“She’s now sporting a bracelet made of bullet shells, a gift from a Ukrainian soldier who she met at the Munich Security Conference in mid-Februar “: Nancy Pelosi, untethered: ‘If you don’t like your pillow, it’s not my fault’ https://t.co/JNaaz9KlKU
— JB Holston (@jholston) March 4, 2023
All good nerds will be reminded of Wonder Woman’s magical protective bracelets, of course. Unpaywalled (gift) link:
… “You don’t have any responsibilities,” the former speaker told herself, attending the annual getaway for House Democrats as a congressional commoner for the first time in more than 20 years. As Biden administration officials gave policy presentations on Wednesday, Pelosi said she whispered a message to those at her table: “If you don’t like your pillow, it’s not my fault. If you don’t like the menu, I don’t care. I don’t even care.”
That’s not entirely true, because the longest-serving House Democratic leader of the past 60 years still cares deeply about her caucus’s future. And Pelosi, 82, is as busy as she’s ever been, but just in a much different way than in the last two decades.
Veterans of her team have labeled this new period “Pelosi 3.0,” after a career that saw a 15-year climb to the highest ranks of leadership, then two decades at the top, and now this next phase where she has begun to serve as something akin to roving ambassador for the Democratic Party.
She’s not in charge of anything, has no real responsibilities in the House other than casting votes (she declined to take any committee assignments), yet she maintains a level of influence that goes well beyond her rank-and-file status. Inside the Capitol, Pelosi has taken up a mentoring role: not to the trio of new leaders of the Democratic caucus but to the junior lawmakers who want to learn, particularly the few dozen freshmen Democrats who never served under her.
And she maintains a role as a fundraising eminence, particularly for an outside group led by former attorney general Eric H. Holder fighting legal battles to draw up House district maps. She’s hosting former president Barack Obama and Holder in San Francisco on Friday for high-dollar donors.
“I get my tasks, and I do them,” she said, predicting a large haul for this event. “We’ll do well.”…
While she led the Munich congressional delegation last year, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she returned this year as a dignified member participating in multilateral meetings that seemed to always focus on Russia. She praised the Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who led his own delegation there, for the unified voice that lawmakers presented to their allies.
“Everyone who was there was very unified in support for Ukraine,” she said.
Her calls to President Biden now happen on an “as needed” basis, an understandable drop after his first two years in the Oval Office hung so much on Pelosi working her narrow four-seat margin in the House.
“I’m a busy person. He’s a busy person. And I respect being busy, and I know how it is to be completely busy,” she said, reiterating her full support for his reelection…
And she will not tolerate any criticism of her behavior toward Donald Trump when he was president. In Munich, she found the veteran diplomat, Richard Haass, to thank him for sending her his new book, “Bill of Obligations.” Then, she lit into him for the book’s criticism of her ripping up her copy of Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address on live TV. Pelosi felt as if it were a false-equivalence moment compared to Trump’s supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol.
“There is no equivalence,” she told Haass, mocking the thinking of a MAGA rioter justifying trashing the Capitol: “Oh, she tore up the speech, so we can pee all over the floor, and smear our poo-poo all over the walls.”
She didn’t intend to rip up that speech after making notations of things she felt were false claims. But by the time Trump awarded the medal of freedom to Rush Limbaugh — “That bozo, may he rest in peace” — she began to plot exactly how to tear that tough parchment paper apart, her only hesitation coming from how she might upset her curmudgeonly top press aide at the time, Drew Hammill…
Of the last 11 House speakers, only one lasted more than 10 months after giving up the gavel and returning to the rank-and-file. But Pelosi won’t address when she plans to retire and instead enjoys how much freedom she has to mentor young lawmakers. She pushes new women toward committee assignments that will check national security credentials so that if they run for higher office, they will not look weak.
“We will have a woman president. I study it very carefully,” the most powerful woman in American political history said…
In Baltimore, she had just one role: to formally introduce Jeffries and the new leadership at Thursday night’s dinner. One attendee recalled how she regaled the Democrats about her trip to Charm City’s National Aquarium, where she learned that dolphins sleep with half their brain awake and one eye open.
In a metaphor that could explain her own long success, Pelosi gave the crowd a final bit of advice: “Always sleep with one eye open.”
Baud
Once a nonna, always a nonna.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Yep. Same with her use of “poo-poo,” lol!
Baud
Pelosi ♥️ Metallica.
NotMax
Originally Wonder Woman’s wristwear were sacred Bracelets of Submission.
eclare
@Baud: LOL!
She is a treasure, and we are lucky to have her.
Baud
🤣
NotMax
Open thread goodness.
