to sway education policy in Louisiana. As mayor, he began giving relatively small donations, several thousand dollars each, to candidates in Louisiana school board races. But that investment sharply increased after a former New York City deputy schools chancellor, John White, became Louisiana’s state education chief in 2012.

Mr. Bloomberg has made more than $5 million in political donations in the state, including $3.6 million to Empower Louisiana, an education-focused political committee chaired by a powerful Republican donor, and also backed Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. Over the same period, Mr. Bloomberg gave nearly $15 million to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to promote charter schools, and his foundation gave nearly $3 million to the City of New Orleans. Two former senior aides to Mr. Landrieu are now helping lead Mr. Bloomberg’s political strategy in the South and his national outreach to African-American voters.

Some places have become points of convergence for numerous strands of Mr. Bloomberg’s agenda. In Washington State, he contributed more than $2 million to political committees focused on issues like gun control, carbon pricing, soda taxes and same-sex marriage. At the same time, he showered the City of Seattle with grant money for climate-related policy, and the Bloomberg-funded group Everytown for Gun Safety deployed lawyers there, first to help craft regulations and then to defend them in court.

The city’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, now sits on the steering committee of C40 Cities, an alliance of mayors confronting climate change. Mr. Bloomberg is the head of its board. Even in a city like her own, Ms. Durkan said, Mr. Bloomberg stands out.

“There’s a lot of wealth here, and I see a lot of people who are personally interested, to varying degrees,” she said. “I’ve never seen the Mike Bloomberg package before.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s giving to Johns Hopkins has also intersected with his political advocacy. In Maryland, where the university is among the state’s most prominent institutions, he spent more than a half-million dollars in 2014 seeking to elect a governor supportive of gun control. The Bloomberg name, politicians say, is well known throughout the state because of the institutions that carry it, most of all the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the school, said the foundation kept in close touch to monitor the projects it funded, track their attention in the media and connect recipients of Mr. Bloomberg’s money with other people close to the former mayor.

“Sometimes they’ll call us and say, ‘There’s a mayor who is interested in this-- can you talk to them?’” said Dr. Sharfstein, who directs the Bloomberg American Health Initiative, built on a $300 million donation from Mr. Bloomberg.

The range and reach of Mr. Bloomberg’s spending, experts say, cannot but play to his advantage in the presidential race.

“The fact that he can call in all these favors, all over the country-- a normal person can’t do that,” said Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center. “A normal person will never be able to do that.”

Policy, the Bloomberg Way

On a national level, there is arguably no issue more closely associated with Mr. Bloomberg than gun control. Nor does any other issue better capture the tension between his preference for data-driven, incremental, top-down strategy and the surges of ambitious activism that have increasingly defined American politics.

It was a cause he embraced after winning re-election as mayor. On New Year’s Day 2006, Mr. Bloomberg declared in his inaugural address that he saw an urgent duty “to rid our streets of guns, and punish all those who possess and traffic in these instruments of death.”

That April, he convened a Gracie Mansion summit of 15 mayors from across the country, marking the beginning of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which within a few short months included more than 100 civic leaders from 44 states.

Soon enough, Mr. Bloomberg ramped up his spending on politics beyond New York. Frustrated at the flow of firearms from Virginia, a state with lax gun laws, Mr. Bloomberg tried to buoy candidates in the state’s 2011 elections who shared his views.

Then, in 2013, he received a visitor in New York: Mr. McAuliffe, by then a candidate for governor of Virginia. He proposed to Mr. Bloomberg that he make the state a decade-long priority, with an eye toward empowering Democratic supporters of gun regulation.

“I walked out with a multimillion-dollar commitment that day,” Mr. McAuliffe recalled.

Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $3 million in Virginia that year through his super PAC, helping propel Mr. McAuliffe to the governorship and electing a Democratic attorney general supportive of gun control, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. He has plowed millions more into the state since then, culminating last fall with a takeover of the state legislature by Democrats who are now seeking to pass a series of tougher gun laws.

