(no subject)
Nov. 21st, 2019 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I've been scanning critics best of the decade lists and...I don't agree with any of them. And in most cases, I either didn't watch/read over half the things they listed nor feel the need to, or...am kind of paralyzed with not caring very much.
I don't know what that says exactly about me or the decade or my opinion of the current professional book/movie/television critics? Maybe just that taste varies?
It's sort of pointless debating taste. I mean people either like something or they don't. They don't often know why. It just is. Although it is possible to just be ambivalent, and neither like nor dislike something -- which frankly is 98% of the things listed. I am just ambivalent.
I do not understand the appeal of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. People act like no one has written like that before. Has no one read Patricia Highsmith? She was a much better writer -- whose books were made into better movies - "Strangers on a Train", "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Or Dauphne Du Maurie - "Cousin Rachel" or Shirley Jackson - who wrote "We've Always Lived in the Castle".
2. Chest cough is not abating and keeps coming and going. I'll go for a while with nothing, then it's back with a vengeance -- and no real warning. Also it is causing fatigue, loss of appetite (not a bad thing -- that's actually in the plus column), and a sense of ennui or not caring much about anything or irritability.
I'm debating whether or not I can go see a movie on Saturday. Feel like crap today and tonight. But soldiering through. Commuting on trains and subways with a nasty cough and sinus issues is painful. Actually working with it -- is painful. Co-worker are wondering about me. I had one stop by and ask if I was okay. I nodded, just persistent, hack hack, cough, hack hack. I felt like I was hacking up a lung.
Tonight, I have a sinus headache and a chest cough. I've taken mucinex, Phenylephrine -- it's the only one I can take as a decongestant, tylenole, cough drop, lemon/ginger tea, and
chicken soup. Also had potato chips and chocolate, which I regretted. And CBD tea, which I did not regret.
The problem is...even if pesky chest cough is coming and going -- not sure I can see movie in movie theater without driving my fellow movie goers nuts. I mean it is a loud, painful, nasty cough. It sounds and feels like I'm hacking up a lung. I'd kick me out of the movie theater. Granted the movie has subtitles, so it may not matter.
Well, I'll see how I feel on Friday and decide then. I'd prefer not to wait five hours ahead of time -- like I did with Bible Study Group. I told them at 3, Bible Study was at 6:30. Movie is at 1 on Sat. I need to give movie buddy at least twelve hours fore-warning.
I wish I knew whether this was just allergies or a cold. I'd see a doctor -- but there's really nothing they can do for this sort of thing.
3. Hmmm...this is actually an interesting best of..book list:
The 50 Best Non-Fiction Books
I don't generally read nonfiction for pleasure -- mainly because I read non-fiction on the internet and at work -- which is approximately 80% of the time. So commute is fiction, before bed - fiction, and pleasure - fiction. For pleasure? I read whatever I please.
But, I have read a few of these...and I have either tried or own others. And there are others on this list that appear intriguing. Hence the sharing. I may actually try some of these. But I don't feel like copying the whole list here -- so you will have to jump to the link.
4. Work made me nuts again. Two teleconferences where people yelled at each other over the phone -- no wonder I have a headache.
Mother: We shouldn't talk for very long, it will make you cough more.
Me: I've been talking to people all day long and you're really the only one I wanted to talk to.
Mother (laughs)
5. Hmmm...for later reading.. Let's Go Colonize Titan
6. pseudo-political but not blood pressure inducing...
So you are a congresswoman - now what?
[Apparently it's more like VEEP than the WEST WING...which may explain why I could watch the West Wing and not VEEP?]
It’s not easy showing up as a first-year House member that first week in January: The institution is built on norms that no one could be expected to anticipate, much less consider normal. That the offices, for example, don’t necessarily come with trash cans. That any unchained piece of furniture outside the office — a stand for a guest book, for example — is likely to disappear. That no one really expects you to be on time, because scheduled meetings overlap. That the Capitol’s marble floors will be murder on your feet, your back. Heels, like expectations, start out high. Eventually, pragmatism takes over; life goes on in a low, comfortable wedge.
