Pelosi not invited to today’s WH signing ceremony on stimulus, per aide. She and Trump have not spoken in more than five months. More on that here: https://t.co/ickLNTZubI
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 27, 2020
Karen Tumulty, at the Washington Post, applauds “A troublemaker with a gavel”:
… Though Nancy Pelosi does not lack for self-confidence, she rarely indulges in public self-reflection. On that night at the Smithsonian, however, she gave a nod to those who had paved the way for her.
“The women who did all of this — oh my gosh — we revere them. We hold them up as icons. But what we hear people say is, ‘Yes, they were icons. You are troublemakers.’ They were considered troublemakers in their time, so maybe there is a future for all of us,” Pelosi said with a laugh. “But I can just tell you, a troublemaker with a gavel — that’s the real difference.”
This troublemaker with a gavel is the highest-ranking female elected official in the nation’s history and, [last] Thursday, Pelosi will also mark a personal milestone: her 80th birthday. Fittingly, it comes at the end of Women’s History Month. Just as appropriately, Pelosi will be marking it by attempting a huge, complicated and vitally important legislative lift — marshaling support for a massive spending bill to blunt the impact of the coronavirus.
Pelosi will be tested in the coming months, as her generationally divided party looks for a way to navigate the coronavirus crisis while regrouping behind a presidential nominee. Then, in the fall, every seat in the House will be on the ballot and, with it, Pelosi’s 35-seat majority. Voters will render judgment on her decision to press forward with President Trump’s impeachment last fall. But it is likely they will be focused more on figuring out which party can be trusted going forward, and specifically, which is better equipped to manage the next phase of the government’s response to the most challenging peacetime crisis in a century or more…
A woman about to enter her ninth decade has become a warrior-heroine to the social-media generation. It seems that her every gesture toward Trump conveys a message of contempt. When he gave his 2019 State of the Union address, she offered stiff-armed, mocking applause. Right after he delivered it this year, she gracelessly ripped up her copy of what she called “a manifesto of mistruths.”…In nearly every major negotiation between the executive and the legislative branches, Pelosi remains the lone female at the table where the biggest decisions are made. Still, the gains that she has seen women make over the course of her political career have been enormous. When Pelosi arrived in the House in 1987, a freshman at the age of 47, there were barely two dozen women among its 435 members. Now, in part thanks to her efforts, there are more than 100.
But even as these victories are celebrated, they remind us that no woman has yet to climb to the top. “My disappointment is that every time I’m introduced as the most powerful woman in American history, it breaks my heart because I think we should have a president,” she said. “We could have had a female president, and we should and we will.”
It is therefore instructive to recall that Pelosi’s own rise was not one that anyone — starting with the speaker herself — would have foreseen. Life has a way of making a joke of the plans that we devise for ourselves. Only in the rear-view mirror can we see how choices and chances pave a road we could never have imagined…
If one thinks of politics as performance or preening, sure, Pelosi is bad at politics. But if one who believes politics is largely about power, saying a politician usually gets her way means she’s good at politics. https://t.co/Z5diYTKr8b
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 28, 2020
Pelosi’s greatest weakness is what she does in front of a microphone. And she’s not bad in front of a mic. But some people don’t grasp that a caucus leader’s job is mostly away from the mic
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 28, 2020
— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost (@SpiroAgnewGhost) March 27, 2020
Jim Parish
Under the current circumstances, it’s probably a good thing she wasn’t invited to the signing ceremony. She is, after all, in a high-risk group.
Elizabelle
@Jim Parish: That’s a good point.
I want to wrap Nancy Pelosi in protective swathing too. As with the notorious RBG.
Will read this article. I love Nancy Smash.
hueyplong
Safer for Pelosi and further demonstrates Trump’s pettiness on a national stage. Win-win.
[If a human being (i.e., a Democrat) had been president this week, GOP leaders would have invited and they would have declined. You’re only “serious” and “tough” if you’re an asshole when being one isn’t required.]
MattF
And the RW keeps trying to demonize and diminish her. It doesn’t work.
