DO I GET TO KEEP MY SEX TOYS AND BLANKIE??

 Josh Helfgott 

March 5 at 5:27 PM ·

“Look I did not vote for Trump. Either time. I have been standing in the car pool line for nine years listening to every other mom in this zip code tell me that Donald Trump was going to run this country like a business and I needed to get on board or get out of the way. My sister in law cried into her green bean casserole at Thanksgiving because I would not stop asking her to name a single policy beyond build the wall. My book club uninvited me from two meetings because I kept bringing up the deficit. Karen from church told me I had Trump Derangement Syndrome and I told Karen that having standards is not a syndrome and she has not made eye contact with me since.

And now I am sitting in the pickup line at three fifteen on a Thursday afternoon, AC blasting because this is Texas and March already feels like July, and I am scrolling my phone and every single notification is about the Secretary of Homeland Security getting fired because the news broke a couple hours ago and by now the whole internet has lost its mind. And I am reading that this woman was asked on live television yesterday if she is screwing her coworker and she could not say no. While her husband sat behind her. In a room full of cameras. On C-SPAN. At one o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday like it is a goddamn soap opera except the stakes are national security and the acting is worse.

I have three kids in this school right now. If their principal got caught maybe possibly sleeping with the vice principal and then spent 200 million dollars of school funds on a billboard campaign starring herself, she would not get reassigned to a made up position called Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas. She would be fired. By lunch. The PTA would have that handled before the car pool line and we would make sure she never worked in education again. Brenda would have the email chain going before the woman's desk was cold.

But apparently the federal government operates on different rules. Apparently when you spend taxpayer money on a vanity project, lie about who approved it, call dead American citizens terrorists, get caught flying around on government jets with the man you are definitely not sleeping with, and then refuse to confirm or deny any of it while your husband is sitting six feet behind you, you get a gentle reassignment and a thank you note on Truth Social.

And her replacement found out he got the job at the same time as the press. A sitting United States senator learned he was about to run the third largest department in the federal government because he checked his phone. That is not a vetting process. That is a gender reveal party. Surprise Markwayne it is a catastrophe.

I cannot get my health insurance to cover a routine mammogram without three forms and a blood sacrifice but this woman got a quarter billion dollars to make TV commercials about herself. In English. To tell Spanish speaking immigrants to leave. That is like me taping a note to my front door in Mandarin telling the neighbors to stop letting their dog crap on my lawn. Who was that for, Kristi. Who was the target audience. Was it the undocumented immigrants who do not speak English or was it the Fox News viewers who needed to see you looking tough in a bomber jacket so you could run for president in 2028. We all know the answer. You spent 200 million dollars of our money on a campaign ad for yourself and the only person who did not figure that out was apparently Donald Trump who says he never approved it. Which means either you are a liar or he is a liar and honestly it is probably both.

And the affair. Lord have mercy the affair. I am not even mad about the affair itself because honestly at this point fidelity in Washington DC has the same survival rate as a snowball in August in Houston. What I am mad about is the absolute stone cold disrespect of sitting there under oath with your husband in the room, the man who sells crop insurance in South Dakota while you are gallivanting around on government jets with a guy who got arrested for groping a woman at a charity dinner, and you cannot say the word no. One syllable. Two letters. My eight year old can deny eating cookies with chocolate smeared from his eyebrows to his chin more convincingly than a cabinet secretary under oath. She sat there and called it tabloid garbage and said the liberal left attacks conservative women. Ma'am nobody attacked you. Somebody asked you a yes or no question. Those are the two options. There is not a secret third option where you give a speech about sexism and hope everyone forgets what you were asked. Pick one. Say the word. Unless you cannot because it would be perjury, which is a whole other level of stupid that I do not have the energy for today.

Her husband was right there. Right behind her. The man got up early, put on a suit, flew to Washington DC to support his wife at her congressional hearing, sat in that chair, and watched a room full of people ask her if she is sleeping with another man. And she would not say no. That man sat there like a crash test dummy taking a hit he did not sign up for on national television. And then reportedly he got up and left to catch a flight right before the questions got really personal, which is either incredible timing or the most dignified exit in the history of men finding out things they did not want to know.