This year’s freshman class started in a moment of exceptional upheaval, even by congressional standards: For the first time, new lawmakers arrived in the middle of a government shutdown, imposed by Trump, who was refusing to sign off on a budget that did not include $5.7 billion for the wall he wanted along the Mexican border. Starting in the middle of a shutdown: For an aspiring politician, this is like moving into a dream house just as the septic tank explodes. Constituents and activists and no small number of kooks with the office number on speed dial are calling and calling and calling to tell members who have been in office for maybe 18 hours that they are disgusted; they are yelling at them to just build a wall already and open the government, or not to build a wall, never to give in to Trump, never, never, never.
Then there are the new co-workers: a body the size of a small high school packed with nothing but strivers, do-gooders, bossy types and shiny pennies, none so shiny as this year — some so shiny you could go blind. The day she started the job, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representing parts of Queens and the Bronx, had 1.8 million Twitter followers — fans mesmerized by her ingenious use of social media to transmit wit, fight and idealism. More than one million people have watched a video that captured Ayanna Pressley sobbing in the arms of her campaign manager, Sarah Groh, after learning that she beat Representative Michael Capuano, a longtime progressive in his 10th term, in the primary. In the past, the celebrity House member was pretty much an oxymoron, unless you considered Tip O’Neill or Newt Gingrich a celebrity. Throngs of television cameras from all corners of the earth did not flock to the Capitol to try to catch a glimpse of Newt Gingrich. Now longtime staff members on Capitol Hill were horrified by what all the attention would do to an already fractious House. Would this be the Kardashian Congress?
Arriving, as Pressley did, as someone who unseated a well-liked incumbent is also not easy: It’s like showing up for a new job to replace a popular co-worker whom you fought to get fired. Capuano did not have Pressley’s crowd appeal, but he had made a lot of good friends, including Representative Maxine Waters of California, who went out of her way to endorse him. The Congressional Black Caucus also endorsed him. So many people with whom Pressley now had to work had declared, essentially, that they hoped she would lose.
But Pressley had won, after all, which is why she was, on Jan. 3, the first day of the new congressional session, on the floor of the House — nervous, thrilled, aware that not everyone would welcome her with open arms; confident, nonetheless, that she would find her way. After a moving ceremony with the Congressional Black Caucus, she arrived at the Capitol for her first vote of the year, for speaker of the House. On opening day, members are encouraged to bring their children, which means that if you arrive on the later side, as Pressley did, seats are scarce. Pressley’s feet were killing her; her 10-year-old stepdaughter, Cora, was starving. Throughout her campaign, Pressley had said, quoting Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968, if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair. Now Pressley had been elected, and she literally could not find a seat on the House floor. She and Cora sat down on a bench intended for staff members, in the back of the room, and listened as the members, called in alphabetical order, shouted out their candidates for speaker. Just before her name would be called, Pressley made her way to cast her vote someplace more visible. She heard her name: “Pressley.”
“Nancy Pelosi!” she said, with some drama.
Around her, a series of heads swiveled. One man raised his eyebrows. Another laughed, not meanly. Pressley was confused. The congressman who laughed, Steven Palazzo, a Republican from Mississippi, leaned in and joked that she should have voted for him instead. Suddenly, Pressley, taking in the nearby crowd of white men, got it: She was casting her vote for the new Democratic leader among a sea of Republicans.
“On the House floor, you don’t have assigned seats,” Pressley explained a few weeks later, sitting in her office in the Longworth Building, where many freshmen have their offices. “People just sort of mill around. It’s really like an adult cafeteria — people are cliquey, and they have their section, and it’s just understood where they sit, and you don’t sit there. I know that now. But I didn’t know that then.”
Across the floor that day, Abigail Spanberger was taking up three seats: one daughter on her lap, two beside her, all of them a tangle of fair hair as they leaned into one another and whispered. Spanberger was trying to savor the moment, but her kids were starving.