PsiFighter37
My hope is that after the 2020 elections, Nancy Smash lays out who her successors are going to be, since the current trio at the top of the House (her, Hoyer, Clyburn) are all in their late 70s / early 80s. Not too worried, though – there’s a lot of good talent. And I could see Nancy deciding 2024 (if Biden wins and passes off to his VP) is a good time to call it a career. One of the great political talents in House history IMO.
mrmoshpotato
@Jim Parish: Yes. And also, who cares? It’s a signing ceremony. Ooooooooo!!!
Fuck Dump. Go Nancy SMASH!
JMG
The inability of otherwise pretty smart leftists like Pareene to grasp the difference between politics as seen on TV and how legislatures work is amazing to me. Politics has all sorts of specialized skill sets for different circumstances, just like all other human endeavors. But it hurts those folks to have to admit Democrats can do anything right, because that undermines their narrative that the party is the real enemy of progress.
L85NJGT
Disastrous (for Trump) Yahoo\YouGov polling out, so expect more than the usual acting out at the presser today.
Baud
I wonder who these people think is good at politics?
ThresherK
@JMG: Ah, I see you are familiar with the leftier-than-thou trope “Every Democratic victory is a loss, ever service a gap”.
ThresherK
@Baud: Let me introduce you to the LGM blog’s favorite son, Johnny Unbeatable.
I mean, Baud2020 can beat him, but nobody else can.
Baud
I mean, if Tim Tebow complained that Tom Brady was bad at quarterbacking, we’d point and laugh at him, right?
SFAW
@L85NJGT:
The polling that Google returns relates to the Destroyer-in-Chief’s hoped-for Easter miracle. Is there something else? Because I don’t put “yeah, Easter’s too soon, asshole” as being “disastrous,” even if it is 59 percent saying that — it’s only one issue.
Hoping there’s more, that I just overlooked.
Baud
@ThresherK:
The only way to win is not to play.
SFAW
@ThresherK:
I think if Pareene changed “politics” to “politicking” — which, to my teeny-tiny brain, is the closest word to “does good speeching and rousing the electorate” — he’d be a lot closer to accurate. I don’t necessarily interpret his tweet as a leftier-than-thou screed.
MattF
@SFAW: 538 sez Yahoo/YouGov Trump approval is now at 43-52. IOW, back to ‘normal’.
mrmoshpotato
@ThresherK: Baud2020 can’t beat him, but Baud! 2020! will wipe every floor with every one – seafloor too!
JMG
@SFAW: That’s fair, but it still speaks to a too narrow view of how American politics works, one oddly enough born of the same problem Trump has — equating cable TV with all of reality.
randy khan
@L85NJGT:
That poll is brutal:
59-20 that Easter is too soon to stop preventive measures.
60-25 that the Administration didn’t do enough to prepare.
49-43 disapproval of how Trump has handled it.
One poll, etc., but still.
SFAW
@Baud:
Why would we care what a minor-league baseball “player” says?
[By the way, re: Tebow: rarely has a Triple-A player shown the hitting consistency Tebow demonstrated last season, playing for the Syracuse Mets.]
SFAW
@MattF: @randy khan:
Thanks. My Google-fu is obviously sub-par.
OzarkHillbilly
It seems appropriate to put this up here:
Bush may well be an idiot, but he is a human being with a good streak of decency. And yes, even I miss him now.
SFAW
@JMG:
Agree. I’m a little disappointed that Pareene depicted it that way, but (based on my not-very-recent readings of him, so I don’t know if he’s changed) I don’t put him anywhere close to BernBots or similar.
Elizabelle
@L85NJGT: Link to the poll??
Also, people understand the lack of ventilators issue. Andrew Cuomo has raised that daily.
The concept of ventilator rationing is real. If not for yourself, for your elderly or fragile relative, neighbor or friend. Trump dawdled on that for days this week, and a real president would have handled that — and moving the Navy hospital ships into place — a month or two ago.
I hope Trump goes down hard, hard, hard, and then spends the rest of his life in court (unsuccessfully) and then in prison. Grifting family and cronies too.
We can never allow this level of corruption and lying and malfeasance again.