If you’re any kind of a trainhead, a mass transit rabbit hole looking back.
Repetitive? Yup. Also strangely mesmerizing? Yup again.
Cameron
Sounds like she’s having a ball. Good for her.
Mousebumples
Busy day today, on top of a busy week, but I’m hoping to be able to stop by the postcard/music thread WaterGirl had planned on tonight at 745pm eastern (blog time) or 645pm central.
I’ve got some work to do, to complete postcards for the addresses I’ve already claimed. Join me to help GOTV in Wisconsin!
NotMax
@NotMax
If you ever read any of the early years of Wonder Woman comics, she gets trussed up — a lot.
Dr. Marston had no compunction when it came to parading his particular fetish.
bbleh
Wonder when she’s gonna start knifing McQarthy (in the nicest possible way, of course).
Then again, she may feel a little sorry for him. Or maybe he’s just too easy a target.
eclare
@bbleh: I predict she will say her usual “I’m praying for him,” which sounds to me like the “bless his heart” insult.
NotMax
Listening to the great outdoors at this wee hour, is it possible the rains have ceased?
Magic 8-ball sez: “Bwah-ha-ha.”
sab
@eclare: I agree, except that she probably is praying for him.
ETA: Praying for him while praying against his agenda.
sab
@Cameron: I hope she is mentoring my new congresswoman Emilia Sykes. Not that Ms. Sykes needs mentoring.
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: Another way to say that: Praying for him while preying on his agenda.
sab
@Betty Cracker: Why be crass when you can be more effective as a disapproving grandmother.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: Lol. That too.
EarthWindFire
@Baud: Trying to picture Nancy Smash as a headbanger lol
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Was reading last night about the latest Republican hearing failure (impressive how many of those they’ve managed to have in such a short time).
Jim Jordan claimed to have “dozens” of FBI whistleblowers. Only three of them were deemed solid enough to bring to DC for closed-door interviews, and they all fell apart when questioned by Democrats.
Apparently all were recruited and paid by Kash Patel.
Oh also none qualified as whistleblowers under the legal definition.
Think they’ll ever notice how it keeps happening that their “solid evidence” and “smoking guns” never smell so good outside the MAGA bubble?
OzarkHillbilly
My wife works the service desk for a cable company. They got slammed with complaints from irate customers yesterday. Apparently FOX had picture but no sound. The problem was with the feed from FOX, not anything her company could fix.
A couple folks said, “It’s a conspiracy!”
BlueGuitarist
@Mousebumples:
yay for postcard activism!
On Wisconsin!
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: I do think that when she prays for people she does so sincerely, and doesn’t just say that with cynicism.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
BlueGuitarist
@rikyrah: good morning!
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: Husband had to talk to cable company service desk yesterday. They are troupers.
She couldn’t help him, but she tried. Service tech she connected him to was an asshole aggressive salesman. Undid all her work and made her look like a liar.
I used to like Spectrum. Now I have my doubts. First bad experience with them, and it was very bad.
ETA He tried to switch our phone service to Spectrum. Insistant about it. Beyond insistant: extremely rude.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
Good morning! 🙏
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: I suspect that is true more often than not (I doubt she ever prayed for trump).
Betty Cracker
Kellyanne and George Conway are headed to Splitzville, according to Page Six:
George finally took out the trash. (Not that he’s much of a prize anyway.)
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly: Gee, couldn’t have had anything to do with all the storms? Assholes. Your poor wife.
My internet was out about eight hours yesterday and is out again. Frustrating thing is without internet I can’t watch shows on TV, just on my phone.
ETA> oh I see it was the Fox feed. So maybe not storm related. But a lot of company websites/internet were messed up yesterday.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I wonder what type of relationship the kids will have with their mom. At least one has spoken out in the past, no?
sab
@eclare: Without internet I can’t do my remote job.
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: My wife is one of the good ones. She has some pull with the dispatcher. When she finds a problem she can’t fix she’ll contact the dispatcher to see how long it will take for a tech to get there (tomorrow? next week?) and see if things can be juggled around for the customer. Then she will call back to see if the tech actually got there. Most customers are quite shocked that she actually follows thru on her promises to them.
On the other hand there are the abusive assholes. She will let them rot.
eclare
@Baud: Yes. She did some TikToks and was pictured at a post-Dobbs rally with a “Fuck SCOTUS” sign. I doubt she and Kellyanne get along. IIRC her name is Claudia.
sab
@Betty Cracker: I feel so sorry for those kids. Usually kids have two known parents, and hopefully one of them is not an asshole. Doesn’t always work out that way.