On her other side sat Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who, like Spanberger, had flipped a Republican-held seat. They were two of five women, all with a military or intelligence background, who befriended one another after meeting up on the campaign trail at various functions held to support candidates in Republican-held districts. (The party calls members who win in those districts Frontliners.) Early on, a few progressive staff members were irked that several of the moderate women chose offices near one another: Wasn’t Congress cliquey enough without geographic reinforcement? To Spanberger and Houlahan, it seemed like a natural choice: Why not take the edge off a grueling job by staying close to friends, maybe even sharing tips? They made fun of one another’s media spots, sent one another “What the hell??”-type messages approximately 14 times a day.
At the speaker vote, the mood among Democrats was joyful — they had the majority at last! Spanberger, by contrast, looked serious, even nervous, as if she might be hiding behind the 4-year-old in her lap. It was the first vote she had ever taken, and she was not voting with the party. It wasn’t exactly awkward, but it wasn’t ideal either; she certainly did not want to look as though she were taking it lightly.
Spanberger’s district, which had voted decisively for Trump, included several rural counties where Pelosi’s name had become, for many voters, a kind of slur, synonymous with a liberal agenda. Spanberger ran against Dave Brat, a conservative economics professor who defeated Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, in a 2014 primary in large part by running a successful anti-immigrant campaign. But after two terms, Brat had become unpopular in the district for the same reason Cantor had: He never seemed to show up. Constituents complained that they saw more of him on Fox News than they did in the district. Spanberger promised town halls and accessibility, neither of which were Brat’s strengths. (“The women are in my grill no matter where I go,” Brat was caught on tape complaining to a conservative audience in 2017.) Spanberger made strong eye contact, had credibility on national security and had run her daughter’s Girl Scouts troop. She did not go after Trump by name, and in the end, she drew the support of swing voters in the district’s two wealthiest counties, as well as rural voters who wanted someone to fix their everyday problems — prescription-drug and health care costs especially.
In March 2018, Spanberger let officials at the D.C.C.C. know that she felt the party needed new leadership — to “turn the page.” Spanberger did not get any pushback. As Pelosi often said in 2018 when asked how she felt about candidates who might not support her for House speaker, “Just win, baby.”
So Spanberger was stunned by the intense lobbying that began once she was actually elected; by the time she was wrapping her children’s Christmas presents, she was fielding six or seven calls a day from local Democratic figures who were “very disappointed” that she was not supporting Pelosi, or House members warning that she would end up in committee Siberia. During that orientation session for first-year representatives in late November, a member stood up at a meeting to argue that anyone who did not vote for Pelosi clearly did not understand how this place worked, was simply naïve. “Oh,” Spanberger had realized with a start, and some irritation. She was being lobbied by insult. “They’re talking to me.”
One of the first executive moves Ayanna Pressley made as a congresswoman-elect was to appoint her then-29-year-old campaign manager, Sarah Groh, her chief of staff. Making your campaign manager your chief of staff is like moving when pregnant: Those with experience say it’s a bad idea, but plenty of people do it anyway, because it feels like the right thing, even if the two jobs require different skill sets. Pressley never felt more comfortable making a decision than when Groh was in the room. The chief of staff is essential for helping a new member build relationships, and Groh had already proved herself instrumental for Pressley in that regard: She was a friend of Ocasio-Cortez’s — they had both been student activists in Boston — and back in June 2018, at Groh’s invitation, Ocasio-Cortez joined Pressley at a small fund-raiser in New York. The two women quickly connected as they spoke before the crowd, and they promised to see each other in Washington. “So I can’t wait till we win and go start our own caucus,” Pressley said to Ocasio-Cortez.
On Nov. 12, 2018, Veterans Day, they attended an orientation for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where Pressley met various new members she had admired from afar during their campaigns. Two of them, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, had agreed, along with Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez, to duck out of the orientation so they could speak on a panel hosted by VoteRunLead, a nonprofit that supports female candidates, especially women of color. That day on the panel, Pressley acknowledged that many of them were, as she was, a first — Omar and Tlaib were the first Muslim women elected to the House, and Ocasio-Cortez, at 29, was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress — but Pressley emphasized that she did not want the hoopla over their identities to “get in the way of the work.”