And Trump. Donald Trump, the man with the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, satellite surveillance, wiretapping capabilities that would make Cold War spies weep with envy, he figured out the affair because he saw them share a soda can. A soda can. The leader of the free world cracked the case because two grown adults put their mouths on the same Coca Cola and his germophobe brain short circuited. That is not intelligence gathering. That is what Brenda three doors down does at the block party. Oh I saw Steve and Linda share a drink, something is definitely going on there. The President of the United States has the same investigative methodology as a bored suburban housewife with a ring doorbell camera and too much time on her hands.

And apparently he tells this story all the time. Frequently was the word they used. He frequently shares the moment he figured it out. He is proud of it. He solved the case of the shared Coca Cola and he tells people at dinner parties like it is his Sherlock Holmes moment. Meanwhile actual national security threats are presumably walking through the front door while the man who is supposed to be protecting the country is doing forensic analysis on who drank from whose can.

And can we talk about this boyfriend for a second. Corey Lewandowski. This is the man she could not deny sleeping with. This is who was worth the career and the marriage and the public humiliation. A man who got fired from Trump's first campaign for grabbing a female reporter. A man who was charged with criminal sexual harassment after a Republican donor accused him of groping her and stalking her at a charity event and he signed a plea deal. A man who reportedly was out there picking clothes for Noem designed to show off her chest. A man who fired a pilot because his girlfriend's blanket got left on the wrong plane. Her blanket. He fired a pilot over a blanket. That is not a professional relationship. That is a man who thinks he owns you and if you cannot see the red flags at that point it is because you are wrapped in one.

This is the cabinet of the United States of America. This is who is running the country. A woman who shot her own dog and wrote about it in a book like it was a leadership seminar got put in charge of 260,000 federal employees and a department responsible for border security, cybersecurity, disaster relief, the Secret Service, and the entire Coast Guard. And she spent her time making infomercials about herself, letting her boyfriend sign off on government contracts, bottlenecking FEMA disaster relief because she needed to personally approve every expense over a hundred grand like she was managing the petty cash drawer at a frozen yogurt shop, and calling two dead American citizens terrorists before anyone had done an investigation.

Two people are dead. Shot by federal agents during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. And this woman went on television and called them domestic terrorists before anyone had bothered to figure out what actually happened. One of them was 37 years old. Where I come from that is called bearing false witness and it is literally in the Ten Commandments that Karen from church claims to live by but apparently the commandments are flexible when the person breaking them has an R next to their name.

And she is not even the worst one. That is what sends me right over the edge while I am sitting in this pickup line watching Jennifer walk back to her Tahoe with the Trump bumper sticker. She is not even close to the most embarrassing cabinet pick. She is just the first one to get fired this term. There is a whole roster of these people lined up like a clown car at the circus and we are only thirteen months in. The first term he burned through cabinet members faster than my kids go through school shoes. Four Chiefs of Staff. Four. Rex Tillerson fired on the toilet via Twitter while he was on a diplomatic trip to Africa. Jeff Sessions publicly humiliated for two years straight like a dog that peed on the carpet except the dog was the first senator to endorse him and the carpet was American democracy. John Kelly a four star general who figured out that managing Donald Trump was less like running the military and more like trying to put a diaper on a cat in a bathtub. Scott Pruitt buying forty thousand dollar soundproof phone booths and sending his security detail to get his dry cleaning and track down a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel. A used mattress. From a hotel. There is not enough Lysol in Texas to make that okay. Ryan Zinke turning the Interior Department into his personal travel agency. Tom Price chartering private jets to go to lunch like he was too important for first class.

And what did we all think was going to happen the second time around. That he learned something. That the man who has been firing people on television for entertainment since 2004 was suddenly going to develop emotional intelligence and a stable management style in his late seventies. He went through more staff in four years than I have been through pediatricians and I switched three times because Dr. Mitchell kept telling me my kid's ear infection would clear up on its own.

Fifty three Republicans have already announced they are not running again in 2026. Fifty three. Thirty two of them are Republicans. They can see the tsunami coming. They can see the numbers. They are not retiring. They are evacuating. That is not an election on the horizon. That is a controlled demolition and the smart ones are getting the hell out of the building before the charges go off.

And the department she was running has been shut down for three weeks. A hundred thousand employees sent home. The people responsible for cybersecurity. Disaster relief. FEMA. Sent home. In March. In America. Where hurricane season starts in June and the power grid in my state cannot survive a stiff breeze without collapsing. But sure. Everything is fine. Strong leadership. Best people. Art of the deal.