MomSense
I’m so fucking pissed at Angus King. If I bump into him or his CoS at Hannaford I’m going to ditch my usual civility and tell him his “save social security” a/k/a save rich people from paying fair taxes is a bunch of fucking bullshit. Yes let’s keep raising the retirement age until at least half of all beneficiaries don’t live long enough to collect.
Layer8Problem
@Baud: If we thought she was a top notch evil gaslighter for TFG, try to imagine being on the receiving end of that from your own mother. She’d have me doubting the sky being blue on a bright sunny day.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
It’s a hell of a thing, letting your marriage break up because yoou disagree about TFG.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: Our service was fine. We just wanted to add a channel. That turned out to be problematic.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
Claudia is all over the place. She’s smart and I think she has a good heart but is going for the suggestive show lots of cleavage social media persona. Ugh.
MomSense
@Baud:
They reconciled, but it also sounded like they decided to keep family shit private.
eclare
@Layer8Problem: The sky is green. That is an alternative fact.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
I wouldn’t condemn any person for breaking up with their spouse for being MAGA.
eclare
@MomSense: I haven’t seen what King has proposed/said?
sab
@MomSense: Yes! $147,000 was the 2022 cutoff. Significantly above my pay grade.
My mom used to say ” we just can’t save until the Social Security cutoff.” And I used to shake my head quietly, because I would never reach that pay level.
MomSense
@sab:
We had some incidents in Maine with spectrum employees showing up at town meetings pretending to be residents so they could express their concerns about the state funded broadband. How fucking stupid do you have to be to show up wearing business casual in a small town and think the people who live there won’t figure out you don’t belong?
Baud
@MomSense:
Maine is older than Florida!
sab
@MomSense: Yikes. I had heard bad things about Spectrum from jackals. This was my first experience of the bad things.
Baud
@MomSense:
“Hello, fellow
kidsconcerned citizens…”eclare
@MomSense: I just googled what King said. Wow. He is running for re-election on that? Fuck that shit.
sab
@eclare: Also Googled it. Very YIKES!
eclare
@sab: BTW I am still curious about your chocolate sauerkraut cake. Do you put sauerkraut in the batter?
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: Honestly, I think it’s a good reason. There are political positions that are beyond decency.
Kay
@eclare:
The statement is difficult to understand so will just make people trust them less.
It reminds me a little of bullshit on health care reform, where people wanted to pretend there were unlimited options and they were all starting from scratch when really they had been studying health care reform for decades and they knew perfectly well where the tradeoffs and downsides are.
I don’t think it is a “complicated math challenge”. This is just gibberish.
Baud
@eclare:
@sab:
Never trust independents.
MomSense
@eclare:
@sab:
I’m watching the stupid Today show because MSNBC is now weekend Morning Joe and the local storm/news person came in the screen to announce cheerfully that Maine Senator announces plan to save social security. I’d rather shovel two feet of wet snow than listen to that bullshit. Please finish the sentence weekend news chair warmer. Save social security by raising the retirement age so that all you poors get to work longer – if you live that long. This is after decades of wage stagnation and lack of access to health care. Let’s be honest about what this kind of saving means.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@sab: Way, waaaay back in the early years of cable internet, I worked for Charter (now Spectrum). I left when our new souper jeenyus MBA regional manager decided that we had to start all calls with an upsell pitch. Dealing with already angry customers (I was doing Tier 3 consumer/business calls), and the FIRST thing out of my mouth was to hit them up for an EXTRA 30 BUCKS?
NOPE.
lowtechcyclist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
His ‘weaponization’ committee must be buying their weapons from Acme Corp., with the usual results.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s like the story of Jesus feeding the multitude.
Is he talking about saving money by getting people to take the age 62 benefit with smaller payments?
MomSense
@Kay:
He’s used to thinking he’s the smartest person in the room – and his statements reflect that.
sab
@MomSense: My husband is 71 and blue collar, and he just had another friend die of work contracted cancer. It seems like every week. I cannot get my rich white collar relatives to understand my rage.
Kay
Just to remind everyone of the “complicated math challenge” last time they reduced Social Security benefits:
They raised taxes in a way where the majority of the burden fell on lower and middle income people, they reduced benefits by raising the retirement age, but started it with people who were then in their twenties so no politician would be accountable for it, and they pushed an entire new group of payees into the system.
Angus King is there with his slide rule, engineering entirely new parameters to the system! Nonsense.
ryk
My experience with Spectrum has been that their service is great, right up until it isn’t. Most recently a contractor with a backhoe cut the line that feeds our little cul-de-sac. It took Spectrum nine days to send a tech out to make the repair.
