Longtime political journalist Perry Bacon, Jr., recently wrote that watching Speaker Pelosi through 2019 “clarified for me that maybe the politicians aren’t all brilliant strategists.” bluegrassbeat.substack.com/p/how-cities-m…
The tiff over House Dem committee assignments is a good case in point.
Center-left and centrist Dems blocked AOC from a seat on the Energy & Commerce Cmte — but opted for … a rep who literally challenged Pelosi in 2018, a move AOC conspicuously refused to support.
That move — blocking a perceived foe of the Speaker by rewarding *an actual recent foe* of the Speaker — reveals a fragile foundation of support for Pelosi’s leadership, which can’t be what her team wants.
This was one of _two_ fights over seats on the E&C Cmte — which leadership could have paired, letting the left flank have one seat while blocking Kathleen Rice, the rep who challenged Pelosi from the right, from the other. prospect.org/politics/estab…
Instead, House Dems:
- iced AOC from a seat she’d been seen as a shoo-in for;
- rewarded a foe of party leadership;
- bruised the feelings of House Dems’ left flank en route into a Congress in which leadership will need every member’s vote.
That doesn’t seem like smart politics!
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Nate Silver, armed with his aura of expertise, is entering a second day of talking past an epidemiologist telling him, ‘Annie Hall’-style, that he knows nothing about their work.
Oy gevalt.
I meant ‘Annie Hall’-style literally, by the way. The epidemiologist told Silver, in their first reply to him …
More people deserve to know that Trump modeled the scowl in his presidential portrait after Churchill — because that’s what he imagines “leadership” looks like.
He thinks he’s Churchill leading the forces of Western civilization in their finest hour — when the only possible point of comparison that works is with Churchill causing a massive famine in Bengal because he couldn’t be arsed.
What a preposterously stupid, vicious human being.
It’s December, on the cusp of a new Democratic presidency — and Republicans are scheming to tank any chance of aiding an economic recovery, presumably hoping to blame Democrats for the misery that results.
Welp, it looks like Senate Republicans might tank relief for suffering Americans before the holidays — except if Democrats give Republicans a shot at tanking any economic recovery under Biden.
Tails, we all get shafted now; heads, we all get shafted later.
Thanks to an obstinate Republican refusal to provide state or local aid, school layoffs loom just when Americans need to seek to give children _more_ time in schools, so students can make up lost time.
But Republicans don’t want to mortgage kids’ futures, we hear. Okay, sure.
These cheapskate, penny-wise, pound-foolish, bloodthirsty motherf––ers take purposeful steps to get their fellow Americans killed when they aren’t even trying.
If only they spared a tenth of a percent of the energy they devoted to defying the election results to saving anyone but their useless selves from this damned virus.
Things Republicans have fought harder against than the coronavirus:
- marriage equality
- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
- raising the $7.25 minimum wage
- the postal service
- free and fair elections