Then, after leaving office in December 2013, Mr. Bloomberg began expanding his advocacy operation. He founded a new group, Everytown for Gun Safety, which has since spent tens of millions of dollars pushing for gun control measures, with considerable success in swing states like Colorado and Nevada.

Incorporated as a nonprofit, Everytown does not need to disclose its donors or most of its expenditures, but officials there say Mr. Bloomberg typically provides roughly one-third of the group’s budget. While officials at Everytown said the group was ultimately independent, it is closely intertwined with Mr. Bloomberg’s political operation.

Everytown is managed directly by one of Mr. Bloomberg’s close lieutenants, John Feinblatt, a former New York deputy mayor whose wedding Mr. Bloomberg officiated in 2011. Numerous people connected to the group said it channeled Mr. Bloomberg’s priorities, including his strong preference for working with both parties.

The organization came into existence through an almost corporate-style merger: Mr. Bloomberg already had a gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but he needed a grass-roots army to compete with the National Rifle Association. So it joined forces with an existing activist group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, to form Everytown.

Moms Demand Action had sprung up on Facebook after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Volunteers organized into local chapters, held protests and lobbied for legislation. After a year of working long hours for no compensation, many volunteers were running on fumes and well aware their organization needed money.

Mr. Bloomberg promised to infuse the movement with $50 million, bringing his mayors’ group and Moms Demand Action under the Everytown umbrella. According to his spokesman, Mr. Bloomberg has underwritten the gun control movement with a total of $270 million since 2007. But with his backing came a stark shift in culture and a rigid new command structure, one that left some activists feeling they were pawns in matching red T-shirts.

People involved in the group described being forced to communicate exclusively in canned talking points. Kate Ranta, shot twice by her ex-husband in front of her young son, was a member of Everytown’s network of survivors. She was asked to address a rally on the steps of the Capitol, along with her son. Standing beside Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, and Representative John Lewis, she found herself stumbling over the text she had been given.

“Someone from Everytown wrote my speech. It was pushing their legislative agenda versus my authentic voice,” Ms. Ranta said. “I couldn’t say ‘gun control.’ It was moderate messaging-- ‘gun safety’ and ‘gun violence prevention.’”

Other members greatly appreciated the new direction from Everytown. “A structure began to be put into place, and we could avail ourselves of the data that was offered so we could speak more intelligently,” said June Rubin, a Moms Demand Action volunteer in New York. “So we’re focused and single-issue and highly recognizable and speaking with one voice, and it’s powerful.”

The policy agenda was to be focused on tightening background checks; more radical ideas like banning assault weapons were off the table. “There were people who were very, very troubled by that,” Ms. Rubin said. “I became very pragmatic.”

More confrontational tactics were also rejected. After the mass shooting last year at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., other groups organized protests to pressure the retailer to change its policies. But Moms members were discouraged from attending and told not to show any affiliation if they did. One Moms official told volunteers in a closed Facebook group that doing otherwise could “undercut our relations with responsible gun owners whose support we need.”

“Our goal is always to get results, and sometimes that means playing the outside game and sometimes it requires playing the inside game and working with partners who have shown themselves to be amenable to change,” said Maxwell Young, chief of public affairs for Everytown. “We’ve found Walmart to be an ally on gun safety and an example of a leader always willing to engage in productive conversations.”

Mr. Bloomberg also insisted on a strategy of bipartisanship, frustrating activists who saw the Republican Party as unalterably opposed to their goals. In 2016, he spent nearly $12 million to re-elect Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican supportive of background checks but strongly conservative on nearly everything else.

Lisa Boswell, a former Moms volunteer who got involved after the Sandy Hook shooting, said activists in Pennsylvania were ignored. “While the ground volunteers were very much opposed to this idea, the decision was going to be made at a higher level, without taking those views into consideration,” she said.

Mr. Wolfson said that in the wake of Sandy Hook, Mr. Bloomberg felt strongly that Mr. Toomey’s support for background checks represented “an extremely important moment.” Mr. Bloomberg’s view, he said, was that “if you are asking someone to take a strong bipartisan stand in support of an absolute key priority, you want to be supportive of them.”