MomSense
@sab:
Right there with you. I’m so fucking sick of people pretending to be reasonable problem solvers while they destroy other people’s lives.
sab
@Baud: Yep. At least we in Ohio know what JD vance is.
Eyeroller
@Kay: They will try absolutely anything other than taxing all wage income. Ideally all income would be subject to the tax, but from what I’ve read just eliminating the cap on earned income would be enough. But that’s never even discussed. Heaven forfend the affluent pay more.
sab
@Kay: Angus King is nearly 80. He doesn’t care about the youths (under 70.)
eclare
@MomSense: And your other senator claims to be pro-choice, except 100% of the time when she isn’t.
Baud
@Eyeroller:
You could also reduce their benefits. That’s seen as politically problematic, but I don’t know why it would be more so than raising their taxes.
Kay
@Baud:
Light blinking red- it’s the same thing health care reform bullshitters said. “Everyone will receive more! There are no tradeoffs…. because of our math!”
Baud
@Kay:
I believe state employees are still outside of the system.
MomSense
@Kay:
When he was governor he raided the state’s retirement trust fund to pay for his laptop program. We are one of those states with our own retirement system which means you can fuck your self up big time if you don’t realize the implications of that for your social security benefit.
Nelle
@Baud: My neighbor divorced her husband over Rush Limbaugh. Said he listened incessantly and he (husband) got more vile by the day.
Kay
@Baud:
In Ohio they are but I don’t think it’s true of most states.
MomSense
@eclare:
She will vote pro-choice or pro-environment only if her vote is guaranteed to not make a difference. If her vote doesn’t matter, she will throw the libs a lobster.
Geminid
There is at least one good international news story this morning, from Agence France-Press (france24.com):
This treaty has been 15 years in the making, It’s very broad in scope, but it sounds like most details have been agreed on now.
sab
@Kay: As we all know, raising the retirement age means screwing blue collar workers who worked in dangerous or difficult jobs. Yay desk jockeys!
I am a lifelong office worker. My husband worked factory jobs where people had their hands crushed in the machinery while they breathed in toxic fumes.
My job often sucked. His was so much worse.
Kay
@MomSense:
Ugh. Don’t even get me started on how they were all bamboozled into paying way too much for Chromebooks. Public schools are a GIANT market and they are full of YOUNG CUSTOMERS. They should have paid schools to PUT Chromebooks into schools. Public schools are 100% in the drivers seat for this transaction. They should be competing to get into schools, not having us beg to buy their products.
I would start it with “why do you deserve to put your product in our schools?”
Kay
@sab:
I love how at the same time these effete, out of touch clowns are telling young people to go get trades training because they don’t need college degrees.
What exactly do they think electricians and machinists and welders and plumbers do all day? My middle son is currently on a plant roof in Syracuse NY in 10 degree weather.
eclare
@MomSense: Yep. I have noticed that.
Layer8Problem
@Eyeroller:
“Yes, it is indeed hard raising the retirement age, and we feel for you having to endure the pain this will cause, but I assure you raising the cap would be orders of magnitude worse, which is why we never speak of it. Envision a Mad Max-style hellscape of endless guerrilla warfare, a world with no cable or Internet, fine dining at Applebee’s a thing of the past. I tell you the living would envy the dead.”
MomSense
@Kay:
Well we were the first state to do this and we shelled out the big bucks for macs.
ETA He’s not just a granny starver, he’s a visionary!
sab
@Kay: My son in law is a roofer. My stepson used to do recycling crushing until he became a machinist. Now he breathes in oil and metal bits all day
ETA Bye the way, every one of these jobs is statistically very much more dangerous than being an urban cop.
MazeDancer
Angus King is going to lose his reasonable guy cred and deserves it.
Joe Biden putting up to $200 extra dollars every month into people’s Social Security checks is what people want to hear.
Can imagine that boost, plus not paying robbery prices for insulin must feel like a new world for some people.
Quinerly
@Nelle:
I broke up with a guy who wasn’t remotely political until the second coming of Newt Gingrich. 2012. Thankfully I had invested less than 90 days in the “relationship.”
MomSense
@MazeDancer:
I talked to two youngs about his plan yesterday and they both told me they were resigned to the fact that they would never collect social security.
I said why would you just acquiesce to this cruelty. They are counting on you to assist them by just accepting their greed and cruelty. Fight it when you are young.
Kay
The cranky old men of the antiwoke crusade are just a laugh riot. So creative! Such out of the box contrarian thinking!
