Nancy pelosi

As Cockburn scrolled through the gossip about Kim Kardashian's latest breakup (this time with Pete Davidson), he couldn't help but think of her show, a sloppy soap opera/reality TV series where drama runs with tear-stained makeup. Sound familiar? Cockburn couldn't help but think of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. After all, lately there's been enough drama in her family to fill at least three seasons of runtime (at a conservative estimate, of course). Pelosi, having successfully returned home from her long-awaited trip to Taiwan, is now engaging in another slap-fight with Xi Jinping. In an interview on NBC’s Today, she said of the trip, “Yes, it was worth it,” and “[Xi] is in a fragile place...he’s acting like a scared bully.

Donald Trump headlined CPAC Texas, delivering a series of broadsides to the Biden administration to a packed arena at Dallas’s Hilton Anatole. The more than 2,500 seats were filled — with even more guests lining the aisles. Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was supposed to introduce the 45th president — but found herself bumped at the expense of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for reasons that remain unclear. Prior to the former president’s speech, a short film played on the large TV monitors. “We are a nation in decline,” a Trump voiceover began. “We are a failing nation.” Gloomy black-and-white footage followed, accompanied by thunder and rain sounds. A screenshot of Trump’s suspended Twitter account was perhaps the most moving image.

Are the January 6 hearings over yet? Is this a miniseries or will it be picked up for season two? And does the cast of this ensemble production have anything to say about being snubbed at this year’s Emmys? No matter what final “findings” the democracy-defending committee leaves us with, this saga will rightly go down in history as nothing more than a show trial. It didn’t have to be this way. Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow Republican congressmen Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio to serve on the select committee investigating what Joe Biden describes as the “worst attack on the US since the Civil War.

In their 2004 chart-topping album American Idiot, Green Day sings that “another protester has crossed the line to find the money’s on the other side.” Fast forward to 2022, and we find that many young politicians posing as threats to the establishment are singing the same tune. Top millennials in Washington may brand themselves as rebels, but their votes often end up indistinguishable from the elder establishment they so revile. In a recent campaign ad, South Carolina Democratic gubernatorial candidate Joe Cunningham declared that both his state and America are being run by a geriatric oligarchy. “Some of these people have been clinging onto power for 30, 40, even 50 years,” Cunningham said.

Cockburn may indulge in more liquor than he should, but even he would never shove a child. So imagine how shocked he was to see Nancy Pelosi elbow aside a kid during a photo-op. Mayra Flores was recently elected to finish out a term in Texas’s 34th Congressional District, which has historically been a safely held Democratic constituency. Flores ran on a pro-life ticket and won the largely Hispanic district in South Texas. During her swearing in, Flores’s children stood next to Nancy Pelosi. At one point, Pelosi pushed Flores’s daughter with her elbow, which triggered a media outcry. Flores tweeted: “I am so proud of my strong, beautiful daughter for not allowing this to faze her. She continued to smile and pose for the picture like a Queen.

Congress on Thursday approved a bill that gives the White House power to enact price controls on gasoline. The Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act lets the Federal Trade Commission treat so-called price gouging as a deceptive trade practice. Congress specifically directs the FTC to prioritize cases “concerning companies with total United States wholesale or retail sales of consumer fuels in excess of $500,000,000 per year.” In other words, all the major suppliers of oil and gas to the United States. “This is a major exploitation of the consumer, because this is a product the consumer must have,” droned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose love of fuel price gouging legislation dates to 2005.

Recently, money was extracted from the taxpayers at gunpoint to create a PBS puff piece about Nancy Pelosi. Called "Pelosi's Power," the documentary is more or less what you'd expect: Pelosi comes off as a strong if sphinxlike figure surrounded by idiot men who can't seem to stop slipping on banana peels and starting riots. Her infamous 2009 lies about waterboarding, her bizarre slandering of her own hair stylist — all of it gets overlooked in favor of the usual "you go, girl!" narrative reductionism. Yet there is one thing about the piece that holds up well: its title. Whatever else can be said about Nancy Pelosi, she knows how to wield power. And little wonder, given that she grew up in Baltimore's Little Italy neighborhood where her father was a political broker.

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

The latest version of the Democrats' $1.5 trillion spending bill being pushed through Congress includes funding for questionable foreign projects, such as "gender programs" in Pakistan and democracy building in authoritarian nations. According to a section of the bill outlining State Department funding for the year, an unspecified portion of the nearly $4 billion available in bilateral economic assistance — meaning direct transfers from the United States to other countries — shall "be made available for programs to promote democracy and for gender programs in Pakistan.

Long live the gerontocracy: Nancy Pelosi will seek reelection in 2022. The House speaker, who turns eighty-two in March, announced her move in a Twitter video. “While we have made progress much more needs to be done to improve people’s lives,” Pelosi said. “Our democracy is at his because of assaults on the truth, the assault on the US Capitol and the state-by-state assault on voting rights.” “This election is crucial: nothing less is at stake than our democracy,” the speaker continued. “But as we say: we don’t agonize, we organize! And that is why I am running for re-election to Congress and respectfully seek your support.