When the discussion was over, a staff member at the nonprofit snapped a photo, and Ocasio-Cortez quickly posted it to Instagram with one small word: “Squad.” On their way back to orientation, Ocasio-Cortez held up her phone’s camera as the group walked through the halls of an office building. “We out here!” she said. Her tone was playfully subversive — it was a warning as much as an announcement. Pressley, chiming in, struck a friendlier note: “Hi, y’all!” she said with a smile. Ocasio-Cortez labeled the video “squadgoals.” The photo and the video captured something intimate and vibrant about the four women of color, who as a group looked like no other congresswomen ever elected: Omar, in a hijab; Pressley, with braids; Ocasio-Cortez, so youthful. The photo on Instagram picked up 6,000 comments and 200,000 likes in 24 hours. The name stuck.
The four women were already mutual fans, but now, because Ocasio-Cortez was an instinctual brander, they were all instantly something more, at least in the public’s imagining: girlfriends, a team, a four-person symbol of ascendant minority and female power but also of the far-left resistance, coming from within the building.
Spanberger had been in office less than two weeks when she headed to work with mixed emotions. It was Jan. 16, and she was going to meet the president of the United States. Who would have ever dreamed that she, Abigail Spanberger, would be meeting with the president? And who would have ever dreamed that if she did, she would not even be excited?
Spanberger was one of only seven Democrats in the House who agreed to meet with Trump (along with a number of Republicans) to discuss a possible path out of the government shutdown; all seven were members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of Democrats and Republicans who commit to try to work together. Spanberger hoped that as someone who had worked for the C.I.A. and who had also served as a postal inspector, tracking narcotics, she might be able to demonstrate that “there were Democrats who could reliably discuss security issues.” At a minimum, she thought, she should tell the president that the federal employees in her district were suffering without pay. Also unspoken: Trump was popular in her district. It would not hurt for her to demonstrate to voters that she was showing the office some respect by meeting with him.
I don't know what that says exactly about me or the decade or my opinion of the current professional book/movie/television critics? Maybe just that taste varies?
It's sort of pointless debating taste. I mean people either like something or they don't. They don't often know why. It just is. Although it is possible to just be ambivalent, and neither like nor dislike something -- which frankly is 98% of the things listed. I am just ambivalent.
I do not understand the appeal of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. People act like no one has written like that before. Has no one read Patricia Highsmith? She was a much better writer -- whose books were made into better movies - "Strangers on a Train", "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Or Dauphne Du Maurie - "Cousin Rachel" or Shirley Jackson - who wrote "We've Always Lived in the Castle".
2. Chest cough is not abating and keeps coming and going. I'll go for a while with nothing, then it's back with a vengeance -- and no real warning. Also it is causing fatigue, loss of appetite (not a bad thing -- that's actually in the plus column), and a sense of ennui or not caring much about anything or irritability.
I'm debating whether or not I can go see a movie on Saturday. Feel like crap today and tonight. But soldiering through. Commuting on trains and subways with a nasty cough and sinus issues is painful. Actually working with it -- is painful. Co-worker are wondering about me. I had one stop by and ask if I was okay. I nodded, just persistent, hack hack, cough, hack hack. I felt like I was hacking up a lung.
Tonight, I have a sinus headache and a chest cough. I've taken mucinex, Phenylephrine -- it's the only one I can take as a decongestant, tylenole, cough drop, lemon/ginger tea, and
chicken soup. Also had potato chips and chocolate, which I regretted. And CBD tea, which I did not regret.
The problem is...even if pesky chest cough is coming and going -- not sure I can see movie in movie theater without driving my fellow movie goers nuts. I mean it is a loud, painful, nasty cough. It sounds and feels like I'm hacking up a lung. I'd kick me out of the movie theater. Granted the movie has subtitles, so it may not matter.
Well, I'll see how I feel on Friday and decide then. I'd prefer not to wait five hours ahead of time -- like I did with Bible Study Group. I told them at 3, Bible Study was at 6:30. Movie is at 1 on Sat. I need to give movie buddy at least twelve hours fore-warning.