Still with the fucking trigger warning, for a decade now. After this “joke” he probably says something boring about pronouns.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: This after 40 years of telling folks to go to college so they wouldn’t have to do “those jobs.”
Oh do not get me started on that rant. 😏
sab
@MomSense: I didn’t think I would have Social Security when Reagsn raised the rates in the 1980s.
Tell them every generation is told this, and no generation has saved enough to avoid needing Social Security.
eclare
@Nelle: I broke up with a guy because he was for the Iraq war. He refused to ride in my car that had an “Attack Iraq? No!” bumper sticker, but he was too lazy to drive us anywhere. There were other issues, but that was the nail in the coffin.
Baud
@MomSense:
Propaganda. Oligarchs have pushed the message that young people are helpless and that’s the message that dominates their world view, even though they are now the majority.
Same thing that they do to keep women down.
Kay
I read everything antiwoke crusaders say in an Andy Rooney voice in my head:
Baud
@Kay:
Jeez, that’s sad.
Baud
@Kay:
Hahaha. Perfect.
eclare
@MomSense: How did the youngs respond to your reasoning?
jonas
Alexander Vindmanns….they were not.
MomSense
@Kay:
I love the people who “can’t keep up with all the new pronouns”. A totebagger said that to me. In my head I said Bitch it’s the same fucking pronouns. Jesus Christ.
The application changed not the words. It’s really not that complicated.
sab
@MagdaInBlack: Other than the oil fumes, my dyslexic step son loves his machining job. He was made to do this. He is very good at it. It applies his skills and competencies. Reading was not his forte, but a lot of other stuff was.
eclare
@Kay: Maybe, just maybe, if so many people (usually but not always men) weren’t so violently cruel to others, we could cut back on trigger warnings because fewer people would be traumatized.
MomSense
@eclare:
Mostly blank. One of them thinks I’m an apologist for Democrats. They love to complain but they’re not so into the doing something about it.
narya
Nancy SMASH is possibly one of my all-time-favorite politicians. As many of my fellow jackals are around my age (about to be 65), one of the things that I continue to contemplate is how things have changed with regard to women in public roles. I don’t remember seeing female legislators, reporters, NASA staff, doctors, professors, and on and on. I come from a working-class family and working-class town, so the only roles I saw women perform were parent, teacher, secretary, and nurse. Those are extremely valuable roles–not dissing the roles at all–but I also knew they weren’t what I wanted to do. But I had no idea what that would look like, what the possibilities were, how one . . . DID that. No way to know what other choices I might have made, but I am so glad to see women and people of color in so many public, important roles; I love watching NASA feeds precisely because the folks in those rooms are so various. Variety is strength.
Also: heading out in search of postcards and postcard stamps today, instead of waiting for the CafePress BJ pet postcards . . . wish me luck, and I’ll join the thread if I’m successful!
Layer8Problem
@MomSense: That’s the never-ending ground game we need, people like us pushing against received “truths.”
“I’ve been told by authority figures and noted influencers that This Good Thing Here is bad/unnecessary/inevitably vanishing.”
“Why do you take their word for it? Why not question it and fight?”
Baud
@MomSense:
As someone who’s bad with names, I’m a little sympathetic, but not enough for it to make me cruel or dominate my world view.
eclare
@MomSense: That is depressing.
sab
@Kay: I have a trans niece, and my granddaughter has a trans sibling.
My nephew was always a weird kid. Kind, lovable, but always a bit off and odd. When he/she came out as trans, suddenly it all made sense. Seeing him as a girl made complete sense of every doubt I had had of him/her as a child. This is who she always was.
Baud
@MomSense:
Cut him out of the will. Maybe then he’ll fight for Social Security.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: I think reducing benefits on the high end might forfeit one of the program’s current advantages, which is that it’s a program almost everyone benefits from. You don’t want it to be perceived as a program for “poor” people. Look at the political peril in harming Medicare as opposed to Medicaid. Better to raise high earner’s taxes and even things out that way.
Matt McIrvin
@MomSense: There are nonbinary people who use neopronouns like “ze/hir” or “xe/xem”, but it’s not a super-common thing since singular “they/them” got grammatically destigmatized. Of course right-wing scare literature is going to emphasize the most unfamiliar stuff.
I remember a proposal for singular gender-neutral pronouns from the 1970s that involved reviving the extinct letter thorn and using something like “þe/þim”, but adding a letter to the alphabet just to make a neopronoun seemed like borrowing trouble.
MomSense
@Baud:
One of my kids would never say such a thing to me! I would just tell them that social security is what separates me from living on your couch in my old age. That would get a letter to the editor or a phone call out of them.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hahahaha! I’m gonna steal that — perfect retort.