I’d be good with hanging Trump, McConnell, the really awful ones. We won’t do it, but we should. They are traitors. They have a body count.
KsSteve
Bill Belichick and Andy Reid are also bad behind the mic.
L85NJGT
@SFAW:
Immanentize
@SFAW: Well, Michael Jordan had about the same batting average, no?
Jerry
@MattF:
As does the left.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
As I understand, a month ago those Navy hospital ships were already in drydock for maintenance, and were unavailable.
OzarkHillbilly
@L85NJGT: I sense a disconnect in those numbers.
Chyron HR
@L85NJGT:
But DA SQUAD told me that he and McConnell are the new champions of progressive politics.
evap
Tom Coburn has died.
Baud
@SFAW:
Exactly my point.
Baud
@evap: Covid?
ETA: cancer
p.a.
@L85NJGT: linky?
BroD
Nancy is awesome!
I’m a long-life-long Baltimorean and very proud of her.
p.a.
@randy khan: tks.
Immanentize
@evap: Max Planck:
L85NJGT
@Elizabelle:
Here
You have to plow through the article – and they REALLY don’t trust Wilmer
FOX has him down nine nationally.
dmsilev
@L85NJGT: While 43% approval is far more than he deserves, we should compare and contrast with the ~90% approval rating George Bush had right after 9/11 (also far more than he deserved, but that’s another story). As this gets worse and more pervasive, Trump is not likely to gain supporters. Especially since, unlike Bush, he didn’t even make a pretense of seeking unity under the circumstances.
ThresherK
I’m fascinated (read: nearly disgusted) with how much of Lefty Twitter is taking Pelosi and Schumer to task over Trump’s signing statements.
As someone else mentioned, this is blaming the people who are writing the laws for the actions of those who will break them.
Also, why didn’t Nancy and Chuck just write “no signing statements” into the bill? That would have totally worked!
Mai naem mobile
I am pretty sure her not being there will end up being a blessing in disguise. And I don’t think much of Schumer’s leadership overall but I am glad he wasn’t there either. This may end up being an attrition situation and I would rather as many of our folks avoiding these situations especially considering we’ve already gotten McAdams and DeSaulnier down in the House.
germy
hueyplong
One thing “our side” shares with GOPers is a refusal to apply the “San Francisco” label to anything good that Pelosi does. Is there some thought that she’s being held hostage in SF, longing for a return to Baltimore that for some reason or another cannot be done?
Immanentize
@Baud: re: that Okie Asshole:
danielx
@Amir Khalid:
usns comfort was in Norfolk for repairs but not in dry dock, sailed for nyc yesterday.
dmsilev
Want to get even angrier at Trump’s handling of this crisis? Try reading this:
Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country amid the coronavirus crisis
(emphasis added).
Baud
@L85NJGT:
Interesting. Bernie had been polling well against Trump in the past. Obviously, only one poll….
germy
How will they survive this? I mean, their product is sitting unsold on the shelves… //
germy
@dmsilev: It’s not the deaths Graham cares about, it’s the optics.
Baud
@dmsilev:
He was going to lose to Biden when the economy was booming. He actually had a small chance to save himself by slightly exceeding the low, underneath the earth bar he set for himself by deferring to the scientists. He could not do it.
debbie
@Jim Parish:
He carries far worse viruses than COVID-19. The farther away she can stay, the better for us all.
p.a.
The only explanation I have seen for trump having ANY support that I find accurate is the authoritarian personality/cultist explanation. And the authoritarian aspect is damageable by self-preservation/survival instincts (Hitler/Nazi support started cracking after Stalingrad, shattered w allied bombing. Also too W’s support collapse eventually via Iraq & Katrina). I think that’s the 28%-40%. The base 27% are the cultist/cyanide pill in the mouth people. Wish I could say I’m shocked there are that many here in Murica.
debbie
@germy:
We live in a time where Christians can openly and unashamedly prioritize the economy over human lives. I still can’t get over this.
MattF
@dmsilev: Graham has moved his nose a full millimeter in the right direction, and I offer him appropriate praise.
L85NJGT
@Baud:
The Democratic Party rank and file has decided that the nomination is over. Justice dems not noticing a massive shift in the political landscape is par for the course.