I wish I knew whether this was just allergies or a cold. I'd see a doctor -- but there's really nothing they can do for this sort of thing.
3. Hmmm...this is actually an interesting best of..book list:
The 50 Best Non-Fiction Books
I don't generally read nonfiction for pleasure -- mainly because I read non-fiction on the internet and at work -- which is approximately 80% of the time. So commute is fiction, before bed - fiction, and pleasure - fiction. For pleasure? I read whatever I please.
But, I have read a few of these...and I have either tried or own others. And there are others on this list that appear intriguing. Hence the sharing. I may actually try some of these. But I don't feel like copying the whole list here -- so you will have to jump to the link.
4. Work made me nuts again. Two teleconferences where people yelled at each other over the phone -- no wonder I have a headache.
Mother: We shouldn't talk for very long, it will make you cough more.
Me: I've been talking to people all day long and you're really the only one I wanted to talk to.
Mother (laughs)
5. Hmmm...for later reading.. Let's Go Colonize Titan
6. pseudo-political but not blood pressure inducing...
So you are a congresswoman - now what?
[Apparently it's more like VEEP than the WEST WING...which may explain why I could watch the West Wing and not VEEP?]
It’s not easy showing up as a first-year House member that first week in January: The institution is built on norms that no one could be expected to anticipate, much less consider normal. That the offices, for example, don’t necessarily come with trash cans. That any unchained piece of furniture outside the office — a stand for a guest book, for example — is likely to disappear. That no one really expects you to be on time, because scheduled meetings overlap. That the Capitol’s marble floors will be murder on your feet, your back. Heels, like expectations, start out high. Eventually, pragmatism takes over; life goes on in a low, comfortable wedge.
This year’s freshman class started in a moment of exceptional upheaval, even by congressional standards: For the first time, new lawmakers arrived in the middle of a government shutdown, imposed by Trump, who was refusing to sign off on a budget that did not include $5.7 billion for the wall he wanted along the Mexican border. Starting in the middle of a shutdown: For an aspiring politician, this is like moving into a dream house just as the septic tank explodes. Constituents and activists and no small number of kooks with the office number on speed dial are calling and calling and calling to tell members who have been in office for maybe 18 hours that they are disgusted; they are yelling at them to just build a wall already and open the government, or not to build a wall, never to give in to Trump, never, never, never.
Then there are the new co-workers: a body the size of a small high school packed with nothing but strivers, do-gooders, bossy types and shiny pennies, none so shiny as this year — some so shiny you could go blind. The day she started the job, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representing parts of Queens and the Bronx, had 1.8 million Twitter followers — fans mesmerized by her ingenious use of social media to transmit wit, fight and idealism. More than one million people have watched a video that captured Ayanna Pressley sobbing in the arms of her campaign manager, Sarah Groh, after learning that she beat Representative Michael Capuano, a longtime progressive in his 10th term, in the primary. In the past, the celebrity House member was pretty much an oxymoron, unless you considered Tip O’Neill or Newt Gingrich a celebrity. Throngs of television cameras from all corners of the earth did not flock to the Capitol to try to catch a glimpse of Newt Gingrich. Now longtime staff members on Capitol Hill were horrified by what all the attention would do to an already fractious House. Would this be the Kardashian Congress?
Arriving, as Pressley did, as someone who unseated a well-liked incumbent is also not easy: It’s like showing up for a new job to replace a popular co-worker whom you fought to get fired. Capuano did not have Pressley’s crowd appeal, but he had made a lot of good friends, including Representative Maxine Waters of California, who went out of her way to endorse him. The Congressional Black Caucus also endorsed him. So many people with whom Pressley now had to work had declared, essentially, that they hoped she would lose.
