Cockburn

In the surest sign of the permanent decay of Cockburn’s mind and soul, he spent all yesterday waiting for the President to post about the size of his appendage. The fact that Donald Trump has yet to do so fills Cockburn with sadness and ennui. This weekend doesn’t offer much promise either, as Trump is in the air on his way to Scotland. Maybe he’ll take some time to ponder his nether regions on Air Force One. The impetus for Cockburn’s hope comes from the season premiere of South Park, which portrays Trump as a selfish, horny imbecile, as it used to portray Saddam Hussein more than 20 years ago. Also like South Park’s Saddam, Trump has a homosexual love affair with Satan, who notices the resemblance.

The Republican majority in the House is down to +7: Representative Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district officially resigned on Monday. Green was the subject of a rather messy scandal in his final term: his wife of 35 years initiated divorce proceedings last September, wrongly accusing the congressman of having an affair with a 32-year-old female Axios reporter in the filing. He was, in fact, cheating on her with a different young woman, who exonerated the reporter. “We’ve all had to basically grieve the loss of the person that we thought was our father,” Green’s daughter Catherine told local press at the time. “My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man... His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.

The exclusive WSJ letter Cockburn nearly drove his roadster into a ditch when the Wall Street Journal broke news in the early evening that Donald Trump had written a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, which Ghislane Maxwell collected into a “leather-bound album.” According to the WSJ, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair….The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” In an interview with the WSJ, Trump said the letter was fake.

Trash talk Who gets to call themselves MAGA these days, anyway? Politico Playbook declared this weekend that “MAGA is whatever Trump decides it will be” – the administration’s go-to defense when the President does something the further-right side of his base doesn’t care for, such as dispatching military support to Ukraine, say, or running interference for the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Heading into the midterms – and we’re past the halfway point of 2025, so we are heading into the midterms – Republican candidates up and down the country are already attempting to bill themselves as the most “MAGA” in the field, in hope of garnering a Trump endorsement that could see them win office.

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.

A great travel miracle has occurred – and Cockburn, who flies frequently and disgruntledly, couldn’t be more thrilled. The TSA, as of either yesterday or very, very soon, will no longer require airline passengers to remove their shoes when going through security. Shoes on/shoes off has been the bane of every commercial airline passenger’s existence since British terrorist Richard Reid attempted to detonate his shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. Since then, it’s been federal policy to X-ray your Nikes and, repulsively, your flip-flops. Now either that threat has passed – or maybe it wasn’t ever that much of a threat. Regardless, we are free. Cockburn would like to see some other flying experience changes to accompany this one.