MagdaInBlack
@sab: Yup. I’m glad he found his “place.” Same with my industry, collision repair. Most of my techs love what they do and had no interest in college. I’m also thinking of the high school counselor I had who actively discouraged interest in the trades. Also thinking of all the conversations I’ve heard /seen over the years that denigrated the trades.
Suzanne
@Kay:
Thank you. This is what I have been saying. Do you know how many superintendents I’ve worked with over the years who are missing fingers?! Kind of a lot.
Geminid
@Geminid: And there is another potentially good story from AFP, concerning International Atomic Energy Agency chief Raphael Grossi’s news conference in Teheran today. Grossi met with Iranian officials including President Raisi yesterday and today.
Director-General Grossi has been dealing with Iran and its nuclear program very intensively and coming from him, the statement is very positive. I expect that Laura Rozen and Cheryl Rofer will make some informed comments on Grossi’s news conference.
MomSense
@Matt McIrvin:
Exactly. We are used to navigating nicknames and shortened names with friends and acquaintances. It really isn’t a stretch to find out how people like to be addressed. The problem is that adopting this kindness forces an acknowledgment and an acceptance that things that used to more hidden and whispered are now out and a part of our common social interactions.
Betty Cracker
I once stopped dating a guy because he had a Nagel print in his apartment. As soon as I saw it I realized things would never work out!
Eyeroller
@Layer8Problem: People like the unlamented Peter G. (Pete) Peterson spend millions and millions of dollars to catapult that propaganda.
Matt McIrvin
@MagdaInBlack:
A growth industry, as far as I can tell!
MomSense
@eclare:
I’m planting seeds. Some of them may grow. Just keep planting seeds.
MagdaInBlack
@Matt McIrvin: Except we can’t find body techs, they don’t make them anymore.
delphinium
@MomSense:
Especially, as other commenters have noted, referring to people how they ask to be doesn’t require any mental gymnastics, just common courtesy.
Layer8Problem
@MomSense: 👍
Brit in Chicago
@sab: When former Speaker Pelosi is the mentor, I think everyone has something to learn. I’m really glad she’s still there in an informal advisory role.
sab
@MagdaInBlack: I prepare tax returns. I enjoy doing it. When people I know sneer at me I ask them if they prepare their own returns and if they enjoy it.
Different people like different stuff.
sab
@Brit in Chicago: That is what I think. Ms Sykes might not need a mentor but she will learn a lot from a good one. Her dad was also a good one.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That’s how they’ll feel if you raise their taxes, which is the same thing. They’re not dumb.
Kay
@delphinium:
It reminds me of when my local school district put an antibullying program in – there were pro bullying parents. Apparently people beating the shit out of other people in school is a cherished right of passage that must be preserved. The only way we coud sell it to them was to make it punative- a disciplinary approach, to “keep order”. When we pitched it as people treating other people decently and with respect they rejected it is as an impossibly high standard that no one could meet.
eclare
@sab: I did that, tax returns, for thirty years. I’m now trying to transition to something else, not in an office, but it’s tough to get out when your resume is all tax.
oldgold
Economies are made up of labor and capital. One of the many problems with our tax system is that labor bears way too much of the burden. Why, for instance, should labor be responsible for financing 100 percent of Social Security and Medicare?
narya
@sab: Oh, I have to remember that for this tax year . . . I’m gonna have health insurance from three sources (old employer, exchange, medicare) and income from (likely) three sources, including unemployment and consulting. I’ve already done a lot of research into the forms I’ll need and I have created a worksheet for the self-employment tax (I’ve done consulting before), but having a professional review my work would make me feel better. My current challenge is guessing how much I’ll make in consulting this year–my first year doing this particular work–so I don’t underpay for my exchange health insurance.
Geminid
@sab: Rep. Sykes will have a new colleague Tuesday, when Jennifer McClellan is sworn in as Representative for the Virginia 4th CD. Like Sykes, McClellen is an experienced state legislator.
Baud
@oldgold:
Half of Social Security is paid by the employer.
sab
@eclare: I know. Good luck.
Frankensteinbeck
Wow, you can hear the “who’s burning in Hell” in that sentence, can’t you?
Suzanne
@MomSense:
Honestly, then those people are not very smart. It’s really not difficult.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Oh shit. 100%.
narya
@Suzanne: The only one that’s ever given me pause was someone who wanted to use Fae pronouns; I’m not sure the Fae would go along with that, as they tend not to be all that fond of humans.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne: Contrary for the sake of being contrary. In other words, they’re assholes 😊
Eta: Cookie Butter ice cream gets a big YES in this house.
sab
OT I am still in bed on BJ and my cats are furious. When are we getting canned cat food breakfast?