But Pressley had won, after all, which is why she was, on Jan. 3, the first day of the new congressional session, on the floor of the House — nervous, thrilled, aware that not everyone would welcome her with open arms; confident, nonetheless, that she would find her way. After a moving ceremony with the Congressional Black Caucus, she arrived at the Capitol for her first vote of the year, for speaker of the House. On opening day, members are encouraged to bring their children, which means that if you arrive on the later side, as Pressley did, seats are scarce. Pressley’s feet were killing her; her 10-year-old stepdaughter, Cora, was starving. Throughout her campaign, Pressley had said, quoting Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968, if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair. Now Pressley had been elected, and she literally could not find a seat on the House floor. She and Cora sat down on a bench intended for staff members, in the back of the room, and listened as the members, called in alphabetical order, shouted out their candidates for speaker. Just before her name would be called, Pressley made her way to cast her vote someplace more visible. She heard her name: “Pressley.”
“Nancy Pelosi!” she said, with some drama.
Around her, a series of heads swiveled. One man raised his eyebrows. Another laughed, not meanly. Pressley was confused. The congressman who laughed, Steven Palazzo, a Republican from Mississippi, leaned in and joked that she should have voted for him instead. Suddenly, Pressley, taking in the nearby crowd of white men, got it: She was casting her vote for the new Democratic leader among a sea of Republicans.
“On the House floor, you don’t have assigned seats,” Pressley explained a few weeks later, sitting in her office in the Longworth Building, where many freshmen have their offices. “People just sort of mill around. It’s really like an adult cafeteria — people are cliquey, and they have their section, and it’s just understood where they sit, and you don’t sit there. I know that now. But I didn’t know that then.”
Across the floor that day, Abigail Spanberger was taking up three seats: one daughter on her lap, two beside her, all of them a tangle of fair hair as they leaned into one another and whispered. Spanberger was trying to savor the moment, but her kids were starving.
On her other side sat Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who, like Spanberger, had flipped a Republican-held seat. They were two of five women, all with a military or intelligence background, who befriended one another after meeting up on the campaign trail at various functions held to support candidates in Republican-held districts. (The party calls members who win in those districts Frontliners.) Early on, a few progressive staff members were irked that several of the moderate women chose offices near one another: Wasn’t Congress cliquey enough without geographic reinforcement? To Spanberger and Houlahan, it seemed like a natural choice: Why not take the edge off a grueling job by staying close to friends, maybe even sharing tips? They made fun of one another’s media spots, sent one another “What the hell??”-type messages approximately 14 times a day.
At the speaker vote, the mood among Democrats was joyful — they had the majority at last! Spanberger, by contrast, looked serious, even nervous, as if she might be hiding behind the 4-year-old in her lap. It was the first vote she had ever taken, and she was not voting with the party. It wasn’t exactly awkward, but it wasn’t ideal either; she certainly did not want to look as though she were taking it lightly.
Spanberger’s district, which had voted decisively for Trump, included several rural counties where Pelosi’s name had become, for many voters, a kind of slur, synonymous with a liberal agenda. Spanberger ran against Dave Brat, a conservative economics professor who defeated Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, in a 2014 primary in large part by running a successful anti-immigrant campaign. But after two terms, Brat had become unpopular in the district for the same reason Cantor had: He never seemed to show up. Constituents complained that they saw more of him on Fox News than they did in the district. Spanberger promised town halls and accessibility, neither of which were Brat’s strengths. (“The women are in my grill no matter where I go,” Brat was caught on tape complaining to a conservative audience in 2017.) Spanberger made strong eye contact, had credibility on national security and had run her daughter’s Girl Scouts troop. She did not go after Trump by name, and in the end, she drew the support of swing voters in the district’s two wealthiest counties, as well as rural voters who wanted someone to fix their everyday problems — prescription-drug and health care costs especially.
In March 2018, Spanberger let officials at the D.C.C.C. know that she felt the party needed new leadership — to “turn the page.” Spanberger did not get any pushback. As Pelosi often said in 2018 when asked how she felt about candidates who might not support her for House speaker, “Just win, baby.”
