Well, not all the idiots in Congress are Republicans. Democrat Jamaal Bowman of NY pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol yesterday, seeking to delay a vote. It caused the building to be evacuated while officers could investigate. Bowman apologized for causing the mess. Of course, the reasonable and measured response of the Republicans included Kevin McCarthy equating it to the Jan. 6 riot, and fellow NY Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said she’ll introduce a resolution to expel Bowman from the House. No mention of the death penalty as of this writing.
The Onion paid tribute to the late Senator Dianne Feinstein with a retrospective of articles they published about her in recent years. These included:
Jimmy Carter Makes Pact With Dianne Feinstein That If Both Single In 50 Years They’ll Marry Each Other
Dianne Feinstein Recovering After Hospital Gurney Plunges Down Stairs And Launches Her Into Wall
Sheet Placed Over Dianne Feinstein Between Votes
Sen. Feinstein Grants Power of Attorney To Broom Resembling Daughter
Biden Speeds Away In Truck After Dropping Dianne Feinstein Off In Empty Field
Of course, Owl Chatter is aghast at how tasteless and disrespectful they all are, especially that last one (which is our favorite).
The NYT gave her a far more deserved sendoff today. Maureen Dowd noted that DiFi, as she was called, entered the Senate in 1992 when DC was much more male-dominated than it is today. She ignored the sexism and bulled her way ahead. E.g., as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she led the fight in 2014 to release the classified report on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. She went up against Obama and his C.I.A. chief John Brennan. Bush’s C.I.A. director Michael Hayden said dismissively that Feinstein couldn’t be objective because she was motivated by “deep emotional feeling.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped back. The senator simply wanted America to face the ugly truth so we would never betray our values in such a grotesque way again.
Feinstein was reelected five times. In the 2012 election, she received 7.86 million votes, the most popular votes received by any U.S. Senate candidate in history.
A story by Heather Knight focused on her ties to SF, where she was born the same year construction was started on the Golden Gate Bridge. She was mayor after the Harvey Milk shooting. She kept a firefighter’s coat and helmet in her car so she could show up at every major fire in the city. She saved the cable car system when it was on the verge of collapse and steered the city through serial killers, the Jonestown massacre, the Patty Hearst business, and the Milk and Mayor Moscone killings. Current Mayor Breed said Feinstein often called her about things like uneven sidewalks and potholes. “Dianne never stopped being mayor,” Breed said.
She was traveling in a car several years ago past a downtown parking structure, and was frustrated to see a ratty mattress propped up against a fire hydrant.
“Ed!” she hollered over the phone to Ed Lee, who was mayor at the time. “There’s a mattress!”
Days later, she returned to the neighborhood, and the mattress was gone. She was very pleased with herself.
Feinstein was married three times and is survived by her daughter Katherine, who looks nothing like a broom.
Rest in peace, DiFi.
Yesterday was the birthday of American poet and essayist, W.S. Merwin who died in 2019 at the age of 91. When he was a junior at Princeton, Merwin decided he would be nothing but a poet for the rest of his life, and would never get a job that didn’t have something to do with poetry. [That’s pretty much how I feel about being a tax professor.] So after college he went to Europe, where he worked as a babysitter for writer Robert Graves in Majorca and wrote poems in his spare time.
He was an ardent anti-Vietnam-War activist. When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for The Carrier of Ladders, he refused the award out of shame for being an American. He asked that that the money go instead to a painter who was blinded by police in California while watching a protest.
In 1976, he moved to Hawaii and bought 20 acres of land by a dormant volcano that had been an ill-run pineapple plantation. Merwin and his wife turned it into a palm forest, hacking down dead growth with machetes and planting palms one by one. It now holds more than 700 species of trees and plants, along with geckos and mynah birds. He didn’t use a cell phone or email and wrote every morning in longhand.
He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius. In 2010, the Library of Congress named him the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate.
He continued to plant a tree every day during the rainy season for as long as he was able to.
He wrote:
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree.
Here are some palms:
This poem is called “History Lesson” and is by Jeff Coomer.
My grandfather left school at fourteen
to work odd jobs until he was old enough
to join his Lithuanian kin chipping
anthracite out of the Pennsylvania hills.
Nine hours a day with five hundred feet
of rock over his head, then an hour’s
ride home on the company bus
to a dinner of boiled cabbage and chicken.
When the second big war broke
he headed “sout,” as he pronounced it,
for better work in the blast furnaces
churning out steel along the shores
of the Chesapeake. Thirty-two years
and half an index finger later he retired
to a brick rancher he built with his own hands
just outside the Baltimore city line.
The spring he got cancer and I got a BA
from a private college we stood under
a tree in his backyard while he copped
a smoke out of my grandmother’s sight.
“Tell me, Pop,” I said, wanting to strike up
a conversation, “how did you like
working in the mills all those years?”
He studied my neatly pressed white shirt,
took a long drag on his cigarette and spit a fleck
of tobacco near my shoes. “Like,” he said,
“didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Ted Kennedy was campaigning outside of a factory, shaking hands with the workers as they were coming to work. One guy stopped and said, “Tell me, Kennedy, did you ever work at a place like this even one day in your life?”
Kennedy replied, “No, I can’t say that I have.”
The worker said, “You haven’t missed a fucking thing.”
Oy, we can’t end on such a gloomy note. Any special guest stars in the puzzle today who might light up the joint? Oooh, Rachel Brosnahan popped in at 43D from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Even though the character Mrs. M is Jewish, Rachel isn’t, but she says she was immersed in Jewishness growing up in Highland Park, IL. [BTW, Grace Slick is from Highland Park too. She’s not Jewish, but get this — Jorma Kaukonen is (via his mom).] Rachel is married to actor Jason Ralph, who got all dressed up for us. Awww, sweet. No kids.
We’ll let Rachel’s pretty eyes send us off tonight. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 