In 2018, even as Mr. Bloomberg was spending nine figures to defeat congressional Republicans, Everytown backed another Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, for re-election. A number of local volunteers, who said they had been assured that Everytown had no plans to support Mr. Fitzpatrick, quit to form their own gun control organization.

Former members of Moms Demand Action, who had been cut off from private Facebook groups and blocked by leadership on Twitter, were surprised when they received emails from Mike Bloomberg 2020. Then they learned his campaign had rented the group’s email list, for $3.2 million, two days before he announced his candidacy in November.

At least a half-dozen former Everytown and Moms Demand Action officials have joined the Bloomberg campaign, including senior political and legal strategists and the deputy director of the Survivors Network. Spokespersons for both the Bloomberg camp and Everytown said that they had put up a firewall in the campaign, and that there was no coordination between the two entities.

In his campaign, Mr. Bloomberg has proposed a gun control agenda that goes far beyond Everytown’s, including a ban on assault-style weapons and a national licensing system.

When Mr. Bloomberg spent roughly $10 million on a Super Bowl commercial this month, he chose to focus his 60-second spot entirely on gun control. The emotional ad featured Calandrian Simpson-Kemp, whose son had been shot and killed, and who previously appeared in videos for Everytown, wearing the distinctive red Moms Demand Action T-shirt.

Powerful Alliances

In the presidential race, Mr. Bloomberg has activated his sprawling network of allies to great effect-- drawing on his foundation and its beneficiaries to build a campaign staff, and calling on politicians he has supported in the past for their endorsements.

It is that network, as much as the raw force of his campaign spending, that has propelled Mr. Bloomberg into contention in the Democratic race. He is not the only candidate spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting himself: Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund investor, has spent at least $243 million of his fortune on the race but has struggled to win support.

Mr. Bloomberg’s trajectory has been different. He has climbed to the top rank of contenders, even catching up to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in some national polls.

Since the start of his campaign, more than 50 employees of Bloomberg Philanthropies have moved across town to his Times Square campaign headquarters as paid staff members, including the foundation’s chief executive, Patricia E. Harris, a former New York deputy mayor, and James Anderson, previously the foundation’s head of government innovation.

Overnight, Ms. Harris and Mr. Anderson went from providing cities around the country with grants to contacting mayors for support. Dozens of current and former mayors have since endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, including leaders from major cities like Houston, Memphis, Tampa and Washington.

Two prominent Democratic leaders with direct ties to the foundation quickly renounced their support for Mr. Biden after Mr. Bloomberg joined the race. Former Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia, a fellow attached to Mr. Bloomberg’s What Works Cities initiative, became a paid adviser to the campaign. Manny Diaz, the former mayor of Miami and a paid board member at Bloomberg Philanthropies, defected from Mr. Biden to Mr. Bloomberg several weeks later.

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign commercials have featured his crusades against coal, tobacco companies and the N.R.A. And he has continued to dole out money to the party-- giving $10 million to a super PAC supporting House Democrats, $5 million to a voting-rights group led by Stacey Abrams, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee as well as dozens of state parties. The D.N.C. recently revised its debate-qualification standard to make it possible for someone like Mr. Bloomberg, who does not accept political donations, to participate, drawing accusations of favoritism from other campaigns.

One of the first members of Congress to endorse Mr. Bloomberg was Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida. Elected in 2016 as a champion of gun control, Ms. Murphy said she had worked closely with Everytown on legislation, and said Mr. Bloomberg had shown his political mettle by backing groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood.

“All of these are organizations that supported and endorsed my campaign in ’16 and ’18,” Ms. Murphy said. “This is a guy who puts his money where his mouth is.”

Mr. Bloomberg has promised to do just that in the general election, spending aggressively to defeat Mr. Trump no matter who the nominee is. But advisers to Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged the scale and focus of his spending would differ, depending on whether he is the Democratic standard-bearer.

“If Mike Bloomberg is the nominee, he will ensure that the Democratic Party has the greatest funding in its history,” Mr. Wolfson said, describing a plan to guarantee “all 50 states have the resources that Democrats need to compete up and down the ballot.”

