Sen. Mitch McConnell Tag

Because as a writer I work mostly at home; because I'm both a news junkie and a political junkie; because being female, double tasking comes second nature to me; because how often do we get to watch living history in which we have standing, a stake, and a part?; because of all this and more, I watched virtually every boring, exhilarating moment of the first week of Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial. I know that others didn't have that enviable privilege or didn’t choose that tiresome challenge, depending on how you view it. But I know that I also reorganized my closets and drawers, paid bills, watered and fed numerous plants, wrote these notes, made soup, organized a podcast, had three meetings, interviewed two people and was interviewed by a third, dealt with a bathroom-shower-small-flood disaster, and answered mail, all with one eye and ear glued to the TV. ...

Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, age 78, married to the same man for more than 50 years, mother of five (five) children and grandmother of eight, may be the most strategically brilliant political leader since Elizabeth I (Tudor) of England. Both women went into the family business, although Thomas "Tommy" J. D'Alesandro, Jr., a Maryland congressman and then mayor of Baltimore, was not lethal to his (one) wife, unlike Henry VIII. Pelosi herself was the last of six children and the first daughter—who had to negotiate herself out of expectations that she would honor the family by becoming a nun. An activist behind the scenes in local Democratic politics while raising her own kids, she then ran for and was elected to Congress from California in 1987 and has served ever since, posting landslide electoral victories and dropping beneath 80 percent of the vote only twice. She made history being...

The personal is political. Well, yeah, I admit it: it was a good phrase years ago, challenging the notion that feminism was just "personal stuff." It's a good phrase still, with ever widening applications. So this blog post is personal—in the most political sense.