The bell just rang and my kids are coming out and my 12 year old daughter is going to get in this car and tell me about her day and I’m going to smile and say that sounds great honey because I am not going to tell her that the woman who was supposed to be keeping this country safe got fired for being a corrupt incompetent liar who could not keep her story straight or her personal life out of the headlines. I am not going to tell her that the government in charge of protecting her is shut down because the adults in the room cannot agree on how to fund it. I am not going to tell her that 53 members of Congress have already given up on the next election because they know the ship is sinking.

I am going to drive home and make dinner and help with homework and just pretend everything is normal because that is what moms do. We hold it together while everything falls apart.

But I swear to God if Jennifer says another word to me about how “he tells it like it is” I am going to lose it in the H-E-B parking lot and Brenda is going to have to pull me off a Tahoe.”

~Texas Mom (via I Fucking Love Australia)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

 

THE LAST GATEKEEPERS - ASHA

 

The Last Gatekeepers

Why the Trump administration wants to neutralize state bar discipline.

In my research into complicity, lawyers make alarmingly frequent appearances as enablers of misconduct. It was a memo written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that offered the legal rationale for torture. In the Epstein case, it was the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida that cobbled together a sweetheart deal that allowed Epstein to continue his crimes for another eleven years. Lawyers at the Justice Department diluted efforts by the U.S. Attorney to hold Purdue Pharma accountable in the mid-aughts, allowing the company to continue aggressively market Oxycontin as the opioid epidemic exploded. Lawyers tried to bully whistleblowers in the Theranos fraud and silence victims of Harry Weinstein.

In short, lawyers are often part and parcel of complicit systems — including those that become institutionalized into governments. As we have seen over the past decade, there have been many lawyers that have been actively facilitating the erosion of the rule of law. This is part of a global trend: As Ruth Ben-Ghiat details in her book, Strongmen, military coups are out; legal coups are in. (You have to read that in your best Heidi Klum Project Runway voice.) And Professor Kim Lane Scheppele (who I hope will be a guest speaker soon for my Complicity and Courage series) details how electoral autocracies (also called “competitive authoritarianism” — regimes that have the trappings of democracy, but nothing really behind them, much like a facade on a movie set — all have lawyers at the helm.

It used to be that at the very least, lawyers — even those working for an in corrupt governments — might be deterred by the prospect of criminal liability. John Mitchell, President Nixon’s attorney general, was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury, and spent nineteen months in prison. But our democracy has a second layer of protection against attorney misconduct: The state bar grievance committees. In Trump 1.0, many of those state bars worked — slowly and not against as many people as we might have liked, but they worked — and ended up disbarring or suspending the license of a number of lawyers who tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Kenneth Cheseboro. (Sydney Powell and Jeffrey Clark have been recommended for discipline in their respective jurisdictions.)

Now that the Justice Department itself has been hijacked, criminal liability — at least for misconduct at the federal level — is not a realistic possibility. So the only real accountability that exists at the moment (apart from state crimes) comes from state bar grievance committees, which can investigate complaints and discipline lawyers. That’s why it should worry us that the Justice Department is trying to limit state ethics probes into its lawyers. You can read the proposed rule here.

State bars, in their modern incarnation, began in the 1870s. The American Bar Association (ABA) was founded in 1878, to set a uniform ethics code — but it’s the state bars that determine who can “practice law” within their jurisdictions, set licensing standards (the bar exam), and adjudicate misconduct. As the former dean of admissions at Yale Law School, I was a gateway into the profession and interfaced with many of these bars when students graduated and took the bar. Here’s what I can tell you: States control the admission and discipline of lawyers in their jurisdiction, not the feds. In other words, what the Justice Department is trying to do is not a thing.

The sudden attempt to try to interfere in state bar grievance processes was oddly coincidental to a report that the State of Florida had initiated an investigation into Lindsay Halligan, the “U.S. Attorney” who had indicted James Comey and Leticia James. Are they related? Unclear. The Florida bar had indicated that Halligan was under investigation in a letter to the Campaign for Accountability, which had filed complaints about Halligan to the Florida and Virginia bars, where Halligan is admitted to practice.