If Mr. Bloomberg is not nominated, Mr. Wolfson suggested a narrower focus. “If you’re trying to defeat Donald Trump and you’re not on the ballot, you’re going to focus on the battleground states,” he said.

There are places where Mr. Bloomberg’s past spending has left a less helpful mark for his campaign: Pennsylvania may be one of them, since some Democrats there still resent his past support for Mr. Toomey. Teacher unions view Mr. Bloomberg with distrust because of his donations to school-choice groups and his charter-friendly policies as mayor.

But in most places he has ventured as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg’s many years of largess have helped earn him a warm reception.

During the week of the Iowa caucuses, he toured California with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for whom Mr. Bloomberg spent millions in a 2018 gubernatorial race, and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a beneficiary of Bloomberg foundation grants. He visited Providence, R.I., to be endorsed by Gov. Gina Raimondo, a moderate Democrat whose election Mr. Bloomberg aided in 2014. And he got an endorsement from Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, for whom Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC spent more than $2 million in the last midterm elections.

Some of his biggest endorsements have come out of cities that have been focal points for his philanthropy. In the Bay Area, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation has distributed dozens of grants to museums, dance companies and climate organizations, while his political donations have funded school board candidates and referendums to tax soda and ban e-cigarettes. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, endorsed Mr. Bloomberg last month, hailing his “ability to beat Trump.”

Mr. Wolfson said no promises had been made to Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsers about what they could expect from him down the line. “I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone where I suggested or implied any future support, nor did anyone ask for it,” he said.

So far, most lawmakers Mr. Bloomberg supported in 2018 have not endorsed him, but in interviews several acknowledged that his status as a patron of the party was weighing on their thinking. Sitting down with members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Bloomberg was greeted by a sequence of thank-yous from House members he backed in 2018, according to two lawmakers present.

Neo-fascist slob Steve Bannon knows from first-hand experience how a plutocrat can buy the presidency. Friday, on PBS' Firing Line, he predicted that "2020 is going to be the nastiest election in American history" with Bloomberg buying the Democratic Party to use as a vehicle of both ego and Trump-hatred. Jacobin writer Ross Barkan opined this week that "an admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot-- Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump... Though the Democratic Party has moved away from its admiration for union-busting charter schools, Bloomberg remains an ardent supporter. He isn’t about to embrace single-payer health care. He does, at least, believe in science and he would, inarguably, represent an improvement over Donald Trump, but that is not supposed to be the bare standard on which the next president is judged. Swapping kakistocracy for oligarchy will not undo the damage of the Trump presidency. It will merely calcify the rot." Which Republican would you vote for?

Bannon's Scammy Wall Halted In Texas

Neo-fascist Trump supporter, Stephen Bannon, decided to ignore all the legal barriers and just build a wall of hatred and bigotry with money from Trump racist, xenophobic supporters. He probably shouldn't have picked bright blue Hidalgo County, Texas for the stunt. In 2016, Hillary crushed Trump there-- 79.0% to 18.9%. Last year, Beto clubbed Ted Cruz and in the gubernatorial race, Lupe Valdez had a landslide win against Gov. Greg Abbott. Hidalgo is split up between 3 congressional districts, all firmly in the hands of Democrats. Hidalgo dominates TX-15 and performed last year as a D+45 county for Vicente Gonzalez. Next door, Republicans didn't even bother to put up a candidate in TX-28. And on the other side of the county, TX-34's bluest county is Hidalgo who performance for Filemon Vela last year was D+44. Every member of the county government is a Democrat.

And Bannon and his fascist vigilantes-- "We Build The Wall"-- barged right in and started building... with no permits and in defiance of government orders. What the hell? The Washington Post's Ted Amus explained what happened. The plan was to erect 3 miles of 18 foot steal fencing. On Tuesday a state judge in Hidalgo County jordered them to stop construction, ruling that "the National Butterfly Center, a 100-acre riverfront preserve in Mission, Tex., could face 'imminent and irreparable harm' if We Build the Wall continues with plans to erect a 'water wall' between the nature refuge and a state park. Javier Peña, a lawyer for the butterfly center, told the Washington Post that the wall could act as a dam that would redirect floodwater to the sanctuary-- a popular spot for school groups and birders-- and wipe out its vegetation, thus destroying the site or reducing its property value. 'You can do almost anything with your property. But what you can’t do is hurt other people’s property,' he said. 'For these guys to come down and use fear and hate to destroy it [the center] for their personal gain-- that’s what troubles us.'"

