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It was remarkable that Kristi Noem found a place in the Trump administration after Puppygate — the controversy that erupted after the former South Dakota governor wrote about shooting a poorly trained hunting dog named Cricket in a gravel pit.
But even more remarkable was what ostensibly ended Noem’s tenure as the head of Homeland Security — unhappiness over a $200 million-plus marketing campaign starring a glammed-up Noem on horseback.
The contracts for that campaign were awarded in spring of last year, at the same time that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was actively looking for government waste.
In that environment, it’s hard to understand how anyone thought spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on vanity ads was OK, but some did.
Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican, has called ads like this “spending porn,” saying on Fox News, “I’m pretty cheap when it comes to money. I squeak when I walk.”
His calm questioning of Noem in a Senate hearing resulted in a phone call from the president and, soon, in Noem’s reassignment. While many debated whether the president was complicit as Noem said (Trump told Kennedy he was not, and Kennedy says he believes the president), for a brief, shining moment, Americans were united in their belief that taxpayer money should not be spent on vanity ads.
Meghan McCain pointed out on X that the DHS spent more on the ads than Hollywood spent on some blockbuster movies.
Fox News personality Tomi Lahren, a former intern for Noem, also weighed in, saying, “I don’t know how you spend $220 million riding a horse by Mount Rushmore.” (To be fair, that figure is not what was spent on one ad, but a larger campaign, detailed in devastating detail in November by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica.)
Lahren went on to say when Republicans call out Democrats for fraud, it’s important that they call out their own. She added: “Kristi had to go. And also I will say, ‘Justice for Cricket.’”
The debacle was a timely reminder that conservative politicians abandon the virtue of frugality at their own risk, and self-aggrandizement (in anyone but the current president) rarely plays well.
Now if only Kennedy would go after those “Project Funded By President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” signs, one of which is still applauding the former president on a street near me, and similar ones bearing the name of the current president.
CNN regrets a tweet
CNN on Tuesday deleted a tweet that, while not factually inaccurate, was wildly and absurdly tone deaf.
The post said the two men arrested for throwing homemade explosive devices at protests outside the home of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani could have spent the day “enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather” but for their arrest.
People who didn’t know better might have thought that the men, who authorities say were inspired by the Islamic State group, were innocents wrongly detained.
CNN said the post “failed to reflect the gravity of the incident” and was deleted. The network’s media analyst, Brian Stelter, defended the story but agreed with critics that the post was “outrageous.”
Additionally, the CNN story that was promoted with the post was updated with this editor’s note: “A previous version of this story included a summary that does not reflect the gravity of the incident, thereby breaching the editorial standards we require for all our reporting. It therefore has been changed.”
The publicity is not great for CNN, where employees are reportedly quaking about the prospect of Bari Weiss taking over if the Paramount Skydance/Warner Bros. deal is finalized. “When does the new ownership take over?” one exasperated X user asked.
It was also not great for the young journalists who wrote the story, who found themselves being ridiculed by talk-show hosts, which may not be fair — the reporters may not have written the social media post and story summary themselves.
The Iran conflict, Season 1
A flurry of new polls have emerged about the military action in Iran. The New York Times’ headline Tuesday was “Unlike past U.S. conflicts, Iran attack is opposed by most Americans.”
Even a Fox News poll, the Times report said, found that half of Americans oppose the action.
But a more granular look at the Fox poll tells a different story. The half of respondents who oppose the action are bolstered by large numbers of Democrats (80%) and independents (60%) who do not approve of the strikes. Republicans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly approve of the action — 84%.
This helps to explain why, on a recent email promoting the “Top 10 shows on Fox Nation,” one of the 10 — in addition to “Gutfeld!” and “Jesse Waters Primetime” — was “Operation Epic Fury: U.S. strikes Iran,” a collection of news conferences and other recent Iran coverage, underneath a small header that says “Season 1.”
That was probably just a technological glitch in loading the content. Still, let’s hope there’s not a Season 2.
The Oscars, handicapped by politics
The Academy Awards are Sunday night; Conan O’Brien is hosting. Most of the nominees, according to an article in The Independent, are “furiously political.” Look for Noem to be a target of at least one joke.
“There’s no running from politics, it seems, not even on Oscar night. It’s the star player of many of this year’s Best Picture nominees and is about to pogo onstage whether the Academy likes it or not,” Xan Brooks wrote.
Recommended Reading
Prediction markets say they don’t take bets on assassinations, but weeks before military strikes in Iran, one allowed wagers on whether Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “out as Supreme Leader.” Jay Evensen dove into this abhorrent type of betting.
“In the wake of Saturday’s attack, a crypto-analytics firm called Bubblemaps flagged six people who made $1.2 million through accurate wagers on Polymarket. The Wall Street Journal reported that one user placed $26,000 on predictions of an attack on Feb. 28 and won more than $200,000.”
Taking wagers on military strikes? It must stop
Valerie Hudson said a lot of people are applauding the AI company Anthropic standing up to the Pentagon. But Anthropic is not the hero of the story.
“Big AI is indifferent to a world in which humans are superfluous. Of course, those who run Big AI will never make themselves superfluous; they will be a rich and powerful new species of human. The rest of us will be Morlocks to their Eloi.”
The irony of Anthropic’s stand
What comes to mind when you think about a “stay-at-home” parent? Probably not their child care needs. But stay-at-home parents occasionally need child care too, and policymakers should keep their needs and preferences in mind, say Elise Anderson, Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel of the think tank Capita.
“Our research found that a majority of parents with children under the age of 12, whether or not they are stay-at-home parents — and including close to half of Republicans — would be more likely to support child care legislation if it both strengthened families with stay-at-home parents and those that use licensed child care programs," they write.
Who is a stay-at-home parent? It’s complicated, and family policies should reflect that
End Notes
Last week, we asked Right to the Point readers if they watched an evening news show in the past month. Few had, which makes me nostalgic for my childhood, in which my grandparents settled into their La-Z-Boy recliners each evening to learn what had happened in the world that day.
As Tim Siedell tweeted this week, “Man was not meant to monitor this many situations.” There was a time not so long ago when a morning newspaper, an afternoon newspaper and a nightly news show was enough.
But then again, we didn’t have AI cat videos.
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