However, yesterday, the Florida bar did a sudden about face, stating that its statement in the earlier letter was an error and that Halligan isn’t under investigation. Which, of course, is itself oddly coincidental coming on the heels of the sudden proposed “rule” by the Justice Department. Hmmm.

It’s pretty clear to me that the lawyers in this administration understands that right now the state bars are the only bodies that can actually impose accountability, and they want to render them impotent. And, since they have no actual power over these state bars, the claim that they will limit the bars’ ethics investigations is, in the pattern of everything else this administration has done — with law firms, universities, and corporations —, a not-so-veiled threat that the state bar associations better get on board.

Looks like it might be working.

MAUREEN DOWD

 

Wuthering Heights,’ MAGA Style

March 7, 2026

 

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.

You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.

Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.

With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.)

Holiday Barbie, as Robbie’s Cathy has been dubbed for her ostentatious dresses and hairstyles, pales in comparison with the costumes and Rapunzel extensions of ICE Barbie. Imprisoned in her marriage to Edgar Linton, Robbie’s Cathy gleams in elaborate gowns and necklaces. But Noem topped that. When she went to see migrants in prison in El Salvador, she sported a baseball cap with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement logo — and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona that’s worth $50,000.

Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.)

President Trump had rejected the plea of Lewandowski — who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign until he got fired after dust-ups with the Trump family and others — to be Noem’s chief of staff, because Trump was disturbed “by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved,” as The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer put it. (Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married with children, have denied the affair.)

Kristi slid Corey into the Department of Homeland Security as a temporary special government employee and made him her powerful aide-de-camp. He has stayed long beyond his allotted 130 days, thanks to scheming workarounds. For a time, Trump let it ride, even though, according to The New York Post, he cringed when he saw them flagrantly taking sips from the same can of soda — an unmistakable tell.

An Atlantic story called Lewandowski and Noem “the First Couple of a Dysfunctional D.H.S.” As Noem’s enforcer and promoter, Lewandowski had a hand in every decision.

An upcoming book by the NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley reveals that senior officials held a secret meeting in 2025 after Trump was sworn in to discuss what they saw as the toxic romance warping — or wuthering — the agency’s plans as it embarked on the barbaric roundup of illegal immigrants. The rough manhunt drained the department of compassion as it attempted to build up Noem and capture headlines. Lewandowski tried to think of ways to redeem Noem after she disgustingly called Renee Good and Alex Pretti, victims of her ICE run amok, domestic terrorists.

Like Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Noem was aspirational, always trying to move up. Cathy traded up to the big house nearby; Kristi commandeered the Coast Guard commandant’s waterfront residence. But her tactics were too flashy and narcissistic even for Trump. She and Lewandowski jetted around in a luxury 737 Max, according to The Wall Street Journal, and once highhandedly tried to dismiss their Coast Guard pilot when he failed to transfer her blanket to a different plane. They had to get him back once they realized there was no one to fly them home. (Other accounts say it was her bag that was left. But what was in that bag that could cause such a ruckus?)

Axios reported that Noem had planned to use border funds for an almost $300 million luxury jet fleet for D.H.S.

It was the end for Noem when she was quizzed at her hearing on Tuesday by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about spending $220 million on glossy commercials, including one where she wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse near Mount Rushmore.

She should have known better than to hog attention from the president, the biggest attention hog of all time.

A skeptical Kennedy pressed Noem about whether Trump had signed off on the ads, and she said that he had.

The senator reported that the president called him afterward “mad as a momma wasp,” denying he knew about the ads. At that moment, Kennedy said, “She was dead as fried chicken.”

Now Democrats are investigating whether Noem and Lewandowski gamed the system on the ad contract, which looks politically incestuous, so that they and their allies financially benefited. They’re also looking into whether she perjured herself.

At Noem’s intensely awkward House hearing on Wednesday, with her husband sometimes sitting behind her, she was grilled about Lewandowski.

“So, Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as director of Homeland Security, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?” Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat, asked, calling Lewandowski “unqualified” for his job.

Noem called the subject “tabloid garbage.” But I didn’t hear a no.

In a way, this terrible love story is a triangle. Trump can’t quit Corey either, no matter how many times the pit bull is pushed aside. Trump sees his first campaign manager as a character, someone who had faith that his brash style could click, that America would adapt to Trump, not the other way around.