Do you remember Brian Kolfage, a hustler who started a Trump-approved GoFundMe page to build the wall that first Mexico and then Congress refused to pay for? Almost a year ago, yelling about "too many illegals... taking advantage of the United States taxpayers," Kolfage raised $20 million in just a few days. How stupid does someone have to be? Their evangelical pastors have them well-trained to be just that stupid. Kolfage was aiming for a billion dollars to build Trump's wall for a "fraction of what it costs the government." How'd that work out for the morons? Kolfage, who was able to enlist failed Kansas politician Kris Kobach for his company's board, says his wall will cost between $2 and $3 million per mile. Kolfage is known for shady behavior in the past, including the misuse of funds he raised. BuzzFeed looked into Kolfage’s previous crowdfunding efforts, which included an initiative to mentor wounded veterans at military hospitals-- among them Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center. He raised thousands for the project, but spokespersons for the medical facilities told the outlet they have no record of him working at the hospitals or donating money.

Yet the Florida group, and its founder, outspoken military veteran Brian Kolfage, may be barreling forward anyway.

“We have many people who try to stop us legally with silly attempts, and in the end we always prevail,” Kolfage said in an email to The Post. “I would put a 50/50 chance this is fake news, and if it’s not it will be crushed legally pretty fast.”

In a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday evening, the group’s project manager-- a man in a hard-hat identified only as “Foreman Mike”-- said that a mile and a half of land had been cleared, and steel bollards and panels would be installed within 48 hours.

“We’re going to be putting this up,” he said, asking for more donations, while pledging to have the whole project complete by Jan. 15, 2020. “We have to supercharge it now. It’s time to get really moving.”

Kolfage, a triple amputee in Florida who received a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq, first went viral last December, when he launched a GoFundMe looking to crowdfund $1 billion to privately build Trump’s border wall.

As he raised $25 million online, his campaign drew scrutiny about where all that money was going. But Kolfage, who enlisted the likes of Bannon and Kris Kobach to serve on his board, then revealed that the group had hired a North Dakota construction firm to erect a half-mile of fencing on private land in Sunland Park, N.M.

In May, the town’s mayor sent We Build the Wall a cease-and-desist letter, seeking to block its construction on private land belonging to a brick company. Days later, though, the construction firm-- headed by a major GOP donor and touted by Trump himself-- was later allowed to finish carrying out the project.

Over the summer, Kolfage and his group set its sights on South Texas, where they again hired the North Dakota firm to erect a “water wall” on private land along the Rio Grande belonging to a sugar cane farmer.

The U.S. Army Corps typically builds on higher ground along river levees, placing steel bollards yards away from the ever-shifting curves of a river that has been especially prone to flooding. (The butterfly center has sued the Trump administration over its plans to extend such construction into the protected area, and a circuit court is set to hear arguments later this week.)

Unlike the federal government’s construction, Peña said that Kolfage’s plans ignore the possibility of damage to neighboring properties.

“Whether you’re for the wall or against the wall, they [the government] are cognizant of the dangers that construction could cause,” he said. “These guys are just going in there to stoke everyone’s anger and fear, raise money, and then move along to the next victim.”

The International Boundary and Water Commission, a joint U.S.-Mexico agency that issues permits to build along the Rio Grande, asked the group to halt construction, submit an engineering study and remove heavy equipment from the levees, The Post’s Nick Miroff reported. The group appeared to ignore that request.

During that time, Kolfage and the butterfly center erupted into an online flame war. Kolfage accused the center of assisting cartels and partaking in insect smuggling, calling them “left wing thugs with a sham butterfly agenda.” The center took its own jabs at Kolfage on social media, sometimes including the hashtag “#LiarLiarPantsOnFire.”

