Nick Adams

Tuesday

Matt McDonald

Who’s the most special envoy?

On the final weekend of her tenure as Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem was in South America meeting the President of Guyana. Photos posted by the US Embassy in Guyana show Noem’s “senior advisor” Corey Lewandowski sitting alongside her. It would, of course, be “tabloid garbage” to repeat rumors of an affair between the two, to use Noem’s phrase when questioned (both Noem and Lewandowski have vehemently denied the affair, although she didn’t explicitly deny “sexual relations” when under oath in Congress). Noem’s South American jaunt seemed to straddle the role she was leaving and the one she’s just started. She was officially in Guyana on DHS business but has a new posting as Donald Trump’s “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

special envoy

Friday

Cockburn

Texas’s Hail Mary pep talk

Fumbled… As Texas digs out from last weekend’s catastrophic flooding, the state’s leaders are using the only metaphor its residents understand – football – to try and shift blame. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a great protector of the Republican establishment, said at a Tuesday press conference, “Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game.’” But the “losing team,” in this case, appears to be the Republican-run Kerr County, which did not have a proper flood warning system in place.

Football

Friday

Cockburn

Want to buy Russia Today’s DC broadcast studio?

Axed-ios Axios announced in an email to staff this week that they are laying off 10 percent of their workforce — and to add insult to injury, the announcement was stylized like one of their editorial products.“Why it matters: We’re eliminating about 50 positions to get ahead of tectonic shifts in the media, technology, and reader needs/habits,” the email read. The canned staffers were also informed via email rather than in an in-person meeting, which Axios claimed was for logistical reasons.It gets worse. A spy tells Cockburn that the laid-off workers were summarily frog-marched out of the media company’s northern Virginia building Thursday by security.