So Spanberger was stunned by the intense lobbying that began once she was actually elected; by the time she was wrapping her children’s Christmas presents, she was fielding six or seven calls a day from local Democratic figures who were “very disappointed” that she was not supporting Pelosi, or House members warning that she would end up in committee Siberia. During that orientation session for first-year representatives in late November, a member stood up at a meeting to argue that anyone who did not vote for Pelosi clearly did not understand how this place worked, was simply naïve. “Oh,” Spanberger had realized with a start, and some irritation. She was being lobbied by insult. “They’re talking to me.”
One of the first executive moves Ayanna Pressley made as a congresswoman-elect was to appoint her then-29-year-old campaign manager, Sarah Groh, her chief of staff. Making your campaign manager your chief of staff is like moving when pregnant: Those with experience say it’s a bad idea, but plenty of people do it anyway, because it feels like the right thing, even if the two jobs require different skill sets. Pressley never felt more comfortable making a decision than when Groh was in the room. The chief of staff is essential for helping a new member build relationships, and Groh had already proved herself instrumental for Pressley in that regard: She was a friend of Ocasio-Cortez’s — they had both been student activists in Boston — and back in June 2018, at Groh’s invitation, Ocasio-Cortez joined Pressley at a small fund-raiser in New York. The two women quickly connected as they spoke before the crowd, and they promised to see each other in Washington. “So I can’t wait till we win and go start our own caucus,” Pressley said to Ocasio-Cortez.
On Nov. 12, 2018, Veterans Day, they attended an orientation for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where Pressley met various new members she had admired from afar during their campaigns. Two of them, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, had agreed, along with Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez, to duck out of the orientation so they could speak on a panel hosted by VoteRunLead, a nonprofit that supports female candidates, especially women of color. That day on the panel, Pressley acknowledged that many of them were, as she was, a first — Omar and Tlaib were the first Muslim women elected to the House, and Ocasio-Cortez, at 29, was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress — but Pressley emphasized that she did not want the hoopla over their identities to “get in the way of the work.”
When the discussion was over, a staff member at the nonprofit snapped a photo, and Ocasio-Cortez quickly posted it to Instagram with one small word: “Squad.” On their way back to orientation, Ocasio-Cortez held up her phone’s camera as the group walked through the halls of an office building. “We out here!” she said. Her tone was playfully subversive — it was a warning as much as an announcement. Pressley, chiming in, struck a friendlier note: “Hi, y’all!” she said with a smile. Ocasio-Cortez labeled the video “squadgoals.” The photo and the video captured something intimate and vibrant about the four women of color, who as a group looked like no other congresswomen ever elected: Omar, in a hijab; Pressley, with braids; Ocasio-Cortez, so youthful. The photo on Instagram picked up 6,000 comments and 200,000 likes in 24 hours. The name stuck.
The four women were already mutual fans, but now, because Ocasio-Cortez was an instinctual brander, they were all instantly something more, at least in the public’s imagining: girlfriends, a team, a four-person symbol of ascendant minority and female power but also of the far-left resistance, coming from within the building.
Spanberger had been in office less than two weeks when she headed to work with mixed emotions. It was Jan. 16, and she was going to meet the president of the United States. Who would have ever dreamed that she, Abigail Spanberger, would be meeting with the president? And who would have ever dreamed that if she did, she would not even be excited?
Spanberger was one of only seven Democrats in the House who agreed to meet with Trump (along with a number of Republicans) to discuss a possible path out of the government shutdown; all seven were members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of Democrats and Republicans who commit to try to work together. Spanberger hoped that as someone who had worked for the C.I.A. and who had also served as a postal inspector, tracking narcotics, she might be able to demonstrate that “there were Democrats who could reliably discuss security issues.” At a minimum, she thought, she should tell the president that the federal employees in her district were suffering without pay. Also unspoken: Trump was popular in her district. It would not hurt for her to demonstrate to voters that she was showing the office some respect by meeting with him.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-22 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-22 08:24 pm (UTC)Yeah, I'm really wondering about the current crop of critics. They seem to like things that are biting, satirical, and somewhat mean for some reason. Or trendy. Not that I can say I've read anything truly memorable in the last ten years or saw much for that matter. It's all blended together in my head. LOL!