Then, the butterfly center sued Kolfage and his group. Peña said that the preserve’s leaders wanted to conduct a study of the fencing itself, but have been blocked from doing so until the court grants them access to the land now being used by We Build the Wall.

“They’re not stopping. They’re not planning on conducting studies. They’re not concerned with what damage it would do to neighboring properties,” he said. “They just want to build the wall.”

The temporary restraining order will last at least until Dec. 17, at which point it can be extended for another two weeks and may then lead to a temporary injunction hearing.

Should Kolfage and his group continue construction anyway, a judge could call them in for a hearing and consider sanctions ranging from monetary fines to jail time, Peña said.

The Trumpist War Against Pope Francis

Like Hitler, about a third of Germans had been born into Catholism in the 1930s. (Hitler himself had already found a different god by then.) As the Nazis came to power they recognized the Church as an enemy. They banned the Catholic-aligned Centre Party in 1933 and although the Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican that year guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics, the Nazis confiscated Church property and closed down Church schools and youth organisations and banned the Catholic press. Pope Pius Xi and, after 1939, Pius XII were the popes during Hitler's rise and fall.Pius XII's obsession with hatred of communism was helpful to the Nazis. He was more inclined to condemn "the evils of modern warfare" than the Nazis.

His silence gave license to Catholic members of the SS to shoot the Jewish men, women and children as they cowered on the edge of the massive graves, to turn on the gas in the concentration camp chambers and then to go to confession with untroubled conscience. It encouraged the Germans in the belief that God was still on their side... The Nazis desperately needed the Pope's silence for that very reason. They knew that any complaint my the Pontiff would damage the war effort and slow the progress of the Final Solution... It gave some Catholics-- including quite a few priests-- the excuse to man the rat-lines to help the SS criminals escape, after the war, to Latin America. The Pope's silence in face of this overwhelming evil was a deliberate choice.

Like Hitler, the Trumpists were alarmed that the Vatican could be a center of opposition to its plans and since Trump occupied the White House, his men have been attacking Pope Francis for not being more like Pius XII. The Trumpists have backed an American fascist cardinal, Raymond Burke in his schemes against Pope Francis. Two years ago the Real News Network started covering this. Sunday MSNBC is running a Richard Engel one-on-one interview with Steve Bannon about his war against Pope Francis. This morning he previewed it on Morning Joe:



Engel also penned a piece about it today for NBC New, Steve Bannon and U.S> ultra-conservatives take aim at Pope Francis. "The populist political consultant has a new target in his crusade against 'globalism'-- Pope Francis," wrote Engel. "'He’s the administrator of the church, and he’s also a politician,' said Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump. 'This is the problem... He’s constantly putting all the faults in the world on the populist nationalist movement.'" To attack the Pope, Bannon and the fascists are trying to pin the Vatican sex abuse scandals on him.

Since becoming pope in 2013, Francis has expressed a consistent message on the type of “America First” nationalism championed by Bannon.

Two years ago, the pope cautioned against growing populism in Europe, warning it could lead to the election of leaders like Hitler.

He has called for compassion toward migrants, saying that fearing them "makes us crazy," as well as other marginalized groups including the poor and gay people. He has also defended diversity.

Bannon alleges that Francis has mismanaged numerous sex abuse scandals roiling the church, and says the pope is not treating the issue seriously enough.

"The Catholic Church is heading to a financial crisis that will lead to a bankruptcy," he said. "It could actually bring down, not the theology, not the teachings, not the community of the Catholic Church, but the physical and financial apparatus of this church."

In a speech ending a landmark Vatican conference on the issue of clerical sexual abuse in February, the pope vowed to "decisively confront the phenomenon," adding: "The church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case."

But Bannon is not alone in criticizing the pontiff. A raft of conservative Catholics, from bishops to lay theologians to firebrand pundits, have attacked Francis.

They were supporters of Francis’s traditionalist predecessor, Benedict XVI, who unexpectedly resigned in 2013. On Thursday, Benedict published a letter outlining his views on the sex abuse crisis. "The crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign," he wrote.

