Category: Questions
Let’s talk about Trump unintentionally admitting tariffs are raising your grocery prices….
From Gene Weingarten On Corruption & Crime
The Teapot Noem® Affair by gene weingarten
Read on Substack
Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool. You know the drill. We give you a topic, you spill your guts, we betray you by publishing it next week with snarky comments.
We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, a brief nod to what seems to be a burgeoning scandal in the Trump regime, one that was almost totally ignored yesterday, drowned out by more salacious semi-details in The Epstein Chronicles. I’d considered waiting a bit to address this new scandal-in-progress but I came up with the perfect name for it, and I wanted to stake that claim, which I have done with the headline above.
Here is the story.
Until Watergate, the existing American scandal standard was “The Teapot Dome Affair,” though “-dome” never entered the lexicon as “-gate” did for required scandal suffixery. (Tragically, the 1959 steel scandal never became “Chromedome.”)
Teapot Dome was a rather simple affair. Warren Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, a man who looked like an angry and constipated Mark Twain,
… took bribes from oilmen amounting to hundreds of thousand of dollars’ worth of cash and cows — he was also a rancher — in return for leasing them government oil reserves in the West that included the Teapot Dome field in Wyoming, which was no beaut of a butte; it was said to look something like a teapot, with its spout, but only as designed by those architects of Herman Goering’s priapic tables.
Eventually, Fall, the fall guy, fell. He did a year of hard labor in the teapot can.
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Kristi Noem — former governor of South Dakota — is also a Westerner, and also a rancher, and also a member of the president’s Cabinet and as such also controls huge domestic budgets, and also is connected by photographs to large mountains.
The beginnings of the Teapot Noem® Affair were revealed yesterday by ProPublica. Here are the headlines:
Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts
The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.
…
The majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.
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Honestly, you don’t need to know more than that. Or maybe you do. I myself didn’t read any further because the Epstein news of the day seemed to imply the possibility that Donald Trump once gave Bill Clinton a blow job. That story seems pretty, um, inflated, but you know. Eyeballs.
More on Kristi “Twisti” Noem later in the week, I am guessing.
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Today’s Gene Pool challenge is based on something that happened to me last evening. I was in my car, traveling west on Massachusetts Avenue, a bustling two way thoroughfare in D.C. I turned right onto 15th Street SE, a one-lane, one-way street going my way. This street had a bike lane, which was, of course, also one-way in the same direction as the street. I checked to my left for bikers. There were none. So I turned right. This turn was legal and prudent. And that is when I almost killed a young woman and a girl I presumed to be her daughter, who looked to be about seven. They were on an electric scooter. The girl was standing in front of her mom, between mom and the handlebars.
The scooter was going the wrong way in the bike lane at twilight. It was rolling to a stop for the light, but moving faster than I was.
I had to jam on my brakes and veer to the left to avoid them. Then I did something I almost never do. I butted in to something that was Clearly Not My Business. I pulled to the curb and got out of my car. They were still at the light.
I said, “Ma’am, this is not my business, but I think you’re risking both of your lives by driving the wrong way in a bike lane on a one-way street at night. I almost hit you. I don’t think you should do this.”
She stared at me, blandly. She did not seem offended.
“Okay,” she said.
The light changed.
She roared off, at maybe 20 miles an hour, down the bike lane, the wrong way on a one-way street, into the darkening, menacing night.
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So, that is your challenge for the day. What is some advice — buttinsky or otherwise — that you once gave with the best of intentions that either backfired or was ignored to someone’s detriment, or yours?
Send ’em as always, here. (snip-a bit MORE and a little poll on the page)
Ms. Rachel Calls-Out NYT In Response To Leaked Internal Memo
There’s no flash of light at conception
Responding to an argument about gay marriage
The Incalculable Cost Of The Gaza Genocide
Abby Martin joins the program to discuss her new film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy which exposes the U.S. military as the world’s largest polluter. Live-streamed on November 6, 2025.
Let’s talk about Trump and Obamacare royalties….
Please watch. As she says the site is called Dunning Kruger and states it is not fake news or lies because it is totally fictional and made up. But tRump believes it. Hugs
Not just any Democrat will do
https://www.alreporter.com/2025/11/11/opinion-not-just-any-democrat-will-do/
The Democrats’ fold on the shutdown highlights the fact that not just any Democrat can do the job that America needs.
The shutdown is over.Well, not officially, but it’s over. Seven Democrats and a Dem-caucusing independent caved, providing Republicans with the eight votes necessary to shove through a funding bill that will eventually reopen the government.Once again, Republicans’ will to do the wrong thing was greater than Democrats’ to do the right thing.
Amazing how often that happens. With Medicare-for-all. With Senate representation for Puerto Rico and D.C. With revamping the U.S. Supreme Court. With simply seating a properly nominated Supreme Court justice.
Every single time, when the fight got hard, there were just enough Democrats willing to tuck tail and run to give Republicans another win. Just enough Democrats willing to believe that this time the GOP Lucys won’t move the football.
It’s coming again, sure as you’re reading this.
There will be no negotiation over Affordable Care Act subsidies—the lone concession that Democrats received for their spineless fold. Anyone with a working brain can see the end of this thing.
Republicans are going to renege. There’s going to be shock and outrage. Republicans and their media partners will not care. They’ll spin it in the dumbest possible way. Four million Americans will lose health care coverage. The costs of insurance premiums will go up substantially for all of us.
It’ll probably end up being Obama’s fault somehow.
Because this is how bad the Democrats are at messaging. Even when every single fact is on their side—and the facts were decidedly on their side—they can’t even get their own caucus to buy in.
I want you to consider what was happening. Take a step back. Consider all of the facts. And behold the breathtaking failure that the Democrats snatched from the jaws of accomplishment.
You have a country that is extremely angry with its current president, because that guy has failed to do anything that he promised he was going to do. (Probably because he lacks both the intelligence and the will to do any of those things.) This guy, whose policies have driven up prices and bankrupted American farmers and businesses, was publicly snatching food from the mouths of hungry children and poor people. At the same time, his party’s disastrous spending bill, which included ridiculous tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations at the expense of health care subsidies for the poor and working class, was in the beginning stage of jacking up monthly premiums from barely affordable to “I guess we’ll just die” rates.
For 41 days, the Democrats told everyone who would listen that they simply could not stand aside and allow this pain to fall upon good Americans. That this was a fight they wouldn’t abandon. That this was a fight they were in until the end.
Or until the airports got real busy.
I mean, people starving because food stamps were cut off was one thing. But long lines and cancelled flights, pfft, what are we, some sort of third-world country?
So, seven of them caved. Like sniveling, pathetic cowards.
Because more wasn’t demanded of them.
I’ve been preaching for some time now about the absolute necessity of researching and voting for the right people. For not simply voting for the party-affiliated candidate. To demand more. To vote for the people who best represent you and who have the best answers to your issues.
For most of you, particularly the working class and poor, that will be a Democrat. It just needs to be the right Democrat. We have to stop electing weak, ineffective, soft candidates, and choose people who will fight with intelligence and grit.
Look, let’s keep in mind the reality here. The things that were at the center of this fight—food stamps, health care subsidies, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security—none of them would exist without Democrats, without a progressive party that governs based on morals and decency. A party that made sure the poor have food on the table and access to medical care. A party that said senior citizens deserved to live with dignity and some security.
But what happened with the shutdown cave should highlight the fact that it’s not enough to simply elect Democrats. You have to demand more. You have to demand a commitment, a willingness to fight.
Anything less, as we’ve seen, is just a waste of everyone’s time.
Scottie's Playtime 