OzarkHillbilly
@germy: Couldn’t happen to a nicer gal.
Frankensteinbeck
@p.a.:
You don’t think hate, bigotry, and the desire of stupid, dipshit assholes to see someone like them in charge isn’t plausible? ‘Cause I gotta tell ya, I’ve lived most of my life surrounded by people who are motivated by those things.
gene108
@Immanentize:
Jordan only played AA ball.
Tebow was pretty good in AA, but can’t handle AAA at all.
debbie
@evap:
Zero tears here.
L85NJGT
@debbie:
It’s a peculiar American death cult, not Christianity.
kindness
Love me some Nancy Smash!
Trump will run against her as much as Biden like he did Hillary. It won’t work with Nancy.
Immanentize
@gene108: I knew someone would point that out! Still, Jordan stole a bunch of bases his one season, even though his batting average was like .200. I don’t know why these people think baseball is easy.
patrick II
I talked to the nice 75 year old lady across the courtyard yesterday. She treats everyone well, hosts the condo association meeting, makes popcorn, and says the states should have been more prepared with ventilators. She has FOX news on all day and thinks Trump is the greatest president ever.
CliosFanBoy
@JMG: another reason why term limits are a bad idea. let the amateurs run the country!!!!
Sab
@germy: Gojo’s owners are Democrats.
CliosFanBoy
@Frankensteinbeck: There is a LOT of overlap between the two.
p.a.
@Frankensteinbeck: I think those are subsets of authoritarian and cultist. Conservative cultist more accurately, as any group can have a cultist component.
danielx
@p.a.:
neither shocked nor surprised at this point.
germy
gene108
@Immanentize:
No idea, why they think baseball’s easy.
It seems to be the hardest sport to project how a draft pick / prospect will pan out, as he goes up in levels of competition.
There’s no minimum level of physical ability that maps to much of anything, in baseball, unlike speed in football or height in basketball, for example
Barbara
@dmsilev: I am much closer to retirement than I was 12 years ago, during the last true meltdown of the stock market. And frightened as I am at my own prospects, I know that I am personally very lucky compared to many, many people, even most people. I simply cannot imagine not understanding that the stock market is a barometer, a yardstick, not a thing unto itself. I am so angry right now in a generalized way that I have to keep myself from writing more about this. But I can’t imagine getting to Trump’s age and not understanding this, anymore than I can imagine someone smugly opining that because there are only 15 cases of a virus on this one day that it has been contained. It’s not just narcissism, it is something fundamentally broken in his understanding of reality. Like a one year old who doesn’t grasp the concept of object permanence, and that things continue to exist even if you don’t see them.
This is not going to be pretty. Someone snapped at me in the supermarket this morning that I needed to move further away from him and wait my turn. I could have replied in kind but I didn’t. And no, I wasn’t even that close and I had my back to him.
OzarkHillbilly
Because they’ve never tried to hit an Adam Wainwright curve ball. Or a Randy Johnson fastball. Or a….
BCHS Class of 1980
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d argue that people would not understand the courage it takes to stand in the box against those pitches (and pitchers) at their apex. The John Kruk story still makes me laugh and he was a serviceable major-leaguer for years.
Biff Baxter
@KsSteve: Ike wasn’t made Supreme Allied Commander in Europe because he dazzled at the microphone.
Brachiator
@germy:
She was probably just following orders and didn’t get the hastily revised instructions before going on air.
Look how Fox News is trying to softly support Trump’s “virus ain’t that bad, no back to work” nonsense.
VOR
@danielx: Right, USNS Comfort was undergoing planned maintenance but wasn’t in drydock. I wonder whether the maintenance was complete and if this will impact the deployment.
Much of the crew are Naval Reserve members, which means they were pulled out of their civilian jobs. Any doctors, nurses, corpsman were probably already working in the community so this is basically a transfer of personnel, not new new healthcare personnel. But 1000 beds in an orderly environment is a very good thing.
My understanding is they will not place COVID-19 patients on USNS Comfort or USNS Mercy (in LA), but instead use them to relieve pressure on civilian hospitals.