A Washington scandal involving sex is never very sexy. And it’s usually not simply about secret passion; repercussions ripple far beyond the carnal transgression. Institutions are betrayed and undermined, and so are the people who count on them.

 

 

Well, That Solves That!

No, it don’t!

Trevor Stone Irvin Mar 7

Well, the Barb-a-licious cos-playing train wreck known as Krusty Gnome is Noem more.

Well, sorta. They moved her over to a new job that Gruppenfuhrer Stevie Miller created in the 12 seconds after she was let go. (While she spoke at a conference no less.)

Her new pretend job is “The Royal Special Envoy and Panty Shield of the Americas for the Western Hemisphere.” The big question on everyone’s lips is, what kind of costumes will she wear, and what kind of hats will go with Special Royal Envoy of the Panty Shield for the Entire Western Hemisphere’s costumes? The Western Hemisphere covers a shit-ton of territory.

Will it be:
Sombreros? Hockey helmets? Panama Hats? A Bolivian bowler? Chieftain headdress? Eskimo fur hood? Salvadorian straw hat? Peruvian knit cap? Mexican cowboy hat? Royal Canadian Mountie Hat? A Toque? Tricorne Hat? Beaver fur hat? Racoon Cap?

Oh, oh, oh… maybe an Indiana Jones hat!

My, my, my, the choice of hats available throughout the entire Western Hemisphere seems endless. Krusty will have her work cut out for her and will need a much bigger closet.

I’ve been told that the headquarters of the Royal Special Envoy and Panty Shield of the Americas for the Western Hemisphere is located onboard a tramp steamer anchored off the coast of Antarctica, where Krusty will feel right at home shooting baby seals.

What is the job of a Royal Special Envoy and Panty Shield of the Americas for the Western Hemisphere? No one knows, as it is a completely made-up fictional job title that hopefully doesn’t come with expensive Boeing 737 flying bordellos.

Speaking of the flying bedrooms that Krusty purchased at taxpayers expense, will Krusty get to bring along her favorite “blankie” and that buzzing travel bag of “potentially embarrassing” objects that Lewdindowski had to hurriedly get off the plane before the flight crew started testing out the batteries of her emotional support “travel accessories.”

And does Cory Lewdindowski still cum with her new job title? His wife is asking. Or will he be demoted to service the new United States Suckretary of Homeland Insecurity, MarkyMarkWayneMullet, as his personal FlufferNutter!

Will this new job change the Krusty we know and love?
Will Krusty Gnome go back to her previous fashion statement by deflating her lips and wearing a beehive on her head? Let’s hope so.

In keeping with hiring the catastrophically incompetent, MarkyMarkWayne will likely be much worse than Krusty. But it should be fun because MarkyMark Mullet has a real problem stringing more than three words together to form his “I’m a big boy” and “I can beat you up” nonsense sentences. There are clips of his inability to speak all over the internet to enjoy.

My current favorite is MarkyMark Wayne saying, “We’re not at war, we’re not at war, they declared war on us, OK, I misspoke we’re at war.” That there is some brain surgery level shit.

The man from Opie-Mc-Dopey Oklahoma is a college drop out, a plumber, and the only senator without out even a bachelor’s degree. He has no police or security training. In fact, during his 2012 congressional campaign, federal agents raided Mullin Plumbing based on a tip from an employee. They discovered a stocked gun safe belonging to Tim Saylor, a convicted felon employed by the company, who ultimately pleaded guilty to firearm possession.

Mullin admitted he had not performed any background checks on Saylor and acknowledged shooting guns with him. MarkyMark Wayne said “I didn’t do a background check because he is a racist white guy who liked guns and drinking and looked OK to me. It’s all those black guys I worry about.”

Boy I feel safe now!

When Trump selected his cabinet, I had no idea that the sole qualification required is, having the IQ of a cabinet.

And so, the orange pedophile’s war of Epstein’s Epic Fury continues.

Now This Just In:
Here is a superb example of Putin ass kissing by the orange turd and his Minister of Stupid, Scott Besset. Russia is sharing intelligence of locations with Iran to support Iranian attacks against US forces in the Middle East. So, what did we do? We “unsanctioned” and lifted the restrictions on Russia’s oil, just to be friendly, to a country that wishes us all dead.

And that’s your Life in the Key of Stupid today.