Bannon has found an ideological ally in conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former archbishop of St. Louis who was demoted by Francis and has supported calls for the pope's resignation.

Burke and Bannon reportedly met at the Vatican in 2014 and are both involved in building an incubator for budding right-wing ideologues in Italy. Bannon described the project as "an academy that brings the best thinkers together" to train "modern gladiators."

Other American theologians have openly attacked Francis for “devaluing the doctrines of the church.”

The center of the anti-Francis backlash is in the U.S., according to Massimo Faggioli, a liberal professor of theology at Villanova University. "There is no question about that," he said.

Francis, the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, was a trailblazer and an outsider from the start, and the elevation of an Argentine brought a new “geopolitical perspective” and priorities to the papacy, Faggioli said.

While Benedict saw Catholicism’s future squarely within the Western world, Francis has espoused a vision of “global Catholicism” in which issues of social justice are paramount.

He has turned support for the poor and the environment into the key issues of his pontificate, while warning against consumerism and unfettered capitalism.

Francis has set precedents by condemning the death penalty in all cases and signaling that divorced and remarried Catholics should be able to receive Communion.

John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown, said this reformist impulse has rankled church traditionalists. Accustomed to favorable treatment from the Vatican, many American Catholics saw themselves sidelined by Francis' progressive agenda.

“If you’re an archbishop living in a big house with a big car and he says you need to have the smell of the sheep, that’s threatening,” Carr added. “He looks at the world from the bottom up and from the outside in. If you’re on top, if you’re an insider in the church, in the economy, in politics, he can threaten you.”

The backlash has been swift. Weeks after Francis’s election, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, a prominent conservative, announced that members of the right wing within the church had “not been really happy.”

Robert Sirico, the founder of the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based think tank, considers Francis to be sympathetic to socialism.

“His dominant understanding of what business is is selfish and doing things to benefit only themselves rather than the poor,” said Sirico, who met Francis in 2013.

The Acton Institute’s mission is to integrate free market principles with Christian theology, and Sirico disagrees with the pope about issues including welfare, taxation and climate change.

While both Sirico and Bannon say they don't believe the pope should step down, others go further.

They have adopted an extremist, “take-no-prisoners” approach unlike any opposition to John Paul II or Benedict, according to Faggioli.

The Vatican’s former ambassador to America, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, wrote a letter last August claiming that Francis had covered up misconduct by Theodore McCarrick, a disgraced ex-cardinal.

“Homosexual networks” within the clergy, Viganò wrote, were responsible for the high incidence of abuse and were “strangling the church.” The Vatican has not commented on Viganò's allegations.

To moderate and liberal Catholics, such weaponization of the sex abuse crisis is aimed at undermining Francis.

His critics want to tarnish “the affection people have for him as pope,” according to Carr.

“The irony is that they don’t have any particular history of standing up for victims and in some cases were allies of those who were involved in the crisis,” added Carr, who is himself a survivor of clerical sexual abuse.

Bannon's Campaign Rallies Are A Complete Bust... Everywhere

Looks like the Trumpist base isn't interested in Dr. Frankenstein any longer, now that his own monster has banished him. He released a delusional, manipulative video-- starring Corey Lewandowski, Hungarian Nazi, Sebastian Gorka and other #MAGAbomber types-- that has been largely ignored. This was his big screening for neo-fascist Michael Grimm fans (all 38 of them) on Staten Island earlier in the week:

The film employs the right-wing penchant for victimhood, specifically designed to make low IQ and opioid-addicted Trump fans feel like they are under siege by their imagined enemies. Bannon took his pathetic show on the road but has received the same non-reception everywhere. The "Red Tide Rising Rally" in the Buffalo suburb of Elma was widely publicized and Bannon said Trumpist Congressman Chris Collins-- currently out on bail after being arrested by the FBI on a pile of heavy-duty corruption charges-- and other far right Republican office-holders and candidates would be onstage with him at the suburban fire-house. No candidates or office-holders showed up, disappointing the 200 people who did turn out.