ETA Their dishes are always filled with dry cat food.
sab
@Geminid: Yay for us. We have some very good new people in Congress.
Kay
Rupert Murdoch told his multi-millionaire employees to demand Republicans have someone arrested to prop up their shitty, low quality cable channel and thus their paychecks – because they’re unemployable anywhere else. As usual, they’re all parroting on orders from The Boss but they have no choice really. They can’t work anywhere else.
oldgold
@Baud: So what? It is still based on labor.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Even the grumpy grandpa?
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: I think a good retort to people pulling the faux-confusion about pronouns (which is complete bullshit) should be: if you are so confused/panicked about someone’s gender identity and pronouns, how about you just not talk about them at all. If you are talking directly to them, “you” works just fine. Otherwise, shut the F up and stop talking about people you shouldn’t be talking about.
Kay
7 to 12 dollars an hour, but that’s not the funniest part. The funniest part is where they claim the ticket to CPAC is worth “$29,000” dollars.
delphinium
@MagdaInBlack: Yeah, no need to denigrate the trades or other careers. I’m always grateful there are still lots of people interested in doing these needed jobs and that they enjoy doing them.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I wouldn’t blame anyone either. It’s like me with my sister. I look at her and I think how can she possibly have been the person I thought she was all those years before? If that doesn’t need you to thinking about a divorce then I don’t know what would.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Maine is also smarter than Florida!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Well, he’s solid on Social Security. I don’t trust him on other things.
sab
@eclare: Yes. Just another ingredient.
Mike in NC
Per MSNBC, Fat Bastard will be speaking at the fascist CPAC convention tonight, where we can expect him to call for the overthrow of the US government and his ‘reinstallation’ as “Putin’s favorite president”. Really don’t have the stomach to watch that bullshit.
H.E.Wolf
I have a One Weird Trick for the stamps: currently, 2 “extra ounce” stamps = 1 postcard stamp.
(Postcard stamps are currently 48 cents.”Extra ounce” are currently 24 cents, and are available in Multiracial Uncle Sam, Cute Rabbit, and/or School Bus.)
Also, I like the simplicity of the PostcardsToVoters.org talking points for “Judge Janet” Protasiewicz. They don’t make writers spell her surname. :)
Steeplejack
@Kay:
I liked the comment about the tickets: “And the scalpers want even less!”
Someone said that post might be fake, because they couldn’t find confirmation anywhere else, but it’s still funny. And the videos from CPAC show dismal attendance. (See @atrupar’s feed on Twitter.)
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I started to watch something on the New York mob on Netflix yesterday, but turned it off because they were using a bunch of interviews with Rudy and his klatch of New York FBI assholes.
All they did was replace the predictable, somewhat orderly Italian mob with the much shittier Russian mob.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: @Baud: There are reasons he chooses not to be a Democrat. He is a free rider on the party. He benefits when the party does well by caucusing with the Dems, but anytime anyone has to make a hard decision he can assert his independence.
Cameron
@Mike in NC: Day’s still early – there’s time for you to score the right drugs.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: I’m imagining Eighties Guy from Futurama, the one who died tragically of boneitis.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
The current antiwoke crusade is today’s iteration of the squeals against “political correctness” of the 90s.
They’re really angry that they can’t call progressive whites “n****r lovers” without drawing scorn anymore, and that standards of cultural empathy have changed.
Geminid
@Mike in NC: Trump is hard to watch for sure. Ron Filipkowski has a strong stomach though, and will likely be tweeting “highlights” of the CPAC speech as they happen at @RonFilipkowski. I’ll probably check him out.
sab
Chocolate sauerkraut cake. Recipe was for two 8 inch pans, and I only had three nine inch pans, so I doubled it and then made cupcakes. It was a lot of cake. Excellent but too much. Next time will be cupcakes only. Recipe for 2 8inch pans.
1/2 c butter, softened. 1 1/2 c sugar 3 eggs at room temp. 1 T vanilla. 2 c sifted allpurpose flour. 1/2 c baking cocoa 1 t baking powder 1 t baking soda 1 c water 3/4 c sauerkraut, chopped and squeezed dry.
Mix together. Pour into buttered and floured pans.
Bake at 350° 35-40 minutes. Cool on racks.
Frosting:
Frosting:1 1/3 softened butter. 8 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted 1 t vanilla 4 c powdered sugar 1/4 c whole milk.