SFAW
@Biff Baxter:
Tina, on the other hand, was amazing.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
That’s always been true. I know this virus is stressful and scary but there have been other egregious examples of R indifference to human life. I’ll believe a change has happened when the votes show it.
ThresherK
@Immanentize: It’s not that he thought it was easy, so much as he hadn’t played it competitively since (I think) high school, and we have long since passed the era of two-sport stars. Bo Jackson was thirty+ years ago, and it’s even news when a pro player-quality guy gets drafted in the 10 round by a baseball team.
We’re simply too far into the era of specialization starting in the tween (or earlier) years, and athletes are just better than 30 or 60 years ago. We are going ever farther down the end of the talent distribution curve.
I read a book maybe two decades ago titled something like “Why Michael Jordan Couldn’t Hit the Ball”, about the topic, featuring the stories about a number of athletes.
SFAW
@Immanentize:
I think Ted Williams once said that hitting a baseball (as well as he did) was the hardest thing he ever did. I think that included his stints as a Marine pilot during WWII and Korea. I think it was Ted who also noted that hitting a [three-inch-diameter] ball, being thrown at ~80 mph, with a narrow piece of wood, and where a 30-percent “success” rate was pretty effing good, was a bit difficult.
SFAW
@dmsilev:
Graham will eventually return to the fold, even if the Pandemic-Pusher-in-Chief does nothing re: any of Graham’s suggestions.
Well, until Jaime Harrison opens a 20-point lead in polling, that is.
columbusqueen
@Sab: Gojo also employs a ton of Nepali & Bhutanese refugees, which makes Akron the second biggest Nepali community in the country.
Brachiator
@Barbara:
Trump is crude, simple and simple minded. Unemployment must be the lowest in history, the Dow must be the highest in history, and he must be applauded for it as the best president ever. This is the extent of his emotional life.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@Brachiator: I woke up this morming to my sister going on about how Trump was going to save the world. He’s doing what Kennedy was trying to do and got killed for, whatever that is.
Apparently the Las Vegas shooting was an attempt on his life. Trump and Mohammed Bin Salman were both supposed to be there but got tipped off. So the guy settled for shooting at the crowd. I can only guess he needed so much ammo because Trump is a god walking among us.
Dadadadadadada
@SFAW: That’s exactly the point. In this analogy, Pelosi is Tom Brady (a legendary talent who has indisputably accomplished great things) and the leftier-than-thou scolds are Tebow (people who tried to enter Brady/Pelosi’s line of work and were such miserable failures at it that they were forced to seek other lines of work, where they also failed).
Ruckus
@p.a.:
The reason that cohort exists is that is human nature, not politics or any kind of rationality. A percentage of people are followers. They pick a side that has some appeal to them and they stay welded to that decision. And a weld can hold far more than an ideal. It’s not the idea here it’s the following, the rigidity, the resistance to change, to observation, to reality, and it can be any political direction. Most often it is to a rigid concept, because that’s easiest to sell to them. Take conservatism, now take the far left. Conservatism is really about money, it’s always been about money. It’s always been about who controls/has the majority of the money. Take the far left, it’s about who controls the power, who dictates everything. Conservatism has been sold in this country, and in many others as controlling life itself, but even a cursory evaluation shows that to conservatism, life itself is money. The far left is about power, and about who controls that and hardly ever actually about what they do. And right now look at our two far sides, the 1% and BS. Which of those two extremes do you want in power and why? What will they accomplish for the majority?
MattF
@Brachiator: Missing a point, I think. In fact, whatever is happening in the ‘real’ world, in Trumpworld, everything is fine. And not merely fine, it’s the greatest ever.
SFAW
@Dadadadadadada:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got it [i.e., the original “Tebow comment] the first time, even without any explanation.
My comment about Tebow was what’s known in the common parlance as “a(n) (attempted) joke.” In the future, I’ll try to make sure I explain all such attempts at humor, so that people don’t feel the need to “mansplain” things to me. [NB: “Mansplain” is used here irrespective of explainer’s sex/gender.