The Guardian reported that "in a move unlikely to please his former boss, Bannon spent the first part of his speech at the Jamison Road volunteer firehouse in Elma talking up his own importance in Trump’s 2016 victory, in an apparent attempt to thrust himself back into the national spotlight.

“Let’s go back in time,” Bannon said, in a potentially revealing turn of phrase.

“When I came into the campaign as CEO in mid-August [2016], we were down, what-- eight,10, 12, 16 points – double-digits down in every battleground state. Not a lot of money, not a lot of organization.”

There followed a Trump-style riff – a retelling of the obstacles and hardships the Trump campaign overcame to win a thrilling victory on 8 November.

The difference is that in Bannon’s version, he is very much front and centre, the power-- or, as Saturday Night Live portrayed him, the grim reaper-- behind Trump, whispering in the candidate’s ear, guiding him to victory.

Bannon, clad in familiar green Barbour jacket, grey hair swept back, recalled what he told Trump after signing on to the campaign.

“I said: ‘The numbers show that working class people in this country will unite around a leader who will return America to her former glory.

“‘This whole campaign is going to be compare and contrast. She [Hillary Clinton] is the representative of a corrupt elite, and you are the voice of the working people in this country.’

This recounting is unlikely to impress Trump, who claimed Bannon had “lost his mind” after leaving the White House, but then the president is probably not following his former guru as closely as he once did.

When Bannon left his job as Trump’s chief strategist in August 2017, reportedly after clashing with colleagues, he returned to Breitbart News, the organization Bannon had once declared “the platform for the alt-right.”

He could be “more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on” than in the White House, Bannon claimed, but the reunion proved to be short-lived. Bannon was booted from Breitbart in January of this year after saying Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer was “treasonous” in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The volume prompted Trump to speculate about the state of Bannon’s mind and brand him “Sloppy Steve."

The debacle left Bannon with some catching up to do to regain relevance in conservative politics. Wednesday marked a beginning of sorts-- the former chief strategist drew a crowd of just 38 to an event in Staten Island, New York, on Monda-- but the Elma event had got off to an inauspicious start when the original venue cancelled, allegedly amid threats of violence.

Bannon had originally been slated to appear with David DiPietro, running for re-election to the New York state assembly, but after the first venue pulled out, so did DiPietro.

A couple of hours before the event, Michael Caputo-- conservative strategist, organizer of the Bannon event, and DiPietro’s campaign manager-- still thought DiPietro might actually turn up. Caputo said he had invited all Republicans running for office in the western New York area, but had yet to receive a single reply.

“It might be no one,” Caputo said.

He was right. Even Chris Collins, the US congressman for New York’s 27th district who is running for re-election despite having been charged with federal securities fraud, stayed away.

...Bannon spoke for about 25 minutes, warning of the ills of the “marxist left” and eventually explicitly praising Trump on job numbers, the border, and Korea.

And as he drew to a close, the former hedge fund manager showed off the knack for appealing to the man in the street-- however disingenuous that appeal may be-- that brought him, and Trump, such success.

“If you gave me the choice between the first hundred people who showed up here at Jamison firehouse today, in a red ball cap, to govern the country, or the top hundred partners at Goldman Sachs, I would take these red ball caps every day,” Bannon said, to whoops and whistles from the crowd.

“Think about what the country would be if we took the first hundred of you and you made the decisions,” he said. “Well, that’s the closest we’ve got with Trump.”

Tonight, crazy right wing nut, Jeff Lukens, vice chairman of the Hillsborough County Republican Party, is hosting a dinner featuring Bannon. The county GOP was counting on the gala event to be their big Get Out The Vote fundraising bonanza and were selling tickets for $1,ooo per person. Well, not exactly selling... trying to sell. No one in Florida wants to have dinner with Sloppy Steve. So they cut the ticket prices in half and then in half again and finally to $50-- and no one bought any. Yesterday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the big event is now FREEEEEEEEE and that a mysterious (unnamed) donor is covering the costs. The event is to commemorate the anniversary of Trump being "elected" president.