My humble suggestion is melt butter and chocolate together, mix with sugar and milk, then cool until spreadable.ETA
ETA When I do it again, I will instead make a lot of cupcakes, poured into large cupcake pans (with cupcake paper liners.) Frost when cake is cooled.
gwangung
Late to the thread, but if Nancy gets a charge being a mentor (I get the same charge mentoring folks in my field), I can see her staying around for more terms….
delphinium
@Kay: That is just so sickening. No one is expecting everyone to like everyone else, but it shouldn’t be too much of an ask to not bully kids so that the focus can be on education and getting kids ready for the next stage of development.
I’m very introverted which at times has served me well in jobs since I can do the normal pleasantries (“good morning”, “how was your weekend?”) while dispensing with longer conversations with those less likable people. No need for bullying! Can go about the rest of my day and get work done. : )
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
Ditto for @atrupar.
sab
@delphinium: My suspicion is that a lot of rich people think that they or their ancestors got rich by bullying, and the schools are depriving their kids of needed life skills. They are wrong, but they fervently believe this.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: I’m loving the pictures of all the empty seats. I do wonder if they’ll fill up for The Beast
HinTN
@Kay:
Slide rules forced you to think through the problem. McMegan’s calculator, OTOH… Punch those fucking numbers and get the magic answer.
Baud
@Geminid:
Yeoman’s work. Although I think watching the GOP would be easier if there were an outlet, even if the outlet is just reporting on it to decent people. But I don’t want to test that theory.
delphinium
@Geminid:
Thank you for doing these posts on our various reps and what they are doing-much appreciated. As a bit of a normie, it helps me keep track of things.
Omnes Omnibus
@narya:
Give them some honey. It should help.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I think it’s simpler: they were themselves bullies and they don’t want to be told that they did something wrong.
Also, many conservatives sincerely believe that bullying of anyone they consider weird is how we enforce gender and social roles and keep society from descending into chaos.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
DeSantis is skipping CPAC to speak to a Club for Growth “donor retreat” in Palm Beach, as MSNBC hosts keep pointing out, pretty much down the street from Mar-A-Lago, and the never-trumpers (Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, etc) are having a “Principles First” conference in DC, all that fun in one weekend!
sab
@Matt McIrvin: That too.
delphinium
@gwangung: Yup, let her dispense all that useful knowledge!
sab
Emilia Sykes does not need to learn from Pelosi, but if you could mentee under an equivalent of Abe Lincoln wouldn’t you want to?
Geminid
@sab: Rep. Sykes probably also gets good advice when she wants it from Representative Joyce Beatty.
sab
@Geminid: That too. I intend to get a lot of voting advice from black women. They are not normies even when they keep quiet, because they keep informed.
sab
@Geminid: Agreed. Beatty is very good, but Pelosi is historically good. Like in the history books ( outside of Texas.) Like you tell your grandchildren and great nieces and nephews that you knew her.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Why would one not want to learn form both? And bring one’s own ideas into the mix.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure, a new Representative can learn from both. That’s why I said “also.”
I picked out Representative Beatty because she is an influential member of the House Democratic caucus, and also a home state ally.
New Reps probably learn in a different way from their leadership team of Jeffries, Clark and Aguilar, and also from other members including their fellow 1st year colleagues. This class has some very experienced people from very different districts..
Layer8Problem
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, you and your “give and take/marketplace of ideas/cross pollination/laboratory of democracy” stuff. //
Omnes Omnibus
@Layer8Problem:
Sorry, I’ll try to be worse.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: there is no try, there is only be worse
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
But I am so damn good…
sab
Jackals don’t hunt in packs. They are nitwits on their own or with their SO.
My SO won’t even read the comments. That is the S in our relationship. Or possibly the O. Not both.
J R in WV
My SO Wife is a dedicated lurker here and on many other lefty websites. I am so lucky, many days she can read me the jokes before I get to them myself. A little competition there…
Manyakitty
@sab: she may not need it, but she’s still super young and it can only make her even more effective. She’s my rep as well and I’m excited to watch her grow into the role.
Manyakitty
@sab: and yet people still chose him over Tim Ryan. I will never understand our state.
sab
@Manyakitty: I think he ran as who he thought we wanted rather than as himself.
Yutsano
@eclare: Why not come to the other side of the equation? There’s a huge IRS office in Memphis.
Origuy
Those people who “can’t remember pronouns” have never studied a foreign language. They should try Finnish. Fifteen noun cases and genderless pronouns; hän is both he and she.
columbusqueen
@Manyakitty: Tim shot himself in the foot by running against his own party. It made him look dishonest to independents & dampened energy among committed Democrats.