ETA: By the way, in case there was any question: my use of “Tina” @ 78, in response to Biff Baxter @ 75, was made knowing full well that Biff was not, in fact, talking about Ike Turner.
rikyrah
@L85NJGT:
Links?
Comrade Scrutinizer
@debbie: Christians don’t prioritize economy over lives. White supremacists masquerading as evangelicals do. Don’t confuse the two.
SFAW
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Christianists do, however.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Can I choose “none of the above?”
Brachiator
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
I don’t understand how anyone could look at Trump’s fumbling, mendacious briefings and not see how incompetent he is.
Someone challenged me with, “well, you would believe him if he were a liberal,” and my reply was, no.
And Trump has been a “Democrat” and an “Independent.” He has always been a dishonest fraud.
Feathers
@debbie: One of the things to realize is that the Dominionists/Reconstructionists have a very different theology from what has been considered Christianity for the first two millennia of the religion. However, instead of creating a new splinter sect to proclaim their beliefs,* they “steeple-jacked” existing religious sects (Southern Baptists, etc.), keeping the name and respectability, but having beliefs incompatible with what outsiders call Christianity. It’s a neat trick. If you call them out for their actual faith and doctrine, you are called anti-Christian, which causes all the politicians and people on the TV to faint.
The Netflix documentary on The Family is great and one of the places that talk about this. “Jesus plus nothing” means hijacking the Christian “brand” and doing whatever evil you have your mind on that day.
*which would have been honest, but probably doomed them from any sort of public life.
TLDR; if the world were right, we would have mainline, but conservative churches and a small but fanatic sect called Dominionism, which would be hated everywhere and seen as a cult.
BroD
Dipshit: “I’ll be the oversight.”
Nancy: “No, you fuckin’ won’t”
Ruckus
@MattF:
Are we confusing trump with the right side of the political spectrum? Yes he is a conservative. But his “appeal” is that of a powerful person who sees what others don’t. That it is things that are true or not, is irrelevant. Truth is what they believe, not what can be seen right in front of their faces. They don’t have to think with trump, he tells them what’s what. And it doesn’t matter that 10 seconds later he changes everything, that means he knows things they don’t. They want to believe, so they do. Logic is non existent, not even a consideration. So he lies, so does everyone else. He’s educated far beyond them so he must be smart. He’s richer than them so he must be smart. He has gold plated crap, so he must be better.
It actually helps that none of this makes sense, if it did, they could see it, they would have to see it, it would be obvious to them. Nothing is obvious to them. That’s why they can’t see it.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I fucking hope so……
That was of course the point, thanks for seeing it.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
trump has always been trying to find that place he fits, mainly because until recently he didn’t fit anywhere. But he can hate with the best of them so he fits in the party of hate. And hate has blinded the right to reality, as it has to everyone who ever has decided that hate is a political party.
NotoriousJRT
I thought Nancy Smash gave a tour de force interview on Maddow last night.
sdhays
Awww, poor baby!
Does this mean ramping up the polarization and always shitting on a wide variety of people has bad consequences? That it’s not “savvy “? Unpossible!!
James E Powell
@Frankensteinbeck:
Totally agree. I understand why people running for office have to talk about Americans like they’re noble, wise, and pretty much the most generous and good-hearted people ever. I don’t understand why anyone would really believe it.
NotMax
@Brachiator
Shall say it again. It’s Trumpfinger.
“No, Mr.
BondAmerican, I expect you to die.”Bart
Can someone please teach Anne Laurie to not put a “more” link in the middle of a quote block? Those don’t work.
No One You Know
@L85NJGT: Dead thread, but I feel whipsawed. I am getting emails that say a landslide win for GOP is coming if I don’t rush to contribute cash. I’m already doing all I can. On the theory that giving up is fatal. I go on, but I’m really tired of it. Seems like pollsters are the same as economists: lay them end to end, and they still point in all directions.
Geminid
@No One You Know: polls vary so much in modeling and sample size that they can drive you crazy. But if you can follow a good one over time you can see trend which to me is real information. But we’re seven months out from the election, and your contribution now is not going to make or break your cause, so if you feel whipsawed you can step back for a while if you want.