The Teapot Noem® Affair by gene weingarten
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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)